At first reflection, last stands would appear to be exclusively the province of doomed cultures. What could be more final than a last stand? And yet, they often signify precisely the opposite: that the culture that expends its all in one final act of military resistance, and is then subdued, can often emerge the ultimate victor should it be culturally and religiously strong enough to survive the ensuing oppression. The history of the Jewish people offers us just such an example. In two great battles, millennia apart, the Jews were not only defeated but killed nearly to the last man. And yet, less than a century after the second of these existential struggles, they not only have regained their biblical homeland but also boast one of the world’s most efficient militaries, devoted solely to the concept of Never Again.
The Siege of Masada and the Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto both mark ends. Masada signified, along with the destruction of the Second Temple, the end of Jewish political autonomy at the beginning of the Roman Empire; the physical annihilation of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 spelled the end of Poland’s once-thriving Jewish intellectual, legal, and commercial community and the beginning of the horror known as the Final Solution. That the Jews have overcome both is a testimony to the power of culture and faith in the teeth of two of the mightiest and most ruthless military machines the world has ever known.
The story of Masada, as we know it, has come down to us through the writings of the historian Titus Flavius Josephus. A member of an aristocratic, romanized Jewish family, Josephus lived and worked in the first century A.D. during the reigns of the last three Julian emperors and the Flavians who ruled between 69 and 96 A.D.—a remarkably turbulent time in Roman, Jewish, and Christian history. He was the son of a priest and, on his mother’s side, descended from the Hasmonean dynasty that had ruled Israel until Herod in 37 B.C., and throughout his life—no matter which side he was on—he traveled in high circles. A diplomat, a politician, a warrior, a rebel, he began his career working for the Romans, switched sides during the first Jewish-Roman War, was captured and enslaved by the Romans but was granted his freedom by the general Vespasian in 69 A.D., after prophesying correctly that the military commander would become emperor of Rome. Josephus was with Titus—another future emperor—during the Siege of Jerusalem and witnessed the fiery destruction of Herod’s Temple in the year 70. He wrote extensively about his own times, producing his magnum opus around 75 A.D., The Jewish War, a work whose most riveting section contains the only known account of the Siege of Masada in the year 73 A.D.
The question is, can we believe him?
The Masada story itself is as stirring and tragic as any in the literature. A small group of about 960 Jewish rebels, known as the Sicarii, took refuge after the fall of Jerusalem in a hilltop fortress called Masada overlooking the desert and the Dead Sea, about 33 miles from the city. Led by the charismatic Eleazar Ben Yair, they were an offshoot of the Zealots, who opposed Roman rule in the province of Judea. The Sicarii were especially deadly assassins—a sica was a dagger—who would strike down their victims, whether Romans or imperial sympathizers, in public, and then melt away into the crowd. In short, hit men.
After the fall of Jerusalem, the Romans continued to mop up Jewish resistance around the province. One by one they rolled up the strongholds until at last there was only Masada—a forbidding and majestic mesa rising some 450 meters out of the desert1 and topped by a fort and an opulent palace, terraced into the hillside, built by Herod himself as a last refuge in case the Jews tried to depose him and restore the Hasmoneans. After Herod’s death in 4 B.C., the Romans enlarged the province of Judea to include Samaria and Idumea and took possession of Masada with a small garrison, but the Sicarii overwhelmed and slaughtered the troops and occupied the redoubt as they prepared for a millenarian last stand. And so it was toward the nearly impregnable fortress of Masada that the Roman general Flavius Silva and the legendary Tenth Legion (one of Caesar’s own), numbering about eight thousand fighting men, marched out and prepared to lay siege.
Everybody knows the ending: after three months or so, the Romans managed to construct a broad ramp and roll a huge siege engine up to the walls.2 Upon breaking through, they found nearly every man, woman, and child in the fort lying dead on the ground. The Jews had chosen death by their own swords rather than at the hands of the Romans.
It’s come down to us as a tale of good vs. evil—as indeed, representationally, it is. The Siege of Masada, which ended, as best we can reckon, in April of 74 A.D., is part of the foundational mythos of an independent Israel and a source of national pride. Upon completion of basic training, some new members of the Israel Defense Forces’ Armored Corps complete their swearing-in atop the fort, vowing, “Masada shall not fall again.” Masada is the alpha as the Holocaust is the omega to Israel’s defiant existential motto.
History, however, is never quite as tidy as we would wish it to be. In every human conflict, both sides think they are in the right; both sides fight for something that matters deeply to them, whether in retrospect noble or base. In Othello, Iago thinks himself the good guy; on the Ides of March, the plotters who killed Julius Caesar called themselves the Liberators, believing they were acting in the best interests of the Roman Republic. History may indeed be written by the victors, but sometimes the losers have the last laugh after all. Context is everything.
The first century was a particularly complex and vexatious time for the inhabitants of the Roman Empire. The forty-year reign of the former Gaius Octavius had put an end to the Republic, mostly by avoiding the question of whether it would ever return, but no one was quite sure what was going to come after him. The first Roman emperor had never quite formally assumed the title—being “dictator for life,” as his great-uncle Caesar had been, ensured that Augustus’s patron’s own life had been immediately cut short. So Imperator Caesar Augustus he became.
