Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

Germany’s cultural descent seemed mirrored in politics. Where only decades earlier Bismarck had bestridden the political stage as a giant, the country’s representatives now appeared reduced to squabbling pygmies, the irredeemably divided Reichstag a reflection of an irredeemably divided Germany — irredeemable, that is, unless a new national hero creating (if need be by force) new unity should emerge. Hopes could be invested only in the vision of such a hero — warrior, statesman, and high priest rolled into one — who would arise from the ashes of national humiliation and post-war misery to restore national pride and greatness.¹⁸ The seeds of subsequent intellectual backing for Hitler and his Movement were fertilized in such soil — however distant reality proved to be from the ideal.

The shrill antisemitism of the Nazis was no barrier to such support. The Jews — less than 1 per cent of the population, the vast majority more than anxious to be seen as good, patriotic German citizens — had few friends. Even those who might criticize overt Nazi violence and the frequent outrages which the Jewish community had to suffer during the Weimar Republic were often infected by some form of resentment, envy, or suspicion of the Jews. Though relatively few were drawn to the outright violence against Jews (which was nonetheless commonplace in Weimar Germany), latent or passive antisemitism was widespread.¹⁹ As incessant Nazi agitation shored up layers of animosity already intensified by the search for scapegoats for a lost war, revolution, mounting political crisis, and deep social misery, prejudice intensified. Allegations that Jews were disproportionately wealthy, harmfully dominant in the economy, and unhealthily influential in the cultural sphere proliferated. The sense, in other words, that Jews were different (however much they strove to prove the opposite) and were responsible for Germany’s ills was spreading fast even before Hitler took power.

Once he had done so, the anti-Jewish premisses of Nazism were able to build on such negative feelings, permeate the entire regime and, magnified by incessant propaganda, touch all levels of society. The intention of ‘removing’ the Jews from Germany, as a basis of national renewal resting upon racial ‘purification’, was therefore guaranteed to prompt initiatives from every corner of the regime. And among the many who felt unease or disquiet at the ferocity of antisemitism in the new state, widespread latent dislike of Jews and moral indifference to discrimination offered no barriers to spiralling persecution.

The restraining of open aggression towards the Jews in the Olympic year of 1936 was regarded by activists as a mere temporary device, and simply kept the pressure for further discriminatory measures simmering below the surface. Social resentment, malice, and greed, as well as outright hatred and ideological correctness made sure the screw of persecution did not loosen. By late 1937 the ‘aryanization’ of the economy was starting to advance rapidly. By 1938, open assaults on the Jewish community were again commonplace. The internal dynamics of an ideologically driven police force with its own agenda, on the look-out for new racial target-groups, searching for fresh possibilities of ‘solving the Jewish Question’, additionally meant that radicalism in the fight against the ‘racial enemy’ mounted, rather than subsided, in the ‘quiet years’ of 1936 and 1937.

Gradually, then, the ‘removal of the Jews’, which Hitler as early as 1919 had advanced as the necessary aim of a national government, began to seem like a realizable aim.²⁰