The text at the top reads: "Jews-Freemasonry" followed by; "World politics World revolution." The text at the bottom reads, "Freemasonry is an international organization beholden to Jewry with the political goal of establishing Jewish domination through worldwide revolution." The map, decorated with Masonic symbols (temple, square, and apron), shows where revolutions took place in Europe from the French Revolution in 1789 through the German Revolution in 1919. (Printed by WWII NaziGovernement)

The Nazi’s justified every escalation of persecution against the Jews (who with the ‘Aryanisation’ of their money and property, where asked to ‘pay up’, for their ‘stab in the back’) as a response to what they alleged was a prior act of aggression by international Jewry. And early on already Nazi propaganda hinted at its intention to "extermi­nate" the Jews as part of one overarching war of retaliation and defense. Written in 1924 (the year of the following, poster on the left) Hitler as if preparing for the next war already, in Mein Kampf:

"If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fif­teen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas - the sacrifice of millions would not have been in vain." 1

Faced with expressions of such views by Nazi Germany's national political leaders, most contemporary Marxists, liberals, and conserva­tives of the time, as well as a good number of postwar scholars, were skeptical that the Nazis truly believed their own propaganda. And yet an examination of modern political culture draws attention to the causal significance of many irrational and illusory ideological perspectives. In the case of Nazi Germany, historians have amply documented what Saul Friedlander has called Hitler's early "redemptive anti-Semitism," which combined paranoid fantasy about an all-powerful international Jewry with promises of redeeming and saving Germany from that perni­cious influence. The Nazi party however attracted so many votes exactly because they denounced the Jews as the cause of Germany's problems, from mili­tary defeat to the Depression, and especially as an international conspiracy that ‘pulled the string’, or as Hitler called it in his 1945 testament (an elusive), “community of the spirit.” 2

In this sense the underlying narrative (rhetoric) of the Nazi’s remained the same, see for example on the left a poster dated 1924 asking Germans to vote for the Nazi party titled "The Wire Puller.” 3

On the right a poster this time of the Nazi Government in 1943, titled "He Bears the Guilt for the War." 4

While proclaiming Jewry's threat to Nazi Germany (just like the German Kaiser had previously done by inciting the Russian Revolution in 1917) Hitler prepared to launch a war for Lebensraum, the Kaiser’s previous concept for a 'larger Mitteleuropa'. Such a military action would not only provide Germany with raw materials and food supplies safe from a potential Anglo-W.European, blockade, it would allow for the German armies to reach British India (and like Wilhelm II had previously announced take away their colony) plus lay the groundwork for a sub­sequent bid for world domination and an attack on the United States.5

With the explosion of scholarship about the Holocaust, two scholarly communities emerged. One, composed of military historians, continued to focus on the conventional battlefield narratives of World War II, while the second examined the history of the Holocaust by examining Auschwitz-Birkenau and other extermination camps, instead of a more inclusive understanding of "the war against the Jews."

For when the Nazi leaders, in private conversations, office memos, or public statements, drew a connection between the Jews and World War II, they were referring to World War II and the Holocaust taken together as one apocalyptic battle. They did not limit the meaning of their war against what they called international Jewry to the Final Solution. Instead, they viewed the Final Solution, the details of which they never discussed in public, as a necessary campaign of retaliation in the context of a broader war of defense waged by Nazi Germany against in­ternational Jewry. These prejudices and phobias had been commonplaces of European anti-Semitism long before the Third Reich, but particularly in the case of Germany as we have seen, by the end of WWI.

As Hannah Arendt noted in her classic work The Origins of Totalitarianisrn, "in order not to overestimate the importance of the propaganda lies one should recall the much more numerous instances in which Hitler was completely sincere and brutally unequivocal in the definition of the movement's true aims, but they were Simply not acknowledged by a public unprepared for such consistency." 6

Two key verbs and nouns in the German language were at the core of the language of mass murder in Nazi Germany: vernichten and ausrotten. These translate as "annihilate," "exterminate," "totally destroy," and "kill," and the nouns Vernichtung and Ausrottung as "annihilation," "extermination," "total destruction," and "killing." Whether taken on their own from the dictionary meaning or placed in the context of the speeches, paragraphs, and sentences in which they were uttered, their meaning was clear. To the ears of military men, the term Vernichtungschlacht, "battle of annihilation," had a familiar, Clausewitzian ring and denoted complete defeat of the enemy armies. In describing the Jewish people as a whole as Nazi Germany's enemy, the Nazi narrative was an attempt to situate the threats to annihilate and exterminate within the normal or at least known language of warfare.7

Especially from 1941 on, the Nazi regime strove to assimilate genocidal language into a seemingly ordinary or more conventional narrative of war. But when Hitler and other Nazi leaders and propagandists uttered them to describe what they intended to do to the Jews, they almost always did so after claiming that it was the Jews who were intending to exterminate or annihilate not only the Nazi regime, the Nazi party, and the German armies but the German people as a whole when the Nazis projected a policy of Vernichtung or Ausrottung onto international Jewry, the clear meaning in that context was that the Jews were supporting a genocidal policy aimed at Germany. By summer of 1941, Hitler and Goebbels were saying publicly that the threatened extermination of the Jews was now a part of ongoing official policy.

