Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Peter Longerich [essential books to read TXT] 📗

study is primarily a reconstruction

of the decision-making process the account will necessarily appear somewhat

imbalanced or one-sided: whenever the Nazis’ Judenpolitik enters a new phase the

narrative will broaden out, but a policy once implemented will be described

relatively briefly. In other words, this book is designed to be an analysis of

Judenpolitik that goes back to the events themselves in the form of a schematic

narrative and where possible only summarizes them when it is necessary to do so

in order to reconstruct an aspect of Judenpolitik. The account of the gradual

radicalization of the persecution of the Jews in the occupied territories of the

Soviet Union will, for example, need considerably more space than the depiction

of the rapidly executed deportations of the Hungarian Jews in 1944. However, this

study is only one-sided in so far as it is chiefly concerned with the perpetrators

and only takes account of the reactions of the victims or of third parties when their

behaviour permits conclusions to be drawn about the perpetrators.

This book first appeared in Germany in 1998 under the title Politik der

Vernichtung. For this English edition, the whole of the original text was revised

to take account of the latest scholarship in the field of Holocaust studies: the book

has been significantly reworked, shortened in some places and extended in others.

The cuts that were made chiefly affect Part I on the persecution of the Jews in

Germany and Part III on the war against the Soviet Union. The sections that are

new to this English version are on anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic (Intro-

duction), the removal of the Jews (Entjudung) from German society (Chapter 1),

life in the Polish ghettos (Chapter 7), the Holocaust in Eastern Europe between

1942 and 1944, and the end of the Holocaust (Part V).

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: ANTI-SEMITISM

IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

This study begins with the first anti-Semitic measures taken by the National

Socialists immediately after taking over government in 1933. These measures

represent the end of the equality of citizenship that the Jews had enjoyed

throughout Germany since 1871.

By gradually removing the citizenship rights of German Jews the Nazis were

fulfilling one of the principal demands that radical anti-Semites had been making

since the 1870s. It is possible to trace a line of development that began with anti-

Jewish agitation in the context of the so-called ‘Gründerkrach’ of 1873 (the stock-

market crash that ended the period known as the ‘Foundation Years’) and

continues in the anti-Semites’ petition of 1880/1 and in successful political candi-

datures from anti-Semitic parties from the 1890s onwards. It was also manifested

in strongly anti-Semitic agitation on the part of large professional interest groups

at that period. The line could be traced further within the right-wing, ethnic

nationalist movement known as the ‘völkische Bewegung’ that formed after the

turn of the century and was highly charged with anti-Semitic sentiments, or with

the simultaneous breakthrough of a biological-determinist concept of race in

various branches of science, which lent spurious respectability to the nonsense

talked about the Jewish ‘race’. 1 One could argue, too, that this line was continued in the anti-Semitic agitation at the end of the First World War, 2 and in the wave of anti-Semitic hate campaigns and violence in the immediate post-war period, until

it culminates in the anti-Semitism of the NSDAP. In this manner a picture could

be painted of a virtually constant stream of radical anti-Semitic movements that

led inexorably to the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis.

However, this image of a clear, uninterrupted line of anti-Semitism in Germany

is the result only of a superficial examination of history. It is important, too, to

consider the political contexts in which such radically anti-Semitic movements

developed. Despite its prominence in Imperial Germany, radical anti-Semitism was

only a splinter-group and had no decisive influence on the political course of the

German state. In comparison with contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic

11

in other European countries (such as Austria, Hungary, France, or Russia) it by no

means represented a vibrant political force. The tide of anti-Semitic action was

stemmed by the fact that whilst the political establishment—above all the power

base in the Conservative Party—certainly cultivated anti-Semitism, it also resisted the

repeal of Jewish emancipation: from a conservative perspective the emancipation of

the Jews was a component of the compromise that lay at the foundation of the Empire

and could not simply be ignored. Furthermore, the repeal of rights once granted could

not easily be reconciled with the claims of the German Empire to be a state founded

on the rule of law. Nationalist utopia and populist anti-Semitic agitation were in

contradiction to the elitist political conception of many conservatives. 3

With the end of the First World War, however, the context in which the

nationalist radical anti-Semitic movement was to operate changed fundamentally.

These new conditions for a breakthrough in radical anti-Semitism in Germany are

much more important than the anti-Semitic tradition that can be traced back to

the early years of the Second Empire. Two points are decisive with respect to the

changed conditions that the end of the First World War brought about.

The first is the completely new status that the radical anti-Semitic movement

gained by virtue of a need to renew the basis of nationalism in Germany after its

military defeat and the end of the Empire. 4 It was clear that the institutions of the Empire that had collapsed in 1918 (the monarchy, the Imperial government, and the

army) could not represent German nationalism any longer and the ‘kleindeutsch’,

Prussian-German interpretation of German history lost conviction with the end of

Bismarck’s Empire. It was just as obvious that the old hierarchical structures of the

Empire, the class society and the nation’s religious divide, were obstacles that would

have to be comprehensively surmounted if national regeneration were to be possible. 5

The various attempts to found a new German identity in place of imperial

nationalism and create a strong enough sense of nation to overcome the traumatic

defeat of 1918 shared one common element: a reversion to the idea of the people as

the real source of national energy—or an attempt to found a new nation by

regenerating the people and the ideas of nationhood that lay dormant in them. 6

This regeneration could be directly linked to the recent experience of war by

suggesting that it was in the trenches of the First World War that