A Patriot's History of the Modern World by Larry Schweikart & Dave Dougherty

Author:Larry Schweikart & Dave Dougherty [Schweikart, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101601686
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

And on and on. As Professor Robert Loewenberg once observed, “Hitler’s choice to eradicate the Jews and Judaism instead of Armenians or Biafrans is what makes for the Holocaust’s particularity” (emphasis ours).59 Understanding Hitler in this way makes it literally impossible to refer to a “Palestinian holocaust,” for example. Repeatedly, Hitler invoked spiritually charged pseudo-Christian terms to describe the war against the Jews, referring to “eternal Germanity,” effecting a “reconciliation of mankind,” emphasizing the “purity of the blood.”60 The fight had to be one to the death, for the Jew intended the “enslavement, and with it the destruction, of all non-Jewish peoples.”61 Connecting Jewishness to trade-unionism and Bolshevism enabled Hitler to demonize the Soviet Union; linking Jewishness to bankers and financiers permitted him to do the same with the United States and Britain. But these connections only constituted necessary tactics to achieve the final goal, the “extermination” (Ausrottung) of the Jews as a “race,” and this objective was only the first step in replacing Christianity with Nazism. The Nuremberg trials revealed the extent of the Nazis’ war on Christianity, noting that “Christian churches were systematically cut off from effective communication with the people. They were confined as far as possible to the performance of narrowly religious functions, and even within this sphere were subjected to as many hindrances as the Nazis dared to impose…[including through] illegal and terroristic means.”62 Both the German Evangelical Church and the Norwegian National Church (after the Nazi invasion) were seized by the Nazi government. All other churches were directly controlled through Nazi administration of their finances and through a series of laws that drastically reduced their powers across a broad spectrum of issues. But whether the Jews were (at first) specifically singled out as the end product of Nazi terror, or whether they were the first step toward a National Socialist religion mattered little in practical terms as the decade unfolded and Jews were rounded up, renamed, and eventually gassed.

All the elements worked together—anti-Bolshevism, anti-Semitism (as Hitler claimed the socialist movement was “Jewish”); Lebensraum to free the land from the Bolsheviks and Jews; German national fanaticism and liberation from control of the Allies and their (Jewish) financiers; and continued purification of German blood. The latter involved the dual removal of the Jews from German society and concentration of “racial” Germans inside “Greater Germany” (in other words, the concept of Anschluss or in Mein Kampf, “One blood demands one Reich”).63 Each part fed the other. Each demonic seed grew in perfect harmony, shaded and watered by the rest.

When Hitler was appointed chancellor, only a few Germans and even fewer non-Germans knew what he was up to, but large numbers (perhaps just shy of a majority) agreed with his nationalist impulses and his explanations of why Germany languished. Most thought reparations constituted not only an undue burden on the Weimar Republic, but also an immoral and unjust one. Quickly forgotten were the images of mutinies during the Great War and the public outcry over casualty lists, and in their place came a new wave of resentment and revenge.

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