The Holocaust Read online

  No social mobility existed across these four divides. By profession, by language and by religion, the gulfs were unbridgeable. Pole, Ukrainian and Ethnic German had one particular advantage: each could look to something beyond the imperial and political confines of Tsarist Russia in order to assert his own ascendancy, and could call upon outside powers and forces to seek redress of wrongs and indignities. The Jew had no such avenue of redress, no expectation of an outside champion. Unable to seek help from the emerging Polish or Ukrainian nationalisms, or from German irridentism, he lacked entirely the possibility each of the other three had, that war, revolution and political change might bring about better times.

  The four-tier structure of Pole, Ukrainian, Ethnic German and Jew ensured that the conditions of assimilation and emancipation which came into being in Western Europe after the French Revolution did not exist, and could not exist, east of the River Bug; that the ideals and opinions which benefited Jew and non-Jew alike throughout Western Europe in the hundred years following the destruction of the remnants of the medieval ghetto system, and much more, by Napoleon, failed to penetrate those regions in which by far the largest number of Jews were living in the hundred years between Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and the First World War.

  In the war which came to Europe in August 1914, Jews served in every army: and on opposite sides of the trenches and the wire. German Jews fought and died as German patriots, shooting at British Jews who served and fell as British patriots. Of the 615,000 German Jews in 1914, more than 100,000 served in the German army, although before 1914 Jews could enter the military academies only with difficulty, and certain regiments almost entirely excluded Jews. Man for man, the Jewish and non-Jewish war casualties were in an almost exact ratio of the respective populations. Jews and non-Jews alike fought as Germans: for duty and for the Fatherland.

  The first member of the German parliament to be killed in action was a Jew, Dr Ludwig Haas, member for Mannheim: one of twelve thousand German Jews to fall on the battlefield in German uniform.2 Jews in the Austro-Hungarian army fought Jews in the Russian, Serbian and Italian armies. When the war ended in November 1918, Jewish soldiers, sailors and airmen had filled the Rolls of Honour, the field hospitals and the military cemeteries, side by side with their compatriots under a dozen national flags.

  After 1918, within the new frontiers of post-war Europe, Jews found themselves under new flags and new national allegiances. The largest single Jewish community was in the new Polish state. Here lived more than three million Jews, born in the three empires destroyed in the war: the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian and the German. In the new Hungarian kingdom lived 473,000 Jews. A similar number lived in the enlarged Rumania, and only slightly more, perhaps 490,000, in Germany. Czech Jewry numbered 350,000; French Jewry, 250,000. Other communities were smaller.

  The security of the new borders depended upon alliances, treaties, and the effectiveness of the newly created League of Nations, whose covenant not only outlawed war between states, but also guaranteed the rights of minorities. In each state, old or new, the Jews looked to the local laws for protection as a minority: for equal rights in education and the professions; and for full participation in economic life.

  Even as the First World War ended on the western front, more than fifty Jews were killed by local Ukrainians in the eastern Polish city of Lvov. In the then independent Ukrainian town of Proskurov, seventeen hundred Jews were murdered on 15 February 1919 by followers of the Ukrainian nationalist leader, Simon Petlura, and by the end of the year, Petlura’s gangs had killed at least sixty thousand Jews. These Jews were victims of local hatreds reminiscent of Tsarist days, but on a scale unheard of in the previous century. In the city of Vilna, the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’, eighty Jews were murdered during April 1919; in Galicia, five hundred perished.3 ‘Terrible news is reaching us from Poland,’ the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann wrote to a friend on 29 November 1918. ‘The newly liberated Poles there are trying to get rid of the Jews by the old and familiar method which they learnt from the Russians. Heartrending cries are reaching us. We are doing all we can, but we are so weak!’4

