Nazifying the Germans

[Mensch Meyer]

Nazifying the Germans Ralph Raico

(Originally published: CHRONICLES (Rockford, Ill.), January 1997, pp. 15-17.

Not long ago a German friend remarked to me, jokingly, that he
imagined the only things American college students were apt to
associate with Germany nowadays were beer, Lederhosen, and the
Nazis. I replied that, basically, there was only one thing that
Americans, whether college students or not, associated with
Germany. When the Germans are mentioned, it is Nazism that
first springs to mind; whatever else may occur to one later
will be colored and contaminated by thoughts of the Nazis. When
Molly Ivins (described by Justin Raimondo, in his new book,
Colin Powell and the Power Elite, as a "liberal columnist and
known plagiarist") remarked, of Pat Buchanan's speech at the
1992 Republican convention, "it sounded better in the original
German," everyone instantly knew what she meant. The casual
slander was picked up by William Safire and others, and made
the rounds. A constant din from Hollywood and the major media
has helped instruct us on what "German" really stands for.

And yet, as some Germans plaintively insist, there are fifteen
centuries of history "on the other side" of the Third Reich. In
cultural terms, it is a not unimpressive record (in which the
Austrians must be counted; at least until 1866, Austria was as
much a part of the German lands as Bavaria or Saxony). From
printing to the automobile to the creation of whole branches of
science, the German contribution to European civilization has
been, one might say, rather significant. Albertus Magnus,
Luther, Leibniz, Kant, Goethe, Humboldt, Ranke, Nietzsche, Carl
Menger, Max Weber-these are not negligible figures in the
history of thought. And then, of course, there's the music. The
German role over centuries in transmitting advanced culture to
the peoples to the east and south was critical at certain
stages of their development. The Hungarian liberal, Gaspar M.
Tamas, speaking for his own people, the Czechs, and others,
wrote of the Germans who had lived among them and were driven
out in 1945, that their "ancestors built our cathedrals,
monasteries, universities, and railway stations." As for our
country, the highly laudatory chapter that Thomas Sowell
devotes to the German immigrants in ETHNIC AMERICA is one of
the best in a fascinating book. More than five million Germans
came to the United States in the nineteenth century alone
(according to recent census figures, around fifty-seven million
Americans now claim to be of German heritage). Together with
the descendants of the immigrants from the British Isles, the
Germans form the basic American stock. They were highly valued
as neighbors, and their ways were woven into the fabric of
American life-the Christmas tree and "Silent Night," for
instance, and the family-centered Sunday, with its "jovial yet
orderly activities," as an admiring contemporary put it. Is
there any doubt that when Germans composed the leading
population in hundreds of American cities and towns, these were
happier places to live in than many of them are today? Yet the
air is filled with incessant harping on an interval of twelve
years in the annals of this ancient European race. In the
normal course of things, one would expect a countervailing
defense to emanate from Germany itself. But it is precisely
there, among the left intelligentsia, that many of the prime
German-haters are to be found. The reasons for this are fairly
clear.

Over the last decades, these intellectuals have grown
increasingly frustrated at their own people, who remain firmly
bourgeois and order-loving, with little interest in neo-Marxist
transformations of their way of life. Increasingly, too, that
frustration has been vented in hatred and contempt for
everything German. Most of all, the Germans were condemned for
their hopelessly misguided past and bourgeois social structure,
which supposedly produced Nazism. Anguished complaints like
that from the conservative historian Michael Stuermer, that "we
cannot live while continually pulverizing ourselves and our own
history into nothing, while we make that history into a
permanent source of infinite feelings of guilt," were merely
further evidence that the Germans stood in dire need of radical
reeducation. A large segment of the left intelligentsia made no
bones of its sympathy for the "German Democratic Republic,"
which at least did not enslave its subjects to consumerism and
the "elbow society" prevalent in the west. Naturally, there
were certain excesses, but these could be explained by the
pressures issuing from Bonn and Washington. For these
intellectuals, the GDR dictatorship-kept in existence by Soviet
tanks, and forced to resort to building a wall to keep its
subjects in-was a "normal state"; they denounced any attempts
to "destabilize" it, even by the forthright expression of
anti-Communist opinion ("primitive anti-Communism," it was
called). They spoke warmly of Communism's "humanistic values"
and "positive core," which sharply distinguished it from
National Socialism (in this way, they exhibited a
characteristic failing of intellectuals: preferring to look to
theory rather than reality).

