History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Benjamin was particularly influential in his efforts to show that a ruling class manipulated history to perpetuate its own needs, illusions and deceits.

They appeared to be in charge, to set the trends and make the reputations. Their power, such as it was, was confused with the power of the left-intelligentsia as a whole, which aroused envy, frustration and fury. The accusation of Jewish cultural dictatorship was an important weapon in Hitler’s campaign to create a real one.

There was, then, nothing inevitable about the capture of power in Germany by an anti-Semitic regime. But once Hitler had consolidated his personal and party dictatorship, which took a mere eight weeks in February-March 1933, a systematic attack on the Jews was certain.

In particular, Jewish writers, artists and intellectuals knew he would go for them, and most of them left the country quickly.

During Hitler’s twelve years in power, the dualism remained throughout. Right to the end, Jews were the victims both of sudden, individual acts of thoughtless violence, and of systematic state cruelty on a mass-industrial basis. During the first six years, in peacetime, there was a regular oscillation between the two. Once war imposed its own darkness and silence, the second gradually became predominant, on an enormous scale.

Most disturbing of all, from Hitler’s point of view, was that the pogrom was unpopular, not merely abroad but above all in Germany.

Hence he changed his tactics.

As before, the ‘outrage’ was used as the pretext for a fresh campaign of legal measures against Jews. But this time the process was made highly bureaucratic.

legal and systematic.

As Raul Hilberg, the leading historian of the Holocaust, shows, it was this very bureaucratization of the policy which made possible its colossal scale and transformed a pogrom into genocide.

It also ensured that, at one time or another, almost every department of the German government, and large numbers of civilians, were involved in anti-Jewish activities. Hitler’...

medical profession and the churches.

business community

The process of concentrating the Jews, cutting them off from the rest of the population and subjecting them to a completely different regime, also involved the nation as a whole.

all Germans were aware of it.

From start to finish, Hitler’s war against the Jews was a bewildering mixture of law and lawlessness, system and sheer violence.

the war made a difference in two essential ways. First, it changed the emphasis of the moral justification for persecuting Jews which Hitler produced.

Hitler had always insisted that, if a war came, it would be the work of the Jews,

responsible for all the deaths that ensued. The conclusion implicit in this argument was that the Jews had no moral right to their lives either. Indeed, he said on a number of occasions that war would precipitate a ‘final solution’ of the ‘Jewish problem’.

second consequenc...

H...

had learned that open, widespread, physical violence against the Jews as a whole was not acceptable to the German people, at any rate in peacetime. War, however, brought its own exigencies, and it also drew a veil over many activities. It was the necessary context in which genocide could be committed.

So far from the Jews creating the war, then, it was rather Hitler who willed the war in order to destroy the Jews.

Not only was war necessary, to provide the pretext and concealment the act required; it had to include war against Poland and Russia, to give Hitler access to the principal source of European Jewry.

trains carrying Jews were given priority over everything else.

‘The concentration camps have at no time offered labour to the industry. On the contrary, prisoners were sent to firms only after the firms had made a request for [such] prisoners.’

It is significant that the first man appointed to head the euthanasia programme, SS Obergruppenführer Dr Leonard Contin, was sacked when he asked for written orders from Hitler.

The German people knew about and acquiesced in the genocide.

The Austrians were worse than the Germans. They played a role in the Holocaust out of all proportion to their numbers.

The Rumanians were no better than the Austrians; worse in some ways.

After the Germans and Austrians, the Rumanians were the biggest killers of Jews. They were more inclined to inflict beatings and torture, or to rape,

In France too there was an important section of opinion willing to take an active part in Hitler’s Final Solution. It had never forgiven the Dreyfusard victory in 1906 and its hatred of the Jews was reinforced by the Blum Popular Front government of 1936.

Most of the French declined to collaborate with the Final Solution policy but those who did were more enthusiastic than the Germans.

There was a large element of personal hatred in French wartime anti-Semitism.

Hitler found his Italian ally much less co-operative.

Mussolini himself oscillated all his life between philo-semitism and anti-Semitism.

Once the Duce fell under Hitler’s spell his anti-Semitic side became uppermost but it had no deep emotional roots.

Italy, in response to German pressure, introduced race laws in 1938 and when war came some Jews were interned in camps. But it was not until the Italian surrender in 1943 delivered half of Italy into German military control that Himmler was able to draw it into the Final Solution.

In other European states, the ss got little or no help. But this did not necessarily mean failure in rounding up Jews.

The Russians were closest to the Holocaust but never showed the slightest desire to help the Jews in any way.

The British and American governments were in theory sympathetic to the Jews but in practice were terrified that any aggressively pro-Jewish policy would provoke Hitler into a mass expulsion of Jews whom they would then be morally obliged to absorb. For the Nazis, emigration was always one element in the Final Solution, and although the balance of evidence seems to show that Hitler was determined to murder Jews rather than export them, he was quite capable of modifying his policy to embarrass the Allies if they gave him the opportunity.

neither power was prepared to save Jewish lives by accepting large numbers of refugees.

Of all the major European powers, Britain was the least anti-Semitic in the 1930s.

The government feared, however, that widespread anti-Semitism would be the inevitable result of a mass immigration of Jews. Nor were they prepared to budge from the immigration restrictions laid down in the 1939 White Paper for Palestine.

The United States could certainly have accommodated large numbers of Jewish refugees. In fact during the war period only 21,000 were admitted, 10 per cent of the number allowed under the quota law.

There was more anti-Semitism during the war than at any time in American history. The polls showed, 1938-45, that 35-40 per cent of the population would have backed anti-Jewish laws.

A major obstacle to action was F.D. Roosevelt himself. He was both anti-Semitic, in a mild way, and ill informed.

He had nearly 90 per cent of the Jewish vote anyway and felt no spur to act. Even after the full facts of systematic extermination became available, the President did nothing for fourteen months.

The refusal to divert forces for a special Jewish rescue operation was in accordance with general war policy. Both governments had decided, with the agreement of their respective Jewish communities, that the speedy and total defeat of Hitler was the best way to help the Jews.

The fighting Jews wanted to make their stand in Erez Israel, where they had a chance, not in Europe, where it was hopeless.