Translated from Rolf Gutte/Freerk Huisken, Alles bewältigt, nichts begriffen! Nationalsozialismus im Unterricht. Eine Kritik der antifaschistischen Erziehung, VSA-Verlag, Hamburg, 2007, p. 113-144.
The Jews –
victims of senseless crimesThe topic of “anti-Semitic racism” – from the Nuremberg Laws to the “Final Solution” – is the core of a school lesson dedicated to producing an anti-fascist “how was that possible?” attitude. This lesson is cynical – precisely in its intention to produce shock. It knows that the best way to consolidate the desired national morality is to focus on the “extermination of the Jews”: “Without the introduction of one’s own moral shock, the lesson might not sufficiently make clear the dimension [!] of the National Socialist crimes.”[58]
No other piece of fascist politics so surely and successfully calls on the budding German citizen to take moral responsibility. Had Hitler not given the order for the “Final Solution,” the whole of National Socialism would not rise to the rank of an “incomprehensible crime.” Without the Holocaust, fascism might only be stuck with the dull criticism of having deviated from democracy and losing a war. However, coming to terms with the past delivers its full moral impact solely from the Holocaust of the Jews: “The racial doctrine and the hatred of the Jews fomented by the National Socialists led to the most horrific mass crimes committed in the name of Germany.” [59]
Of course, only in the “name of Germany,” not by Germans. The criminal was Hitler. So one should not be surprised when students ask: “Why was Hitler so evil?” “Why would Hitler even be born if he was so evil?” “Why did Hitler love German Shepards?” [60] For some educators, such questions go too far because they demand an explanation of evil, whereas “education after Auschwitz” can only try to “teach in remembrance.” [61] Thus, in view of the Holocaust, education is denied the right to limit itself to enlightenment and explanation. The transition to “liturgy” in the classroom is explicitly demanded, because the purpose of education must be “to preserve these past events, which are considered significant, in the collective memory.” [62] Silently honoring the victims, shuddering at the incomprehensibility of the crimes, guiltily stating one’s awareness that the perpetrators were Germans – these are the ideals of a lesson that confronts “the most sensitive topic in German history with dignity.”
The renunciation of any attempt to gain clarity about the causes of racism and anti-Semitism, to bring to mind the difference between the everyday racism of citizens and racism as a political program, to inquire carefully into the political and economic conditions that give rise to racism, etc., is not an omission but part of the program of “education after Auschwitz.”
Hitler’s simple worldview: He hated the Jews
Yet even the pure presentation of the “atrocities,” the direct appeal to emotion, the most cunning liturgy of remembrance thrives on judgments that at some point must have been thought. The first judgment, which refers to the pogroms against the Jews, classifies Hitler as a psychopathic lone perpetrator: “Hitler hated the Jews,” “Hitler’s anti-Semitism proved more and more the result of pathological ideas,” “Hitler, in his almost pathological hatred” of the Jews,[63] is responsible for the deaths of five to six million Jewish people. What does the student learn here? Such “hatred” is unnatural, he learns! Who so deeply “hates” people they don’t even know and who have done nothing to them? And who puts such “hatred” into (murderous) action? Only pathological, sick people do that. Healthy people control their emotions – even though, according to another psychology, this also makes them ill because it is said to lead to a build-up of aggression.
Be that as it may: Hitler is regarded as a sick man, but apparently no one recognized his illness at first, although his anti-Semitism “proved to be increasingly pathological.” Otherwise, some German doctors would have sent him to a sanatorium in good time. But the image of the sick, evil Hitler should not be taken so seriously. The “pathological hatred” that school textbooks never fail to refer to is not intended to raise the self-critical question of how it was possible for millions of mentally healthy people to allow themselves to be led by a mentally ill person. Rather, it sets up the verdict that none of the justifications Hitler put forward against the Jews are worthy of further consideration because they were the spawn of a sick mind. Thus anti-Semitism is dismissed as a “simple worldview” that is supposed to correspond to the level of a retarded child: “And in such a world, which is neatly divided into friend and foe, black and white, good and evil, every means is declared legitimate.”[64]
Who can take seriously a worldview that only sorts things into good and evil, say educators who find nothing wrong with teaching their students that totalitarianism in any form is nothing but the embodiment of evil. This moral denunciation – it really isn’t a criticism – of the fascist worldview helps them avoid dealing with Hitler’s ideology. His “simple worldview” comes into play: Anyone who, like Hitler, sorts things into good and evil is himself evil. Not a word about the fact that it in any escalating competition between states it is customary to present one’s own interests as terribly good and therefore justified and to demonize the opposing political or economic interests as the product of an evil will. As if Hitler’s state policy had not also been concerned with economic and territorial goals; as if Hitler, like every other politician before and after him convinced of his Germanness, had not wanted to serve the German people and do them all the good he could; as if there had ever been a politician who had made it his goal to spread “evil”!
This “black and white painting,” which is recognized only in Hitler, but not in one’s own classification of Hitlerism, is itself based on a racist finding. Anyone who declares the political goals of a power that has been labeled an enemy to be the spawn of evil transforms the enemy’s will into a characteristic of the enemy. This then leaves the good no choice: it becomes necessary to extinguish the completely uninfluenceable will: The nature of the enemy virtually dictates this consequence. According to this principle, there is no difference between the anti-Semitism of the German fascists and the discovery of Hitler’s pathologically evil brain by the post-war democrats, between the demonization of the USA by Saddam Hussein and that of the Iraqi leadership by the USA, between that of the state of Israel by the radical Palestinians and that of Hamas by the state of Israel.[65]
Hitler was evil and consumed by a pathological hatred of the Jews! This is the first quintessence of education on the subject of ‘anti-Semitism’.
The other, surprisingly, is:
Anti-Semitism has a long history
What should a student take from this statement? Was Hitler an unhinged psychopath, or did his program represent the quintessence of the history of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism? Is incomprehension about the National Socialists’ “criminal hatred of Jews” called for or, in view of the long tradition of this declaration of hostility, is understanding for fascist anti-Semitism being sought? Should the student come to the conclusion that anti-Semitism attacked Adolf Hitler like an inexplicable illness, or should he come up with a kind of historical conditionality or even necessity for it?
Although the two judgments blatantly contradict each other, they both hold true side by side. Not only does this not bother the textbook authors, there is a method to it. Although the judgments refer to the same facts, they can each be easily assigned to different groups of people: “Hitler hated the Jews” and suffered from “pathological ideas,” whereas the German people, insofar as they were anti-Semitic, were not ill, but were following a historical pattern. Thus the same anti-Semitic racism is presented on the one hand as an individual abnormality and on the other as a tradition – bad but potent – stretching back to early Christian times, which has left its mark on a people who, as we know, has entered history. From then on, these play the role of a favorable condition or fertile ground on which fascist anti-Semitism could flourish and on which its evil seeds could sprout. This, say the textbook authors, is pretty bad, and the German people deserve to be blamed for it. But they were not a bunch of little Hitlers.
A completely arbitrary line is thus drawn between the fanatical leaders and the seduced, between a pathological hatred and an anti-Jewish way of thinking and acting that “was not an invention of the National Socialists,” but has a long history.[66] This sorting follows solely the interest in making a clear distinction between the Führer and the German people according to the predetermined degree of involvement in evil. The Hitlers cannot be helped. They are simply sick and must be eliminated as foci of disease. The German people, on the other hand, can be saved if they acknowledge their guilt, if they critically scrutinize traditions and still stand by the fact that no one can imagine themselves free of “unreflected traditional prejudices.”
