raul hilberg on german motivations - 1
German Motivations for the Destruction of the Jews
By RAUL HILBERG
DURING THE NAZI REGIME, one of the most drastic acts in history was fashioned by German hands.The Jews of Europe were annihilated. In conception and execution, it was a unique occurrence. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, a modern bureaucracy set out for the first time to destroy an entire people. Step by step and blow by blow, more than five million Jews were driven to their deaths. Few operations could have been more efficient than this bewildering deed in the midst of a general war.
Twenty years have gone by and grass is growing over the riddled and charred remains of the European Jewish community. One question, however, has lingered unaltered and unanswered through the passage of time. Why were these people killed? What sort of mind produced such an act? The question persists, if only because it yields, not discoveries, but inferences, not answers, but definitions and categorizations.
The German mind has to be reconstructed from the impact which it had. To ask what kind of mind brought forth this act is to ask what kind of act it was. The portrayal of that motivational pattern is derived from a characterization of the event. We shall reproduce the principal descriptions in the pages below. In ordering these conceptualizations, we will attempt to place them under headings which most nearly delimit their content and meaning. We should then observe that they fall into a continuum, from the most familiar, but least appropriate, to the most compelling, but least explicable.[ 1]
The search for German motivations has proceeded from two directions. One orientation seeks to account for the holocaust in something that is rooted in the victim; the other looks to the perpetrator for the underlying clues. Let us consider each in turn.
PROVOCATION
Every hypothesis which is focused upon Jewry contains an assumption of provocation: the Jews had brought their fate upon themselves; they had, in a sense, invited the blow.
Provocation is implied by the very shape of Jewish life in the diaspora, the durability of hostility toward the Jews and the uniformity of reactions against them. The Jews of Europe have been incessantly hounded, perpetually persecuted, recurrently slaughtered. They were not immune in Spain; they were not sheltered in England and France; they were not safe in Russia. That history suggests a set of reasons why Jewry was hunted down.
There have been two emphases in studies of Jewish behavior. One is an ascription to Jewry of an excessive accumulation of negative qualities; the other sees in the Jews an overdose of positive accomplishments.
The portrait of negativism rests essentially on three components: the unassimilability of the Jews, their ambivalence, and their marginality. These factors deserve a brief examination.
The survival of the Jewish substance over thousands of years has involved a rejection of precepts and aims which governed the life of the gentile majority. The Jewish historian Jacob Katz asserts that, while Jews have prayed for the welfare of their Christian rulers, they harbored at the same time “deep reservations as to the ultimate significance of secular States which, seen in the perspective of the messianic hope, were but ephemeral.”[ 2] Viewed in long range, we might well discern such reservations. That famous Jewish apartness nevertheless shrinks in importance when measured in the Germany of the early twentieth century. There, and by that time, Jews had become German in greater proportion and to a greater extent than almost anywhere else. On the eve of World War I, Walter Rathenau called upon them to remove their remaining “correctable peculiarities,”[ 3] and in the war that followed, Jews died for Germany in masses.
Ambivalence has been the second factor in observable Jewish life. Jews have frantically assimilated, without assimilating. The German philosopher von Hartmann saw them at the end of the nineteenth century, both “eclectically acquisitive” and “skeptically negative.”[ 4] Throughout its history, Jewry has been confronted by impossible choices, evading laws and customs under which it could not live, and invoking rules and principles without which it could not survive. During the Middle Ages, the paramountcy of “danger to the community” dictated reliance upon the emperor for protection against local authority, while in modern times, Jews have appealed to the interfering power of foreign states or international organizations in conflicts with their governments. Nowhere, however, was anxiety smaller and trust greater than in modern Germany.
The Jews in most recent times have become successful competitors. Working out of marginal areas, they have occupied powerful economic and cultural positions. Often, the question is asked: Just how much power had passed into the hands of the Jews? A Nazi researcher during the war asked himself that very question, and after exhaustive research published his results, in 1944, in a book which was not circulated. His basic conclusions are not without interest in an exploration of the phenomenon:[ 5]
1. The high point of Jewish economic power in Europe was reached in 1913.
2. The Jews were among the hardest hit by the economic results of World war I. Jewish influence resting upon bank capital in Berlin and Vienna was virtually destroyed in 1931.
3. Prewar “Judaization” of the economy increased from West to East. It was highest in Silesia, Hungary, etc. At the same time, the size of Jewish industrial undertakings decreased in the same direction.
Major questions may be raised by the close and the limits of that development. The successful competitor was not taking over Germany, after all. Moreover, the advancement of the Jew was not guided by Jewry alone. Its paths were determined by exclusions practiced for centuries. It is almost as if Jewry were charged with doing that which it was forced to do.[ 6] In that sense, the problem becomes an inquiry into the extent to which the provocation was the work of those who were provoked.
NOT ALL of the commentators who seek the basis of the German assault in the behavior of its victims portray the Jews with repugnant features: there are observers who see an irritant element in a constellation of Jewish merits and perfections.
Two mechanisms may render virtues provocative. The first is jealousy: the majority attempts to be like the minority, but does not quite succeed. Failing, it withdraws into rejection and hostility. “To the anti-Semite,” states Sartre, “intelligence is Jewish.”[ 7]
A more subtle effect is distraction. For centuries, the two communities have existed side by side, two philosophies, two thought patterns, two ways of life, sometimes deceptively alike, on occasion completely enmeshed, at times hopelessly entangled, but never wholly grown together. The Jewish culture is the older one and its age is magnetic to newer nations, drawing them out of their grooves into a more finished civilization. It is for this reason that, in Spengler’s words, “he who belongs inwardly affirms in the last analysis also where he destroys, while he who is inwardly a stranger negates even where he seeks to build.”[ 8] In all these years, then, the European has continually sought to retain his identity and, failing, attacked his distractors.[ 9]
What, precisely, is virtuous in Jewry? Much has been said about this subject, but in essence the outstanding qualities attributed to the European Jews may be classified in three areas.
