Flexible racism
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Hitler’s racism was flexible and solely of political convenience, as was the racism of Apartheid South Africa, where “race” membership could be reviewed and changed.
Chinese and Spanish Hitler Youth brigades attended the rallies in Germany as honoured guests, alongside the American, British and Canadian brigades.
When asked what he personally thought of Jews, Hitler replied, “A Jew is just a man of a different religion.”
What is the source and date of that quote as it not how the law under the Nazi government defined a Jew?
Pan/Ballantine Illustrated History of World War II. Can’t find my copies.
Found it. On Wikipedia in the entry on Hitler’s religious views. It’s a quote from Mein Kampf about his views when he first moved to Vienna before WW1:
“When he arrived in Vienna as a young man, Hitler claimed, he was not yet anti-Semitic: “In the Jew I still saw only a man who was of a different religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I was against the idea that he should be attacked because he had a different faith.” He thought that anti-Semitism based on religious, rather than racial grounds, was a mistake: “The anti-Semitism of the Christian-Socialists was based on religious instead of racial principles.” Instead, Hitler argued that Jews should be deplored on the basis of their “race”.”
I don’t think we can use that quote as his final, considered opinion.
Since, though, he was a boot boy for German capitalism, it is evident that “race” was an excuse. Scapegoating Jews had centuries of religious “justification” behind it, and Hitler made use of this to coalesce mass opinion, wouldn’t you say?
Yes but he believed the crap he spouted, ie wasn’t cynically pretending to be antisemitic just to win power. No doubt some of the capitalists who financed his party were but not him.
I wonder why Israel’s recognition of Schindler and Battal is not also extended to Kurt Gerstein. He tends to be largely ignored.
Amen. https://g.co/kgs/GTbm2d
I have found the quote. It’s in chapter II of Mein Kampf on the internet:
“For the Jew was still characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I maintained my rejection of religious attacks in this case as in others. ”
At the time he would have been in his late teens or early twenties.
Earlier he had described what seems like a scene from The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. At the time he was working as a building labourer (since he was born in 1889 it would be almost exactly the same time as events in Mugsborough):
“I drank my bottle of milk and ate my piece of bread somewhere off to one side, and cautiously studied my new associates or reflected on my miserable lot. Nevertheless, I heard more than enough; and often it seemed to me that they purposely moved closer to me, perhaps in order to make me take a position. In any case, what I heard was of such a nature as to infuriate me in the extreme. These men rejected everything: the nation as an invention of the ‘ capitalistic ‘ (how often was I forced to hear this single word!) classes; the fatherland as an instrument of the bourgeoisie for the exploitation of the working class; the authority of law as a means for oppressing the proletariat; the school as an institution for breeding slaves and slaveholders; religion as a means for stultifying the people and making them easier to exploit; morality as a symptom of stupid, sheeplike patience, etc. ”
His fellow workers certainly understood the socialist case (which is more than can be said of Owen’s) !
It is a hazardous project going into Hitler as a person as it can start down the line popular materialism and individuals shaping history.
I was aware of the quote and that link because there is some cross over with ‘his’ ideas on religion with those of Nieztche, and Stirner, for that matter.
I started writing something on it last night but got bored with it.
As a child he had sympathetic a kind good ‘jew’ doctor who looked after his beloved mother.
During the war the precursor of the CIA or whatever it was called asked psychoanalysts to profile Hitler.
They wanted to get an idea about how he might start to behave as things started to go pear shaped.
The psychoanalysts were reluctant at first as remote psychoanalysis was heretical at the time, but they did quite a useful job on it.
They had his childhood doctor who had escaped in time to America and dozen people who knew him well.
He was rejected from Art school in Vienna as a crap drawer and painter by ‘Jewish’ art critics.
Apparently he was recruited by the German state to spy on fascist groups and ended up being converted.
The Italian fascists had been a bit different?
…. Indeed, prior to 1938 and the Pact of Steel alliance, Mussolini and many notable Italian fascists had been highly critical of Nordicism, biological racism, and anti-Semitism, especially the virulent and violent anti-Semitism and biological racism found in Nazi Germany. Many early supporters of Italian fascism, including Mussolini’s mistress, the writer and socialite Margherita Sarfatti, had in fact been middle class or upper middle class Italian Jews. Nordicism and biological racism were often considered incompatible with the early Italian fascist philosophy; Nordicism inherently subordinated Italians and other Mediterranean people beneath the Germans and Northwestern Europeans in its proposed racial hierarchy, and early Italian fascists, including Mussolini, viewed race as a cultural and political invention rather than a biological reality….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_racial_laws
There was a lot of anti-capitalist stuff in early Nazi ideology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strasserism
I think this is why what our anti coybynista anti anti-semitism people are playing with fire.
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