{"id":7670,"date":"2014-09-19T00:16:59","date_gmt":"2014-09-19T07:16:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=7670"},"modified":"2014-09-18T20:18:19","modified_gmt":"2014-09-19T03:18:19","slug":"ancient-hatred-writ-large","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2014\/09\/19\/ancient-hatred-writ-large\/","title":{"rendered":"Ancient hatred writ large"},"content":{"rendered":"

Near the end of World Without Jews<\/em> (Yale University Press, 2014), we find this passage from a letter written in June of 1943 by a Wehrmacht officer named Wilm Hosenfeld, a Catholic, a schoolteacher in civilian life who had come to know a lot about the fate of the Jews deported from the Warsaw Ghetto: \u201cWith this terrible mass murder of the Jews we have lost the war. We have brought upon ourselves an indelible disgrace, a curse that can never be lifted. We deserve no mercy, we are all guilty.\u201d Hosenfeld was later captured by the Soviets and died in a Siberian gulag.<\/p>\n

\"image<\/a>The remarkable thing about this letter is not just that it was written, but that its author was a member of the notorious Sturmabteilung who later became a full member of the Nazi party. One may ask: doesn\u2019t the fact that one Nazi could feel this way repudiate the \u201cwe had no choice \u2013 we were following orders\u201d excuse so often heard from other Holocaust perpetrators?<\/p>\n

These are the kinds of questions posed in the meticulously researched new book by Israeli-born historian Alon Confino of Ben-Gurion University and the University of Virginia, which draws upon many non-traditional sources to present an answer to a new Holocaust question: not whether or not the Holocaust was intentional, or how it was carried out, but rather how did Germans come to conceive of a world without Jews? (And, as Confino makes clear: it was indeed a world without Jews, not a Germany without Jews, that the Nazis envisioned.)<\/p>\n

Drawing upon untraditional sources, many of which have only recently been found or made available \u2013 wartime letters, diaries, journals, newspapers and photographs \u2013 Confino provides a shocking answer to this question: \u201cGermany went after the Jews … not in spite of being a nation of high culture but because it was such a nation…. The Nazis perpetrated the Holocaust in the name of culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Confino notes that the burning of the Bible was a Nazi obsession: thousands and thousands of Bibles were heaped on the flames, culminating in the great fires of Kristallnacht, during which not only Bibles, but 1,400 synagogues were set on fire.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Confino\u2019s goal in World Without Jews<\/em> is precisely to explore the very backgrounds and influences that created a uniquely genocidal culture. He begins his quest at a new starting point by asking, if Nazi policies were fueled by master-class racism, why were the Nazis so anxious to prioritize the burning of the Bible? Confino notes that the burning of the Bible was a Nazi obsession: thousands and thousands of Bibles were heaped on the flames, culminating in the great fires of Kristallnacht, during which not only Bibles, but 1,400 synagogues were set on fire.<\/p>\n

Confino\u2019s subject, then, is not Auschwitz, as it is of many Holocaust historians. Rather, it is this: how could Germans imagine a world without Jews? Where could such an absurd, fantastic notion come from? How could it become legitimized? How could it possibly be carried out?<\/p>\n

Confino is certain of one thing: the Judeocide was fully anticipated before it began in 1941. This conviction contradicts that of most Holocaust historians, who feel that the Holocaust was an ex tempore \u201csolution\u201d to the \u201cJewish Problem\u201d raised by the German forces\u2019 occupation of Eastern Europe. Not so, says Confino, because the Holocaust was a result of \u201can accumulation of ancient [largely Christian] hatreds\u201d fueled by 19th-century nation-building and given precedent by the mass murders perpetrated around the world in the 19th century by British, French, Dutch and Belgian colonizers. But why Jews? Why was their extermination seen as so central to German survival?<\/p>\n

Confino\u2019s answer to this question is that Jewish culture had always been a culture of chaim<\/em>, of life; the Nazis wanted to found a culture of death. To do so, they had to \u201celiminate the shackles of a past tradition\u201d to \u201cliberate their imagination to open up new emotional, historical and moral horizons that enable them to imagine and to create their empire of death.\u201d Thus, life-centred Jews had to go, and their books with them.<\/p>\n

What we have here, in other words, is \u201cthe first experiment in the total creation of a new humanity achieved by extermination, a humanity liberated from the moral shackles of its past.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

On the question of who knew what was happening, Confino is uncompromising: no one in Germany could not have known \u2013 not necessarily about the mass murders, but that \u201csomething terrible\u201d was happening.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

On the question of who knew what was happening, Confino is uncompromising: no one in Germany could not have known \u2013 not necessarily about the mass murders, but that \u201csomething terrible\u201d was happening. To prove his point, Confino cites hundreds of articles, pamphlets, radio speeches and photographs \u201cshowing what Germans saw when they walked in the street, drove on the road, or made their way to work\u201d \u2013 all of which refer to the need to eliminate the \u201cJewish influence.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Confino\u2019s view, the extermination of the Jews was fully intentional; all it required was a passive populace, and the active participation of the Christian Church. The Nazis got both, in spades.<\/p>\n

Confino doesn\u2019t hesitate to directly implicate the Christian Church in the Nazis\u2019 program to eradicate Christianity\u2019s Jewish origins: time and again he reasserts the \u201cfundamental affinity\u201d between Nazism and Christianity regarding the need to eliminate Christianity\u2019s \u201cJewish roots.\u201d The difference between them was that for the Nazis, they produced Christ; for the Church, it was because they killed him.<\/p>\n

Nazism, then, was to be a new Bereishit, a new beginning point. Canadian scholar Northrop Frye said often that Western culture was permanently \u201canchored\u201d in the Bible: the Nazi project was to cut this anchor and drop a new one, rooted in the crazed dogmas of Mein Kampf<\/em>. Getting rid of Jews was, in other words, \u201cakin to making a clean historical slate.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the most unforgettable and heretofore never published photos contained in World Without Jews<\/em>, shows a small statue of a crucified Christ in front of a church in Westphalia. Under the statue, in large letters, there is the sign \u201cNo Jews Allowed.\u201d Just over the head of the Christ are the letters \u201cINRI\u201d: that is, in Latin, \u201cJesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.\u201d May this irony not be lost and, to that end, may we be thankful for books such as Confino\u2019s World Without Jews<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Graham Forst<\/strong>, PhD, taught literature and philosophy at Capilano University until his retirement and now teaches in the continuing education departments at Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia and Banff School of Fine Arts. From 1975 to 2010, he co-chaired the symposium committee of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Near the end of World Without Jews (Yale University Press, 2014), we find this passage from a letter written in June of 1943 by a Wehrmacht officer named Wilm Hosenfeld, a Catholic, a schoolteacher in civilian life who had come to know a lot about the fate of the Jews deported from the Warsaw Ghetto: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[2040,53,2038,2039],"class_list":["post-7670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-alon-confino","tag-holocaust","tag-nazis","tag-wilm-hosenfeld"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7670\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}