Was
Hitler a racist?
by RICHARD WEBSTER
WAS HITLER A RACIST? Is the view that he was guilty of genocide
based on a historical misunderstanding? Merely to ask such questions is
likely to arouse hostility and the suspicion that another attempt at
writing revisionist history is about to be launched. But what if the terms
‘racist’ and ‘genocide’ are themselves key concepts in a revisionist
version of history? What if it could be shown that they belong to a
revision of history so huge in its scope and so successful in its
execution that it is beyond the imagination of even the most extreme of
Hitler’s apologists? What if this massive revision of history has already
been accepted by the vast majority of intellectuals and educated people in
the West?
Questions similar
to these have often half-formulated themselves in my mind. But finding
words in which to think the unthinkable is always difficult. I have been
helped to do so now by a fascinating appendix to a recent number of
Race and Class (Volume 32, Number 3, 1991) which appears under the
title ‘A note on Ausländerfeindlichkeit’. The authors of this note,
Annita Kalpaka and Nora Räthzel, make the interesting observation that
‘the term “racism” is virtually taboo in political and theoretical
discussions in Germany … Instead one speaks of Ausländerfeindlichkeit
– “hostility against foreigners”.’ The older term ‘racism’ is often
suppressed, they argue, in order to avoid pointing to disturbing
continuities between Germany’s democratic present and its National
Socialist past. The new terminology ‘allows us to speak about the present
whilst avoiding the analysis of recent history … It is not possible to
analyse the historical roots of Ausländerfeindlichkeit, because it
does not have any.’
This argument is
clearly significant in its own right. But I want to suggest that a very
similar analysis can be made of term ‘racism’ itself. Although in some
contexts the word may be useful, in others it is dangerously misleading.
If we accept the common view that Hitler’s anti-semitism was essentially
‘racist’ in nature and that his attack on the Jews of Europe can be
usefully described by the term ‘genocide’, historical understanding will
almost certainly suffer. For ‘genocide’ is rather like
Ausländerfeindlichkeit. It is not possible to analyse its historical
roots because it does not have any.
What the terms
‘genocide’ and ‘racism’ disguise is that modern ‘racial’ anti-semitism is
the product of a centuries-old tradition of religious hatred, and
that the biological theories of race which were used to reformulate this
ancient prejudice at the beginning of the twentieth century were, in most
important respects, nothing other than successful exercises in
pseudo-science whose effect was to secularise and modernise an ancient
religious idea. To make such a claim is not, or should not be, at all
controversial. For it is now more than a quarter of a century since Norman
Cohn expressed his view, in the foreword to his Warrant for Genocide,
that ‘the deadliest kind of antisemitism, the kind that results in
massacre and attempted genocide, has little to do with real conflicts of
interest between living people, or even with racial prejudice as such. At
its heart lies the belief that Jews – all Jews everywhere – form a
conspiratorial body set on ruining and then dominating the rest of
mankind. And this belief is simply a modernised, secularized version of
the popular medieval view of Jews as a league of sorcerers employed by
Satan for the spiritual and physical ruination of Christendom.’
As Norman Cohn
acknowledged at the time, a similar argument had already been put forward
as early as 1943 by Joshua Trachtenberg in his The Devil and the Jews,
and demonological anti-semitism is generally recognised by historians of
anti-semitism as having been born out of early Christian propaganda during
the conflict between the Church and the Synagogue. Yet although the view
which stresses the essentially religious origins of modern political
anti-semitism has achieved wide currency among specialist scholars, it has
made little headway outside the narrow circles within which such scholars
tend to publish their learned articles. Indeed it is one of the most
startling facts of twentieth century intellectual life that most educated
people are almost completely unaware of the role which has been played by
Christianity in general, and the New Testament in particular, in shaping
the particular form of anti-semitic hatred which has dominated attitudes
towards the Jewish people from the Middle Ages to the time of Hitler and
beyond.