If you continue reading the textbooks, you come across illustrations of historical hostility towards Jews that serve to confirm anti-Semitism rather than immunize against it: “Anti-Jewish thought and action, however, was not an invention of the National Socialists,”[67] begins a historical treatise on anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, which makes you curious about the actual “inventors” of the lies about Judaism. But the textbook remains silent about them. Instead, it changes the subject and focuses on the lives of Jews in the Middle Ages and modern times. The almost complete passage reads:
“As non-Christians [heathens?], Jews in the Middle Ages stood outside the society shaped by Christianity. They were not allowed to belong to any guild and were therefore not allowed to work in the crafts. They were forbidden to own land, so they could not farm either. They were completely dependent on trade and money transactions to earn a living. In the cities, the Jews lived together in their own neighborhoods. These ghettos were closed off from the rest of the city. The Jews were forced to wear special clothing with a pointed yellow hat. The Jews were repeatedly persecuted for a variety of reasons. When Europe suffered a crop failure in 1096, one [?] blamed the Jews. At the time of the Crusades, one [?] persecuted ‘the murderers of our Lord Jesus Christ’ on religious grounds... In the 19th century, under the influence of the Enlightenment, almost all European states, with the exception of Russia, passed laws which gave Jews equal status with other citizens. Despite legal equality, certain reservations remained in the state and among the population throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. One [?] was reluctant to see them as civil servants and officers and sought to prevent their admission to these careers. Among the population, it was considered ‘good manners’ to have something against Jews. After emancipation, many Jewish children attended grammar schools and universities. They became doctors, lawyers and journalists. Some Jews, such as Bleichröder, Oppenheim, Rothschild and Warburg, rose to become major bankers. Jews now also took part in the country’s politics.”[68]
Instead of taking the wind out of the “good (anti-Semitic) tone,” it is confirmed. Nowhere is there any indication that the anti-Semitism described was not due to the religious and social lifestyles of Jews, but rather represented a declaration of hostility that in the past was fed solely by the religious fanaticism of Christians.
Where – if one were to stick to historical logic – it would have been necessary to find the sources of fanaticism and racism in Christendom, the textbook continues with a list of persecutions of Jews, the reasons for which remain obscure, and reports on Jewish ways of life that only partially indicate were forced on them.
This results in a crude mixture in which, on one hand, Jews are portrayed as eternal victims and, on the other, it is cautiously implied that “the Jews” somehow offered themselves as victims. Questions of the following kind are at least hinted at: Why did they constantly isolate themselves from the rest of society? Why did they insist so stubbornly on their “non-Christianity”? Why did they immediately try to conquer key positions in society after their “emancipation” – when they knew what was considered “good manners” by the population? And why, at the beginning of the modern era, did they have to stick to the money-usury trade of all things, which they had admittedly been forced into historically? Would it not have been better for them to avoid anything that would expose them to renewed suspicion? Etc.
The perfidious thing about these questions is that they come across as a criticism of anti-Semitism. At the same time, their content does the opposite. Anyone who wants to show that it was not the fault of the Jews that they were forced into professions in money-usury and trade is taking seriously the judgment that the Jews were not entirely blameless in their persecution. One engages the existing anti-Semitism and wants to absolve the Jews of any guilt. Yet they were never the reason or cause, but always the object of anti-Semitic tirades and pogroms. At work here is the familiar logic according to which the victim always bears some of the blame.[69] Instead, the criticism of racism should only examine the thoughts and actions of the racists. Every change of subject, every attempt to free the victim from all suspicion, grants racist logic a rationality that it does not possess.
The mere fact of examining certain professional groups according to faith, i.e. Jews and non-Jews, underlines the suspicion. Why is a special search among lawyers and doctors, civil servants and bankers carried out for Jews who are then – how could it be otherwise – found? Why is it even considered worth mentioning that after legal equality, people of the Jewish faith – like Protestant and Catholic Christians – actually tried to organize their lives by taking advantage of political and economic conditions? What does faith have to do with opportunities to earn money in capitalism? Catholic bankers did not renounce interest and compound interest, and Protestant businessmen did not distribute their profits among the poor! Here, the social integration of the Jews becomes just as much an indicator as their ghettoization – and this is solely because of the judgment on the Jewish ghettos: the student is invited to think that people who have separated themselves from society cannot be trusted if they suddenly dissolve their ghetto and no longer want to distinguish themselves from the rest of the Germans. Isn’t there then reason to fear that they have “begun the march through the institutions”? The bottom line is that the Jews obviously do not belong with us and, in case of doubt, are up to no good. That’s what Hitler thought too, and the textbooks set out to refute him.
Occasionally, such texts will make it clear that a historical perspective does not contributes anything to explaining fascist anti-Semitism. For example, when they point out that in the Middle Ages “witches and heretics” were persecuted just as much as Jews. The problem of why the “persecution of witches” is considered anti-enlightenment and atavistic today, while anti-Semitism with the same long history is still relevant in the 20th century, is tautologically solved by pointing out that the “discrimination against witches” is “no longer relevant today.”[70] They thereby admit that the relevance of anti-Semitism cannot be explained by its past, but that the reasons for the fascist persecution of Jews must lie in their respective present.[71]
Fascism, especially German fascism, was neither a crusade initiated by religious leaders to take revenge on the Jews nor a large-scale attempt at missionary work. It did not want to enslave Jews nor was it concerned with appropriating Jewish money and capital. As is well known, it pursued imperial intentions militarily and had two enemies: the Bolsheviks and finance capital. In fascist theory, both merged into a single enemy, “the Jew,” whom Hitler discovered as the main force in both enemies. This Nazi anti-Semitism historically presupposes developed capitalism with a consolidated nation state, the development of the world market and the struggle between the world powers over resources and influence in the world, as well as the existence of communism. Therefore, the knowledge that the preferred victims of the fascists have had to endure many a pogrom in the past does nothing to explain fascist anti-Semitism.
Attempts to differentiate between religious anti-Judaism and the racist anti-Semitism of the fascists are also misleading. First, because this need to sort things out is also driven by the interest in distinguishing the traditional anti-Semitism of “the population” from the fanatical racism of the anti-Semite Hitler. Secondly, because textbooks only discover racism when it appears as a political belief backed up by a theoretically elaborate racial theory. The attempt to assume a contradiction between religion and racism is therefore downright grotesque. If students are supposed to learn that the National Socialists justified the persecution of the Jews not on religious grounds, but “with their racial theory,”[72] then they are learning something wrong insofar as religious anti-Semitism represents racist theories and fascist racism could only identify Jews through their faith. The fact that Christians were never lacking in racist slanders against Judaism is demonstrated, for example, by the “great reformer” Luther who, after his attempts to convert them failed, did not leave the believing Jews alone, but attributed their unwillingness to convert to the fact that the devil must then have taken possession of their nature. He tried to prove this by looking at their nature and worked himself up into a veritable pogrom.[73] This should come as no surprise. Since every religion invents gods and devils that personify its morals and correspond to or contradict the image of the believers, the connection between a stated belief in a different religion, the accusation of unbelief, the suspicion of embodying evil, and the certainty of degeneracy is almost obvious.
Judaism and Bolshevism
It is characteristic of this teaching material that it seeks to explain the anti-Semitism of the fascists without making it a topic. Moreover, the few attempts to criticize the racist theory of the National Socialists contain errors that show that the democratic educators are not concerned with anything more than merely a moral criticism of racism. It begins with an obviously distorted presentation of racial theory: “The ‘Aryan, culture creating master race’ is contrasted with the foreign races that merely participate in this culture or even ‘corrode it’. Not only for Hitler did this result in the image of a ‘Jewish world conspiracy’.”[74]
This is only half the truth insofar as Hitler – as can be read in “Mein Kampf” – did not invent a “Jewish,” but a “Judao-Bolshevik world conspiracy.” His actual main political enemy was “Bolshevism.” And he identified “Judaism” as its natural bearer: “In Russian Bolshevism we see the attempt made by Judaism in the twentieth century to seize world domination... Its aspirations are deeply rooted in the nature of its being. Just as no other people renounces the drive to spread its kind and power of its own accord... nor does the Jew abandon his path to world dictatorship out of voluntary renunciation... (He) continues on his disastrous path until another force opposes him and, in a mighty struggle, throws the stormer of heaven to Lucifer. Today, Germany is the great battle target of Bolshevism.”[75]
Bolshevism, with its anti-capitalism and council system, appeared to Hitler as the current embodiment of a Judaism aimed at destroying the Aryan race. He thought he had found proof of the indissoluble link between Bolshevism and Judaism in the fact that he discovered people of Jewish origin among the communist and socialist theorists and party leaders. They had, Hitler concluded, taken control of this movement in order to carry out their work of destruction.
