Hitler and his God

World Conspiration

One of the prevalent accusations against “international Jewry” was that the Jews were plotting a conspiracy to dominate and exploit the world, and that they were using the liberal and capitalist rightist movements as well as the socialist and communist leftist movements to achieve their aim as “the Chosen People” to whom their God had promised the world. It may be noted that the Jews were not the only ones saddled with this design, and that the arguments against the others were much better founded in reality. Bolshevism, for one, openly proclaimed its intention to promote the proletarian world revolution; the grasp for global power by the former USSR was to become one of the main features in the history of the twentieth century. And it has for many centuries been the purpose behind the policies of the Catholic Church to establish itself as the Universal Church which it pretends to be. Moreover, as narrated in a previous chapter, it was the objective of Adolf Hitler himself to conquer the globe for the Aryan master race, and it was this objective which resulted into his opposition to the alleged global aspirations of the Jews, propagated by malicious pamphlets like The Protocols of the Wise Man of Zion but never substantiated. “The thesis of a Jewish world conspiration, of a centrally directed, racially determined and systematically executed world conquest [by the Jews] is so absurd that only a narrowed, diseased mind and a consequently calcified psyche could perceive such obvious fabrication of the imagination as reality.” (Christian Zentner 615)

In Germany the Jews were “few enough to be helpless and numerous enough to be held up as a menace”, in the words of Justice Jackson, president of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal in 1946. There are countless documents telling of the sadistic power trip of the brown storm-troopers and the Hitler Youth, who could humiliate and beat up any Jew, and destroy his property, without as much as a gesture of resistance, and who became hardened by this practice to do worse. It remains a startling fact that Jewish crowds of hundreds or thousands allowed themselves to be led “as sheep to the slaughter”. Raul Hilberg gives the following explanation: “In exile the Jews had always been in a minority; they had always been in danger; but they had learned that they could avert danger and survive destruction by placating and appeasing their enemies. This was a two thousand-year-old lesson. The Jews could not make the switch [when their leadership realized] that the modern machine-like destruction process would engulf European Jewry.” 616 “The simple truth remained that the Jews as a group were weak, vulnerable, and at no time had harboured any aggressive designs against Germany”, writes Robert Wistrich. 617

Léon Poliakov, looking for the causes of such acquiescence, finds them already in the Middle Ages when, after the slaughter by the crusaders at Worms, Mainz, and many other places, “martyrdom became what one could call an institution … Each new victim of Christian furor was a combatant fallen to sanctify the Name; one often bestowed on him the title of ‘kadosh’ (saint), which is a kind of canonisation … In particular the sacrifice of the children, killed by their own parents [to prevent them from being slain or baptized by the Christians] is seen in the light of the sacrifice Abraham was willing to perform, and the story of the patriarch and his son became, under the title ‘akeda’ (Isaac’s sacrifice) the symbol of the Jewish martyrology.” 618

Nonetheless, “the common cliché that Jews did not resist their persecutors and simply went ‘like sheep to the slaughter’ is neither an accurate nor a fair description … When presented as a blanket criticism, it overlooks the extraordinary lengths to which the Nazis went in disguising the genocidal intent of their policy toward the Jews. The perpetrators deliberately encouraged false hopes and the illusion that compliance and work might be the salvation of Jewry”, writes Wistrich.

And he continues: “The slogan of ‘sheep to the slaughter’ also overlooks the fact that the notion of total physical extermination was not only unprecedented but must have seemed to most Jews (and Gentiles) like the product of a diseased imagination. It underestimates the state of sheer exhaustion and demoralization in which the ghettoized Jews found themselves and the degree to which they were isolated and cut off from the outside world. It ignores the intimidating effects of collective punishment as practiced by the Nazis whenever they were faced with even the most trivial and minor acts of defiance. The knowledge that the Germans would exact terrible reprisals was a serious disincentive all over Europe to any armed resistance. There were relatively few efforts at revolt, for example, by the many well-trained Allied soldiers and the hundreds of thousands of Russian prisoners of war in German camps, though they were watched over by a fairly small number of guards. Charges of passivity have rarely been made against them. Yet Western prisoners were not subjected to the unrelenting dehumanization that was the common fate of the Jews in the ghettos and the Nazi camps.

“The Jewish population, to a much greater extent than any other, had the terrifying experience of being hunted down like wild animals. To make matters worse, they found themselves – at least in Eastern Europe – in a generally hostile and anti-Semitic environment. Even in the event of escape, Jewish men were still marked by circumcision, often easily identified by their beards and facial features or else by their distinctive garb. Despite these great obstacles, Jews did subsequently rebel in the ghettos of Warsaw and Bialystok, in the death camps of Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz, and took up arms with the partisans wherever they succeeded in escaping their tormentors.” 619 Armed revolts broke out “in at least twenty ghettos in Eastern Europe”. Best known is the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, from 19 April until 5 May 1943, where in terrible circumstances about a thousand Jewish fighters, armed with light firearms, grenades and Molotov cocktails, confronted the three thousand elite soldiers of SS-General Stroop, equipped with heavy machine guns, howitzers, armoured vehicles and artillery, eventually backed-up by tanks and bombers.

The decisive counter-argument against the allegation of a Jewish attempt at world domination, however, is the unwillingness of the supposedly Jewish-friendly governments to let in the Jewish refugees from Germany after the Hitler take-over. “The Jewish world power did not show itself very powerful”, notes Konrad Heiden. 620 And Robert Wistrich has the following comment: “Even American Jewry, though by 1939 the richest, largest and strongest Jewish community in the world, was still far from being the organized, vigorous, disciplined, cohesive lobby of the post-war era, able to influence the foreign policy of the US government. On the contrary, it was so lacking in unity or self-confidence and seemingly so cowed by the rise in American anti-Semitism during the depression years that it was unable to seriously challenge the draconian immigration restrictions that helped to seal the fate of European Jewry. Much the same could be said of the smaller Jewish community, even though a few individual Jews did achieve prominence in British life during the interwar years.” 621

The question why the Jews, as a people with a revealed religion, were marked with such a contorted and tragic destiny remains, to the non-Jewish observer, unanswered.