The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945

Lucy S. Dawidowicz

• Verlag: Open Road Media
• Jahr: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781453203064
• Thema: Storia
• Thema: Storia dell'Olocausto

A history of how anti-Semitism evolved into the Holocaust in Germany: "If any book can tell what Hitlerism was like, this is it" (Alfred Kazin).

Lucy Dawidowicz's groundbreaking The War Against the Jews inspired waves of both acclaim and controversy upon its release in 1975. Dawidowicz argues that genocide was, to the Nazis, as central a war goal as conquering Europe, and was made possible by a combination of political, social, and technological factors. She explores the full history of Hitler's "Final Solution, " from the rise of anti-Semitism to the creation of Jewish ghettos to the brutal tactics of mass murder employed by the Nazis.Written with devastating detail, The War Against the Jews is the definitive and comprehensive book on one of history's darkest chapters.

PART I

THE
FINAL
SOLUTION

1

The Jews in
Hitler’s Mental World

“If at the beginning of the War and during the War,” Hitler wrote in the last chapter of Mein Kampf, “twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.”¹

Did the idea of the Final Solution originate in this passage, germinating in Hitler’s subconscious for some fifteen years before it was to sprout into practical reality? The idea of a mass annihilation of the Jews had already been adumbrated by apocalyptic-minded anti-Semites during the nineteenth century. Yet even the most fanatic and uncompromising anti-Semites, when confronted with political actualities and social realities, invariably settled for an aggregation of exclusionary measures. Hitler did not. He succeeded in transforming the apocalyptic idea into concrete political action. The mass murder of the Jews was the consummation of his fundamental beliefs and ideological conviction.

The nexus between idea and act has seldom been as evident in human history with such manifest consistency as in the history of anti-Semitism. Jew-hatred is one of those “unit-ideas,” to use Arthur Lovejoy’s phrase, with “long life-histories of their own.” Yet not until Hitler’s accession to power in Germany and his dominion over Europe had the abstract idea of Jew-hatred assumed so terrible a concrete and visible reality. Nor had anti-Semitism ever before been so obviously a product of a system of beliefs. For Hitler’s ideas about the Jews were the starting place for the elaboration of a monstrous racial ideology that would justify mass murder whose like history had not seen before.

Only Hitler’s followers took his ideas about the Jews seriously. His opponents found them too preposterous for serious consideration, too irrational and lunatic to merit reasonable analysis and rebuttal. Today, looking at his photographs, it seems easy to understand how Hitler could have been underestimated, disparaged. He was of medium height, with beady eyes and a comic moustache. The unmanageable cowlick of his pomaded hair became the burlesque symbol of unrestrained passion. He was a strutter and a posturer, “one of those men without qualities,” wrote Konrad Heiden, his face “without radiance.”² Hermann Rauschning too characterized his look as lacking “the brilliance and sparkle of genuine animation.” An authority in “racial” biology described Hitler as he saw him in 1923: “Face and head: bad race, mongrel. Low, receding forehead, ugly nose, broad cheekbones, small eyes, dark hair; facial expression, not of a man commanding with full self-control, but betraying insane excitement. Finally, an expression of blissful egotism.”³

“A raw-vegetable Genghis Khan,” wrote Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen, observing Hitler without his usual bodyguard in a Munich restaurant in 1932. It would have been easy then, in the almost deserted restaurant, to shoot Hitler. “If I had had an inkling of the role this piece of filth was to play, and of the years of suffering he was to make us endure, I would have done it without a second thought. But I took him for a character out of a comic strip, and did not shoot.”⁴

A raving lunatic, a comic-strip character, a political absurdity. Yet his voice mesmerized millions, “a guttural thunder,” according to Heiden, “the very epitome of power, firmness, command, and will.” Was it the sheer physical quality of the voice that hypnotized them? Or was the charisma in the dark message of racial mastery and the rule of blood? Serious people, responsible people thought that Hitler’s notions about the Jews were, at best, merely political bait for disgruntled masses, no more than ideological window dressing to cloak a naked drive for power. Yet precisely the reverse was true. Racial imperialism and the fanatic plan to destroy the Jews were the dominant passions behind the drive for power.