The bloody transition from Republic to Empire, however, was only the second most important event of the period. At the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, the carpenter’s son known as Jesus of Nazareth came into the world and changed it far more significantly than did Augustus. If the historical Jesus was born in Bethlehem during the reign of Herod, he would have had to have been born before 4 B.C. Luke 2:1 specifically states that Jesus was born when Caesar Augustus issued a call for an empire-wide census for taxation purposes. Augustus died in the year 14, to be succeeded by Tiberius, who reigned until 37 A.D., after the death of Christ. Both Josephus and Tacitus write that Jesus was put to death by the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, which places the Crucifixion somewhere between the years 26, when Pilate assumed the governorship of Judea, and 36/37.
It’s a historical confluence of immense moral, political, and literary significance: the birth of the Roman Empire and the birth of the Christian Redeemer occur practically simultaneously. By the time Tiberius died (or was strangled) at his home on Capri—he hadn’t lived in Rome for a decade—Jesus had also died, and so two great antithetical forces, the new Roman Empire and the fledgling faith of Christianity (then regarded as a Jewish sect) were now set upon each other. There could be, as it turned out, only one.
Messianic prophecies were in the air3; the promise of Jesus was one of many. In the midst of this theological turmoil, the destruction of the Temple was another signal event: the beginning of the Jewish Diaspora. Surely the end was nigh. Most Jews in the Empire had been content with Roman rule; the Romans were, after all, liberal in their attitude toward religion (having co-opted and accommodated many native religions in the conquered provinces to foster secular harmony). But a sizable minority of Jews continued to be exercised not only by theological fine points but by issues of nationalism.4 Even though this was not in their best interests, politically speaking, it didn’t matter. In the first century, with Rome expanding and Jesus preaching the new Kingdom of Heaven, there could be nothing but trouble ahead.
As the eminent British historian Paul Johnson5 notes in A History of the Jews, “There is no parallel to this sequence of events in any other territory Rome rules. Why were the Jews so restless? It was not because they were a difficult, warlike, tribal and essentially backward society, like the Parthians, who gave the Romans constant trouble on the eastern fringe.… On the contrary, the real trouble with the Jews was that they were too advanced, too intellectually conscious to find alien rule acceptable. The Greeks had faced the same problem with Rome. They had solved it by submitting physically and taking the Romans over intellectually. Culturally, the Roman empire was Greek, especially in the East.6 Educated people spoke and thought in Greek, and Greek modes set the standards in art and architecture, drama, music and literature.7 So the Greeks never had any sense of cultural submission to Rome. Therein lay the difficulty with the Jews…”
In considering the history of the Romans, the Greeks are often regarded as an afterthought, who bequeathed their phalanxes and priapic gods to the Romans and then wandered off the pages and into obscurity. But such was not the case. The Romans had first encountered the Greeks on the Italian peninsula, where cities planted by the seafaring Greeks dotted the coastlines not only of Italy but of the entire Mediterranean. Via Alexander, the Greeks had founded Alexandria and ruled Egypt as the pharaohs of the Ptolemaic dynasty.8 Greek was the language of the intellectuals, the tongue of poets and philosophers. If you wanted to influence the course of events during the early Roman Empire, you wrote, and thought, in Greek.
The problem was, the Greeks and the Jews did not get along. Although the two populations were roughly equal, it was the Greeks who controlled the intellectual currents of the Roman Empire, and they had little use for Hebrew language or culture: “The culture-contempt on the Greek side, and the love-hate which some educated Jews had for Greek culture, were sources of constant tension. In a way, the relationship between Greeks and Jews in antiquity was akin to the dealings between Jews and Germans in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, though that comparison should not be pushed too far…”
As Johnson notes, the Greek texts were celebrations of honor and virtue; the Jewish texts were “plans of action.” The Greeks tried to understand the world; the Jews wished to transform it into what they thought it should be, whether through education or revolution and, if need be, martyrdom. The Greeks had many gods, the Jews had one. It was a Jewish culture into which fit comfortably the Maccabees’9 revolt against the Hellenistic Seleucids—an empire that stretched from Asia Minor throughout the Levant and into Mesopotamia, Persia, and Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Seleucid imperial line was descended from one of Alexander’s generals, Seleucus, the commander in chief of the Companion cavalry that had destroyed the Achaemenid Persian Empire under Darius III in 330 B.C.
It would be wrong, therefore, to see the principal cultural conflict of the time as being between the Jews and the Romans. Compared to the Jews and the Greeks, the Romans had no culture to speak of, other than militarism. The greatest example of Roman literature, Virgil’s Aeneid, did not come along until 19 B.C., as a celebration of Rome’s foundational myth and presented to Augustus. Even then, Virgil stole his main character from Homer’s Iliad.
The Romans, true to their custom, were also religiously indifferent to the exotic deities of conquered peoples. They made room for foreign gods in their own religion when and as needed, and largely left matters of theology to the locals. Jesus, in Pilate’s eyes, was merely a civil troublemaker, not the Son of God. But in the eastern Mediterranean the real conflict was between the Greeks and the Hellenized gentiles, on one side, and the monotheistic Jews who believed in the God of Israel; neither could accommodate the beliefs of the other. Both groups made up sizable portions of the population of Alexandria, the foremost city of learning in the world at that time, and their battles were fought out both in the streets and within the famous Library itself. They were also in conflict elsewhere across the province of Judea, in Hellenized cities such as Caesarea. When the Great Revolt began in 66 A.D., it began in Caesarea, spread to Jerusalem, and ended at Masada.
