S. Friedlaender Redemptive Anti-Semitism Source: S. Friedlaender, Chapter 3 in: Nazi Germany and the Jews , Vol. I - The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, (New York 1997), p. 73-112. Part A, B, C, D, E, F Part D The Protocols remained obscure until the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. But the crumbling of the czarist regime and the disappearance of the Romanovs and then of the Hohenzollern and Habsburg dynasties suddenly endowed this mysterious text, which was carried westward by fleeing White Russians, with an entirely new significance. In Germany, where the Protocols was excerpted in 1919 in the voelkisch publication Auf Vorposten , it came to be considered concrete proof of the existence of dark forces responsible for the nation's defeat in the war and for its post war revolutionary chaos, humiliation, and bondage at the hands of the victors. Thirty-three German editions appeared in the years before Hitler's accession to power, and countless others after 1933 93 . The various versions of the Protocols published over the decades in a variety of languages share a basically identical core consisting of purported discussions held among the “Elders of Zion” at twenty-four secret meetings. In the immediate future the elders are not shy away from any violent means to achieve control of the world. Oddly enough total power is not intended to lead to some harsh daimed only at benefiting the Jews. The ultimate goal is described as the establishment of a just and socially oriented global regime. The people would rejoice at such beneficent government, and their satisfaction would ensure the survival of the Kingdom of Zion for centuries and centuries. The last part of the Protocols reads like a prescription for some totalitarian utopia, precisely what many people longed for in that period of economic uncertainty and political crisis. Why, then, did this booklet inspire such fear and loathing? The hate effect of the Protocols was due simply to the very idea of Jewish domination over the Christian world. The elders were plotting the disintegration of Christendom. In the same vein the destruction of traditional elites and the very idea of revolution were terrifying to the upper- and middle-class majority of the Protocols' readers. A 1920 American edition, for instance, clearly linked the machinations of the Elders of Zion to the Bolshevik peril 94 . In an article headlined “The Jewish Peril, a Disturbing Pamphlet: Call for Inquiry,” the London Times of May 8, 1920, asked, What re these Protocols'? Are they authentic? If so, what malevolent assembly concocted these plans and gloated over their exposition? Are they forgery? If so, whence comes the uncanny note of prophecy, prophecy in part fulfiled, in part far gone in the way of fulfilment?' 95 A year later the Times reversed itself, declaring that the Protocols was indeed a forgery. Nonetheless the May 1920 article had pointed to a fear buried deep in many minds: of falling victim to secret forces lurking in the dark. The Protocols thus exacerbated to the most extreme degree the paranoia prevalent in those years of crisis and disaster. If the Jewish threat was supranational, the struggle against it had to become global too, and without compromise. Thus, in an atmosphere suffused with concrete threats and imaginary forebodings, redemptive anti-Semitism seemed, more than ever before, to offer answers to the riddles of time. And for the anti-Jewish true believers, the ultimate struggle for salvation demanded the unconditional fanaticism of one who could show they way and lead them into action. V Middle-class anti-Semites and young students came....Adolf Hitler spoke.' The Muenchener Post was describing a meeting, in the spring of 1920, of the former DAP (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or German Workers' Party), newly renamed NSDAP. He behaved like a comedian. After every third sentence of lecture, as in a music-hall song, came the refrain': the Hebrews are guilty....One thing must be recognised: Herr Hitler himself admitted that his speech was dictated by racial hatred. When the speaker brought up the question of how one should defend oneself against the Jews, calls from the assembly gave the answer: Hang them! Kill them!' 96 Although Hitler, in the letter (quoted earlier) to Adolf Gemlich, denounced emotional anti-Semitism and insisted on a rational, systematic course in order to achieve total elimination of the Jews, his own style during the first years of his anti-Jewish agitation was very close to the rabble-rousing techniques of other voelkisch orators, and his arguments did not reach far beyond the usual voelkisch interpretations of history 97 . What happened to the city of the easy-going Viennese?' he asked on April 27, in a speech entitled “Politics and Jewry,” and in answer exclaimed, “For shame! It's a second Jerusalem!” The police report at this point mentions “stormy applause.” 98 None of that, however, amounted to a detailed presentation of Hitler's anti-Jewish credo. A major attempt at this was made for the first time on August 13, 1920, in a three-hour speech in the Hofbraeuhaus, a Munich beer hall. The announced title was “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” 99 At the very outset Hitler reminded his listeners that his party was spearheading a fight against the Jews that was of direct relevance to the workers and their basic problems. There followed a long disquisition on the essence of creative work. In a convoluted way, Hitler argued that work, considered not as imposed necessity but as creative activity, had become the very symbol and essence of the Nordic race, its ultimate form being the construction of the state. This led him back to “the Jew.” Taking the Bible, “which no one can say was written by an anti-Semite,” as the basis for his argument, Hitler affirmed that for the Jew work was punishment: The Jew was unable to work creatively and thus unable to build a state. Work for him was but the exploitation of the achievements of others. Starting from this postulate. Hitler, then stated the parasitic nature of Jewish existence in history: Throughout millennia, the Jew's subsistence and his racial striving to control the other people of the earth meant the parasitic undermining of the very subsistence of the host peoples, the exploitation of the work of others for the Jew's own racial interests. The absolute character of the racial imperative was unquestionable, and Hitler stated it in absolute terms: With all that, we must recognise that there is not good or bad Jew; everyone here works according to the imperatives of the race - or do we prefer to say, the nation? - and all that is linked to it, character and so on, lies, as the Jew himself explains, in the blood, and this blood compels every single individual to act according to these principles....He is a Jew: he is driven only by one single thought: how do I raise my nation to become the dominating nation?' 100 The National Socialist Party had entered the arena at this crucial moment of the struggle. A new hope had arisen that finally the day will come when our words will fall silent and action will begin.' 