First of all, the Jews have been identified with freedom of the individual and protection of his thought. They do not seek dictatorial rule; they will not thrive under censorship. The Jewish spirit, to quote Max Lerner, has “depended on individuality and skepticism. It has depended on the right to be a Jeremiah, the right to be a prophet, lamenting the inequities of society. It has depended on the right to be nobody’s rubber stamp…”[ 10] Jews are iconoclasts. They will not worship idols. In the nineteenth century, the rise of the titanic Jewish idol-smashers, Marx, Freud, and Einstein, jarred the western worId into disequilibrium and quandary. “The Europeans found themselves on quicksand everywhere. Some, most of them, have resisted the onslaught and sought to reconquer the solid ground of former convictions; but in the process, the Jewish people have suffered the most abominable of the persecutions they have known in their long and painful history.”[ 11]
The Jewish commitment is seen as embracing, along with a rejection of tyranny, a marked abstention from illegality, injustice, and immorality. The Jews are the people of the law. The Jewish people gave to Christianity its moral code. Jewry will forever be a witness and a reminder of the divine commandments. “Do you know,” wrote Walther Rathenau, “why we were born into this world? To summon every human countenance to Sinai. You won’t go? If I don’t call you, Marx will call you; if Marx doesn’t call you, Spinoza will call you. If Spinoza doesn’t call you, Christ will call you.”[ 12] Viewed in that role, the Jews are the conscience of the world. They are the father figures, stern, critical, and forbidding. Hence, the succession of uprisings against them. The Jewish policemen of the highest law become the primary target of the basest mutiny in Christendom.[ 13]
Finally, the Jews are as mortar in the bricks of society. At times, they have held it together. In their long history, they have pitted themselves repeatedly against death, dissipation, and debauchery. They are even now preservers of life, guardians of wealth, exponents of beauty. They are the doctors, the merchants, and the performers of the arts. In their everyday functions, they satisfy special wants. The Jews are catalysts and quicken reaction to challenge. “They act as yeast to other peoples,” and this role, too, has contributed to their undoing, for yeast “must remain but a small percentage of the dough:”[ 14]
In the last analysis, however, even the quintessence of Jewish accomplishments is not so overwhelming in the land of the Germans. That nation has not usually stood still at the sight of the performance of others, and the “Judaization” of Germany is but minute in comparison with the Germanization of the Jews.
IF JEWISH TRAITS, bad or good, have provoked destructive reactions, they must have had a significance transcending their apparent scope. Three arguments may be advanced in underscoring this possible effect.
The first is salience. The Jewish character pattern “stands out:” Jewish behavior is “deliberate”; it touches the nerve centers of nations. The Jewish people does possess a large component of “normality,” but the ordinariness of Jewry is a zero quality; its quiescent periods do not count. The peculiarities of the Jews will still be decisive, and this no matter how few the provocateurs, how intermittent their activities, or how subtle their effects. The slightest deviation will register; the weakest disturbance is felt.
The salience of Jewish characteristics is multiplied as soon as there is an increase of contacts between Jews and the Christian world. The principle underlying the contact theory is that group conflicts arise on the periphery. Given a latently hostile situation, the danger to the minority is increased as soon as it loses geographic and social compactness. In the ghetto, people deal with each other, and their relations with the surrounding population are few. At the onset of emancipation, however, this static condition is upset and the scattering of the concentrated mass causes agitation outside. The result is a multiplication of collisions and the heightened provocation of the gentile majority. When Jewry left its sheltered ghettos, it maximized the tension field, and when Jewish penetrations were recorded in the farthest sectors, the threshold of destruction was reached.[ 15]
The third dimension of the Jewish configuration is its invarience. The Jews are said to have behaved in an identical manner since the days of antiquity. “They behaved in Hellenistic times,” said Freud, “as they do today:”[ 16] The provocations in that case would have become cumulative. Throughout their suffering, the Jews have persisted in their action and clung to their ways. Their stubbornness could therefore have become fatal. The cataclysmic reaction felled the Jews of Europe. To the Nazis, it was the “final solution”; to the Jews, it was the last of their martyrdoms.
What, then, can we make of Jewish behavior? The first consideration is that Jewish conduct in all of its intensification, ramification, and magnification, falls manifestly short of those dimensions which alone could have resulted in actions such as those which struck them. Jews had been defined, expropriated, and concentrated before, but the German destruction process escalated into something more vehement and total. The systematic shootings and gassings virtually emptied entire countries and regions of their Jewish inhabitants; the annihilation of Jewish men, women, and children was implemented in an area which extended from Russia to France, and from Norway to Greece. What sort of threat was being eliminated here?
All the documents show that the Jews on the eve of their doom were as harmless as they were impotent. The German Nazis themselves understood the nature of Jewish allegiance, the incidence of Jewish sacrifices, the extent of Jewish productivity. The extollers of Jewish righteousness have the record of Jewry’s desperate attempts to survive on any terms in Adolf Hitler’s Europe. Jewry at its worst was no danger to a growing Germany; Jewry at its best was no obstacle to Nazi plans.
When the totality of the Jewish “challenge” is ranged against the magnitude of the German response, there is consequently a problem of disparity. It is one thing to be provoked. It is something else to be provoked into the killing of five million people. The difference was apparent to so fierce a proponent of Jewish provocation as Josef Goebbels, who spoke of the “judgment” visited upon the Jews as “barbaric.”[ 17]
Another complication intrudes upon provocation analysis: the German reaction to other groups. If Jewry has had other persecutors, Germany has also had other victims. Gypsies were shot and gassed along with Jews; sterilization experiments were conducted with a view to eliminating the Slav populations; consideration was given to the killing of convicted German criminals whose photographs showed that the prospective victims were ugly. If we should rely upon the provocation theory in the case of the Jews, we should be able to construct similar hypotheses about a variety of other groups, some of them inconspicuous, others far from, the German scene, still others new “enemies” of Germandom. Even if we could lend to such formulations some measure of plausibility, we would nevertheless have to take note of a simple fact: the diversified elements which fell into the orbit of Nazi destruction did share a single attribute. Their common denominator was weakness; their outstanding characteristic was helplessness. Their vulnerability itself was a “provocation.” This consideration raises the question as to whether Nazi Germany had reasons for taking advantage of helplessness as such. The next problem then is to find a possible set of such reasons.
PERPETRATION
In provocation analysis, we have looked for anomalies among the Jews, without examining the makeup of the Germans who performed the act. We have instead assumed that these Germans belonged to the normal world and conformed to its practices. Now we have to reverse that assumption and, without regard to the identity of the victim, seek out and specify the special characteristics of the participants in the destruction process. Investigations of this kind may be classified as perpetration theories. The procedures which we must follow in that undertaking are a little more complex.
