The Language of Assault vs.the Language of Dialogue

The shocking assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel, was a stunning and traumatic act. But it was no surprise. In fact, the murder was the culmination of months of verbal assault.  A hero in war, Rabin had been hated and vilified and threatened for forty years by the despots and dictators of the Arab "rejection front" and their terrorist hirelings.  An officer in the War of Independence, he later played pivotal roles four times in the defense of his country against combined military attacks.

As a statesman in peace, he was verbally assaulted also by extremist cadres in the Jewish right wing. As the "peace process" inched forward, as their imperial dreams of an expansionist Israel began to recede, their vilification and threats became a crescendo in intensity and fury.  Like the Arab extremists, the Jewish extremists called Rabin "Nazi."  To this they added verbal blows like "traitor" and "betrayer" and "murderer."  Worst of all, from a religious perspetive, they wrapped up their murderous political violence in the language of piety and orthodoxy.

This is the Language of Assault, which prepares the way and justifies physical violence.  It can never be justified under a legitimate government.  Some think assault and counter-assault are the only political recourse under despotisms and dictatorships.  Against such illegitimate regimes they may be justified, although there are excellent scholars of politics who have concluded that massive Non-Violent Direct Action is superior — in the immediate present and in the long run — to any popular, violent revolt against tyrannies.  In any case, the Language of Assault, with murder its logical end result, has no place among free and democratic peoples.

The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin reminds us of the way the assassination of John F. Kennedy was prepared.  Nationwide, Kennedy was subjected to the most shameless verbal assaults by American extremist groups.  In the autumn of 1963, the decibels increased in intensity.  The John Birch Society and its allies plastered Dallas with posters showing the head of the President surmounted by cross-hairs from target practice.  On November 22nd, JFK was assassinated.  The nation was in trauma, but we had no excuse to be surprised.

Among free and responsible peoples, there is another language: the Language of Dialogue.  As one of its keener student has pointed out, the Language of Assault is intended to shorten the life expectancy of its targets.  By contrast, the Language of Dialogue is intended to tend the political covenant, to inform the public forum, to better the common welfare.  Using the Language of Dialogue, it is possible for fellow-citizens to articulate sharp differences of opinion — and to live with the solutions worked out.  The words of assault, vilification, mendacity, and incitement have no place in democratic discussion, and they are out of place in the politics of democracy.

Those who use the Language of Assault against those of other opinion and policy, if the others are guided by civility and due process, have marked themselves as fit objects of the ban.  Many confused citizens, their confusion deliberately compounded by the mercenary media and vagrant lawyers, cannot presently distinguish the Language of Assault from the Language of Dialogue.  Seduced by babblings about "individual rights," "First Amendment rights" and "freedom," they are led to accept the idea that pornography, tobacco advertising, campaigns of verbal assault against politial opponents — in fact almost any idea that has enough money back of it to pay for an advertisement or hire a wandering lawyer — should have free run.

The slow moral undermining of the moral and physical health of a society is more difficult to measure.  Nevertheless words have consequences in action.  And the immediate result of a crescendo of irresponsible verbal assault can be marked in the burial of a hero of war and of peace a few weeks ago in Jerusalem.  The wild tongues" have won a temporary victory.  But the leaders of the free peoples ase rallying to save the "peace process" which Yitzhak Rabin helped shape.  And the responsible leaders of political groups in his own country are moving to isolate and quarantine the practitioners of the Language of Assault.  Those who love the life of free and responsible men and women may again remind themselves, in the words of an American heroine, Sojourner Truth, "Freedom is a hard-bought thing." 

Today is a time to recall the words of Rudyard Kipling's "Recessional:"

 Franklin H. Littell

Plundering Jewish Wealth: Hitler's 1936 Memorandum

In 1996 scholars hardly need further confirmation that Nazi Germany's confiscation of Jewish assets bolstered its economy.  From National Socialist Saturday (the boycott of Jewish businesses sixty-one days after the Machtergreifung) through the final days of World War II, thousands of documents and memoirs attest to continuous Third Reich interest in this source of wealth.  But under what circumstances did Hitler first consider a wholesale transfer of Jewish assets? 

