A few days ago, Paul Kendal of the British newspaper the Telegraph wrote that in 1941 a medical officer by the name of Major Leo Skurnik received an Iron Cross from the German high command. Skurnik happened to be a Jew. Kendal wrote,
“And Skurnik was not the only Jew fighting on the side of the Germans. More than 300 found themselves in league with the Nazis when Finland, who had a mutual enemy in the Soviet Union, joined the war in June 1941.”[1]
Yet Kendal, without serious self-examination, propounded, “The alliance between Hitler and the race he vowed to annihilate — the only instance of Jews fighting for Germany’s allies — is one of the most extraordinary aspects of the Second World War, and yet hardly anyone, including many Finns, know anything about it.”[2]
The serious historical questions which Kendal failed to posit and which are largely and sometimes deliberately ignored by the Holocaust establishment are simply these: If Hitler’s goal was to annihilate an entire race, how is it possible that there were thousands upon thousands of people of Jewish descent in Nazi Germany?
Is it historically and intellectually satisfying to maintain both contradictory positions at the same time and in the same respect? Is it rationally sound to say that those Jewish people were simply dupes and simply didn’t know Hitler’s real intention? Didn’t they know that their ultimate doom was concentration camps? What actually made them join the Third Reich?
Those are some of the many questions that I asked one writer who happened to publish a widely read book on Nazi Germany. The book is published by the University of California.
In our long private conversation, he kept positing that it was Hitler’s intent to exterminate the Jews of Europe, but throughout his analysis, he failed to seriously deal with the puzzling situation that people of Jewish descent in Nazi Germany posed a serious threat to the prevailing thesis that the Hitler wanted to exterminate all Jews of Europe.
Jewish historian Walter Laqueur attempted to answer this nagging dichotomy last year. He admitted that there were indeed people of Jewish descent in Nazi Germany, but argued that
“Nazi policy toward half- and quarter-Jews (Mischlinge of the first and second degree) was contradictory and changed over time. Half-Jews who were not brought up as Jews (Geltungsjuden) were not deported and killed: There were legal problems, and Hitler, who did not want to be bothered by lawyers, declared that he would take a binding decision only after the final victory.“Those of military age had to serve in the army both at the beginning of the war and its end when the armed forces were depleted. But in between they were excluded from military service, and they were not permitted to serve in positions of command.”[3]
Is this historically accurate? What, then, is the background of all these complex issues and how can one confront some of the prevailing claims of the Holocaust establishment?
Jewish historian Bryan Mark Rigg maintains in his study Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers that “numerous areas relating to the Holocaust and the Nazi era in general remain largely unexplained or poorly understood.”[4]
These areas are poorly understood because theories that are inconsistent with the prevailing vision of the Holocaust establishment—even when based on historical documentation—are dismissed without examination. It is no accident that Laqueur called Rigg’s study “malevolent, more often ignorant, and breathtakingly obtuse in its conclusions.”[5]
Much of Rigg’s sources are from archival documents and personal interviews with those who said they were of Jewish descent in Nazi Germany, but since Laqueur does not seem to be interested in serious research like this, he dismisses Rigg by name-calling.
Rigg argues that “tens of thousands of men of Jewish descent served in the Wehrmacht during Hitler’s rule,” and according to his best estimate, the number of soldiers of Jewish extraction—a group he terms Mischlinge—was more than 150,000.[6] He warns readers, however, that
“previous estimates varied and future scholars may devise more advanced computations to produce a more precise figure. All such efforts should lead to the same significant conclusion: the number of Mischlinge in the Wehrmacht was far greater than anyone previously imagined.”[7]
Albert S. Lindemann
Officers such as Bernhard Losener were well aware that if Hitler “treated half-Jews as Jews, the armed forces would probably lose 45,000 soldiers.”[8]
Hitler “allowed some Mischlinge to apply for exemptions under section 7 of the supplementary decrees of November 1935. In some cases, if Hitler approved, the Mischlinge was allowed to call himself or herself an Aryan.”[9]
Similarly, Jewish historian Sarah Gordon notes,
“In Germany some Jews even supported Hitler despite his anti-Semitism…Max Naumann, the head of the Association of German National Jews, ardently solicited support from the Nazi party after Hitler had come to power, pointing out the national loyalty of his members and their service to the German nation.