The Jews rose against the Greco-Romans on multiple occasions during the latter half of the first century and into the first couple of decades of the second, resulting not only in the destruction of Herod’s Temple but also in the Diaspora—those who were not killed or Hellenized during and after the sack of Jerusalem by Titus were sold into slavery around the empire; the long history of the Jews as outsiders begins here. These uprisings came in the wake of millenarian prophecy, which resulted in divisive theological squabbling among various Jewish factions, not only about apocalyptic visions of the end of the world but also regarding the coming of the Moshiach (Messiah). If the end was near, why not fight, whether to hasten its coming, end the misery of the present, or both?
Thus, the popularity of the Book of Daniel, which exercised an enormous influence on Jewish thought of the time. For many, if not most, Jews, Judaism was destined to be a minority faith—a light unto the Gentiles, perhaps, but still reserved for the select. Jewish Jews were believers, not proselytizers, Hellenized and romanized Jews, such as Josephus, were what today we might characterize as liberal or Reform Jews, culturally Jewish but happy to live and even worship under non-Jewish rule, such as that of the Romans, who didn’t much care about the Jews unless they revolted.10 Daniel, however, promised not only the restoration of an earthly Hebraic kingdom but future immortality via the Resurrection, with the dead directed either to Heaven or Hell at the last trump, and the martyrs for the faith given their eternal reward. The Pharisees in particular seized upon the concept of the afterlife (denied by the Sadducees), in which the arc of history finally terminated in divine justice—the scriptural basis, it might be argued, for the contemporary Jewish trust in the ultimate rule of law.
The Zealots,11 who traced their history to the year 6 A.D., and in particular to the Sicarii, took the Pharisaic belief in immanence a step further, into the here and now. Not only Romans but Jewish collaborators (the forerunners of the kapos who manned the German extermination camps during World War II) went under their knives, in order to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven. Thus, the historical Jesus was not a one-off, a malcontent, an outlier, but a figure squarely within radical Jewish movements of the time. When Pilate, the governor of Judea, consigned Jesus’s fate to the whim of the Passover crowd that chose the murderer Barabbas12 over the pacifist insurrectionist Jesus for commutation,13 the choice was a matter of supreme indifference to the Romans (to their later regret) but something with theological, political, and cultural resonance to the crowd.14 Barabbas might live to kill again, but Jesus was an existential menace—which, in historical fact, proved to be true.
The Sicarii, therefore, were less a threat to the Roman religion (expansionist and accommodationist) than to the political order of a minor province, far less important militarily and politically than Syria, which was on the front lines of combat and would remain so throughout the Empire, past its fall, into the Byzantine period, and up through the Crusades. The Romans could not have Jews killing other Jews—or Roman officials, especially for liberationist aims. It was Roman policy to put down any revolt, and so all aspects of Jewish rebellion, whether for religious or political reasons, had to be eliminated. The Crucifixion was just another exercise in capital punishment for non-Romans.15
From the Roman point of view, Herod16 had been installed as king of the Jews in order to replace the Hasmonean dynasty with a client regent and to thus eliminate any threat of Hasmonean revanchism; Josephus himself was living proof of that, a scion of the Hebraic dynasty transformed into a Roman official in Judea. That Josephus—turned rebel, turned Roman slave, turned Roman official again—found a place at the Emperor Vespasian’s side was unusual but hardly surprising; that the Empire lasted as long as it did was a testament to the wisdom of this approach of co-opting potential foes.17
And so Josephus was there, at the Siege of Jerusalem, to record its appalling bloodshed. Vespasian had begun the campaign to pacify restive Judea in the spring of 67 A.D., but had turned over command of the operation to his son, Titus, during the Year of the Four Emperors two years later, following the death of Nero—a year which saw Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and finally Vespasian himself seize the vacant throne. Titus invested the Holy City and reduced its inhabitants to a starving, helpless rabble before launching his final attack in the year 70. Jerusalem had long been protected by its formidable walls—actually three concentric walls, with the innermost Old Wall, dating from the time of David and Solomon, being the sturdiest—but the Romans knew both how to build walls and how to reduce them to rubble with their massive siege engines. With the city on the verge of not simply capture but annihilation, Josephus claims he addressed the Jewish leaders in Hebrew:
… adding his own insistent appeals that they should spare their country, beat out the flames that were ready to lick round the sanctuary, and restore the sacrifices which they owed to God. There was no response from the people, cowed into reticence as they were, but the warlord heaped abuse and curses on Josephus and ended his rant by saying that he would never fear capture of the city, as it belonged to God. At this Josephus shouted back: “And of course you have kept it so immaculate for God, haven’t you? No pollution of the holy place—oh no! No insults to the God you hope will fight for you, no interruption to his accustomed sacrifices! You impious wretch, if anyone starved you of your daily sustenance you would take him as an enemy—so how can you expect the God you have robbed of his ever-continuous worship to be your ally in this war? And how can you blame your own sins on the Romans? They have carefully respected our traditions throughout, and are now pressing you to restore to God the sacrifices which you, not they, have cut off. Who would not groan and lament for the city at this absurd inversion of roles—aliens and enemies rectifying the effects of your own impiety, while you, a Jew, a child of the laws, treat it with more cruel contempt than anything coming from them?”