Hitler’s ideas about the Jews were at the center of his mental world. They shaped his world view and his political ambitions, forming the matrix of his ideology and the ineradicable core of National Socialist doctrine. They determined the anti-Jewish policies of the German dictatorship from 1933 to 1945, and they furnished the authority for the murder of the Jews in Europe during World War II. Few ideas in world history achieved such fatal potency. If only because these ideas had such consequences, they deserve serious analysis despite their irrationality, historical falsehood, scientific sham, and moral loathsomeness.

Mein Kampf provides much of our knowledge about Hitler and his ideas. He wrote it in the prison at Landsberg, while serving a highly abbreviated term (November 11, 1923–December 20, 1924) of a five-year sentence for high treason in organizing the unsuccessful Munich Putsch. Graceless, prolix, disorganized, incoherent in parts, repetitious, Mein Kampf was written in the tradition of confessional biography, in which the hand of Destiny is clearly seen to be shaping the course of the writer’s life. It is, above all, a self-aggrandizing document, in which the author is presented as intellectual nonpareil and political savior. Nothing was to detract from this image of Hitler, and consequently he suppressed mention of persons or events that molded and influenced him. As for his ideas, we can never really be confident that his descriptions in 1924 of the ideas he held in 1904 or 1908 or 1912 are honest, or whether he recreated his intellectual development swathed in legends. During his lifetime Hitler’s champions and enemies furnished additional bits and pieces to the sketchy information about his early life. Subsequent scholarship has yielded a few more details to the portrait of the authentic Hitler. Still, much mystery surrounds his origins and early life.

Adolf Hitler was born April 20, 1889, in the town of Braunau, on the Inn River, at the Austro-German border, the fourth child of Alois Hitler and Klara, his third wife, twenty-three years his junior.⁵ Alois (1837–1903) was the illegitimate son of Maria Anna Schicklgruber (1795–1847), in whose name he had been christened. The identity of Adolf Hitler’s paternal grandfather has remained an unraveled historical mystery of more than passing interest, since it raised doubts about Adolf Hitler’s pure “racial” ancestry. Nearly all the evidence is in dispute.

In 1842, when Alois was five years old, his mother married Johann Georg Hiedler (the family name variously spelled Hüttler, Hütler, Hitler). Alois, however, seems to have been brought up by Georg’s younger brother, Johann Nepomuk, who, according to another version, was his real father. In 1876, when Georg was eighty-four years old, he formally acknowledged Alois, then thirty-nine, as his son, who, legitimated, took the name of his father, real or putative. Another version has it that with Georg long dead, Nepomuk managed to get the parish records changed, by bringing three witnesses to testify that they knew Georg had accepted Alois as his son.

A more fanciful version of Adolf Hitler’s origins exists: the allegation that his paternal grandfather was Jewish. Its source was the confession by Hans Frank, governor general of German-occupied Poland, written while awaiting execution at Nuremberg. According to Frank, William Patrick Hitler, the son of Alois, Jr., Hitler’s half-brother (by his father’s second wife), had threatened in a letter to divulge Hitler’s Jewish ancestry. Hitler asked Frank, then legal adviser to the NSDAP, confidentially to investigate the charge, which Frank claimed to have substantiated, that Maria Schicklgruber’s child had been fathered by the nineteen-year-old son in a household, presumably Jewish, where she had been employed as a domestic. Post-1945 investigations of the local records indicate, however, that no Jews lived in that area at the time, and the story was probably groundless. Still, uncertainties about his own ancestry must have obsessed the man who made ancestry the measure of the Aryan man.

Adolf’s father was a customs official in the Austrian civil service, and the family moved whenever his assignments were changed. Three years after Adolf’s birth, they moved to Passau, another border town. In 1894, when Adolf was five years old, they moved to Leonding, a suburb of Linz, where they finally stayed. Alois retired the next year and spent his time buying and selling farms, strolling about the neighborhood, and socializing at the local tavern. His relations with his son Adolf were stormy and tense. An indifferent and indolent pupil, Adolf was, at his father’s insistence, enrolled in the Realschule in Linz, a secondary school whose training would lead to a technical or business career. In sharp conflict with his father, Adolf wanted instead to become a painter, an artist. When Alois died in 1903, the pressure on Adolf ceased. Klara continued to draw her late husband’s pension and Adolf continued his schooling.