“Gerhart Hauptmann, a Nobel Prize recipient for literature, even voted for Hitler. Many Jews were quite comfortable living in Germany despite latent anti-Semitism, whether intellectual or social.”[10]
Hitler “played a direct role” in allowing such Jews to remain in his service.[11] Those Mischlinge families “had lived in Germany for generations, and most had lost all contact with their Jewish heritage. They had helped develop German society, fought in her wars, and furthered her culture. Some had not known of their Jewish heritage until Hitler came to power.”[12]
Historian Albert S. Lindemann of the University of California states that some Jews supported the Third Reich “at its creation; they had prospered materially in it, and they remained reticent to criticize it in a fundamental way.”[13]
What’s more startling is that Hitler “even allowed some to become high-ranking officers. Generals, admirals, navy ship captains, fighter pilots, and many ordinary soldiers served with Hitler’s personal approval.”[14] More importantly,
“Many German Jews and Mischlinge thought that Hitler based his anti-Semitic tirades on Ostjuden [German and Eastern Jews] who had emigrated from the ‘land of Bolshevism.’ The Nazis reinforced this preconception when they issued decrees against Ostjuden in 1933 and later when they forced eighteen thousand of them to leave the Reich in 1938…
Howard M. Sachar
“Dr. Max Naumann, a Jew and a retired World War I army major and founder of the militant right-wing organization of National German Jews, wrote Hitler on 20 March 1935 that he and his followers had fought to keep Ostjuden out of Germany. Naumann felt that these ‘hordes of half-Asian Jews’ were ‘dangerous guests’ in Germany and must be ‘ruthlessly expelled.’”[15]
Academically and economically, those Ostjuden made little progress largely because they learned “Polish Talmudic barbarism, as contrasted with refined German Bildung(education).”[16] Lindemann writes that
“Western Jews often described Ostjuden as parasitic and filled with hatred of non-Jews, those specifically Jewish qualities that were the source of the most insistent and hostile remarks by anti-Semites about Jews generally.”[17]
The Ostjuden were humiliated by the German Jews, who viewed them as “irrational, mystical,” and believed that their “superstitious religion…no longer had a place in a world based on reason and scientific knowledge.”[18]
Therefore, for the fully assimilated German Jews, “Hitler’s anti-Semitism” was “a reaction to the culture of the Ostjuden.”[19] Karl Marx himself despised the Ostjuden.[20]
It was no accident, then, that a group of wealthy intellectual Jews who were already immersed in Enlightenment thought and practice would despise some German Jews because of their “primitive lifestyle.”[21]
Wolf Zuelzer, “a 75 percent Jew,” declared that “for the majority of German Jews, the Orthodox Ostjuden dressed in his caftan, fur hat and ritual side-locks was a frightening apparition from the Dark Ages.”[22]
As a result, at the dawn of the twentieth century, “many of the local Jewish communities in Germany refused to allow Eastern Jews to vote in community elections on the grounds that they were not German nationals.”[23]
Robert Braun, a Mischlinge, noted, “Generally, Mischlinge are very anti-Semitic.”[24] Unsurprisingly, a number of Jewish groups strongly supported National Socialism, because they saw the Ostjuden
“as a grave danger to their social standing who, if allowed to stay in Germany, would only intensify anti-Semitic feelings. In several public statements during the 1920s and 1930s, liberal German Jews labeled Ostjuden ‘inferior’ and asked for state assistance to combat their immigration…Robert Braun recalled that his Jewish father, Dr. R. Leopold Braun, was an anti-Semite who did not like Ostjuden.”[25]