Sometimes in August 1936, Hitler wrote a memorandum in which he called for a law to despoil German Jewry.  Published as No. 490 in Documents on German Foreign Policy, series C, volume 5, it is a crucial Third Reich statement pertaining to its economic plans.

The memorandum's contents do not demolish either intentionalist or functionalist positions on the Holocaust.  What it does argue powerfully is that, for Hitler, economic policy had no meaning outside foreign policy or war.  Moreover, throughout the 1930s, Hitler did not grasp that the German economy could not possibly function except as part of an all-European economy.  Autarchy was National Socialism's impossible dream. 

On June 21, 1934, President Paul von Hindenburg had made clear to Hitler that the tragi-comic, near-anarchy brought on by Nazi radicals must end.  Nine days later, Hitler responded with a massacre of Kampfzeit comrades, the murderous assault on the SA leaders, the so-called Night of the Long Knives.  In August of the same year he appointed Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht Minister of Economics, in addition to his responsibilities as President of the Reichbank.

Schacht's vehicle for economic stability was a "New Plan," whose key was stringent wage-and-price controls.  The New Plan also included features characteristic of the economic policies of some advanced industrial powers: thus, Germany declined to pay its financial debts and paid for raw material and food import through barter.

Schacht reasoned that although Germany's cash reserves had shrunk at one point to a mere RM100 million, the nation had sixty million avid consumers in a world full of producers anxiously seeking markets.  By offering German outlets to foreign exporters, he persuaded them to help influence their governments to accept indefinite postponements on German debts.  By playing exporters in various countries (and even in the same country) against each other, he further convinced them to accept Marks that could only be spent in Germany for such items as harmonicas, medical equipment, and obsolescent weapons. 

An unquestioned success at its outset — in part because Schacht insisted that Jews in various business fields not be harassed — the New Plan began to fall apart as early as the second half of 1935.  Foreign exporters, especially in the Balkans, discovered limits to internal harmonica markets; and, worse, German agricultural production failed to keep pace with rising demand.  The regime resisted rationing lest its prestige be damaged.  When the Minister of Food and Agriculture Walter Darré demanded that Schacht provided more foreign exchange for imports, the imperious Minister of Economics refused. Schacht exacerbated the situation in December 1935 by informing the Minister of Defense Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg that the foreign exchange requested by the armed forced could not be provided. 

As usual in economic matters, Hitler avoided making a definitive decision.  Instead, he appointed Hermann Goering, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, to arbitrate Darré and Schacht.  Perhaps predictably, Goering came down squarely on Darré's side and, thus, precipitated a governmental crisis that resulted in Hitler's 1936 memorandum, the announcement of a Four-Year Plan, and, in the Fall of 1937, prompted Schacht's resignation. 

While Goering and Schacht verbally attacked each other publicly and privately on related issues of foreign exchange and imports, the economy drifted to Hitler's deep annoyance.  To vent his frustration, Hitler put pen to paper and drafted his now-famous memorandum that would deeply affect the status of German Jewry. 

The memorandum is a model of Hitler's approach to problem-solving.  Three-and-a-half years' experience in government had changed nothing in his thinking.  The first paragraph once again presents a summary of his Weltanschauung, already well-known from dozens of speeches.  The second paragraph offers reasons why Marxism must be crushed and reads like passages in chapter 11 of Mein Kampf. 

Not until the tenth paragraph does Hitler get to the central point of the document.  "We are overpopulated and cannot feed ourselves from our own resources," he laments.  "When our nation has six or seven million unemployed, the food situation improves because these people lack purchasing power." 

What to do?  One idea he proposes is that the "distillation of potatoes" must cease forthwith: "Fuel must be obtained from the ground not from potatoes."  Another is that, "In short, I consider it necessary that now, with iron determination, a 100 percent self-sufficiency should be attained in every sphere where it is feasible . . ."

He advocates two legal measures.  The first is "A Law providing the death penalty for economic sabotage."  The second is "A Law making the whole Jewry liable for all damage inflicted by individual specimens of this community of criminals upon the German economy, and thus upon the German people." 

