Please forgive me if I ramble, but you see: I feel that simple, clear “answers” to this question (“Why the Nazis did what they did, and will we do it, and are we also guilty?”) defy us; they cannot be had. Are we guilty of what the mad, subrational “planners” in Washington, D.C., are doing right now? I don’t know. Was some old village German lady in 1939 “guilty” of a decision at Eichmann’s bureau in Berlin? There are a few established facts, however, that we should remember. (1) When Himmler asked for and got the chance to witness an execution of innocent, harmless Jewish people (by firing squad), he had a convulsion of horror; he fainted, fell to the floor, rolled in a spasm of anguish; his aides had to drag him to his feet; and, there and then, Himmler decreed that no more Jews “were to be shot, but that some merciful method, painless and instant” had to be found. Remember, mark, this. So even this unman, this thing, reified into the top ranks of Nazi officialdom, had “feelings.” (Hitler would neither have cared to watch, and if he had, he would not have had any emotional, ethical reaction; mark that, too.) Also, the Wermark Soldaten (the average German soldier) hated the Schwarzers, the SS. . . knew them as murderers. Mark that. German citizens poked bread into the sealed cattle cars carrying Jews to their death through the Reich; read that and ponder. Remarque records a German playing the theme from Beethoven’s Fidelio that depicts the prisoners — unjustly held by a tyranny — as they are at last, for a moment, let up to see the light — playing this as a team of Jewish concentration camp victims are led down the street past his house. Even German whores came to the walls of the death camps, hoping “to do something for” those within. In other words, good (and I will not put quotes around that word) impulses broke out constantly among average Germans as and when they became aware of what was being done to the Jews; many, admittedly, spat on, kicked, jeered at, Jews being hauled off. . . but not all. “Die Stille im Lande” [the quiet in the land] the Nazis called these Germans who did not approve of the racial policies; these Germans knew that if they showed themselves they, too, would be killed. Mark this: The first inhabitants of the concentration camps were non-Jewish Germans. And it did mean death, during the war, for a German citizen to show any dissent from official policy; a German woman, for example, was imprisoned because the newspaper with which she lined her garbage pail had on it a photo of Hitler; this was decreed by the court (the so-called Reichs Gericht) a “crime against the state.” They made it stick!
Yet, the German people, or a good part of them, better than half, voted, legally voted, Hitler into power, and knowing his racial views. Read Goebbels’ early diaries; the Partei had the support of the working class — not the bourgeoisie. Mark that, too: The working class swung from supporting the Communists and the moderate socialists to the Nazis. Why? Well, I can hazard a guess. The Nazis, like the big city political bosses who used to run Chicago and New York and Boston, were always “open,” always there and ready to listen, to help, to dole out food and support. . . and the Germans were starving, dying, being evicted, being deprived; it was the Depression, remember, and the people, as our people, were desperate. One of our favorite folk singers of today in those days (late 30s) not only sang against our support of the U.K. and defense plant activity but drawlingly spoke of being listed as a “Japanese spy”; in other words, this “now liberal, one of us” great folk singer — his initials are P.S. — was for Nazi Germany — because of the German-Russian Pact. World Communism and Naziism were cooperating, for a time; the Nazis were not “rightists”; they were coleftists — at least until the Nazi tanks entered the Russian-controlled half of ex-Poland.
