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... Munich police. The effect of Eckart’s brand of “metaphysical anti-Semitism”, mentioned in a previous chapter, is incontestable, e.g. in the following passages: “We do not want to be emotional anti-Semites who seek to create the atmosphere of the pogrom: we are driven by the relentless resoluteness to expose the evil at its base and to eradicate it root and branch. To attain our goal any means will be... onwards. They will climax (for the time being) in a speech on 13 August 1920, less than a year after his entry in the Harrer and Drexler circle. The title of this speech was explicit: “Why are we Anti-Semites?” and Hitler gave a recital of his complete anti-Jewish repertoire. In the police protocol of the speech is noted the usual crescendo in the response of the audience: “laughter – applause – bravo and ...

... with Alfred Rosenberg, propagator of The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion and theorist of anti-Semitism. Less than a year after the Gemlich letter, Hitler delivered his speech “Why are we anti-Semites?” presenting his enthusiastically responding Munich audience with an outline of his anti-Semitism which will not be changed for the rest of his life – except that “the final solution” still remained ...

... at the meeting in question was Gottfried Feder, author of a Manifest for the Breaking of the Interest Slavery of Money , a cranky theory which at the time made a deep impression on the German anti-Semites, including Hitler, who remarks: “Feder’s lecture was known to me from the courses [for propagandists at Munich University].” In fact, Feder was standing in for Dietrich Eckart, a “guest” of Thule who ...

... and a direct expression of the Creator; it should be made into a religion. The holy land was not Palestine, but Germany. Rosenberg bolstered the dualism of a world divided into Nordic people and Semites, more particularly Jews. As such, he deepened the “North-South divide”, all the same extending the south eastwards, for his hate of the Russia that had made him an expatriate never abated. The Nordics ...

... influenced my later political work’. Issued in pamphlet form, Treitschke’s articles gave reinforcement and professional authoritativeness to the anti-Semitic movement. Treitschke spoke, the anti-Semites said, ‘for thousands, perhaps millions of his countrymen’.” 569 Poliakov calls Treitschke le maître à penser of the German nationalist youth, which is how he became known to us in an earlier chapter ...

... their far-reaching communal relations, one of the reasons being simply that, as an intellectual people, they were far too individualistic and therefore diverse. “In spite of the myths of the anti-Semites”, concludes John Weiss, “the German economy would not have been significantly different had there never been a German Jewish community”. And: “The Jews were not and never have been a menace to Germany ...

... the swastika 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 ...

... within the multinational Austrian state. Already in 1848 Catholic anti-Semitism flourished among Austro-Germans … In 1911, the last election before 1914, two-thirds of all Austro-Germans voted for anti-Semites. It is not surprising that Austro-German participation in the Holocaust was higher than that of Germans in general.” (John Weiss 138) The pages in Mein Kampf written on Georg von Schönerer and ...

... that “no Jew played a noteworthy role in the [French] Revolution nor in the philosophical revolution by which it was preceded”. 331 On the contrary, leading writers like Voltaire were outspoken anti-Semites. In his stance against the Enlightenment and progress, Hitler was as völkisch as could be and an exponent of the times in Germany. But he extended this oppositional attitude to everything deemed ...

... them – upgraded what formerly had been inspired literature to the status of sacredness. For the völkisch movement it was “unbearable that their Nordic race had borrowed the god of another race, the Semites, and held on to him. Each people has its own God, they asserted, thinking of Nietzsche who once had stated that ‘the Nordic races should be embarrassed not to have produced a single own god in two ...

... and it supported its inherent racism by giving it a semblance of scientific justification.” 429 Another surprise of Haeckel’s tree of humanity is that he, though 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 ...

... this propaganda section. Mayr, “very much radical Right”, was “ambitious, intelligent, a talented organizer and politically involved”; he was also an opponent of the Weimar Republic and an anti-Semite. 16 His network of connections seems to have extended to the most influential centres of German society. He was extraordinarily active, brimming with ideas and initiatives, and his influence was much... imprinted upon the German mind, the subject was not mentioned by the instructors at Munich University. It has, moreover, been shown by Brigitte Hamann that Hitler was not an actively conscious anti-Semite during his Vienna years, where he had friendly relations with Jews among the inmates of the men’s hostel and among the shopkeepers who sold his water colour paintings. Where, then, or by whom had he... even the smallest hint of the later concepts … One may even conclude that Hitler did not have any interest in politics [before 1919] … One is not even sure that at that time he was already an anti-Semite …” (Eberhard Jäckel 25) It is evident that in the summer months of 1919 an important change took place in Hitler’s life. Sebastian Haffner calls this period “an unexplainable gap”. Konrad Heiden ...

