In 1808, at the dawn of the nineteenth century, the Jewish-German essayist Ludwig Börne advised future “historical researchers” that the motives for discriminating against and persecuting Jews “vary with the times.” Börne was responding to the social and psychological aftereffects of upheavals and new prejudices that arose in his native city of Frankfurt am Main. For people at the time, the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, the guilds, and the patrician system seemed like the end of the world. Within this context, Börne identified “envy and greed” as two increasingly strong motors of anti-Jewish resentment. He witnessed with his own eyes how the Jews of Frankfurt, liberated from the ghetto, elicited “the jealousy of the crowd” as “aristocrats of the trading class.” Börne added: “[It is not] the extent of their wealth for which they are envied—Jewish merchants are not the richest ones in the city. But it was impossible to observe without irritation the speed and confidence with which they earned their money.” Hardly had a new epoch of economic life begun than the enemies of Jews began using religion as “a pretense for hatred.”1
Sixty years later, at the high point of the Industrial Revolution and the massive social realignments that were so painful for millions of people, secular anti-Semitism appeared as a force on the political stage. It directly addressed acute societal and economic problems, drawing from them its ultimately enormous destructive power.
Before the nationalist movements in Europe achieved political predominance, their theorists standardized national languages, codified national myths, folk tales, and legends, and selectively wrote down the narrative of a history understood in nationalist terms. Nationalists, who were usually in the political opposition and also considered themselves committed democrats, advocated compulsory education to combat widespread ignorance in the populace. They battled against the privileges of the aristocracy and the clergy. They supported the modern administrative state and demanded an independent judicial system, freedom of the press, free and secret elections, the creation of a robust national middle class, and better opportunities in life for everyday people. Europeans still enjoy their efforts today.
In the nineteenth century, nationalism blossomed as a romantic springtime of various peoples. In the twentieth, its ascendance set the tone for wars and revolutions that devoured countless human lives. As lawmakers, European nationalists dedicated themselves to the social emancipation of their own native groups. They also tried to expand the geographical boundaries of their “national soil,” encouraging irredentist movements and violence against neighbors of other nationalities. The governments of newly founded states, or those that for nationalistic reasons had been either expanded or diminished, isolated themselves from one another. The reasons why are easily enumerated: mass impoverishment in the wake of the First World War, fear of revolution as of 1917–18, persistent brutality and fighting in disputed marginal areas, the end of legal emigration, and jingoism. Exacerbating the situation was the widespread suffering caused by the Great Depression, which many countries still hadn’t overcome by the start of the Second World War.
Wanting to help their people get back on their feet, the political leaders in the old and, in particular, the new nations supported restrictive tariffs and their domestic analogue—laws and decrees disadvantaging minorities, especially Jews. Such measures fit into broader social-nationalist policies such as Romanianization, Lithuanianization, Magyarization, Hellenization, Polonization, Czechization, and, relatively late, Aryanization. The idea of nationalization, a euphemism for expropriating what was owned by people branded as foreigners, harmonized well with the idea of the social-welfare state. It bridged divisions between socialists and social democrats, especially when it negated the property rights of “Jewish capitalists,” “Jewish bankers,” and “Jewish speculative investors.” General battle cries like “la France pour les français” or “Polska dla Polaków” were all too often specifically directed against Jews. More and more, concepts like the national economy connoted that the entire economy rightfully belonged to an ethnically defined people, and that interlopers had parasitically enriched themselves by claiming the best parts of it. The logical conclusion from all this was to turn away Jewish refugees and force “foreign” Jews to emigrate, if need be by governmental pressure and the enlistment of popular rage.
In his 1979 Handbuch der europäische Geschichte (Handbook of European History), Theodor Schieder put forward a multistage model to illustrate the transitions between ethnocratic resettlement and mass murder of minorities. For Nazi Germany’s “special population-policy methods,” he identified the following sequence: 1) mandatory detention, 2) pressure to emigrate, 3) deportation, 4) forced resettlement in occupied territories conquered by Germany, and 5) physical destruction. Schieder had been complicit in Nazi policies. Forty years after he himself had drawn up plans for the resettlement of Poles and Jews, he acknowledged—self-critically, it seems—that the mass murder of Jews had been preceded by this multiphased “preliminary stage.”2
Anyone wanting to analyze the political processes that led to mass murder should not skip over these preliminary stages, whose success or failure was decisive for what came next. In Athens, Brussels, Denmark, and parts of Italy, German occupiers failed in their efforts to arrest Jews and confine them in ghettos and camps because they lacked local support. But where local populaces and security forces cooperated, as they did in most places, all that was needed was German energy, encouragement, and authorization for people to commit previously unimaginable crimes.
Not everyone involved needed to participate in every stage. Modern division of labor was one of the defining characteristics of the Holocaust. That made it impossible for any one individual to see the entirety of what was happening, allowing people to look the other way. It diluted individual responsibility and lamed people’s consciences, especially once the preliminary stages in Schieder’s model had rendered Jews nearly invisible and isolated from everyday life. All too often, the jobs and belongings of those who were ghettoized, either locally or at some remove, were already being divvied up while they were still alive.
The spiritual fathers of the nationalist movements of Europe discovered anti-Semitism early on. Starting in the 1880s, in France it merged with powerful antirepublican, conservative currents, although it also appealed to some in the socialist camp. The overlap reflected a mutual interest in the protection of traditional French artisans, merchants, lawyers, and doctors. In Salonika, there was a drive to Hellenize what had not been a Greek city, and the Jewish majority was resented for the perceived favoritism they enjoyed under the Greeks’ Ottoman Turkish archenemies. In Poland, leading proponents of nationalist democracy and the clergy propagated an anti-Jewish variant of economic protectionism and Catholic social teachings.
Beginning in 1930, after a brief internationalist phase, a Russian-accented Communism crystallized in the Soviet Union. Anti-Semitism, which had been suppressed for a good decade but never truly overcome, enjoyed a revival in socialist garb. With Jews having been allowed since 1917 to live anywhere in Russia, anti-Semitism took hold within segments of the population not previously susceptible to it. As was also true in the nonsocialist countries of Western Europe, not only did progress in education animate many millions of formerly uneducated citizens, it also stoked their hatred of Jews.
