Search e-Library

... trying to overthrow the throne of the pharaoh. There is the assertion that it was the Christians, followers of Paul, the Jew of Tarsus, who undermined the Roman Empire and caused its downfall. (To Hitler – as to Wagner, Chamberlain, Rosenberg and most of the Nazis – Christ was not a Jew but an Aryan and an anti-Semite.) There is the fundamental Jewishness of the Catholic Church, for is their holy book... internationalism, democracy, socialism, communism, Bolshevism, etc. Take any of these terms in the writings, speeches and conversations of Hitler and you will find them associated with “the Jew”. The words “Jew” and “Jewish” could be used for anything Hitler and his people found unpleasant, inferior, unjust, inimical or criminal. Philosophically, however, they always related to the changing world in... Another reason may have been that Hitler remained no longer satisfied with Eckart’s “metaphysical anti-Semitism” and turned to more tangible justifications of his mission. True, Eckart was a blazing Jew-baiter, preaching a purification of the German race from the Jewish Evil and the advent of a Führer who would lead the Germans toward their glorious future; but his way of reasoning and his philosophical ...

... proclaimed to the world by Martin Luther. Was Christ, the founder of their faith, not a Jew? Chamberlain contended that he was not. At the time Christ walked upon the earth Galilee was inhabited by non-Jewish tribes. Christ had “a large proportion of non-Semitic blood”, and: “Whoever claimed that Jesus was a Jew was either being stupid or telling a lie.” 444 This irrefutable argument was duly repeated... existing on earth, the saviours of the world and the creators and carriers of the supreme Western culture. “The Aryan was distinguished by a physical form that typified the Germanic ideal of beauty; the Jew was his very opposite. Symbolically, only to be too deeply believed later on, the two represented the polarization of God and the devil … God was, so to speak, embodied in the German race, and the devil... Germans were not only the purest Aryans, they were the foremost in every field, also the religious, and “much more devout Christians than other peoples”. Hitler too believed that Christ was not a Jew. “Christ was an Aryan”, he said in one of his monologues, “but Paul abused his teaching to mobilize the dark forces and to organize a proto-Bolshevism”. 445 How far speculations of this sort can be spun ...

... Jews have been trained through thousands of years. Today the Jew is looked upon as especially ‘clever’, and in a certain sense he has been so throughout the ages. His intellectual powers, however, are not the result of an inner evolution but rather have been shaped by the object lessons which the Jew has received from others … Since the Jew never had a civilization of his own, he has always been furnished... ready-to-hand around him.” It was part of the stereotype of the Jew that his mind was dry, sterile, incapable of creation, and that he was a parasite or a vampire of the life-force and creativity of others. “The Jewish intellect will never be constructive but always destructive”, wrote Hitler. “In the course of a few years [the Jew] endeavours to exterminate all those who represent the national i ...

... instance, Anna Maria Sigmund, in her biographies of prominent Nazi women, quotes the father of Gerda Bormann as saying: “The Jew is not a human being. He is an element of decay. Just as the fission fungus chooses rotten wood to settle and destroys its tissue, just so the Jew has found the occasion to insinuate himself into the German Volk and do his mischief when, weakened by the loss of blood in the... alien racial elements, and when these have already insinuated themselves, it must suppress them and eliminate them. The Jew is such an alien and, therefore, when he wants to insinuate himself, he must be warded off. This is self-defence. In saying this, I do not characterize every Jew as inferior, as Negroes are, and I do not underestimate the greatest enemy with whom we have to fight. But I reject Jewry... he answered: “Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.” 536 “The Jew too is a human being, nobody has ever doubted this”, said a sarcastic Joseph Goebbels. “But the flea is also an animal, though not a pleasant one. And as the flea is ...

... “Great Master of the Lie” If the Aryan was “the Prometheus of mankind, from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed forth”, his antagonist was the Jew. “The Jew offers the most striking contrast to the Aryan”, wrote Hitler. “There is probably no other people in the world who have so developed the instinct of self-preservation as the so-called ‘chosen’ people... Eckart, who had used much of it in his magazine In Plain German , was an admired teacher. If the Aryan was the highest being in a human form, the Jew was the lowest; in fact, he was not even subhuman and his human shape was only a deceptive appearance. “The Jew wriggles his way in among the body of the nations and bores them hollow from inside,” teaches Mein Kampf . He is “a parasite among nations”, “a... theories about race and blood. “[The Jew] poisons the blood of others but preserves his own blood unadulterated … The religious instruction of the Jews is principally a collection of instructions for maintaining the Jewish blood pure.” 326 Therefore, what was at stake in the war between the Aryans and the Jews was nothing less than the life of humanity. “The Jew is the enemy of human existence. His ...