What "damage" were "individual specimens" inflicting?  The role of 500,000 Jews in the German economy had already been grossly exaggerated by both Nazi and anti-Nazi writers — the former to "prove" that Jews controlled Germany's destiny, and the latter to extol German Jewry's achievements.  The realities are that almost 75 percent made their living from trade and commerce (overwhelmingly in small and medium-size establishments), the rest from banking and the professions.  In 1930 Jews owned nearly 60 percent of all wholesale and retail clothing businesses.  They were most visible as owners of department and chain stores, of almost half the private banks in the country, and (until 1934) of the influential publishing house, Mosse and Ullstein.  However, fewer than one percent of Germany's more numerous and increasingly important credit banks were owned by Jews, and they were less than prominent in the leadership of German industry.  What there was to take from them in 1936 probably amounted to RM8-10 billion, in communal and personal assets.

No law of the type Hitler wanted for German Jewry was passed until after the Crystal Night, on November 9-10, 1938.  Meanwhile, big business, not the regime, became the beneficiary of a wave of major Aryanizations that began during the second half of 1937.  The wealthiest Jewish family in Europe, the Petscheks and the Rothschilds, would be devastated by Goering (in his capacity as head of the Four-Year Plan), by Krupp, by I. G. Farben, the Deutsche and Dresdner banks, and, especially, by Friedrich Flick.

Goering read the memorandum to the Reich Cabinet on September 4, 1936, stressing that a "showdown with Russia is inevitable," that the New Plan could be improved "in detail," and that "the execution of the order of the Führer is an absolute command."  Later that month, Hitler proclaimed a Four-Year Plan characterized by the same vagueness that marked his memorandum, except that it laid down the basis for the plundering of Jewish wealth in Germany.

 In retrospect, the major beneficiary was Germany's elite business corporations: I.G. Farben above all.  One of its senior executives emerged as the top manager determining the policies of the Four-Year Plan, which channeled large amounts of Jewish assets in private German hands.  All too many of the beneficiaries survived the war and went on to build upon their ill-gained wealth.  None gave back any assets to their former Jewish owners or their lives.

Milton Goldin

Reply to Reply : Schweitzer to Rosen

Dr. Philip Rosen's Reply really concedes my original point.  I never asserted that the pseudo-scientific racism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not an essential part of the explanation of the Holocaust.  My argument is that racism would condemn in equal measure, equally murderously, all groups outside the racial-national community (Volksgemeinschaft ).  The issue then is, why did Nazi racism seize upon the Jews so fatally and much less so or not at all on other "races"?  It is the combination of traditional Christian antisemitism — with its demonization, deicidal accusation, and criminalization of the Jews and Judaism — with the racial ideology that proved to be genocidal.  Dr. Rosen's citation of Raul Hilberg's dictum, "The Christian said 'You cannot live among us as Jews,' but the Nazis said 'You cannot live'," does not contradict my assertion.  There is an intimate connection between the two elements of that sequence; you would not have had the second without the first.

Dr. Rosen notes, correctly, that roots of the Holocaust are to be found in the belief that "race is the major determinant of history."  But how did the Nazis define the Jews?  According to the racial decrees of 1933 and the notorious 1935 Nuremberg Racial Laws, as Hilberg demonstrates in The Destruction of the European Jews  (1985 ed., pp. 66-68), the definition was religious, Jewishness hinging on how many of one's grandparents were members of the Jewish religious community.  There is no reference to physical traits or racial features, an inconsistency that helps to explain the wide use of the negative form, "non-Aryan."  To a remarkable degree, the racial terms and concepts employed by the Nazis were transparent veils, embroidery and embellishment camouflaging traditional religious and theological antisemitism, secularized and updated in the racial jargon of the modern age.

A case in point is Julius Streicher (1885-1946), medieval apparition and chief exemplar of Nazi medievalism, the repulsive Gauleiter of Franconia who was tried and hanged by the IMT at Nuremberg.  "I stand at the head of the struggle [against the Jews]," he said in 1933 at the time of the Anti-Jewish Boycott which he led.  He was the Hitler regime's antisemitic megaphone, broadcasting his filthy rantings in speeches and his pornographic weekly, Der Stürmer.