Also during 1941, the Nazi leaders understood that American aid to Britain was crucial for keeping Britain in the war, as a result, they intensified their propaganda attacks claiming the USA was controlled by Jews. In American society and politics in the 1930s and during World War II in reality, Jews were a marginal ethnic group with modest political influence, living in a society still riven by powerful anti-Semitism. In view of their small numbers, it was not surprising that their influence on American foreign and military policy was negligible. Following four decades of immigration, the 4.8 million American Jews made up 3.7 percent of the American population. Of the six Jews in the United States House of Representatives, Seventy sixth Congress, in 1940-1941, four came from New York City, and one each from Chicago and Philadelphia. There were no Jews in the United States Senate. There were no Jews in the top positions in the key government departments of the Roosevelt administration dealing with foreign and military affairs. None of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States military were Jews. Anti-Semitism remained a force in the U.S. officer corps. Roosevelt's only Jewish secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, lobbied with little success against resistance from the Department of State to expanding Jewish emigration to the United States.8

Indeed, citing domestic anti-Semitism, and displaying some of their own, State Department officials avoided any focus on the persecution of the Jews, so as not to intensify already considerable domestic opposition to American intervention in the war in Europe. Some Jewish leaders agreed, fearing that raising the issue would only add to American anti-Semitism. American Jews in and outside government were unable to convince the administration to lift immigration quotas to aid Jews seeking to escape from Germany. And the wartime surveys was that anti-Semitism actually increased in American society during World War II.9

Yet the daily and weekly press directives issued by the Office of Active Propaganda in the Propaganda Ministry for this period are telling. Take for example the Periodical Service directive of June 6, 1941. (Note: Showing it’s Christian roots, the following use of the words Juda’s plan sometimes called Alljudas, was common in Nazi language. They evoked a link between the Jews and Judas Iscariot, whom the New Testament depicts as having betrayed Jesus.)

Why relevant now:

England ultimately ruled by Jewry; same is true of the USA; accordingly, English-North American plans for conquering the world serve Judas's plan to use, deracinate, and in this way generally exterminate all non-Jews of all peoples. What is at first the for us incomprehensible, hostile stance of the USA towards Germany becomes understandable as soon as one recognizes the degree to which the non-Jewish citizens of USA are already in the hands of warmongering Jews.

Goal:

Clarity about the aim of Jews in the USA at any price to destroy and exterminate Germany, which grasped the Jewish danger in time.

Framework:

Emphasize: In the USA, even more than in England, there is a Jewish parallel government alongside the official U.S. government. The latter becomes ever less important, the more it is filled with Jews selected from the parallel government. Today, this process can be seen as having already been completed. I 14 The periodicals (who received the directive) should "avoid injuring or mocking non-Jewish USA citizens, owing to their apparent acceptance of enslavement by Jewry or their cowardice in the fight against Jewry and its slaves." Nor should German periodicals suggest that in spring 1941 it was "too late" to break the oppression of the Jews in the United States.10

The directive next drew attention to Hitler's claims in Mein Kampf that the Jews were responsible for American entry into World War I. The current "warmongering" was therefore the second Jewish anti-German campaign. The directive asserted that Franklin D. Roosevelt had "Jewish blood" traceable to Dutch Jewish ancestors in seventeenth-century Holland. However, Nazi wartime propaganda focused more on Roosevelt as a servant of the Jews than as a Jew himself. The directive listed, the king of USA banking and stock exchanges is the Jew l P. Morgan." Morgan was of course not Jewish, but the Nazis found Jews in many places of power.

“The Jews in the USA hold power with the help of the Jewish government, bleed the people white, and oppress them ... The Jews in the USA have treated the non-Jews [there] exactly as the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" prescribed. The Jew is on the way to destroying and annihilating the USA, that is, the USA of nonJewish people and things. In the process and until his final victory, he uses a modest number of non-Jewish creatures (for the purpose of more effective camouflage). The non-Jewish residents of the USA face extermination by the Jews.”