... called him “a prophet of the Devil”. Günter Scholdt writes about his “shamelessness in his relation with truth”. Hitler defined his own mental processes accurately when he wrote that to the Jew lying was an art. “[The Jew] speaks to hide his thoughts, or at least to disguise them, and what he really means is not to be found in what he says but between the lines”. 1061 His own language and that of Joseph... Ignorance, Suffering and Death, and that these four aspects were therefore features of his personality. Falsehood. One of Eckart and Hitler’s recurrent themes was Schopenhauer’s saying that the Jew was “the great master of the lie”. When browsing through Mein Kampf we have found that Hitler systematically applied the methods of the fictional Elders of Zion, in which he was thoroughly instructed ...

... technique, borrowed from the popular lore, is to make the “other”, whether enemy or just “not one of us”, into a stereotype. The völkisch stereotype of the Jew would afterwards be taken over by the propaganda machine of the Third Reich. “The Jew lacked a soul, all virtues, and the capacity for ethical behaviour for the reason that Judaism was a fossilized legalism. What a striking contrast this made... whether, if the Jew lacked a proper soul, he could be classed as human. On the economic and social front it was asserted that Jews had consorted in diabolical intrigues to seize power in order to dominate the Gentile world … In a whole series of novels Jewish characters lacked all human qualities and met miserable fates, victims of their egoistical power drives. The objectification of the Jew as evil by... sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but they were not as critical then. The Jew at that early date was still pictured as a comic, though grotesque, figure. In the image presented by the völkisch thought, he became a menace; he held the Germans in actual bondage. “The racial stereotype attributed so many grotesque qualities to the Jew that he was in essence dehumanized”, concludes Mosse. 533 Dehumanization ...

... simple”, states John Weiss, “not at all bothered that his hatred of the Jews denied the power of Christ to redeem all humanity. To him the Jew was simply not human. As the Protestant ‘German Christians’ of the Nazi movement would later claim: the blood of the Jew was beyond redemption.” 559 “A line of anti-Semitic descent from Martin Luther to Adolf Hitler is easy to draw. Both Luther and Hitler were... is true also that Luther, in particular, turned to the Jews for support of his new construing of the Bible and his rejection of papal claims. In his 1523 pamphlet, On the Fact that Christ was born a Jew, he argued that there was now no reason at all why they should not embrace Christ, and foolishly looked forward to a voluntary mass conversion. When the Jews retorted that the Talmud conveyed an even... will never shine on a more bloodthirsty and revengeful people, which therefore thinks that it is the people of God and that it has to murder and strangle the heathen.” 555 Or: “Cursed goy [i.e. non-Jew] that I am, I cannot understand how the Jews manage to be so skilful, unless I think that when Judas Iscariot hanged himself, his guts burst and emptied. Perhaps the Jews sent their servants with plates ...

... 10. The Jewish Question Hitler and his God “The Jews are our Misfortune” “A Jew remains a Jew, in Germany or any other country. We can never change this race, even by centuries of residence among other people”, says the Handbook of the Hitler Youth, published in 1937. 564 This statement, a point of doctrine for Hitler’s young, rash and ready heroes,... persisted in looking inward, which was a good thing, but also backward, which was not. That it developed simultaneously into the foremost industrial nation in the world made it more schizophrenic, and the Jew still more guilty. And that the Jews were intelligent and some of them highly visible, did not help either. A few quotes will have to do. They are intended to suggest the anti-Jewish atmosphere of... struggle. The Jewish question was therefore not to be met with tolerance. Instead it was reducible to a mortal contest: either the Jewish or the ‘true’ German way of life must prevail in the end … The Jew became the incarnation of evil. Any humaneness Lagarde possibly possessed was eventually obscured by his call for the extermination of the Jews like bacilli” 566 – a simile which was to enjoy a long ...

... the Jew, with the aid of his Marxist creed, triumph over the people of this world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of mankind, and this planet will once again follow its orbit through the ether without any human life on its surface, as it did millions of years ago. And so I believe today that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: in standing guard against the Jew I am ...

... 10. The Jewish Question Hitler and his God “The Jew” “‘The Jew’ was invariably referred to in Nazi discourse as a type to which all Jews conformed, whether western or eastern, men or women, secular or religious, assimilated or unassimilated, bourgeois or proletarian. Even baptized Jews were irrevocably tainted in Nazi ideology by the stigma of degenerate ...

... more example, and a curious one, of social selection.” The community of people called “the Jews” was therefore based on “psychic convergence” and not on the physiological or taxonomic facts. To be a Jew, according to Vacher de Lapouge, was to belong to a group with the “Jewish mentality”, which was the result of religion and tradition. Pichot concludes: “The notion of race – whether Jewish or any... model for the establishment of a new aristocracy by natural or eugenic means.” Here Pichot quotes from Hitler’s dictates to Bormann, on one of his very last days at the bunker in Berlin, saying that the Jew is fundamentally a stranger, and that the Jewish race is foremost a community of the mind, shaped by a common destiny through all the persecutions they had to suffer in the course of the centuries. 595 ...