Not only that, most of the Mischlinge “felt Aryan and did everything they could to disassociate themselves from Jews and to be viewed as faithful Germans.”[26]
Adolf Hitler
Hitler’s racial theories did not come out of thin air. In the early 1920s,
“he directed much of his hatred toward Eastern Jews and Jewish Communists…he also hated Communists and felt that Communism was a Jewish movement. He was present in Munich when Kurt Eisner, whom Hitler called ‘the international Jew,’ led his Socialist revolution from 1918 to 1919. Hitler felt that ‘Judeo-Bolsheviks’ like Esiner were responsible for and had profited from Germany’s defeat in World War I.”[27]
As we saw in previous articles, it was not just Hitler who saw that Bolshevism would create a nightmare in Europe. Winston Churchill and many other political leaders drew similar conclusions. For Hitler, the Jews made matters worse when the Red Terror, which was dominated by Jews,
“tried to gain more power, under the leadership of people of such Russian Jew Eugen Levine…As a witness to this chaos in Bavaria, Hitler described it as being a ‘rule by the Jews.’ So, since Hitler felt that Communism was a Jewish movement and inherently dangerous, he directed his hatred toward the Jews.”[28]
It was a sense of Jewish supremacy over the Germans that accelerated the Nazis to move quickly to develop a response to Jewish ascendancy. In the early part of the 1900s, Lindemann says,
“Gentiles could hardly miss noting how many liberal German-speaking Jews had begun to assert that a Jewish background engendered enlightenment, while a Germanic heritage was a burden, pulling in the direction of irrationality and barbarism. As historian Steven Beller has commented, ‘Jews…began to see themselves as bearers of the Enlightenment’ in Austria and Germany.”[29]
Lindemman continues,
“In private correspondence, Graetz expressed his destructive contempt for German values and Christianity even more forthrightly. In 1868 he had written to Moses Hess, ‘I am looking forward with pleasure to flogging the Germans and their leaders—Schleirmacher, Fichte, and the whole wretched Romantic school.’ In the same letter, he wrote ‘we must above all work to shatter Christianity.’”[30]
As early as 1902, a Viennese Jew by the name of Solomon Ehrmann talked about how the world needed to be “Jewified” in order to be enlightened and in order to fulfill the goals and purposes of Judaism.[31] This idea played a major role during the Bolshevik Revolution, particularly in the lives of non-Jews who joined the movement.[32]
Yet this side of history has never seen the light of day in the Holocaust establishment precisely because it would destroy the building block of this school of thought completely. Jewish historian, Howard M. Sachar has a chapter on Nazi Germany in his over a thousand-page work A History of the Jews in America. Incredibly, he doesn’t even touch on these complex issues.[33]
Instead, he tells us that “anti-Semitic discrimination in all echelons of the Polish economy kept a quarter million Jews endlessly dependent on soup kitchens, clinics, orphanages.”[34]
What is even more astonishing is that when discussing the Frankfurt School, Sachar only mentions in passing that it was an institution funded largely by Jews and for Jewish leftists, but failed to document their pornographic and revolutionary activities.
Moreover, he did not even touch on the pornographic nature of Weimar Germany, which Jewish revolutionaries made possible and which eventually incited anti-Jewish reactions among some racialists and other secular intellectuals and writers of various stripes. On the contrary, Sachar extols the school: “It was extraordinary research, in both quantity and quality.”[35]
Sachar turns a blind eye because his ideology does not allow him to see the obvious. He keeps propounding the unconvincing thesis that Jewish persecution was a direct result of hatred, rather than Jewish revolutionary activity.