He concluded that Jews and Bolsheviks had to be responsible for the decline of Germany and the German people which he had identified because the Germans themselves could not be responsible for it. Consequently, there had to be an un-German force at work in Germany that prevented the German people from developing all their heroic qualities; a force that did not bring plague and cholera upon the people, but rather denied the Aryan race its rightful role in the world.
The “bacillus” he was looking for must have been aimed at the state and thus the national unity of the true Germans. With the combination of communist criticism of the state – which he did not invent – and his interpretation of Judaism as a people incapable of forming their own state, one which needs a “host state” in order to settle in it parasitically and thus denature it – an interpretation he had developed by drawing from previous inventions – Hitler believed he had found the solution to the problem he himself had created: The Jewish-Bolshevik world conspiracy against the Aryan race was to blame for the state of Germany, which did not correspond at all to the image of the master race.
There is little to be learned about this connection from the textbooks. It could also irritate young people who are trying to figure out the current classification of communism = evil and democratic West = good. Shouldn’t they have learned and accepted the following by the early 1990s?
“In Bolshevism/communism we see the attempt made by the Russians in the twentieth century to seize world domination. They do not abandon their path out of self-willed renunciation. Rather, they continue on it until another force confronts them and defeats them. Today, Germany/the free West is the great battle target of Bolshevism/communism.”[76]
Since communism was still the enemy number one after the Second World War, while the Jews and the Israeli state received “reparations” and were asked by Germany to forgive their guilt, the connection Hitler made between communism and Judaism was largely downplayed or even concealed altogether in school textbooks.[77] No student learns that Hitler had political reasons for his anti-Bolshevism that are very familiar to any anti-communist today. He had discovered that communists and Bolshevists were atheists and considered morality to be a sign of “stupid sheep’s patience,” that they wanted to abolish the state and private ownership of the means of production, that they propagated materialism and criticized nationalism, and were therefore not champions but traitors to the fatherland who waged the class struggle worldwide instead of establishing the unity of the people.[78]
The democratically trained mind knows all these judgments and shares them. It recognizes the enemy in this list compiled from “Mein Kampf.” That is why it is simply impossible to ever discover the “pathological evil,” the “incomprehensible that defies all rationality” in Hitler’s political judgments. Students could easily come up with the idea of discovering in Hitler the teacher of anti-communism. Consequently, none of this had any place in anti-fascist instruction. The National Socialists – as Nolte and Hillgruber once tried to do (Historikerstreit) – would have easily passed as the praiseworthy but unfortunately unsuccessful pioneers of the Western crusade against the “evil Russian bear” and Hitler as a far-sighted politician with no luck.
The textbooks know what to do.[79] They first separate Hitler’s racist anti-Semitism from his declaration of war on communism and declare it a “senseless crime.” In this way, they not only succeed in further simplifying Hitler’s “simple world view.” At the same time, it is clear that Hitler was primarily targeting the Jews. Now Hitler can be criticized for killing innocent German citizens of Jewish faith for purely racist motives. He sorted the German people into Jews and Aryans quite wrongly and senselessly. Democrats really can’t find anything wrong with the elimination of the communists. Perhaps they think the concentration camps were too harsh a measure. Perhaps they would want to leave it at party and professional bans for members of the party and only imprison the functionaries – but what does “would” actually mean here?
By decoupling Bolshevism and Judaism, the textbooks at the same time – unintentionally – reduce Hitler’s declaration of war on the “Judeo-Bolshevik world conspiracy” by a number of contradictions. For example, Hitler castigated the Communists for their atheism and linked Judaism to their religiousness; he feared the Communists would abolish the state and the Jews would parasitically conquer the state. He feared the communists would abolish capitalism and accused the Jews of conquering finance capital, “rapacious capital.” He blamed the communists for their aggressive class struggle, while he claimed to have discovered a “sycophantic nature” in the Jews.
The textbooks paint a broad picture of the finding that Hitler had wrongly sorted things. Their criticism of racism is based on this finding:
Racist anti-Semitism:
Unscientific, arbitrary sortingThe textbooks are particularly concerned with demonstrating to the younger generation the scientific untenability of fascist racism. To do this, the “liturgy” of “shocked remembrance” is interrupted and explicitly argued. It seems as if the textbooks do not want to rely anti-Semitism automatically being classified as an “incomprehensible crime” by the younger generation. They know their people.
The criticism of the unscientific nature of racism is as exasperating as the issue itself. It always follows the same pattern: “Since ‘racial science’ was naturally [!] unable to distinguish between ‘German blood’ and non-German blood, religious affiliation was used to define Jewishness. However, this unscientific demonstration was by no means embarrassing to the racial ideologists. They knew how to take advantage of the lack of blood proof by inventing the ‘Jewish soul’ and thus denigrating those who had ‘Aryan characteristics’ but were not enthusiastic about National Socialism. Conversely, this method also offered the numerous top Nazi officials who did not look ‘Nordic’ the opportunity to invoke their racial consciousness. Göring’s words: ‘In my ministry, I decide who is Jewish’ illustrates the extent to which such a procedure opened the floodgates to arbitrariness.”[80] “It thus becomes clear that Hitler’s fight against Judaism was based solely on prejudice against a minority and not justified by anything.”[81]
This triumph over the “unscientific nature” of fascist racism speaks volumes. Not only do the textbook authors not take their own statement that it is a “racial ideology” seriously, they also refute a naturalistic ideology about the innate good German national character by pointing out that the blood of the German Aryans is not different from that of the Jews. As if any racist ideology, be it that of apartheid or the slave owners of Negroes, had ever taken its starting point from a biological fact. As if anyone had ever deduced a political attitude, a national character, an ethnic worthiness or unworthiness from it; as if any racist doctrine had ever made its sorting policy dependent on the fact that information about political intentions can be derived from human biology!
Of course, fascist theorists were not “embarrassed” that they had not discovered a “sub-humanity” in Jewish blood. Since the racist logic of fascism was based on the superiority of the Aryan race anyway, the task of racial theorists was not to look for evidence for the judgment on the inferiority of the Jews, but to find it. And since the discovery of “the Jew” as the “corrosive danger” did not mean that it was clear who or what a “Jew” actually was, how one can be recognized, and how the finding could be “operationalized,” the fascists were able to come up with a whole host of scientific tricks that are still in use today, e.g. when it comes to scientifically lending the character of natural necessity to a politically decided sorting out of people from an education system, from the labor market, or from a nation or national territory. Fascists “recognized” the Jews by their religion, their physique, their character, and the typical Jewish huckster soul, etc. For the fascists, every Jewish citizen who was a communist, socialist, freethinker, left-wing artist, liberal intellectual, banker, publisher or merchant was also evidence for the judgment about the “corrosive character of Judaism.”
So it is downright silly to try to prove a fascist wrong with statistics: For example, that the majority of German Jews were by no means communists, bankers, artists or merchants, but rather good German workers, employees and craftsmen; that they could be found in all parties and were represented in all social classes. For racist fanatics, such counter-evidence is of no importance at all, since in its hermetically constructed “decomposition” and “parasite” theory, it always has the objection at hand that it is typical of the perfidious Jews to “nest” in the German people in the guise of the bourgeoisie. Anyone who grants the status of evidentiary truth to images and checks racist judgements for plausibility has already been taken in by racism. He must then inevitably find it plausible if a statistic proves that the relative proportion of Jews in the banking caste, or among communists and merchants, is comparatively much higher than that of German Aryans since he wants to derive the coherence of a racist judgment from constructions which only underpin the political interest in a purebred German national unity.
It is therefore not a sign of “arbitrariness” when fascists had “comrades” in their ranks who did not correspond to the Aryan phenotype at all. After all, they claimed a connection between a corrosive character and racial characteristics which they had invented for the Jews. Their hatred was directed at the intention, which they saw embodied in Judaism, to undermine the German state and thus the German people. It was not directed at hooked noses, fat lips, or money owners per se. It was therefore just as logical for them to discover the Jewish soul in, for example, a blond and blue-eyed communist, i.e. a phenotypical Aryan, as it was for them to discover the good German in contemporaries who, if they had already earned merit as loyal party members, did not seem very Aryan to them. However, they did not make their sorting dependent on a test in the NSDAP. They believed too much in the connection they had established between nature and political character.