... One Rindtfleisch led a mob against them and they were killed and burnt to the last person. But Rindtfleisch did not stop there, for this “butcher of the Jews”, as he became known, led his troupe of Jew-baiters from place to place, attacking and slaying the Jews wherever he found them, except when they consented to be baptized. The killer wave ran through Franconia and Bavaria, making tens of thousands... crystallization of anti-Semitism in its classical form, which later led to the statement of Erasmus: ‘If it is the sign of a good Christian to hate the Jews, then we are all good Christians’ … Even if the Jew is no longer present in some places [the Jews were banished from Spain, France and England], the people invent him, and the less a Christian population runs into Jews in its daily life, the more it is ...

... Pagels shows how the authors of the four canonical Gospels – Mark, Luke, Matthew and John – gradually grew more inimical towards the Jews. In this they followed the footsteps of Paul of Tarsus, himself a Jew who had converted to Christianity, and who would transform the Judaic sect of the followers of Christ into a potentially universal (“catholic”) religion no longer bound to a particular people and its... committed the most heinous crime by hatching the complot against the Saviour of humanity … It is in consequence necessary that the city where Jesus suffered be destroyed from top to bottom, that the Jew be chased from his home, and that others [i.e. the Christians] be called by God to the blessed election.” Gregory of Nyssa, around the same time, preached in the true Christian spirit: “Murderers of ...

... will remain an inexhaustible stock of oratorical ammunition for Hitler, who of course never mentioned that among the mourners of the Jew Kurt Eisner, and wearing a red armband, there had been himself. Taking all this into consideration, it is rather ironical that the Jew Karl Marx, a favourite target of Hitler’s anti-Judeo-Bolshevik rhetoric, was a life-long anti-Semite – a fact for which he is rarely... could not. Yet, though many Socialist leaders are Jews, only few Jews are Socialist leaders. To call the mass of modern Jewry Socialist, let alone revolutionary, is a bad propaganda joke. The imaginary Jew portrayed in The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion ostensibly wants to bend the nations to his will by revolutionary mass uprisings; the real Jewish Socialist of France, Germany and Italy, however ...

... distance not wanting to think about her responsibility. “For [the Jew] language is not an instrument for the expression of his inner thoughts but rather a means of cloaking them”, Hitler wrote. “He will stop at nothing. His utterly low-down conduct is so appalling that one really cannot be surprised if in the imagination of our people the Jew is pictured as the incarnation of Satan and the symbol of evil... flee Germany, and the way so many allowed themselves to be led “like lambs to the slaughter”. Cohn quotes the testimony after the war of SS-general Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, one of the notorious Jew-slayers: “Had the Jews only in the least been organized, millions of them could have been saved, but they were entirely taken by surprise.” 337 In his book on Hitler, one of the earliest biographies ...

... a novel. The Sin against the Blood was written in 1917, published in 1921, and became “a phenomenal best-seller”. The novel “depicts a rich Jew who violates an innocent Aryan girl, polluting her blood. A volkist, Dinter believed that intercourse with a Jew destroyed the capacity of Aryan women to reproduce anything but racially polluted offspring”, 500 a theme which will be repeated ad nauseam by... role in the formative years of Nazism. 499 He would even claim to be a precursor of Nazism and not hesitate to assert this for all to hear. A militant anti-Semite, he had held one of the very first Jew-baiting speeches as early as 1914, at the Zirkus Busch in Berlin, to a crowd of five thousand. He befriended Dietrich Eckart in Munich and Julius Streicher in Nuremberg, and corresponded from 1916 till ...

... Rathenau, the epitome of the German Jew, declared: “I am a German of Jewish descent. My people is the German people, my fatherland is Germany, my religion that Germanic faith which is above all religions.” 585 Professor Heinz Moral committed suicide after being dismissed from his university post for racial reasons; in a letter to the dean of faculty he had written: “I am a Jew and have never made a secret ...

... to the intimate circle around Hitler. Gutbarlett believed in the ‘sidereal pendulum’, an astrological contraption, and claimed that this had given him the power to sense at once the presence of any Jew or persons of partial Jewish ancestry, and to pick them out in any group of people. Hitler … had many discussions with him on racial questions.” 69 Wilhelm Gutberlet, a medical doctor, is mentioned in... as Thule’s emblem; others were Baron Karl von Teuchert, Countess Heila von Westarp and Prince Gustav Maria von Thurn und Taxis. The eighth person to be executed together with those anti-Semites was a Jew, professor Ernst Berger, arrested by mistake; he had insisted on being led to his execution thinking that they were taken to be interrogated and that he would be able to prove his identity. The news ...

... and cultivate their superior Aryan soul. The German people were destined to redeem the world. As high as the Aryan Germans stood on the hierarchical ladder of humanity, so low stood the Jews. “The Jew has no sense of the experience of what is eternal or of the need of immortality. Ergo: he has no soul, and is therefore the opposite pole of the Germans, who are always striving for something higher... constituted the vanguard. This battle must not only be fought in the open, between the opponents in society, but first of all in every individual, for only mastery within himself of the Aryan over the Jew could lead to mastery over the world. The Jews “belong to ‘the organism of humanity’ as certain bacteria do to the human body. … We have to endure the Jews among us as a necessary evil, who knows for ...