When we considered the Jewish victim, we were thinking of Jews as a whole, for the target of destruction was Jewry as such, and in German plans a maximum number of them were to be killed. In speaking about the German perpetrator, however, we will be concerned primarily with those men who were involved in the destructive work, and often this work was performed by a minimum number of personnel. Hence, there appears to be a choice. One may consider the perpetrators as a group of people with independent motives who sought in the destruction of Jewry the attainment of ends of their own. The principal task in such an exploration is therefore the specification of individual aims which could be realized through action against Jews. But one may also view the active Germans as agents of German society. An assumption of this kind leads to a probe in the German collectivity for the mainsprings of the destructive upheaval. That is, in essence, a postulation of mass-eruption.
SELF-GRATIFICATION
The possibility of self-gratification in the process of destruction arose from the circumstance that Nazi Germany’s bureaucratic apparatus was basically anarchic. The administrative machine consisted of a Fuhrer and a far-flung network of offices in the party, the ministries, business, and the army. In each of these power structures, there were capabilities for initiating and implementing a variety of measures. Functionaries could thus move freely. in isolation or in clusters, until restrained by superiors, checked by competitors, or subverted by subordinates. In the permissive atmosphere of the anti-Jewish campaign, these bureaucrats hurled stake after stake into new jurisdictional territory, extending their “workspheres” into areas never touched before. Amongst the vanguards in this outpour, one may discern three types of personalities with special goals: the opportunists, the profiteers, and the sadists.
The opportunists were interested in power. There were two levels of that interest; one was the attempt to maintain the Nazi system as a whole, the other was the more narrow tendency to preserve or extend control within a particular organization. The first was primarily a concern of the “usurpers”-the Nazi party and its formations; the second was a general phenomenon in German administration.
The usurpers could employ two mechanisms to stay at the top. Since they had made promises, they could be expected to have used the Jews as a scapegoat for their failures. Anti-jewish measures, in this sense, could be employed as substitutes for substantive action not realized in other spheres: thus, the “Aryanization” of Jewish property in the place of a nationalization of German firms, the decimation of Eastern Jewry in lieu of the destruction of Soviet partisans, the annihilation of European Jewry instead of the winning of the war.[ 18] They could also be timed to deflect attention from problem areas or mobilize excitement during inactivity.[ 19] Shock-waves of anti-Jewish attacks did come during such lulls, for example, the Nuremberg laws which had to be made ready for a party rally in 1935, or the pogroms in 1938 which were organized between invasions. Neither the substitutions nor the deflections, however, were more than manipulations within a multipronged destructive process which was planned continuously and pushed relentlessly into ever more drastic phases. In its growing complexity, the agitators were unable to steer its course; with its spreading secrecy, they lost all opportunity to publicize their doings.
While the Jews could no longer serve as a scapegoat during the later stages of the operation, the annihilation of Jewry did lend itself to another kind of control mechanism, for now the party men could implicate widening sections of the bureaucracy in a thickening bloodguilt. Those who had killed would not desert.[ 20] The bloodguilt had its difficulties, if only because the party and the SS had to set an “example”-in the euthanasia stations, the mobile killing units, the major killing centers. More important, these efforts do not explain why other groups, whose power base was not dependent on the survival of Nazism, should have participated to such an extent.
Opportunism, to be sure, manifested itself also in sheer bureaucratic self-preservation and self-extension. Within the German bureaucracy non-participation in Jewish affairs could mean a shrinkage of relative power, if not an absolute loss of functions. In that connection, one might mention officials whose hold over jurisdiction was at times precarious: the diplomats, the military administrators, and the judiciary. The party itself had offices and formations whose functions were derived in large part from anti-Jewish activities: the Race-Political Office, the propagandists, the SS industries. Much as may be said about these preoccupations and their implications, they do not account for the actions of those large hierarchical conglomerations which had been pillars of the German state for generations and which had too little to gain from the destruction of the Jews to have contributed so much to its success: the ministries of interior, economy, finance, labor, and agriculture, which laid the foundations of the destruction process, the Order Police which guarded Jews in large parts of Nazi-occupied Europe, the German railroads which transported most of the victims to their deaths.
IF OPPORTUNISM was not all-encompassing, there were elements which were even less decisive: profiteering and sadism. The profit motive was a twofold spur to destructive activity: Jewry had to be suppressed so that its possessions could be seized, and it had to be eliminated so that gains from these seizures could be kept. The large gainers-powerful corporate entities which dealt as equals with the party and the civil service-soon swallowed the choicest morsels. They were followed by a phalanx of lower middle class and low class characters who operated on the smallest scale and on the lowest level. One may cite a number of “Aryan” partners and debtors of Jewish businessmen, the “eastern helpers” including ethnic Germans and Balts who pitched in during the shootings and then helped themselves to the possessions of the dead, the SS families and bombed out Germans who received furniture and clothing of deported Jews. Although there were many such operations, their importance is nevertheless limited. The destruction process was governed, however imperfectly, by the overriding principle of “all profits to the Reich,” and those who were violating that rule were frequently on the defensive, always under suspicion, sometimes prosecuted, often harassed. It would be difficult to prove that any major segment in the machine of destruction was dominated by these people or even that it depended on them.
The third group in the destructive vanguard consisted of sadists who were prone to use their positions of power to revel with immunity in the orgy of blood. They included, to cite but well-known examples, (1) the perverts in the field, such as Obersturmbannführer Strauss, Commander of Security Police and SD in White Russia, who paraded wounded Jews bleeding from their heads through the streets of Minsk, or Oberscharführer Moll at Auschwitz who smashed babies’ heads against pavements and walls, or Brigadeführer Dirlewanger who, as commander of a labor camp in Poland is reported to have undressed comely Jewish women, injected them with strychnine, cut them into pieces, and tossed the remains into boiling water to prepare a brew of soap, (2) the experimenters in the camps, like Dr. Mengele of Auschwitz who tortured twins with a view to discovering the secrets of multiple birth, and his colleague Dr. Clauberg who operated on Jewish women in a vain attempt to perfect a method of sterilization, and (3) the zealots in Berlin who were intoxicated with destructive words and statistics of death, amongst them the Foreign Office’s Martin Luther and the Gestapo’s deportation expert Eichmann, or the party’s race expert Gross who wanted to mate unmarried quarter-jews in the hope that offsprings from such unions might show a sufficient accumulation of Jewish characteristics to make them eligible for “extermination.”
However large the crowd of opportunists, profiteers, and sadists, their presence does not suffice to explain the coherence of the destruction process, its efficiency and its success. It appears almost as if these men were the inevitable by-products of such an operation rather than its essential cause. To view the outburst in its totality, we should, therefore, explore in what way it might have been formed and furthered by the very character of the German nation itself.