101 As German historian Eberhard Jaeckel has emphasised, the broad scope of Hitler's anti-Semitism appeared only in Mein Kampf 102 , in which the full force of the apocalyptic dimension of the anti-Jewish struggle found its expression. That may have been an outcome of Hitler's independent evolution; it was probably the result of the ideological input of a man whom Hitler met either in late 1919 or early 1920: the writer, newspaper editor, pamphleteer, drug addict, and alcoholic Dietrich Eckart. Eckart's ideological influence on Hitler and the practical help he extended to him on several decisive occasions between 1920 and 1923 have shone in our eyes like a polar star', he said of him, and added: At the time, I was intellectually a child at the bottle.' 103 Mein Kampf was dedicated to Hitler's comrades killed during the 1923 putsch and to Dietrich Eckart (who had died near Berchtesgaden on Christmas Eve 1923). The notorious “dialogue” between Eckart and Hitler, Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin: Ein Zwiegespraech zwischen Adolf Hitler undMir ( Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: A Dialogue Between Adolf Hitler and Myself ), published some months after Eckart's death, was written by Dietrich Eckart alone, probably even without Hitler's knowledge 104 . For some historians the Dialogue is the expression of Hitler's basic ideological stance with regard to the Jewish issue 105 ; for others the text belongs much more to Eckart's rather than to Hitler's way of thinking 106 . Whoever the author of the pamphlet may have been: Everything we know about Eckart and Hitler lends credence to the document as a representation of the relationship and the ideas they shared.' 107 The themes of the Dialogue clearly appear in Mein Kampf , wherever Hitler's rhetoric surges to the metahistorical level. What is immediately striking in the Dialogue , even its very title, is that Bolshevism is not identified with the ideology and the political force that came to power in Russia in 1917; Bolshevism is instead the destructive action of the Jew throughout the ages. Indeed, during the early years of Hitler's career as an agitator - and this includes the writing of the text of Mein Kampf - political Bolshevism, although always recognised as one of the instruments used by the Jews to achieve world domination, is not one of Hitler's central obsessions. It is a major theme only insofar as the Jews from whom it derives, are the major theme. In other words, the revolutionary period of 1919 is not at centre stage in Hitler's propaganda. Thus, to consider Nazism primarily a panic reaction to the threat of Bolshevism, as has been argued by German historian Ernst Nolte, for example, does not correspond to what we know about Hitler's early career. The Dialogue is dominated by the apocalyptic dimension attributed to the Jewish threat. Eckart's pamphlet is certainly one of the most extreme presentations of the Jew as the force of evil in history. At the very end of the text, “he” (that is, Hitler) sums up the ultimate aim of the Jew: It is certainly so' he said, as you [Eckart] once wrote: One can understand the Jew only when one knows toward what he aims for in the end. Beyond the domination of the world, toward the destruction of the world.' 108 This vision of the world ending as a result of the Jew's action reappears almost word for word in Mein Kampf : If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world,' Hitler wrote, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through [the] ether devoid of human beings.' 109 At the end of the second chapter of Mein Kampf comes the notorious statement of faith: Today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.' 110 In Eckart, and in Hitler as he came to state his creed from 1924 on, redemptive anti-Semitism found its ultimate expression. Some historians have turned Hitler's ideological expostulations into a tight and highly coherent system, a cogent world view (in its own terms); others have entirely dismissed the significance of the ideological utterance as either a system or as policy guidelines 111 . Here it is argued that Hitler's worldview indicated the goals of his actions, albeit in very general terms, and offered guidelines of sorts for concrete short-term political initiatives. Its anti-Jewish themes, presented in clusters of obsessive ideas and images, had the internal coherence of obsessions, particularly of the paranoid kind. By definition there are no loopholes in such systems. Moreover, although Hitler's worldview was entirely geared toward political propaganda and political action, it was no less the expression of a fanatical belief. The combination of total belief and a craving for mass mobilisation and radical action led naturally to the presentation of the worldview in simple and constantly repeated propositions, whose proof was offered not by means of intellectual constructs but by those of additional apodictic declarations reinforced by a constant stream of violent images and emotionally loaded metaphors. Whether these anti-Jewish statements were original or merely the rehashing of earlier and current anti-Semitic themes (which indeed they were) is basically irrelevant, as their impact stemmed from Hitler's personal tone and from his own individual style of presenting his metapolitical and political beliefs. Does this mean that Hitler's anti-Jewish obsessions ought to be analysed in terms of individual pathology? It is a lead that has often been followed 112 ; it will not be taken up here. Suffice it to say that any such interpretation usually appears to be highly speculative and often reductive. Moreover, similar anti-Jewish images, similar threats, a similar readiness for violence were shared from the outset by hundreds of thousands of Germans belonging to the extreme right and later to the radical wing of the Nazi Party. If “pathology” there was, it was shared. Rather than an individual structures we must face the social pathology of sects. It is unusual, however, for a sect to become a modern political party, and it is even more unusual for its leader and his followers to keep to their original fanaticism once they have acceded to power. This, nonetheless, was the unlikely course of things. And this road, which was to lead to domains of unfathomable human behaviour, has a well-documented starting point lying in the full light of history: the ranks of a small extremist party in post war Bavaria, which, after the failure of its 1923 putsch attempt, seemed doomed to oblivion in the German Republic's new atmosphere of increased political stability. Hitler relentlessly repeated a story of perdition caused by the Jew, and of redemption by a total victory over the Jew. For the future Fuehrer, the Jew's ominous endeavours were an all-encompassing conspiratorial activity extending throughout the span of Western history. The structure of Hitler's tale was not only inherent in its explicit content; it was also the essence of the implicit message the story conveyed. Despite the pretense of a historical analysis, the Jew, in Hitler's depiction, was dehistoricised and transformed into an abstract principle of evil that confronted a no less metahistorical counterpart just as immutable in its nature and role throughout time - the Aryan race. Whereas Marxism stressed the conflict of changing historical forces, Nazism and particularly Hitler's world view, considered history as the confrontation of an immutable good and an immutable evil. The outcome could only be envisioned in religious terms: perdition or redemption. There was another level to Hitler's vision of the Jewish enemy: The Jew was both a superhuman force driving the peoples