Although Sachar mentions that a number of Jews participated in the Bolshevik Revolution, he tempers his remarks by saying, “The largest numbers of Russian Jews had never adopted a Bolshevik political agenda.”[36] According to Sachar, Jews are persecuted because of their success![37]
Despite the fact that many Germans during that time opposed anti-Semitism, it was obvious to them that “many Jews themselves were not genuinely interested in mixing but were rather bent on destruction and domination.”[38] Rigg noted the same thing:
“Quarter-Jew Horst von Oppenfeld, a descendant of the Jewish Oppenheim family, who was a captain and an adjutant to Stauffenberg, said that Orthodox Jews experience so many problems because they do not assimilate. ‘Their problem,’ he claims, ‘is due to the fact that they want to be different.’”[39]
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen argues in his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust that anti-Semitism was so ingrained in the entire German people that not even the ordinary Germans were spared that irrational hatred.[40]
Other Jewish writers such as Lucy Dawidowicz and Steven T. Katz ascribe to that thesis.[41] Yehuda Bauer agrees with many of Goldhagen’s theses and tries mightily to rescue him from historical oblivion and insanity, although he criticizes Goldhagen on other issues.[42] Yet Lindemann tells us a different story:
“Racism and anti-Semitism were, in the eyes of many German-speaking Jews, more accurately seen as products of reactionaries and of the mob. Hatred of Jews, they believed, was most typically to be found in eastern Europe, or in the less developed parts of the German-speaking world.”[43]
Historically, the Goldhagen thesis suffers badly when one looks at Jews in Germany in the 1800s. Sarah Gordon, in a book that was written years before Goldhagen postulated his historically risible thesis, notes:
“Cultural explanations that include anti-Semitism as a central reason for Hitler’s electoral success are inadequate as explanatory tools because of their nebulous formulation and because counterexamples from the works of famous scholars and writers indicate that cultural influences were diverse; for example, Treitschke wrote an anti-Semitic tract, but Mommsen wrote a countering statement.“Thus German’s cultural heritage was not uniformly anti-Semitic. Moreover, a deep commitment to a legal and constitutional state was shared by late-nineteenth-century liberals and conservatives. Both groups rejected all attempts to nullify the legal equality of Jews; not a single law was passed between 1869 and 1933 to rescind the new freedoms granted during the foundation of Germany.“Of course, in practice there were many instances of job discrimination, social snobbery, and other types of hostility toward Jews; these were common in all Western countries at the time. Nevertheless, legal emancipation was accepted as part and parcel of the new state despite pressure from rabid anti-Semites to re-impose legal restrictions on Jews.“Not only liberals and conservatives but also many Catholics and Protestants were opposed to anti-Semitic legislation on ideological or intellectual grounds…This was obviously a rational pragmatic stance, but in addition it was an expression of the humanitarianism embodied in Christian ethics.”[44]
Before the 1930s, groups that adopted anti-Semitic propaganda influenced only a fraction of the population, and they “never drew a large percentage of the total votes. Only in the election of 1930 and later years did the Nazis succeed in obtaining strong support…and the causative role of anti-Semitism in this success is by no means clear.”[45] Moreover,
“Between 1887 and 1912 anti-Semitic deputies represented only 2 percent of all Reichstag delegates, including all who were reelected, and by 1914 the anti-Semitic parties were practically defunct and their press was in ruins. After World War I additional small anti-Semitic parties arose with racist programs, but once again their electoral strength was less than 5 percent of all valid votes.
“These small volkisch groups eventually either allied with and were absorbed by the Nazis or gradually faded into insignificance. The track record of anti-Semitic parties was very poor even from their own point of view.”[46]
After laying out the historical background of anti-Jewish reaction, Gordon concludes that “the attributions of anti-Semitism to a uniquely distorted ‘German mind’ or ‘German character’ are largely irrelevant, whether based on psychology, sociology, intellectual history, or demonology.”[47]
If Goldhagen is right, then Jews would never have gotten so much power in Germany. Gordon states, “German universities admitted Jews on an equal footing as early as 1790, and Jews were overrepresented among university professors and students between 1870 and 1933.”
