Whoa, got your attention, didn’t I?
I recently picked up a copy of my cousin’s European History doctoral dissertation. Two Three hundred pages later, I’m almost finished. I don’t recommend it as a nightstand book, but there’s a lot of really interesting stuff in there.
Here’s the latest thing. There were several groups of Jews, and lots of Jewish individuals, who (before all the murdering started) more or less supported the Nazi party.
This is weird to me, of course, and it takes a shift in my knee-jerk understanding of Nazism before I can understand it. I normally think of the Nazis as gaining and retaining power while persecuting Jews.
And that’s true, but it’s not the whole truth. The National Socialists were a political party, like any other. They had a platform, like any other party, and the Jewish thing was only part of that platform.
The majority of Germans wanted an authoritarian government. They wanted a strong leader. They wanted militarism, and a sense of strength and nationalism and pride. And since Jews were a part of German society, then it’s reasonable to assume that a fair amount of them wanted the same thing.
Unfortunately, the party also offered anti-Semitism, so Jews couldn’t whole-heartedly support it, no matter how much they agreed with the rest of the platform. But they could sort of say, “well, aside from that part, I really like what they bring to the table. They’re better than the other guys. So we just need to convince them to drop that anti-Semitic part.”
And remember that anti-Semitic laws were nothing new. In the beginning, this wasn’t some huge horror. In the beginning, it was more like, “those bastards are doing this again,” and less like “oh my God, what are we going to do.”
After all, it wasn’t the pogroms in Russia. It wasn’t like Germans were uncivilized. Most Jews assumed that the normal German wouldn’t take it “too far.” And that the normal German could be educated.
So we had these Jews, and Jewish groups, who believed in fascism, believed in most of what the Nazis said, but just wanted to remove the hate from the platform. There was even a Jewish equivalent of the Nazi youth groups. And they weren’t opposing the Nazis. They were mirroring them, and showing them that Jews could be Nazis, too.
Of course, not all Jews felt that way. There were Jewish communists, and Jewish liberals, and all the rest. But they’re not interesting. What’s interesting is the Jewish fascists.
Now imagine their disillusionment and sense of self-recrimination when it all went worse than they ever imagined.
How did they feel, when the laws and restrictions and outright violence made it too hard to believe that they had backed the right horse? And then, when the Final Solution was put into action, leaving the Russian pogroms far behind in brutality and senseless death. How did they feel?