The next year he was transferred out of the Realschule because of his poor scholastic record. He was enrolled in the Staatsrealschule at Steyr, where he boarded and which he left in 1905, with indifferent success, after completing four years of secondary school. The only two subjects in which he excelled were freehand drawing and gymnastics. He failed to take the final examinations and never received a diploma. Years later one of his teachers described him as lacking self-discipline, “being notoriously cantankerous, willful, arrogant, and bad-tempered.” When he returned home from Steyr, his mother sold the house at Leonding and moved with Adolf to Linz proper. Living on her monthly widow’s pension and the proceeds of the sale of the house, she supported Adolf, who seemed to have no thought of settling down or looking for work.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler minimized the influences on him of his family, friends, and general milieu in Linz. He said he did not remember having heard the word “Jew” during his father’s lifetime, characterizing Alois’s views as “more or less cosmopolitan.” There were just a few Jews in Linz, whom, Adolf said, he regarded merely as Germans of a different religion. He claimed that he “did not so much as suspect the existence of an organized opposition to the Jews.” His boyhood friend August Kubizek remembered otherwise. Alois Hitler, he said, was a supporter of Georg von Schönerer, Pan-German nationalist and anti-Semite. One of Hitler’s elementary school teachers was said to have been an open anti-Semite, and the Realschule had several teachers “with decided anti-Semitic views.” According to Kubizek, Hitler himself was a confirmed anti-Semite as early as 1904. While attending the Realschule at Linz, he was reading the local anti-Semitic paper, Linzer Fliegenden Blatter. Furthermore, Linz was where Hitler discovered Wagner as composer and ideologue. He went to the theater to hear Wagner, and in Linz he discovered Wagner’s prose writings and no doubt read Jews in Music and the grandiloquent Decay and Regeneration. Wagner, Hitler would later write, stands besides Frederick the Great and Martin Luther: “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner.”

He visited Vienna briefly in 1906 and then managed to convince his doting mother to finance a lengthier trip there to fulfill his ambition of entering the Academy of Fine Arts. In October 1907 he submitted his drawings to the academy, but they were rejected as unsatisfactory. He stayed in Vienna, living on money sent by his mother, and applied again the following year to the academy. This time he was not even admitted to the test. Meanwhile his mother had developed breast cancer and was rapidly succumbing to the disease. On December 21, 1908, she died and Hitler came home for the funeral. A few weeks later he left Linz for good and returned to Vienna, where he would live in anonymity for four cheerless years.

These years in Vienna are the most obscure in Hitler’s life. After he spent his modest inheritance and orphan’s pension, he had to move into a flophouse. He joined forces with a Reinhold Hanisch, a tramp in the same lodgings. Hitler painted postcards, copying views of Vienna, which Hanisch peddled about town. In 1910 Hitler thought he was being cheated by Hanisch and brought a suit against him. Hanisch was put in jail and that broke up the partnership. Very little is known of Hitler’s life during the next three years in Vienna, except that he continued to live the same miserable marginal existence that he later described as the unhappiest years of his life.

In Mein Kampf he set down the record of how he wanted the development of his intellectual life to appear. Vienna, Hitler said, transformed him into an anti-Semite. “For me this was the time of the greatest spiritual upheaval I have ever had to go through. I had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and became an anti-Semite.” The apprenticeship in anti-Semitism that he had served in Linz was glossed over. Hitler wanted his discovery of the “truth” to be wholly his own, untainted by any influence, especially a paternal one. Still, Vienna was far more decisive than Linz as the place where his ideas about Jews took shape and where he began to give serious attention to thoughts of race and racial biology.

