The Third Reich and Adolf Hitler will always be associated with an outburst of anti-Jewish sentiment not seen since the Crusades or the Middle Ages. Despite countless books and films having been created on the actual anti-Jewish activities themselves, almost none have focused on trying to explain why Hitler and the Nazi Party were anti-Jewish.

Nazi anti-Jewishness was based on three pillars:

• First, Jews were identified with political subversion and Communism in particular. (See chapter 61:"Jews and Communism") As outlined earlier, this sentiment was by no means a Nazi invention, and had been written about in public by Winston Churchill and a host of others including Henry Ford in America;  the political subversion of which Jews were accused ranged from the fantastic (the Protocols of Zion) to the promotion of pornography, racial mixing, degenerate art ("modern art") and other issues identified as problematic by the Nazis;

Above: Nazi propaganda  depicting Jews (Stars of David); Capitalism, (Dollar Signs) and Communism (Hammer and Sickles) all as part of the disease under inspection.

• Secondly, the Nazis associated Jews with super capitalism and economic exploitation. This descended directly from the traditional and pre-Christian objections to Jews. Hitlerian anti-Jewishness also accentuated the links between Jewish super capitalists and Communism, personified by the financing of the 1917 Russian Revolution by the American Jewish banker Jacob Schiff; and

• Thirdly, the Nazis associated Christianity with Jews, arguing that this religion was the product of Middle Eastern thought and not native Europe. The Nazis did not however dare to attack Christianity openly, rather leaving it alone to wither by itself, something that has to a large degree started to become reality by the end of the 20th century. Nonetheless, if the private comments of Hitler himself on Christianity are read, it can be seen that Hitler clearly identified Christianity with Jews.

 Only in this light can an understanding of the motivating factors behind the state that Hitler created be gained: a tradition of anti-Jewishness going back centuries; modern political thought associating Jews with Communism and subversion; the degradation of Germany under the Treaty of Versailles; economic collapse; and the outstanding oratorical ability of Hitler himself; all combined to propel the Nazi Party to power in 1933.

1933: Jewish Declaration of War on Germany

The very first declaration of war which led up the Second World War was in fact made on 23 March 1933, when a meeting of Jewish leaders from around the world formally and publicly declared war on the Hitler government, which at that stage was only two months old and had passed none of its racial laws.

The Jewish declaration of war was carried publicly by a large number of newspapers, including the Daily Express in London, which ran a bold full page headline "Judea Declares War on Germany" on its edition of 24 March 1933. Calling on all "Jews of the world to unite" the meeting of Jewish leaders resolved to launch a series of mass demonstrations and also to institute a worldwide boycott of German goods, presumably through their international business connections.

Unwittingly, this public declaration of war on Germany only served to inflame anti-Jewish feeling in Germany: the German government barred Jews from holding public office or "positions of influence" which were defined as university lecturing posts, journalists or newspaper editors, amongst others.

This declaration of war also provided the legal basis upon which Germany would later justify its internment of large numbers of Jews inside Germany: America had after all, interned its Japanese, as had Canada, and Britain had interned all its Italians. If Jews had declared themselves at war with Germany, the Nazis argued, then it would not be unreasonable to treat them as a hostile group and intern them as well. Despite this, not all Jews were interned, even right through the war.

So it was that when the Soviet Army occupied Berlin in 1945, a fully functioning Jewish community a few thousand strong, complete with synagogue, was still in existence in the German capital.

The Concentration Camps

Nazi Germany is however most known for its concentration camps, and particularly those in which large numbers of emaciated and dead prisoners were discovered at the end of the war, and which have become synonymous with any image of that era. The first concentration camps were set up soon after the Nazis came to power, with the best known being Dachau, which is situated to the north of Munich.

These camps were in fact large prisons, and the prisoners were sentenced by civil courts to fixed terms of imprisonment which depended upon the crime committed. These crimes could be overtly political - membership or activism in the banned Communist Party was common - but was also extended to all other crimes, including conventional criminal activities such as theft or robbery. Eventually homosexuals were also interned: although this would only occur quite a while later.

It was in fact a former Communist, who had been sentenced to imprisonment in the Dachau concentration camp for several months, and then released, who planted a bomb at the Munich beer cellar in November 1939. The bomb very nearly killed Hitler (he left early: if he had kept to the program for the speech that night, he would most certainly have been killed). The fact that the perpetrator was a former camp inmate, released after the war had started, is however the point: it showed that sentencing to the concentration camps was not necessarily a permanent condition and that it was not Jews alone who were sent to the camps.