What are the contents of his antisemitism?  Most of what he said could have originated in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries.  His diatribes on ritual murders and the talmudic injunction to commit them fill article after article and were the subject of special issues such as the notorious one of 1934.  Typical of Streicher's obsession with ritual murder is a 1935 speech, when he warned of the pending "mass murder" planned by the "whip-swinging" Jews, what would in fact be "the greatest ritual murder of all times" and the prelude to "Jewish domination not just in Germany but final Jewish domination in the whole world."  On demonization, Streicher was fond of citing its charter text, the Gospel of John (8:42-47), where Jesus excoriates the Jews whose "father is the devil" not God or Abraham.  Typical references by Streicher are to the Jews as "neither man nor animal" but the "Devil in human disguise"; the battle is "to save humanity from destruction by the Jewish devils," a "satanic race [which] has no right to exist," and much else warning ad nauseam of "the frightfulness and dangerousness of the Jew."  How more conventional can he be on the crucifixion: "Golgotha has not yet been revenged" — which means, as many a medieval theologian also said, "Jewry/Judaism is organized criminality."  Torah tells Jews to "get all the wealth into their hands" and "spoil every country racially."  For millennia Jews have falsely been accused of "desecration of churches, of usury, of ritual murder, etc."  His medieval litany goes on with "Ahasver, the eternal Jew, wandering from country to country" under "the curse laid upon this criminal nation by God."

Streicher explained at his trial that until 1933 "the public made distinctions with respect to Jews only on the basis of religion" — but it certainly did not stop then and Streicher continued to do so, even when he wrote in "racial" terms.  Typical of his lucubrations on how to identify a Jew by racial features was his disquisition in Der Stürmer that Jews are short and small of stature with flat feet, a roll of fat at the nape of the neck, speak in a distinctive sing-song cadence, exude a "sharp, sour-sweet odor" (another medieval leitmotif), but no reference to the proverbial Jewish nose that was given much play in his cartoons.  Jews also, he said, were over-sexed, have exceptionally large genitals, are irresistible to innocent females, and infect German women with syphilis.  In Der Giftpilz he explained to children that indeed the Jew is usually recognizable by his nose, "crooked" and "bent," but also by his lips, "thick" and "sloppy," and his eyes and "thicker and more fleshy" eyelids; yet the decisive medievalistic "fact" is that "from a Jew's countenance the evil Devil talks to us."  This is Streicher's rendering of "the sin of the blood," the counterpart in his racial theology of original sin: "One single cohabitation of a Jew with an Aryan woman is sufficient to poison her blood forever.  Together with the 'alien albumen' she has absorbed the alien soul.  Never again will she be able to bear purely Aryan children, even when married to an Aryan."  Her children will be "bastards" having a "dual soul," ugly, deficient in character, and prone to illness.

If this is "racial science," I doubt that the authors Dr. Rosen cites from Gobineau and Galton (neither of whom were antisemitic) to H.S. Chamberlain would recognize it as such.  Jay Baird concluded that Streicher's ideas of race were so jejune as to be "comical."  Yet Streicher's maunderings were the kind of antisemitism that sold in the Third Reich, much more so than the high-flown scientific sludge of someone like Alfred Rosenberg.  As Streicher told the Tribunal in 1945, the German he addressed "is in his thinking simple and in his feelings prodigious.  He demands that one speak to him the way he speaks . . .   To that way of speaking and writing I held my colleagues in Der Stürmer and in the Party."  At Nuremberg Streicher was sentenced to the gallows, whether justly or not, because "his 25 years of speaking, writing, and preaching hatred of the Jews . . .  infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism, and incited the German people to active persecution."

The fact that Hitler had reserved a Final Solution for Christianity is perfectly true, but that was an ideological, not a racial matter, and the trouble with Christianity, as Dr. Rosen notes, is that it is "Jewish."  So, finally, my point is that there is little difference between us.  I neither offered "proof" that traditional Christian antisemitism was the cause of the Holocaust, nor that the European racial ideology of the nineteenth century and after was irrelevant; I say that the two of them together created the lethal dynamic for mass murder, that teaching the Holocaust will be superficial unless both phenomena are duly taken into account. 

Frederick M. Schweitzer, PhD
History Department, Manhattan College

Errata

Jonathan Petrie, author of A numerus Clausus . . . in Year 2, No 5, wishes to make the following clarifications in his text due to editorial oversights: 1) instead of "well over two million" he prefers "well over a million"; 2) instead of executions, he suggests "deaths" as more appropriate. 

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The January 1996, Forum carelessly misnamed Arthur A. Cohen. (Our thanks to Jack Nusan Porter).