In class conflicts between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, less mobile citizens rose up against the more inventive, talented, and successful in the name of justice and equality. It’s no surprise, then, that the borders between socialist and nationalist collectivism remain permeable even today. Italy and Germany weren’t the only places after 1918 where the two merged into one. Together the parties that ruled on the European Continent despised and attacked British liberalism. They worshiped the concept of the people and rejected individualism as a vestigial remnant of an epoch that had yet to be illuminated by the spirit of national solidarity.
Anti-Jewish slogans were an easy way to motivate masses of people, and they sat easily with the goal of national and social betterment. Once governments began protecting majorities against Jewish minorities, years of further discrimination were sure to follow. Jews denied the right to study at university or to sell tobacco and alcohol would soon be prohibited from practicing certain professions and then stripped in stages of their civic rights. From that point, it wasn’t a huge leap for people to begin considering more drastic “solutions.” Those who advanced such policies—for instance, the Polish nationalist-democrat Roman Dmowski or the Greek republican Eleftherios Venizelos—never envisioned mass shootings or gas chambers, but they did increasingly come to believe that their Jewish minorities should emigrate sometime in the foreseeable future.
Between the two world wars, nearly all Continental European countries pursued policies of isolationism and viewed neighboring states as enemies. In the same period Jewish minorities began to feel the full weight of deliberate state and societal marginalization. Romanian, Polish, Hungarian, Greek, and even French politicians began to speak more openly about forcing Jews to leave, promising members of their respective national majorities jobs, small-business opportunities, nicer places to live, successful medical and legal practices, and chances to become educated and have better futures.
As of 1933, Germany served as a radical example of how a Jewish minority could be dissimilated, and of how a mixture of naked violence and laws could be applied to undo all the advantages of Jewish emancipation within the space of weeks, months, or a few years. As early as April 1933, the Nazi regime was already hounding thousands of Jews from the public sector. In May 1935, Jews were barred from military service and the social respect it entailed, and that fall they were stripped of their rights as citizens. Together with anti-Jewish boycotts, dozens of laws and edicts discriminated against Jews to the benefit of the national majority, the much-vaunted German Volk. In 1938, the Third Reich, having incorporated Austria and other territories, assumed control of Jewish assets and drove tens of thousands of impoverished people out of the country.
Along with great numbers of refugees and displaced persons, the German regime succeeded in exporting the “Jewish question” to much of the rest of Europe, encouraging anti-Semitism in France, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Norway, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. This was a conscious strategy, as is evident from a pamphlet titled “The Jewish Question as a Factor in Foreign Policy in the Year 1938,” which the German Foreign Ministry sent to its outposts abroad in 1939. One passage read: “The emigration of only around 100,000 Jews was sufficient to awaken foreign interest in, if not the understanding of many countries for the Jewish peril. We are able to calculate that the Jewish question will become a problem for international politics, if large masses of Jews from Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Romania are forced to move by increasing pressure applied by their host people.”3
The social rise of the European masses bolstered rather than lessened anti-Jewish resentment. As historian Ulrich Wyrwa has shown in his comparison of pre-1914 German and Italian anti-Semitism, extremely limited voting rights in Italy basically ruled out the development of organized anti-Semitism. As of 1882, a mere 7 percent of the Italian populace enjoyed the franchise. “This deficit in terms of democracy benefited the predominantly bourgeois, literate and well-educated Jewish community,” Wyrwa writes. “Anti-Semitic parties, whose political success in Germany was based to a large degree on the general right to vote for Reichstag deputies, would have had no chance in Italy.”4 Since 1871, all German men enjoyed the equal right to vote by secret ballot in Reichstag elections, although in Prussia a three-tier system continued to exist until 1918.
Wyrwa characterizes the historical situation as paradoxical, but in fact it was a harbinger of the rapid spread of anti-Semitism under democratic conditions in the period between the wars. Conditions for the racial segregation and ultimately homicidal hatred of Jews are not unique to authoritarian, totalitarian, or dictatorial states. Parliaments and governments in democratically organized nation-states also saw nothing amiss in following ethno-collectivistic doctrines. All too often, they operated according to the principle identified by sociologist Ulrich Beck: “Fundamental rights are nationally divisible—they can be accorded to everyone with the same nationality, the members of the Volk, and denied to all other human beings.”5
One piece of evidence supporting Wyrwa’s insight is the electoral reform introduced in 1896 in the royal Austrian regions of Bohemia and Moravia. It gave all adult males, with only marginal limitations, the right to vote. In so doing it “helped put anti-Semitism on the agenda,” as historian Michal Frankl has shown. “Starting in the spring of 1896,” he writes, “all Czech political parties mobilized their ranks whenever there were imperial council elections. In this phase of heightened activity, with its numerous events and press propaganda, the influence of anti-Semitism became increasingly apparent.”
A group of radical young Czechs who called themselves Česká družina (Czech Following) formulated an early, typically national-socialist platform: state controls upon stock exchanges and high finance, nationalization of major industries, moderate taxes on modest earners, state assistance for small business people and farmers, and anti-Semitism. Česká družina leaders considered their fight against Jews as “not so much a national or racial … as above all an economic and social” struggle and demanded that “the gentile population be legally protected against Jewry.”