Jews in 1909-1910 were “less than 1 percent of the population,” yet “almost 12 percent of the instructors at German universities were Jewish, and an additional 7 percent were Jewish converts to Christianity, so that 19 percent of the instructors in Germany were of Jewish origin.”[48]
Rigg writes that “between 1800 and 1900, around seventy thousand Jews converted to Christianity in Germany and in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These numbers do not include those Jews who left Judaism and did not embrace another religion.”[49]
The Jews perceived that the only way they could move forward was through assimilation, which sometimes included (false or opportunistic) conversion. For Heinrich Heine, conversion to Christianity was the “entrance ticket to European civilization…Most Jews who now converted to Christianity did so simply as a mode of qualifying per se and, as often as not, without really relinquishing their family and social ties with the Jewish community.”[50]
Many of those Jews, after their conversions, as Michael A. Meyer puts it, “often associated almost exclusively with fellow converts. In Germany they were referred to as Tauffuden, baptized Jews. They had not really become Christians but had taken on a borderline identity in which they still feared the verdict of the Gentile.”[51]
Karl Marx’s father, for example, accepted Christianity more “for practical reasons than heart-felt conviction.”[52] There were also instances where “Jewish parents would baptize their children in infancy while retaining their own religious status.”[53]
In the nineteenth century, the tsar began to discover that Jews were fomenting revolution and began to establish policies in an attempt “to Russify the Jews through conversionist assimilation.”[54]
Historian Erich E. Haberer writes that this was largely forced assimilation, but Jewish scholar Benjamin Nathans seems to show that it was not forced; since the tsarist government wanted the Jews to integrate, they produced a number of academic programs that would be suitable to Jews. One of them was the university, “the setting in which selective Jewish integration achieved its most dramatic success.”[55]
There were also movements among the Jews that sought to “‘Europeanize’ Russian Jewry through secular education and general socio-cultural self-regeneration.”[56] The results of these undertakings were many, but one was that “Jewish gymnasium students and rabbinical seminarians” began to hijack nihilism, which was used “for preaching socialism, propagating revolution,” and so on. Nihilism was opposed by both Orthodox Jews and Gentiles.
“On almost every level [the nihilists] had to struggle against unyielding opponents who viewed their unconventional behaviour and unauthorized activity as subversive to the established order of traditional Jewish and official Russian society.
“For those who persevered this was a ‘school of dissent’ which imbued them with a sense of mission, gave them the stamina to fight on, and trained them to operate in a hostile environment.”[57]
Heinrich Heine fit the pattern of Jews who converted to Christianity for political or “opportunistic reasons.”[58] This was justified when revolution broke out in France in the summer of 1830. Heine, who was on vacation during that time, felt that he too should take up arms in the revolutionary mode of the time. He wrote,
“Gone is my longing for peace and quiet. Once again I know what I want, what I ought, what I must do…I am a son of the revolution and will take up arms.”[59]
When Moses Mendelssohn, a Jewish composer who (opportunistically) converted to Christianity, failed to put his musical talent to revolutionary use, Heine scolded him. He lamented to one of his friends in 1846,
“I cannot forgive this man of independent means, because he sees fit to serve the Christian pietists with his great and enormous talent. The more I admire his greatness, the more angry I am to see it so iniquitously misused. If I had the good fortune to be Moses Mendelssohn’s grandson, I would not use my talents to set the piss of the Lamb to music.”[60]
Heine “contracted syphilis in his youth and died of the malady in 1856.”[61] During his last days, when his health was deteriorating, Heine gave signs that his conversion was not sincere. He said,
“If I could walk with crutches I’d go to church, and if I could walk without I’d go to the whorehouse.”[62]He called Christianity “a gloomy, sanguinary religion for criminals,” and later noted that “I make no secret of my Judaism, to which I have not returned, because I have not left it.”[63]
Around 1835 Heine met Marx and Engels, and in 1842 he foresaw that Communism would terrorize the entire world.
“Though Communism is at present little talked about, vegetating in forgotten attics on miserable straw pallets, it is nevertheless the dismal hero destined to play a great, if transitory role in the modern tragedy…
“[It will be] the old absolutist tradition…but in different clothes and with new slogans and catch-phrases…there will then be only one shepherd with an iron crook and one identically shorn, identically bleating human herd…Somber times loom ahead…I advise our grandchildren to be born with a very thick skin.”[64]
Moses Mendelssohn was a strong proponent of assimilation, and by 1871, Jews “had become Germans in speech, outlook, and culture, as well as their patriotic feelings.”[65]
Yet full assimilation was another way to embrace German mores, which progressively had become more secular and somewhat Masonic in nature and ideology.