of the world to perdition and a subhuman cause of infection, disintegration, and death. The first image, that of the superhuman force, raises a question left unanswered both in Mein Kampf and in Hitler's speeches: Why did the people of the world offer no resistance, why for centuries had they been driven to ruin by the machinations of the Jew without offering any effective resistance? This question will arise strongly many years later, in connection with Hitler's Reichstag speech of January 30, 1939, when he “prophesied” the extermination of the Jews if they were again to drive the European peoples into a war. How was it that the nations of the world were unable to withstand these machinations? Implicit in this vision is a stupefied, hypnotised mass of peoples completely at the mercy of the Jewish conspiracy. The are the hapless cattle killed by sneering Jewish ritual slaughterers in the final scenes of The Eternal Jew , the film whose production was initiated and overseen by Goebbels in 1939-40. But, as Hitler profusely showed in Mein Kampf , the image of superhuman control typically gives way to the second one, subhuman threats of contamination, microbial infection, spreading pestilence. These are the swarms of germ-carrying rats that will later appear in one of the most repellent scenes of The EternJew . Images of superhuman power and subhuman pestilence are contrary representations, but Hitler attributed both to one and the same being, as if an endlessly changing and endlessly mimetic force had launched a constantly shifting offensive against humanity. Many of the images, not only in Hitler's vision of the Jew but also in Nazi anti-Semitism generally, seem to converge in such constant transformations. These images are the undistorted echo of past representations of the Jew as endlessly changing and endlessly the same, a living dead, either a ghostly wanderer or a ghostly ghetto inhabitant. Thus the all-pervasive Jewish threat becomes in fact formless and unrepresentable; as such it leads to the most frightening phantasm of all: a threat that looms everywhere, that, although it penetrates everything, is an invisible carrier of death, like poison gas spreading over the battlefields of the Great War. The last major expression of Hitler's anti-Jewish obsession was the second volume of Mein Kampf , published in 1927. Another book by Hitler, completed in 1928, remained in manuscript form 113 . It was politically safer not to disclose the violence of the Fuehrer's views, mainly on international affairs, as he was now donning the garb of a statesman. In his speeches, however, Hitler was less res. In an article of November 5, 1925, headlined HITLER IN BRAUNSCHWEIG, the Braunschweigische Landeszeitung reported a speech delivered by the Nazi leader at a party meeting in the city's concert hall. After mentioning some of the themes of the speech, the story noted that Hitler dealt with the Jews in well-known form and the usual fashion. One knows what the National Socialists have to say against these citizens, and therefore we may spare ourselves reporting how Hitler held forth on this theme.' 114 The writer of the article could not have put it more concisely or more truthfully. A similar remark appeared in the Mecklenburger Nachrichten's account, on May 5, 1926, of a Hitler speech in Schwerin two days earlier 115 . The hail of insults and threats against the Jews was, if at all, even more massive than in the past. At this time hardly any of Hitler's speeches lacks the kind of anti-Semitic rhetoric established in the early speeches and in Mein Kampf . It is as if the failure of the 1923 putsch, as if imprisonment and the temporary disbandment of the Nazi Party, had led to a heightened fury, or as if the needs of political agitation demanded the most aggressive and repetitive slogans that could possibly be mustered. The stock-market Jews and Jewish international capital were brandished side by side with bloodthirsty Jewish revolutionaries; the themes of Jewish race defilement and a Jewish conspiracy to control the world were fed to the delirious party faithful with the same instantaneous effect. In order to hammer home his attacks, Hitler used every rhetorical device, even the rather unusual method of telling well-known Jewish jokes in order to illustrate the perversity of the Jewish soul 116 . Yet, even in the aftermath of his imprisonment in Landsberg, whenever political expedience dictated caution in the use of gross anti-Jewish outbursts, Hitler knew how to avoid the topic. When, on February 28, 1926, he spoke to the Hamburg National Club of 1919, a conservative-nationalist association whose generally upper-class membership included a number of former high-ranking officers, the Nazi leader simply avoided reference to the Jews 117 . One is reminded of the “detachment” of his later speech to the Association of German Industrialists in Duesseldorf. But what drove Hitler was his anti-Jewish hatred, and it was the calculated restraint that demanded effort. For Hitler the struggle against the Jews was the immutable basis and obsessional core of his understanding of history, politics, and political action. Sometimes the anti-Jewish stance was rephrased in unexpected terms. Thus, according to a police report, Hitler declared in a speech in Munich on December 18, 1926, that Christmas was significant precisely for National-Socialists, as Christ had been the greatest precursor in the struggle against the Jewish world enemy. Christ had not been the apostle of peace that the Church had afterward made of him, but rather was the greatest fighting personality that had ever lived. For millennia the teaching of Christ had been fundamental in the fight against the Jew as the enemy of humanity. The task that Christ had started, he [Hitler] would fulfil. National Socialism was nothing but a practical fulfilment of the teachings of Christ.' 118 Hitler's speeches during the decisive year 1932 have not yet been published as this book goes to press, but most of the diatribes of the years 1927-31 are now available 119 : In them anti-Semitic hatred remained prominent. Sometimes, as in Hitler's ferocious polemic against the Bavarian People's Party (Bayerische Volkspartei, or BVP) in the Munich speech of February 29, 1928, not very long before the May national elections, the agitator's venom of the early twenties was back in full force, with the Jews as the central issue because the BVP had rejected anti-Semitism. The themes were the same; the rhetorical devices were the same; the delirious reactions of the crowd were the same: Speaker and audience were thirsting for violence - against the same people, the Jews 120 . References: 93 See Cohn, Warrant for Genocide , p. 138. For new details and nuances regarding the historical context of the Protocols , see Richard S. Levy's Introduction to Binjamin W. Segel, A Lie and a Libel: The History of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion , trans. and ed. Richard S. Levy (Lincoln, Neb., 1995). Segel's study was originally published in Berlin in 1926. 94 The Protocols and the World Revolution including a Translation and Analysis of the “Protocols of the Meetings of the Zionist Men of Wisdomî (Boston, 1920), p. 144. 95 Ibid., pp. 144¯48 (the passage quoted is on pp. 147¯48). 96 Quoted in Georg Franz-Willing, Die Hitler-Bewegung , vol. 1, Der Ursprung 1919¯1922 (Hamburg, 1962), p. 150. 