The Jews refused to surrender to the turncoat, and so Titus, in true Roman fashion, decreed no mercy.18 The Temple was fired and the wholesale annihilation of the mostly Jewish inhabitants began:
As the temple burned anything found was looted and anyone caught was killed. The slaughter was massive—no pity shown for age, no regard for rank: children, old men, laymen, priests were killed indiscriminately, and war extended its grip to encompass people of every class and condition, no matter whether they were begging for mercy or trying to resist. As the fire spread ever further, the roar of the flames mingled with the groans of the dying. The height of the hill and the mass of the burning edifice made it look as if the whole city was on fire: and as for that noise, it would be impossible to imagine anything more dominant or more terrifying. There were the war cries of the Roman legions as they went into action; the yells of the rebels surrounded by fire and sword; the screams of the civilians trapped up there as they ran panic-stricken straight into the enemy and met their fate. The clamour on the hill was duplicated by the crowd in the city below, and many who were too wasted by starvation to retain the power of speech now gathered enough strength to moan and wail when they saw the temple on fire. The din was intensified by the booming echoes sent back from Peraea and the surrounding mountains.
Yet more terrible than the noise was the human suffering. The temple hill, one huge mass of fire, seemed to be boiling over from its very roots, but you would also have seen rivers of blood outrunning the flames and the killed outnumbering the killers. Nowhere could the ground be seen for the corpses covering it, and the soldiers had to clamber over piles of bodies to pursue those still trying to escape.
While Josephus was not present at Masada—he composed his account based on reports of the Roman commanders and centurions who were there—he did have access to contemporaneous Roman reports of the battle and its aftermath. He wrote his narrative of the final struggle between the Romans and the Jews with a profound sympathy for his own people and determination to present their heroism in the best possible light. In the spirit of Jewish millenarianism and cultural heroism, that is exactly what he did. His audience may have been Roman, but his truth was Jewish, whether it was literally true or not.
And so in Josephus we read of several examples of Jewish mass suicide rather than Roman murder or enslavement. For example, in his description of the Siege of Jotapata (Yodfat) in 67 A.D., in which Josephus was fighting on the side of the rebels against the Romans, the defenders of the small hilltop fortress drew lots, then killed their comrades until there were only two left, one of whom was Josephus. At that moment, Josephus related a dream he’d had earlier, which indicated that God was now rooting for the Romans as punishment for the sins of the Jews.19 Accordingly the two of them surrendered to an acquaintance of Josephus, who happened to be a member of Vespasian’s general staff. It was the luckiest break of his life—not to mention an adumbration of the historian’s account of Masada as well.
By cheating the Romans of a victory, Josephus elevated the deaths of Jews—and by extension, all oppressed peoples—above the actual circumstances of their demises into something universal, heroic, and archetypal, thus linking them directly to the Spartans at Thermopylae; losers transformed, in an act of both defeat and defiance, into winners. Better dead than the red of the Empire.
The particulars of the Siege of Masada are well known; if Josephus is essentially the only source of our information, his basic account has been both backed up and, in spots, challenged by extensive archaeological work on the site. But we know something extraordinary happened there. The Jews did not perish from starvation or from lack of water. Excavations have unearthed coins and weapons, and perhaps even shards of the lots used to decide who would be victim and who the executioner. Remains of biblical scrolls and other literature in Aramaic as well as in Hebrew and Greek testify to the literacy of the defenders and their fervent belief in their cause. But they were up against the cream of the legions, and once the Romans had managed to roll a siege-engine-cum-battering-ram up and along a man-made path erected by filling in a chasm, their fate was sealed.
Masada, in fact, was less a battle than an engineering feat that only the Romans of the time could have pulled off. As Caesar had done in the Siege of Alesia, his final triumph over the Gauls of Vercingetorix in 52 B.C., the Romans built a circumvallation wall around the base of the fortress, both to prevent external reinforcements and to keep the besieged locked up. They constructed forts and placed the legions and auxiliaries around the site. The only footpath up to the top was known colloquially as the “snake path,” a single-file footway that zigzagged its way for two kilometers up the eastern side of the mountain, from the level of the Dead Sea to the top four hundred meters above.20 There was no way the Romans could get their legions up that way. So they decided to attack from the west.
The problem was how to elevate themselves in order to roll the siege engines into place and breech the walls. The solution they devised was to design a wide ramp built on a foundation of dirt and crushed stone. It took them nine months, but when it was finished, up the ramp trundled a 90-foot siege tower equipped with a battering ram to pound the walls to pieces and the garrison into submission. At one point, the Romans shot flaming arrows into the wooden parts of the Masada walls, but the wind shifted direction and briefly ignited the siege engine itself before changing direction once more, igniting the defensive walls. Seeing that reversal as a sign of divine favor, they returned to camp and planned their final attack for the morrow.