Thus not only were the Jews threatening to "annihilate" Germany-they were also intending to "annihilate" non-Jewish Americans. Such directives, bringing the arcane arguments of the Protocols up to date, were distributed to several thousand newspapers and periodicals.

On December 10, 1941, the day before Hitler declared war on the United States, the Propaganda Ministry sent its customary 125,000 copies of the Word of the Week to be posted in the familiar prime locations for the greatest visual impact around the country. "Das judische Komplott ("The Jewish Conspiracy" see below) offered a detailed, indeed byzantine, diagram of the names and channels of influence of "the Jewish wire pullers" and their "stooges and accomplices" involved in the international Jewish plot. Here, in black and yellow, the immense conspiracy was depicted for all to see. In its apparent exactitude about the names of particular individuals and their alleged connections to and influence on one another, the poster was a paradigmatic case of the paranoid vision of radical anti-Semitic propaganda. Appearing in yellow (a color associated in Nazi propaganda with the Jews) against a black background, the wall newspaper combined text and image to draw the eye first to an anti-Semitic caricature of a male face with oversized ears, nose, and lips, curly hair, heavy eyebrows, and a small growth of a beard-this was the Jew at the center of the plot. Wide arrows in striking yellow, showing direction of influence, issue from two Stars of David named for the two key figures in the international conspiracy, Bernard Baruch of the United States and "Mosessohn," a sarcastic reference to the Soviet Politburo member Lazar Kaganovitch. Baruch exerts direct influence on the non-Jews Roosevelt and Churchill and on the Jewish bankers Schiff, Warburg, Kahn, Karp, whose names are inscribed between two Stars of David. Baruch also has a direct link to "Roosevelt's intimates and leading advisers," identified as "Jews!": Henry Morgenthau, Felix Frankfurter, New York governor Herbert Lehman, Fiorello LaGuardia, Sol Bloom (chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee), and an unidentified Cohen. The arrows of influence stemming from "Mosessohn" Kaganovich extend to "Finkelstein-Wallach"-that is, former Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov. “'Mosessohn" Kaganovich influences the non-Jew Stalin. The circle of influence is completed by a yellow line connecting Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin.

Once the curiosity of passersby had been aroused by the striking colors, the arrows, the caricatures, and the familiar-sounding Jewish names, the viewers' attention might turn to the text of the poster, which revealed the secrets of this vast and powerful conspiracy. To the left, the text identified Baruch, Mosessohn, Schiff, Finkelstein, and Maisky as Jews and asserted that they were in league with the non-Jews Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Below, text about the Jewish "wire pullers" ("die Jüdischen Drahtzieher") introduced four points identifying the images and the connections between them: for example, the "Jevv ... Baruch" was "one of the great warmongers and war profiteers of the world war, inventor of the Versailles tribute clauses, close friend and adviser to the Freemason Jewish hireling Roosevelt, personal friends with Churchill, called today by the Americans the unofficial president of the USA" LaGuardia, Morgenthau, Bloom, Frankfurter, Lehmann, Cohen, and Kaufman were "Roosevelt's intimates and associates." Kaganovich, or "Lazarus, son of Moses Kaganovich," was "Stalin's only trusted aid, most intimate adviser, deputy, and father-in-law." Maxim Litvinov and Ivan Maisky were both mentioned, as were such Jews active in English politics as Leslie Hore- Belisha and Lord Rothschild.

Among the millions of Germans who walked past this wall newspaper in that second week of December 1941, those who may have stopped long enough to read the text probably had no idea whether Roosevelt was really a Freemason, whether Churchill was a Jewish father-in-law (Judenschwiegervater), or whether Stalin had married Kaganovich's daughter. They would have had only a smattering of information about who Baruch, Kaganovich, and the others were; however, especially after Hitler declared war on the United States on December 11, they did know that Russia, England, and the United States were now at war with Nazi Germany. The image and text of the wall newspaper offered a seemingly compelling explanation of how the Jews, so few in number, could have been so successful in plotting against Germany. Perhaps the passerby would have been impressed by all the specific names and the graphic illustration of the arrows of influence, not to mention its technical expertise. For those immersed in the Nazi context, it could also convey the impression of a complex, well-researched and compelling causal explanation of why it was that three of the most powerful countries in the world were at war with Nazi Germany. Surely not all the names could be fictional. Surely some part of this conspiracy must exist. The Propaganda Ministry had not pulled Bernard Baruch and Lazar Kaganovich out of thin air. Of course, to people outside Nazi Germany the wall newspaper would have appeared, as it appears today, to be crackpot realism based on a combination of mental derangement, political fantasy, unjustified hatred, pathetically erroneous causal connections, and inferences-all of which amounted to a sick grotesque falsification. Yet the Germans gazing at this wall newspaper during that week of short, cold, mostly gray December days were within Nazism's grasp and thus had access to no alternative explanation of how political decisions were being made in Moscow, London, and Washington and how or whether Jews had any impact whatsoever on them. Some unknown number of pedestrians turned away from the wall newspaper in disgust and anger, appalled at the distortions of the criminals in charge of their government. Yet an equally unknown though larger group of passersby in all likelihood believed that "The Jewish Conspiracy" taught them a great deal about the world as it really was.11