The German left's "march through the institutions" after 1968
was spectacularly successful in the media, schools and
universities, churches, and more and more in politics. Its
control of the cultural infrastructure produced a situation
where the public declaration of any pro-German attitude was
viewed as evidence of Rechtsradikalismus. Some thirty years
ago, when Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, at a dinner in
Jerusalem, expressed to Konrad Adenauer his confidence that
"under your leadership the German people will return to the
community of civilized peoples," the old Chancellor retorted:
"Mr. Prime Minister, what you think is of no concern to me...I
represent the German people. You have insulted them, and so
tomorrow morning I shall depart." It is impossible to imagine
any recent German leader, in particular, the lickspittle former
Federal President Richard von Weizsaecker, responding with such
unabashed patriotism, especially to an Israeli.

Then came 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and signs that the
Germans might still harbor some sense of national pride. The
conservative historian and publicist Rainer Zitelmann writes
that "the left experienced the reunification [of Germany] and
the collapse of socialism as a defeat," a grave setback that
had to be made good, lest a 'turn' occur and the left lose its
power to control political debate. The perfect opportunity
presented itself when a few half-wits started firebombing the
homes and asylums of foreign residents. (These incidents were
strategically exploited in the same way as the Oklohoma City
bombing has been exploited in the United States.) Now came an
all-out campaign against allegedly deep-seated German 'racism'
and 'hostility to foreigners,' accompanied, naturally, by
hysterical warnings of a "Nazi resurgence" and endless
allusions to the affinities between Nazism and bourgeois
Germany. Thus, the normal human desire to live in one's own
country among one's own kind was equated with the will to
annihilate other peoples manifested by Hitler and his butchers.

The latest spasm of German abuse and German self-hated occurred
with the publication of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's HITLER'S
WILLING EXECUTIONERS: ORDINARY GERMANS AND THE HOLOCAUST.
Launched with a remarkable publicity barrage by Knopf, absurdly
acclaimed by the author's Harvard friends, it was touted by Abe
Rosenthal in the NEW YORK TIMES for packing the emotional
equivalent of a first visit to Auschwitz. The thesis of this
work, which won an award from the American Political Science
Association, is that the Judeocide is easily explained: for
centuries the Germans had been "eliminationist anti-Semites,
and under the Nazis, they became openly and enthusiastically
"eliminationist." Suffice it to say that in public debates
recognized holocaust scholars demolished the crooked
methodology and preposterous claims of this academic hustler.

The best review appeared in the FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
and the excellent German Conservative magazine CRITICON, by
Alfred de Zayas, an American historian and jurist and respected
authority on international law.

Whenever anti-Semitic attitudes or acts are mentioned, de Zayas
observes, Goldhagen speaks of "the Germans"-not "the Nazis," or
even "many Germans"-offering no justification at all; it is
simply a polemical trick. He neglects to mention well-known
facts, e. g., that everyone connected with the killing of the
Jews was bound by Fuehrer Order No. 1, as well as by special
orders from Himmler, mandating the strictest silence, under
penalty of death. So it should not be surprising that, for
example, the former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, during the war a
Luftwaffe officer, testified that he had never heard or known
anything of the annihilation of the Jews; or that Countess
Doehnoff, publisher of the liberal paper, DIE ZEIT, should
state that, despite her connections to many key people during
the war, she knew nothing of the mass-killings in the camps,
and that "I heard the name 'Auschwitz' for the first time after
the war." Goldhagen simply disregards major standard works that
contradict his thesis. He claims, for example, that the German
people approved of and joined in the Kristallnacht in a kind of
nation-wide Volksfest. Yet Sarah Gordon, in her authoritative
Hitler, Germans, and the "Jewish Question" wrote: "there was a
torrent of reports indicating public disapproval of
Kristallnacht ... [whatever the motivation] what is not in
doubt, however, is the fact that the majority did disapprove
... after Kristallnacht, the Nazis deliberately tried to
conceal their measures against the Jews?"

