Stephen H. Norwood - Prologue to Annihilation: Ordinary American and British Jews Challenge the Third Reich

STUDIES IN ANTISEMITISM

Alvin H. Rosenfeld, editor

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Indiana University Press

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2021 by Stephen H. Norwood

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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Norwood, Stephen H. (Stephen Harlan), 1951- author.

Title: Prologue to annihilation : ordinary American and British Jews challenge the Third Reich / [Stephen H. Norwoord].

Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2021] | Series: Studies in antisemitism | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020047239 (print) | LCCN 2020047240 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253053619 (hardback) | ISBN 9780253053626 (paperback) | ISBN 9780253053657 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: JewsPersecutionsGermanyHistory20th century. | JewsPersecutionsPress coverageUnited States. | JewsPersecutionsPress coverageGreat Britain. | NazisPress coverageUnited States. | NazisPress coverageGreat Britain. | JewsUnited StatesAttitudes. | JewsGreat BritainAttitudes. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)Causes. | GermanyForeign public opinion, American | GermanyForeign public opinion, British

Classification: LCC DS134.255 .N67 2021 (print) | LCC DS134.255 (ebook) | DDC 940.53/1830941dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047239

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047240

CONTENTS

Introduction: Foundations of the Final Solution

1.Portents: September 1930 to January 1933

2.Barbarism and Entrapment: The Cold Pogrom, 19331934

3.A Tidal Wave of Protest: March to May 1933

4.The Escalation of Judaeas War against Nazism: May to December 1933

5.Exposing and Boycotting the Third Reich: 1934

6.Disaster for the Jews: The Saar Plebiscite, January 1935

7.Entertaining Nazi Warriors in America and Britain: 19341936

8.Degradation, Appeasement, and Looming Catastrophe: 1935

Epilogue: Defeats, 19361939

Bibliography

Index

IN EXPLAINING HOW AND WHEN the Hitler regime decided to annihilate the Jews, Holocaust scholars have concentrated on the period from the Kristallnacht pogroms in November 1938 through the early years of World War II. The few scholars who have addressed Western responses to the plight of European Jewry also dwell mainly on the years after Kristallnacht. This examination of American and British responses focuses instead on the critical early years of the Third Reich, illuminating how much was known in the West about Nazi ambitions at the time. This was the period in which Western actions could still have precluded the ensuing catastrophe to Jewry and Europe.

Widening the lens of scholarship on Nazism and the Holocaust, Prologue to Annihilation demonstrates how the Nazis early policies and atrocities formed the foundation of the Final Solution. It argues that developments in the early years of Hitlers rule, and in the years immediately preceding it, foreshadowed what was to come. I show that from the establishment of the Nazi Party, its explicitly racial antisemitism was the central focus of its ideology. Of the twenty-five points in the party platform, endorsed in 1920, ten were aimed directly at the Jews. In one point, the Nazis made it clear that they intended to strip Jews of their citizenship on racial grounds: Only one who is of German blood irrespective of religion, can be a member of the nation. No Jew, therefore can be a member of the nation. The Jew could live in Germany only as a guest, and must be subject to alien legislation. The Hitler regime made this official in 1935 by introducing the Nuremberg race laws. The party platforms very first point telegraphed the Nazis expansionist designs, calling for the union of all Germans in a greater Germany.

Some newspapers were quick to recognize the menace Nazis presented to Jews and sounded the alarm. A little more than a month after Adolf Hitler became chancellor, the London Daily Telegraph pointed out that the Nazi Partys practice of unleashing violent attacks on Jews was long-standing and warned that this would not change after the party assumed the responsibilities of government. The editors asked rhetorically, Can a party that has been fed for years upon little but hysterical hatred and counsels of violence settle down [and direct] a government that does not destroy and persecute?

Although not addressed in the newspapers, the Nazis promoted their lethal program by drawing heavily on Christianitys teachings about the Jews. The Nazis routinely presented Jews not only as the root of all of Germanys miseries but also as bent on taking over the world, subjugating the Aryan race, and destroying Christian civilizationgoals that only a people evil and powerful enough to have murdered a god would pursue and could effect. Conflating theological and racial antisemitism, Nazi leaders roused their followers by invoking the image of the Jews as Christ killers and Satans allies, while also characterizing them as subhuman. In a 1932 speech in Nuremberg, Julius Streicher urged his audience to listen to Christ who said to the Jews: You are children of the devil. He confirmed that all Jews have one common aim: World dominion. As the leader of the Nazis April 1, 1933 national boycott of Jewish stores and offices, Streicher proclaimed to an audience of one hundred thousand in Munich, Golgotha has not yet been avenged. He pledged that this time it would be the Jews themselves, the crucifiers of Jesus and arch-enemy of the German people, who would meet their punishment there. Drawing on the medieval libel that Jews murdered Christian children to extract their blood to mix with matzo at Passover, he denounced the Jews as a nation of bloodsuckers.

As early as April 1, 1933, the Manchester Guardian warned that Hitler appeared to telegraph the Nazis annihilationist intentions even in 1925, when he graphically described Jews in Mein Kampf as a spiritual pestilencethe worm of destruction gnawing at the tree of civilization. The survival of civilization demanded the wiping out of the pestilence, the killing of the worm.

From the beginning, the Nazis made their rationale for ridding the world of this pestilence explicit. In what can be called annihilation inversion, the Nazis attributed their own genocidal intentions to the Jews. On April 1, 1933, the Nazi Womens Federation justified that days national boycott of Jewish stores and offices by explaining that the Jews objective was the destruction of the German people. The federation claimed that it was the Jews who were responsible for Germanys defeat in the world war and for the 2,000,000 war dead and the starvation of old men, women, and childrensteps toward their ultimate goal. With the Nazis in power, the Jews were now determined to deprive awakened Germany of all possibility to live. Now it was the Jews who had become the new inquisitorswho would burn Germans.