... The most dangerous contamination in Hitler’s eyes was, of course, the Jew. (“He poisons the blood of others but preserves his own blood unadulterated.”) In the following paragraph of Mein Kampf , one of the most often quoted, one again hears an unmistakable echo from Gobineau: “If with the help of his Marxist faith the Jew is victorious against the peoples of this world, then his crown will be a ...

... Catechism of the Anti-Semite; its twenty-seventh impression in 1907 was renamed Handbook of the Jewish Question and remained till the end of the Third Reich a source of reference and inspiration for all Jew-haters. Fritsch launched the “Anti-Semitic People’s Party” in 1889. In 1902 he started a periodical, the Hammer , which became such a success that Hammer Associations sprang up everywhere in Germany ...

... after having had to remove him as Gauleiter of Thuringia for recurrent misbehaviour and corruption. “There is, in spite of all his weaknesses, not a single full-blooded personality like him … And the Jew is much more base, bloodthirsty and satanical than Streicher has depicted him”, said Hitler in one of his monologues. 1024 He will never forget that in 1922, after his “conversion”, Streicher transferred ...

... compared the Austrian corporal in the first months after the Great War to “a worn out stray dog” who would accept a crust of bread from anyone who wanted to be his master, even from a Frenchmen or a Jew. Mayr was caught and handed over to the Germans. He died in the Buchenwald concentration camp on 9 February 1945. 239 ...

... 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 ...

... on the political scene was “a decision that would be for good, with no turning back”. How came that Hitler, who was not an anti-Semite in May 1919, at least not an outspoken one, became a militant Jew-baiter in the following months, as is evident from reactions to his pep talks as an army propagandist and from the Gemlich letter, written on 16 September? How had Hitler constructed the pillars of his ...

... gestures by German Aryans, but it is undeniable that the general atmosphere was inimical towards the Jews. There is no doubt that Hitler did not have to push much to make a National Socialist kick a Jew, and harassing those “other” people was a lot of fun for a member of the Hitler Youth, as retaliation was out of the question. National Socialism wanted to discard the Jews from German society. Hitler ...

... soon established along the great European trade routes and in urban centres. By the ninth century the Jews of Europe enjoyed their greatest success as international merchants and traders; the words Jew and merchant were virtually synonymous. Along with Greeks, Syrians and Italians – Christians all – Jews were the advance agents of a society yet to come … Down to our own time, the wealth of some highly ...

... German nationalist hostages had been murdered. This was at a time that the leadership of the Russian Revolution, including Lenin, was generally (but incorrectly) supposed to be entirely Jewish, that the Jew Bela Kun had started a short-lived Marxist revolution in Hungary, that the Jews Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogisches and others had sparked off the Spartacist revolt, and that Marxist revolts were brewing ...

... of the Treaty of Versailles (he entertained the same irrational hopes for an understanding with Great Britain as the German leadership before the Great War); the protagonist of the Aryan race, the Jew, had to be discarded in one way or another. But now Hitler dared to express what could only have drawn ridicule when he was still known as the Austrian corporal: Germany must conquer the world for the ...

... numbers and were reprinted till the end of the Third Reich. What the nationalist literature did not promulgate were the visionary predictions of a Romantic like Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), who was a Jew. “Christianity – and this is its nicest merit – has somewhat softened the crude German fighting spirit but could not eradicate it, and when the taming Talisman, the Cross, falls to pieces, then the savagery ...

... hungry and penniless. They could not forever be kept marching and chanting in the streets or collecting money for the Party – while doing a little mischief on the side, for instance beating up an old Jew. They were looking forward to what was promised to them – power, food and money – and this not in the long term but as soon as possible. “Hitler had already for some time become the hostage of his ...

... of falling to the level where Southern Italy is today. This pestilential adulteration of the blood, of which hundreds of thousands of our people take no account, is systematically practised by the Jew today.” Hitler also wrote the following, which may be taken as a summing up of his basic ideas on the subject of race: “Therewith we may lay down the following principle as valid: every racial mixture ...

... strains were, he declared in his table talk, inferior to the Jews: if 5000 Jews were transferred to Sweden, within a short time they would occupy all the leading positions.” 635 The mystery of the cause of Hitler’s hatred of the Jews must have been closely connected with “his vision of the apocalyptic conflict between the Aryans and the Jews”, which we have briefly examined when leafing through Mein... executive organs of the regime would know that any radicalization of the politics against the Jews was authorized by the highest representative of the regime. On top of this, “Hitler gave confidentially direct oral orders with which he started particular operations of the systematic mass murder of the Jews.” 628 This is carefully worded by Longerich and supported by many persons involved in the ... 634 which is a historians’ understatement. And Joachim Fest puts is as follows: “We can probably no longer plumb the cause of this ever-growing hatred [of the Jews], which lasted literally to the last hour of Hitler’s life.” “He admired the Jews”, says Fest. “Their racial exclusiveness and purity seemed to him no less admirable than their sense of being a chosen people, their implacability and intelligence ...