What is perhaps
even more significant is that some of those who are aware of the
historical arguments, fiercely resist them. Bernard Levin, for example,
writing in The Times, challenges his reader to explain Jew-hatred
‘if you can’. ‘But you can’t,’ he continues. ‘The volumes which purport to
explain this extraordinary attitude would circle the globe three times,
yet none of them has ever got even reasonably close to the solution’ (The
Times, 30 July, 1993). Levin goes on to reject the idea that
anti-semitism has its roots in Christianity.
A similar view is
taken by Frank Kermode who writes that ‘explanations that go back to . . .
the crucifixion will hardly suffice nowadays . . . Perhaps it is an
updated notion of wickedness that is really called for’ (LRB, 22
October 1992). Though such thinkers would probably readily accept the
proposition that in the twentieth century we have secularised many of the
Christian virtues, the notion that we might also have secularised some of
the Christian vices is, it would seem, dismissed without a hearing.
When we deny the
profound links which exist between modern anti-semitism and the
traditional Christian faith as it is expressed in the New Testament we
are, I believe, tacitly endorsing a form of historical revisionism far
more sweeping, and ultimately far more dangerous, than any that has been
enacted by David Irving in relation to the history of National Socialism.
There can be little doubt that one of the most important of the many
factors which hold this revisionist view in place, is our unthinking
acceptance of terms like ‘genocide’ and ‘racism’.
The word ‘genocide’ was coined only in 1943 and, in that it was derived
from the Greek word for ‘race’ (and the Latin word for ‘kill’) , it
belongs to the same view of the nature of prejudice as the word ‘racism’.
Because both words rely on a conceptual outlook which was only
crystallised in the twentieth century, and which does not concern itself
with the roots of anti-semitism (or any other form of prejudice),
they, even more than Ausländerfeindlichkeit, function to block out
disturbing historical perspectives. By doing so they prevent us from
facing up to our own past.
Of course,
according to the ordinary currency the words now have, Hitler was
a racist and he was guilty of genocide - or at least of attempted
genocide. Yet, if we could only bring ourselves to open up the historical
perspectives that these words close down, we might recognise how
misleading is the habit of mind they encourage and how insidiously
they tend to confirm a common historical misunderstanding. For the
tradition of anti-semitic hatred which Hitler inherited and which he
manipulated for his own political ends was essentially a religious
tradition.
Nor is it an updated notion of wickedness that we need in order to
understand anti-semitism. What we need much more urgently is to excavate
and imaginatively reconstruct an outdated notion of virtue. For hatred of
the Jews has been one of the marks of Christian virtue in countless
orthodox forms of Christianity from at least the third century down to our
own century. And the fantasy that the Jewish people make up a Satanic host
who must be cleansed from the face of the earth, though it was enunciated
in almost precisely these terms by National Socialists in Germany in the
twentieth century, is itself an ancient fantasy which belongs to the
orthodox heart of Christian eschatology.
The fact that we
have allowed ourselves to forget such cruel notions of virtue along with
the destructive apocalyptic dreams which kept them company throughout
almost all the centuries of Christian history, is not a mark of civilised
progress. It is an intellectual tragedy. For it is this attitude, together
with the myth of ‘racism’ with which we have surrounded the phenomenon of
anti-semitism, which has helped to bring about that vast, almost
unimaginable revision of our history within which the majority of educated
people now live.
Over the past
twenty or thirty years a number of scholars and historians have sought to
challenge this view of history. Yet, because of the immense power of the
historical myths which we have ourselves created, it is the secularised,
revisionist view which still holds sway over our historical imagination.
The process whereby, under the influence of the Christian church,
anti-semitism became part of the very spirit of Europe, with tragic
consequences which would ultimately extend far beyond Hitler’s Germany and
far beyond the six million Jewish victims whose lives it claimed, is a
story which has yet to be fully told.
Southwold, 1993.
First published on this website, June 2002.
NOTE
Joshua Trachtenberg's study of the medieval demonisation of the Jewish
people,
The
Devil and the Jews, has
now been reissued. For details click
here.