In his comments in Niekas George H. Wells speaks of “Jewish nationalists,” and that they “were overlooked.” This is a point, too; at the time of the rise of anti-Jewish ideology among non-Jewish-Germans, the Jewish-Germans were beginning, in great part, to think — as not Germans or even Europeans, but as nationalists of the soon-to-be-reborn national state of Israel. (Moses Mendelssohn pleaded with the people not to accept this, but to “come out and be part of the European community”; generally, he failed.) So: We saw Jews, in Germany, arrive at the same idea as the pre-Nazi “racists,” such as Wagner, and it always seems that Richard Wagner is the goat in this; he invented the idea that Jews were aliens, hostile to Germany. Catcrap. A thorough study of Wagner’s ideas shows that he broke with Nietzsche in the end, saw a redemption of Germany (i.e., of man per se) in Christian love, not in military bombast (vide Parsifal). So even among the famous pre-Nazi theoreticians we don’t find the uniformity of outlook; what we do find, however, is the Englishmen Stuart House Chamberlain, and Carl Rhodes. . . and of course Nietzsche; but we find English madmen-thinkers right at the “heart of darkness,” so to speak. Teaching the idea, as Hannah Arendt says, of a small, worldwide elite of Nordics who will run things: a top caste who will tell the “darkies,” i.e., the rest of us, where to go. . . and “where to go” may be into the false shower baths that are really cyanide gas chambers. Yes, Harry Warner, writing in Niekas, is right: We squirm and we remember because it is not “them” but “us” who thought those awful thoughts, and hence instigated those awful deeds; and the “us” includes the Jewish nationalist fanatics, some of whom live today in Israel, who invade schools, break up grammar school class meetings with their quasi-military (I think the form is paramilitary) thugs. . . because the teacher of the class is not racially “correct.” In this case, however, not sufficiently Jewish, rather than sufficiently German.
The Zionists drove one million Arabs out of Israel, and those Arabs, supported — i.e., kept from starving — by the Quakers, are the greatest single lot of displaced persons on earth today. And don’t let anyone tell you that those Arabs (i.e., non-Jews and hence aliens, although their people had lived there for two thousand years) wanted to leave. They were terrorized into leaving, and they cannot return. So the victims of World War Two have become the arrogant nationalists, ready to go to war (vide the Suez crisis) with their neighbors as soon as assured of adequate military support (and again it is Britain who gives it, Britain and France).
This is all dreadful. In the Jewish refugee settlements in the Far East under the Japanese during World War Two, many Jews set up Hitler organizations, including the Nazi (or Roman, if you prefer) salute.
We like to think of the victims of tyranny and cruelty as innocent (e.g., Chessman). But often the victim is blood-stained, too; i.e., he has participated actively in the situation that has at last claimed his life. Many Jews today won’t ride in a VW, and some won’t even listen to the music of Beethoven; is this not as neurotic and “sick” as was the nineteenth-century ideologies of blood, race, and land being taught by both Germans and Jewish-Germans? Personally, I enjoy telling fanatical nationalistic, blood-oriented Jewish friends a fact they generally don’t know: Many of the medieval German knight-poets, the minnesingers, were — Jewish.
So, Dr. Friedrich Foerster, “the greatest modern critic of Germany” to the contrary, there are now, have always been, at least two, and probably three, seven, nine Germanics; i.e., worldviews held by Germans. J. S. Bach considered himself a Pole (his monarch was under fief to a Polish king.) But we call Bach a German because he spoke German. Tony Boucher speaks German, and perfectly; is he, therefore, a German, hence a Nazi? The German Jews spoke German. . . and remember, a Jewish violinist’s hand was broken by a Zionist fanatic swinging a lead pipe because that violinist dared to play a Richard Strauss piece in concert in Israel. . . . Is this not the Brown Shirts of the thirties once more, or is it not?
When a Jewish fanatic friend of mine calls me a “gentile” I simply say, “Call me a goy and let it go at that.” Because, if I am a “gentile,” then two thousand years of evolution in human thought has been abandoned.
And if he won’t ride in my VW — which was probably made in New York, not Germany, and was certainly, for sure, sold me by a Jewish person, Leon Felton of San Rafael — then I will not allow him to eat a bagel in my presence. (I am, of course, joking; I am trying to show this: That we can no more hold a people responsible than we can hold any other mythical, semantic, nonactual entity responsible; German1 is not German2 and German2 is not German3, and so forth. Just as, in this country, you and I did not bomb those little Negro schoolchildren in that church Sunday school. . . you know goddamn well we did not, and if we, you and I, could catch the white bastards — or rather just plain bastards — who did it, we would work just as much and quick vengeance on them as any Negro mob would or could.)