Jewish wealth in 1933's Germany

[ColinWright]

WTF are you trying to relate? There is no causation ever that can justify that type of behavior which leads to sanctioned murder. At which roadside ditch have you lost your ethics and morals?

Obviously, events have causes. If you're not prepared to grant that, rational conversation becomes impossible.

Following that line of "reasoning", if I see that my neighbour is a bit richer than I am, and then cut his throat and take his belongings, the "cause" of that regrettable event is my neighbour's wealth? It's his own fault for provoking me by buying a bigger car than mine?

As I said before, both ridiculous and offensive.

That would be ridiculous and offensive. However, nothing I have said is remotely equivalent to that.

[ColinWright]

...modern states don't collect such information and have no need for it, especially classified by religious of tribal affiliation of its citizens (it was actually forbidden in the constitution). Only totalitarian and authoritarian/bureaucratic states do such things.

Do tell.

Don't ever look at the data collected by the US Census bureau, the Justice Department, etc.

[ColinWright]

For example, one explanation that's been advanced for the sudden rise in German anti-Semitism was the arrival of Jews from Eastern Europe.

The Eastern Jews were arriving in Germany with the earnest desire to be assimilated, to get rich quick and have fun. Because in their Eastern shtetls ruled by religious fanatics, surrounded by mass of impoverished and ignorant of everything natives it was impossible to live a normal modern life.

There were real black robed Jews in Germany but it was a tiny minority - although very visible because of their medieval attires. Many of them were Eastern religious leaders and their wealthy adherents recuperating their health in German spas.

If so, then this is the sort of thing that needs to be added to the picture if we're to understand where the Holocaust came from. What were the Germans seeing? What was the reality that lent credibility to the Nazis' anti-Semitic rantings?

This obviously isn't a project to be undertaken lightly. It's a life's work; descrying contemporary perceptions and ideological needs and how Jews came to be seen as a group that had to be driven out.

Sometimes I think that Nazism needed an 'other' -- an enemy with which the new, pure Germany could be contrasted. The Jews were cast for this part because no one else fit quite so well. After all, part of the point of Nazism was to resolve class tensions. If workers and factory owners and farmers were all to live in harmony, then none of them could be the enemy. Ergo, it had to be the Jews.

We are all united because we are not them. As long as you're not one of them, you can be part of us. Forgiveness is extended to all miscreants who reform, and we're a community, and the reality and significance of that community is confirmed by the existence of them. Without Jews, could the Nazi notion of a national community have held real meaning?

However, this is merely speculation. The process by which Jews were made to fit this role also has yet to be completely described. It also fails to explain whether or to what extent the Nazis consciously sought to do this, or whether some aspect of human consciousness demands that we define ourselves as a community against some group that is explicitly not part of the community.

Finally and of course, many groups manage to formulate such definitions without actually killing each other. Mormons are quite sure they're Mormons, and their neighbors are equally sure they're not Mormons, and yet the two groups manage to coexist without too much friction. About all that gets generated is a rather suspicious literature revealing the awful truth about Mormons.

[wm]

Don't ever look at the data collected by the US Census bureau, the Justice Department, etc.

The US seems to be strangely racist, so many questions about race. Even the Polish pre-war census merely asked about the language spoken at home.

But still useless, there is a question about income but not about wealth. Income is not wealth.
Many German Jews asked about their race would answer German - they were only Jews in the Nazi sense (a single grandparent).
Many Jews weren't religious or were members of other denominations, especially the wealthy Jews.
This reminds me, the known number of Jews in Germany in 1933, is the number of the Judaistic Jews - not the total number of all German Jews (whatever it means to be a German Jew).

[wm]

They certainly weren't a threat in any material sense; I imagine quite a few would have been happy to support a Nazism stripped of anti-semitism -- after all, many or most gentile Germans were.

The Jews were a threat to various groups and classes, existing or emerging. They all competed for limited resources: mainly career opportunities, business opportunities, political influence.
Although the Nazi ideology was more than that exploiting existing conflicts was useful.
Additionally they strongly believed in a nation based on ethnic blood brotherhood. The Jews couldn't possibly be part of that.
And the idea of blood brotherhood was the core of of Nazism (the National Socialist German Workers' Party - socialism for the German tribe only).

Then too, the Nazi targeting of the Jews can't really be equated with their various other killings. Even the shocking murder of three million or so Russian POW's wasn't really planned so much as allowed to happen when their numbers overwhelmed the provision the Germans had made for POW's. Moreover, the deaths were halted when it became apparent Germany needed the labor of the POW's.