That imprisonment at the camps was not necessarily permanent, has been proven beyond question by the uncovering in the Moscow State archives by the British Historian David Irving of a release note for a prisoner from Auschwitz itself in 1944 - supposedly at the height of that camp's gas chamber operations!

It was however so that a large number of Communists who were interned were Jews: however, by the time that the Second World War broke out in September 1939, the majority of Germany's Jews - some 319,900 out of a total population of 500,000 - had emigrated from Germany for good, leaving only some 180,000 Jews in Germany itself. (Racial Hygiene, Medicine Under the Nazis, Robert N. Proctor, Harvard University press, 1988). As the existence of the Jewish community in Berlin in 1945 showed, not even all of these had been interned during the war.

Above: Conditions in the Nazi camps worsened during the war, particularly when the large scale bombing of Germany started destroying supply lines in late 1944 and early 1945. Nightmarish scenes such as these awaited Allied troops when they seized the camp of Bergen Belsen in northern Germany. These corpses were not killed by gas chambers: they all show the unmistakable signs of having died of typhus, with the characteristic thinness being caused by the dehydration which accompanies that sickness. Although it was initially claimed that there were gas chambers in all the camps, it is now claimed that the only gas chamber victims were in the camps in German occupied Poland.

Nazi-Zionist Alliance

The outbreak of the Second World War did not initially see an increase in the number of concentration camps, although their number had been steadily growing since 1933. However, the closing of the borders following the declaration of war meant that the steady flow of Jews out of German territory was cut off. Soon the German victories in Poland and in the West had added significantly to the total number of Jews under German territorial control.

Initially the Nazi plan with its Jews was open ended: vague projects had been started, all varying from proposing the resettlement of Jews in Rhodesia, Madagascar or Palestine. In this way one of the more remarkable alliances of the war was struck up between Reinhard Heydrich, the SS general who would later be assassinated in Prague, and German Jewish Zionists.

Heydrich, in co-operation with the Zionists, actually set up farms in Czechoslovakia for Jews wishing to emigrate to Palestine, to learn basic agricultural skills: several hundred of these Nazi trained Jewish farmers were then settled in Palestine during the war, entering that land through Turkey.

However, all these plans were impractical while the war continued to rage: eventually a conference of top Nazi leaders was called in January 1942 at a villa in the suburb of Wannsee outside Berlin. Here the leadership of the Reich would decide what to do with the Jews under German control.

The Wannsee Conference

Although much has been made of the Wannsee conference and its detailed minutes, the record of the proceedings does not make particularly gripping reading: nowhere is it said that Jews were to be put to death, and only talks about interning Jews and resettling them in the protectorate of Poland to be used as laborers until the war was over, when another plan could be worked out.

Contemporary historians have taken the word "resettlement" as used in the Wannsee minutes to be a codeword for extermination - there is however no evidence to support this interpretation. For a full analysis of the Wannsee minutes, click here.

The Einsatzgruppen

In the interim, Germany had invaded the Soviet Union and had conquered huge areas of that country. The SS, entrusted with the political mission of the Nazi Party, formed what were called Einsatzgruppen - "Special Action Groups" to go in behind the German front-line with the specific instructions to execute, by shooting, all Communist functionaries, partisans or other "politically unreliable" elements behind the front-line.

The Einsatzgruppen carried out their task with Germanic efficiency, sending back regular reports to Berlin (which survived the war) detailing in specific detail how many people they had killed in each time period between reports. Due to the fact that a large number of Communist functionaries were Jews, this group made up a large number, but not always a majority, of the people eliminated by the Einsatzgruppen, who were always careful to specify exactly how many of who they had killed in each particular operation.

The battle with Communist partisans was sometimes particularly fierce: more than one Einsatzgruppen commander was killed in combat. Although a final tally of Einsatzgruppen victims has never been conclusively estimated, at least 200,000 people, and possibly more, were killed by the Einsatzgruppen before their efforts were abandoned in the wake of the German retreat from the occupied areas.

The Concentration Camps in Poland

In the part of Poland set up as German protectorate, called the Government General, six new concentration camps were built, with the first starting to function in late 1942, and the last being closed by August 1944.

The six camps became known by the towns to which they were nearest situated: Chelmno (also known as Kulmhof), Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek (also known as Lublin), and Auschwitz.