Hitler dramatized his first confrontation with East European Jews: “Once, as I was strolling through the Inner City, I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought.” Observing the man, his next question was: “Is this a German?” To find an answer, he turned, “as always,” to books: “I bought the first anti-Semitic pamphlets of my life.” But he found the literature unsatisfying, for, he said, it presupposed knowledge or understanding of the Jewish question. Besides, the “dull and amazingly unscientific arguments” were unconvincing. Only his own study, his own experience, his own “slowly rising insights” brought him to an understanding of what the Jews were and of the need to combat them. That is, Hitler was saying, without the reinforcement of the then existent anti-Semitic movement, without prior influences from home, without benefiting from the plenitude of anti-Semitic literature then in the public domain, he himself mastered the “Jewish question” in the solitary genius of his mind. Vienna was for him, he wrote, “the hardest, though most thorough school” of his life, where he obtained the foundations for “a philosophy in general and a political view in particular,” which remained with him for the rest of his life.

But outside influences were plainly at work upon him. In Vienna, in Hitler’s time, anti-Semitic politics flourished, anti-Semitic organizations proliferated, anti-Semitic writing and propaganda poured forth in an unending stream. Despite his down-and-out flophouse existence, he was aware of much of the anti-Semitic doings. He was, for one, an avid, if unsystematic, reader. He tells us that he read the “so-called world press,” the Neue Freie Presse and the Wiener Tageblatt. Impressed at first, he soon came to see in them, he claimed, the ugly manipulation by the Jews. The hostile attitude the Viennese press took toward Germany particularly vexed him. On this subject, he admitted, “I was forced to recognize that one of the anti-Semitic papers, the Deutsches Volksblatt, behaved more decently.” The Deutsches Volksblatt was a popular Viennese paper whose appeal was derived from its anti-Semitism, anticapitalism, and antiliberalism. Hitler was familiar, then, with the anti-Semitic press. Perhaps he read it regularly. In fact, by his own admission, he bought and read anti-Semitic pamphlets.

Which ones? Of the superabundance of such writings in those days in Vienna he probably sampled a variety. We know that he was for a time fascinated by the publications of Lanz von Liebenfels, an eccentric occultist-racist.⁶ Between 1907 and 1910 Lanz published a series of pamphlets called Ostara: Briefbücherei der blonden Mannesrechtler (“Newsletters of the Blond Champions of Man’s Rights”), in which he depicted the struggle between the blond Aryan heroes and the dark, hairy ape-men representing the lower races. All human existence revolved around this struggle, whose central burden was to preserve the purity of Aryan women from the demonic sexuality of the ape-men. Ostara was available at many newsstands, and Hitler had picked up a copy at the corner tobacconist’s and then began to buy it regularly. In 1909 he sought out Lanz to get back issues, which Lanz, flattered, provided free of charge.

The ape-men in Ostara were not always explicitly identified as Jews, perhaps because Lanz thought that the racial conflict as he depicted it was sufficiently lurid to gratify the erotic fantasies of his rootless, unemployed, down-and-out readers, most of whom, like Hitler, were unattached men. With regard to the Jews, Lanz wrote in an issue of Ostara: “We would never dream of preaching pogroms, because they will come without encouragement.” Sterilization, the “castration knife,” would, Lanz held, solve the Jewish problem. The swastika was regarded as a symbol of racial purity, and Ostara dwelt tirelessly on the swastika’s origins and secret meanings. Practicing what he preached, Lanz hoisted the swastika over his castle, Burg Werfenstein, in 1907.

Besides Ostara, Lanz wrote pamphlets on race occultism, at least one of which was found in Hitler’s private library: Das Buck der Psalmen teutsch: Das Gebetbuch der Arisophen Rassenmystiker und Antisemiten (“The Book of Germanic Psalms: Prayerbook of Ariosophic Race Mystics and Anti-Semites”). Another, Das Gesetzbuch der Manu und die Rassenpflege (“Manu’s Book of Law and Race Cultivation”), published in 1908 and hence available to Hitler in those days, advocated that the “mongrelized breed” of Jews and other inferior beings be wiped from the face of the earth. These horror tales of race defilement and the lurid depiction of the perils confronting Aryan womanhood obviously gratified the young Hitler, feeding his fears and obsessions—personal, sexual, racial.* Ostara’s influe...