  On 18 December 1919 a British diplomat wrote an account of one such episode, during which Poles had killed a number of Jews suspected of Communist sympathies, and arrested many others. The Jewish women who had been arrested, but who had been exempted from execution, he noted, ‘were kept in prison without trial and enquiry. They were stripped naked and flogged. After the flogging they were made to pass naked down a passage full of Polish soldiers. Then, on the following day, they were led to the cemetery where those executed were buried, and made to dig their own graves, then, at the last moment, they were told they were reprieved; in fact, the gendarmerie regularly tormented the survivors.’ The victims, added the diplomat, ‘were respectable lower middle-class people, schoolteachers and such like’.5

  In Germany, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Jews were among those active in rebuilding the broken nation. Hugo Preuss, Minister of Interior of the new government, prepared the draft of the Weimar Constitution, one of the most democratic in post-war Europe. Another Jew, Walther Rathenau, served as Weimar’s Minister of Reconstruction, and then as Foreign Minister.

  But in the turmoil of defeat, voices were raised blaming ‘the Jews’ for Germany’s humiliation. In Berlin, the nation’s capital, there were clashes between Jews and anti-Semites: ‘Indications of growing anti-Semitism’, the Berlin correspondent of The Times reported on 14 August 1919, ‘are becoming frequent.’6

  A manifestation of this anti-Semitism was shown by one of Germany’s new and tiny political parties, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the NSDAP, soon better known as the ‘Nazi’ Party, after the first two syllables of ‘National’—Nazional. The party’s twenty-five-point programme was published in Munich on 25 February 1920, at a time when it had only sixty members. The essence of its programme was nationalistic, the creation of a ‘Great Germany’, and the return of Germany’s colonies, which had been lost at the time of Germany’s defeat. Point Four was a racialist one: ‘None but members of the Nation’, it read, ‘may be citizens of the State. None but those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the Nation. No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the Nation.’7 Another point demanded that all Jews who had come to Germany since 1914 should be forced to leave: a demand which would affect more than eighteen thousand Jews, most of them born in the Polish provinces of Tsarist Russia.

  The anti-Jewish sections of the Nazi Party’s programme had been drafted by three members. One of them, Adolf Hitler, was number seven in the party’s hierarchy. A former soldier on the western front, he had been wounded and gassed in October 1918, less than a month before the war’s end. On 13 August 1920, Hitler spoke for two hours in a Munich beer cellar on the theme, ‘Why we are against the Jews’. During his speech, he promised his listeners that his party, and his party alone, ‘will free you from the power of the Jew!’ There must, he said, be a new slogan, and one not only for Germany—‘Anti-Semites of the World, Unite! People of Europe, Free Yourselves!’—and he demanded what he called a ‘thorough solution’, in brief, ‘the removal of the Jews from the midst of our people’.8

  A year later, on 3 August 1921, Hitler set up a group within the Nazi Party whereby he would control his own members and harass his opponents. This Sturmabteilung, or ‘Storm Section’ of the party, was quickly to be known as the SA; its members as Stormtroops. These Stormtroops were intended, according to their first regulations, not merely to be ‘a means of defence’ for the new movement, but, ‘above all, a training school for the coming struggle for liberty’. Stormtroops were to defend party meetings from attack, and, as further regulations expressed it a year later, to enable the movement itself ‘to take the offensive at any given moment’.9 Brown uniforms were designed; their wearers soon becoming known as Brownshirts. Parades and marches were organized. The party symbol became the Hakenkreuz, or swastika, an ancient San
skrit term and symbol for fertility, used in India interchangeably with the Star of David, or Magen David, whose double triangle had long signified for the Jewish people a protective shield, and had become since 1897 a symbol of Jewish national aspirations.

  From the Nazis’ earliest days, the swastika was held aloft on flags and banners, and worn as an insignia on lapels and armbands.

  By the time of the establishment of the Stormtroops, membership of the Nazi Party had risen to three thousand. Hatred of the Jews, which permeated all Hitler’s speeches to his members, was echoed in the actions of his followers. Individual Jews were attacked in the street, and at public meetings and street-corner rallies Jews were blamed, often in the crudest language, for every facet of Germany’s problems including the military defeat of 1918, the subsequent economic hardship, and sudden, spiralling inflation.