On December 11, 1941, Hitler declared war on the United States in a speech to the Reichstag broadcast over German radio and printed in full in the German press. His central point was that "a single man," Roosevelt, "and the forces driving him" were the cause of World War II.  "The brain trust that the new American president must serve consists of the members of the same people we fought in Germany as a parasitic appearance of humanity and which we began to push out of (German) public life. "The "circle of Jews surrounding him" encouraged his foreign policy initiatives. They were "motivated by Old Testament greed" and he was a man of "utterly satanic perfidy." This tactic of diversion was a key reason for Roosevelt's meddling in European affairs.   "We know what powers stand behind Roosevelt. It is the eternal Jew who thinks his time has come to inflict on us what we shudder to see and must experience in Soviet Russia," It was, he continued, "Franklin Roosevelt's and the Jews' intention to destroy one state after another." The war was a matter of the "existence or nonexistence" of nations, Roosevelt and the Jews "would now exterminate National Socialist Germany." 12

On the left, "The Jewish Conspiracy", December 10, 1941, Reich Propaganda Directorate of the Nazi Party. Landeshauptarehiv Koblenz, no. 1709. On the right,"The Jew: Instigator of the War, Prolonger of the War," Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Germany, no, 003-020-022.

Then on November 26, 1942, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem cast from Berlin a speech on German radio in Arabic in what became a striking example of the translation of Nazi propaganda into the idioms in the Arab world even today.” Jews and capitalists have pushed the United States to expand this war, in order to expand their influence in new and wealthy areas.- America is the greatest agent of the Jews, and the Jews are rulers in America. The Arab peoples had shed "noble blood" for the freedom and independence of Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian peninsula. "The martyr's death is the protective tree in whose shadows marvelous plants again bloom." 13

The leading Nazi propagandist, Johann von Leers, in "Judentum und Islam als Gegensiitze," contrast Islam and Jews as opposites.14 He further pointed to apparent intellectual and moral foundations for an alliance between the Third Reich and radicalized Arabs and fundamentalist Muslims. Van Leers applauded what he depicted as Islam's long history of anti-Jewish sentiment and action. "Unquestionably, one result of Muhammad's hostility to the Jews was that oriental Jewry was completely paralyzed by Islam. Jewry's resistance was broken.

In contrast to Europe, where the Jews were allowed to receive interest or engage in theft, the Arab and Islamic world kept the Jews in a state of fear. "If the rest of the world adopted a similar policy, we would not have a Jewish question today." Hence von Leers celebrated "the immortal contribution of the religion of Islam." It pre­vented the threatened domination of Arabia by the Jews. In so doing, Islam "opened the path to a higher culture [and] gave its adherents an education and human form that still today makes a Muslim who is se­rious about his faith one of the most noble phenomena in this confused and chaotic world." 15

And when finally that same month word reached England about the atrocities in Poland 16, Propaganda Minister Goebells wrote, on December 12, 1942, "The atrocity campaign about Poland and the Jewish question is assuming enormous dimensions on the other side. I fear that over time we cannot master the issue with silence. We have to have some kind of answer ... It is best to go over to the offensive and talk about English atrocities in India or in the Middle East. Perhaps that will get the English to keep quiet. In any case, by doing so, we change the subject and raise another issue." 17

The Allied declaration regarding the murder of Europe's Jews took place a day before the opening of the Islamic Institute in Berlin. Grand Mufti al-Husseini gave a speech at the event in which he argued that Arabs, and indeed all Muslims, should support the Nazi cause. The Koran, he continued, was full of stories of Jewish lack of character, Jewish lies and deceptions. Just as they had been full of hatred against Muslims in the days of the Prophet, so they were in modern times.AI-Husseini then misconstrued Chaim Weizmann as having said that World War II was a "Jewish war." 18