It was therefore not easy to clearly identify “the Jew.” For this reason, after consulting racial theorists, the “Nuremberg Laws” stipulated that a “Jew” was “anyone descended from at least three racially Jewish grandparents,”[82] with membership in the Jewish religious community being used as proof of racial affiliation. This double “operationalization” was the inevitable result of racist logic: anyone who wants to recognize a Jew by the fact that he has Jewish ancestors has admitted that he is unable to identify him by race. Anyone who wants to recognize a Jew by his ancestors must ask himself how he can recognize his Jewish ancestors. And anyone who refers to the ancestors of the ancestors becomes entangled in a circular regression. The only way anti-Semitic logic can escape this if it gives up and digs out a criterion for race that has nothing at all to do with race as the fascists wanted to prove it, i.e. with a biological nature. In this case, it was the “profession of faith,” i.e. the result of a religious expression of will that seemed sufficiently verifiable to distinguish the Jew from the non-Jew in individual cases. And since the profession of faith in the fascist doctrine stands for the “Jewish nature,” it did not prevent Hitler and Co. from executing their declaration of enmity if Jews professed a different faith or – as in the case of communists of Jewish origin – were atheists. A Jew remains a Jew was their credo.
Of course, the inventors of racist ideologies did not have this concept of what they were doing: they believed in their own inventions and therefore considered suggestions – such as those repeatedly voiced even within the NSDAP – that Jews should only be identified after a test of their loyalty to the fatherland to be far too risky in view of their finding that they could not escape their own skin.
That is why Hitler could not accept plans for a “final solution” that envisaged a mass resettlement of all Jews. His argument against such plans, including those put forward by “resistance fighters” such as Bonhoeffer and Goerdeler, was that wherever the Jews were sent, they would have no choice but to follow their destiny once again and set out on the “road to world dictatorship,” which, as we know, only the Aryan race is entitled to.[83]
The textbooks’ first blow against racism is thus ultimately an implicit affirmation of racist logic. The criticism, presented in an embarrassing gesture of triumph, is limited to the point that the evidence for the alleged racist connection has not been correctly established. The evidence for the racism of the fascists is unscientific! The racial theorists’ research is so poor that even a textbook author notices it. In other words, the whole criticism goes like this: To justify fascist racism, there would need to be better, more scientifically convincing evidence than the fascists presented in their slipshod manner! A teacher’s handbook makes this claim:
It “should be emphasized once again that racial ideology cannot be scientifically justified and that hereditary biology has not yet [!] come to any conclusive, scientifically unobjectionable findings.” [84]
Hereditary biology will have to work a little harder to provide “unobjectionable” proof that inferior dispositions can be inherited, that people with a certain genetic make-up are predisposed to criminality and degradation, and that others have inherited stupidity and laziness. But if the fascists had proven all this beyond doubt to the textbook authors, who could have blamed them for euthanasia and the murder of the Jews?!
This criticism of fascist racial theory takes its images seriously, as if they were scientific findings, whereas the fascist racial theorists only “proved” what the racists had cast in images: “Unicellular organisms and humans who have not progressed to community formation preserve their lives by maintaining themselves as parasites of community beings. This applies to bacteria as well as to Jews. A comparison of the Jews with tubercle bacilli is obvious...” [85]
It criticizes the lack of ultimate scientific certainty and only for this reason denies the justification of racist sorting and acts of extermination. Of course, no textbook author – who would be outraged by such criticism of his work – wants to have meant it this way. But this kind of criticism of racism takes it upon itself to scrutinize every new “scientific” justification of the Nuremberg Laws and their consequences. The basic dogma of fascist racism, according to which “inferiors” have no right to life, must therefore make sense to them. Otherwise they would have pilloried the racist intention itself instead of making its condemnation dependent on the tenability of scientific evidence.
Racist anti-Semitism: Jews are useful, i.e. good Germans
The next criticism is also based solely on the interest in avoiding a “false” classification: “How nonsensical the doctrine of the ‘inferiority of the Jewish race’, of Jews as ‘sub-humans’ was, is proved [!] by the mere fact that in the course of history many important public figures, poets and thinkers, politicians, scientists and artists have come from the Jewish people. They made a significant contribution to the development of Western culture with their works.”[86]
The fact that the National Socialists did not ignore Jewish poets and thinkers at all, but rather used them as proof of their subhuman theory, proves how absurd this refutation of racist anti-Semitism is. They identified Jewish “degeneracy” in their works and they saw the Jewish intelligentsia not as a blessing, but as a particular danger for Germany.
If democratic textbooks now rely on the same material as the fascists, but come to the opposite conclusion, then it becomes clear that we are not talking about art and science here, quite apart from their content. Rather, there is a decidedly political interest in the work which does not reveal itself as such, but rather discovers a contribution to “western culture” in the conveniently partisan poetry. It is not difficult to determine what democrats value in those poets and thinkers who Hitler declared “degenerates”: The lists of German intellectual giants that adorn school textbooks only include those “great personalities” who emigrated before Hitler (Einstein and others), called for resistance against National Socialism from abroad (Thomas Mann and others) or died in the concentration camps (von Ossietzky and others).[87] They include not only people of the Jewish faith, but above all democratically-minded and otherwise useful opponents of fascism. The lament here is not that poets and thinkers, politicians and researchers were exiled or destroyed by Hitler, but rather personalities who were known as friends of democracy, i.e. of the post-war order, whose Nobel Prizes and other merits Germany later adorned itself with, whose research results it could use and whose mourned deaths came in handy for singing the song of the incorruptible spirit. On the other hand, this explains why the textbook authors do not also include personalities and politicians, poets and thinkers who were not only opponents of fascism, but also explicit critics of capitalism, perhaps even organized communists, in their honor roll.[88]
The teaching materials shamelessly state that this is not about rejecting fascist criticism of the intelligentsia and certainly not about the suffering inflicted on those who were persecuted, but about the benefits for German science and economy and Germany’s reputation in comparison with other cultures: “As a result, Germany’s economic situation was further weakened because it lacked the initiative and drive of a lot of Jewish economists; in the scientific field, Germany lost its previous first place in atomic research, physics and psychoanalysis; ... with the non-Jewish scientists and artists (e.g. Thomas Mann) who emigrated for political reasons and with the defamation of all works written by Jews, Germany lost its association with international science and international cultural production.”[89]
This points to another precarious standard of criticism. What Hitler allowed to slip away in terms of national potential is – if you think the schoolbook’s text through to the end – completely incomprehensible and absurd: how could a German politician have been so stubborn as to put his racism above the scientific, economic, and cultural benefits of the nation?! The conclusion is also suggested that a German leader – it wouldn’t have to be Hitler – equipped with Jewish economic power and a Jewish atomic bomb, with Jewish labor and military strength, would not have lost the war.[90] So it is not racism that is being pilloried, but certain, today undesirable effects of racist selection. The fascists are thus accused of having made themselves captive to their racism and failing to put it aside when it got in the way of national concerns.
Racist anti-Semitism: scapegoats
Fascist anti-Semitism is downright trivialized when it is lumped together with modern psychology and social psychology:
The “great intellectual achievements of German Jewry (had) given rise to an inferiority complex among the National Socialists, which they now wanted to vent.”[91] And to this end, a war was started against an internal enemy, the same enemy was pursued into enemy territory, and a world war was started that others have counted the corpses of often enough! All out of frustration over the “intellectual achievements of German Jewry” which the “Bohemian corporal” and “painter” was incapable of? Why didn’t the admiration, on which the envy was solely based, lead to open promotion of all those who the authors consider intellectual giants? Why didn’t this follow from them being made the measure of science and education, instead of the high achievers who Hitler supposedly admired being punished with death for those achievements? Obviously, neither the theory about an inferiority complex or an abreaction into a Holocaust needs a rationale. In any case, they only stand for the judgment that Hitler was mentally ill. Therefore, his deeds do not have to be judged as political at all.
