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The Canadian Jewish News, Thursday, January 13,1983 - Page 7
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Hitler became chancellor of Germany on Jan;30> 1933* In the foUowhig^s^ C. C. Ar^nsfeld, of the Institute of Jewish Affairs, Londoh, teUs of the disheUef which g^ted the iclea that he might ride Grermany one day.
By
C. C.ARONSFELD
The Nazi experience, in its present perspective of 50 years, is one of those paradoxes that seem near, at least to those who survived it, and yet so remote as to seem increasingly incredible.
We all have suffered; the scars on body and mind will never disappear, and indeed the whole world has beien transformed by the events of those 12 years. But when it is asked (as it unendingly is) how did it all happen?, the answers are much like the voices in The Wizard of Oz, pointing this way and that way and making for all-round confusiori.
The gene:ratioh of 50 years ago was brought up in the tradition of the 19th century, which had great faith in human progress, a faith hallowed by the emancipation of man as well as by science and social thought. The ideals of the French Revolution had essentially been vindicated and occasional disappointments were thought to be no more thah inevitable setbacks. We had advanced, we were advancing and so far as could be foreseen, t|iere was nothing to stop us advancing.
19th century
There were, of cdurse, voices of warning. Heine had a vision of the time, exactly 100 years before it happened/when '.'the insane beserk rage'' of the ancient Teutons would "break the taming talisman^ the Cross" and "a crash wouldbcciJt- as nothing ever crashed iti world historythe anti-Semites seemed to him simply"'the little dogs that run about the empty arena barking arid snapping at each other before the hour strikes;and the host of gladiators arrive."
But the prophets counted for little, least perhaps among Jews. The bold flights into poetic speculation and inspired essays in pessimism were duly admired- but life was rational and one had to be optimistic.
Twenty-five years before the pogroms, Jews hailed "the spirit of humanity in every edict of the Czar" promising "a glorious future for the Russian Jews." A generation later there was still anti-semitism but the demons seemed to have been banished, even Stocker got nowhere and Dreyfas after all reinstated.
Things were bad after the war, but when Hitler failed in the Munich coup in 1923 he was thought to have "proved himself impotent to withstand ridicule.'' This was precisely whatshould have happened according to the textbooks of enlightened progress. Moliere's famous line: ' 'You laugh, my friend? So much the worse for him who laughsj" came fittingly from a comedy.
Even years later German Jews, while not neglecting to warn, were not unduly disturbed. Leo Baeck thought German anti-Semitism was "a literary and Spiritual^ one j" and though admittedly *^an epidemic now raging in the land," it was ^^much exaggerated by friend and foe alike.*' Jewish political leaders, ;too, had lear^ from the past that anti-semitic movements have away of coming and going: the Nazis were unlikely to be an exception to the rule. - The Nazis polled 6,000,000 votes in 1930-but many Jews took comfort in the thought that not every Nazi voter was necessarily an anti-semite but rather, because of the widespread unemployment,"simply desperate, "n
Others were sceptical. They believed that those who had shown themselves in favor of power being entrusted to avowed, radical Jew-baiters, would have no objection to a persecution of the Jews and that even those who did not vote Nazi were not genuinely
quareling with Nazi anti-semitism.
This was a sensiiyeTeaction but those who felt like this failed in the courage of their convictions, whiGh4s a reproach oiily in idle hindsight. Three months before the-sheet-lightning of the elections in September 1930, Jews were warned by a then unknown voice with the weirdly prophetic words: "What are you waiting for? for the year when the young generation that/is now being incited to a veritably insane degree will be in office?"
But who would, could look ahead? For the time being, JeWs were assured by their leaders that things would sort themselves out: a little more stamina, a little more pride, a little less fear would work wonders, the run of trained observers found it impossible to assume that Jews were going to be treated as Hitler threatened, "seeing they had become too interwoven in the German social fabric."
Zionists, usually wont to pride themselves on their realism, also misjudged the situation. "Of course (they said) the Nazis will try to practice a cold pogrom by way of legislation, and no dotibt they will succeed withthe wretched existences of the little Jew. But with the big and wealthy Jews they will sooner or later, one way or another, have to come to terms. This, unfortunately, is an ancient chapter of Jewish history." So much for the lessons men draw from history.
Outside Germany people were not much wiser. So seasoiied and perceptive a student of events as the Manchester Guardian which later consistently exposed the Nazi regime, considered the "charlatan'' Hitler to be "no revolutionary leader'' though his "blood-sodden grandiloquence" could not be ignored, and [in 1930] there seemed to be *yot the slightest doubt that Jews in Germany will be defended by the law exactly as other Geriman citizens."
Some trust was also apparently put in such big lies as Hitler practiced when he told The Times that he "had nothing against decent Jews, but if Jews assQciatecl themselves with Bolshevism, as many unfortunately did, they must be regarded as enemies."
The internationally respected (Jewish) editor of the BerHner Tageblatt, Theodor WolfiP, ppohpoohed the idea of the, Nazis coming to power —-- three weeks before it happened.