Barbarossa required a total defeat of the Red Army in a few weeks. It was known the Red Army was enormous - it was millions of soldiers. So how come they could have been overwhelmed by a total victory, which was pre-planned too - the POWs weren't going to disappear into thin air.
The knew they had no food for them, and they knew they didn't have sufficient food for the occupied territories - even more they didn't even have sufficient food for the Wehrmacht. The Wehrmacht was supposed to live off the land. All that was a war crime of unprecedented proportions.

Compare and contrast to the Jews, whose extermination was deliberately and carefully planned, and often carried out in spite of the need for their labor

At the beginning it was assumed the Jews weren't needed, that the East Europeans were more than enough and would replace them easily. That the Jews only uselessly consumed food badly needed by the starving Germans themselves.
The assumption was shortly afterwards shown to be false, and killings of work capable Jews were stopped.

[ColinWright]

Don't ever look at the data collected by the US Census bureau, the Justice Department, etc.

The US seems to be strangely racist, so many questions about race. Even the Polish pre-war census merely asked about the language spoken at home.

That would be because we have had many races in the US. It would have been rather silly to ask about race on a German census in the 1920's: hey look! 99% percent are white!

Note that the Poles -- who did have several large and distinct groups -- effectively asked about ethnicity by inquiring about language.

Happily, now that Europe is acquiring many races too, you all seem to be becoming strangely racist as well. In fact, you seem to be rapidly surpassing us.

[ColinWright]

Barbarossa required a total defeat of the Red Army in a few weeks. It was known the Red Army was enormous - it was millions of soldiers. So how come they could have been overwhelmed by a total victory, which was pre-planned too - the POWs weren't going to disappear into thin air.
The knew they had no food for them, and they knew they didn't have sufficient food for the occupied territories - even more they didn't even have sufficient food for the Wehrmacht. The Wehrmacht was supposed to live off the land. All that was a war crime of unprecedented proportions.

That's very debatable. The Wehrmacht mounted Barbarossa with various unresolved difficulties -- they certainly didn't allow for winter, for example. Nor were they prepared for the appalling state of the roads. Finally, they grossly underestimated the size of the Red Army -- which of course meant they also underestimated the number of prisoners.

However, the real point is that while they were indifferent to the fate of the prisoners, their death wasn't actually sought. This contrasts with their attitude towards the Jews. I live in the countryside in Hawaii; I am indifferent to the fate of the wild pigs in the woods around me, and if food is short for them, I wouldn't bother to put any out. It'd be all to the good if there were fewer pigs. This could be compared to the initial German attitude towards their Red Army prisoners.

However, this is distinct from my attitude towards the rat that's moved into the kitchen: him, I want to kill.

I am familiar with the argument you cite about the genocidal intention of Barbarossa; that the Germans were supposed live off the land, eat the Russians out of house and home, and thus starve them to death. The flaw here is that even with all the rear area troops and so on, the forces invading Russia couldn't have come to more than five million men. How five million were supposed to starve out a grain-exporting nation of one hundred and fifty million simply by joining them at the table escapes me. On examination, it's a ridiculous argument, and really says more about the post-war tendency of German historiography to self-flaggellation than it does about anything else.

[ColinWright]

At the beginning it was assumed the Jews weren't needed, that the East Europeans were more than enough and would replace them easily. That the Jews only uselessly consumed food badly needed by the starving Germans themselves.
The assumption was shortly afterwards shown to be false, and killings of work capable Jews were stopped.

I don't think that's true. The German need for labor became apparent in the winter of 1941-1942 -- that's why the remaining Red Army soldiers started to be fed and cared for to some extent.

However, that's precisely when the calculated general extermination of all of Europe's Jews started. Moreover, it continued right through 1944, with the wholesale extermination of Hungary's Jews.

Even such unfortunates as Russian POW's were kept alive when it was realized they had a use; I believe between 30% and 40% survived to eventually return to the Soviet Union -- 1.8 million such returnees is the figure that comes to mind. Of course, nothing like that proportion of the Jews of Nazi-Occupied Europe emerged from the camps in 1945. Most of those who survived did so because they were never caught.

You seem to be determined to deny that there was a qualitative difference between the Nazi treatment of the Jews and their attitude towards other groups. There was such a difference: it's obvious.

It's peculiar. There's been a perhaps excessive emphasis on the Holocaust, and worse, lately it's been increasing. Go into an American public library and literally half the books concerned with the Second World War are about the Holocaust. In the store in the Imperial War Museum in London there's practically an Anne Frank shelf -- this in a museum supposedly devoted not just to World War Two but War in general.