97 Anything relating to the psychological, intellectual, and ideological development of “Hitler before Hitlerî and, therefore, to the origins of his anti-Semitic obsession is entirely hypothetical. Were the ministrations¯and particularly his morphine injections during the terminal illness of Hitler's mother¯of the Jewish physician Eduard Bloch at the source of the future dictator's identification of the Jew with mortal penetration of the motherly body of the nation and the race? Did the theories of the pan-German history teacher, Leopold Poetsch, at the Realschule in Linz have any intellectual impact? Undoubtedly, early elements of Hitler's world view stem from his sojourn in Vienna from 1908 to 1913; there he must have been influenced by Georg von Schoenerer's and Karl Lueger's political campaigns. But how much further can we rely on his own declarations about this period or on the so-called recollections of his companions at the time, August Kubizek and Reinhold Hanisch? For excellent accounts of Hitler's life before 1918 see in particular Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (London, 1952); Joachim C. Fest, Hitler (New York, 1974); as well as useful corrections regarding this period in Anton Jochimsthaler, Korrektur einer Biographie: Adolf Hitler, 1908¯1920 (Munich, 1989). For a systematic correlation between any indices of Hitler's early anti-Semitism and his later anti-Jewish world view and policies, see Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the “Final Solutionî (Berkeley, Calif., 1984). 98 Adolf Hitler, Saemtliche Aufzeichnungen , ed., Eberhard Jaeckel and Axel Kuhn (Stuttgart, 1980), p. 128. 99 For the first complete publication of the text of the speech, with a detailed critical commentary, see Reginald H. Phelps, “Hitlers Grundlegende' Rede ueber den Antisemitismus,” VfZ 16, no. 4 (1968): 390ff. 100 Hitler, Saemtliche Aufzeichnungen , p. 199. 101 Ibid., p. 202. 102 Eberhard Jaeckel, Hitler's Worldview: A Blueprint for Power (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 52ff. 103 Adolf Hitler, Hitler's Secret Conversations 1941¯1944 , ed. Hugh R. Trevor-Roper(New York, 1972), p. 178. 104 Shaul Esh, “Eine neue literarische Quelle Hitlers? Eine methodologische oeberlegung,” Geschichte und Unterricht , 15 (1964), pp. 487ff.; Margarete Plewnia, Auf dem Weg zu Hitler: Der “voelkischeî Publizist Dietrick Eckart (Bremen, 1970), pp. 108¯9. 105 Ernst Nolte, “Eine fruehe Quelle zu Hitlers Antisemitismus,” Historische Zeitschrift 192 (1961), particularly 604ff. 106 Esh, “Eine neue literarische Quelle Hitlers?” 107 Engelman, “Dietrich Eckart,” p. 236. 108 Dietrich Eckart, Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin. Zwiegespraech zwischen Adolf Hitler und mir (Munich, n.d. [1924]), p. 49. 109Hitler, Mein Kampf , p. 65. 110 Ibid., p. 679. 111 The most thorough presentation of Hitler's ideology as a coherent intellectual system is to be found in Jaeckel, Hitler's Worldview ; for the direct relation between the world view and Nazi policy see in particular Eberhard Jaeckel, Hitler in History (Hanover, N. H., 1984). This (“intentionalist”) position stands in opposition to the “functionalist” approach, which dismisses the systematic aspect of Hitler's ideology and marginalises or completely negates any direct causal relation between Hitler's ideology and the policies of the Nazi regime. The most consistent exponent of the extreme functionalist position has been Hans Mommsen. With regards to Hitler's anti-Jewish policies, see in particular Hans Mommsen, “The Realization of the Unthinkable.” For an excellent evaluation of these different approaches see Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation , 3rd ed. (London, 1993), mainly chaps. 4 and 5; specifically with regard to anti-Jewish policies see an evaluation of both positions in Friedlaender, “From Anti-Semitism to Extermination.” 112 Among the many attempts to explain Hitler's personality and particularly his anti-Jewish obsession in terms of psychopathology, mainly by using psychoanalytic concepts, see in particular Rudolph Binion, Hitler Among the Germans (New York, 1976); Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God: A Biography of Adolf Hitler (New York, 1977). See also the wartime analysis published some thirty years later: Walter C. Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report (New York, 1972). The problems raised by psycho-biographical inquiries have been debated at length; for an evaluation of some of the issues see Saul Friedlaender, History and Psychoanalysis: An Inquiry into the Possibilities and Limits of Psychohistory (New York, 1978). 113 Adolf Hitler, Hitler's Secret Book (New York, 1961). 114 Adolf Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen: Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933 , vol. 1, Die Wiedergruendung der NSDAP: Februar 1925¯Juni 1926 , ed. Clemens Vollnhals (Munich, 1992), p. 208. 115 Ibid., p. 421. 116 Ibid., p. 195. Even when he [the Jew] writes the truth, the truth is only meant as a way of lying....A Jewish joke is known on that account: Two Jews are sitting together on a train....One asks the other: So, Stern, where are you going? Why do you want to know? Well, I would like to know it - I am going to Posemuckel! It is not true, you are not going to Posemuckel. Yes, I am going to Posemuckel. So you are really going to Posemuckel and are also saying that you are going to Posemuckel - what a liar you are!' Hitler seems to have liked this joke so much that two years later he used it in another speech. See Adolf Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen: Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933 , vol. 2, Vom Weimarer Parteitag bis zur Reichstagswahl Juli 1926¯Mai 1927 , ed. Baerbel Dusik (Munich, 1992), p. 584. 117 Hitler, Reden, Schriften , vol. 1, p. 297. 118 Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 105¯6. 119 The still missing volumes will cover the period June 1931¯January 1933. 120 Hitler, Reden, Schriften , vol. 2, part 2, August 1927¯Mai 1928 , pp. 699ff. Part E In the 1928 Reichstag election, the Nazis received only 2.6 percent of the vote (6.1 percent in Bavaria, 10.7 percent in Munich): The breakthrough was yet to come. Anti-Jewish agitation continued. We see,' Hitler exclaimed in his speech of August 31, 1928, that in Germany, Judaisation progresses in literature, the theatre, music, and film; that our medical world is Judaised, and the world of our lawyers too; that in our universities ever more Jews come to the fore. I am not astonished when a proletarian says: What do I care?' But it is astonishing that in the national bourgeois camp there are people who say: This is of no interest to us, we don't understand this anti-Semitism.' They will understand it when their children toil under the whip of Jewish overseers. [italics in the original]' 121 After the stunning success of the NSDAP in the September 1930 elections, and during the almost two and a half years that followed until Hitler acceded to the chancellorship, the Jewish theme indeed became less frequent in his rhetoric, but it did not disappear. And when Hitler did refer to the Jews, as, for example, in a speech on June 25, 1931, the reference carried all the dire predictions of former years. In the first part of that speech, Hitler described how the Jews had destroyed the Germanic leadership in Russia and taken control of the country. In other nations the same process was developing under the cover of democracy. But the finale was more direct and more threatening: The parties of the middle say: everything is collapsing; we declare: what you see as collapse is the beginning of a new era. There is but one question about this new era: will it come from the German people...or will this era sink toward another people? Will the Jew really become the master of the world, will he organise its life, will he in the future dominate the nations? This is the great question that will be decided, one way or the other.' 