Heinrich Heine
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Jewish intellectuals began to embrace Enlightenment principles and distance themselves from the “darkness” of the Talmud. Instead of the Talmud, they began to embrace Godtthold Ephraim Lessing’s play Nathan der Weise, in which we are told that all the major religions—namely Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—are false.
E. Michael Jones argued that the play was Masonic in nature.[66] But this form of covert operation was another way to keep revolutionaries away from ultimate reason and the cross. Jewish philologist Hermann Steinthal bragged that “
“Together with the prophets, it is Lessing, Herder, Kant, Fichte, Schiller, and Goethe and the two Humboldts who arouse our enthusiasm—and they could not have emerged from any other people.”[67]
Assimilation, in many ways, was a break from the “darkness” of the Talmud. But that form of assimilation drew many Jewish intellectuals to the Enlightenment ideology, which we saw was Masonic in its ideological orientation. Jewish historian Barbara Tuchman acknowledged,
“The process begins with the ‘Enlightenment’ initiated by Moses Mendelssohn in 18th century Germany, which shattered the protective shell of orthodoxy and opened the way to acquaintance with Western culture and participation in Western affairs. The reign of the Talmud and the rabbis was broken. All over Europe the shattered windows were flying open. Jews read Voltaire and Rousseau, Goethe and Kant. The reform movement followed, shedding the old rituals, trying to adjust Judaism to the modern world.”[68]
Many of the Jews at that time saw that “assimilation into German society was completely consonant with being a ‘good Jew.’”[69] They appreciated German culture and mores, and even contributed to its advancement.
Assimilation was such a major theme among Jewish communities that Henry Oswalt, a Jew and grandfather of Michael Hauck, “forbade his daughter to marry a Jew. She obeyed. The grandfather, whose mother was a cousin of Heinrich Heine’s, wanted the family to be more German and accepted by society.”[70]
Assimilation, to some extent, proved to be better than the “darkness of the Talmud”:
“In Prussia’s war against France from 1870 to 1871, 12,000 Jews served: 120 were officers and 373 received the Iron Cross; 483 died or were wounded during the war…After the war’s victorious conclusion, many Jews felt their service entitled them to enter the ranks of the German elite.”[71]
There were still some doubts about how loyal the Jews were, particularly since Europe went through a revolution in 1848, led exclusively by Jews. But Jewish soldiers who remained loyal to German culture and mores were highly honored for their service.
“German Jews displayed their willingness to make the supreme sacrifice for their country time and time again when Germany went to war.”[72]
Arno J. Mayer
The same thing was happening in France. Jewish historian Arno Mayer notes, “During the Great War as well as between the wars, the assimilationists were intensely patriotic. They were also good republicans, dividing their support between the traditional right and the moderate left.”[73]
Suspicions of Jews as revolutionaries gradually faded, since many proved themselves to be good soldiers, particularly in Germany.
“In 1760, the ‘enlightened despot’ Frederick the Great promoted the Jew Konstantin Nathanael von Salemon to general for his bravery in battle…Frederick also employed some Schutzjuden, who had become court Jews, as general purveyors to his army…The king also encouraged the Jews under his rule to build factories to supply his army.
“Veitel Ephraim and Daniel Itzig possibly ‘helped Frederick avoid defeat’ during the Seven Years’ War by supplying and equipping his troops. In recognition for his intelligence and contribution to society, Frederick granted the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn exemptions from some of the laws restricting Jews’ freedom.”[74]
Yet Rigg declares that “this should not imply that Frederick liked Jews—he in fact, detested them. But it seems his hatred did not cloud his reason. He knew he needed some Jews to ensure the smooth running of his country.”[75]
Reason certainly belies this claim. If he detested Jews so much, why would he grant Mendelssohn exemptions from some of the laws? Surely Frederick was not ignorant of Jewish revolutionary activities, and it stands to reason that he probably was suspicious because of that.