MASS-ERUPTION
In 1933, the Jews were an old established community. Its roots were complex and deep; its strands reached far into the institutions and associations of its neighbors. The German administrative machine cut those links one by one, dissolving “Aryan”-Jewish relations, establishing “Jew-houses” and ghettos, regulating food rations and working conditions for Jews, confiscating bank accounts, pensions, and personal belongings. The intricacies of that task required the application of every skill and specialization. No class or profession, no agency or office was unrepresented or exempted in that process. The destruction of the Jews was shaped and fashioned by the organization of an entire society. That is why the perpetrator cannot be distinguished, in his background or makeup, from the Germany of his day. All of his actions stemmed ultimately from a ubiquitous, all-encompassing readiness.
The German nation is a large and difficult area of study. Nevertheless, not a few researchers have already delved into that subject, some coming to the conclusion that the destruction process was the result of a fault in German society which threw it out of gear and caused it to run wild, others perceiving in the outbreak the presence of a special factor, peculiar to German history and thought, which propelled the perpetrator into unique and irrevocable paths. The first assume a malfunction; the second propose a fixation.
[See Part 2 here.]
FOOTNOTES
[ 1] Theoretical works are cited here to be representative, not exhaustive. Factual material is drawn mainly from my book, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961). This essay was begun with a small grant from the University of Vermont for eventual inclusion in a Franz L. Neumann memorial volume. Since the volume was not published, the article is hereby dedicated to his memory.
[ 2] Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance (Oxford, 1961), p. 51.
[ 3] Walther Rathenau, Zur Kritik der Zeit, 4th ed. (Berlin, 1912), p. 220.
[ 4] Eduard von Hartmann, Das Judentum in Gegenwart und Zukunft (Leipzig-Berlin, 1885), p. 162.
[ 5] W. Höfler, Juden in der Weltwirtschaft (Vienna, 1944), in the library of the University of Vermont through the courtesy of Dr. S. A. Goudsmit. On the proportional decrease of Jewish economic power from the 19th century to the 20th, see also Bernard W. Weinryb, “The Economic and Social Background of Modern Antisemitism,” in Koppel S. Ponson, Essays on Antisemitism (New York, 1946), pp. 17-34. As for the paucity of Jewish control in the sensitive area of the press, see Oron J. Hale, The Captive Press in the Third Reich (Princeton, 1964), pp. 2-3.
[ 6] See the striking parallels with Huguenots in Warren C. Scoville, The Persecution of Huguenots and French Economic Development 1680-1720 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960), particularly pp. 133, 145-50.
[ 7] Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (New York, 1948), p. 23.
[ 8] Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Munich, 1922), II, 395.
[ 9] Three focal points of distraction in history are Christianity, the capital economy, and the city. Both Nietzsche and Marx saw particularly in Christianity a Judaization of the world. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Zur Genealogie der Moral,” in Werke (Munich, Karl Schlechta edition), II, 778-82, 795-97. Karl Marx, Die Frühschriften (Stuttgart, 1953), pp. 171-207, particularly pp. 178, 184-85, 201, 206. On capitalism, see Werner Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Leipzig, 1911). The city is stressed by Spengler, op. cit., II, 389, 390-91. It is mentioned also by Franz Neumann: “The modern theater, atonal music, expressionism in painting and literature, functional architecture, all these seemed to constitute a threat to the conservatives whose cultural outlook was basically rural, and who thus came to identify the city and its culture, its economics, and its politics with the Jew.” Behemoth (New York, 1944), p. 123.
[ 10] Max Lerner, The Role of the American Jew (American Jewish Congress, undated postwar pamphlet).
[ 11] Salvador de Madariaga, Portrait of Europe (New York, ca. 1955), p. 200.
[ 12] From a letter by Rathenau dated February 20, 1919, as quoted by Hermann Rauschnigg, The Redemption of Democracy (New York, 1941), p. 223. Rathenau, a Jew, was German Foreign Minister after World ’War I. He was assassinated. For an observation very similar to Rathenau’s, see Erich Kahler, Die Verantwortung des Geistes (Frankfurt, 1952), pp. 164-65.
[ 13] See Henry Loeblowitz-Lennard, “The Jew as Symbol,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, XVI, 32-38, at p. 36.
[ 14] Madariaga, Portrait, p. 202. The biological term “symbiosis” has been introduced to characterize the usefulness of Jewry in a Christian environment. See Robert Ezra Parks, Race and Culture (Glencoe, 1950), pp. 353-54. Also, Adolf Leschnitzer, The Magic Background of Anti-Semitism-An Analysis of the German-Jewish Relationship (New York, 1956). Similarly, the notion of a “cultural pair” by Rudolph M. Loewenstein, Christians and Jews-A Psychoanalytic Study (New York, 1951), pp. 181-99.
[ 15] See Werner J. Cahnman, “Socio-Economic Causes of Antisemitism,” Social Problems, V, 21-29.
[ 16] Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York, 1957), p. 134. A German theologian adds: their “peculiar power of life” struck already the pagans as “weird” (unheimlich). Franz Kohler, “Wurzeln des Antisemitismus,’ pamphlet of Landeszentrale für Heimatsdienst in Niedersachsen, Reihe A, Heft 8 (Duderstadt, 1955), p. 30. Invariance, to the extent that it exists, is somewhat localized. It does not imply that Indian Jews, North African Jews, and European Jews are alike.
[ 17] Louis Lochner, ed., The Goebbels Diaries (Garden City, 1945) , pp. 147-4S.
[ 18] “Racism and Anti-Semitism are substitues for the class struggle.” Neumann, Behemoth, p. 125. The party did interpret its nationalization clause away by restricting its applicability to Jews. In reports from occupied Russia, Jews were often referred to as bandits, partisan-helpers, etc. On the substitution of the destruction process for the war, see Hitler’s political testament, Nuremberg document PS-3569.
[ 19] Neumann, Behemoth, p. 121.
[ 20] Göring spoke of a “burning of bridges.” Lochner, Goebbels Diaries, p. 266, entry for March 2, 1943. The phenomenon was noted by Neumann in the 2d ed. of Behemoth (1944), p. 552, and by Leo Alexander, “War Crimes and Their Motivation,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, XXXIX, 298-326.
[ 21] See Paul Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction (New York, 1949), Waldemar Gurian, “Antisemitism in Modern Germany,” in Pinson, ed., Essays on Antisemitism, pp. 2lS-65, and Peter G.J. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (New York, 1964).