The invention of a psychopath tormented by an inferiority complex who had to vent his anger on Jews is continued in the socio-psychological scapegoat theory: the “image of a ‘Jewish world conspiracy’ (was) suitable for excusing one’s own failure and defeat.”[92]
It is claimed that politicians wanted to distract attention from their “own failures” and declared completely uninvolved Jews to be the culprits for a “defeat” they had caused, making them scapegoats. It remains unclear which “defeats” and which “failures” are meant in this case, however, because neither the defeat in the First World War nor the economic crisis or the “Dictate of Versailles” were Hitler’s fault. He did not have to make apologies, nor did he want to excuse his predecessors. Moreover, this theory must claim with counterfactual cynicism that the fascists and other anti-Semites had nothing against Jews! They were supposedly only using them as a distraction from their own sins, simply as long-suffering scapegoats. In “Mein Kampf” and in every speech he gave, Hitler must have been driven solely by the idea of deliberately telling the masses untruths about this religious community; he must therefore have been tormented by terrible pangs of conscience every time Jews were transported to the gas chambers – after all, he supposedly knew that those he had condemned to death purely as a distraction were innocent. Why Hitler chose the Jews to be scapegoats and not, for example, East Frisians, Swiss, or all people of small stature, remains a mystery in this theory seeking to explain anti-Semitism.
The specific feature of fascist racism, its nationalist declaration of hostility to the Jews, is thus reduced in the scapegoat theory to a propaganda trick, a diversionary tactic. It is thus completely at odds with Hitler’s own statements. For him, the Jews were enemies. He identified them as a foreign people without a state within the German state and derived from this a Jewish program of subversion whose ultimate success Hitler wanted to protect Germany and the Aryan race from. That is why he declared war on the Jews and, in order to preserve the state unity of the German people, who were called to higher things, he carried out the Final Solution. He was convinced of the truth of his false explanation for Germany’s decline and acted accordingly uncompromisingly in line with it – which, as we know, is not only the case with fascist politicians.
A unique crime
The claim that the Holocaust was a unique crime in world history serves as a central argument for the negative national morality of the post-war period. The textbooks contain three findings that are intended to support this claim: The Jews who were killed were, according to the first, for the most part not strangers or foreigners at all, but good neighbors and German citizens, and thus “innocent.” The Holocaust, according to the second, was organized as an “industrial mass extermination.” And thirdly, the number of Jews killed becomes an argument: it is unimaginably large.
When examining the standards of these three findings – this concern alone is already considered a sacrilege by many educators – it is not about questioning the “singularity” of the Holocaust by pointing to the countless other massacres that have accompanied the course of world history. Every argument about who deserves the crown for mass murder or genocide shares the standards and concerns of the three pieces of evidence:
■ Those who consider it a unique monstrosity that Hitler, the Chancellor of the Germans, killed masses of completely “innocent” Germans, are on record as saying that they might well judge the matter differently had Hitler only killed foreigners – preferably those against whom he was waging war, i.e. those who, as foreigners, had also been declared enemies of Germany. It is apparently so self-evident that statesmen use their violence to destroy foreign peoples that only the exception to this causes offense. Mass killings, strictly sorted and judged according to the victims’ nation of origin, are more likely to be understood – always with the due disgust, of course.
The fact that every warlord who wants to defeat the “enemy” sends his own “innocent” citizens into the trenches, who then die there in the same large numbers as the Jews in the concentration camps, is therefore supposed to be a completely different thing: after all, in war, the people must defend their homeland, goes the murderous insight. Accordingly, many “innocent” Germans certainly may have also died in the world wars, but – according to nationalist reporting – firstly they did not die senselessly and secondly they were not killed by Germans. Of course, this interpretation does not stand up to scrutiny. In both world wars, German soldiers may not have been killed by German generals themselves, but were at least sent to war by them. And if many soldiers did not have to be conscripted, but went to war with enthusiasm, thus saw a point in dying for their fatherland, then this only shows that nationalistic sentiments are ultimately fatal for citizens, and therefore not a very good argument.
The supposedly inexplicable nature of mass killings applies to every war in which Germans were and are “involved.” The first explanation for the uniqueness of the Holocaust is therefore based solely on a sorting of the purposes for which German statesmen have German citizens die. A war is considered downright honorable compared to a concentration camp if it is waged for reasons that make sense in terms of post-war politics. This then seems to make sense, which is why soldiers – as the strange logic of exchange[93] goes – give their lives for their homeland. Mass deaths in concentration camps, on the other hand, are senseless because the German Jews did not die for a German cause that still enjoys recognition today.
Anyone who considers it particularly outrageous that Germans gave the order to gas Germans must come to terms with the fact that Hitler did not see the Jews as Germans at all. He considered the fact that they had German citizenship to be a desecration of this honor. In his view, only those who belonged to the German people, i.e. the Aryan race, could rightly claim it. This raises the question of which justification for German citizenship is more justified: the fascist one, which cites racial reasons, or the democratic one, which does not sort German citizens into true Germans and Jewish parasites, but applies a different criteria of usefulness to a state’s people.
The argument that the gassing of the Jews by the Germans was a singular monstrosity thus accepts the fraud of a racial differentiation between a citizen and a “Volksgenossen” [a member of the German blood community – translator] instead of criticizing it. It takes the state’s standpoint that only the citizenship granted by the German Reich or the Weimar Republic is valid, while the correction made by Hitler is wrong. Yet it can hardly be denied that in both cases people were declared German purely for reasons of state and others were deprived or denied citizenship.[94]
Hitler was not the only one to attach importance to the fine distinction between belonging to a state and an ethnicity. Every revanchist desire that arises after a lost war knows how to invoke the former nationality as a still valid ethnicity when it comes to claiming the right to regain lost land and lost people. As is well known, the victor always sees things differently. It insists that the new citizenship bestowed on the plunder will, over time, also create a new nationality, that is, if it impresses their new national identity on them clearly enough.
The racist policies of the National Socialists opened up the difference between citizens and people not only externally, but also internally. In addition to the revanchist – “Sudetenland is German!” – they were particularly adept at racial categorization, which led them to believe that certain citizens were wrongly bearing the honorary title of ‘German’. The rest is well known and leads to the second assertion:
■ Since Hitler saw the “fake Germans” as not just an error on the part of the passport authorities, but saw German and foreign Jews as enemies of Germanness, he declared and waged war on them. Only those who do not want to acknowledge this ideological definition of the enemy are affected by that special German dismay when faced with the so-called “industrial mass killing” in the concentration camps which they do not experience when faced with the “industrial mass killing” on the modern battlefields.
One peculiarity of this internal war, which allegedly underlines the “horror of the industrial-looking machinery of extermination,” should not be ignored. Unlike a declaration of war between states, Hitler’s declaration of hostility toward the Jews was not reciprocated by them. The Jews did not arm themselves as a warring party in this war; they did not even think of procuring weapons in time and organizing themselves for resistance. This couldn’t have been due solely to a lack of opportunity or resources. The only German Jews who were surprised by Hitler were those who, like many of their Protestant or Catholic fellow citizens, did not want to believe that Hitler meant his announcements seriously. They saw no objective conflict of interests between themselves as Jews and the fascist state power, and indeed there wan’t any. They had no intention of establishing themselves as an autonomous Jewish state on German territory, nor were they out, as their own “class,” to appropriate the state’s money wealth which was located in the hands of others. Rather, they felt so much like good Germans that Hitler’s claim that they were the downfall of Germany did not seem to them to be a unilateral declaration of war, but completely implausible and downright ridiculous. Initially, they had no reason for collective resistance. If they had been what Hitler’s ideology said about them and made the standard for his policies, he would not have had such an easy time with these people who had been unilaterally declared enemies. They were not; in fact, they were good Germans and behaved as such.[95] The nationalism of the German Jews was the primary reason that the fascist declaration of enmity met with so little organized resistance. This – and not so much the Jewish faith, which is known to legitimize all kinds of warlike behavior – is the basis for one of the images meant to illustrate the finding of “industrial mass killing”: the image of the slaughterhouse where people wait in absolute powerlessness, seemingly patiently and meticulously registered by zealous bureaucrats in uniform, for their death in the gas chamber.