122 For external consumption Hitler sounded far less apocalyptic, far more moderate. In an interview given to the London Times in mid-October 1930, he assured the correspondent that he was not to be linked to any pogroms. He merely wanted “Germany for the Germans”; his party did not object to “decent Jews,” but if the Jews identified with Bolshevism - and many unfortunately were inclined to do so - he would consider them enemies 123 . Incidentally, in articles published at the same time, Hitler expressed his conviction that recurring reports about the growth of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and interpretations of the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky as a struggle between an anti-Semite and a Jew were unfounded and farcical: Stalin does not have to be circumcised, but nine-tenths of his associates are authentic Hebrews. His actions only continue the complete uprooting of the Russian people with the aim of its total subjugation to the Jewish dictatorship.' 124 Whatever Hitler may have been writing about the Jewish dictatorship in the Soviet Union, in Germany some people were taken in by the apparent ideological change expressed in the Times interview. On October 18, 1930, Arthur Mahraun, himself no philo-Semite and the leader of the conservative Jungdeutscher Orden, the youth movement of the newly formed Deutsche Staatspartei (German State Party), wrote in his organisation's periodical: Adolf Hitler has abandoned anti-Semitism; this much one can now say with certainty. But officially [he has done so] for the moment only vis-a-vis foreign representatives and above all for the consumption of the jobbers in the City and Wall Street. At home, however, National Socialist supporters continue to be taken for a ride with anti-Semitic slogans.' 125 Was Mahraun really fooled by Hitler's tactical pronouncements? Hitler's partial restraint at this time was more than made up for by his subordinates 126 . The prime example was the new Berlin Gauleiter, Joseph Goebbels, and his weekly (later daily), Der Angriff (The Attack), a paper certainly worthy of its name: it was ruthless and relentless against its main target, the Jew. As the symbol of the Jews' evil machinations and misuse of power, Goebbels chose Dr. Bernhard Weiss, vice president of the Berlin police, whom the Gauleiter dubbed “Isidor.” Dozens of anti-Isidor articles appeared from May 1927 (when the police temporarily banned the Nazi Party in Berlin) to the eve of the seizure of power; the articles were given extra punch by Hans Schweitzer's (pen name: “Mjoelnir”) cartoons. A book of the earliest of these articles by Goebbels, along with the cartoons, was published in 1928 as Das Buch Isidor (The Isidor book) 127 . On April 15, 1929, Der Angriff turned its attention to a young boy's unexplained death in the vicinity of Bamberg. Goebbels' paper stated that a conclusion could be reached if one were to ask which existing religious community in Germany has already been under suspicion for hundreds of years for containing fanatics who use the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes.' 128 A Berlin court dismissed the slander charge that was brought against Der Angriff by arguing that Goebbels' paper had not stated that the Jewish community as such encouraged murder and that putting quotation marks around “religious communityî meant merely that the author of the article was not certain that the Jews was a religious community 129 . Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda continued without respite throughout the decisive months preceding Hitler's accession to power 130 . VI On November 19, 1930, the Hebrew-language theatre Habimah presented S. Anski's The Dybbuk in the Wuerzburg municipal theater. A group of Nazis in the crowd tried, without success, to stop the performance. As it was leaving the theatre the predominantly Jewish audience was attacked by the Nazis and several Jews were seriously wounded. When the assailants were taken to court, the judge dismissed the charges, arguing that the demonstrators did not act from base motives.' 131 The Wuerzburg mayor explained that the police had not intervened because they were certain that the demonstration had “merely” aimed at preventing a show 132 . Although physical assaults of this kind were infrequent during the Weimar years, a pogrom-like anti-Jewish rampage that started in Berlin's Scheunenviertel district on November 5, 1923 went on for several days 133 . Although there is no straight line between these developments and the events that followed 1933, the trends described here are part of a historically relevant background. Nonetheless, this focus on anti-Semitism should not lead to a skewed perception of the German scene - and particularly of the situation of the Jews in Germany - before 1933. The Jewish influenced perceived by the anti-Semites was mythical, but for the great majority of Jews in Germany the Weimar Republic opened the way to social advancement and, indeed, to a greater role in German life. The growth of anti-Semitism was real, but so - for a time at least - was a powerful renaissance of Jewish culture in Germany 134 and, until the onset of the crisis in 1929-30, a wide acceptance of Jews among the liberal and left-wing sectors of German society. On the right, however, anti-Semitism spread unabated, and during the final phase of the republic, it caught on beyond the reaches of the radical, and even the traditional, Right. No political group shared the rabid anti-Jewish positions of the Nazis, but even during the years of stabilisation, between 1924 and 1929, extreme anti-Semitic themes were not uncommon in the political propaganda of the nationalist camp, particularly in that of the German National People's Party (DNVP), whose voelkisch wing was particularly vehement. At the end of 1922, the most extreme of the anti-Semitic DNVP Reichstag members, Wilhelm Henning, Reinhold Wulle, and Albrecht von Graefe, left the party to establish their own political organisation. But during the debates surrounding this secession, Oskar Hergt,of the leaders of the DNVP and the former finance minister of Prussia, nonetheless reaffirmed that anti-Semitism remained a fundamental political commitment of the party 135 . For the French journalist Henri Beraud, who himself was to become an extreme anti-Semite in the 1930s, the German right's Jew-hatred seemed completely out of control. We have no idea in France,' Beraud wrote in a report from Berlin in 1926, of what the anti-Semitism of German reactionaries can be. It is neither an opinion nor a feeling, nor even a physical reaction. It is a passion, a real obsession of addicts, which can go as far as crime.' 