  Hitler’s party had no monopoly on anti-Jewish sentiment. Several other extremist groups likewise sought popularity by attacking the Jews. One target of their verbal abuse was Walther Rathenau, who, as Foreign Minister, had negotiated a treaty with the Soviet Union. Street demonstrators sang, ‘Knock off Walther Rathenau, the dirty, God-damned Jewish sow.’ These were only words, but words with the power to inspire active hatred, and on 24 June 1922, Rathenau was assassinated.

  Following Rathenau’s murder, Hitler expressed his pleasure at what had been done. He was sentenced to four weeks in prison. ‘The Jewish people’, he announced on 28 July 1922, immediately on his release, ‘stands against us as our deadly foe, and will so stand against us always, and for all time.’10 In 1923, a Nuremberg Nazi, Julius Streicher, launched Der Sturmer, a newspaper devoted to the portrayal of the Jews as an evil force. Its banner headline was the slogan: ‘The Jews are Our Misfortune’.

  On 30 October 1923 Arthur Ruppin, a German Jew who had earlier settled in Palestine, noted in his diary, while on a visit to Munich, how ‘the anti-Semitic administration in Bavaria expelled about seventy of the 350 East European Jews from Bavaria during the past two weeks, and it is said that the rest will also be expelled before too long.’11

  On 9 November 1923 Hitler tried, and failed, to seize power in Munich. Briefly, he had managed to proclaim a ‘National Republic’. He was arrested, tried for high treason, and on 1 April 1924 sentenced to five years in detention.

  After less than eight months in prison, Hitler was released on parole. During those eight months he had begun a lengthy account of his life and thought. Entitled Mein Kampf, My Struggle, the first volume was published on 18 July 1925. In it, the full fury of Hitler’s anti-Jewish hatred was made clear: he explained that he was drawing upon his personal experiences as a young man in Vienna before the First World War.12 He had come to Vienna in February 1908, shortly before his nineteenth birthday, and had remained there until May 1913.13

  Every page of Hitler’s recollections contained references to the Jews of Vienna and their evil influence. ‘The part which the Jews played in the social phenomenon of prostitution,’ he wrote, ‘and more especially in the white slave traffic, could be studied here better than in any other West European city,’ with the possible exception, he added, of ‘certain ports’ in southern France: ‘a cold shiver ran down my spine when I first ascertained that it was the same kind of cold-blooded, thick-skinned and shameless Jew who showed his consummate skill in conducting that revolting exploitation of the dregs of the big city. Then I became filled with wrath.’14

  There were, Hitler argued, two perils threatening ‘the existence of the German people’, Marxism and Judaism.15 It was in Vienna, he wrote, that he had discovered the truth about the Jewish conspiracy to destroy the world of the ‘Aryan’, by means of political infiltration and corruption, using as its tool the Social Democratic Party, and as its victim, the working class. This word ‘Aryan’ was a linguistic term, originally referring to the Indo-European group of languages. Since before the end of the nineteenth century it had already been distorted as a concept by a number of writers, among them Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who gave it racial connotations, and used it to denote superiority over the ‘Semitic’ races. Yet the term ‘Semitic’ itself was originally not a racial but a linguistic term, relating, not to Jews and non-Jews, but to a language group which includes Hebrew and Arabic. None of these refinements troubled the new racialism. For Hitler, ‘Aryan’ was synonymous with ‘pure’, while ‘Semitic’ was synonymous with ‘Jew’, and hence ‘impure’.