So the Almighty had cast his lot with the Romans. This was the end, and the leader of the Jewish forces, Eleazar Ben Yair, knew it. In back-to-back long speeches, undoubtedly invented by Josephus in the historical tradition of Livy and other earlier Greek and Roman historians, he urged the Jews to die by their own hands rather than fall into the clutches of the Romans, who could only bring torture, slavery, and death.
I think it actually a favour from God that we have it in our power to die honourably as free men, unlike others who have met an unexpected defeat. We face certain capture tomorrow, but we still have the free choice of a noble death for ourselves and our loved ones. The enemy, for all their hopes of taking us alive, can no more prevent this than we can now defeat them in battle … we have lost all prospect of survival—that is manifestly the hand of God.… There is a penalty for these crimes. But let us not pay it to our mortal enemies the Romans, but to God, and at our own hands.
Speaking for Eleazar, Josephus reminds the Jews of the sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple: “Where now is that great city, the mother-city of the whole Jewish race, secure behind all those rings of walls, protected by all those guard-posts and massive towers…? Where has it gone, that city of ours which was believed to have God as its founder? It has been torn up by the roots and swept away.”
It was time to die.21 First, each man killed his wife and children. Then they piled up their possessions and set fire to them. They chose ten of their number by lot to kill the survivors. Finally, they chose one of the ten to kill the other nine: “The one last survivor first checked that in the whole spread of bodies in this massive carnage there was no one still needing his hand to finish them: satisfied that all were dead, he set the palace ablaze, and then with all the force of his hand drove his sword right through his body, and fell dead alongside his family.”
When the Romans entered the fort, they found no resistance, just hundreds and hundreds of dead bodies. “There was none of the usual sense of triumph over an enemy: instead they could only feel a wondering admiration for the nobility of their collective decision and for the disregard of death which so many had resolutely taken to its conclusion.”
Perhaps anticipating that his veracity would be challenged by future historians, Josephus22 somewhat defensively concludes The Jewish War with these words: “We promised to set down a completely accurate history for the information of those who want to know the detail of how this war between Romans and Jews was fought. The success of its literary expression must be left to the judgement of its readers, but as for its accuracy, I would not hesitate to claim with confidence that throughout the whole narrative I have aimed at nothing but the truth.”
One thousand, eight hundred and sixty-nine years later, another small group of embattled Jews would find themselves facing an even more hostile military machine, this one backed up by a dictator with even greater powers and far more malicious intent than the Roman emperors. While the ending would substantially be the same, how it came about would be vastly different—and what emerged from it would change the world.
The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew. In hardly any people in the world is the instinct of self-preservation developed more strongly than in the so-called “chosen.” Of this, the mere fact of the survival of this race may be considered the best proof. Where is the people which in the last two thousand years has been exposed to so slight changes of inner disposition, character, etc., as the Jewish people? What people, finally, has gone through greater upheavals than this one—and nevertheless issued from the mightiest catastrophes of mankind unchanged? What an infinitely tough will to live and preserve the species speaks from these facts!
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Chapter 11
At first glance, Adolf Hitler appears to be paying the Jews a compliment, admiring their cultural and religious tenacity, the maintenance of their Jewish character throughout the Diaspora, their sheer instinct for survival in the face of the “mightiest catastrophes.” To anyone else, they would seem admirable and worthy of emulation.
But not, of course, to Hitler. Throughout his public career, he had never made any secret of his antipathy for the Jews. During his time in Landsberg Prison, in which he was incarcerated for 264 days in 1924 for his role in the failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler dictated Mein Kampf (My Struggle) to his secretary, Rudolf Hess. It is the most heartfelt testament of a born loser ever committed to paper, and certainly the most influential; in it, the aspiring Führer defended his role in trying to overthrow the Weimar Republic, indulged his animus toward both the Jews and the Communists by lumping them together as Bolsheviks and linking them as enemies of “Aryan” civilization, and planted the seeds of his political and social programs that would bear such poisonous fruit just twenty years later.
There are many ways in which to view Hitler, one of the most written-about figures in world history. There is Hitler the failed landscape painter, his sociopathic watercolors strangely devoid of people and all human feeling. There is Corporal Hitler the doughty war veteran and Iron Cross honoree, gassed at Ypres in 1918 by the British and temporarily blinded. There is Hitler the firebrand politician and spellbinding orator (although today we find him merely histrionic; German speakers surely noticed his hayseed Austro-Bavarian accent, sounding like the Central European equivalent of Gomer Pyle). There is Hitler the paramilitarist, Hitler the political theoretician, Hitler the early member of the German Workers Party, which he joined in 1919 and transformed into the National Socialist German Workers Party, with himself as leader, by 1921. By 1933, he was chancellor of Germany. Six years later, the world was at war. Six years after that, he was dead.