The Česká družina never achieved any real significance, but its ideas did, as was evident at the conclusion of the election campaign in spring 1897. The democratic Young Czech Party won Prague with a decidedly anti-Jewish platform. Anti-Semitism had existed before, but as Frankl put it, the elections lent it a “new legitimacy” and organizational form. By late November/early December, there was serious violence against Jews in Prague and other cities. Those who carried out the pogroms looted and burned Jewish businesses and smashed synagogue windows. But as was true everywhere in Western Europe at the time, murder remained the exception. The public unrest, which resulted from this well-intentioned voting-rights reform, surprised the Austrian governorship. They declared martial law and threatened to shoot the rioters and strictly punish disturbers of peace. Within a few hours, the situation calmed down.6
According to Tomáš G. Masaryk, later the founding president of the Czechoslovakian Republic, there were many significant countercurrents in Czech Prague. Nonetheless, anti-Semitism remained an integral part of Czech nationalism. Frankl saw its general cause in the modernization of everyday life, and not in any persistence of medieval prejudice. “Resistance to basic liberal concepts of society and the free market” personified by the mentally agile Jewish minority, Frankl wrote, was “the central source” of Czech anti-Semitism. In retrospect, the 1867 law on Jewish emancipation and the extremely progressive expansion of the franchise in 1896 encouraged a nationalistic anti-Semitism. In other words, two major liberal reforms of the Hapsburg monarchy helped anti-Semitism take on a broadly effective organized form. Young Czech politicians were among the most influential anti-Semites as well as being of “the greatest service to the cause of Bohemian self-rule.”7 Anyone who thinks that modern anti-Semitism has nothing to do with aspects of political and economic progress will be unable to understand the ideology or plausibly describe its pandemic spread.
In 1906, the reformist, if not democratic Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin wanted to ease the anti-Jewish laws in autocratic Russia but was hindered by the opposition of ordinary people. When the journalist and Jewish activist Paul Nathan asked for his help, he responded, “We can’t do this because the Russian people don’t want this sort of change and we’re afraid that if Jews are given fully equal rights, there will be new massacres.”8 Just a year before, in fact, revolutionary rebellions against the feudal powers in Russian-, Ukrainian-, and Polish-settled regions of the disintegrating Romanov Empire had all led to major pogroms.
The social background of the people who attacked, robbed, and murdered Jews in 1905 led the literary critic and philosopher Mikhail O. Gershenzon to some gloomy conclusions. He warned against the fashionable faith in the masses of uneducated workers and farmers shared by many Jewish socialist intellectuals. In 1905, as though anticipating the mass murder of Jews committed in the name of liberation between 1917 and 1920 within the collapsing tsarist empire, Gershenzon wrote: “With regard to our situation, it is not only impossible to ‘melt into the masses.’ On the contrary, we have more to fear from these masses than all the possible punishments of the state. We should praise and thank the government because ultimately only its bayonets and prisons stand between us and the rage of the people.”9
Anti-Semitism reared its head in Hungary in 1920. Since their emancipation in 1867, Jews in Hungary had achieved significant economic positions and represented a major part of the bourgeoisie. While political groups before 1914 had claimed the Jews had usurped too many rights, after 1920 they had the chance for the first time to take political action in democratic conditions. At that point, such groups were able to privilege Magyars in the name of equity and to the detriment of successful Jews. Between 1920 and 1944, both houses of the Hungarian parliament passed many anti-Jewish laws by huge majorities. Those who voted against such legislation included deputies who considered certain laws not anti-Semitic enough.
Historian Michael Schwartz sees in the widespread policies of ethnic violence in the twentieth century “the entanglement of ethnic and social conflicts.” Schwartz points out that ethnic-social political platforms had by 1920 already led to the genocide of Armenians and other cases of mass murder. Occasionally scholars have asserted that the various ethnic displacements of populations in twentieth-century Europe had nothing to do with the persecution of the Jews. “It would downplay the seriousness of the situation,” argued one 2011 study, “to treat the ideology, planning and execution of National Socialist policies toward Jews as a case of ‘ethnic cleansing.’”10 As the preceding pages have shown over and over, however, this view is patently incorrect. The Holocaust was the most extreme example of the ethnic-cleansing phenomenon. While the Shoah cannot be solely explained as a product of any European-wide ethnicity-based political tendencies, such tendencies played an obvious role in the prehistory of the Holocaust. The hope of easily enriching oneself and quickly rising up the social ladder was a general motivation for twentieth-century ethnic violence and a significant contributor to the discrimination, persecution, and murder of European Jews. “The materialist distribution of wealth,” Schwartz concurs, “was a decisive factor in gaining broad social acceptance of an ethnic cleansing, carried out primarily by elites for political reasons.” It is perfectly legitimate to speak of a social revolution organized along ethnic lines to benefit ordinary people.11
Annexation of foreign territory did nothing to lessen the conflicts with minorities in Hungary and Germany, or, in 1941, in Romania and Bulgaria. On the contrary, those conflicts only increased. In the end, it was a relatively small step for the planners of state-mandated resettlement policies to view war as the great opportunity to use severe methods to solve self-created problems. Annexed territories became practice fields to try out expropriation and murder in the name of Germanification, Magyarization, Romanianization, Croatification, or Bulgarianization. Jews were only one unwanted minority among many. But everywhere they were the first to be expropriated and removed.
In his short excursus “The Stranger” from 1908, sociologist Georg Simmel investigated a number of theoretical questions that are relevant here. Simmel wrote about foreigners in general but also referred to the “classical example” of European Jews. For him, the “stranger” is a wanderer who encounters those fixed in one place, a free-floating cosmopolitan who meets those tied to a plot of land. But unlike wanderers who come today and go tomorrow, Simmel’s stranger is a “person who comes today and stays tomorrow. He is, so to speak, the potential wanderer: although he has not moved on, he has not quite abandoned the freedom of coming and going.” This stranger continues to view the native with distance, which makes him more independent. “He is freer practically and theoretically; he surveys conditions with less prejudice; his criteria for them are more general and more objective ideals; he is not tied down in his action by habit, piety, and precedent.” The stranger is thus the “fundamentally mobile person.”
In Simmel’s description, strangers usually enter the lives of locals as traders and merchants. If the local economy is basically one of individual subsistence, merchants who occasionally offer products from faraway lands will not be an irritant. It is only with the advent of modernity that the stranger becomes a problem. The rapid division of labor in industrial production, which may involve cities, regions, states, and even continents, demands a swiftly expanding apparatus of intermediaries: transport companies, information connections, stock and commodities exchanges and brokers, lines of credit from banks, financial guarantees, and contracts. The stranger organizes this new realm of economic life. He is international and able to communicate with the entire world. He occupies many of the increasing numbers of new positions that require considerable intelligence, be they entrepreneurial, fixed-employment, or freelance.
