In these long years there was only one who kept up an imperturbable, unflagging fight, and this was the Jew. His Star of David rose higher and higher in proportion as our people’s will for self-preservation vanished. Therefore, in August 1914, it was not a people resolved to attack which rushed to the battle-field; no, it was only the last flicker of the national instinct of self-preservation in face of the progressing pacifist-Marxist paralysis of our national body. Since even in these days of destiny, our people did not recognize the inner enemy, all outward resistance was in vain and Providence did not bestow her reward on the victorious sword, but followed the law of eternal retribution.10
As part of their plan for world domination the Jews were determined to destroy Germany and the German people. The struggle against Jews served both survival and racial purity. Jews symbolize all evil, but also serve a positive function: by spurring the Aryan to struggle against them, they make him increasingly conscious of his own race.11 Jews must be destroyed to preserve the higher Aryan culture.
Racial purity was an overriding purpose; it was an obligation to destroy anything that interfered with it, whereas anything that promoted it had to be done. Jews were the most serious threat, but other groups like Gypsies and eastern Europeans were also considered inferior and a threat to racial purity. This was convenient because Hitler intended to provide the German people with Lebensraum (living space) through conquest in the east.
Lebensraum was another central aspect of Hitler’s ideology. Aryans, the bearers of superior culture, had a right to a “place in the sun.” They had a right to take land from racially inferior people. This aspect of Hitler’s ideology was consistent with German nationalism and with the expressed purpose of Germany in fighting World War I. It had strong appeal for many Germans.
Hitler’s race theories are sometimes discounted as a cause of his actions. Certainly we often discount politicians’ statements of good intentions; apparently this also happens with statements of bad intentions. Before, during, and since the Holocaust some have claimed that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was mere demagoguery, intended to gain the support of anti-Semites. The highly influential American psychologist Gordon Allport, author of The Nature of Prejudice, wrote in 1954: “Hitler created the Jewish menace not so much to demolish Jews as to cement the Nazi hold over Germany.”12 It is easier to see the generation of hatred and antagonism toward a group as Allport did – “The Macchiavellian trick of creating a common enemy in order to cement an ingroup”13 – to see it as having a pragmatic purpose that leads to a commonly understood gain, than to see it as being done out of hate or due to commitment to an ideology, seemingly for its own sake.
It is true that anti-Semitism did cement the ingroup and helped it to gain followers – not simply because the Germans were anti-Semitic, but because scapegoating Jews helped Germans deflect feelings of betrayal by their leaders and feelings of personal and collective responsibility for their troubles. The ideology also provided a blueprint for a “better” world and elevated the Germans’ greatly threatened view of themselves. The Nazi movement fulfilled the need for connection and for relinquishing a burdensome identity. By the time the extermination of Jews began, the German people were devoted followers of Hitler. By this time the ideology and the progression along a continuum of destruction had lives of their own.
The German historian Meinecke writes as if Hitler had been concerned only about power, rather than ideology.14 He points out that Hitler’s allies, the Japanese, were subhuman – according to National Socialist ideology. This is an oversimplified view. The evidence clearly indicates that Hitler would use and abandon people or countries or strategies in pursuit of his goals; for example, he entered into an alliance with the Soviet Union and then invaded it. His strategy is expressed in the following 1937 response to dissatisfaction with his speed of action against Jews:
The final aim of our whole policy is quite clear for all of us. Always I am concerned only that I do not take any step from which I will perhaps have to retreat, and not to take any step that will harm us. I tell you that I always go to the outermost limits of risk, but never beyond. For this you need to have a nose more or less to smell out: “What can I still do?” Also in a struggle against an enemy. I do not summon an enemy with force to fight, I don’t say: “Fight,” because I want to fight. Instead I say “I will destroy you!” and now, Wisdom, help me to maneuver you into the corner that you cannot fight back, and then you get the blow right in the heart.15
Thus the more successful the Nazi system became, the more it persecuted Jews and others, although many dictatorships become milder as their success and acceptance grow.
In his early public speeches, and especially before the Nazis gained power, Hitler hinted at but did not explicitly state the extremes to which (according to earlier written statements) he was willing to go in his “treatment” of Jews. He knew that many of his potential adherents were not psychologically ready to support such actions or to publicly commit themselves to a group advocating them. Although he underplayed attacks on Jews in the last election campaigns before the Nazis gained power, he did not hide his views.
Five Nazis broke into the hotel room of a young columnist asleep with his aged mother and murdered the man. He was shot, stabbed, and bludgeoned, receiving twenty-nine wounds in all. The five were sentenced to death, reprieved by von Papen, and later released by Hitler. Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologue, wrote this when the sentence was handed down:
Bourgeois justice weighs a single communist, and a Pole at that, against five German
