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

had been dissolved and the nation reborn.

The fact that this new attempt to found a sense of national identity from within

the people was structured in großdeutsch or ‘greater German’ terms (as opposed to

stemming from a kleindeutsch or ‘smaller German’ viewpoint) meant that it

derived particularly explosive potential from the foreign-policy situation at the

end of the war. Policy framed in großdeutsch terms effectively gave Germany a

stick of dynamite that could blow apart the new Central and Eastern European

order that the treaties signed in the suburbs of Paris had created. In concrete

terms, consideration was given to the incorporation of German-speaking

Austrians and German minorities in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Baltic into

12

Historical Background

a ‘greater German Reich’ which would at the same time take the German

minorities in South-Eastern Europe ‘under its wing’.

If during the years of the Weimar Republic a concept of nation based on the

common ancestry and shared culture of the German people gradually gained accept-

ance even amongst moderate right-wingers, an attitude such as this was relatively

open to the ideas represented by the nationalist völkisch movement. 7 The rediscovery of the people via the ‘everyday anti-Semitism’ of the conservatives or the moderate

right was distinct from the völkisch position largely because the latter defined the

people using racist criteria, raised the idea of the regeneration of the German people to the level of an absolute good, and linked their programme of ‘purifying’ the German

people of alien elements with visions of redemption. However, their point of reference

was essentially the same as that of more moderate nationalism: the restitution of the

‘body of the people’ to full health. Above all a concept of nation that was based on

common ancestry and shared culture remained open to the kind of radical anti-

Semitism propounded by the völkisch movement and especially to the argument that

Jews did not form a proper part of the community of the German people because of

their distinct culture and alien ancestry. Before 1918 the völkisch idea was mostly the

province of sectarians, outsiders, and nutcases, but this new context gave it the chance

to take centre stage in the process of founding a new German national identity.

The second decisive aspect of the changed conditions in Germany after the First

World War was the shift in the relationship of radical anti-Semitic groups to the

state. Before 1914 they had in principle been loyal to the system, or in other words

they reckoned that the institutions of Imperial Germany would ultimately be

amenable to their demands. If I were Kaiser was the title of one of the most

influential publications from the radical anti-Semitic camp, written in 1912 by

Heinrich Class, the President of the Pan-German League. 8 After 1918, however, confronted with the Republic, radical anti-Semitism was uncompromisingly

hostile to the new system and linked their demands for amendments to the

emancipated status of the Jews with a demand for the removal of the Republic

itself, which they claimed was dominated by Jews. Radical anti-Semitic aims were

no longer inhibited as they had been before 1914 by such considerations as loyalty

to the existing order or respect for a state governed by the rule of law. Radical

anti-Semitism became identical with the campaign against the Weimar Republic.

Far-reaching völkisch ambitions such as these did seem utopian from the per-

spective of those emerging from the First World War but their negative corollary, the

inner ‘cleansing’ of a new nation defined along nationalist lines immediately caught

on and manifested itself in the form of attacks against a Jewish minority that was

clearly visible or had been made visible and had no place in the new nation.

As a direct reaction to the revolution, and then with greater intensity in the

second half of 1919, small radical anti-Semitic groups and solo activists began to

emerge right across the country. They exploited the general paralysis that the

revolution had caused in the larger right-wing organizations, openly indulging in

Anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic

13

propaganda in favour of the use of force as a means of solving the so-called ‘Jewish

question’ and using such sloganizing to dominate opinion formation in the radical

anti-Semitic camp. It was these forces that evidently lay behind the demands for a

‘pogrom’; at the same time there was an increase in anti-Semitic acts of violence. 9

These activities laid the groundwork for the anti-Jewish agitation of the ‘Ger-

man People’s Defence and Offence League’ (Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und

Trutzbund) that can be regarded as the parent organization of many radical

anti-Semitic activities in the Weimar Republic. It campaigned for depriving

German Jews of their citizenship. 10 In 1922 the League had more than 150,000

members and was developing a raft of anti-Semitic propaganda primarily to

attract workers from the Socialist parties. 11 Whilst this strategy was largely unsuccessful the organization’s main effect lay in a general radicalization of anti-Semitic

attitudes in right-wing associations and parties. 12

The NSDAP—the German Workers’ Party that had been founded in 1919 and

changed its name to National Socialist German Workers’ Party in 1920—also

profited from anti-Semitic agitation such as this. In a series of anti-Semitic points

the NSDAP programme for 1920 made provision for the removal of the equal

citizenship rights that Jews had enjoyed in the German Empire since 1871.13 Even if the NSDAP succeeded in becoming the leading force in the Munich radical right

wing by 1923, its effectiveness was nonetheless essentially restricted to Bavaria. 14

Anti-Semitic agitation was also a key element in the activities of the German

National People’s Party (DNVP) that was formed after the end of the First World

War as a successor to Imperial Germany’s Conservative Party, and they directed

their efforts in particular against ‘Eastern Jewish’ immigrants. 15 But like the Conservatives in the pre-war period they resisted the demands of their völkisch

wing for the exclusion of the Jews from German citizenship. After fierce in-

fighting its radical völkisch-German wing broke away from the DNVP to form

the German Völkisch Freedom Party (DVFP) with similar aims to those of the

NSDAP. Its stronghold was in North Germany. 16

There were many other groups that belonged to the troubled and internally

divided völkisch camp in the post-war years and also argued for an end to equal

citizenship rights for Jews. In its second issue, in 1921, the German Völkisch

Yearbook cited nearly seventy ‘German national unions, organizations, leagues,

and orders’ where