The anti-Semitism that erupted so massively in Europe as of 1880 fits in well with this schema. As Simmel says, “Trade can always absorb more people than primary production; it is, therefore, the sphere indicated for the stranger, who intrudes as a supernumerary, so to speak, into a group in which the economic positions are actually occupied.” But trade entails “unlimited combinations” and opens up new possibilities for economic success. “Intelligence always finds expansions and new territories, an achievement that is very difficult to attain for the original producer with his lesser mobility and his dependence upon a circle of customers that can be increased only slowly.”12
In this period of general upheaval, the sedentary natives, who suddenly became the slow, relatively backward members of society, considered themselves unfairly disadvantaged. They reacted to the flexible strangers with a mixture of admiration and reserve, jealousy and animosity. It was precisely this incubator that yielded the anti-Semitic stereotypes we know so well. Jews were soon denigrated as rootless cosmopolitans while the settled residents were elevated into preservers of popular tradition, whose forefathers had cultivated the homeland with their hands since time immemorial, defending it against outside interlopers. This task was purportedly passed on as a legacy to younger generations.
In The Jewish Century, Yuri Slezkine doesn’t refer to Simmel’s model, but he does put forward a similar, if somewhat more nebulous distinction between what he calls Mercurians and Apollonians. In Greco-Roman mythology, Mercury (Hermes) was the god of messengers, merchants, intermediaries, and border-jumpers. Reducing Apollo to his little-known role in Cretan mythology, Slezkine depicts him as the god of shepherds and their flocks, holding a protective hand over the sedentary.13
We might object to Simmel and Slezkine that most Eastern European Jews lived in poverty, eking out livings as small-time traders, door-to-door peddlers, self-employed tailors, cobblers, smiths, or plumbers. Many lived hand to mouth and described themselves as possessing little more substance than air. Simmel, however, focused exclusively on the bourgeois, assimilated Jews of Germany, who assuredly were very different sorts of Jews. But in the present context we are concerned primarily with the historical juncture at the opening of the twentieth century, a period characterized by exceptional Jewish striving for social betterment. Simmel only touched on this topic, but his contemporary and fellow sociologist Werner Sombart explored it in depth. Again and again, Sombart stressed the point that although Jews started out from conditions equal to or worse than those of Christians, in Berlin and wherever else they were accorded economic freedom they succeeded in climbing the social ladder three to four times as quickly as Christians, who found themselves utterly overshadowed. Sombart found Jews in Germany on average “so much cleverer and more energetic than we are” that their exclusion from university teaching positions was justified. From the perspective of the economy, Sombert argued, it was lamentable that whenever there were two applicants, the “stupider” candidate, not the Jewish one, usually got the job. At the same time he approved of protective restrictions because otherwise “every single position as lecturer or professor would be occupied by Jews, baptized and not, which in the end makes no difference.” This concluding remark illustrates the start of an anti-Semitism that went beyond religious confession. Like many people of his day, Sombart recognized that Jewish intellectual superiority by no means stopped when Jews converted to Christianity.14
The same rationale led the prominent nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke in 1879 to write anti-Jewish polemics. His often cited essay “Unsere Ansichten” (Our Views) focuses on the economic ambition of Jewish migrants, whom Treitschke pejoratively describes as a “horde of ambitious pants-peddling young punks … whose children and grandchildren they want to someday rule over Germany’s stock exchanges and newspapers.” Treitschke excoriated the “presumption” and nimble-witted dexterity of the Jewish parvenu, arguing that such qualities offended the “modest piety” and “old-fashioned, familiar willingness to work” of native Germans.15
This phenomenon was also evident in the other countries discussed in this book, whether the subject was the preponderance of Jews in the Lithuanian import-export trade or the high percentages of Jewish academy and university students; the number of Jewish tailors who established textile factories or merchants who ran flourishing trading businesses, turned tiny bookshops into major publishing houses, organized the construction of railroads or telegraph connections, or developed banking and stock markets. In time, the envy of Jewish success turned into a hatred that was born of socioeconomic obstacles and the resentment and depraved retaliations they engendered.
At the start of the twentieth century, socialists and bourgeois discussed how to encourage upward social mobility among the lower classes. The goal was to open opportunities to the “talented and capable.” In 1920, German political scientist Paul Mombert concluded with satisfaction that this “selection process” was the subject of intense political and scientific attention since, ultimately, it was in the national interest to find out “how upward mobility proceeded, what the decisive factors were and who could climb the social ladder.”
On the basis of empirical examples of gentile families within Germany, mostly over three generations, Mombert identified a tendency to make transitions slowly: “As a rule, the rise or fall from one class into another is completed by going through all the various levels of a specific social class before the next generation enters the next one.” There was “a constant up and down” on the social ladder. In general, people sought to constantly better themselves, but setbacks were also common, and sometimes the bottom dropped out. At first gentiles were slow to strive for something better for themselves or their children, but with the demise of the old class system, the pace increased. By 1920, Mombert concluded, striving was “an integral part of what people today want.”16
By the turn of the century at the latest, thanks not least to the broad educational activities of social democratic parties, class structures had become fluid. German novelist Theodor Fontane described this particularly well in his 1899 novel, Der Stechlin. It features a Pastor Lorenzen who can somewhat but not fully understand social democratic ideas. “The main opposition of everything modern to what is old comes from people who no longer have to occupy the position in which they were born,” Fontane has his pastor say. “They now have the freedom to use their abilities in all directions and in every area. It used to be that people were an estate lord or a linen weaver for three hundred years. Now every linen weaver can be the lord of an estate someday.” His advice on how to get through the new social ups and downs halfway intact: “Prefer the old as far as you can and go with the new as far as you must.”17
The new conditions went hand in hand with a high degree of status anxiety. The desire of large numbers of people to educate and better themselves, which the state supported, was further encouraged during the First World War, in line with the saying, “Every soldier carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack.” But millions came away disappointed. The general race for happiness created winners, losers, and people who achieved a lot but never made it to the top spots. That provoked hatred and envy for those in a recognizable group who were more successful.