Hitler’s political program was always clear. As the Weimar Republic collapsed, two major ideological groups battled for supremacy both at the ballot box and, crucially, in the streets. They were the Communists, or “reds,” and the brownshirted National Socialists, both movements of the German political left. The Communists and their offshoots looked to the new Soviet Union, the flagbearer of international Socialism, while the National Socialists sought their cultural roots in German prehistory, which they called “Aryan.” In today’s terms, neither could be called either “conservative” or “right-wing,” although the National Socialists—who generally called themselves exactly that, Nationalsozialisten23—shared some nationalist traits with the real conservatives, the landed aristocracy of the Junkers (jung Herr, or young nobleman), the group from which Hitler’s deadliest domestic enemies would eventually emerge.24
For Hitler, the Jews and the Communists were almost interchangeable. There were many Jews in the front ranks of the early Bolsheviks—Trotsky, Sverdlov, Zinoviev; even Lenin had a Jewish great-grandfather, Moshko Blank, who had converted to Russian Orthodoxy in 1844—so the opportunity to tar the Jews with the sins of the Bolsheviks was too easy to pass up. After all, even Karl Marx was of Jewish origin, descended from a long line of rabbis on both sides of his family; like many German Jews of the nineteenth century, Marx’s father had converted to Lutheranism to improve his prospects, changing his first name from Herschel to Heinrich. Marx himself addressed religion and Jewishness in his 1843 materialist tract, Zur Judenfrage (On the Jewish Question).
Hitler saw Jewish influence everywhere. The Jews were the hidden forces behind all of society’s ills, a rootless, cosmopolitan population of cultural appropriators. He believed wholeheartedly in the tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which portrayed the Jews as incorrigible schemers against temporal authority and the architects of a vast conspiracy to control the world.25 “If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world,” wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf, “his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.”
But Hitler’s animus against the Jews ran deeper, into outright, irrational, and all-consuming loathing. Naturally, there was a sexual component:
With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate. Just as he himself systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale. It was and it is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master.
For a racially pure people which is conscious of its blood can never be enslaved by the Jew. In this world he will forever be master over bastards and bastards alone.
And so he tries systematically to lower the racial level by a continuous poisoning of individuals.
And in politics he begins to replace the idea of democracy by the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In the organized mass of Marxism he has found the weapon which lets him dispense with democracy and in its stead allows him to subjugate and govern the peoples with a dictatorial and brutal fist.
This is thoroughly nasty stuff, made all the nastier by its contemporary recrudescence. But there is no way to sugarcoat it: identity politics was the essence of National Socialism as articulated by the Führer and as put into practice by the National Socialist German Workers Party upon their seizure of power—democratically, to be sure—in 1933. Whereas the Romans had largely been indifferent to the Jews as a race (as the term was used at that time), took little or no interest in their One God, and only intervened when there was a military threat to the Empire, the National Socialists made Jew-hatred a principal tenet of their new and terrible paganism.26
There is no disputing the centrality of anti-Semitism in the Nazi cosmology. From the Nuremberg Laws to beginnings of the continuous deportations to the east, the course of Jewish persecution in the NS-Staat (National-Socialist State, as it was frequently termed by Germans themselves) was clear. The railroads from the principal cities of the Reich ran all the way to the end of the lines, at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor.27
In each city, the Jews were at first confined to their quarters—the Jewish ghettoes—organized and systematically stripped of their belongings and their rights by Germans acting through the agencies of the Jewish Councils, the Judenräte.28 Later, as the German fortunes of war waned, particularly after the failure of Operation Barbarossa at the end of 1941 and the long rollback of Hitler’s assault on the Soviet Union throughout 1942, the pace of deportations from the ghettoes to the death camps increased. If Hitler could not take out his maniacal ire on the Bolsheviks—who, after all and much to his surprise, could fight back—then he would take it out on the near-helpless Jews, the vast majority of whom lived in Poland and the Soviet Union.29
And so we come to Warsaw at the beginning of 1943, a city Hitler particularly loathed, for multiple psychological reasons. For one thing, Hitler, like many Germans, despised the Poles as Untermenschen, Slavs occupying valuable Lebensraum to the east and fit only for slavery to their Teutonic masters. For another, the largest Jewish community in Europe (3.5 million people) resided in Poland, with some settlements dating back to the Middle Ages, their inhabitants eking out a living in small shtetlekh (Yiddish for “villages”) as traders and merchants. Poland has the geographic and historical misfortune of being sandwiched between Germany and Russia, and down the centuries its periodic bouts of independence were more than offset by its domination by one or the other. In Hitler’s eyes, Poland offered ripe lands for settlement for an expansionist Reich, but was burdened with an enormous Jewish population that needed to be removed by any means necessary.
On April 19, 1943, on the eve of Passover, the German authorities under Hans Frank,30 Hitler’s personal lawyer and the Governor-General of Poland, ordered the emptying of what was left of the Warsaw Ghetto and the immediate deportation of the roughly 60,000 Jews who were still there. Most of the Jews had already been shipped off to the death camps, including some 265,000 dispatched to Treblinka and thousands more simply shot or sent to forced-labor camps elsewhere, to be worked to death.
By this point, it was impossible for the remaining Jews not to know what was happening in the outside world (20,000 of the Jews still in the ghetto were in hiding, their presence unknown to the Germans). Reports had filtered back all over Europe: that when the transport wagons arrived, those deported would never be seen again. Sometimes Jews themselves had helped the Germans with the deportations while acting in reasonable—or unreasonable—self-interest.31
Accordingly, by mid-1942 the Warsaw Jews had organized themselves into two paramilitary units, the Jewish Combat Organization and the Jewish Military Union; at first adversarial, they eventually began to work together. Their combined numbers totaled about 750 fighting men, which at the height of the conflict swelled to about 1,500. Their weapons came from members of the Christian Polish underground, who had been putting up a separate, heroic resistance against the Germans practically from the time of the initial invasion in 1939. The Polish Resistance eventually culminated in its own Warsaw Uprising in the summer of 1944, while the Wehrmacht was busy trying to hold back Red Army on the outskirts of Warsaw. But as the Poles rose to attack the retreating Germans, the Russians halted their advance, giving the Germans time to temporarily regroup, crush the last vestiges of the Polish resistance, and to raze the city.