136 In 1924, the bankruptcy of the brothers Heinrich and Julius Barmat, two Polish Jews who had settled in Germany in 1918, led to a full-scale right-wing anti-Semitic and anti-Republic onslaught. The Barmat brothers were accused of having received loans from the state-sponsored postal savings bank in return for various financial favours to Social Democratic politicians. Given the political ramifications of the affair, the right-wing parties succeeded in setting up an investigation committee that led to the resignation and indictment of several ministers and Reichstag members. But the main target of the right-wing campaign was President Friedrich Ebert, who was accused of having helped the Barmats to obtain a permanent residence permit and even of having dabbled in their food import transactions during the immediate post war years 137 . There was a similar situation, on a smaller scale, in 1929, with the bankruptcy of the Sklarek brothers 138 . The main casualty this time was the mayor of Berlin, and the political consequence a contribution to the Nazi Party's strong showing in that year's local election 139 . Political parties soon limited the number of their Jewish Reichstag members - with the exception of the Social Democrats, who retained approximately 10 percent Jewish membership on their Reichstag list to the very end. A telling illustration of the change of mood is to be found in the German Communist Party: In 1924 there were still six Jews among the party's sixty-four Reichstag members; in 1932 not a single one remained 140 . The Communists did not hesitate to use anti-Semitic slogans when such slogans were deemed effective among potential voters 141 . The most significant political expression of the general climate of opinion was the transformation of the German Democratic Party (DDP), which had often been dubbed the “Jewish Party” because of the prominence of Jews among its founders, the large number of Jews among its voters, and, for a while at least, its espousal of themes identified with the position of the “Jewish press.” 142 In the January 1919 elections, the DDP obtained 18.5 percent of the vote, which made it the most successful of the middle-class liberal parties 143 . That success did not last. Gustav Stresemann's DVP kept attacking the competing DDP as “Jewish,” and, as a result, the DDP steadily declined. Within the party itself, personalities associated with the “liberal” right were openly critical of the party's identification with Jewish voters and influence 144 . In 1930 the DDP as such disappeared, to be replaced by the Deutsche Staatspartei (German State Party). This group's leadership became mostly Protestant and some of its components, such as the youth movement Jungdeutscher Orden, did not admit Jews. The DDP's voters had been the pro-Weimar liberal middle classes; the change in party name and policy reflect what were perceived, within these middle-class liberal circles, as electorally useful attitudes regarding the “Jewish problem.” However, neither the “de-Judaisation” represented by the Staatspartei nor the hostility of the DVP was of any avail to these parties. Whereas in the elections of 1928 the DDP obtained twenty-five seats and the DVP forty-five, and in those of 1930 the DDP still gained twenty seats and the DVP thirty, in the elections of July 1932, the DDP was reduced to four seats and the DVP to seven 145 . The decline of the liberal parties during the Weimar Republic had been thoroughly analysed, and the social transformation that underlay it starkly defined 146 . In terms of the changing situation of the Jews in German, it meant that their main political basis (apart from the Social Democrats) had simply disappeared. The “pernicious” influence of Jews on German culture was the most common theme of Weimar anti-Semitism. On this terrain, the conservative German bourgeoisie, the traditional academic world, the majority of opinion in the provinces - in short, all those who “felt German” - came together with the more radical anti-Semites. The role of Jews in Weimar culture - in modern German culture in general - has been most extensively discussed, and, as we have seen, this theme was not only on the minds of anti-Semites, but often a source of pre-occupation for Jews themselves, at least for some of them. In his first book on the subject, the historian Peter Gay showed what role the former “outsider” (mainly the Jew) played in the German culture of the 1920s 147 ; later he reversed his position, arguing that, objectively, there was nothing to distinguish Jewish from non-Jewish contributions to German culture and that, as far as cultural modernism in particular is concerned, the Jews were neither more nor less “modern” than their German environment 148 . Such downplaying of the Jewish dimension may well miss part of the context that provided the anti-Semitic ranters of the twenties with their ammunition 149 . The situation described, for example, in Istvan Deak's study of “Weimar's left-wing intellectuals” seems closer both to reality and to what the general perception was. After surveying the dominant influence of Jews in the press, book publishing, theatre, and film, Deak turns to art and literature: Many of Germany's best composers, musicians, artists, sculptors and architects were Jews. Their participation in literary criticism and in literature was enormous: practically all the great critics and many novelists, poets, dramatists, essayists of Weimar Germany were Jews. A recent American study has shown that thirty-one of the sixty-five leading German expressionists' and neo-objectivists' were Jews.' 150 Deak's presentation in turn demands some nuancing, as, after all, the cultural scene in the twenties was dominated by such figures as Thomas Mann, Gerhart Hauptmann, Bertolt Brecht, Richard Strauss, Walter Gropius; but undoubtedly, in the minds of the middle-class public, be it of the extreme or the moderate right, anything “daring,” “modern,” or “shocking” was identified with the Jews. Thus, when shortly after (the entirely non-Jewish) Frank Wedekind's death, his “sexually explicit” Schloss Wetterstein was staged in Munich (December 1919), the political right did not hesitate to call it Jewish garbage. The police warned that performance of the play would lead to a pogrom 151 , and, sure enough, during the last performance Jews and people who “looked Jewish” in the audience were beaten up 152 . As a police report put it: One can easily understand that a German who still feels German to some degree and who is not morally and ethically perverted looks with greatest disgust upon the public enjoyment of Wedekind plays.' 153 Jewish writers and artists may not have been any more extreme modernists than their non-Jewish colleagues, but modernism as such flourished in a culture in which the Jews played a central role. For those who considered modernism the rejection of all hallowed values and norms, the Jews were the carriers of a massive threat. References: 121 Ibid., vol. 3, Zwischen den Reichstagswahlen Juli 1928¯September 1930 , ed. Baerbel Dusik and Klaus A. Lankheit, part 1: Juli 1928¯Februar 1929 (Munich, 1994), p. 43. 122 Ibid., vol. 4, Von der Reichstagswahl bis zur Reichspraesidentenwahl, Oktober 1930¯Maerz 1932 , part 1, Oktober 1930¯Juni 1931 , ed. Constantin Goschler (Munich, 1994), pp. 421¯30. 123 Ibid., pp. 22¯23. 