But why did the aversion to Jews in Poland, Lithuania, or Romania increase so steadily when the majority of them were so obviously impoverished and disadvantaged? One explanation was put forward by the Marxist Zionist Ber Borochov in 1917. Borochov described the social situation of the Jewish and gentile segments of the population not as static but rather, like Sombart, as a dynamic process. In Borochov’s view, modern capitalism pushed aside the Jewish artisans predominant in Eastern Europe, people who cut cloth, made shoes, or built furniture in tiny workshops. “Machinery is their greatest enemy,” wrote Borochov. But Jews didn’t react to this upheaval by attacking machinery or turning fatalistic. They adapted. Borochov described a “forcing out of Jewish workers that happened not suddenly, but as part of a long-term process of social regrouping.” The introduction of steam-powered looms in Łódź and Białystok brought with it Christian rather than Jewish labor, and Jewish weavers there all but disappeared. The transition from hand to machine work generally entailed the transition from Jewish to Christian work. Jews emigrated, moved to big cities, or took the initiative by founding new industries.
Borochov saw mental reasons for the differences in behavior: “A Jew will decide to strike off on his own with limited resources and poor prospects for success in a way that a Christian would never dare to.” Jews began new businesses with little capital, while a Christian worker, even when he had a superior starting point, tended to remain “another man’s servant for his entire life.” Borochov concluded that “the human makeup of the Jewish working class is in constant flux,” shifting far more swiftly than the Christian segment of the working class. With great determination, many Jews lifted themselves out of proletarian misery. They were succeeded in many jobs by other Jews who in turn emancipated themselves as quickly as possible from factory enslavement.18 Gentile Socialists in Russian Poland observed the same pattern but viewed it negatively. In 1912 they cast doubts upon the revolutionary commitment of their Jewish class comrades because the latter “established themselves and became bourgeois” more quickly than Christian workers. The Socialists were suspicious of the speed with which Jews found ways and means of climbing the social ladder—and with which they left gentile proletarians behind.19
Far removed from any Marxist interpretations, Joseph Tenenbaum reached conclusions similar to Borochov’s and, indirectly, to those of the Polish Socialists who repeatedly criticized “Polish sluggishness.”20 In his home city of Lviv, Tenenbaum observed: “The Jews mainly represent the urban middle-class, a category of people that in an exquisitely rural region like Galicia, where racial hatred runs strong, is not well-suited to alleviating the economically based conflict between town and country.” Once large numbers of Galician peasants began moving to cities and encountering these sorts of Jews, the friction quickly increased: “[The farmer] arrives as homo rudis, as an uncultivated dunderhead, and runs into an intelligent, superior middle class with which he can hardly compete.” Because the situation featured a clearly definable group of people who spoke and behaved differently and followed a different faith, Tenenbaum argued, the “envy born of competition” could take on much more acute form than in situations where the massive problems of social upheaval could not be projected onto a specific group. In a period of general urbanization, Jews were defamed as the ones “blocking” important avenues for earning a living in European cities.
Tenenbaum particularly emphasized two socioeconomic factors: the increasingly hostile opposition between town and country that was unavoidable in the early stages of capitalist development and the dashed hopes of the first generation of Christian proletarians who had little choice but to move to the city, where because of their lack of education and sophistication they were condemned to fail. The result was an army of disappointed people who felt cheated of any chance to live happily. Moreover, many Poles’ sense of national pride was wounded by the recognition that “Jewish hard work and Jewish initiative” had helped the country achieve a measure of prestige and economic might.21 It was from this tension, analyzed by Börne, Simmel, Sombart, Borochov, Tenenbaum, and Slezkine, that modern anti-Semitism derived its energy. Twelve years before Simmel, Theodor Herzl had recognized “the upward class movement” of Austro-Hungarian Jews as a new source of enmity and contrasted this “entrepreneurial spirit” with the “stationary” work done by many gentiles. But the First World War socially activated those who survived it, often uprooting and forcing them to start anew and move forward. National majorities, encouraged and supported by their political representatives and governments, began to close the gap.22
Along with the growing anti-Semitism in so many nations of Europe, another central precondition was required for genocide to occur: the Second World War and its furious destructive force. Germany bears sole responsibility for the war, as it does not for anti-Semitism per se. The Wehrmacht’s pitiless, homicidal campaigns in Eastern Europe, the main area of Jewish settlement, dragged tens of millions of people into a vortex of privation, terror, and death. It made civilians into profiteers of the victims—and often enough into victims themselves. The demise of normal political structures of governance and organization, an end intentionally pursued by German occupiers, set the scene for plunder and murder.
The war was what lowered people’s inhibitions against committing acts of violence, fueled their fantasies about internal enemies and traitors, and encouraged their covetousness of other people’s belongings. It was in part the conditions created by war that paralyzed the consciences of so many Christians, so that thinking in brutal friend-enemy dichotomies and jaded shoulder-shrugging indifference to others’ suffering became the norm. In the spring of 1942, when Goebbels wrote of the “extremely barbaric” procedure needed to bring about a final solution to the Jewish Question, he expressed gratitude for the necessary preconditions created by Germany: “Thank God, we have in war a whole series of possibilities that were off-limits to us in peace. These we must use.”23
With the exceptions of Denmark and parts of Belgium, German executioners were able to exploit specific anxieties to encourage violence against Jews in all the countries they occupied or dominated. They picked up on people’s long-standing wish for an ethnically pure national state or for the elimination of Jewish refugees or unwanted competition. The German overlords always tried to allow individual governments, national and local administrations, and certain segments of occupied populations to benefit from ghettoization and deportation of Jews. That helped them secure the assistance of local police units and administrators as well as the support or at least indifference of those populations. More than anything, however, the war waged so brutally by Germany augmented an already existing greed for the property of “foreigners.” As a result, over and over, German occupiers pushed through the complete expropriation of Jews as a way to alleviate the misery they themselves had caused.
