Prologue to Annihilation

Stephen H. Norwood

Description

American and British appeasement of Nazism during the early years of the Third Reich went far beyond territorial concessions. In Prologue to Annihilation: Ordinary American and British Jews Challenge the Third Reich, Stephen H. Norwood examines the numerous ways that the two nations' official position of tacit acceptance of Jewish persecution enabled the policies that ultimately led to the Final Solution and how Nazi annihilationist intentions were clearly discernible even during the earliest years of Hitler's rule.

Further, Norwood looks at the nature and impact of American and British Jewish resistance to Nazi persecution and the efforts of Jews at the grassroots level to press Jewish organizations to respond more forcefully to the Nazi menace. He examines the worldwide protest and boycott movements against Germany and German goods as well as mass demonstrations by working-class and lower-middle-class Jews in many American and British cities.

Prologue to Annihilation details how the events of 1930-1936 tested American and British societies' willingness to accept Nazism and its anti-Jewish philosophy and illuminates the divisions that existed even within the Jewish community about how best to challenge Nazi antisemitic policies and atrocities.

Introduction: Foundations of the Final Solution
1. Portents: September 1930 to January 1933
2. Barbarism and Entrapment: The Cold Pogrom, 1933-1934
3. A Tidal Wave of Protest, March to May 1933
4. The Escalation of Judaea's War against Nazism, May to December 1933
5. Exposing and Boycotting the Third Reich, 1934
6. Disaster for the Jews: The Saar Plebiscite, January 1935
7. Entertaining Nazi Warriors in America and Britain, 1934-1936
8. 1935: Degradation, Appeasement, and Looming Catastrophe
Epilogue: Defeats, 1936-1939
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• 20th Century
• Modern
• Holocaust
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• The Holocaust
• Modern history
• Cold War
• General officer
• General
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Holocauste

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 03 août 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253053657
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

STUDIES IN ANTISEMITISM
Alvin H. Rosenfeld, editor

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.org
2021 by Stephen H. Norwood
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2021
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Norwood, Stephen H. (Stephen Harlan), 1951- author.
Title: Prologue to annihilation : ordinary American and British Jews challenge the Third Reich / [Stephen H. Norwoord].
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2021] | Series: Studies in antisemitism | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020047239 (print) | LCCN 2020047240 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253053619 (hardback) | ISBN 9780253053626 (paperback) | ISBN 9780253053657 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Jews-Persecutions-Germany-History-20th century. | Jews-Persecutions-Press coverage-United States. | Jews-Persecutions-Press coverage-Great Britain. | Nazis-Press coverage-United States. | Nazis-Press coverage-Great Britain. | Jews-United States-Attitudes. | Jews-Great Britain-Attitudes. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)-Causes. | Germany-Foreign public opinion, American | Germany-Foreign public opinion, British
Classification: LCC DS134.255 .N67 2021 (print) | LCC DS134.255 (ebook) | DDC 940.53/1830941-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047239
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047240
To Eunice G. Pollack
CONTENTS
Introduction: Foundations of the Final Solution
1. Portents: September 1930 to January 1933
2. Barbarism and Entrapment: The Cold Pogrom, 1933-1934
3. A Tidal Wave of Protest: March to May 1933
4. The Escalation of Judaea s War against Nazism: May to December 1933
5. Exposing and Boycotting the Third Reich: 1934
6. Disaster for the Jews: The Saar Plebiscite, January 1935
7. Entertaining Nazi Warriors in America and Britain: 1934-1936
8. Degradation, Appeasement, and Looming Catastrophe: 1935
Epilogue: Defeats, 1936-1939
Bibliography
Index