That, however, was still in the future as the Warsaw Jews planned their defense of the Ghetto. Of course, they knew it was hopeless. With the Germans still in full control of the city, their living conditions nearly impossible, their sources of armaments uncertain, and their men largely untrained, they stood no chance against the Wehrmacht. But they didn’t care. Like the Jews at Masada, they were going to die to the last man if need be; unlike the Jews at Masada, they were going to take as many Germans with them as they could.
Their leader was Mordechai Anielewicz, just 24 years old but actively engaged in the resistance from the moment of the German invasion. Roman-style, the Germans had begun the circumvallation of the Ghetto in 1940, segregating it from the rest of the city and confining the Jews in cramped quarters to let disease and starvation do their dirty work for them.32 Armed basically with hand grenades, Molotov cocktails, and pistols (there were few rifles and no heavy weapons, such as mortars or bazookas), the Jews created a system of underground bunkers in which the air was so close, one man recalled, that you couldn’t light a candle for lack of oxygen.
The first battle came on January 18, 1943, as the Germans tried to resume deportations. Jewish fighters infiltrated a column of Jews being marched away for “resettlement” and they attacked the German guards. In the melee, some of the prisoners got away but most of the warriors were killed; Anielewicz managed to escape. It was a minor victory—but a huge moral one.
In the German language, in part because of the determinism of its grammatical structure, what should not be possible therefore will not be possible. If it is against the law, it will not happen. If it is permitted, then nothing untoward can occur. To this day, Germans will drive their fast cars on the autobahn at unlimited speeds straight into a fogbank because there are no signs to forbid them from doing so. Their faith in the letter of the law is touching, but too often the result is an 80-car pileup with multiple fatalities. At first, many of the German Jews subscribed to that notion, refusing to credit Hitler’s animus against them, relying on their service to the German army during the First World War; in their minds, they were every bit as “German” as the ethnic Germans. It took Kristallnacht and the Nuremberg Laws to finally disabuse them of that fatal delusion.
In the time of Caesar and Augustus, the reputation of the Germans had been that they were brave but undisciplined warriors; like the Gauls, they were prone to cut and run at the first sign of trouble. On the battlefield they lacked a supreme commander, and even when they had one, such as Vercingetorix, they still ran from a reversal of fortune, especially once their commanders fell. But first under Bismarck and the Prussians and later under the National Socialists—who sought explicitly to evoke ancient Rome with their massed ranks of Soldaten marching under an imperial eagle—they had learned how to fight. In fact, they had learned it so well, and had been rewarded with such easy victories over the exhausted French in May 1940 and the other victims of the Blitzkrieg, that they had almost forgotten how to lose.
The Eastern Front had rudely reminded them of human fallibility. But in that case, they were up against a Red Army they had drastically underestimated, a foe capable of absorbing maximum casualties thanks to its nearly limitless manpower. The Soviets’ tactical retreat along the broad front of Operation Barbarossa—shades of Hannibal at Cannae, but on a gigantic scale—sucked the three invading Army Groups into the maw of Mother Russia in winter; suddenly the Germans felt a great affinity with Napoleon, whose own ill-advised attack on Russia had been defeated by General Winter in 1812. But to take casualties from a Jewish rabble destined for Treblinka and annihilation? It was impossible.
There was a lull as the Germans, occupied across the Eastern Front, decided how best to make Warsaw Judenrein. The first indication came on April 16, when a Gestapo lieutenant called a meeting with the Warsaw Judenrat to discuss the health of the Ghetto children and their need for fresh air (a particular German obsession). Why not build a playground in the courtyard of the Judenrat? With Passover coming up, he’d even throw in some matzos.
It was a trap. Two days later, the Germans mobilized at 2 a.m. and cordoned off the Ghetto at six o’clock in the morning. Anielewicz promised his men a guerilla war to the death. The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto was underway. The Germans made little headway on the nineteenth, but late that evening the newly arrived German commander, SS general Jürgen Stroop, got a telephone call from none other than Heinrich Himmler, who informed Stroop that, as April 20 was Hitler’s birthday, he expected a Grossaktion33 in celebration, and thus an expeditious end to the Jewish problem in Warsaw.
In fact, the battle raged for nearly a month. The Germans turned their artillery on the houses and set them alight with flame throwers. They tunneled under buildings to destroy the bunkers; for their part, the Jews moved underground, through the sewer systems that were still connected to the city beyond the Ghetto, to bring in what information and supplies they could. The Germans killed the resistance fighters wherever they found them. Despite the heroism, however, it was just a matter of time.
In his last letter, Anielewicz wrote, “The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves. Let us not get accustomed and adjusted to these conditions. The one who adjusts ceases to discriminate between good and evil. He becomes a slave in body and soul. Whatever may happen to you, remember always: Don’t adjust! Revolt against the reality! Peace go with you, my friend! The dream of my life has risen to become fact.”