Did anti-Jewish measures and acts of violence make it easier or harder for Germany to occupy other countries? After all, the German conquerors needed to maintain control over vast stretches of territory with relatively small forces of their own. In his comprehensive 2011 study of the genocide of Jews in Lithuania, historian Christoph Dieckmann investigated this question. He concluded that the murder of Lithuanian Jews was used as a “means of encouraging upward social mobility” and that it accelerated the social and economic “reordering processes within a perennially poor society.” The act of genocide was in keeping with the anti-Semitic, nationalist policies of social emancipation for the Lithuanian people that had been in place since the late nineteenth century.
Dieckmann interprets the expropriation of Jewish property during the war as a “policy of national-racist redistribution of wealth in society.” Lithuanians were able to enrich themselves by stealing everything, portable or not, left behind by people who had been imprisoned in ghettos and murdered; this was a “major means of binding” German occupiers and Lithuania’s gentile population. For Dieckmann, direct social and economic profit is the main explanation for the scant opposition to the murder of almost all of this small country’s 220,000 Jews. He also concludes that the mass killing of Jews, carried out with the active assistance of the native population, made the German occupation of Lithuania “easier rather than more difficult.”24
Collaboration isn’t a fully adequate term for the interplay of native forces and occupiers. It is more accurate to speak of a coincidence of specific interests. Where Jews were concerned, this coincidence led to a level of popular and state cooperation that went far beyond the actions of individual traitorous Quislings. Today, memorial plaques in French schools memorialize Jewish students who were murdered in German death camps. They usually contain a statement that the children who were deported were arrested “avec la complicité active” of French police in the Vichy regime and then handed over to Nazi barbarians.
The Nazi regime wanted to “solve the Jewish question” in all German-occupied and -allied states and combined that aim with the idea of transporting Jews outside those countries for “work deployment.” Germany’s offer of “help” was accepted in many places. Indeed, it was viewed as a unique opportunity that had the additional advantage of allowing the political powers in the countries concerned to dilute their own responsibility or abdicate it entirely. Collaborators like French premier Pierre Laval talked about “work deployment” and “resettlement” for so long that they eventually believed in these things themselves.25 And cooperation was made easier because occupation officers and representatives of the SS and the German Foreign Ministry offered material incentives when they pressed for Jews in occupied and allied countries to be deported. German occupiers were at pains to ensure that state coffers and national majorities in all these countries profited from the disappearance of an unwanted minority.
On October 15, 1941, the local German commandant of Kryvyi Rih in Ukraine reported that “the remaining Jews” were being shot by police forces, which included “the entire auxiliary police.” The Ukrainian city administration had “confiscated Jewish homes, keeping the furniture for themselves or selling it to needy locals.”26 In the cities of Belarus, as historian Christian Gerlach has documented, German occupiers alleviated the housing shortage caused by their war in similar fashion: “As a rule, German military and civilian administrators left the former homes of Jews for the local government.… It was responsible for allocating them.” The portable belongings of those who had been murdered were also used to benefit Belarussian and Polish people living in the area. Some were in such desperate need that they didn’t think about the source of the goods they received, but “others accepted the massacre and the homes they were given with indifference or even approval [of their origins].”27 In the middle of a cataclysmic war, the murder of millions of people allowed the governments of the countries affected by it to reallocate more than a million places to live, mostly in cities.
Against the wishes of the German occupation authorities in Belgrade, Hermann Göring decreed in early 1942 that Jewish assets were to be given to the Serbian state treasury “to provide financial assistance for the Serbian state budget, which has been heavily burdened by the costs of occupation.” Around the same time, the 100 million francs French Jews had been required to pay to German occupiers were distributed to French gentiles whose property had been damaged by British air raids on Parisian rail facilities. The money was doled out by a specially formed comité ouvrier de secours immédiat.
German occupiers acted in much the same way during their brief African campaign in French Tunisia. After the port city of Tunis had been exposed to heavy British bombardment in the summer and fall of 1942, Security Police and Security Service commandos organized “immediate support for bombing victims,” forcing Jews to pay a special levy of 50 million francs. As was the case in Paris, this stolen aid money was distributed by a special committee of locals to “families who have suffered damage, especially Muslims.”
German occupiers offered similar immediate help to bombing victims in Budapest and Milan.28 In occupied Poland, they deported hundreds of thousands of Jews to ghettos to make room for Poles who had been displaced by Germans in an attempt to Germanize the annexed western Polish provinces.29 Businesses and workshops, furnishings, and clothing were sold to Poles by local Polish officials and mayors or handed out for free to displaced Poles, who had lost everything.
In Salonika, Himmler’s Security Service intervened energetically in the summer of 1943 when the German military commandant tried to distribute the belongings of Jews deported to Auschwitz to members of the small local Bulgarian- and Romanian-language minorities. SS Hauptsturmführer Herbert Hösselbarth countermanded this as being “without a doubt politically and propagandistically unfavorable.” The Greek government and local authorities, he said, had been promised that “Jewish assets would be put at the exclusive disposal of the Greek state for the purpose of benefiting Greek citizens.”30
German occupiers handed out rewards everywhere, although never without keeping a portion of the booty for themselves.31 Occupation authorities in various places confiscated bank accounts, securities, and life insurance policies. Local offices sold property and, insofar as they had not already been looted by neighbors, the contents of homes and workshops at bargain prices to natives. This participatory practice secured the passive support of millions of people in almost all the nations of Europe.