None of the scholarly critics made much of an impression on
audiences that witnessed the debates in the United States or
during Goldhagen's tour of Germany late last summer, and
certainly not on sales of the book. In any case, most of them,
except for de Zayas, overlooked the function performed by a
work such as Goldhagen's. While he indicts the Germans as
uniquely, pathologically anti-semitic and while some of his
critics report that, no, all of Christendom, indeed,
Christianity itself, is implicated in the Jewish genocide,
attention is kept fixed on the supposed single great crime of
the recent past, if not of all of human history to the virtual
exclusion of all others. In particular, the misdeeds of
communist regimes are unduly neglected.

A decade ago, Ernst Nolte, then of the Free University of
Berlin, ignited the HISTORIKERSTREIT, or dispute of historians,
and became the target of a campaign of defamation led by
Juergen Habermas, by asking: "Didn't the 'Gulag Archipelago'
come before Auschwitz? Wasn't the 'class murder' of the
Bolsheviks the logical and factual resupposition of the 'race
murder' of the National Socialists?" These are still good
questions. In fact, Stalinist--and Maoist-- offenses, while
acknowledged, are generally downplayed and have achieved
nothing remotely approaching the publicity of the Nazi massacre
of the Jews. In the United States, it is likely that a person
who keeps abreast of the news media will encounter references
to the holocaust literally every day of his life. Yet who has
heard of Kolyma, where more people were done to death than the
present official count for Auschwitz? The figures for the
victims of Maoist rule that are starting to come out of China
suggest a total in the range of 30 or 40 million, or more. Do
these facts even make a dent in public consciousness?

Moreover, there is an aspect of Stalinist atrocities that is
very pertinent to the "Goldhagen Debate." In their history of
the Soviet Union, UTOPIA IN POWER, Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr
M. Nekrich touch on the issue of whether the German people had
full knowledge of the Nazi crimes. They state no opinion. But
regarding the Soviets' murderous war on the peasantry,
including the Ukrainian terror-famine, they write:

There is no question that the Soviet city people knew about the
massacre in the countryside. In fact, no one tried to conceal
it. At the railroad stations, city dwellers could see the
thousands of women and children who had fled from the villages
and were dying of hunger. Kulaks, "dekulakized persons," and
"kulak henchmen" died alike. They were not considered human.

There has been no outcry for the Russian people to seek
atonement and no one speaks of their "eternal guilt." It goes
without saying that the misdeeds of Communism, in Russia,
China, or elsewhere, are never debited to internationalism and
egalitarianism as those of Nazism are to nationalism and
racism.

Pointing to Communist crimes is not meant to "trivialize" the
destruction of European Jewry, nor can it do so. The massacre
of the Jews was one of the worst things that ever happened. But
even supposing that it was the worst thing that ever happened,
couldn't some arrangement be worked out whereby Communist
mass-murders are mentioned once for every ten times (or hundred
times?) the Holocaust is brought up? Perhaps also, if we must
have publicly-financed museums commemorating the foreign
victims of foreign regimes, some memorial to the victims of
Communism might be considered, not on the Mall itself, of
course, but maybe in a low-rent area of Washington?

If the crimes of Communism go relatively unmentioned, what are
we to say of crimes committed against Germans? One of the most
pernicious legacies of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao is that any
political leader responsible for less than, say, three or four
million deaths is let off the hook. This hardly seems right,
and it was not always so. In fact-the reader may find this
incredible-there was a time when American conservatives took
the lead in publicizing Allied, and especially American,
atrocities against Germans. High-level journalists like William
Henry Chamberlin, in America's Second Crusade, and Freda Utley,
in The High Cost of Vengeance, pilloried those who had
committed what Utley called "our crimes against humanity"-the
men who directed the terror-bombing of the German cities,
conspired in the expulsion of some fifteen million Germans from
their ancestral lands in the east (in the course of which about
two million died-see de Zayas's Nemesis at Potsdam), and
plotted the "final solution of the German question" through the
Morgenthau plan. Utley even exposed the sham "Dachau trials" of
German soldiers and civilians in the first years of the Allied
occupation, detailing the use of methods "worthy of the GPU,
the Gestapo, and the SS" to extort confessions. She insisted
that the same ethical standards had to be applied to victors
and vanquished alike. If not, then we were declaring that
"Hitler was justified in his belief that 'might makes right.'"
Both books were brought out by the late Henry Regnery, the last
of the Old Right greats, whose house was the bastion of
post-World War II revisionism, publishing works like Charles
Callan Tansill's classic, Back Door to War.

