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

concepts of the humanly beautiful and sublime, as well as
all ideas of an idealized future of our humanity, would be
lost forever.” 35 Hitler even claimed that the French toleration
of black-white intermarriage and its seemingly colorblind
conception of assimilation was turning France into
an extension of Africa into the heartland of Europe. 36
Like everyone else who was threatening German nationality
and racial purity, the French were of course doing
the bidding of the Jews—the ultimate enemy. At no point
in Mein Kampf does Hitler explicitly call for the extermination
of the Jews, but the implication that they would have
no place in a resurgent and regenerated Germany is unmistakable.
Furthermore, given the fact that they were able to
use nations like France and Russia as tools of their diabolical
conspiracy, full security and fulfillment for Germany
would be guaranteed only if all the Jews in the world were
eliminated or at least rendered powerless. Something like
the Holocaust was not an illogical or far-fetched consequence
of such thinking. Something more than, or different
from, simple biological racism may be required for an understanding
of Hitler’s phobic antisemitism and that of
some of his followers. In the statement he dictated to Martin
Bormann shortly before his death in 1945, he called the
Jews “more than anything else, a community of the spirit
. . . with a sort of relationship with destiny.” Their “trait of
not being able to assimilate . . . defines the race and must
be reluctantly accepted as a triumph of the ‘spirit’ over the
flesh.” 37 If Hitler’s racism had a nonmaterial or “spiritual”
foundation, it would have been quite consistent with the
beliefs of Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologist of the Nazi
Party from the time that he stood in for Hitler when the
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