INTRODUCTION
Foundations of the Final Solution
IN EXPLAINING HOW AND WHEN the Hitler regime decided to annihilate the Jews, Holocaust scholars have concentrated on the period from the Kristallnacht pogroms in November 1938 through the early years of World War II. The few scholars who have addressed Western responses to the plight of European Jewry also dwell mainly on the years after Kristallnacht. 1 This examination of American and British responses focuses instead on the critical early years of the Third Reich, illuminating how much was known in the West about Nazi ambitions at the time. This was the period in which Western actions could still have precluded the ensuing catastrophe to Jewry and Europe.
Widening the lens of scholarship on Nazism and the Holocaust, Prologue to Annihilation demonstrates how the Nazis early policies and atrocities formed the foundation of the Final Solution. It argues that developments in the early years of Hitler s rule, and in the years immediately preceding it, foreshadowed what was to come. I show that from the establishment of the Nazi Party, its explicitly racial antisemitism was the central focus of its ideology. Of the twenty-five points in the party platform, endorsed in 1920, ten were aimed directly at the Jews. In one point, the Nazis made it clear that they intended to strip Jews of their citizenship on racial grounds: Only one who is of German blood irrespective of religion, can be a member of the nation. No Jew, therefore can be a member of the nation. The Jew could live in Germany only as a guest, and must be subject to alien legislation. The Hitler regime made this official in 1935 by introducing the Nuremberg race laws. The party platform s very first point telegraphed the Nazis expansionist designs, calling for the union of all Germans in a greater Germany. 2 The antisemitic terror that the Nazis openly directed at the Jews in the Saar, which Germany annexed after its victory in the January 13, 1935, plebiscite, clearly signaled the fate awaiting all Jews in the steadily expanding greater Germany. As the journalist William L. Shirer observed, The most important [of the twenty-five points] . . . were carried out by the Third Reich, with consequences disastrous to millions of people. 3
Some newspapers were quick to recognize the menace Nazis presented to Jews and sounded the alarm. A little more than a month after Adolf Hitler became chancellor, the London Daily Telegraph pointed out that the Nazi Party s practice of unleashing violent attacks on Jews was long-standing and warned that this would not change after the party assumed the responsibilities of government. The editors asked rhetorically, Can a party that has been fed for years upon little but hysterical hatred and counsels of violence settle down [and direct] a government that does not destroy and persecute? 4
Although not addressed in the newspapers, the Nazis promoted their lethal program by drawing heavily on Christianity s teachings about the Jews. The Nazis routinely presented Jews not only as the root of all of Germany s miseries but also as bent on taking over the world, subjugating the Aryan race, and destroying Christian civilization-goals that only a people evil and powerful enough to have murdered a god would pursue and could effect. Conflating theological and racial antisemitism, Nazi leaders roused their followers by invoking the image of the Jews as Christ killers and Satan s allies, while also characterizing them as subhuman. In a 1932 speech in Nuremberg, Julius Streicher urged his audience to listen to Christ who said to the Jews: You are children of the devil. He confirmed that all Jews have one common aim: World dominion. As the leader of the Nazis April 1, 1933 national boycott of Jewish stores and offices, Streicher proclaimed to an audience of one hundred thousand in Munich, Golgotha has not yet been avenged. He pledged that this time it would be the Jews themselves, the crucifiers of Jesus and arch-enemy of the German people, who would meet their punishment there. Drawing on the medieval libel that Jews murdered Christian children to extract their blood to mix with matzo at Passover, he denounced the Jews as a nation of bloodsuckers. 5
As early as April 1, 1933, the Manchester Guardian warned that Hitler appeared to telegraph the Nazis annihilationist intentions even in 1925, when he graphically described Jews in Mein Kampf as a spiritual pestilence - the worm of destruction gnawing at the tree of civilization. The survival of civilization demanded the wiping out of the pestilence, the killing of the worm. 6 In a German press interview on May 21, 1933, Hitler combined a hoary Christian antisemitic accusation dating from the fourteenth century with annihilationist imagery similar to that highlighted in the Guardian . Jews were well-poisoners of the German and Christian world-soul, and this lousy pest, this infection, degenerate in soul and spirit, was something one must exterminate if Germans and Christians were to thrive. 7
From the beginning, the Nazis made their rationale for ridding the world of this pestilence explicit. In what can be called annihilation inversion, the Nazis attributed their own genocidal intentions to the Jews. On April 1, 1933, the Nazi Women s Federation justified that day s national boycott of Jewish stores and offices by explaining that the Jews objective was the destruction of the German people. The federation claimed that it was the Jews who were responsible for Germany s defeat in the world war and for the 2,000,000 war dead and the starvation of old men, women, and children -steps toward their ultimate goal. With the Nazis in power, the Jews were now determined to deprive awakened Germany of all possibility to live. 8 The pro-Nazi German newspaper K lnischer Zeitung denounced the March 27, 1933 mass rally in New York s Madison Square Garden to protest Nazi antisemitism as a great auto da f , alluding to the Spanish Inquisition s public burning at the stake of conversos (whom the Nazis, as racial antisemites, considered Jews). 9 Now it was the Jews who had become the new inquisitors-who would burn Germans.
The Berlin pogroms of 1930 and 1931, even before Hitler came to power-in which organized bands of Nazis shouting, Perish Judaea! savagely beat Jews in the streets, smashed the large plate-glass windows of Jewish-owned department stores with paving stones, and wrecked Jewish-owned caf s-foreshadowed the infamous Kristallnacht of 1938. 10 Similarly, the Nazis declaration of war against Germany s 600,000 Jews . . . broadcast . . . from every wireless station in the country, which preceded their April 1, 1933 national boycott of Jewish stores and offices, loudly foretold the impending disaster. The London Daily Herald , the British Labour Party newspaper, commented that there was hardly any need for this official announcement, because crowds up and down the country were already taking the law into their own hands. They attacked Jewish stores at Eberswalde, Schwedt, Goettingen, Emden, Kiel, Wernigerode, Ereinwalde and Dortmund-that is to say from north to south and east to west of Ger