Keeping the Nazi period constantly before our eyes serves the
ideological interests of a number of influential groups. That
it benefits the Zionist cause, at least as many Zionists see
it, is obvious. It is highly useful also to the advocates of a
globalist America. Hitler and the crying need for the great
crusade to destroy him are the chief exhibits in their case
against any form of American "isolationism," past or present.
Any suggestion that our Soviet ally in that crusade was guilty
of even greater offenses than Nazi Germany, that the United
States government itself was incriminated in barbarous acts
during and in the aftermath of that war, must be downplayed or
suppressed, lest the historical picture grow too complex.

The obsession with the never-ending guilt of the Germans also
advances the ends of those who look forward to the extinction
of the nation-state and national identity, at least for the
West. As the philosopher Robert Maurer argues, it inculcates in
the Germans "a permanent bad conscience, and keeps them from
developing any normal national self-awareness." In this way, it
functions "as a model for the cosmopolitan supersession of
every nationalism," which many today are striving towards.
Ernst Nolte has recently suggested another strategy at work,
aiming at the same goal. Nothing is clearer than that we are in
the midst of a vast campaign to delegitimize western
civilization. In this campaign, Nolte writes, radical feminism
joins with Third World anti-Occidentalism and multiculturalism
within the western nations "to instrumentalize to the highest
degree the 'murder of six millions Jews by the Germans,' and to
place it in the larger context of the genocides by the
predatory and conquering West, so that 'homo hitlerensis'
ultimately appears as merely a special case of 'homo
occidentalis.'" The purpose is to strike at "the cultural and
linguistic homogeneity of the national states, achieved over
centuries, and open the gates to a massive immigration," so
that in the end the nations of the West should cease to exist.
There seem to be cultural dynamics operating that will
intensify rather than abate the present fixation. Michael
Wolffsohn, an Israeli-born Jew who teaches modern history in
Germany, has warned that Judaism is being emptied of its
religious content and linked solely to the tribulations of the
Jews through history, above all, the Holocaust. More than one
commentator has noted that as the West loses any sense of
morality rooted in reason, tradition, or faith, yet still feels
the need for some secure moral direction, it increasingly finds
it in the one acknowledged "absolute evil," the Holocaust. If
these claims are true, then the growing secularization of
Judaism and moral disarray of our culture will continue to make
victims of the Germans and all the peoples of the West.

* * *

Ralph Raico is professor of history at the State University of
New York College at Buffalo. His Die Partei der Freiheit:
Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Liberalismus aus liberaler
Sicht will be published next year in Cologne. This essay is
adapted from a talk originally delivered at the 1996 conference
of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, in San Mateo, California.

[Dan]

Good article. Not many people know that Germans are the largest (plurality) ethnic group in America. They are about 10 times as numerous as Jews.

[Charles Bunch]

Good article. Not many people know that Germans are the largest (plurality) ethnic group in America. They are about 10 times as numerous as Jews.

I'm sorry, but that is an inaccurate statement.

There may be 60 million people who claim some German somewhere in their ancestry, but not 60 million who are of exclusively German ancestry.

[Dan]

My understanding is that when asked what ethnic background you have, 57 million claim German. Next would be Italian, but if those claiming Scot, Welsh and English would all claim British, this group would be the plurality.

[Charles Bunch]

My understanding is that when asked what ethnic background you have, 57 million claim German. Next would be Italian, but if those claiming Scot, Welsh and English would all claim British, this group would be the plurality.

http://www-lib.iupui.edu/kade/adams/chap1.html

The figures of 50 or 60 million German-Americans reported in the press after the 1980 census is based on a statistical game that is at best questionable. In that year the census asked about the country [countries] of origin of each individual, or his or her ancestors. Of the 226 million Americans, 17.9 million responded with "Germany." Additionally, 31.2 million reported that there were also Germans among their ancestors. Altogether, a total of 49.2 million Americans, or 21.7% of the total population, claimed to have had Germans among their forefathers. It would, of course, make no mathematical sense to try to compare this figure with those of other nationalities because someone who reported "German-Irish," for instance, would be enumerated twice. However, if we play the statistical game of nationalities a bit anyway -- just to get some graphic sense of the "German element" -- then we must use this questionable figure of nearly 50 million Germans as a comparison to the likewise debatable statistic of 101.4 million people who reported England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland as their ancestral homes. The fact remains that no one knows just how many "German" Americans there are today. What the melting pot has put together, statisticians can no longer untangle.

