April 18 2015
Why the Nazis Needed to Destroy the
Jewish People:A Look Back after 70 Years
 |
| Courage of the Spirit Essay, 1937 |
Our Torah reading of this Shabbat
opened with the bizarre death of the two sons of Aaron, Nadav and Avihu just at
what should be the greatest of days, the day of their dedication as priest of
the new sanctuary in the desert. Moses tries to comfort his brother, ” I will
be sanctified by those closest to me,” but Aaron answer is Vayidom Aharon, “Aaron kept silent.” He
could give no answer and could accept no comfort. ( Leviticus 10).
The fate of the martyrs of Holocaust
in some ways is reminiscent of the fate of Nadav and Avihu. Let no one blame
any faction of Jews for failure or lack of righteousness nor for silence or
fear. Our only deep answer possible is
that of Aaron, Vayidom Aharon. We are silent, like Aaron.
Nevertheless, speak we must and lay
the blame clearly, not at the feet of the victims, nor at the feet of God, but
at the feet of the perpetrators, the
bulk of the Germans and their fellow travelers of other nations who
swore allegiance to Hitler or joined in the bloodshed for whatever reason.
Now it is 70 years to the end of the
Holocaust on May 7, 1945, marking the collapse of the Third Reich. Our own friend ,Joe Alexander, was freed at
Dachau on April 29.My mother, Irene Weinberg, was liberated sometime
mid-February in the Czestochowa region and sometime in April my father arrived
in a liberated Vienna.
I mention my father, Rabbi Dr William
Weinberg. Many of you know that I recently published a book about him, Courage
of the Spirit. He had served as the first State Rabbi of Hesse, the
American zone around Frankfurt, Germany. I look into his writings to find hints
of how and why this great human horror story unfolded.
Why did the Nazis need to destroy the
Jewish people. It is true that they vented their rage on homosexuals and
Gypsies and were out to enslave the Slavs, but only one people so focused the
mind of Hitler in his manifesto, Mein Kampf. Only one people, small and few in numbers, the
Jewish people, so focused his mind. Why so? Obviously, there is the old history
of Christian anti-Semitism and the accusation of Christ-killer. But, as my
father wrote, not one Nazi ever accused him of being a Christ killer.
He had spent two years in a Nazi prison
from 1935 to 1937. His fellow inmates were political prisoners for the most
part, either Communists or other Nazis! Yes, other Nazis, because Hitler needed
to control those Nazis who believed too much in the cause. So for two years, he
learned the inner thinking of the Nazis, up close.
He was released in April and escaped
quickly to Vienna, and while there, he wrote a series of essays that appeared
in the Zurich Jewish newspaper just two months later, under
the name," Courage of the Spirit". It was on the contrast between
Judaism and the great ideologies of modernity: economic determinism, what we
call Marxism, psychological determinism, what we call Freudianism, and
biological determinism, what we could call, in parallel, Hitlerism.
Note the irony that two of the three
are associated with Jews. Marxism proved to be pathological, Freudianism, much
more benign, but the third was fatal, certainly to us as Jews. In opposition to
these three, my father posed Judaism. Modern ideology proposed that we are all
controlled, either by our economic status, our psychological make-up, or our blood
( today, the equivalent is DNA), especially as marked by race. Our concepts of
true and false, right and wrong, good and evil, are illusions, imposed upon us
by factors beyond us. We are ourselves therefore never free agents of our own
will. In opposition to this was the core idea of Judaism:
“Judaism's theory of history is
activist, the Jewish ethos is a willful ethos, the Jewish religion is
outspokenly a religion of will. The originality of Judaism rests primarily on
the point that the Bible, for the first time, inquired into the question of the
sense and inner unity of all human history and conceived of the individual
events of history as steps up to a meaningful and powerful world goal. “(Translation
of text, Courage of the Spirit, pp 122-138)
In
other words, to cut through my translation of his flowery German prose, we as Jews
believed in a common destiny for humanity, a common value, a common ethic. It
is this which distinguished us from Nazism, even more so than from the other
ideologies, which shared at least some sense of commonality of humanity. It is
this belief that the human shares his humanity with others, that the human is “God’s
partner in creation”.
There
is one other aspect to Nazism that has never been properly explained. This too
was addressed in the essays. At the root of Nazism is nihilism, a belief that
all the inherited values of western civilization were an imposition through
Christianity by the Jews. This concept
of permitted and forbidden would be opposed by the expression of pure will and
force, an elimination of the boundaries of conventional morality. In addressing
this outlook, my father declared that this liberation of the individual from
moral restraints would be ultimately catastrophic, and he wrote:
“Nietzsche
was its first victim and ended in mental derangement and the German people as a whole was her second
victim which has ended in National
Socialism.”
Now, Nietzsche was the brilliant philosopher who
preached the devaluing of all values. He died in terrible insanity. The
metaphor, for my father’s readers was clear. The German people had fallen into
the same degenerative insanity that had befallen the great intellect. Nietzche self-destructed;
so to say, the German people had self-destructed. So prophetic! Within the
space of seven years, the Third Reich had plunged the entire world into a “Twilight
of the Gods”, the world saw mass murder with efficiency on a scale never
imagined, and the human race entered the age of nuclear weaponry. Germany was
rubble.
I contend that to understand this horror that Nazism
needed, in order to destroy the Jewish people, a reason greater than that of
“Christ killer.”
Nazism, as a movement of will and the expression of
absolute power, needed to destroy the very people who brought the world their
commonly accepted system of values. Christianity stood in the way, for sure,
but the resistance of the Church, whether Protestant or Catholic, proved feeble
and powerless to sway the bulk of the people of Germany and their fellow
travelers, the collaborators among the other Europeans. No. The target had to
be “The Jew”, because the Jew is at the root of Christianity. The Jew
represents the father, represents obligation, responsibility, prohibition. To
borrow from Freudian explanations, the son must destroy the father in order to
have the mother. This underlying pathology was a greater cause of fear in
Hitler’s obsessions, as of those of his followers, a greater fear than the Jew as
capitalist and communist combined, or the Jew as the creature whose tentacles
control the governments of the world. Buried deep in their psyche, was the Jew
as the obstacle to the fulfillment of unbridled passion, power and force. For
Nazism to be the “Triumph of the Will” it needed, above all, to triumph, not
over the malicious American and English capitalists, not over the evil
Bolsheviks, but over the Eternal Jew. All the efforts of the war would be subordinated
to the annihilation of the Jew.
We are here today, then, because we still
stand for the conscience, for the freedom of the human soul, for the ability to
shape our lives as individuals and as peoples, for a belief in a higher goal
for humanity that is shaped in the Divine image. We stand for a day, as
difficult and deluded as it may seem, a day in which the words of the prophets
Isaiah and Micah would be fulfilled, words inscribed on the walls of the United
Nations, words that Nazism worked so hard to prevent:
“They will beat their swords into
plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword
against nation, nor will they learn war anymore” (Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3-5).
To this, the prophet Micah added:
“All the nations may walk in the name of
their gods” . . ..
“In the name of their gods”! The prophet
did not care what way different nations followed their gods or their version of
God, no matter if they called in the name of Jesus or in the name of Allah or Ahura Mazda.
He concluded:
“But we will walk in the name of the LORD
our God for ever and ever.( Micah 4:3-5)
So shall we all walk one day, all peoples,
each in its own path, but together.
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