In his diary, Hungarian writer Sándor Márai, born Henrik Grosschmis in Košice in 1900, described the effects under even a mild occupation regime. In the winter of 1944–45, while fleeing the Red Army toward Budapest, he made a chance acquaintance. “On the road, a man joined me. He had fled from Lajosmizse.… I sought to reassure him that he’d be able to return home soon. In an addled voice, he murmured, ‘I own two acres of Jew land. Do you think I’ll get to keep it?’” This was how small-time profiteers from murder and larceny spoke about their spoils. Average, otherwise perfectly respectable people from all social classes derived benefits, large and small, from others’ misery.32
And they did not want to give up those benefits. In the final months of the war, Czech president-in-exile Edvard Beneš announced in London that repatriating Jews would bring “difficulties” for his government. Ranking members of the French Resistance advised Charles de Gaulle in 1944 that he should not promise to bring deported Jews back to France, warning that it could damage his reputation.33
In 1947, the World Jewish Congress succeeded in getting the Polish government to extend the deadline for filing claims to assets by a year to December 31, 1948. But only a few survivors were able to make such claims. In the French occupation zone of postwar Germany, the French military government refused to restitute Jewish property in line with the regulations in the American zone because it was felt that the rules went too far and could stir up fresh anti-Semitism.34
Throughout Europe, including of course Germany, Nazi leaders had made as many people as they could into profiteers of Jewish persecution. Those who had participated in robbery, no matter how minor, said nothing when Jews were taken away to destinations unknown. Some people were happy to see the deportations. Those who had taken over the job of a deported office worker, a business or apartment, or borne off winter clothing or furnishings didn’t as a rule protest against Nazi inhumanity. The only thing that interested such people was that the Jews were gone for good. The leaders of Nazi Germany counted on this effect. They knew only too well from their own experience of buying popular support by distributing the assets of German Jews that sharing such spoils shored up cooperation between occupiers, the people, and their political offices. It encouraged a bandit morality within a conspiratorial community from which it was very difficult to break free once people had taken the bait.
According to the wishes of the German military commandant in Paris, revenues from the sale of Jewish businesses and real estate were to go to “French state finances.” Göring further ordered that the “economic participation of French buyers be prioritized.” In this way France was to be “divorced from the Jewish world,” as German ambassador Otto Abetz explained in Paris. He meant cutting the country’s traditional ties to the Western democracies and binding it to Germany.35
Following Italy’s example, in the winter of 1943–44 the Hungarian government tried to leave its ill-fated alliance with Nazi Germany. In response, the Wehrmacht subjected the country to a mild form of occupation on March 19, 1944. The Reich Commissioner for Hungary, Edmund Veesenmayer, changed only some of Hungary’s political leadership and offered to help the new government address its “Jewish question.” Six weeks later, on the orders of the Hungarian Interior Ministry, not the German occupiers, Hungarian police had interred 300,000 Jews in ghettos for immediate deportation to Auschwitz.
Goebbels watched what was happening from Berlin and felt a sense of triumph. “The Hungarians, in any case, will no longer break out of the logic of the Jewish question,” he wrote. “He who says A must say B, and now that the Hungarians have started with Jewish policy, they won’t be able to apply the brakes. At a certain point, Jewish policy drives itself. That’s now the case with Hungary.” Hitler added that “as the Hungarian example again shows … the advantages of anti-Semitism … are of a significance that shouldn’t be underestimated.” By involving the government in Budapest and above all the head of state Miklós Horthy as participants in mass murder, Hitler successfully bound Hungary to Germany so that its potential could be mobilized “to a major extent” for German interests.36 Three years earlier, when the Reich Commissioner in Croatia, Edmund Glaise-Horstenau, had an audience with the Führer on April 14, 1941, he reported that the new Ustashe government needed money “because it wants to seek a solution to the Jewish question in Croatia as soon as possible.” Hitler interjected, “We can send them some experienced experts.” But he rejected the idea of deporting Jews who had emigrated to Croatia after 1914. “The most money is with the other ones,” he reasoned.37
Because the German conquerors shared their booty with the peoples they had subjugated, they lessened occupied people’s willingness to resist, turning them into confidants and accessories. That helped the leadership persist in a ridiculously overambitious war, which they were ultimately able to extend to five years. Goebbels, Hitler, and their henchmen knew exactly what was meant by “He who says A must say B.” They intentionally corrupted millions of people in the belief that at a certain point moral corrosion would become self-reinforcing. They made people callous and obedient.
The results of this mass complicity are evident in the whispered comments Fenyö Miksa (born Miksa Fleischmann) overheard in Budapest in the winter of 1944–45. Two deaconesses were talking about the people kept in the city’s ghetto. Miksa wrote: “One of them said: ‘It’s completely certain that the Arrow Cross intends to do something terrible to the ghetto.’ The other answered: ‘I feel sorry for these poor people, but maybe it’s good the way it is. This way they won’t be able to take revenge.’”38
Nazi allies and German-occupied states had considerable leeway in refusing requests from Berlin to deport their Jewish populations, as examples from Bulgaria, Romania, France, Slovakia, individual European cities like Athens, and pre-1944 Hungary show. In those places, the national politicians didn’t deliver up all their Jews, and there was little the Nazi regime could do about it. The reasons were twofold. First, the assimilated Jews of Athens, Sofia, Paris, Budapest, Bratislava, and Bucharest usually enjoyed much better protection than their Yiddish-speaking, traditional coreligionists. Second, the military successes of the anti-Hitler coalition made politicians who might have leaned toward complicity think twice. In most cases it was the increasingly successful prosecution of the war against the Wehrmacht, and not any moral qualms, that saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of acutely threatened Jews. It was only on April 29, 1943, after the German military had suffered painful defeats in Stalingrad and North Africa, that the commissioner of Jews in the German Foreign Ministry complained: “In all of the Balkan countries, the negative attitude toward anti-Jewish measures has recently increased.”39
Everything that happens has prior factors and developments—prehistories—that can be viewed as potential causes, although the plausibility of such connections decreases the greater the time elapsed between a factor and an event. Moreover, depending on the perspective of the observer, the number and significance of relevant prehistories is open to debate. But there are some general truths. Few people today would dispute that the Holocaust was caused by a multiplicity of factors. And what made it singular is also beyond debate: the pitiless thoroughness with which six million people—in a brief period and across an entire continent—were killed because of their “ethnic origins.”
It is correct to point out that the interplay of causes was what made such an unprecedented crime possible. But evaluated on their own, none of these individual causes is unique. Each one of them fits into the continuum of German and European history. This is most evident in the case of “modern” anti-Semitism, but it also applies to the other phenomena we have repeatedly encountered in the preceding chapters: jingoistic nationalism, anti-liberalism, friend-and-foe dichotomies, discrimination against minorities, the expropriation of alleged enemies of the people, heightened social and economic competition, general striving for social and economic betterment, utopian dreams of homogeneous societies, and the legal and morally caustic effects of foreign and civil wars. These mutually influencing factors all encouraged increasing radicalism, and anti-Semites from various countries eagerly learned from their peers.