-Midstream, Vol. XI, No. 2, June, 1965, pp. 23-30
By RAUL HILBERG
DURING THE NAZI REGIME, one of the most drastic acts in history was fashioned by German hands.The Jews of Europe were annihilated. In conception and execution, it was a unique occurrence. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, a modern bureaucracy set out for the first time to destroy an entire people. Step by step and blow by blow, more than five million Jews were driven to their deaths. Few operations could have been more efficient than this bewildering deed in the midst of a general war.
Twenty years have gone by and grass is growing over the riddled and charred remains of the European Jewish community. One question, however, has lingered unaltered and unanswered through the passage of time. Why were these people killed? What sort of mind produced such an act? The question persists, if only because it yields, not discoveries, but inferences, not answers, but definitions and categorizations.
The German mind has to be reconstructed from the impact which it had. To ask what kind of mind brought forth this act is to ask what kind of act it was. The portrayal of that motivational pattern is derived from a characterization of the event. We shall reproduce the principal descriptions in the pages below. In ordering these conceptualizations, we will attempt to place them under headings which most nearly delimit their content and meaning. We should then observe that they fall into a continuum, from the most familiar, but least appropriate, to the most compelling, but least explicable.[ 1]
The search for German motivations has proceeded from two directions. One orientation seeks to account for the holocaust in something that is rooted in the victim; the other looks to the perpetrator for the underlying clues. Let us consider each in turn.
PROVOCATION
Every hypothesis which is focused upon Jewry contains an assumption of provocation: the Jews had brought their fate upon themselves; they had, in a sense, invited the blow.
Provocation is implied by the very shape of Jewish life in the diaspora, the durability of hostility toward the Jews and the uniformity of reactions against them. The Jews of Europe have been incessantly hounded, perpetually persecuted, recurrently slaughtered. They were not immune in Spain; they were not sheltered in England and France; they were not safe in Russia. That history suggests a set of reasons why Jewry was hunted down.
There have been two emphases in studies of Jewish behavior. One is an ascription to Jewry of an excessive accumulation of negative qualities; the other sees in the Jews an overdose of positive accomplishments.
The portrait of negativism rests essentially on three components: the unassimilability of the Jews, their ambivalence, and their marginality. These factors deserve a brief examination.
The survival of the Jewish substance over thousands of years has involved a rejection of precepts and aims which governed the life of the gentile majority. The Jewish historian Jacob Katz asserts that, while Jews have prayed for the welfare of their Christian rulers, they harbored at the same time “deep reservations as to the ultimate significance of secular States which, seen in the perspective of the messianic hope, were but ephemeral.”[ 2] Viewed in long range, we might well discern such reservations. That famous Jewish apartness nevertheless shrinks in importance when measured in the Germany of the early twentieth century. There, and by that time, Jews had become German in greater proportion and to a greater extent than almost anywhere else. On the eve of World War I, Walter Rathenau called upon them to remove their remaining “correctable peculiarities,”[ 3] and in the war that followed, Jews died for Germany in masses.
Ambivalence has been the second factor in observable Jewish life. Jews have frantically assimilated, without assimilating. The German philosopher von Hartmann saw them at the end of the nineteenth century, both “eclectically acquisitive” and “skeptically negative.”[ 4] Throughout its history, Jewry has been confronted by impossible choices, evading laws and customs under which it could not live, and invoking rules and principles without which it could not survive. During the Middle Ages, the paramountcy of “danger to the community” dictated reliance upon the emperor for protection against local authority, while in modern times, Jews have appealed to the interfering power of foreign states or international organizations in conflicts with their governments. Nowhere, however, was anxiety smaller and trust greater than in modern Germany.
The Jews in most recent times have become successful competitors. Working out of marginal areas, they have occupied powerful economic and cultural positions. Often, the question is asked: Just how much power had passed into the hands of the Jews? A Nazi researcher during the war asked himself that very question, and after exhaustive research published his results, in 1944, in a book which was not circulated. His basic conclusions are not without interest in an exploration of the phenomenon:[ 5]
1. The high point of Jewish economic power in Europe was reached in 1913.
2. The Jews were among the hardest hit by the economic results of World war I. Jewish influence resting upon bank capital in Berlin and Vienna was virtually destroyed in 1931.
3. Prewar “Judaization” of the economy increased from West to East. It was highest in Silesia, Hungary, etc. At the same time, the size of Jewish industrial undertakings decreased in the same direction.
Major questions may be raised by the close and the limits of that development. The successful competitor was not taking over Germany, after all. Moreover, the advancement of the Jew was not guided by Jewry alone. Its paths were determined by exclusions practiced for centuries. It is almost as if Jewry were charged with doing that which it was forced to do.[ 6] In that sense, the problem becomes an inquiry into the extent to which the provocation was the work of those who were provoked.
NOT ALL of the commentators who seek the basis of the German assault in the behavior of its victims portray the Jews with repugnant features: there are observers who see an irritant element in a constellation of Jewish merits and perfections.
Two mechanisms may render virtues provocative. The first is jealousy: the majority attempts to be like the minority, but does not quite succeed. Failing, it withdraws into rejection and hostility. “To the anti-Semite,” states Sartre, “intelligence is Jewish.”[ 7]
A more subtle effect is distraction. For centuries, the two communities have existed side by side, two philosophies, two thought patterns, two ways of life, sometimes deceptively alike, on occasion completely enmeshed, at times hopelessly entangled, but never wholly grown together. The Jewish culture is the older one and its age is magnetic to newer nations, drawing them out of their grooves into a more finished civilization. It is for this reason that, in Spengler’s words, “he who belongs inwardly affirms in the last analysis also where he destroys, while he who is inwardly a stranger negates even where he seeks to build.”[ 8] In all these years, then, the European has continually sought to retain his identity and, failing, attacked his distractors.[ 9]
What, precisely, is virtuous in Jewry? Much has been said about this subject, but in essence the outstanding qualities attributed to the European Jews may be classified in three areas.