Big Anne is watching you. One would never guess only perhaps one in ten of the victims of World War Two were Jewish. Moreover, they mostly died in rather uninteresting ways. Think if we felt -- for example -- a need to give an equivalent share to the three million or so dead of the 1943 Bengal Famine. Where would we put all the books? How much could there possibly be to say?

However, it's possible to go too far in the other direction as well, and so I find myself arguing the opposite position here. The Jews did occupy a unique position in Nazi theology, and from the first, they were treated differently -- and worse.

[ColinWright]

The Jews were a threat to various groups and classes, existing or emerging. They all competed for limited resources: mainly career opportunities, business opportunities, political influence.

I think a statement like that could do with documentation. It sounds good, but...

While Jews were a large and distinct group elsewhere -- for example, in Poland -- in Germany they made up less than 1% of the population, and even if they took more than they proportionally should have of some position, would still make up no more than perhaps 20% of all professors of Theosophy or whatever.

Moreover, they were assimilated -- very much so. So to what extent were Jews genuinely perceived as a threat by the mass of Germans prior to the Nazis? They don't seem to have been. For example, one link I noticed claimed that 10% of the SDP's deputies in the Reichstag were Jewish; that would have been political suicide if Jews were regarded as an especial danger by the mass of Germans.

We get back to needing solid documentation -- which I'm reasonably confident is out there. How wealthy were German Jews; one source mentions that in the 1924 elections, 42% voted for the SDP, 48% for the DDP (whatever that was), and 6% for the Communists.

That hardly suggests they were all plutocrats. Perhaps the more lurid calculations about their wealth are right out. If they had been twenty times as wealthy as the average German, it would be remarkable that half then proceeded to vote SDP or Communist. It needs to be remembered that the rhetoric -- even if not the actual behavior -- of the Weimar SDP was very anti-capitalist. This wasn't a party men of property would have comfortably voted for.

[CroGer]

The Jews were a threat to various groups and classes, existing or emerging. They all competed for limited resources: mainly career opportunities, business opportunities, political influence.

I think a statement like that could do with documentation. It sounds good, but...

While Jews were a large and distinct group elsewhere -- for example, in Poland -- in Germany they made up less than 1% of the population, and even if they took more than they proportionally should have of some position, would still make up no more than perhaps 20% of all professors of Theosophy or whatever.

Moreover, they were assimilated -- very much so. So to what extent were Jews genuinely perceived as a threat by the mass of Germans prior to the Nazis? They don't seem to have been. For example, one link I noticed claimed that 10% of the SDP's deputies in the Reichstag were Jewish; that would have been political suicide if Jews were regarded as an especial danger by the mass of Germans.

We get back to needing solid documentation -- which I'm reasonably confident is out there. How wealthy were German Jews; one source mentions that in the 1924 elections, 42% voted for the SDP, 48% for the DDP (whatever that was), and 6% for the Communists.

That hardly suggests they were all plutocrats. Perhaps the more lurid calculations about their wealth are right out. If they had been twenty times as wealthy as the average German, it would be remarkable that half then proceeded to vote SDP or Communist. It needs to be remembered that the rhetoric -- even if not the actual behavior -- of the Weimar SDP was very anti-capitalist. This wasn't a party men of property would have comfortably voted for.

The assassination of Walther Rathenau, a jewish entrepreneur and politician, is a good indicator.

Rathenau's assassination was but one in a series of terrorist attacks by Organisation Consul. Most notable among them had been the assassination of former finance minister Matthias Erzberger in August 1921. While Fischer and Kern prepared their plot, former chancellor Philipp Scheidemann barely survived an attempt on his life by Organisation Consul assassins on 4 June 1922.[29] Historian Martin Sabrow points to Hermann Ehrhardt, the undisputed leader of the Organisation Consul, as the one who ordered the murders. Ehrhardt and his men believed that Rathenau's death would bring down the government and prompt the Left to act against the Weimar Republic, thereby provoking civil war, in which the Organisation Consul would be called on for help by the Reichswehr. After an anticipated victory Ehrhardt hoped to establish an authoritarian regime or a military dictatorship.[...]

State memorial ceremony with Rathenau's laid out coffin in the Reichstag, 27 June 1922.