Anielewicz was killed in action on May 8, 1943, buried in the rubble of his headquarters at 18 Mila Street, where his bunker was located. The Germans had finally located the lair of their tormentor and were drilling through the earthen roof, dropping grenades below. When Anielewicz and his companions refused to come out, the Germans began piping in gas. One of his men recommended that, like the Jews at Masada, they should kill themselves. Anielewicz argued against it. Author Dan Kurzman in The Bravest Battle (Da Capo Press, 2009) writes:
As at Masada, where 2000 years earlier a group of Jews decided to kill themselves rather than surrender to the Romans, most of the 120 fighters at Mila 18 chose the same solution, though it was not imposed on anyone. The more than eighty civilians who remained would either surrender or die of asphyxiation in the bunker.
No one is sure what really happened in the end. We don’t know whether Anielewicz and his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer, shot themselves or died of the poison gas. Ironically, one of the Jewish commandos discovered an escape route that no one had known existed and got away. But it was too late.
On May 16, with the resistance extinguished, General Stroop ordered the city’s main synagogue, built in 1877, demolished. As the engineers laid the charges, the German statisticians totaled up the numbers: 56,065 Jews killed or captured since the uprising began. Around 8:15 p.m., Stroop pressed the detonator button, and the synagogue vanished. That evening, he sent a cable to his superiors in Krakow: “The former Jewish quarter of Warsaw no longer exists.”
Two years later, in another underground bunker, Adolf Hitler lay dead as well, shot by his own hand, preferring death34 to capture by the enraged soldiers of the Red Army. Perhaps he would have found it (fleetingly) ironic that both he and the Jewish fighters should have chosen the same setting for the same end—he for reasons of fear and cowardice, they for their nation and their faith. Hitler’s obsession with the Bolsheviks had led him first to make a sham alliance with them, via the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, and then to launch a surprise attack on them less than two years later. And his obsession with the Jews turned not only into the Holocaust but also an auto-da-fé for himself and Germany as well. Hatred, it seems, has consequences for everybody. The last stands at both Masada and Mila Street eventually spelled doom for both the empires that afflicted them.
Jürgen Stroop was captured in Germany at the end of the war, tried and convicted by the Allies of murdering American prisoners of war, and then extradited to Poland, where in 1952 he was convicted of crimes against humanity and hanged. Today, Mila Street is not only Anielewicz’s grave but a memorial to the resistance fighters who died rather than submit.
From the arid hilltop of Masada to the fetid sewers of the Mila Street bunker, the long journey of the Jewish people had taken many a tragic turn. But on May 14, 1948, just five years later, the State of Israel was born. The Romans are gone, Hitler is gone, the National Socialists are gone—but Jews are free to worship in the Nożyk Synagogue, and once again, Masada is in Jewish hands.
Perhaps this is not the sweetest revenge the Jews have taken on their former tormentors. One of the strongest weapons in the Jewish arsenal has been humor, the surgical use of ridicule—not from a distance, either, but up close, personal, and in your face. The great Jewish comics and filmmakers, born in the first half of the twentieth century, did not flinch when turning even the enormity of the Holocaust, Hitler, and National Socialism to their advantage. In his 1967 comedy The Producers, Mel Brooks (b. 1926) put a Führer-like figure on stage in the middle of a mock-musical, Springtime for Hitler. He lampooned the Nazis again in 1983 with his remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (Lubitsch was also Jewish), about an acting troupe in prewar Warsaw planning a production of Hamlet on the eve of the occupation. Amazingly, Lubitsch’s original was made in 1941 and released early the following year.
In 1962, the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum appeared on Broadway and became a film four years later under the direction of Richard Donner. With both music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, the show takes aim at Rome under the Emperor Nero, pitting slaves such as Pseudolus (Zero Mostel, the pride of New York’s Yiddish theater) and Hysterium (Jack Gilford) against the patrician Senex and a Roman general, Miles Gloriosus, on behalf of Senex’s dim-witted son, Hero (played by a very young Michael Crawford35). Few can miss the resonance.
The most audacious confrontation between Jews and their German antagonists came in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 blackest of black comedies, Dr. Strangelove. The Jewish Kubrick co-wrote, produced, and directed the film, which took a gimlet-eyed look at nuclear Armageddon and cast the brilliant British comic actor Peter Sellers in three roles: as the balding American president, Merkin Muffley36; as the stiff-upper-lipped British officer, Group Captain Mandrake; and as the unrepentant Nazi scientist, Dr. Strangelove. Sellers, whose mother was Jewish, brought an especial gusto to Strangelove (formerly Dr. Merkwürdigliebe—“He changed it when he became a citizen”), whose paralyzed right arm and prosthetic hand periodically shoot up in an uncontrollable Nazi salute, maniacally cackling even as the world goes up in flames.
It is doubtful today that the culture of victimhood would tolerate such shenanigans; almost everything now is too serious for comedy. But, more than anybody, the Jews of the war generation understood that it is precisely because some things are so horrible that they should not be joked about that they must be joked about, lest we all go mad.37 It doesn’t matter, from Josephus to the present, whether the stories really happened. What matters is that they are true.