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Authors: Richard Rhodes
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entire Weimar Republic were Jewish,” historian Eberhard Jäckel paraphrases Hitler’s universalizing of Jewish influence: “Marxism and the Soviet ‘dictatorship of blood’ and, of course, high finance . . . were Jewish; the political parties of the Left were ‘mercenaries of Jewry’; and, finally, democracy, parliaments, majority rule and the League of Nations were all Jewish as well.”
The idea of a war of conquest against the Soviet Union surfaced in Hitler’s thinking in 1924. He linked Bolshevism with a Jewish “international conspiracy” finally definitively in Mein Kampf, written in Landsberg Prison between April and December 1924 and published in two volumes beginning in June 1925. Jäckel finds “four new aspects of Hitlerian antisemitism” in Hitler’s book: “its increased significance to Hitler himself; a new universalist-missionary element; its linkup with [Hitler’s] outline of foreign policy; and, finally and above all else, an enormous radicalization of the intended measures [against the Jews].”The elimination of the Jews, Jäckel adds, “had now turned into their extinction and extermination; indeed, it had become quite openly an advocacy of their physical liquidation, of murder.”
The result for the half-million Jews of Germany, once Hitler took power and installed his Third Reich, was gradually escalating oppression as the Nuremberg Laws systematically abrogated the rights of Jewish citizens and government policy drove them to emigrate (after forfeiting their assets). Paradoxically, the first mass-murder operation of the Nazi regime was the purging of Hitler’s own paramilitary army, the SA brownshirts—the Röhm Purge of June 1934, when Himmler’s SS forces hunted down and murdered more than two hundred of Hitler’s and Hermann Göring’s political enemies.
“Associates of Hitler,” Victor writes, “said the arrests after the Reichstag fire, the Röhm purge, and the anti-Semitic measures of the 1930s were experiments. They served to condition him to escalating aggression, to condition his followers and the nation for the mass destruction to come, and to find out how far he could go.” Certainly Hitler’s murderous escalations in the 1930s tested the German public’s and the world’s tolerance for Nazi violence and atrocity. “Conditioning,” however, implying that Hitler was hardening himself, is inaccurate; in fact his level of violent socialization never changed until the end of his life, when he shot his new bride Eva Braun in the last days of the war before committing suicide. “The final aim of our policy is crystal clear to all of us,” Hitler told his party leadership in 1937, speaking of his plans for the Jews. “All that concerns me is never to take a step that I might later have to retrace and never to take a step that could damage us in any way. You must understand that I always go as far as I dare and never further.” What was the final aim that was crystal clear? In 1935, in a private conversation that an adjutant wrote down — a handwritten note survives—Hitler told his closest colleagues, “Out with them from all the professions and into the ghetto with them; fence them in somewhere where they can perish as they deserve while the German people look on, the way people stare at wild animals.”
Violence begot violence. The concentration camps multiplied. When Germany absorbed Austria in March 1938, political opponents were murdered by Einsatzgruppen-like cadres and Jews were arrested en masse and deported to German concentration camps. The first synagogue was burned in Germany in June 1938, after which more than two thousand German Jewish citizens were arrested and confined. At Evian, on the French shore of Lake Geneva, in July 1938 thirty-three nations and thirty-nine private organizations gathered at President Franklin Roosevelt’s request to consider facilitating emigration of political refugees from Germany and Austria, but with the exception
The idea of a war of conquest against the Soviet Union surfaced in Hitler’s thinking in 1924. He linked Bolshevism with a Jewish “international conspiracy” finally definitively in Mein Kampf, written in Landsberg Prison between April and December 1924 and published in two volumes beginning in June 1925. Jäckel finds “four new aspects of Hitlerian antisemitism” in Hitler’s book: “its increased significance to Hitler himself; a new universalist-missionary element; its linkup with [Hitler’s] outline of foreign policy; and, finally and above all else, an enormous radicalization of the intended measures [against the Jews].”The elimination of the Jews, Jäckel adds, “had now turned into their extinction and extermination; indeed, it had become quite openly an advocacy of their physical liquidation, of murder.”
The result for the half-million Jews of Germany, once Hitler took power and installed his Third Reich, was gradually escalating oppression as the Nuremberg Laws systematically abrogated the rights of Jewish citizens and government policy drove them to emigrate (after forfeiting their assets). Paradoxically, the first mass-murder operation of the Nazi regime was the purging of Hitler’s own paramilitary army, the SA brownshirts—the Röhm Purge of June 1934, when Himmler’s SS forces hunted down and murdered more than two hundred of Hitler’s and Hermann Göring’s political enemies.
“Associates of Hitler,” Victor writes, “said the arrests after the Reichstag fire, the Röhm purge, and the anti-Semitic measures of the 1930s were experiments. They served to condition him to escalating aggression, to condition his followers and the nation for the mass destruction to come, and to find out how far he could go.” Certainly Hitler’s murderous escalations in the 1930s tested the German public’s and the world’s tolerance for Nazi violence and atrocity. “Conditioning,” however, implying that Hitler was hardening himself, is inaccurate; in fact his level of violent socialization never changed until the end of his life, when he shot his new bride Eva Braun in the last days of the war before committing suicide. “The final aim of our policy is crystal clear to all of us,” Hitler told his party leadership in 1937, speaking of his plans for the Jews. “All that concerns me is never to take a step that I might later have to retrace and never to take a step that could damage us in any way. You must understand that I always go as far as I dare and never further.” What was the final aim that was crystal clear? In 1935, in a private conversation that an adjutant wrote down — a handwritten note survives—Hitler told his closest colleagues, “Out with them from all the professions and into the ghetto with them; fence them in somewhere where they can perish as they deserve while the German people look on, the way people stare at wild animals.”
Violence begot violence. The concentration camps multiplied. When Germany absorbed Austria in March 1938, political opponents were murdered by Einsatzgruppen-like cadres and Jews were arrested en masse and deported to German concentration camps. The first synagogue was burned in Germany in June 1938, after which more than two thousand German Jewish citizens were arrested and confined. At Evian, on the French shore of Lake Geneva, in July 1938 thirty-three nations and thirty-nine private organizations gathered at President Franklin Roosevelt’s request to consider facilitating emigration of political refugees from Germany and Austria, but with the exception
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