The terrorists' aims were not achieved, however, and civil war did not come. Instead, millions of Germans gathered on the streets to express their grief and to demonstrate against counter-revolutionary terrorism.[31] When the news of Rathenau's death became known in the Reichstag, the session turned into turmoil. DNVP-politician Karl Helfferich in particular became the target of attacks, because he had just recently uttered a vitriolic attack upon Rathenau.[31] During the official memorial ceremony the next day, Chancellor Joseph Wirth from the Centre Party held a speech soon to be famous, in which, while pointing to the right side of the parliamentary floor, he used a well known formula of Philipp Scheidemann: "There is the enemy - and there is no doubt about it: This enemy is on the right!"[32

]

[ColinWright]

Rathenau's assassination was but one in a series of terrorist attacks by Organisation Consul...

Educational.

I'll note Organization Consul's mission statement:

'"Spiritual aims:

The cultivation and dissemination of nationalist thinking; warfare against all anti-nationalists and internationalists; warfare against Jewry, Social Democracy and Leftist-radicalism; fomentation of internal unrest in order to attain the overthrow of the anti-nationalist Weimar constitution . . .

Material aims:

The organization of determined, nationalist-minded men . . . local shock troops for breaking up meetings of an anti-nationalist nature; maintenance of arms and the preservation of military ability; the education of youth in the use of arms.

Notice:

Only those men who have determination, who obey unconditionally and who are without scruples . . . will be accepted. . . . The organization is a secret organization. "...'


Notice that at least in the eyes of this group, the problem with Jewry isn't their wealth: on the contrary, they're associated with 'Social Democracy and Leftist-radicalism.'

[CroGer]

Rathenau's assassination was but one in a series of terrorist attacks by Organisation Consul...

Educational.

I'll note Organization Consul's mission statement:

'"Spiritual aims:

The cultivation and dissemination of nationalist thinking; warfare against all anti-nationalists and internationalists; warfare against Jewry, Social Democracy and Leftist-radicalism; fomentation of internal unrest in order to attain the overthrow of the anti-nationalist Weimar constitution . . .

Material aims:

The organization of determined, nationalist-minded men . . . local shock troops for breaking up meetings of an anti-nationalist nature; maintenance of arms and the preservation of military ability; the education of youth in the use of arms.

Notice:

Only those men who have determination, who obey unconditionally and who are without scruples . . . will be accepted. . . . The organization is a secret organization. "...'


Notice that at least in the eyes of this group, the problem with Jewry isn't their wealth: on the contrary, they're associated with 'Social Democracy and Leftist-radicalism.'

Wealth had nothing to do with it.
I quote from... well, wikipedia, but Joachim Fest wrote an exceptional and highly acclaimed book on Hitler's national socialism. A summery:

Fest explained Hitler’s success in terms of what he termed the "great fear" that had overcome the German middle classes, as a result not only of Bolshevism and First World War dislocation, but also more broadly in response to rapid modernisation, which had led to a romantic longing for a lost past. This led to resentment of other groups — especially Jews — seen as agents of modernity.

It was not their wealth. It was the new capitalism. It was pornography. It was "entartete Kunst" (degenerated arts).
The Nazis had their own almost mythological books. They are, as far as I can tell now, quite romantic. One was "Mythus des 20.Jahrhunderts", which I have not read yet, one important book was "Der Wehrwolf" bei Herrmann Löns, which I have read.
National Socialism was born out of the same womb as marxism. The old order has died. The industrialisation and technological novelties changed the lifestyle of the people incredibly fast.
Jews were simply leading in everything that this new age brought. Germany had always been a deeply religious country. But "god was dead", what modernity brought with it can be interpreted as decadence.

It was - as contradictory as it sounds - an anti-modernist movement - yet highly emphasizing technology to attain a goal: win the war, gain "Lebensraum", return to the idea of the germans as a autark people of "Wehrbauern" (armed, self-sufficiant farmers)".

I don't think you can explain the rise of national socialism in a country that was once know for being the land of "poets and thinkers" by just pinpointing at to a short list of things. A lot had to come together.

I am an atheist, but one thing that I am always astouned of is how much luck Hitler had. If you read about his career, his "kampfzeit" (battle times - before their rise to power), the incredible time from 1933-1940 where everything he touched turned into gold, and the time 1941 where he almost made a sharespear-esque turn into insanity and ruined the empire he created - yet had all the luck in the world by surviving numerous assassination attempts... I almost start believe in something like "fate".

Himmler called him the "Messiah of the next 2000 years". And Hitler is the most important man of his century. Hitler is still talked about, there is a "Hitler/WW2/Holocaust"-industry, the words "Nazi" and "Hitler" are thrown around like "heretic", "blasphemer" back in the day, and in many ways Hitler has replaced the devil.

