Racism, the Nazis and American media

NB: The debate on the Holocaust unleashed by Whoopi Goldberg's comments about race could be about her ignorance; but it could also arise from a linguistic misunderstanding around the concept of race. An issue related to this one is the origin of Nazi race legislation, the study of which may be found in this book by James Whitman: Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law; Princeton University Press; (2017). The following extracts from a much-acclaimed book by an exile from Nazi Germany may be of interest.

Jimmy Carr condemned for ‘abhorrent’ Holocaust joke about Roma people

All his observations are not necessarily correct, as for example that conversion to Christianity secured Jews from persecution. This was not the case, as often enough converts were also persecuted. Nonetheless Haffner's book is a valuable account by a German exile who hated the Nazi regime and left his homeland in disgust - DS

The Meaning of Hitler was published by Sebastian Haffner (Raimund Pretzel's pseudonym ) in 1978. Here are some details of Raimund Pretzel's life and his exile from Germany. His partner, later wife, was classed as Jewish under the Nuremburg Laws of 1935. The details are followed by some observations from his book, which deal with Nazi racism. 

After January 1933, Haffner witnessed as a law student the deployment of the SA's as an "auxiliary police force" and, after the March Reichstag fire, their hounding of Jewish and democratic jurists from the courts. What shocked him most in these events was the complete absence of "any act of courage or spirit". In the face of Hitler's ascent it seemed as if "a million individuals simultaneously suffered a nervous collapse". There was disbelief, but no resistance.  Doctoral research allowed Haffner to take refuge in Paris, but unable to gain a foothold in the city he returned to Berlin in 1934. Having already published some shorter fiction… he was able to make a living writing for style magazines…

But the tightening of political controls and, more immediately, the pregnancy of his journalist girlfriend, classed as Jewish under the Nuremberg Laws, urged emigration. In 1938 Erika Schmidt-Landry (née Hirsch; 1899-1969) was able to join a brother in England, and Haffner, on a commission from the Ullstein Press, was able to follow her. They married weeks before the birth of their son Oliver Pretzel. Britain's declaration of war against Germany on 3 September 1939 saved Haffner from deportation. As enemy aliens Haffner and his wife were interned, but in August 1940 they were among the first to be released from camps on the Isle of Man.

Extracts from The Meaning of Hitler, pp 91-95

As for antisemitism, Hitler was wrong not only about the Jews but even about the antisemites. Hitler really believed - this is proved not only by his quoted written and public statements but also by oral and private remarks made during the war - that his antisemitism would gain him world-wide sympathy for the German cause, that it would make Germany’s cause the cause of mankind. He counted on the existence of antisemites throughout the world. But Hitler’s variety of antisemitism, demanding extermination, existed nowhere except in eastern Europe, from where he himself had got it; and even there, it must be said to the credit of the Ukrainians, Poles and Lithuanians, it was based not on Hitler’s fantasies of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy to enslave or exterminate ‘Aryan’ humanity, but upon the plain fact that the Jews in those countries were settled as a compact alien people. This was not the case anywhere else, and accordingly antisemitism elsewhere never aimed at the extermination or the’ removal’ of the Jews.

For the most part, where it did exist, it was of a religious character: after all, until the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church in particular had been in open conflict with the Jews as unbelievers. The aim of that religious antisemitism, by far the most widespread kind, was not the extermination of the Jews but their conversion; the moment they were baptized all was well.

There was also a social antisemitism, especially in rural areas. There the Jews were hated as money-lenders - often, as is well known, the only occupation they were allowed to practise prior to their emancipation. That social antisemitism, paradoxically as it may sound, aimed at the emancipation of the Jews. As soon as Jews appeared in functions other than that of money-lender that type of antisemitism disappeared: Jewish doctors, for instance, where they existed, were invariably highly esteemed and much in demand.

Finally, there was a new, post-emancipation antisemitism which might be called competition antisemitism. Since their emancipation, that is roughly since the mid-nineteenth century, the Jews, partly through their talent and partly also, as has to be admitted, by sticking together, had reached leading positions in various fields in many countries - especially in all fields of culture, but also in medicine, the law, the press, industry, finance, science and politics. They proved to be if not exactly the salt of the earth then certainly, in many countries, the salt in the soup: they formed a kind of élite. In the Weimar Republic, at least in Berlin under the Weimar Republic, they even formed something like a second aristocracy.

That, needless to say, earned them not only deserved admiration but also envy and dislike. Anyone who was an antisemite on those grounds was pleased to see the Jews getting a knock now and again. But extermination - for God’s sake! What Hitler’s specific kind of homicidal Jew-phobia and Jew-hatred produced even among antisemites in other countries was initially, so long as he raged only verbally, a shaking of heads; and subsequently, when he proceeded to act, frequently real horror. The run-of-the-mill antisemites shared few of the misconceptions and fallacies spread by Hitler about the Jews. We shall now briefly examine these - briefly, because for the most part they refute themselves by their mere presentation.