  Considering the ‘satanic skill’ displayed by Jewish ‘evil councillors’, Hitler wrote, ‘how could their unfortunate victims be blamed?’ The Jewish politicians were masters of ‘dialectical perfidy’, their very mouths ‘distorted the truth’. Marxism was a Jewish device, a Jewish trap. ‘The more I came to know the Jew, the easier it was to excuse the workers.’16

  Hitler presented himself as the man who had seen, and who would prevent, not only the destruction of German life, but the destruction of life on earth, by ‘the Jew’. The dangers, as he saw them, concerned the racial integrity of the German people, and a deliberate assault on that integrity. As he told his readers:

  The black-haired Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end, satanically glaring at and spying on the unsuspicious girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood and removing her from the bosom of her own people.

  The Jew uses every possible means to undermine the racial foundations of a subjugated people. In his systematic efforts to ruin girls and women he strives to break down the last barriers of discrimination between him and other peoples.

  The Jews were responsible for bringing negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate.

  For as long as a people remain racially pure and are conscious of the treasure of their blood, they can never be overcome by the Jew. Never in this world can the Jew become master of any people except a bastardized people.

  For this reason, Hitler added, ‘the Jew systematically endeavours to lower the racial quality of a people by permanently adulterating the blood of the individuals who make up that people.’17

  In Mein Kampf Hitler outlined his mission: to expose, and then to destroy the threat posed by a worldwide Jewish effort to destroy the foundations of ‘Aryan’ life. ‘Was there any shady undertaking,’ he asked, ‘any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate?’ and he went on to answer his own question in these words: ‘On putting the probing knife carefully to that kind of abscess one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew who was often blinded by the sudden light.’18

  Germany could only become a great nation again, Hitler argued, if it saw, and repelled, the Jewish danger. Germany’s defeat in 1918 could have been prevented, but for ‘the will of a few Jews’: traitors inside the German Reich.19 ‘There is no such thing’, Hitler concluded, ‘as coming to an understanding with the Jews. It must be the hard-and-fast “Either-Or”.’20

  In his book, Hitler described the mission that inspired him, telling his readers:

  Should 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 ether, without any human life on its surface, as it did millions of years ago.

  And so I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord.21

  There was little reason for anyone to heed such hate-mongering in the summer of 1925. The Weimar republic was scarcely halfway through its first decade, slowly establishing a democratic, parliamentary regime. The twin economic pressures of reconstruction and the payment of reparations to the Allies were being lessened year by year. The crisis of whirlwind inflation had passed. Employment was slowly rising. International conferences offered Germany, for the first time since her defeat
, equal participation in European diplomacy. On 16 October 1925, three months after the publication of Hitler’s first, bitter, obscure volume, Germany signed the Locarno Agreement, guaranteeing, as an equal partner with Britain, France, Belgium and Italy, the frontiers of Western Europe.

  Under Article Two of Locarno, Germany and France, as well as Germany and Belgium, mutually undertook ‘that they will in no case attack or invade each other or resort to war against each other’.22 These undertakings offered the prospect of security for the war-weary masses of all the signatory states, which included Poland and Czechoslovakia.

  For the eight million Jews of Europe, Locarno seemed to offer the prospect of a quiet life. Several years had passed since the Ukrainian massacres of 1918 and 1919. But in at least one Jew’s mind, vengeance was called for. His name was Shalom Schwarzbard—his Hebrew first name meaning ‘Peace’. On 25 May 1926, in Paris, he killed the exiled Ukrainian leader, Simon Petlura. ‘I am performing a duty for our poor people,’ he had written to his wife a few hours earlier. ‘I am going to avenge all the pogroms, the blood….’23

  On 10 December 1926 Hitler published the second volume of Mein Kampf. Once again, anti-Jewish venom permeated its pages. ‘At the beginning of the war,’ Hitler wrote, ‘or even during the war, if twelve or fifteen thousand of these Jews who were corrupting the nation had been forced to submit to poison gas, just as hundreds of thousands of our best German workers from every social stratum and from every trade and calling had to face it in the field, then the millions of sacrifices made at the front would not have been in vain.’ On the contrary, Hitler continued, ‘if twelve thousand of these malefactors had been eliminated in proper time, probably the lives of a million decent men, who would be of value to Germany in the future, would have been saved.’24