... was Jewish.) The Marburg professor of philosophy Hermann Cohen wrote in 1916: “As Germans we want to be Jews, and as Jews Germans”, and he thought he saw how in the perspective of history Germans and Jews would fuse into unity. “It was from this angle”, writes Dietrich Bronder, “that the Jews as German soldiers have affirmed themselves on all occasions, even in Hitler’s armies, and that they were... “When World War I began, the Jews expressed their sense of German nationalism by swarming into the army with an ardour as lemming-like as that of the gentiles. Some 100 000 Jews (one out of every six, including the women and children) entered the German Army. Of these, 80 000 served in frontline trenches, 35 000 were decorated for bravery, and 12 000 were killed. ‘The Jews were pathologically patriotic’... German Jews hoped their sacrifice in war would convince all of their patriotism, and indeed, in the name of national unity, German anti-Semitism was muted at first”, writes John Weiss. However: “Soon German racism surpassed even pre-war intensity, encouraged by the German army. When Jews were accused of slacking, the general staff requested the Ministry of War to conduct a count of Jews at the front ...

... “Numerically, the Jews remained a tiny minority, never more than about one percent of the population. Those few, however, tended to congregate in Berlin. The 50 families of 1671 grew to a population of 3 322 in 1800, to 92 000 in 1900, to a peak of 173 000 in 1925 (about six times the 29 000 in Frankfurt, Germany’s second-largest Jewish community).” Even during this increase, Berlin’s Jews never numbered... like Wertheim, Tietz and Kaufhaus Israel. The most important newspaper groups were owned by Jews, and, to a very considerable extent, the spectacular culture of Berlin in the 1920’s; the culture dominated by personalities like Max Reinhardt and Bruno Walter and Albert Einstein, was a Jewish culture. “To the Jews, this was naturally a matter of pride, and more than one Jewish chronicler has pointed out... Burleigh and John Weiss make the effort to find out who the German Jews actually were, how they lived, and, most important, in how far the accusations of their torturers and executioners were justified. Were the Jewish people really one coherent, monolithic body, striving to fulfil its destiny as a race? Was it to this end that the Jews gathered the world’s money in their hands, and that they tried ...

... of the new ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, was also “a vicious anti-Semite” (Weiss). The many barbs against the Jews in his Philosophical Dictionary are there for all to read, e.g. “the Jews, our teachers and our enemies, whom we believe and detest”, or: “The Jews thus treat history and ancient fables as their old-clothes-men threat their worn garments: they turn them and sell them for... Nazism 10. The Jewish Question Hitler and his God A Less Prejudiced Attitude How, then, did the next stage in Europe’s history, the Enlightenment, treat the Jews? Its principle was a radical questioning of all certainties and dogmas formerly held to be unquestionable. The field of questioning was broadened constantly by discoveries of new lands and peoples,... English editor and translator of the Dictionary tries to defend his author: “This sort of thing is common form in Voltaire, and the legend of his anti-Semitism has persisted … He did not dislike the Jews on ‘racial grounds’, but only because they were the people of the Old Testament and the precursors of Christianity” – which looks like a curious reason for his dislike. 562 “I therefore ask, gentlemen ...

... Pan-Germans against Jews and Czechs in the streets of Vienna was a fact of everyday life. Schönerer had become “the idol of German shopkeepers, artisans and clerks, his photo was displayed in countless shops, his paper was available for reading in nearly every pub. A brisk business was done in watch chains with images of hanged Jews … The party program was depressingly familiar: Jews must not teach or... or serve in the army or the civil service, and there should be quotas in law and medicine … Artisans and peasants must be protected [against the Jews] and Jews kept out of the empire; those already there were to be treated as aliens with special legal and tax burdens.” 141 “It is indeed beyond question that Hitler not only took over Schönerer’s political principles, but that he nearly copied them,”... hostel in the Meldemannstrasse were Jews, as Hamann herself found out. She also writes: “The decisive question when anti-Semitism became for Hitler the crucial point cannot be answered from his time in Linz and Vienna.” 146 When Hitler in the hostel and in the frontline dugouts launched into one of his rhetorical outbursts, his vehemence was not directed against the Jews; he was angered because Germany ...

... founder of the Germanenorden . In all cases German racism was practically identical with anti-Semitism, for the Jews were the main foreign organism, often compared to a germ or a virus, in the living body of the Volk. (Compared to the numbers and the economical and cultural influence of the Jews, the Gypsies were hardly of any importance – if the murder of half a million of them can be said to be of little... a prominent Pan-German, put the Semites on a nearly identical level with the Indo-Germans. If the Jews were hated and feared, it was in part because they were secretly admired (also by Hitler) for their surviving qualities and purity as a race, and for their intelligence. The characteristics of the Jews, stereotyped by Christianity in general, were ingrained, “programmed” in the thinking modes of the... virulent and aggressive because German nationalism and racism became virulent and aggressive. Even Treitschke wanted to give the Jews a chance to integrate into the nation, by converting to Christianism, before he became a militant anti-Semite and coined the slogan “The Jews are our misfortune”, which would resound through the coming generations. Ernst Haeckel seems never to have gone that far. ...

