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Authors: Robert S. Wistrich
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many German Protestants with Hitler’s deeds during the Third Reich’s anti-Semitic persecutions. Catholics, too, were increasingly implicated in anti-Semitic political movements in France, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and other European states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the Holocaust, many Catholic clerics, like their Protestant counterparts, were often indifferent or even hostile to Jews. The deep ambivalence of the Vatican and the Christian churches cannot, however, be understood without taking into account the long-standing “teaching of contempt,” which had deep roots in the New Testament itself and in the teachings of the Church Fathers. Nazism, though ultimately determined to uproot Christianity, built on the negative stereotypes about Jews and Judaism that the churches had disseminated for centuries.
The Germans did not carry out the Holocaust alone, although under Nazi rule they were undoubtedly its spearhead and driving force. When it came to killing Jews, they found many willing collaborators and “helpers” among Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Romanians, Croats, and others. Austrians (who had been annexed to the German Reich in 1938) formed a wholly disproportionate number of the SS killers, death-camp commandants, and personnel involved in the “Final Solution.” Even official France “collaborated” eagerly, not in the killing of Jews but in their deportation eastward and in the passage of draconian racist legislation.
The Holocaust was a pan-European event that could not have happened unless millions of Europeans by the late 1930s had wished to see an end to the age-old Jewish presence intheir midst. This consensus was especially strong in the countries of east-central Europe, where the bulk of Jewry lived and retained its own national characteristics and cultural distinctiveness. But there was also a growing anti-Semitism in western Europe and America, tied to the hardships caused by the Great Depression, increased xenophobia, fear of immigrants, and the influence of fascist ideas.
This hostility was evidenced by the unwillingness of British and American decision-makers to undertake any significant rescue efforts on behalf of European Jewry during the Holocaust. Already in the 1930s, the quota system in the United States had precluded any mass immigration of Jews from central and eastern Europe, which might have relieved some of the enormous pressures on Jewry. British concerns about Arab unrest in Palestine, following increased Jewish immigration in the 1930s to their “national home,” led to another major refuge being denied them. Hitler duly noted these responses and the appeasement policy of the West before 1939 and drew his own conclusions: his expansionist ambitions could be pursued without too great a risk, and the West would not interfere with his increasingly radical anti-Jewish measures.
The Jews of Europe, on the eve of the Holocaust, found themselves in a trap from which there appeared to be no escape. They were faced with the most menacing and dangerous enemy in their history—a dynamic power in the heart of Europe that openly sought their destruction. Its influence was felt in neighboring states, especially to the east and southeast, which were passing laws of their own to restrict Jewish rights and pushing for the removal or emigration of their Jewish populations. Moreover, the three million Jews in Communist Russia were cut off from the rest of the Jewish world; yet the identification of Jews with Bolshevism had become a highly dangerous political myth that would eventually fuel the mass murders carried out by the Nazis and their allies on the eastern front after June 1941.
The Jews of America were limited in what they could do for European Jewry by a combination of their own insecurity, their fears of anti-Semitism, and the reality of American isolationism prior to late 1941. The Jews of Palestine were still a relatively small
The Germans did not carry out the Holocaust alone, although under Nazi rule they were undoubtedly its spearhead and driving force. When it came to killing Jews, they found many willing collaborators and “helpers” among Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Romanians, Croats, and others. Austrians (who had been annexed to the German Reich in 1938) formed a wholly disproportionate number of the SS killers, death-camp commandants, and personnel involved in the “Final Solution.” Even official France “collaborated” eagerly, not in the killing of Jews but in their deportation eastward and in the passage of draconian racist legislation.
The Holocaust was a pan-European event that could not have happened unless millions of Europeans by the late 1930s had wished to see an end to the age-old Jewish presence intheir midst. This consensus was especially strong in the countries of east-central Europe, where the bulk of Jewry lived and retained its own national characteristics and cultural distinctiveness. But there was also a growing anti-Semitism in western Europe and America, tied to the hardships caused by the Great Depression, increased xenophobia, fear of immigrants, and the influence of fascist ideas.
This hostility was evidenced by the unwillingness of British and American decision-makers to undertake any significant rescue efforts on behalf of European Jewry during the Holocaust. Already in the 1930s, the quota system in the United States had precluded any mass immigration of Jews from central and eastern Europe, which might have relieved some of the enormous pressures on Jewry. British concerns about Arab unrest in Palestine, following increased Jewish immigration in the 1930s to their “national home,” led to another major refuge being denied them. Hitler duly noted these responses and the appeasement policy of the West before 1939 and drew his own conclusions: his expansionist ambitions could be pursued without too great a risk, and the West would not interfere with his increasingly radical anti-Jewish measures.
The Jews of Europe, on the eve of the Holocaust, found themselves in a trap from which there appeared to be no escape. They were faced with the most menacing and dangerous enemy in their history—a dynamic power in the heart of Europe that openly sought their destruction. Its influence was felt in neighboring states, especially to the east and southeast, which were passing laws of their own to restrict Jewish rights and pushing for the removal or emigration of their Jewish populations. Moreover, the three million Jews in Communist Russia were cut off from the rest of the Jewish world; yet the identification of Jews with Bolshevism had become a highly dangerous political myth that would eventually fuel the mass murders carried out by the Nazis and their allies on the eastern front after June 1941.
The Jews of America were limited in what they could do for European Jewry by a combination of their own insecurity, their fears of anti-Semitism, and the reality of American isolationism prior to late 1941. The Jews of Palestine were still a relatively small
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