==========

Obviously, saying you have a German somewhere in your ancestry is not the same as saying you have a German ethnic background.

[viriato]

Charles Bunch wrote:

Obviously, saying you have a German somewhere in your ancestry is not the same as saying you have a German ethnic background.

In fact it is sufficient to become a german citizen to prove that one ancestor was born on Germany or was a german citizen in 1913 or afterwards. So every single american of those 50/60 million with german ascendency can claim german citizenship.

[Charles Bunch]

Charles Bunch wrote:

Obviously, saying you have a German somewhere in your ancestry is not the same as saying you have a German ethnic background.

In fact it is sufficient to become a german citizen to prove that one ancestor was born on Germany or was a german citizen in 1913 or afterwards. So every single american of those 50/60 million with german ascendency can claim german citizenship.

We're not talking about German citizenship, but about the number of Americans who have a German ethnic background. Many people have ancestors from a variety of countries, including Germany. The 60 million number is a statistical anomaly, not a true count of ethnic Germans in America.

[Victor´s Justice?]

Levi Eshkol, at a dinner in
Jerusalem, expressed to Konrad Adenauer his confidence that
"under your leadership the German people will return to the
community of civilized peoples,"

Really not a surprising comment, given that it was said by a racist and oportunistic ruler like the ones who crush Palestinians now...

[Roberto]

Levi Eshkol, at a dinner in
Jerusalem, expressed to Konrad Adenauer his confidence that
"under your leadership the German people will return to the
community of civilized peoples,"

Really not a surprising comment, given that it was said by a racist and oportunistic ruler like the ones who crush Palestinians now...

Again the poor Palestinians, even though I haven’t yet seen Victor intervene on their behalf in the discussion on the Military History Forum under

http://milhist.phpwebhosting.com/phpBB2 ... 85a217376d

One may think that he doesn’t really give a damn about the Palestinians, just hates the bloody Jews ...

[Mensch Meyer]

Good article. Not many people know that Germans are the largest (plurality) ethnic group in America. They are about 10 times as numerous as Jews.

Actually going beyond the genetic/ethnic plurality of Germans in America, there are additional factors that Germans have brought to this country, and thereby to the rest of the world.

In 1999, in reflection of the TWENTIETH CENTURY, TIME Magazine used its substantial marketing muscle to promote the notion of an "American Century" and to celebrate US world superiority.

Not to create a misunderstanding, obviously no one would say that Germany is the "best" nation (after all, there was the THIRD REICH, WW II and the Holocaust etc.) Perhaps the century would have been better off without Germany, and there may be many "better" places to live in.

However in all objectivity Germany had more impact on the Twentieth Century and thereby upon Western Civilization than any other nation, including USSR & US & UK, who collectively defeated it in both WWI and WW II.

Admittedly this subject would be hostile to those who "hate Germans," and it would be as ridiculous in the same sense as the TIME's "Turn of the Century" issue was. As mentioned above, the proposal that the 20th century was THE GERMAN CENTURY is a challenge to Time's silly provincialism through even more silly provincialism. -- Not a convincing strategy, perhaps.

But let's assume it will attract more attention than the nobler strategy of completely ignoring TIME's jingoistic arrogance.

At the risk of beating a dead horse lets consider that most of the defining ingredients of the TwenCen (both "good" and "evil") stem from Germany:

[1] The modern car and its various types of engines, and the car industry
(this century's largest).

[2] The programmable computer, basis of the TwenCen's second
largest industry.

[3] The dynamo which has produced most of this century's electricity.