... which will remain, as far as the Jews are concerned, the basis of his ideology, his real “granite foundation”, till the last day of his life. There is the foreignness and the danger represented by the Jewish people; there is the affirmation that the Jews are a race, not a religious community; and there is the statement that the ultimate aim of the struggle against the Jews must be, “unshakeably”, their... to answer a question put to him in writing by Adolf Gemlich, another of Mayr’s military propagandists. The question was: “What is the attitude of the social-democratic government towards the Jews? Are the Jews also included in the socialist programme of “equal rights” of the peoples, even so when one considers them to be a threat to the Volkstum [the people as a race]?” 21 In his request to answer... an audience, and this would be of crucial importance for his and Germany’s future. Another noteworthy fact during his mission in Lechfeld was that Hitler, for the first time, began to attack the Jews, so vehemently that he had to be restrained by his superiors, who, however much they might agree with him, were after all serving a social-democratic government. The commandant of the Lechfeld camp ...

... of little importance to launch the Kristallnacht, a euphemism for the biggest pogrom in German history. Soon a series of decrees gradually made life in Germany unbearable for the Jews – and not only for the Jews: Himmler issued his decree “to fight the Gypsy plague” on 8 December. Whatever the half-measures Hitler had been forced to take not to offend world opinion too much, from now on he indubitably... acceptance. But it seems one cannot rely on common sense to stand the strain.” 1113 Now Hitler, convinced that he was pressed for time, loosened all the brakes. For a time he had gone easy on the Jews, heading straight for his world war and allowing nothing to come in between. In the back of his mind, though, the idea had taken shape that the war would be the right occasion to realize, unheeded by... within his power, with the ultimate aim to eradicate them ( ausmerzen ) in the whole world. Sri Aurobindo read his intentions and signalled the preparations for “the deliberate cold-blooded murder of the Jews” as early as the last day of 1938. Hitler, the appearances notwithstanding, was sorely disappointed with the results of the Munich Conference. Raving against Chamberlain, he shouted: “That fellow ...

... guidance, with the adamant conviction that the Germans were the Herrenmenschen ; that he was the one come to lead them towards the fulfilment of their Volkhood and their highest aims; and that the Jews were the enemies of this fulfilment. The practical aspects of this task coincided for the most part with the political aspirations of that time. In the prison at Landsberg, and most probably under the... Then, as Chancellor of the Reich, he capitalized on the political situation to secure the foundations of the Aryan world empire, and to execute what until then had been unthinkable, the genocide of the Jews. Hermann Rauschning 1 has already been quoted elsewhere as saying that Hitler could not proclaim his great, basic ideas openly from the start. He had at first to stick to the “fascist”, i.e. ... mind from the beginning of his career and remained always present, even when circumstances forced him to agree for a while with the Madagascar plan or with the emigration of the German and Austrian Jews. The ultimate settlement of accounts between the false and the true Chosen People was, in Hitler’s vision, inevitable. The growth of the National Socialist movement, the regained prosperity of Germany ...

... Dora, where the V-2s were built? Or the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen in Russia – Walter Ohlendorff, Arthur Nebe, Friedrich Jeckeln … – who performed such an effective job of slaughtering Jews and non-Jews alike in their tens of thousands? ...

... Lord”, fountainhead of all culture and everything worthwhile in the history of humanity, and they were the Chosen People. If the false pretenders to the title of Chosen People were the Jews, if the ultimate aim of the Jews was world dominion, as documented in The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, and if Hitler’s Aryans had to exterminate them “to do the work of the Lord” and found the Kingdom of God... have told you] is not about equality with others but about power over others … In all these conquered countries it will be your task to play the leading role in the name of the German people … As the Jews were able to become the all-encompassing world power from their diaspora, so will we today, as the true people of God, from our dispersion throughout the world become the omnipresent power, the master ...

... in Hitler’s subconscious mind. “Eckart was very influential in the development of the anti-Semitic dynamic within the ranks of the Workers’ Party”, writes Mosse. “He reinforced Hitler’s abhorrence of Jews as a mysterious, strange and conspiring people, supplementing Hitler’s ideas in some areas, while creating a more fanatical foundation for their development in others. While Hitler had already shared... Jewish question is the chief problem of humanity, in which, indeed, every one of its other problems is contained. Nothing on earth could remain darkened if one could throw light on the secret of the Jews’.” 155 What happened between Eckart and Hitler during their frequent meetings remains unknown. It is nonetheless undeniable that Hitler generated a sudden burst of energy which would make him within... unification of all Germans into a Greater Germany; 2. the abolition of the Treaties of Versailles and St. Germain; 3. the right of Germany to the necessary territories and colonies; 4. the expulsion of all Jews from Germany.” 158 Before long the name of the German Workers’ Party (DAP) was changed into “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (NSDAP) – quite a mouthful, but no problem in a language in which ...