The multiplicity of diverse prehistories leads to the question of how the individual elements combined, reacted to one another, and developed their explosive genocidal energy. When a tragedy occurs, a common reflex is to draw attention to chains of events. On their own, none of the individual events is causal; it’s the combination, including factors that may appear entirely harmless, that produces a result. The catastrophe is analyzed, and those who come after try to minimize the risks of repeating history either by eradicating isolated culprits or averting their unpredictable interplay. Instead of chains of causality, we could also speak of contingent events. The Latin root of the word, tangere, means to physically touch. Most scholars use the term as a synonym for “possible” or “random.” I understand the Holocaust to be a contingent event in the sense of a likely possibility, in the prehistory of which a variety of actors with various aims played a larger or smaller role. These protagonists sometimes interacted unconsciously or semiconsciously. In other respects they behaved in the full knowledge of what they were doing and why. Many couldn’t suspect that their anti-Semitic rhetoric, incitement, and activities would help lead, years or even decades later, to Auschwitz. Even so, increasing numbers of Europeans between 1880 and 1939 came to wish that “the Jews” would disappear, and many of them did not shy from using violence. Others—perhaps most notably Theodor Herzl—recognized early on that persecution and bloodshed were a possibility and warned against it.
Anyone who aims to learn about the Holocaust in the preventative sense must insist on differentiated investigations of the prehistories that were the basis of this barbarity. It won’t do to reduce the diverse forms of complicity to formulaic entities like the National Socialists, ethnic ideologues, and racist anti-Semites, or fascism, totalitarianism, and dictatorship, or even the dictator Hitler. Such labels serve the understandable longing to put maximum distance between ourselves and genocide. But they cover what we as human beings find so threatening in a layer of abstraction and explain nothing. Nor is it especially productive to trace modern anti-Semitism back to the centuries-old anti-Judaism of Christianity. Not even the anti-Semitic clerics of Poland referred back to this ideology. They, too, used contemporary economic and social arguments.
Insofar as gentiles in the first half of the twentieth century pressed for Jews to be partially or completely stripped of their civil rights or insisted they be shipped off to somewhere outside Europe, they were motivated by the same obsessive anxiety: the fear of a supposedly overwhelming power and the real intellectual and economic agility of a small, precisely delineable “foreign” group. Whether in Russia, Hungary, Poland, France, Greece, or Germany—everywhere the slow were pitted against the quick, the unimaginative against the lovers of ideas, the lazy against the industrious, the enviers against the envied. Under the pretense of equality and equity, the less educated tried to restrict the access of intellectually more nimble Jews to master apprenticeships, academies, universities, and certain professions. For fearful laggards, the civil service in particular was a realm that offered professional security, and thus was everywhere kept tightly closed to potential Jewish colleagues.
With the end of the First World War, anti-Semitism became a political factor in most European countries. It primarily created a class-bridging sense of community, suffused with the national majority’s envy and fear of failure. A secondary product of this lack of self-confidence was pompous claptrap about “genuine” Russians, Romanians, or Magyars, about the eternal values, the heroic grand deeds, and the historical sublimity of every so-called national people. One extreme example was the self-elevation of the humiliated German losers of the First World War into a “master race.” In this sense, there was something real to “racial theory”—it helped majority titular peoples compensate for feelings of inferiority. Members of national majorities didn’t really feel contempt for Jews as subhumans, even if that notion became commonplace in Nazi Germany. On the contrary, to stay with the metaphor, they admired and fought against superhumans. For that reason, in The Jewish Century, Yuri Slezkine doesn’t analyze racial anti-Semitism at all. For Slezkine, Jews represented a “successful minority” in largely unsuccessful European nation-states.40
Jews’ head start in terms of formal education and entrepreneurial spirit was already shrinking before the First World War and decreased notably thereafter. Everywhere, Christian majorities were beginning to catch up. Investment in schools and universities in both democracies and autocratic states was paying off. Urbanization, which put people in proximity to institutes of higher education and universities, also played a role.
In this situation, young artisans, salesmen, entrepreneurs, civil servants, academics, and workers’ and peasants’ ambitious sons sought to restrict opportunities for Jews or expel them from society entirely. The struggle for the rewards of modernity, which were always connected to performance, had begun in the 1880s and reached its zenith in the interbellum years. As the gap in education closed, the degree of friction between Jews and majority populations increased. A paradox? No, because only when those trying to bridge that gap had made a certain amount of progress did the elevated social status of those first out of the blocks appear attainable. Envy is born of social proximity, not of the distance between two cleanly separated groups whose material circumstances are different but fundamentally stable.
That leads us to a vexing conclusion, which I would like to present as a final thought for discussion, if not as an ultimate truth. Evil arises not only from evil but also from what is basically good. Well-intentioned educational policies and state-supported desires to lift the masses socially—both of which can be counted among twentieth-century Europe’s great triumphs—served to increase hatred. The same is also true of the best political ideas and those most deserving of continuation: democracy, liberty, popular participation, self-determination, and social equality.
Arthur Ruppin, the sociologist and cofounder of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was thinking of just such positive social developments when he asserted in 1930 that “Jews are being confronted with rising Christian competition.” The Christian majorities had learned from those they considered their enemies and woken up. “The mentality displayed by Jews today,” Ruppin wrote, “is the mentality of gentiles tomorrow.”41
The general drive for upward social mobility, which entailed so many fears and so much stress, insecurity, and possible disappointment for so many individuals, had stoked anti-Semitism since the nineteenth century. But it became especially strong in the politically, economically, and culturally turbulent 1920s and ’30s. Seen from this vantage point, the greatest crime of the twentieth century, the Holocaust, is connected to the greatest achievement of the same epoch, namely, the social elevation of masses of people. Under the extreme pressure of the war, begun and led by Germany, what had moved civilization forward had also brought about its destruction.