First of all, the Jews have been identified with freedom of the individual and protection of his thought. They do not seek dictatorial rule; they will not thrive under censorship. The Jewish spirit, to quote Max Lerner, has “depended on individuality and skepticism. It has depended on the right to be a Jeremiah, the right to be a prophet, lamenting the inequities of society. It has depended on the right to be nobody’s rubber stamp…”[ 10] Jews are iconoclasts. They will not worship idols. In the nineteenth century, the rise of the titanic Jewish idol-smashers, Marx, Freud, and Einstein, jarred the western worId into disequilibrium and quandary. “The Europeans found themselves on quicksand everywhere. Some, most of them, have resisted the onslaught and sought to reconquer the solid ground of former convictions; but in the process, the Jewish people have suffered the most abominable of the persecutions they have known in their long and painful history.”[ 11]
The Jewish commitment is seen as embracing, along with a rejection of tyranny, a marked abstention from illegality, injustice, and immorality. The Jews are the people of the law. The Jewish people gave to Christianity its moral code. Jewry will forever be a witness and a reminder of the divine commandments. “Do you know,” wrote Walther Rathenau, “why we were born into this world? To summon every human countenance to Sinai. You won’t go? If I don’t call you, Marx will call you; if Marx doesn’t call you, Spinoza will call you. If Spinoza doesn’t call you, Christ will call you.”[ 12] Viewed in that role, the Jews are the conscience of the world. They are the father figures, stern, critical, and forbidding. Hence, the succession of uprisings against them. The Jewish policemen of the highest law become the primary target of the basest mutiny in Christendom.[ 13]
Finally, the Jews are as mortar in the bricks of society. At times, they have held it together. In their long history, they have pitted themselves repeatedly against death, dissipation, and debauchery. They are even now preservers of life, guardians of wealth, exponents of beauty. They are the doctors, the merchants, and the performers of the arts. In their everyday functions, they satisfy special wants. The Jews are catalysts and quicken reaction to challenge. “They act as yeast to other peoples,” and this role, too, has contributed to their undoing, for yeast “must remain but a small percentage of the dough:”[ 14]
In the last analysis, however, even the quintessence of Jewish accomplishments is not so overwhelming in the land of the Germans. That nation has not usually stood still at the sight of the performance of others, and the “Judaization” of Germany is but minute in comparison with the Germanization of the Jews.
IF JEWISH TRAITS, bad or good, have provoked destructive reactions, they must have had a significance transcending their apparent scope. Three arguments may be advanced in underscoring this possible effect.
The first is salience. The Jewish character pattern “stands out:” Jewish behavior is “deliberate”; it touches the nerve centers of nations. The Jewish people does possess a large component of “normality,” but the ordinariness of Jewry is a zero quality; its quiescent periods do not count. The peculiarities of the Jews will still be decisive, and this no matter how few the provocateurs, how intermittent their activities, or how subtle their effects. The slightest deviation will register; the weakest disturbance is felt.
The salience of Jewish characteristics is multiplied as soon as there is an increase of contacts between Jews and the Christian world. The principle underlying the contact theory is that group conflicts arise on the periphery. Given a latently hostile situation, the danger to the minority is increased as soon as it loses geographic and social compactness. In the ghetto, people deal with each other, and their relations with the surrounding population are few. At the onset of emancipation, however, this static condition is upset and the scattering of the concentrated mass causes agitation outside. The result is a multiplication of collisions and the heightened provocation of the gentile majority. When Jewry left its sheltered ghettos, it maximized the tension field, and when Jewish penetrations were recorded in the farthest sectors, the threshold of destruction was reached.[ 15]
The third dimension of the Jewish configuration is its invarience. The Jews are said to have behaved in an identical manner since the days of antiquity. “They behaved in Hellenistic times,” said Freud, “as they do today:”[ 16] The provocations in that case would have become cumulative. Throughout their suffering, the Jews have persisted in their action and clung to their ways. Their stubbornness could therefore have become fatal. The cataclysmic reaction felled the Jews of Europe. To the Nazis, it was the “final solution”; to the Jews, it was the last of their martyrdoms.
What, then, can we make of Jewish behavior? The first consideration is that Jewish conduct in all of its intensification, ramification, and magnification, falls manifestly short of those dimensions which alone could have resulted in actions such as those which struck them. Jews had been defined, expropriated, and concentrated before, but the German destruction process escalated into something more vehement and total. The systematic shootings and gassings virtually emptied entire countries and regions of their Jewish inhabitants; the annihilation of Jewish men, women, and children was implemented in an area which extended from Russia to France, and from Norway to Greece. What sort of threat was being eliminated here?
All the documents show that the Jews on the eve of their doom were as harmless as they were impotent. The German Nazis themselves understood the nature of Jewish allegiance, the incidence of Jewish sacrifices, the extent of Jewish productivity. The extollers of Jewish righteousness have the record of Jewry’s desperate attempts to survive on any terms in Adolf Hitler’s Europe. Jewry at its worst was no danger to a growing Germany; Jewry at its best was no obstacle to Nazi plans.
When the totality of the Jewish “challenge” is ranged against the magnitude of the German response, there is consequently a problem of disparity. It is one thing to be provoked. It is something else to be provoked into the killing of five million people. The difference was apparent to so fierce a proponent of Jewish provocation as Josef Goebbels, who spoke of the “judgment” visited upon the Jews as “barbaric.”[ 17]
Another complication intrudes upon provocation analysis: the German reaction to other groups. If Jewry has had other persecutors, Germany has also had other victims. Gypsies were shot and gassed along with Jews; sterilization experiments were conducted with a view to eliminating the Slav populations; consideration was given to the killing of convicted German criminals whose photographs showed that the prospective victims were ugly. If we should rely upon the provocation theory in the case of the Jews, we should be able to construct similar hypotheses about a variety of other groups, some of them inconspicuous, others far from, the German scene, still others new “enemies” of Germandom. Even if we could lend to such formulations some measure of plausibility, we would nevertheless have to take note of a simple fact: the diversified elements which fell into the orbit of Nazi destruction did share a single attribute. Their common denominator was weakness; their outstanding characteristic was helplessness. Their vulnerability itself was a “provocation.” This consideration raises the question as to whether Nazi Germany had reasons for taking advantage of helplessness as such. The next problem then is to find a possible set of such reasons.
PERPETRATION
In provocation analysis, we have looked for anomalies among the Jews, without examining the makeup of the Germans who performed the act. We have instead assumed that these Germans belonged to the normal world and conformed to its practices. Now we have to reverse that assumption and, without regard to the identity of the victim, seek out and specify the special characteristics of the participants in the destruction process. Investigations of this kind may be classified as perpetration theories. The procedures which we must follow in that undertaking are a little more complex.