124 Article of January 11, 1930 ( Illustrierter Beobachter ). This article and previous texts in the same vein are quoted in Rainer Zitelmann, Hitler: Selbsteines Revolutionaers (Stuttgart, 1990), pp. 476ff. 125 Martin Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar Germany (New York, 1987), p. 125. In his private conversations Hitler showed no restraint in his anti-Jewish fury. A telling illustration is to be found in the notes covering the years 1929¯1932 and written down in 1946 by Otto Wagener, interim chief of staff of the SA and then head of the economic division of the party. Wagener remained a true believer even after the war, and thus it would have been in his interest to tone down Hitler's remarks about the “Jewish question.” As they are¯toned down or not¯Wagener's recollections reflect the same themes and the same unbounded hatred that we know from Hitler's earlier speeches and texts. For Wagener's text see the critical edition of his notes published by Henry A. Turner, Otto Wagener, Hitler aus naechster Naehe: Aufzeichnungen eines Vertrauten 1929¯1932 (Frankfurt am Main, 1978). For the anti-Jewish tirades see in particular pp. 144ff. and 172ff. 126 For the inner core of the Nazi leadership, anti-Semitism was an essential part of their world view from very early on. This early anti-Semitism was particularly extreme in the case of Rosenberg, Streicher, Ley, Hess, and Darré. Himmler and Goebbels also became anti-Semites before joining the Nazi Party. (The notable exceptions were Goering and the brothers Strasser.) On this issue I do not share Michael Marrus's evaluation regarding the absence of anti-Semitism among party leaders before 1925. See Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover, N. H., 1987), pp. 11¯12. For a discussion of the apocalyptic dimension of the anti-Jewish creed among the Nazi elite, see Erich Goldhagen, “Weltanschauung und Endloesung: Zum Antisemitismus der nationalsozialistischen Fuehrungsschicht,” VfZ 24, no 4 (1976): 379ff. The marginal importance of anti-Semitism among the SA has been well documented by Theodor Abel. See the reworking and reinterpretation of Abel's questionnaires in Peter Merkl, Political Violence Under the Swastika: 581 Early Nazis (Princeton, N. J., 1975). The same cannot be said, however, of the middle-class future members of the SD, who often belonged to extreme right-wing anti-Semitic organisations from the early post war years onward. See Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien. 127 Russel Lemmons, Goebbels and “Der Angriff,î (Lexington, Ky., 1994), particularly pp. 111ff. 128 Ralf Georg Reuth, Goebbels (Munich, 1990), p. 200. 129 Ibid. 130 In 1932 the Nazis launched a vicious anti-Semitic attack against the DNVP candidate for the presidency, Theodor Duesterberg (one of the two leaders of the right-wing veterans' organisation, the Stahlhelm), harping on the Jewish origins of his grandfather, a physician who had converted to Protestantism in 1818. For this entire episode see Volker R. Berghahn, Der Stahlhelm: Bund der Frontsoldaten 1918¯1935 (Duesseldorf, 1966), pp. 239ff. 131 Roland Flade, Die Wuerzburger Juden: Ihre Geschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Wuerzburg, 1987), p. 149. 132 Trude Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland 1918¯1933 (Hamburg, 1986), p. 346. 133 Ibid., p. 329ff. 134 Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, Conn., 1996). 135 Heinrich-August Winkler, Weimar 1918¯1933: Die Geschichte der ersten deutschen Demokratie (Munich, 1993), p. 180. 136 Henri Béraud, “Ce que j'ai vu à Berlin,” Le Journal , October 1926. Quoted in Frédéric Monier, “Les Od'Henri Béraud,” Vingtième Siècle: Revue d'Histoire (Oct.¯Dec. 1993): 67. 137 On this whole affair see Erich Eyck, Geschichte der Weimarer Republik , vol. 1 (Erlenbach, 1962), pp. 433ff. (For some reason Eyck refers only to Julius Barmat.) 138 Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 316ff. See also Winkler, Weimar 1918¯1933 , p. 356. 139 Ibid. For the Barmat and Sklarek scandals see also Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland , pp. 141ff. 140 See Maurer, “Die Juden in der Weimarer Republik,” in Dirk Blasius and Dan Diner, eds., Zerbrochene Geschichte: Leben und Selbstverstaendnis der Juden in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), p. 110. 141 Knuetter, Die Juden und die Deutsche Linke , pp. 174ff. 142 For an analysis of the “Jewish problem” in the DDP see Bruce B. Frye, “The German Democratic Party and the Jewish Problem' in the Weimar Republic,” LBIY 21 ([London] 1976), pp. 143ff. 143 Winkler, Weimar 1918¯1933 , p. 69. 144 Frye, “The German Democratic Party,” pp. 145¯47. 145 Berghahn, Modern Germany , p. 284. 146 Larry E. Jones, German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System 1918¯1933 (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1988). 147 Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York, 1968). 148 Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York, 1978). 149 The same minimisation of the Jewish factor appears in Carl Schorske's otherwise magnificent study of fin-de-siecle Vienna. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980). For criticism on this issue see Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews , pp. 5ff. 150 Istvan Deak, WeimarGermany's Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbuehne and Its Circle (Berkeley, Calif., 1968), p. 28. 151 Peter Jelavich, Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting and Performance, 1890¯1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 537¯39. 152 Ibid., p. 302. 153 Ibid., p. 304. Part F More ominous, however, than cultural modernity was left-wing culture in all its aspects. Within months of the end of the war, Jewish revolutionaries were easy targets of the counter-revolution. After Rathenau's murder no Jew (with the exception of the Socialist Finance Minister Rudolf Hilferding) played any significant role in Weimar politics. On the other hand, left-wing political, social, and cultural criticism and innovation were often “Jewish”. If cultural contributions by Jews were far out of proportion to their numerical state,' Deak writes, their participation in left-wing intellectual activities was even more disproportionate. Apart from orthodox Communist literature where there were a majority of non-Jews, Jews were responsible for a great part of the leftist literature in Germany. (The periodical] Die Weltbuehne was in this respect not unique; Jews published, edited, and to a great part wrote the other left-wing intellectual magazines. Jews played a decisive role in the pacifist and feminist movements, and in the campaigns for sexual enlightenment.' 154 Polemics regarding the role of Jews on the cultural scene raged and became more virulent as the Nazi movement grew in strength and as the republic approached its end. One of the most extreme forums of the Right was the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg's Kampfbund fuer deutsche Kultur (Fighting League for German Culture), established in 1928; it achieved wide influence by opening its ranks to a variety of anti-republic, anti-Left, anti-Jewish elements - from members of the Bayreuth Circle to conservative Catholics like Othmar Spann, from fanatic anti-Semitic literary specialists like Adolf Bartels to Alfred Heuss, publisher of the Zeitschrift fuer Musik. But sometimes the debates took place in more neutral contexts or were even initiated by Jewish organisations. Thus, in 1930, Max Naumann's Association of National German Jews invited the right-wing literary critic Paul Fechter to lecture on “The Art Scene and the Jewish Question.” Fechter did not mince words. He warned his listeners that the “anti-Germanism” of left-wing Jewish intellectuals was a major source of rising anti-Semitism and that the Germans would not tolerate for long the continuation of this state of things. National Jews and national Germans, Fechter suggested should act in common to oppose such anti-national Jewish intellectual attacks. In a more roundabout way, he hinted at the excessive presence of Jews in German art, literature and theatre. This to, although unsaid, could be understood as a source of growing anti-Jewish feelings: I feel obliged to express,' declared Fechter, that a great number of German authors, painters, playwrights go around today with the feeling that it is much more difficult to find a place in German theatres, on the German book market, in the German art business, for things German than for others.' 