This idea was not quite as absurd as it
Hitier's declared intention t6 wipe out the Jews was hard to believe before he took power on Jan.30,1933.
everyone was "very depressed," so much so that he saw a "danger of the party falling to pieces" and Hitler actually hit on the happy thought of "putting an end to it all in three minutes with a pistol."
Konrad Heiden, the classic historian of Nazism, writes: "The National Socialist movement was evidently in full physical and moral disintegration."
Even those, perhaps especially those who had carefully investigated Hitler's history of organized crime, would not rate his prospects very high. Prof. E. J. Gumbel, who
Bullock in his Hitler biography A Study in Tyranny) the Communists who "openly announced that they would prefer to see the Nazis in power rather than lift a finger to save the Republic. Despite the violence of the clashes on the streets, the Communist leaders followed a policy approval by Moscow which gave priority to the elimination of the Social Democrats as the rival working class party." ' •■ ^
Others were simply deaf to the voice of conscience. They knew of the crimes that had been perpetrated even before 1933. They
authoritatively exposed the terrorist (Vehme) might have spoken up effectively and without
might now appear. For the Nazis were by ho means the formidable, almost unchallengeable force they were thought to be. Not only had their strength in Parliament just been reduced, from 230 to 196 seats, with portents of further decline, but Hitler's continuing failure to advance his ambition of defeating democracy by exploiting democracy produced within the Nazi party widespread doubt and despondency. Goebbels' (later minister of propaganda) noted in his diary
murders in Weimar Germany, later confessed: "I did not believe that a man without a name, with an obscure past and with an extremely vague program, really had a chance." ,,
The illusion was at the back of many desperate calculations by otherwise responsible minds that such was the absurdity of the Nazis' program that perhaps they might be given the chance of demonstrating it and so destroying themselves. Even if (the pious assumption ran) a majority was supporting them — which seemed by no means certain after the election results in 1932 — even then
great risk but they shamefully kept their peace. ■
there \yas still"the world" to be reckoned with, and they surely would not stand for it.
And yet it was (or should have been) particularly true of the one non-Nazi force
In the final phase of the Weimar Republic, when the avowed enemies of Hitler had been largely reduced to impotence, this was
surprising to see who did stand for it. Not only those who could be suspected of sympathies, however secret. Hitler drew support from very different quarters too. It was (says Alan
Rows of barbed wire
West Germany issues stamp to mark seizure of power
By
JAMES MONTAGNES
Germany will issue a stamp this week to mark 50 years since the seizure of power by the Nazis under Hitier on Jan. 30, 1933. The stamp is a reminder —- as if one were needed — of the beginning of persecution, resistance and terrible sufferings of Jews and other non-Aryans.
The stamp features rows of barbed wire to symbolize persecuTion and resistance, and has a white rose as a symbol of hope held during the period of terror from 1933 to 1945. -In 1979 Germany issued a stamp to Anne Frank on the 50th anniversary of her birth. She wrote a diary of her life hidden in an Amsterdam house during the German occupiation of Holland, until she and her family were captured by the Gestapo and taken to death camps in Poland.
The German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, in 1978 issued a stamp featuring barbed wire to recall the concentration camp at Mauthausen, in 1956 for the concentration
left, those bourgeois nationalists who helped the Nazis into power by joining the government in such offices as they hoped would enable them to keep Hitler in check.
Their leader, Alfred Hugenberg, head of the far-flung press and film empire which aided and abetted aggressive nationalism, was under no illusion about the character of his associates. The old-fashionedi dyed-in-the-wool capitaUst despised the Nazi "Socialist' ' upstairs; with his allies of the Evangelical Church, degenerate though it was, he Jiad no time for the new pagans. But he reckoned that he would so dominate them as to carry his own cause forward. His party, he claimed, was the 6nly one able to deal with the Nazis "constructively," a delusion later to be shared by those who joined the force of evil in the hope of "preventing worse."
They all fancied they could play with the Nazi fire without burning their fingers. Hugenberg certainly was within a few months effectively outmaheuvered, even with indecent ostentation, and had burned the whole of his political career.
These human inadequacies displayed in dealing„with Hitler seem to me among the,.. West German stamp was issued this week to most potent forces to account for the rise of-mark 50th anniversary of Hitier^s ascension the abdmjiriation which went by the name of to power.' the Third Reich. Admittedly, Hitler owed=-
camp al Buchenwald, and in the following much to his'own prowess, his determination few years for such death camps as Ravens-
bruek and Sachenhausen.
France in 1970 issued a stamp marking the 25th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps, showing a hand with the broken shackles which had held it to a wall.
There have been other stamps to the con-
and demonic charilsma, much also to the indecision of his enemies^ but the staunchest of his allies were, in their varying ways, the widespread refusal to face the worst, the callous contempt for moral principle and — saddest of all — the hallowed belief in
irreversible progress. They between them did more to advance centration camps started by the Nazis in the. ^^e onrush of evil than any sinister conspiracy countries they occupied in Europe. or scheming intrigue.
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