When we considered the Jewish victim, we were thinking of Jews as a whole, for the target of destruction was Jewry as such, and in German plans a maximum number of them were to be killed. In speaking about the German perpetrator, however, we will be concerned primarily with those men who were involved in the destructive work, and often this work was performed by a minimum number of personnel. Hence, there appears to be a choice. One may consider the perpetrators as a group of people with independent motives who sought in the destruction of Jewry the attainment of ends of their own. The principal task in such an exploration is therefore the specification of individual aims which could be realized through action against Jews. But one may also view the active Germans as agents of German society. An assumption of this kind leads to a probe in the German collectivity for the mainsprings of the destructive upheaval. That is, in essence, a postulation of mass-eruption.
SELF-GRATIFICATION
The possibility of self-gratification in the process of destruction arose from the circumstance that Nazi Germany’s bureaucratic apparatus was basically anarchic. The administrative machine consisted of a Fuhrer and a far-flung network of offices in the party, the ministries, business, and the army. In each of these power structures, there were capabilities for initiating and implementing a variety of measures. Functionaries could thus move freely. in isolation or in clusters, until restrained by superiors, checked by competitors, or subverted by subordinates. In the permissive atmosphere of the anti-Jewish campaign, these bureaucrats hurled stake after stake into new jurisdictional territory, extending their “workspheres” into areas never touched before. Amongst the vanguards in this outpour, one may discern three types of personalities with special goals: the opportunists, the profiteers, and the sadists.
The opportunists were interested in power. There were two levels of that interest; one was the attempt to maintain the Nazi system as a whole, the other was the more narrow tendency to preserve or extend control within a particular organization. The first was primarily a concern of the “usurpers”-the Nazi party and its formations; the second was a general phenomenon in German administration.
The usurpers could employ two mechanisms to stay at the top. Since they had made promises, they could be expected to have used the Jews as a scapegoat for their failures. Anti-jewish measures, in this sense, could be employed as substitutes for substantive action not realized in other spheres: thus, the “Aryanization” of Jewish property in the place of a nationalization of German firms, the decimation of Eastern Jewry in lieu of the destruction of Soviet partisans, the annihilation of European Jewry instead of the winning of the war.[ 18] They could also be timed to deflect attention from problem areas or mobilize excitement during inactivity.[ 19] Shock-waves of anti-Jewish attacks did come during such lulls, for example, the Nuremberg laws which had to be made ready for a party rally in 1935, or the pogroms in 1938 which were organized between invasions. Neither the substitutions nor the deflections, however, were more than manipulations within a multipronged destructive process which was planned continuously and pushed relentlessly into ever more drastic phases. In its growing complexity, the agitators were unable to steer its course; with its spreading secrecy, they lost all opportunity to publicize their doings.
While the Jews could no longer serve as a scapegoat during the later stages of the operation, the annihilation of Jewry did lend itself to another kind of control mechanism, for now the party men could implicate widening sections of the bureaucracy in a thickening bloodguilt. Those who had killed would not desert.[ 20] The bloodguilt had its difficulties, if only because the party and the SS had to set an “example”-in the euthanasia stations, the mobile killing units, the major killing centers. More important, these efforts do not explain why other groups, whose power base was not dependent on the survival of Nazism, should have participated to such an extent.
Opportunism, to be sure, manifested itself also in sheer bureaucratic self-preservation and self-extension. Within the German bureaucracy non-participation in Jewish affairs could mean a shrinkage of relative power, if not an absolute loss of functions. In that connection, one might mention officials whose hold over jurisdiction was at times precarious: the diplomats, the military administrators, and the judiciary. The party itself had offices and formations whose functions were derived in large part from anti-Jewish activities: the Race-Political Office, the propagandists, the SS industries. Much as may be said about these preoccupations and their implications, they do not account for the actions of those large hierarchical conglomerations which had been pillars of the German state for generations and which had too little to gain from the destruction of the Jews to have contributed so much to its success: the ministries of interior, economy, finance, labor, and agriculture, which laid the foundations of the destruction process, the Order Police which guarded Jews in large parts of Nazi-occupied Europe, the German railroads which transported most of the victims to their deaths.
IF OPPORTUNISM was not all-encompassing, there were elements which were even less decisive: profiteering and sadism. The profit motive was a twofold spur to destructive activity: Jewry had to be suppressed so that its possessions could be seized, and it had to be eliminated so that gains from these seizures could be kept. The large gainers-powerful corporate entities which dealt as equals with the party and the civil service-soon swallowed the choicest morsels. They were followed by a phalanx of lower middle class and low class characters who operated on the smallest scale and on the lowest level. One may cite a number of “Aryan” partners and debtors of Jewish businessmen, the “eastern helpers” including ethnic Germans and Balts who pitched in during the shootings and then helped themselves to the possessions of the dead, the SS families and bombed out Germans who received furniture and clothing of deported Jews. Although there were many such operations, their importance is nevertheless limited. The destruction process was governed, however imperfectly, by the overriding principle of “all profits to the Reich,” and those who were violating that rule were frequently on the defensive, always under suspicion, sometimes prosecuted, often harassed. It would be difficult to prove that any major segment in the machine of destruction was dominated by these people or even that it depended on them.
The third group in the destructive vanguard consisted of sadists who were prone to use their positions of power to revel with immunity in the orgy of blood. They included, to cite but well-known examples, (1) the perverts in the field, such as Obersturmbannführer Strauss, Commander of Security Police and SD in White Russia, who paraded wounded Jews bleeding from their heads through the streets of Minsk, or Oberscharführer Moll at Auschwitz who smashed babies’ heads against pavements and walls, or Brigadeführer Dirlewanger who, as commander of a labor camp in Poland is reported to have undressed comely Jewish women, injected them with strychnine, cut them into pieces, and tossed the remains into boiling water to prepare a brew of soap, (2) the experimenters in the camps, like Dr. Mengele of Auschwitz who tortured twins with a view to discovering the secrets of multiple birth, and his colleague Dr. Clauberg who operated on Jewish women in a vain attempt to perfect a method of sterilization, and (3) the zealots in Berlin who were intoxicated with destructive words and statistics of death, amongst them the Foreign Office’s Martin Luther and the Gestapo’s deportation expert Eichmann, or the party’s race expert Gross who wanted to mate unmarried quarter-jews in the hope that offsprings from such unions might show a sufficient accumulation of Jewish characteristics to make them eligible for “extermination.”
However large the crowd of opportunists, profiteers, and sadists, their presence does not suffice to explain the coherence of the destruction process, its efficiency and its success. It appears almost as if these men were the inevitable by-products of such an operation rather than its essential cause. To view the outburst in its totality, we should, therefore, explore in what way it might have been formed and furthered by the very character of the German nation itself.
