Hitler and the Holocaust by Robert S. Wistrich Read Free Book Online

I NTRODUCTION
The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The German Nazis had at last decreed: You have no right to live.
    RAUL HILBERG, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961)
    The Holocaust was an unprecedented crime against humanity that aimed at the annihilation of the entire Jewish population of Europe, down to the last man, woman, and child. It was the planned, deliberate policy decision of a powerful state, the Nazi Reich, which mobilized all of its resources to destroy an entire people. The Jews were not condemned to die for their religious beliefs or for their political opinions. Nor were they an economic or military threat to the Nazi state. They were killed not for what they had done but for the simple fact of their existence.
    To be born a Jew, in the eyes of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime, meant that one was a priori not a human being and therefore unworthy of life. There were other innocent victims of Nazi racial ideology: Gypsies, who were considered racially impure, were sent to the gas chambers; Russians, Poles, and other occupied peoples in eastern Europe were reduced to slavery; even those ethnic Germans who were branded as mentally or physically defective were put to death until a public outcry moderated this policy. We know that under the Nazi regime, the SS, the Einsatzgruppen (mobilekilling units), the Wehrmacht, the Order Police, and the guards in the death camps practiced brutality on a hitherto unknown scale; that they mowed down row upon row of shivering, half-naked adults and smashed the heads of Jewish infants without pity or remorse; that they built a vast system of concentration camps and death camps, the purpose of which was the production of corpses on an industrial scale.
    The central unanswered question is why? Why were Jews worked to death on senseless, unproductive tasks, even when the Reich was experiencing an acute labor shortage? Why were skilled Jewish armament workers killed in the camps despite the pressing military needs of the Wehrmacht? Why did the Nazis insist they were fighting an omnipotent “Jewish” power even as their mass murder of the Jews revealed the powerlessness of their enemy?
    At the heart of this seeming mystery lay a millenarian weltanschauung (worldview) which proclaimed that “the Jews” were the source of all evils—especially internationalism, pacifism, democracy, and Marxism; that they were responsible for Christianity, the Enlightenment, and Freemasonry. They were branded “a ferment of decomposition,” formlessness, chaos, and “racial degeneration.” The Jews were identified with the fragmentation of urban civilization, the dissolving acid of critical rationalism, and the loosening of morality. They stood behind the “rootless cosmopolitanism” of international capital and the threat of world revolution. In a word, they were the Weltfeind —the “world enemy” against which National Socialism defined its own grandiose racial utopia of a Thousand-year Reich.
    In Hitler’s genocidal, racist ideology, the redemption ( Erlösung ) of the Germans and of “Aryan” humanity depended upon the “Final Solution” ( Endlösung ) of the “Jewish question.” Unless the demonic Weltfeind was annihilated, there would be no “peace” in a Europe that was to be united under Germanic leadership so that Germany could fulfill its “natural destiny” by expanding to the east to create Lebensraum (livingspace) for its people. The Second World War, which Hitler initiated, was simultaneously a war for territorial hegemony and a battle against the mythical Jewish enemy.
    War made the Holocaust a concrete possibility. The victories of the Wehrmacht brought millions of Jews under the heel of German power for the first time. The task of annihilating them in cold blood was delegated by Hitler to the SS, under