■ Finally, the argument of large numbers. Of course, the figure of five to six million dead Jewish people is impressive. And yet the standpoint of counting the victims is cynical. It insists on quantity as a decisive argument, which in itself is supposed to have a unique quality. It is not interested in the reasons that lead to the extermination of people, nor in the suffering inflicted on each individual. The singularity theorists, however, need the large numbers because they are interested in distinguishing this fascist act from non-German, e.g. colonialist or imperialist massacres.[96] They literally fight over every corpse with the “revisionists” who deny Auschwitz. And if the school materials regret that there are still no “exact figures” about the concentration camp victims, then they have already entered into the wretched “Auschwitz debate”: “It would be desirable to be able to give exact figures in order to put an end to the immoral [why im-?] and macabre dispute as to whether 6 or ‘only’ 4 million Jews were killed, but it is hardly possible to put a definitive end to this question: There are no precise transport and extermination statistics [were they bureaucratic or sloppy, those fascists?], nor can the number of emigrants be precisely determined.”[97]
The dispute is not the result of the imprecision of the numbers. It is not the difficulty of the research material that causes truth-striving historians to arrive at different numbers. This is proven by the “revisionists.” Leuchter and others start from the assumption that the Holocaust did not take place, but was invented by a group of Jewish conspirators against Germany.
They gather and falsify their material for this determination, so they would not be impressed even by a neatly compiled “extermination statistic” signed by Himmler himself. Anyone who wants to prove that what happened really happened takes the doubts of fascists more seriously than they do themselves. This dispute cannot be settled because the “revisionists” cannot ever be convinced. It continues unabated because both sides are only mulling over questions of guilt anyway. The denial of Auschwitz does not serve any “historical truth,” but rather to excuse German fascists. And access to “exact figures” is conversely only considered “desirable” by those critics of fascism who want to use quantitative evidence to point to the uniqueness of the genocide and thus emphasize and relativize the guilt of the Germans.
What did the Germans know?
The time when Germans were still allowed to declare without challenge that they knew nothing about all this is long gone. Conversely, school textbooks have been cultivating the question of guilt for some time now and consider those who seriously claim that they were unaware of the persecution and extermination of the Jews to be untrustworthy, mendacious, or masters at repressing things. The fact that Hitler not only made no secret of his anti-Semitism, but also proclaimed it as an obligatory political doctrine, is not enough for them.
Rather, they need eyewitnesses to mass killings to prove that Germans are telling lies when they deny any knowledge of the concentration camps. For example, they have dug up the following: “Gradually, rumors leaked out about the ... terrible events in the concentration camps and in the occupied territories. It could not be true that there were people in the German nation who allowed themselves to be forced to commit such monstrous crimes.”[98]
Without such evidence, textbooks apparently have no reason to doubt the innocence of the Germans. It does not occur to them that the only Germans who “knew nothing” were those who did not believe that Hitler and company took anti-Semitism seriously. They declare it a question of knowledge, what was solely a question of the German citizen’s nationalistic trust in the state.
Since the textbooks have found what they are looking for in their search for witnesses, the parents and grandparents who supported fascism have to put up with a little criticism:
“The persecution of the Jews by the National Socialists was accepted by the German population with an indifference that is difficult to explain.” [99]
They knew about the persecution of the Jews, but they did not express their protest, the writers hold. The riddle therefore puts the guilt on the Germans and at the same time excuses them in the usual way. The accusation is that they did nothing about it. Consequently, the acquittal says that in their German hearts they were neither stubborn anti-Semites nor trusting Germans. Nor were they simply “indifferent,” but rather “indifferent in a way that is hard to explain.” This does not explain the spread of anti-Semitism, but the lack of popular resistance to it. They were therefore, as always, unwilling participants.
Yet even today school textbooks still insist that most Germans could not have known anything about the “terrible events.” They are spinning another fable that is intended to shed a better light on the German people. Although the persecution of the Jews was carried out quite publicly, most Germans could not have known anything about the “Final Solution” program, the “actual” Holocaust. They point out that the “Final Solution” had been declared a “secret Reich matter” by Himmler himself and use this to derive the Germans’ anti-anti-Semitism. Fear of mass protest is said to have persuaded Himmler to keep the systematic extermination of the Jews in the eastern territories secret.[100] The fascists, according the fable, had to hide the truth from the people. Because if they had found out about the extermination policy toward their Jewish fellow citizens, the days of the Third Reich would have been numbered.[101]
The NSDAP leadership had indeed decided that the German people were not yet “ready” for the truth.[102] However, this decision obviously did not apply to the everyday persecution of the Jews. From 1933 onwards, the NSDAP unhesitatingly imposed this and many other things on people and, as could be seen from the reactions of the Germans, it was not mistaken about the people’s “degree of readiness.”[103] The fable spread by the textbooks thus disproves itself by only discovering the Germans’ selfless spirit of resistance to anti-Semitism during the “Final Solution.” In every anti-Semitic decree up to the beginning of the war – and it is well known that these did not consist solely of empty threats – there was no sign of this willingness to undertake an uprising against the state in order to save their Jewish fellow citizens. But what can we make of an anti-Semitism that is only directed against gassing, but tolerates all the other attacks on the bases of the Jews’ existence? What should we make of a spirit of resistance that only awakens when the “Final Solution” is initiated, but is still full of trust in the state when it comes to the “Nuremberg Laws,” the “Reichskristallnacht,” and all the subsequent prohibition decrees? Only those who want to cling to the idea that there was never any kind of agreement between the German people and the fascist leadership fall for such fables. Consequently, the secrecy could only have been ordered out of fear of the people’s will to resist – a people who, in the meantime, were working diligently for the victory of the German cause, fighting, having children and from whom enough people could be recruited to deport and gas Jews.[104]
The unwanted lesson:
Instead of senseless destruction, sensible useThis is what students are supposed to learn:
The mass extermination of German and foreign Jews was the greatest crime in world history. It was unique in quality and quantity. The Germans will forever be in debt to the Jews because of it, although Hitler and his leadership team alone hated the Jews fanatically. The German people, on the other hand, were at most caught up in traditional anti-Semitism. The reason they did not prevent the Holocaust was partly due to the fact that the program to exterminate the Jews was kept secret by the fascists. In a democracy, students learn, people would never be capable of such a crime. They would be immune to senseless mass murders of fellow German citizens. Because in a democracy, racism has no chance as a state doctrine. Freedom of religion prevails here, and Article 3 (3) of the Basic Law applies. When racism does appear – which students can best recognize by the fact that foreigners have their barracks set on fire and “Heil Hitler” is shouted – it must be fought. There is also “everyday racism,” which is not so easy to detect. That’s why one always has to be friendly to foreigners who behave well here. Otherwise, foreigners will get the wrong idea. The following insights, on the other hand, are unwanted:
1. The anti-racism of democracy is enshrined in Article 3 (3) of the Basic Law. If in this country “no one may be disadvantaged or favored because of sex, descent, race, language, homeland and origin, faith, religious or political views,” then this does not mean that the interests of women and men, of Catholics and Jews, of blacks and whites, of communists and democrats are proven right. Rather, it simply asserts that such differences between people have no weight under German law: Women and men, yellows and reds, monarchists and socialists have equal rights. It is not equal treatment, nor the equal validity of different interests that is promised, but only equality before the law of the German speaking state authority.
This makes it clear that law is not a matter of interpretation by those affected. They may feel entitled to many things themselves and place their own moral rights above political law. What justice is, however, is articulated, decided, and enforced by the political power alone. The only promise is that everyone will receive the treatment to which they are entitled by law. Nothing more and nothing less.
2. With this equality postulate, the democratic society only incriminates discrimination that does not fit in with its concerns. It is already apparent from Art. 3(3) that discrimination on economic grounds is not prohibited.
It is not forbidden for people who have been made unemployed to be denied access to food, nor is it frowned upon to use old age as a reason to impose a long-term pension crisis on people. Sorting by grades is not frowned upon, nor is the fact that social background regularly forms the basis of school selection.
All these differences and a few more do not just fit in with the raison d'être of democratic capitalism. Rather, it creates them, is then based on them, and ensures their permanent reproduction. First of all, there is the sorting of people into owners and non-owners of private property, which ensures that the company and land owners and their managers do not run out of workers and employees. Further social differences emerge from this: since the economic and social differences are based on the opposition of classes, political supervision is needed that does not strive for equalization but for maintaining the functionality of the opposition. The means of violence of the bourgeois state apparatus that are necessary for this are used to sort people again. This time not according to the quality of their property, but according to their powers: political rule with its functionaries on the one hand and the ruled, the people, on the other.