No matter how often Hitler asserted that the Jews were not a religious community, anyone could see that the opposite was true. The Jewish religion stands as a huge rock before the eyes of the world: the first and still the purest monotheistic religion, the only one that has dared to think out, undiluted and unsoftened, the enormous idea of the One nameless, imageless, incomprehensible and unfathomable God, and has persisted in it; and probably the only one that was able, through nineteen centuries of the Diaspora and intermittent persecution, to hold its believers together as a community of faith. Hitler did not see that, he probably quite genuinely was blind to it. He was, in spite of his customary rhetorical appeals to ‘Providence’ and the ‘Almighty’, not only irreligious himself but also had no perception of what religion can mean to others. His handling of the Christian Churches clearly revealed that.

On the other hand, the Jews quite patently are not a race — not even if one is prepared to apply the concept of ‘race’ to the various tribes and variants of the white race. Present-day Israel, for example, is a clearly multi-racial state, as any visitor can discover with his own eyes; and the reason is that Judaism has always been a missionary, proselytizing religion. Members of all nations, tribes and variants of the white race in the Roman Empire became Jews in late Roman days, though not perhaps quite as many as became Christians at the time; for several centuries Judaism and Christianity were in missionary competition with each other.

There are even some Jews, though not many, who belong to the black or the yellow races. And Arthur Koestler has recently made out a credible case to the effect that the eastern Jews, in particular, those who suffered worst under Hitler, were most of them probably not Semites at all but descendants of the Khazars, a Turkic people originally settled between the Volga and the Caucasus, who adopted the Jewish religion in the Middle Ages and subsequently migrated towards the west and north-west. (To that extent even the word ‘antisemitism’ is inaccurate but, since it has become the current term, we are using it here.)

Can the Jews be called a people, a nation? That is more debatable. Without any doubt they lack what identifies nations most clearly - a common language. English Jews speak English, French Jews French, German Jews German, etc. It is also true that many - probably most - Jews have, since their civil emancipation, become good patriots of their respective home countries, at times, and especially in Germany, super-patriots. Nevertheless, a certain Jewish sense of belonging together, a solidarity across national frontiers, a Jewish sense of nationhood, has lately become particularly marked in the shape of a general Jewish solidarity with Israel. And that is hardly surprising: religion often serves nations which have not had a state of their own for a long period as a national cement.

Thus, the Catholicism of the Poles and the Irish has, in addition to its religious component, unmistakable nationalist ingredients. Among the Jews, who had lived without a state of their own very much longer than the Poles or the Irish, this national tie and nation-building force of religion has possibly been even stronger. Frequent persecution further served to make the Jews stick together. Something of this binding force of religion (and persecution) is active probably even among those who, as individuals, have abandoned their faith. The same may be observed among the members of other religions. A lapsed Protestant and a lapsed Catholic differ no less in their way of thinking than a Protestant does from a Catholic. Their mental habits remain impregnated by the religion of their fathers and forefathers, often for several generations. With a religion as strong as Judaism it may take even longer for the effects to evaporate among the apostates.

None of that is a reason for being an anti-semite, let alone for persecuting the Jews with that murderous hatred and wish to exterminate them by Hitler evinced from the very beginning. That specifically Hitlerian hatred of the Jews can only be diagnosed as a clinical phenomenon, especially as Hitler’s justification of it is so clearly retrospective. The existence of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy to exterminate all ‘Aryans’ is patently not just a misconception but paranoid nonsense. Or perhaps not even that but the ingenious rationalization of a preconceived resolution to do murder. At all events, it is incorrect in all respects.

‘World Jewry’ not only did not pursue the sinister aims which Hitler fancifully attributed to it; it had no common aims of any kind. On the contrary, especially in Hitler’s day, it was more disunited and often more divided in its attitudes than it had ever been before in its 3,000 years of history: between traditional religiosity and modern secularization, between assimilation and Zionism, between nationalism and internationalism. Furthermore, all the major divisions of the world also ran right through Jewry which, since the civil emancipation of the Jews, had been integrated with the world in a manner unknown before. Many Jews had indeed been busy, for a century or half a century, deliberately abandoning their identity through assimilation, conversion and intermarriage, and being wholly absorbed in their respective native countries; and nowhere was that process taking place with so much conviction and fervour as in Germany.

Naturally, there was also among many Jews stubborn resistance to that trend. In short, the Jews, whom Hitler pretended to see as a community of conspirators as powerful as they were diabolical, were in fact a community in deep crisis, weakened as never before, often in a state of incipient dissolution, when his frightful attack fell upon them. They went as lambs to the slaughter, and the would-be slayer of dragons was murdering the helpless…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_Hitler

Book review: The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis

Ordinary people. The courage to say NO

REMEMBER THIS LADY - In memory of Irena Sendler

Sources for German archival materials

Hitler's annihilation of the Romanis (the Gypsies of Europe)

National Citizenship Law & Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German blood and German Honour

The Romanies - roots of antigypsyism: to the Holocaust and after - Ian Hancock

Hitler’s World by Timothy Snyder