... language Hitler used when he wrote or talked about the government of the Weimar Republic was even worse than the way he talked about the hated French. “November criminals”, designating all Leftists and Jews allegedly responsible for the armistice and related events, was used by him on uncountable occasions and became a sort of political concept in Naziland. But there was much more, and better, also in... against Germany’s mortal enemy prepared. Hitler called the government “the present Jewish-Democratic Reich, which has become a veritable curse for the German people”; they were “those ruffians of Jews who came into power in 1918 and were able to rob the nation of its arms”; they were “a gang of bandits”. 272 “According to the laws that govern human history, it is inconceivable that the German people ...

... in the first place Matthias Erzberger, had betrayed their country. Germany was not guilty of starting the war; it had lost the war because it had been betrayed by the Social-Democrats, communists and Jews within its own house; the nation must become strong and powerful again and take revenge. These were the inexhaustible themes of Adolf Hitler, who had been as shocked as the rest of the German nation... plunged his dagger between his shoulders and killed him. Now, once again, “the fighting Siegfried [i.e. Germany] succumbed to the dagger plunged in his back [by the pacifist Social-Democrats and other ‘Jews’]”, wrote Hitler in *Mein Kampf.* 260 This untruth, a lie called legend, launched by Hindenburg before a commission examining the cause of the German collapse, was reinforced and propagated by Ludendorff... tation and offended patriotic feelings provided abundant ammunition for Hitler’s broadsides against “Germany’s enemies”, real or imagined, internal and international. (And exposing the whole lot as Jews always elicited consent from his audiences.) France, however, was his favourite target among the Allies. This country was “a victor which should not have been one”, for it was unjust “that such a highly ...

... widows and orphans.” For now it was no longer a matter of the killing of a hundred persons whom Hitler disliked, or of a thousand Jews caught at random, but of hundreds of thousands of German soldiers, people of other nations, and of the systematic genocide of the Jews. In Stauffenberg’s position as a staff officer he could not but know about this, even if he did not know all of it. “Stauffenberg was... become thoroughly alarmed over what was taking place”. 722 The falling of the scales from his eyes happened gradually. The iron-fisted totalitarianism, the vulgar and systematic suppression of the Jews, the never ceasing flood of blatant propaganda, the black side of Hitler and his paladins, the arrogance and ruthlessness of the SS, the atmosphere of suspicion and fear – it all looked more and more ...

... become a moving force … I agree fully with Mister Hitler that what is called the social-democracy of the government is completely at the mercy of the Jews … All harmful elements must, like breeders of illness, be expelled or isolated – which goes for the Jews too …” 97 Hitler’s first visit to the DAP was not the casual occurrence it is still generally supposed to have been. This can also be deduced from ...

... “Hitler was not a politician who based himself on a programme and who had to justify his actions to the people, but the redemptive figure of an exoteric cult whose aim was to liberate the world from the Jews … Strictly speaking the Germans did not need to know anything. They only had to have faith.” 775 “I have taught you how to have faith: now give me your faith!” Hitler shouted. And he said on another ...

... Chronicle of the Crusades Daim, Wilfried: Der Mann, der Hitler die Ideen gab Davidson, Eugene: The Making of Adolf Hitler – The Birth and Rise of Nazism Dawidowicz, Lucy: The War against the Jews 1933-45 Delpla, François: Hitler Fest, Joachim: Der Untergang Fest, Joachim: Hitler (1974 ed.) Fest, Joachim: Speer – The Final Verdict Fest, Joachim: The Face of the Third... Fischer”. Iyengar, K.R. Srinivasan: Sri Aurobindo Jäckel, Eberhard: Hitlers Weltanschauung Joachimsthaler, Anton: Hitlers Weg begann in München 1913-1923 Johnson, Paul: A History of the Jews Junge, Traudl: Bis zur letzten Stunde Kaufmann, Walter: Nietzsche – Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist Kempowski, Walter: Haben Sie Hitler gesehen? Kershaw, Ian: Hitler – 1889-1936 ...

... the supermen would, moreover, become always purer and nobler because they would be freed of the peril of degradation by lower races and especially by the demonic race that was the lowest of all, the Jews. As Sri Aurobindo’s vision was that of a new era initiating the transformation of the human race into a race of higher beings he also called “supermen”, and as these higher beings would populate a new ...

... destruction of that happy order had been the work first of the Romans and then of the Church of Rome … The Old Testament was dismissed as valueless; for from the time of the creation onwards it was not the Jews but the Germans who were the Chosen People. Adam and all his descendants down to Japheth [one of the three sons of Noah], including all the Patriarchs, were Germans speaking German … It was Japheth ...

... go out and spill their blood for a Greater Germany to which the world would have to bow; it made them feel the true Chosen People, entitled and even missioned to exterminate the false pretenders, the Jews. This development is rather surprising if one has a look at the history of the German master race. As a Volk they were a battered people for centuries, moving, in the words of H.R. Trevor-Roper, ...

