ABSTRACT
THE exclusion of Jews from all walks of life, from the professions as well as from cultural life, from the schools and Universities as well as from business life, dealt a fatal blow to the material basis of the very existence of the Jews in Germany, but even this was not enough. Insult had to be added to injury. The Jews, who had been divested of everything in the material sphere, were made to suffer still more in the moral sphere. No insult which the mean Nazi spirit could devise was spared the Jew. During the period when the Nazis strove for power, Dr. Goebbels, chief propagandist, had a favourite gibe. In almost every one of his many speeches it cropped up again. “Some people ask,” he cried, “are not the Jews human beings? I answer: of course they are human beings, just as the bug is a creature.” To use such methods in the political struggle is bad enough, but to continue using them after victory is worse. The Nazis, who are fond of talking about their chivalry towards conquered foes, do not show any of this chivalry towards the Jews. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, said that the Jew was regarded as the very image of the devil. This idea was the foundation of the campaign of defamation which has gone on incessantly since 1933. The very fact that the Nazis, in speaking of the Jews, rarely use the plural term, is significant. By referring to “the Jew” they want to imply that they are fighting an individual enemy, not a number of people connected by race or religion, but the deadly enemy of Germany, nay, of mankind. When referring to the devil the singular term is also generally used. As soon as “devils” are mentioned, they acquire a rather harmless aspect, mischievous, impish beings, that do not do much harm and are finally outwitted. The devil is something very different. The devil is the eternal foe against whom every means may be used. The Jews are a number of people, good and bad, people one may like or dislike, or regard indifferently, but certainly not a unit. The Jew, or Judah, is something different, something very much more dangerous, something that has to be hated and pursued relentlessly, something, in short, that is outside the pale and against which the ordinary rules of struggle do not apply. The clever psychologists in the Nazi Party realized this very soon, and their success in the propaganda campaign against the Jews is largely due to this method of lumping together numerous enemies. To fight five hundred thousand devils might have appeared an impossible undertaking to many Germans. To fight the one dragon, the Jew, for the greater glory of the German nation was a different matter.