But when the Jews proved themselves to be men of honor, they received the accolades any other German would. Many of the Jews were so loyal to the German culture that “on 11 March 1812, Prussia’s first prime minister, Karl August von Hardenberg, emancipated the Jews and allowed them to perform military service.”[76]
“During Prussia’s War of Independence from 1813 to 1815, a conservative estimate of 731 Prussian Jews served in the war against Napoleon. Five hundred and sixty-one of them were volunteers. One German Jew wrote, ‘Who doesn’t rejoice to hear the honorable call to fight and conquer for the Fatherland…Oh Death for the Fatherland, you’re the most beautiful fate to befall any mortal.’”[77] Some of the stories of those Jews who stood in high regard in the army are worth mentioning:
“Luise Grafemus (real name Esther Manuel) decided to join the Prussian army after she lost her Jewish husband in battle. She served during the battles of 1813 and 1814 and later became a Wachtmeister. She was wounded twice in battle and received the Iron Cross.
“During the battle at Belle-Alliance (Waterloo) in 1815 alone, 55 Jewish soldiers of the reserve militia died in combat. Prussia decorated 82 Jews with the Iron Cross, and one received the Pour le Merite decoration between 1813 and 1815…
“Moses Mendelssohn’s youngest son, Nathan, reported for duty in 1813 and later became a lieutenant. According to the records, 23 of these Prussian Jewish soldiers became officers: one major and 22 lieutenants.”[78]
Moses Mendelssohn
In World War I, about 10,000 Jews “volunteered for duty, and over 100,000 out of a total German-Jewish population of 550,000 served during World War I. Some 78 percent saw frontline duty, 12,000 died in battle, over 30,000 received decorations, and 19,000 were promoted.
“Approximately 2,000 Jews became military officers, and 1,200 became medical officers…One Jewish pilot, Lieutenant Wilhelm Frakl, died in action and received the prestigious Pour le Merite…The youngest Jewish volunteer of the war was thirteen-year-old Joseph Zippes. He lost both legs during combat.”[79]
Jews stood with the Germans and showed their patriotism through their deeds. A letter which was written by a German Jew declared that Jews and Germans “are united, one people, one army. In love and loyalty, we get along. We stand together! All differences disappear…there is only one people in our land! We fight for the kaiser and the Reich.”[80]
German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen expressed a similar sentiment. In 1914, one Jew wrote, “The German Jews stand shoulder to shoulder with their Christian comrades without anyone asking about ancestry or religion.”
Sergeant Fritz Beckhardt, “a Jew, flew a plane with a swastika on its side to display his German pride.”[81] This certainly puts the Goldhagen thesis in a historically uncomfortable position.
What should all these historical accounts teach us? First, it must be pointed out that there were problems with the assimilation process in Germany.[82]
It must also be re-emphasized that people should be cherished for who they are, for as Winston Churchill rightly put it, people can be good, bad, and indifferent. Churchill moved on to add quite powerfully that
“Nothing is more wrong than to deny to an individual, on account of race or origin, his right to be judged on his personal merits and conduct.”[83]
This is certainly as important, and it is quite in line with what the Church has been saying for thousands of years. The Church has been echoing that Jewish revolutionaries embrace subversive movements not because their DNA is corrupt—a morally disgusting and logically repugnant argument which has made inroads in racialist literature, too much to detail here—but because they reject metaphysical reason or ultimate Logos. Logos, as we shall see in a future article, is the source of the moral and political order. Once Logos is rejected, metaphysical and political chaos reigns.
And once that metaphysical rejection is codified in a theological text—the Talmud—the breeding ground for political, economic, and spiritual revolution is therefore firmly planted in the minds of those revolutionaries in one way or another.
But the issue always takes place in the theological realm and then works its way down to the political and intellectual realm with severe consequences.
One person who indirectly ended up admitting this point was one-time cultural phenomenon Elizabeth Wurtzel. She argued that people like her “are hopeless Talmudists”[84] who draw their ideological and sexual politics from the well of the Talmud.