3. This is how democratic capitalism works in principle. The exclusion of the majority of producers from the wealth that they themselves have created is the substantial “discrimination” on which this society thrives and which it therefore elevates to the status of the first good worthy of protection in the relevant articles of the Basic Law and secures through valid rule: “Property and the right of inheritance shall be guaranteed.” (Art. 14)
Equality before the law – Art. 3(3) – contributes to maintaining inequality before private property. On the established basis of economic opposites, equality before the law ensures that people sort themselves according to their objective position in relation to ownership of capital.
The progressive social studies teacher occasionally notices this. He is then outraged that the equality of the law in criminal proceedings imposes the same fine on the homeless shoplifter as on the yuppie who wanted to “dare to do something.” He thinks this is unfair because one has a source of money and the other lives on benefits. The fact that the same right encounters highly unequal conditions here is not a shortcoming of the law, but its purpose. It is not intended to shake the economic foundations of society, but to maintain them by preventing the owner and the ownerless from appropriating someone else’s use value free of charge. Only the permanent exclusion from material wealth, called “protection of private property,” which is achieved through the compulsion to acquire goods not according to need but solely according to the ability to pay of one’s private purse, ensures that the majority of the population must strive for work in the service of others. It is this enforced equality before the law that ensures that capital does not lack a regular supply of cheap and willing wage laborers.
The social differences and contrasts that have been created are reproduced in the competitive events of this society with the participation of all citizens. In a democracy, neither origin nor race, neither faith nor political opinion is considered a sufficient reason to deny a person participation in the competition for social positions. The equality of all citizens before the law opens up equal opportunities for them; citizens should take advantage of them themselves and make something of them through their hard work. This society is not only not bothered by the fact that a working class child can rise to the top leadership level. With this procedure, it aims to regulate access to leadership positions not through inheritance, but through long-term proof of merit. If a working class child meets the performance criteria better than the child of a professor, then they are more qualified regardless of their social background. The fact that the administrators of this system of ascent and descent also show off with high achievers and display something as a social feat which in fact has its rationale in the social interest of entrusting leadership positions to a pure “meritocratic elite” is then seen by idealists of democracy as proof that the social is the purpose of the thing.
The overall order of the democratic community is not thrown into disarray because the hierarchy of positions does not change when there are people moving up and people moving down. On the contrary: the best, i.e. those who have submitted to the predetermined sorting criteria with the most success, are given the most important positions! This is the principle that democratic selection follows. It underlines once again how important those positions are to democratic society that secure power politically, legally and ideologically. It needs a selected, trained elite of professional nationalists so that the economic elite of the owners or representatives of property find the best conditions for increasing capitalist property for the benefit of the company and the nation.
This means that only those discriminations, i.e. distinctions, that are appropriate are applied to the employment of people who are sorted into wage labor. Their working capacity must have a qualification that is in demand and be subject to the conditions of wage labor in terms of income, working hours, work content, etc. No other individual characteristics play a role here. It would be inappropriate to take them into account. This relates not only to the needs of wage laborers, who, as is well known, were not born with the prospect of subjecting their own lives to factory or office work. This also relates to those sorting criteria that Article 3(3) excludes: Neither skin color nor religious belief, neither gender nor ancestry represent in themselves a special obstacle or advantage to the capitalist use of labor assets. As long as dark skinned people, Muslims, Volga Germans, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses do their work to the satisfaction of a company, they are used in the same way as the other light-skinned, Protestant and native Germans, i.e. completely equally and with equal rights.[105]
5. However, even democracies are no strangers to racist standards of assessment, despite their fundamental insistence on equal opportunities in competition. The fact that these are in no way in conflict with competition is shown by the fact that they are regularly used to explain the results of competition. When, for example, performance and success diverge in school, i.e. when it becomes evident that the individual is not the architect of his own fortune with his absolute performance, science offers up human nature with unsightly regularity. This is then used to prove that no amount of effort can compensate for a lack of talent. Consequently, the teacher has not weeded out the student, but has merely taken account of their natural disposition. Strangely enough, scientists only discover this inner programming for failure after the person has failed the test. Before that, the mendacious performance principle also applied to him.
This racism is just as widespread in democracy as a second racism, which is occasionally even brought into play before a person has to compare himself with others. This person is then practically excluded from proving himself in competition and in employment. Anyone who has been proven to lack political decency or a sense of right and wrong, who has been involved in organizations that are considered “criminal associations” or “anti-constitutional parties,” must assume that certain bourgeois careers are no longer open to him, just like somebody with multiple previous convictions. And since deviation from political decency in a democracy cannot really have any reasons, let alone good reasons, for all convinced democrats, criminal intent, weakness of character, or a mental derangement are quickly identified as justifying a ban from a profession, loss of honor, committal to a psychiatric ward, or transfer to Stammheim prison.
Recently, another racist criterion has made its way into the world of work: Immigrants, as not only the regulars at the tavern know, but is now the law, have to rank behind Germans when it comes to the demand for work or housing, simply because they are foreigners. They are always suspicious to democratic politicians – which is why Article 3(3) and other rights only apply to them to a limited extent or not at all. The leaders of democratic nation states assume that everyone cares about the national interests of “their” state as much as their own private interests. They treat nationals and foreigners as if their citizenship were a matter of their own nature. This is why the decision to admit foreigners to the domestic labor market is never made dependent on supply and demand. At the beginning, there is always the political assumption that “foreign workers” must always be assumed to pose a loyalty risk, quite apart from the examination of their skills and abilities.
There are calculated exceptions to this racism, such as those resulting from the state of the national labor market, but the fact that foreigners are occasionally desired as a labor reserve does not change the general suspicion. This already shows the special treatment to which foreign workers are subjected. Democracy grants its “guest workers” only a reduced wage laborer status, which is interpreted more or less narrowly depending on the considerations that have to be taken into account in the country of origin. However, mobility and political rights are always restricted because their servitude is not accorded full political trust.
A transition to tougher sorting measures is the order of the day in democratic states when they find themselves in a state-political emergency due to foreigners or foreign countries. If, for example, foreign policy affairs intensify into acute hostility towards another state, then it is executed on that part of the foreign population that has been sent abroad to earn money. The latent suspicion then immediately becomes virulent and is no longer subject to a calculation based on economic criteria. These foreigners are then barracked, deported, or killed. Furthermore, all foreigners and other suspects – in addition to all those who are considered useless or contagious – are registered as a preventive measure, even if their special treatment is still within democratic limits. So in the midst of everyday democratic life, democratic politicians are thinking further ahead and remembering that ultimately it is always ethnicity that decides between good and evil.
Democrats do not need to apprentice themselves to a Hitler for this racism.
[58] Lehrplan Geschichte für die Klasse 10, Bremen 1982, p. 26.
[59] Erlebnis Geschichte, Bd. 9, Oldenbourg 1986, p. 24.
[60] From a survey conducted by teachers among primary school students on what they wanted to know about fascism.
[61] M. Brumlik, Erziehung nach Mölln oder im Gedenken unterweisen, in: Erziehung & Wissenschaft, 4/1995, p. 9.
[62] Ibid. Not even Adorno, whose “Education after Auschwitz” Brumlik and co. refer to, went that far.
[63] See: Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 35, Erlebnis Geschichte, et al., p. 23, Didakt. Grundriß für den Geschichtsunterricht, Bd. 4, Paderborn 1969, p. 42.
[64] Spiegel der Zeiten, Bd. 4 (B), p. 80, Frankfurt 1971.
[65] The differences that exist are in the way racism is practiced – which will be discussed later.
[66] Erlebnis Geschichte, et al., p. 23. According to this logic, one could also claim that Hitler, after all a son of a people steeped in anti-Jewish tradition, was appointed to lead the people in order to take the traditional message seriously! In the same way, the entire people could be said to be suffering from this pathological delusion.
[67] Ibid., p. 23.
[68] Ibid.
[69] According to this logic, a judge grants the molester mitigating circumstances because his victim was wearing make-up. Following the same logic, the critic of German xenophobia points to the contributions of foreign workers to the German economy. Consequently, the foreigners themselves are always to blame for the assaults if they do not (or are not allowed to) contribute anything to Germany.
