Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

THREE Climax and Retreat
ernment and the liberal principles on which it was based.
As insecurity and dishonor turned into panic and desperation,
the Nazi Party, organized in 1921, emerged as one
response to the crisis. The history of the fall of the Weimar
Republic and Adolph Hitler’s rise to power has been told
many times. For our purposes, it suffices to reemphasize
the role of antisemitism. 28
No careful reader of Mein Kampf, written in 1924 while
Hitler was in prison after the failure of the “beer hall putsch”
in Munich in 1923, can doubt that hatred and fear of the
Jews was the main obsession behind the political movement
that he led and personified. The text manifests the sincerity
of the fanatic more than the cant of the demagogue whenever
Hitler is referring to “the Jewish menace” (although
the authenticity of his “socialist” commitment to the economic
welfare of the working classes might be questioned).
Jews were responsible, in Hitler’s eyes, for Germany’s loss
of the war, its collapsing economy, and the threat posed to
it by the Russian Revolution and the rise of Bolshevism.
The vast Jewish conspiracy that Hitler imagined was responsible
for the threat coming from two seemingly conflicting
sources—international capitalism and Soviet Communism—
both of which were antithetical to what he
conceived of as the German national soul, or Volksgeist.Jews
stood for all varieties of internationalism, cosmopolitanism,
and universalism. They were leading practitioners and promoters
of the transnational modern art that Hitler, the onetime
painter, believed was corrupting the aesthetic standards
of the West. To the internationalism of the Jews,
Hitler opposed the nationalism of the Germans, which was
based squarely on race. 29
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