In his last lead editorial in Das Reich on January 21, 1945, Goebbels wrote: "Who drives the Russians, English, and Americans into the fire, and sacrifices masses of foreign lives in a hopeless struggle against the German people? The Jews! Who invents new programs of hatred and extermination against us, and in so doing makes this war into an awful act of horrendous self-slaughter and self-annihilation of Europe's life, its economy, education, and culture? The Jews!  Who justifies this perverse political situation with a cynical hypocrisy and fear? ... Jews, only the Jews! " 19

Thus to the end, Goebbels never wavered from the deluded but internally consistent anti-Semitic explanation for why Nazi Germany was about to lose the war: it had been betrayed and abandoned, one might say "stabbed in the back" by the Western Allies, who had succumbed to Jewish domination. In the minds of the Nazi leaders, World War II ended as World War I had, with noble Germany betrayed. This time, though, betrayal did not come from within, as in 1918-1919, but from abroad, at the hands of the Western, Jewish plutocracies. Goebbels argued, in effect, that Jewish power and policy making in London and Washington had prevented Nazi Germany from winning the war. In February 1945, the propaganda minister held the Jews responsible for the Third Reich's impending defeat. As the chroniclers of the death marches of spring 1945 have recalled in recent years, "revenge" continued up to the very end against the relentless and soon-to-be-victorious foe.20
 

1) The Gospel According to St. Matthew 27:20-22, 24-26 in which the Jews are said to have selected Barabbas to live and Jesus to die. The multitude tell Pilate, "Let him [Jesus] be crucified" and "His blood be on us, and on our children" (p. 9). The latter quotation might suggest to people inclined toward prejudice that this warrants the Jews deserving any pain and suffering that comes their way, i.e., pogroms, the Holocaust. The animosity that spread from antisemitic writings such as the aforementioned quotation in the New Testament--animosity that has continued for centuries and is still prevalent to this day--explains in part why Jews are scapegoated; antisemitism, in part, allowed Nazis and their sympathizers to excuse and justify their genocidal acts while inciting soldiers to participate in the Holocaust.

 

1 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim, 1971, p. 679.

2 Adolf Hitler, Political Testament/Politisches Testament: Die Bormann-Diktate vom Februar und April 1945, Hamburg, 1981,69.

3 From, Friedrich Arnold, 220 Politische Plakate als Dokumente der Deutschen Geschichte, 1900-1980, p.198 S.

4 Germany, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, no. 003-020-020.

5 For the historical context here, see also L. Albertini, Origins of the First World War: Nazi Germany's Ultimate War Plans to Attack the United States.

6 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianisrn, 1958, p. 343.

7 On the radicalization of the application of the terms Vernichtung and Vernichtungskrieg from Clausewitz to Verdun in World War I and then to the Nazi war on the eastern front in World War II, see Jan Phillip Reemtsma, "Die Idee des Vernichtungskrieges: Clausewitz, Ludendorff, Hitler," in Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, eds. Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehr­macht, 1941-1944, 1995, pp. 377-401.

8 See Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 1999.

9 See Henry L. Feingold, A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream, 1920-1945, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

10 "Themen der Zeit: Juden in USA!" Zeitschriften-Dienst 110, no. 4676, June 6, 1941: 6-9. From the offices of Anti-Semitische Aktion and the Archiv des Reichsministeriums fur Volksaufklärung und Propaganda.

11 "Das jüdische Komplott" December 10, 1941, available in Bestand 712, Plakate, Wandzeitung Parole der Woche, no. 1709, Folge 50 (1941),Germany,  Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz.

12 VIdRMVP, 326/41, December 12,1941, ZSg. 109/28, BAK, SO, Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz.

13 Amin al-Husseini, speech no. 45a, "Rundfunkrede an die Nordafrikaner," November 25-26, 1942, Hopp, Mufti-Papiere: Briefe, Memoranden, Reden und Aufrufe Amin al-Husainis aus dem Exil, 1940-1945, 2001, p. 216.

14 "Judentum und Islam als Gegensiitze," Die Juden­frage 6, no. 24, December 24, 1942: 275-278.

15 Ibid., p. 278.

16 plus see also, Representatives Assail Mass Murder of Jews by Germany," New York Times, December 5,1942, p. 9.

17 Goebbels noted that the Propaganda Ministry would thus create a "propaganda campaign" similar to what the English were doing with the Jewish question, entry for December 12, 1942, in Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Frohlich, 1994, II/6.

18 Amin al-Husseini, "Nr. 55: Rede zur Eroffnung des Islamischen Zentral- Instituts in Berlin, 18.12.1942.

19 "Der Krieg und die Juden," in Der steile Aufstieg, pp. 263-270.

20 The story in the New York Times "Goebbels Turns Fire on 'Jewish Problem," May 9, 1943, p. 34.

 

 

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