... desperately looked for help, but became the victims of nothing but cheats. ‘Nothing was too stupid not to be believed.’ …” 49 What was it that made Sebottendorff a fervent German nationalist and anti-Semite – he who had been steeped into the occult tradition of the Near East? Maybe it was the very discipline of inner values, of concentration and the awareness of an invisible but elementary hierarchy, ...

... ent were called, Jean-Marie Arouet, alias Voltaire. Strange to say, this man, who was one of the prominent champions 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 ...

... mechanical engineer, Theodor Fritsch (1852-1933). Some consider him to have been “the most important anti-Semitic before Hitler”. 41 It was Fritsch who compiled, in 1887, the 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 ...

... The Roots of Nazism The Roots of Nazism 10. The Jewish Question Hitler and his God Luther, the anti-Semite Then came the Reformation with the towering personality of Martin Luther, who threw his long shadow ahead in German history. In a previous chapter we have seen him as the precursor of nationalism; here now we will have a look at his influence on the ...

... therefore Bayreuth’s, virulent anti-Semitism was another element inimical to Nietzsche’s feelings, who was convinced that a mixture of races would be beneficial to humanity, and proud to be an anti-anti-Semite. It was against this background that Nietzsche’s idea of the superman took shape. It is worth noting that commentators from Walter Kaufmann onwards have become aware that “superman” is not the correct... at the service of the völkisch convictions. The main culprit in this art of thought laundering was Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth. In 1885 she married, to Nietzsche’s indignation, the militant anti-Semite Bernhard Förster and followed him to found a Teutonic colony in Paraguay, Nueva Germania. The aim of this colony, one of the many utopian communes of the time, was to preserve at least a handful ...

... home and where he became involved in political circles and in journalistic skirmishes with leftist newspapers, for during the first war years he had turned into a fervent nationalist and a rabid anti-Semite. The reasons for this portentous change in his mental outlook are not clear. A spiteful reaction to the non-acceptance or the critical failure of some of his plays does not seem a sufficient explanation... might say aggressive chin.” 120 Eckart took Rosenberg under his wing, improved his knowledge of the German language, made him a collaborator of In Plain German , and got in return a fanatical anti-Semite who would be the main advocate of the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion , the faked, widespread anti-Semitic pamphlet which has done so much damage. This brief biographical sketch of Dietrich Eckart ...

... his dog-whip. At a certain moment he seems to have had three whips! “Hanfstängl introduced Hitler to Frau Elsa Bruckmann, the wife of the publisher Hugo Bruckmann, a pan-German sympathizer and anti-Semite … Hitler’s ingratiating manners and social naivety brought out the mother instinct in her. Whether it was the wish to afford him some protection against his enemies that persuaded her to make him a ...

... mind, the intention to hijack it, and the awareness that his entrance 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,... prolific publicist with an active social life. He was a militant nationalist, acquainted with dozens of important people not only in Munich but also in Berlin and elsewhere. He was, moreover, a vocal anti-Semite, familiar with the literature on this subject and contributing to it in his turn. And he was closely related with the Thule Society, which meant with the powerful Germanenorden and the Pan-Germans ...

... 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 remembered. “Karl Marx, the prototype of the supposed Jewish labour leader, came from a baptized Christian family, and his own relation with Judaism can only be cha ...

... the latest in July, and that both agreed that this Austrian Corporal with the Iron Cross and the gift of the gab might be an asset for the Thule Society’s floundering DAP. Hitler was not an anti-Semite (at least not outspoken) in May, under the Republic of Councils, when he wore the red armband; the course he attended at Munich University was not openly and still less expressly anti-Semitic, for ...

... Himmler because the Führer accepted it. He thought that the ancient Greek tribes were Germanic and that the Roman legionaries were vegetarians. He believed that Christ was an Aryan and a proto-anti-Semite. The fictitious world of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand kept influencing his decisions till the end. And he staunchly insisted on an Aryan science in opposition to the false international, Jewish science ...