155 Fechter's lecture was published in the January 1931 issue of Rudolf Pechel's Deutsche Rundschau, with the following editorial comments: We reproduce [the lecture] as it indicates one of the sources of the dangerous growth of anti-Semitism clearly confirmed during the second half of 1930 and as it indicates some ways that still may allow us to counter this danger.' 156 A bitter debate followed. It is in this context that the novelist Jakob Wassermann, whose autobiographical essay, “My Way as German and Jew,” was possibly the strongest expression of the anguish German Jews felt in the face of the growing tide of anti-Semitism, addressed his question to Rudolf Pechel: Do the rules of good behavior help against Perish, Jew!'?' 157 One of the more remarkable Jewish contributions to the debate was that of Arthur Prinz, published in the periodical's April 1931 issue under the title “Toward Eliminating the Poison from the Jewish Question.” After asking why radical Jewish journalists and literati could provoke such furious anti-Semitic rage in Germany, Prinz ventured an answer that probed deeply into the relations between Germans and Jews: That sort of journalism and literature would be impossible without that deep and old insufficiency of a healthy state and national feeling in Germany, which threatens to become fatal since the sad outcome of the war and can certainly not be compensated for' by the excessive nationalism of the extreme right. The agitation of rootless Jews is poison in a body particularly receptive to it, and precisely this is the main reason for boundless anti-Jewish hatred.' 158 When one turns to the wider reaches of German society as it approached the political turning point of 1933, there is no way of assessing clearly the strength of its anti-Jewish attitudes. For example, the League of Jewish Women (JuFrauenbund) found its allies in the much larger Federation of German Women's Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, or BDF) in their common struggles on feminist issues, but any indication of Jewish identity was not more acceptable to the German women's organisation than it was to the surrounding society. In the words of a historian of the league, the attitudes in the BDF ranged from liberal impatience with Jewish distinctiveness to cover over anti-Semitism.' 159 As for the nature of this anti-Semitism, one of its most nuanced evaluations remains the most plausible: More common and widespread than outright hatred or sympathy for the Jews was...moderate anti-Semitism, that vague sense of unease about Jews that stopped far short of wanting to harm them but that may have helped to neutralise whatever aversion Germans might otherwise have felt for the Nazis.' 160 In early August 1932 Hitler was negotiating with the consummate schemer and not yet the short-lived last chancellor of the Weimar Republic (November 1932-January 30, 1933) Gen. Kurt von Schleicher, at the time still a close confidant of President Hindenburg, the conditions for his being named to the chancellorship. On the tenth of that month, five SA men forced their way into the home of Konrad Piczuch, a pro-Communist worker in the small town of Potempa in Upper Silesia, and trampled him to death. Such brutality once again put a serious obstacle on the path of the Nazi march to power.' 161 Hitler had apparently believed that the top position would now be offered to him; what Hindenburg proposed when they finally met was a mere vice-chancellorship. The meeting had been cool, and the official communique dismissive of the Nazi leader. Hitler was utterly humiliated and furious. It was exactly then, on August 22, that the court in Beuthen sentenced the five SA men to death. The announcement of the verdict led to tumultuous scenes in the courtroom, outside, Jewish and “socialist” shops were attacked. Hitler reacted with an outburst of rage. He wired the convicted murderers: My comrades! In view of this incredible criminal verdict I feel myself tied to you in unlimited fidelity. From this moment on, your freedom is our honour, the fight against a government under which such a thing was possible, our duty.' 162 THE JEWS ARE GUILTY! Goebbels thundered in Der Angriff : The Jews are guilty, the punishment is coming.... The hour will strike when the state prosecutor will have other tasks to fulfil than to protect the traitors to the people from the anger of the people. Forget it never, comrades! Tell it to yourself a hundred times a day, so that it may follow you in your deepest dreams: the Jews are guilty! And they will not escape the punishment they deserve.' 163 In a moment of sheer frustration, Hitler had abandoned his carefully constructed facade of respectability and given vent to relentless and murderous rage. Nonetheless, during those same weeks of the summer and fall of 1932, Hitler continued to oppose the use of force for toppling the regime and went on negotiating and manoeuvring in order to reach his goal 164 . What emerges here with uncanny clarity is a personality in which cold calculation and blind fury co-exisand could find almost simultaneous expression. If a third ingredient Hitler's ideological fanaticism - is added, an insight into the psychological makeup that led to the Nazi leader's most crucial decisions may be possible, also with regard to the Jews. Ideological fanaticism and pragmatic calculation constantly interacted in Hitler's decisions. The ideological obsession was unwavering, but tactical considerations were no less compelling. Sometimes, however, the third element, uncontrolled fury, would burst into the open - triggered by some obstacle, some threat, some defeat - sweeping away all practical considerations. Then, fed by the torrent of ideological fanaticism, the murderous fury would in an unlimited urge for destruction and death. References: 154 Deak, Weimar Germany's Left-Wing Intellectuals , p. 28. 155 Quoted in Anton Kaes, ed., Weimarer Republik: Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur , 1918¯1933 (Stuttgart, 1983), pp. 537¯39. 156 Ibid., p. 539. 157 Jakob Wassermann, Deutscher und Jude: Reden und Schriften 1904¯1933 (Heidelberg, 1984), p. 156. 158 Kaes, Weimarer Republik , p. 539. 159 Marion Kaplan, “Sisterhood Under Siege: Feminism and Anti-Semitism in Germany, 1904¯1938, in Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York, 1984), pp. 186¯87. 160 Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany , p. 80. 161 Fest, Hitler , p. 355. On the unfolding of these events, see also Winkler, Weimar 1918¯1933 , pp. 508ff. 162 Ibid., p. 513. 163 Ibid., pp. 513¯14. 164 Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar Germany , p. 126. Back to the top