In that sense, Wurtzel is quite in agreement with Benjamin Disraeli in his 1844 novel Coningsby, in which he declared that Jewish revolutionaries have always taken part in revolutionary and intellectual movements in Europe, and Russia and Germany happened to be two of their victims.[85]
It must be emphasized again that here we are not fighting against decent people who embrace docility, civility, and rationality. We are fighting against a wicked ideology and the consequences of that weltanschauung.
That wicked ideology is the enemy of the Jewish people precisely because it always creates anti-Jewish reactions whenever it is applied logically and consistently. And flashes of that wicked ideology and double standards are all over the Ukraine crisis.
[1] Paul Kendall, “The Jews Who Fought for Hitler: ‘We Did Not Help the Germans. We Had a Common Enemy,’”Telegraph, March 9, 2014.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Walter Laqueur, “Hitler’s Jews: Max Von Oppenheim and the Myth of German Jewish Guilt,” Tablet Magazine, August 21, 2013.
[4] Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 1.
[5] Laqueur, “Hitler’s Jews: Max Von Oppenheim and the Myth of German Jewish Guilt,” Tablet Magazine, August 21, 2013.
[6] Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 1.
[7] Ibid., 51.
[8] Ibid., 96.
[9] Ibid., 98.
[10] Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the “Jewish Question” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 47.
[11] Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 1, 19-20.
[12] Ibid., 24.
[13] Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 332.
[14] Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 1-2.
[15] Ibid., 12.
[16] Ibid., 10.
[17] Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, 51.
[18] Rigg, Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler’s Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 10.
[19] Ibid., 10.
[20] Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, 164.
[21] Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 12.
[22] Ibid., 12.
[23] Ibid., 12.
[24] Ibid., 24-25.
[25] Ibid., 13.
[26] Ibid., 25.
[27] Ibid., 15.
[28] Ibid., 15.
[29] Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, 331.
[30] Ibid., 141
[31] Ibid., 331.
[32] Ibid., 443.
[33] See Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), chapter 14.
[34] Ibid., 465.
[35] Ibid., 751.
[36] Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in the Modern World (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 326.
[37] Ibid., 227-228.
[38] Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, 331.
[39] Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 48.
[40] See Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).
[41] Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 7.
[42] See Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), chapter five. Even he takes issue with some of Goldhagen’s citations: “Goldhagen puts all anti-Semitism in the same basket, including the liberal type that wanted to see the Jews disappear by assimilation and conversion. He quotes Uriel Tal, but Tal never said that liberal efforts to assimilate the Jews were the same as extermination programs” (98).
[43] Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, 332.
[44] Gordon, The “Jewish Question”, 27.
[45] Ibid., 29.
[46] Ibid., 32.
[47] Ibid., 48.
[48] Ibid., 13.
[49] Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 51.
[50] MacDonald, Separation, 220; also Bakan, Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, 46.
[51] Ibid.
[52] Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, 162.
[53] MacDonald, Separation., 220.
[54] Erich E. Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteeth-Century Russia (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 9.
[55] Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 201-202.
[56] Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Russia, 11.
[57] Ibid., 16, 17.
[58] Jones, Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, 581.
[59] Ibid.
[60] Ibid., 582.
[61] Ibid.
[62] Ibid., 584.
[63] MacDonald, Separation, 220.
[64] Jones, Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, 582-583.
[65] Ibid., 584.
[66] Jones, Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, 563-566.
[67] Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 51-52.
[68] Quoted in Jones, Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, 565.
[69] Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 51-52.
[70] Ibid., 54.
[71] Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 70.
[72] Ibid., 66.
[73] Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, 48.
[74] Gordon, The “Jewish Question”, 66, 67.
[75] Ibid., 67.
[76] Ibid.
[77] Ibid., 68.
[78] Ibid.
[79] Ibid., 72.
[80] Ibid.
[81] Ibid., 73.
[82] E. Michael Jones has done a great work analyzing this in chapter 13 of his magnum opus The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit. I could not address all these issues here because time constraints.
[83] Winston Churchill, “Zionism vs. Bolshevism: The Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” Sunday Illustrated Herald, February 8, 1920.
[84] Elizabeth Wurtzel, “Standing Against a Tide of Hatred,” Guardian, January 16, 2009.
[85] Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby (Boston: Adamant Media Corporation, 2005), 299.
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