[70] H. Dichanz/N. Hauer/P. Hölzle (eds.), Verdeckter Antisemitismus, Arbeitshilfen für politische Bildung der Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Bonn 1994, p. 54.
[71] Moreover, the school textbooks perversely concede that the political and legal equality of people of Jewish faith in the 19th century not only failed to eradicate anti-Semitism, but conversely initiated its radicalization – strangely enough, not in Russia, where equality was not achieved, but above all in Germany. Since, as we know, Hitler was not at all concerned with reversing this equality, and he neither called on the Jews to convert to one of the state-sponsored Christian religions nor banned them – only – from their professions or expropriated them – only – economically, fascist anti-Semitism probably drew up and implemented a declaration of enmity for which there are no historical models. Pointing out that Jews were persecuted and killed even before 1933 is useless. We need to find out why Chrysostom and the Spanish Inquisition, why Luther, why Voltaire, why Kant and Nietzsche and finally why Hitler saw the Jews as a “plague of devils” (Luther). It is obvious that anti-Semitism had other causes after the separation of church and state than during the reign of the Pope. And if Luther wanted to convert the followers of the Jewish faith to the true faith, i.e. to his faith, then this points to a different declaration of enmity than that formulated by Hitler, who saw Bolshevism as an attempt by the Jews to achieve world domination.
[72] Erlebnis Geschichte, et al., p. 24
[73] See: M. Luther, On the Jews and their Lies (1543).
[74] Spiegel der Zeiten, et al., p. 82.
[75] A. Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 751.
[76] Loosely based on Reagan in reference to Hitler or loosely based on Hitler in reference to Reagan.
[77] One exception can be found in: Der Nationalsozialismus, pp. 62, 66, where the context is at least mentioned. Conclusions are missing. Otherwise, the Sinti and Roma, Poles and other “sub-humans” murdered by Hitler often fall victim to this pre-sorting at the same time.
[78] A. Hitler, Mein Kampf, passim.
[79] It is irrelevant here whether they have deliberately falsified the context or whether their anti-totalitarianism has blinded them in this respect.
[80] Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 35.
[81] Didakt. Grundriß, et al, ch. 41.
[82] Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 36.
[83] See: Wannseekonferenz-Protokolle, cited in: Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 63.
[84] Didakt. Grundriß, et al., ch. 52.
[85] Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 36.
[86] Erlebnis Geschichte, et al.,p. 24.
[87] See: Fragen an die Geschichte, Bd. 4, Bielefeld 1971, p. 138.
[88] It is not surprising that many textbooks do not, on the other hand, emphasize that the Germans who emigrated were able to leave in time and were then relatively safe from fascist attacks abroad: “On the other hand, the emigrants bore witness to the fact that there was another Germany than National Socialist Germany.” (Didaktischer Grundriß, op. cit., p. 42) The fact that many emigrants saw themselves in this way does not make things any better: it was not that people brought themselves to safety, but rather did a service to the real Germany.
[89] Didakt. Grundriß, et al., p. 42.
[90] And indeed, from 1933 onwards, German Jews petitioned Hitler or Hindenburg for a dispensation from persecution, declaring their willingness to give everything for Germany, including their lives if necessary. Like the textbook authors who valued the intelligent crème de la crème of German Jews for their contribution to fame and success, these presumptive victims were also aware that the reference to their lives and what they intended to do with them would count for nothing with any state power, let alone the fascist one. They believed that it would help them if they referred to the merits they had earned in some field of national honor. They wanted to present merits that were considered as such in the eyes of the National Socialists. But they couldn’t, because as a Jew you couldn’t present any merits that weren’t immediately interpreted as an attempt to ingratiate yourself with the leadership in a corrosive manner. So none of this helped them any more than it did the Einsteins and Bubers. Even Hindenburg took slight offense at the fact that Hitler did not even exempt “deserving comrades” from the First World War from his sorting laws. German post-war military scientists took this “controversy” to its logical conclusion and determined that Hitler would probably not have lost the Second World War with Jewish cannon fodder – and of course with the Jewish atomic bomb. The suggestion that good German compatriots of the Jewish faith and non-racial foreigners should not be gassed, but rather burned to death, was well received by Himmler. He considered it perfectly compatible with Nazi ideology for subhumans to work themselves to death for Germany in underground arms factories, digging trenches and building roads in enemy territory (see the chapter on Schindler’s List in this volume, p. 273).
[91] Didakt. Grundriß, p. 41.
[92] Spiegel der Zeiten, p. 82.
[93] The chapter “The Second World War” explains why wars are sometimes declared pointless.
[94] Moreover, the Weimar politicians were just as familiar with the treatment of foreigners that characterizes today’s democracy as Hitler was: the desire of foreigners to be registered as German citizens initially counted for nothing. As early as 1919, the internment of “Eastern Jews” was discussed among the interior ministers of the federal states, which was intended to deter further non-German refugees. (See: E. Jungfer, Flüchtlingsbewegungen und Rassismus, in: Diekmann, Chr./Jungfer, E., Arbeitsmigration und Flucht, Beiträge zur nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik Vol. 11, Berlin, 1993, p. 17) And how Hitler dealt with foreigners shortly after the “seizure of power” is even occasionally found in school textbooks. As is the case today, the view then was that citizenship was not based on the free will of people who happened to be born on a particular state territory and thus happened to be within the reach of a particular state power, but on a political interest in them.
[95] See the diaries of Victor Klemperer. (V. Klemperer, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten. Diaries 1933-1945, Berlin 1995).
[96] There are already fascist movements at home and abroad that use this argument and distance themselves from Hitler’s radical anti-Semitism. For example, by pointing to Mussolini and his theorists, they advocate a “fascism with a human and ecological face.”
[97] Der Nationalsozialismus, p. 64.
[98] Spiegel der Zeiten, p. 44.
[99] Erlebnis Geschichte, et al., p. 28.
[100] For example, an SS-Obersturmführer is quoted as expressing his conviction “that the German people, when they learn of these exterminations and when they are confirmed by neutral foreigners, will not tolerate the Nazis one day longer”. (see Spiegel, op. cit., p. 76).
[101] On the occasion of the publication of Goldhagen’s book, Der Spiegel devoted a cover story to this topic (Spiegel, 21/1996).
[102] Spiegel 21/1996, p. 52.
[103] The Holocaust, i.e. the extermination measures from 1943 onwards, was something different, even for the SS. They must have been aware of the importance of their plan – which they deemed necessary. Himmler is said to have told Gauleiters: “Perhaps at a later date we will consider telling the German people a little more about this. I think it is better that we – all of us – have taken this on for our people ... and keep the secret with us to our grave.” (Spiegel, op. cit., p. 52) The German people should not be burdened with the knowledge, Himmler decided. He believed that the people already understood the necessity, but he did not want to test whether they would tolerate the whole truth about the necessity. The fascists therefore had little fear of a refusal to obey. They did not want to put the resilience of trust in the leadership to an overly extreme test. Why Himmler actually ordered the “Final Solution” to be kept secret, even though he must have been aware that it could not be carried out with such an expenditure of manpower and material, is another matter. Perhaps the German leadership was really convinced that a little more persuasion was necessary to gain the full support of the people – including the strangely ignorant military officers who considered gassing to be “dishonorable and cowardly.” Perhaps the foreign countries were supposed to learn as little as possible. Perhaps the fascists just wanted to be celebrated as the saviors of the people after the deed was done. In any case, the motive of not unnecessarily jeopardizing the people’s trust is not only known to fascists. After chemical accidents, for example, the full extent of the damage is regularly only discovered “very late.” And sometimes it only comes to light by chance that a state – such as the USA – has subjected entire parts of its territory and the people living there to large-scale radioactive tests. Out of political necessity, of course! The fact that the state has always expected a lot from its citizens does not mean that it stops making such demands when it is no longer entirely sure of the people’s approval.
[104] See: The Goldhagen Debate.
[105] If there are obstacles to use due to religion, gender, language, etc., then the management reacts just as consistently as with a worker who is constantly ill or who lacks another specific qualification. Special treatment then takes place because of the effect of the particularity on exploitation, but not because of the particularity.