Above: A map showing the network of main Nazi concentration camps. Although it was claimed after the war that all the camps were used as mass murder centers, since the mid 1960s it is claimed that only the caps in Poland were used for mass homicides by gas. In fact, even in the time when this map, extracted from a well known History of the Holocaust, appeared in the early 1970s, the location of the "extermination camps" changed once again - it will be noted that Stutthof (in East Prussia) is shown as one of the "extermination camps" -  this allegation has long since been abandoned and Stutthof is now classified along with the other camps in the West as "only" a concentration camp.

The Wannsee conference had specifically stated that the camps were to be used as forced labor units - and indeed Auschwitz was one of the biggest industrial sites in all of Poland. Situated next to the concentration camp was a number of huge industrial complexes, all relying on concentration camp forced labor: these included Agfa, Bayer Pharmaceuticals and Siemens factories, as well as the famous Buna rubber plant, which produced much of Germany's supplies of rubber, and also which innovated the oil from coal process.

The new camps in Poland also differed substantially from the old camps in Germany itself in another way: the vast majority of prisoners were Jews who had been interned and deported from Germany and occupied Europe with trial. In this way the Polish Jewish doctor, Ludwik Flek was deported to Auschwitz where the SS put him to work in a laboratory manufacturing vaccines: Flek survived the war despite his incarceration in Auschwitz (Racial Hygiene, Medicine Under the Nazis, Robert N. Proctor, Harvard University Press. p. 283).

The Six Million

Despite the presence of massive industrial operations and the short time that the camps were in existence (less than two years all told) it is traditionally claimed that some six million Jews were killed in gas chambers at these six camps in Poland. (The other concentration camps in Germany itself, such as Dachau or Bergen Belsen, did not, it is claimed, have gas chambers).

There is however considerable confusion over the exact number of Jewish deaths in all the camps, and indeed a debate over whether gas chamber executions even took place on the scale so often alleged.. The complete lack of German documentation on the issue has not helped: unlike the Einsatzgruppen, where at least a partial record was kept of all killings carried out, the Germans kept no records of any mass murders in any of the camps.

Jewish Persecution IN NAZI GERMANY

Above: "Don't Buy from Jews" reads this sign behind a Nazi Stormtrooper during one of  many boycotts of Jewish businesses in Germany.

All the debate around the Holocaust and its impact upon Jews and Nazi Germany aside, no-one would question that the Jews, like everyone else in the Second World War, suffered great misfortune and were in particular subjected to unprecedented persecution and harassment on racial grounds.

International Jewry had however publicly and openly declared war on Nazi Germany, and the Nazis therefore regarded Jews as a hostile combatant group of special significance.

Jews were prohibited in many German towns completely and barred from many professions, including operating mail order businesses; from offering services at public markets; from taking orders for goods; or from holding "leadership" positions in German factories.

In 1938, they were forbidden from changing their names to "German sounding" ones: and later in that same year they were all compelled to add Sarah or Israel as a middle name to their original names (depending upon their sex) so as to distinguish them further. German Jews were prevented from attending public theaters and film shows in 1939: places were denied to them at universities and other places of learning; special taxes were imposed upon them and crude anti-Jewish propaganda was taught and encouraged at lower school level amongst school children. Finally, in November 1938, Jews were barred from attending German schools.

Then there was always the constant possibility of physical attack: the most serious widespread example of this came in 1938, after a Jew in Paris assassinated a German diplomat in that city: the following night Nazi stormtroopers attacked Jews, synagogues and Jewish owned shops all over Germany, killing dozens of Jews and leaving so much broken glass in the streets that the event became known as the Kristalnacht - the Night of Crystals.

Above: Herschel Grynszpan, the Jewish assassin of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris, triggered the "Crystal Night" retaliation attacks on Jewish targets in Germany.

 

The German government was however reactive to public opinion. This was vividly illustrated when in 1943 a public demonstration by around 1,000 German women in central Berlin when their Jewish husbands and teenage sons had been arrested and were about to be deported to labor camps. Bowing to the display of public pressure, the German government released all 1,200 interned Jews and half-Jews: they were never subjected to any form of harassment again (Reuters, 09/09/98, Berlin honors 1943 protest against Holocaust).

In September 1998, a plaque was erected in Berlin on the square where the protest took place.

All things said, to have been a Jew in Nazi Germany could not have been a pleasant experience: but, as the over 4.3 million  claims against the post war German state from Jews who suffered as a result of this persecution, (by 1998 the German state had paid out over $50 billion in reparations), certainly far fewer of them died than what is most often claimed. Increasingly, all the evidence urges a complete revision of this aspect of the history of World War Two.