... Socialist Party”, for which the propaganda was launched on Christmas Day. This was meant to be a political party in the classical sense of the word, “German-völkisch and socialist”, but not accessible for Jews. Its newspaper would be the Münchener Beobachter und Sportblatt – a title intended to allure the lower classes by the addition of Sportblatt , which means “sports magazine”. The president of the ...

... devil, to the equally famous ‘scrap of paper’ [Hitler’s disdainful designation of the neutrality treaty with Belgium]. Who cannot see already in Luther’s betrayal of the peasants, the princes and the Jews an early example of the betrayal by the Prussian-Protestant officers of their Church and the world as a whole, is no more than a naïve fool.” 361 ...

... promoters of materialism were the Jews. The latter had no idea of true spirituality, or of a soul, or of another world. Voltaire had written it long ago: “What is very singular is that in all the laws of god’s people there is not a word about the spirituality and the immortality of the soul … It is quite certain, it is indubitable that Moses nowhere promised the Jews rewards and punishments in another ...

... from the ‘chaos of peoples’ caused by the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. To this race belonged the future if it could free oneself from the anti-Germanic elements, in the first place from the Jews. Of all Germanic peoples it was specifically the Germans who were called to rule the world. If they did not succeed in this, they were condemned to perish.” 402 Emperor William II was one of Cha ...

... leadership status against no less patriotic or racist Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenians, Slovenes, Serbo-Croats, Italians, and others. “In Vienna there lived at the time more Czechs than in Prague, more Jews than in Jerusalem and more Croats than in Zagreb.” 34 The new ideas of Theosophy together with the growing self-awareness of the Austrian Pan-Germans explain in part a figure like Guido von List ...

... “materialists”, not much more than material beings in an animal-like state, Untermenschen, i.e. subhumans, or lower humans, or half-humans, and even non-humans although human in appearance (such as the Jews). The German stage was set for Martin Luther (1483-1546). “It fell to Luther to amplify considerably the rise of a nationalism which fused with the Reformation and gave to Lutheranism its specifically ...

... the title “Adolf Hitler, Traitor”, accusing Hitler of all kinds of misbehaviour within the NSDAP, and of acting in the same fashion as the people he ranted against in his speeches and articles, the Jews. The pamphlet was written as an angry reaction against Hitler by a group of NSDAP members. The broader background was that Drexler and others, during a prolonged absence of Hitler in Berlin, had approached ...

... contact was the only way of mixing blood with blood, one finds here the nexus with the widespread sexual and even pornographic character assassination of those intentional spoilers of the Aryan blood: the Jews. “If nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger”, one reads in Mein Kampf , “she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because ...

... survive and even procreate, would mean tampering with the order of nature, whether or not created by a God. (Eugenics – and ultimately the eradication of a people that was supposed to be harmful, like the Jews – was therefore a development in the logical order of things.) Such reasoning left no longer any possibility open for an upward evolution beyond animal man, into a future where the human being might ...

... of his speeches, which reached new levels of vulgarity in the extravagance of their threats and their unconcealed sadism. While Hitler wanted to bring about the millennium by a massacre of all the Jews, there was a certain [Friedrich] Lamberty in Thuringia who wanted to do it by folk dancing, singing and frolicking. Each saviour had a style of his own. No one and nothing was surprising; surprise had ...

... European. The SS men in their “dashing and elegant” black uniforms were very status conscious and conditioned to be so. At the bottom of the pyramid of the Nazi state there were the ordinary people, Jews and Gypsies not included; above them ranked the National Socialist Party members; then came the uniformed members of the SA; and on top stood the SS, looking down on everybody else, also on the SA from ...

... 1048 Sri Aurobindo found in January 1939 that Hitler was “becoming more and more criminal and going down very fast.” 1049 It was at this time that he decided upon “the final solution” concerning the Jews, indirectly announcing this decision in his notorious Reichstag speech on 30 January. After coming to power he had exclaimed: “We are ruthless! I have no bourgeois scruples! They think I am uncultured ...

... Id., p. 303. 554 Paul Johnson: A History of the Jews, p. 242. 555 Dietrich Bronder: Bevor Hitler kam, p. 352. 556 John Weiss: Ideology of Death, p. 23. 557 Dietrich Bronder, op., cit., p. 352. 558 Michael Ley: Apokalypse und Moderne, p. 153. 559 John Weiss, op. cit., p. 24. 560 Lucy Dawidowicz: The War against the Jews 1933-45, p. 50. 561 Voltaire: Philosophical Dictionary... 623 Ian Kershaw: Hitler – 1889-1936 Hubris, p. 573. 624 Traudl Junge: Bis zur letzten Stunde, p. 202. 625 Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf, p. 66. 626 Lucy Dawidowicz: The War against the Jews 1933-45, p. 208. 627 Id., p. 202. 628 Peter Longerich: Der ungeschriebene Befehl – Hitler und der Weg zur “Endlösung”, pp. 185-86. 629 Gitta Sereny: Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth ...