Part X
Did the Antisemites Have Minimal or Significant Influence?
These men were far from marginal writers, contends historian Richard J. Evans. Eugen Dühring attracted so much attention for arguing that socialism had to ensure Jews would be eliminated from exerting financial and political power that German philosopher Friedrich Engels, who collaborated with Karl Marx to co-author the “Communist Manifesto,” felt the need to respond. In writing his famed “Anti-Dühring” treatise, Engels succeeded in combating its effect within the socialist labor movement in 1878.
Heinrich von Treitschke’s history was one of the most popularly read German histories in the 19th century, Evans adds. Treitschke’s tirades against Jewish materialism and deceit provoked a “massive” response from his colleagues in Berlin and other esteemed German academics, who explicitly condemned him for “racial hatred and fanaticism.”
Evans concludes these negative reactions demonstrate that although the influence of German antisemitic critics continued to increase, the “vast majority of respectable opinion in Germany, left and right, middle class and working class, remained opposed to racism of this kind.”
Historian Robert Wistrich points out that before 1914, antisemitism was “politically stronger” in Russia, Austria and Romania, but only in Germany had hatred of Jews been “elevated” to their Weltanschauung, a broad worldview or philosophy of human existence and the universe. German intellectuals, artists and university professors provided scientific legitimacy to strident and “vulgar mob agitation.”
German antisemitism, Wistrich explains, was particularly evident among the ruling class—the aristocratic Prussian landowners (Junkers), civil servants, military officers and the academic community. These groups influenced the lower middle classes.
Since the antisemitic riots in 1819, university students demonstrated their willingness to oppose emancipation and civil equality for Jews. Wistrich said that in 1819, the Hep-Hep movement (a Latin acronym for Hierosolyma est perdita, Jerusalem is destroyed) spread rapidly throughout Germany. German Jews became the scapegoats in the riots against Jewish emancipation, in which nationalistic students actively participated.
Jewish emancipation had initially been enacted, Wistrich said, at the beginning of the 19th century by the French military under Napoleon, which could be viewed as having been implemented without the consent of the German people. Jews were branded as pro-French and anti-national and as a “negative cosmopolitan influence” at the point when Germany was emerging but still uncertain about its own identity.
German Churches:
Protestant and Catholic
As noted, German antisemitism was firmly rooted among the Lutheran Protestants from the time of the Reformation. “The moral bankruptcy of the German churches, Protestant and Catholic alike, regarding Jews was so extensive,” asserts historian Daniel Goldhagen. He said that even during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), “70 to 80 percent” of Protestant pastors were aligned with the antisemitic German National People’s Party. Even prior to the Nazis assuming power, their antisemitism had been adopted by the Protestant press, which had millions of readers and was tremendously persuasive.
The most successful and foremost religious purveyor of antisemitism, Goldhagen said, was the Sonntagsblätter, with a circulation of 1.8 million copies and a readership assessed at three times that amount. The paper portrayed the Jews as “the natural enemies of the Christian-national traditions” and the “authors of a variety of evils.”
A study of the paper’s influence concluded that the constant vilification of the Jews in the Protestant Sunday papers denigrated them to the extent that it emotionally numbed their readers to “the human and finally also the Christian feelings” for the Jews.
Goldhagen said that from the end of 1930 until the Nazis assumed power in 1933, the intensity of the antisemitic rhetoric in the press increased substantially. The decision to intensify the level of vitriol to that of the Nazis was made willingly and with enthusiasm.
Franklin Littell, an American Protestant scholar, theologian and father of Holocaust studies in the U.S., adds: “Most of them [German Protestant theologians] didn’t see the importance of defending the rights of German Jewish citizens as citizens, as human beings. They simply saw the importance of defending converts, Jews who had accepted baptism, saying the Church was unbreakable. To have defended Jews as Jews would have been too much for them. Only a few of them saw the theological seriousness of the attack on the Jews.”
As an institution, “the Catholic Church … remained thoroughly and publicly antisemitic,” Goldhagen declared. Prior to and throughout the Nazi period, Catholic publications, regardless of whether they were written by clerics, laymen or theologians, published current antisemitic grievances that were frequently “indistinguishable” from what the Nazis were expressing.
Although the German churches confronted the government on many of their concerns, they completely abandoned German Jews. In a very real sense, the German religious leaders, Goldhagen said, “were men of God second and Germans first—so powerful was the antisemitic model—for the German men of God could not bring themselves to utter that ‘Jews are part of the human race’ and to declare to their flocks that the moral laws were not suspended for the treatment of Jews.”
Even as these men of God watched as the Jews, who were friends, neighbors or members of the community, were being hunted, battered, forcefully evicted from their homes, deported and then murdered by their “own parishioners,” they did not protest.
In their sermons these “pastors of morality” sanctified and consecrated the loathing of average German citizens.
They also willfully abetted in the process of destruction. When the Germans enacted the Nuremberg Laws on Sept. 15, 1935, enabling the regime to determine the extent of an individual’s lineage, they needed the genealogical documents maintained by the community churches.
In “The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany,” political scientist Guenter Lewy writes:
The very question of whether the [Catholic] Church should lend its help to the Nazi state in sorting out people of Jewish descent was never debated. On the contrary, “We have always unselfishly worked for the people without regard to gratitude or ingratitude,” a priest wrote in Klerusblatt in September 1934. “We shall also do our best to help in this service to the people.” And the cooperation of the Church in this matter continued right through the war years, when the price of being Jewish was no longer dismissal from a government job and loss of livelihood but deportation and outright physical destruction.
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.