[4] The artificial ammonia-based fertilizer that caused the world's
population to grow from 1.8 billion to 6.2 billion - I guess this one
tops the list of high-impact inventions - (and detrimental to the
enironment and humanity!)

[5] The great war that decreased the world's population by more than
50 million, shaped the TwenCen and led to a new world order based
on two superpowers -- and eventually to only ONE superpower.

[6] The Zeppelin.

[7] The jetplane.

[8] The first rocket in space, and the roots of space programmes of both
US and USSR.

[9] Nuclear fission, basis of A-Bomb and nuclear reactors.

[10] X-rays.

[11] Quantum physics.

[12] The fundamental uncertainty principle.

[13] Expressionism and Bauhaus.

[14] Opposition to Marxism, basis of TwenCen communism, the political
system of half the planet during most of the 20th Century.

[15] The Holocaust, probably this century's most organized crime.

[16] The general theory of relativity, probably this century's most
remarkable intellectual achievement.

To rebut these fact it is TIME editors' and German bashers' turn to make a comparable list for the US --- or for any other nation.

[Dan]

] The artificial ammonia-based fertilizer that caused the world's
population to grow from 1.8 billion to 6.2 billion - I guess this one
tops the list of high-impact inventions - (and detrimental to the
enironment and humanity!)

Well, this one's out. The man was a Jew, and his theories allowed Germany to almost will WW1 despite increadible odds. (Fertilizer makes nice bombs and military propelants).

We could have grown without this invention, it would just have been harder.

IMHO thoughtful human development isn't detrimental to the environment, just the opposite.

Nice post though.
Very best
Dan

[Mensch Meyer]

] The artificial ammonia-based fertilizer that caused the world's
population to grow from 1.8 billion to 6.2 billion - I guess this one
tops the list of high-impact inventions - (and detrimental to the
enironment and humanity!)

Well, this one's out. The man was a Jew, and his theories allowed Germany to almost will WW1 despite increadible odds. (Fertilizer makes nice bombs and military propelants).

We could have grown without this invention, it would just have been harder.

IMHO thoughtful human development isn't detrimental to the environment, just the opposite.

Nice post though.
Very best
Dan

Thanks.

apropos the ferilizer-man Habermas being a Jew:

([4] The artificial ammonia-based fertilizer that caused the world's
population to grow from 1.8 billion to 6.2 billion - I guess this one
tops the list of high-impact inventions - (and detrimental to the
enironment and humanity!)

That would go also for Einstein (student of Max Planck) being a Jew and the man of:

[16] The general theory of relativity, probably this century's most
remarkable intellectual achievement.

It must be noted that both Habermas and Einstein were Germans during a time when there was no nation of ISRAEL, hence they could not have been Israeli tourists in Germany, and therefore they can't be considered foreigners during the Third Reich.

Actually you make a good point, however now that you pointed out that both were Jews, I can't remember whether Wernher von Braun or Rhoentgen were Lutherans or Baptists ... Do you?

[Dan]

Hi Mensch

His name was Haber, and he was an ethnic Jew, unlike a member of a religion.

But as I said, I liked the post in general.

Best
Dan

[Mensch Meyer]

Hi Mensch

His name was Haber, and he was an ethnic Jew, unlike a member of a religion.

But as I said, I liked the post in general.

Best
Dan

Thanks.

Your theory would make historically every Jew "statenlos" (without citizenship,) just because of his religion ...

"Ethnic Jew" is the racial definition that scandalized Hitler's aryan theories in categorizing Jews during the Third Reich. Under the subject of this thread I see no reason to enter Religion or Race ... BTW, why single out Haber and dispense with questioning Einstein's citizenship? Just because Einstein changed it as frequently as his socks?

Haber was born in Breslau, and without looking it up I don't know about Einstein's birthplace at the moment, but their German citizenship is uncontestable. Therefore I stand by my statement that both were German citizens. Or would you like to suggest that one was French, the other English, or that both were Israeli tourists in Germany? ...

At the time there was no Israel, therefore their "ethnicity" could not possibly have connected them to any "israeli citizenship."

Oyvey gevalt! ...

[Dan]

I would say that Haber and Einstein were ethnic Jews. I imagine that they held less aliegience to Germany than to international Jewry. Einstein definately considered himself more Jew than German.Too bad.