ABSTRACT
The German National Socialists lost the Second World War but by destroying 6 million Jewish men, women and children during the Holocaust they struck a devastating blow at European Jewry and brought a millennial Ashkenazic Jewish culture on European soil virtually to an end. Yet anti-Semitism, which all over Europe had attained a hitherto unprecedented genocidal savagery during the war years, did not simply vanish with the end of the Third Reich. In Germany, itself, despite the Allies’ efforts at de-Nazification (somewhat half-hearted on the British and American side), many Germans in the immediate post-war era clearly maintained a strong prejudice against Jews, even as they denied all knowledge of Hitler’s mass murder. In 1947, for example, three-quarters of all Germans considered Jews ‘to belong to a different race than ourselves’ and nearly as many opposed intermarriage. At the end of 1948 nearly half of all Germans still approved the Nazi seizure of power and in 1952 a third of the population had preserved a positive opinion of Hitler. Also in the same year, 65 per cent of Germans agreed that the Nazis had largely succeeded in spreading aversion to the Jews, 37 per cent that it was better for there to be no Jews in Germany and no less than a third of all West Germans felt that anti-Semitism was primarily caused by Jewish characteristics.1 At the same time in Communist-ruled East Germany where much firmer action had been taken against ex-Nazis and Jewish ‘Victims of fascism’ were relatively well treated, the country was engulfed at the end of 1952 by an ‘anti-Zionist’ campaign emanating from the USSR which had unmistakably anti-Jewish overtones.
