History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

It included the scientists and pseudo-scientists who misapplied Charles Darwin’s work and created ‘social Darwinism’, in which races struggled with each other to determine the ‘survival of the fittest’; Alfred Krupp sponsored an essay prize on the application of social Darwinism to state policy, winning entries advocating stern policies to preserve the Volk, such as sending Jews and other ‘degenerate’ types to the front as cannon-fodder. It included a new element of German neo-paganism. Thus Paul de Lagarde rejected Christianity, which had been corruptly invented by the Jew, St Paul, and wished it replaced by a specifically German Volk religion, which would conduct a crusade to drive the Jews, with their international materialist conspiracy, from the sacred German soil: he predicted a German–Jew armageddon. Then, too, the circle which gathered round Richard Wagner, which dominated much of the German musical scene from the 1870s, absorbed the race teachings of Gobineau and, later, of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and drew a powerful artistic contrast between the ‘purity’ of German–pagan folk culture and the Judaic-infected corruption of the cosmopolitan idea. The violence with which these views were presented was horrifying. De Lagarde, whose original name was Bötticher, demanded a physical campaign against Jewish ‘vermin’: ‘with trichinae and bacilli one does not negotiate, nor are trichinae and bacilli subject to education. They are exterminated as quickly and as thoroughl...