Over 61 years after the liberation of Auschwitz we can still witness the continued influence of the most lethal of all ideological poisons: the image of “the Jew” as the root of all evil who “pulls strings” behind the scenes is still propagated. With this twisted and unfounded reasoning, all riddles are solved and everything becomes explicable to radical antisemites.
Jeffrey Herf, 59, is professor of History at the University of Maryland in the USA and his latest book, The Jewish Enemy – dealing with Nazi propaganda during the Holocaust – sheds new light on what happened then in Europe and is a trenchant refutation of those who try to make us believe that antisemitic hate speech is merely a cynical tool employed by politicians.
Even when Soviet tanks and American and British bombers rained death and destruction on the armies and cities of the Third Reich and most European Jews had already been killed, the Nazi propaganda machine interpreted the Allies’ attacks as an unprovoked assault by the Jews and as tangible evidence that international Jewry was trying to exterminate the Germans.
Herf demonstrates that the “paranoiac pattern” of the Nazi propaganda accompanied the Holocaust to the very end and describes the mode of operation of the different Nazi propaganda institutions and the persons involved. In particular, he examines the translation of the Nazis’ viscerally antisemitic ideology into a narrative and the tailoring of weekly and daily news to fit that narrative.
The story of an innocent National Socialist Germany besieged by international Jewry intent on its “extermination” was used both for the public announcement of and the justification for the Final Solution. A blend of hatred, self-righteous indignation, and paranoia was at the core of the Nazi justification of genocide.
The evidence Herf presents indicates that when Hitler, Goebbels, Ley and Dietrich used the words Vernichtung (extermination) and Ausrottung (annihilation) it was clearly understood that those words referred to a policy of mass murder.
Most of Hitler’s opponents, however, found it difficult to believe that Hitler actually meant what he said about the extermination and annihilation of the Jews. Some historians have, even many years after the Holocaust, exhibited great difficulty in understanding the full dimension of fanaticism in power.
Despite the vast literature on Nazi Germany, World War II and the Holocaust, a rationalist bias about human motivation has persisted, reinforced by the positivism of the social sciences and challenges to intellectual and cultural history within the discipline of history.
The Nazis, however said exactly what they meant, meant what they said and the meaning was clearly conveyed to millions of people at the same time as they suppressed the facts of the so-called Final Solution.
If the Jews were so powerful, went their logic, what sense would it make to enrage them further with news reports about the Final Solution? The mixture of brutal speech and suppression of the facts was enough to consolidate a “ gangsters’ covenant gangsters” while offering the silent, indifferent and uncurious majority a fig leaf of plausible deniability.
An important element of contemporary antisemitism is the accusation of so-called “Zionist-Nazi collaboration”. But Nazi support for some Jewish emigration to Palestine between 1933 and 1939 did not conflict with Hitler’s view that the Zionist project was a component of international Jewry’s drive for world domination.
In fact, an alliance based on shared antagonism toward Britain and toward Zionism, as well on shared antisemitic ideology had been emerging between the Nazis and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini since 1937. By the end of June 1942, German forces had invaded Egypt and were within sixty miles of Alexandria. The Nazi already prepared the mass murder of the Jews of Palestine. The British Eight Army crushed the Afrikakorps in October 1942 and the Nazi threat to the Jews of Palestine had been thwarted. On November 26, 1942 the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem broadcast from Berlin a speech on German radio in Arabic to North African listeners. Al-Husseini’s speech, attacking the United States in the aftermath of the American landings, was a striking example of the translation of Nazi propaganda into the idioms of the Arab world. It reminds us of recent propaganda:
“The strength of Jewish influence in America has clearly come to the fore in this war. Jews and capitalists have pushed the United States to expand this war, in order to expand their influence in new and wealthy areas. The North Africans know very well what unhappiness the Jews have brought to them. They know that the Jews are the vanguard fighters of imperialism that mistreated North Africa for so long. They [North Africans] also know the extent to which the Jews served the imperialists as spies and agents and how they seek the energy resources of North-African territories to expand their wealth […] The American intervention in North Africa strengthens the power of the Jews, increases their influence, and doubles their misdeeds. America is the greatest agent of the Jews, and the Jews are rulers in America.”
Two weeks later al-Husseini again spoke on German radio to “the Arabs”, this time about the value of martyrdom. Before World War II broke out, the Arabs had been fighting for twenty years against “the English and the Jews who were always hidden behind them.” “We Arabs,” al-Husseini continued, “should clearly join the Axis powers and their allies in common struggle against the common enemy […] Yet if England and her allies, “God forbid,” were to win the war, “Israel would rule the whole world, the Arabian fatherland would suffer an unholy blow, and the Arab countries would be torn apart and turned into Jewish colonies.”
The Grand Mufti’s cooperation with the Nazis extended beyond making speeches. He urged the German Foreign Ministry, as well as Adolf Eichmann, not to allow Jewish children from Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary to escape to Palestine, but to send them instead to Poland. He worked with Himmler to establish an SS division of Muslims from Bosnia, appealed to the Germans to bomb Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and received financial support from the Nazi regime in these years.
Not only did the Nazi regime fiercely oppose the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and lend support to anti-Zionist Arabs, but in the positive reception it afforded al-Husseini it effected a rapproachment between Nazism and Islamic fundamentalism in its early years.
During World War II, this deeply rooted facet of Nazi ideology converged with strategic arguments about the importance of gaining Arab, and eventually pan-Islamic, support for the war. This conjuncture led to a historically significant meeting of minds between Nazism and radical fundamentalist Islam and in the ideological documents of fundamentalist Islam in recent decades, the seemingly absolute clarity and simplicity of a paranoid conspiracy theory focused on actions attributed to “international Jewry” has persisted.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the demented discourse of radical antisemitism has resurfaced in different idioms and cultural contexts. It would be complacent to assume that variants on the narrative explored in Jeffrey Herf’s brilliant work will not play a part in the future as well. The insights that history is not the product of conspiracy and that that political events are full of contingency is an antidote that, though often taken for granted, is the among the most messages in a book that should be read widely.
Jeffrey Herf: The Jewish Enemy:Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-02175-4, Price: £19.95 / € 25.50
The book is available from SPMEMart at spme.org/spmemart.html
Karl Pfeifer is a journalist and author who lives in Vienna. He is a member of the board of control of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW), Vienna correspondent of Budapest weekly Hetek and London monthly Searchlight. Karl Pfeifer is a member of SPME Austria.