I don't like wikipedia as a source for WW2 topic, but I think this article is very well written

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hit ... e_to_power

Both within Germany and abroad initially there were few fears that Hitler could use his position to establish his later dictatorial single-party regime. Rather, the conservatives that helped to make him chancellor were convinced that they could control Hitler and "tame" the Nazi Party while setting the relevant impulses in the government themselves; foreign ambassadors played down worries by emphasizing that Hitler was "mediocre" if not a bad copy of Mussolini; even SPD politician Kurt Schumacher trivialized Hitler as a "Dekorationsstück" ("piece of scenery/decoration") of the new government. German newspapers wrote that, without doubt, the Hitler-led government would try to fight its political enemies (the left-wing parties), but that it would be impossible to establish a dictatorship in Germany because there was "a barrier, over which violence cannot proceed" and because of the German nation being proud of "the freedom of speech and thought". Theodor Wolff of Frankfurter Zeitung wrote:[75]

It is a hopeless misjudgement to think that one could force a dictatorial regime upon the German nation. [...] The diversity of the German people calls for democracy.
— Theodor Wolff in Frankfurter Zeitung, Jan 1933

Even within the Jewish German community, in spite of Hitler not hiding his ardent antisemitism, the worries appear to have been limited. In a declaration of January 30, the steering committee of the central Jewish German organization (Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens) wrote that "as a matter of course" the Jewish community faces the new government "with the largest mistrust", but at the same they were convinced that "nobody would dare to touch [their] constitutional rights". The Jewish German newspaper Jüdische Rundschau (de) wrote on Jan 31st:[76]

... that also within the German nation still the forces are active that would turn against a barbarian anti-Jewish policy.
— Jüdische Rundschau (de), Jan 31st, 1933

[wm]

Notice that at least in the eyes of this group, the problem with Jewry isn't their wealth: on the contrary, they're associated with 'Social Democracy and Leftist-radicalism.'

The Nazis although socialists weren't so fanatical anti-capitalists as the communists and the mainstream socialists. They were like modern social democrats in this regard: big government, high taxes, capitalism closely controlled by governmental regulators, the interests of the state must come first.
For this reason the left wing of the Nazis party led by the Strasser brothers was eventually purged by Hitler.

[wm]

I think a statement like that could do with documentation. It sounds good, but...

Well, they are two possibilities the Jews were a political entity as any other, although one of the large, influential, and spanning the globe ones (the other would be Great Britain, the US, the Komintern) interacting with other political entities in the usual manner.
Or we had a dualistic arrangement of the Jews and of the evil Gentiles, who all like zombies were infected by airborne rabid anti-semitic disease.

It's really a choice between rationality and paranoia.

That hardly suggests they were all plutocrats. Perhaps the more lurid calculations about their wealth are right out. If they had been twenty times as wealthy as the average German, it would be remarkable that half then proceeded to vote SDP or Communist. It needs to be remembered that the rhetoric -- even if not the actual behavior -- of the Weimar SDP was very anti-capitalist. This wasn't a party men of property would have comfortably voted for.

As far as I know American "plutocrats" mostly vote for Democrats. Similarly the rich coastal cities, and the American Jews. The relatively poor flyover country votes for Republicans.

[ColinWright]

Yet another theory of why the Nazis wanted to eliminate the Jews; they were agents of modernity.

Possibly. One would want to look at to what extent Jews dominated -- or were perceived to dominate -- the most conspicuous examples of this 'modernity': modern architecture, abstract and expressionist art, sexual libertinism, the auto, film, etc.

I can think of some qualifying figures right away. For example the 'degenerate' artist Emil Nolde was horrified to discover the Nazis intended to suppress him; he saw his paintings as expressing exactly the vision of Germany that the Nazis advocated. In general, we have several more or less plausible hypotheses: the Jews were getting more than their fair share one way or another, or on the contrary, they were agents of the international Communist conspiracy, or they were 'agents of modernity.' Personally, I'm attached to the idea that the Nazis needed an enemy; you can't really unite a people unless you've got something to unite them against. For a variety of reasons, Jews were the most satisfactory choice.

One would want to look at what the Nazis themselves said they objected to. After all, it's often a good idea to take people at their word, one way or another. One also needs to understand why the mass of Germans came to see this persecution and expulsion of the Jews as somehow acceptable. After all, Germans demonstrated they were perfectly capable of rejecting policies they didn't support; the euthanasia episode is a good example, and the Nazi attempts to transform the churches never really succeeded.