MASS-ERUPTION
In 1933, the Jews were an old established community. Its roots were complex and deep; its strands reached far into the institutions and associations of its neighbors. The German administrative machine cut those links one by one, dissolving “Aryan”-Jewish relations, establishing “Jew-houses” and ghettos, regulating food rations and working conditions for Jews, confiscating bank accounts, pensions, and personal belongings. The intricacies of that task required the application of every skill and specialization. No class or profession, no agency or office was unrepresented or exempted in that process. The destruction of the Jews was shaped and fashioned by the organization of an entire society. That is why the perpetrator cannot be distinguished, in his background or makeup, from the Germany of his day. All of his actions stemmed ultimately from a ubiquitous, all-encompassing readiness.
The German nation is a large and difficult area of study. Nevertheless, not a few researchers have already delved into that subject, some coming to the conclusion that the destruction process was the result of a fault in German society which threw it out of gear and caused it to run wild, others perceiving in the outbreak the presence of a special factor, peculiar to German history and thought, which propelled the perpetrator into unique and irrevocable paths. The first assume a malfunction; the second propose a fixation.
[See Part 2 here.]
FOOTNOTES
[ 1] Theoretical works are cited here to be representative, not exhaustive. Factual material is drawn mainly from my book, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961). This essay was begun with a small grant from the University of Vermont for eventual inclusion in a Franz L. Neumann memorial volume. Since the volume was not published, the article is hereby dedicated to his memory.
[ 2] Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance (Oxford, 1961), p. 51.
[ 3] Walther Rathenau, Zur Kritik der Zeit, 4th ed. (Berlin, 1912), p. 220.
[ 4] Eduard von Hartmann, Das Judentum in Gegenwart und Zukunft (Leipzig-Berlin, 1885), p. 162.
[ 5] W. Höfler, Juden in der Weltwirtschaft (Vienna, 1944), in the library of the University of Vermont through the courtesy of Dr. S. A. Goudsmit. On the proportional decrease of Jewish economic power from the 19th century to the 20th, see also Bernard W. Weinryb, “The Economic and Social Background of Modern Antisemitism,” in Koppel S. Ponson, Essays on Antisemitism (New York, 1946), pp. 17-34. As for the paucity of Jewish control in the sensitive area of the press, see Oron J. Hale, The Captive Press in the Third Reich (Princeton, 1964), pp. 2-3.
[ 6] See the striking parallels with Huguenots in Warren C. Scoville, The Persecution of Huguenots and French Economic Development 1680-1720 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960), particularly pp. 133, 145-50.
[ 7] Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (New York, 1948), p. 23.
[ 8] Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Munich, 1922), II, 395.
[ 9] Three focal points of distraction in history are Christianity, the capital economy, and the city. Both Nietzsche and Marx saw particularly in Christianity a Judaization of the world. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Zur Genealogie der Moral,” in Werke (Munich, Karl Schlechta edition), II, 778-82, 795-97. Karl Marx, Die Frühschriften (Stuttgart, 1953), pp. 171-207, particularly pp. 178, 184-85, 201, 206. On capitalism, see Werner Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Leipzig, 1911). The city is stressed by Spengler, op. cit., II, 389, 390-91. It is mentioned also by Franz Neumann: “The modern theater, atonal music, expressionism in painting and literature, functional architecture, all these seemed to constitute a threat to the conservatives whose cultural outlook was basically rural, and who thus came to identify the city and its culture, its economics, and its politics with the Jew.” Behemoth (New York, 1944), p. 123.
[ 10] Max Lerner, The Role of the American Jew (American Jewish Congress, undated postwar pamphlet).
[ 11] Salvador de Madariaga, Portrait of Europe (New York, ca. 1955), p. 200.
[ 12] From a letter by Rathenau dated February 20, 1919, as quoted by Hermann Rauschnigg, The Redemption of Democracy (New York, 1941), p. 223. Rathenau, a Jew, was German Foreign Minister after World ’War I. He was assassinated. For an observation very similar to Rathenau’s, see Erich Kahler, Die Verantwortung des Geistes (Frankfurt, 1952), pp. 164-65.
[ 13] See Henry Loeblowitz-Lennard, “The Jew as Symbol,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, XVI, 32-38, at p. 36.
[ 14] Madariaga, Portrait, p. 202. The biological term “symbiosis” has been introduced to characterize the usefulness of Jewry in a Christian environment. See Robert Ezra Parks, Race and Culture (Glencoe, 1950), pp. 353-54. Also, Adolf Leschnitzer, The Magic Background of Anti-Semitism-An Analysis of the German-Jewish Relationship (New York, 1956). Similarly, the notion of a “cultural pair” by Rudolph M. Loewenstein, Christians and Jews-A Psychoanalytic Study (New York, 1951), pp. 181-99.
[ 15] See Werner J. Cahnman, “Socio-Economic Causes of Antisemitism,” Social Problems, V, 21-29.
[ 16] Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York, 1957), p. 134. A German theologian adds: their “peculiar power of life” struck already the pagans as “weird” (unheimlich). Franz Kohler, “Wurzeln des Antisemitismus,’ pamphlet of Landeszentrale für Heimatsdienst in Niedersachsen, Reihe A, Heft 8 (Duderstadt, 1955), p. 30. Invariance, to the extent that it exists, is somewhat localized. It does not imply that Indian Jews, North African Jews, and European Jews are alike.
[ 17] Louis Lochner, ed., The Goebbels Diaries (Garden City, 1945) , pp. 147-4S.
[ 18] “Racism and Anti-Semitism are substitues for the class struggle.” Neumann, Behemoth, p. 125. The party did interpret its nationalization clause away by restricting its applicability to Jews. In reports from occupied Russia, Jews were often referred to as bandits, partisan-helpers, etc. On the substitution of the destruction process for the war, see Hitler’s political testament, Nuremberg document PS-3569.
[ 19] Neumann, Behemoth, p. 121.
[ 20] Göring spoke of a “burning of bridges.” Lochner, Goebbels Diaries, p. 266, entry for March 2, 1943. The phenomenon was noted by Neumann in the 2d ed. of Behemoth (1944), p. 552, and by Leo Alexander, “War Crimes and Their Motivation,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, XXXIX, 298-326.
[ 21] See Paul Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction (New York, 1949), Waldemar Gurian, “Antisemitism in Modern Germany,” in Pinson, ed., Essays on Antisemitism, pp. 2lS-65, and Peter G.J. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (New York, 1964).
-Midstream, Vol. XI, No. 2, June, 1965, pp. 23-30