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." (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim, 1971, p. 679.)
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.” (Adolf Hitler, Political
Testament/Politisches Testament: Die Bormann-Diktate vom Februar und April
1945, Hamburg, 1981,69.)
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.” (From,
Friedrich Arnold, 220 Politische Plakate als Dokumente der Deutschen
Geschichte, 1900-1980, p.198 S.) On the
right a poster this time of the Nazi Government in 1943, titled "He Bears
the Guilt for the War." (Germany, Bundesarchiv Kohlenz,
no. 003-020-020.)
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. (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)
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." (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianisrn,
1958, p.343.)
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. (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.)
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. (See Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American
Life, 1999.)
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.
(See Henry L. Feingold, A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream,
1920-1945, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)
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. ("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 Volksaufklarung und
Propaganda.)
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 Judischen 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.( "Das
judische Komplott" December
10, 1941, available in Bestand 712, Plakate,
Wandzeitung Parole der Woche, no. 1709, Folge 50
(1941),Germany, Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz.)
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." (VIdRMVP, 326/41, December 12,1941, ZSg.
109/28, BAK, SO, Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz.)
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."(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.)
The leading Nazi propagandist,
Johann von Leers, in "Judentum und Islam als Gegensiitze,"
contrast Islam and Jews as opposites. ("Judentum und Islam als Gegensiitze," Die Judenfrage 6, no.
24, December 24, 1942: 275-278.) 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."(Ibid., p.278.)
And when finally that
same month word reached England about the atrocities in Poland (plus see also,
Representatives Assail Mass Murder of Jews by Germany," New York Times,
December 5,1942, p. 9.), 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." (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 Tagebiicher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke
Frohlich, 1994, II/6.)
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." (Amin al-Husseini, "Nr. 55:
Rede zur Eroffnung des Islamischen Zentral- Instituts
in Berlin, 18.12.1942.)
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! " ("Der Krieg und die Juden," in Der steile Aufstieg, pp.
263-270.)
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. (The story in the New
York Times "Goebbels Turns Fire on 'Jewish Problem," May 9, 1943, p.
34.)
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.
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