Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

586 DER FUEHRERIn the end, the world will learn to understand us.' The Jews, he said,would do well to keep silent about their persecution in Germany. 'Forthe more they speak of it, the more acute becomes the Jewish question,and once the world begins to concern itself with this question, it willalways be solved to the detriment of the Jews.' Through these wordsshines the truth that National Socialism does not find the question ofJewish world domination ready-made, but creates it. National SocialistGermany suddenly cast this question upon the world, probably soonerthan originally intended; but from then on systematically, not only bymeans of speeches, but by a conspicuous act: stringent anti-Semiticlegislation. It was legally established that the Jews were not citizenswith equal rights; in unofficial speeches it was stated that they were nothuman. Or, as Goebbels had said in a pamphlet, The Nazi-Sozi, in 1932,'Certainly, the Jew is also a man, but the flea is also an animal,' and theother animals do not harbor and cultivate the flea, but exterminate it; asWalter Buch, chairman of Hitler's highest party court, expressed it someyears later: 'The Jew is not a human being, he is a manifestation ofdecay.' In most of the countries of central and western Europe, the Jewswere profoundly fused with the rest of the population; in some placesthey were scarcely distinguishable. The Jews in the German city ofWorms on the Rhine boasted that they had been living there longer thanthe Germanic population; their cemetery showed tombstones from thefourth century A.D. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, when theJews of Regens-burg on the Danube were threatened with annihilationbecause their ancestors had crucified Christ, they replied: it could nothave been the ancestors of the Regensburg Jews, for they had beenliving in Regensburg even before the crucifixion. Not even the anti-Semites denied that the Jews played a large part in the economic rise ofGermany in the nineteenth century; Richard Wagner regarded thecreation of the economic age as the sin of the modern Jews. It was aJew, Walter Rathenau, who at the beginning of the First World War,created the essentials of German economic mobilization; it was thesame Jew who, toward the end of the war, made a profound impressionon the German youth with his prophecy that the economic age wasdrawing to an end.