41845358-Antisemitism

THE DIABOLIZATION OF JEWS
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proper conditions do precisely that, because his racial qualities drive him to do
it.... [T]he Jews ... operate ... like parasites. ... You’d better exterminate
these beasts of prey.” 35
Hitler, who lived in Vienna for six years prior to World War I, had familiarized
himself with the racist pamphlets and tracts that circulated widely in
the Austrian capital. These works employed many of the terms that became an
essential part of Nazi ideology: Master race, inferior race, racial pollution,
racial purity, and conflict between races. Thus there is striking continuity between
Nazism and pre–World War I German racial nationalists who saw race
as the key to world history, denounced Jews as an evil race, and insisted that as
a superior race Germans had a national right to dominate other peoples, particularly
the “racially inferior” Slavs of the East. Hitler, whose thought was an
agglomeration of the nineteenth century’s ideological detritus, declared in
Mein Kampf: “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally
creative race died out from blood poisoning [racial mixture]. ... All who
are not of good race in this world are chaff. ... A state which in this age of
racial poisoning dedicates itself to the care of its best racial elements must
some day become lord of the earth.” 36 Aryanism was central to his worldview:
“All the human culture, all the results of art, science, and technology that we
can see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the
Aryan. ... [h]e alone was the founder of all higher humanity. ... He is the
Prometheus of mankind from whose bright forehead the divine spark of genius
has sprung at all times. ...[t]he first cultures arose in places where the
Aryan, in his encounters with lower peoples, subjugated them and bent them
to his will.” 37
And the Jew was the Aryan’s Manichean antithesis:
The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew. ... He is
and remains the typical parasite, a sponger who like the noxious bacillus keeps
spreading as soon as a favorable medium invites him. ... wherever he appears,
the host people dies out after a short or longer period. ... He poisons
the blood of others, but preserves his own. ... the personification of the devil
as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew. ... With satanic
joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting
girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people.
With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he
has set out to subjugate. 38
Rejecting the principle of equality, racial antisemites judged one not by
one’s accomplishments but by one’s “blood,” over which the individual had no