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JEWISH AFFAIRS Chanukah 2015
700 pages, was prepared by the litigants in less
than two months. And it took the court less than
a month to deliver, on 21 August a detailed,
well reasoned, 31 page-long judgment.
Had the defendants been represented, their
lawyers would probably have advised them to
limit themselves to the technical facts. But when
the day arrived they marched into court, Inch
and Von Moltke in uniform.
They had no money to engage lawyers,
they announced, it was the Jews who had all
the money. They raised all kinds of technical
points, including the argument that there was
no proof that they meant that particular Rabbi.
The lawyers realized that it was the defendants
who would define the scope of the trial, as it
soon became apparent that they viewed the
court as a proper arena for their propaganda. As
the evidence unfolded, the issue was no longer
limited to the authenticity of the document or
the identity of the Rabbi. It became clear that
the court would have to address itself to the
alleged existence of an international plot, to
a Jewish conspiracy to gain domination of the
world. The defendants maintained that the said
document was only the local application of this
international plot. It became clear that the court
would have to rule not only on the authenticity
of a local document, but on that of the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion.
When it was their turn to present their defense,
Von Moltke, speaking for all the defendants,
officially requested the court to allow them to
amend their plea. They now pleaded justification,
he said, they would prove and argue that they
had been justified in whatever they had done,
for it was all for patriotic aims. They now
officially pleaded the existence of a dangerous
international ‘Jewish Plot’.
Was it a coincidence, a friend asked me, that
the two most important trials of the Protocols
took place at the same year, independently of
each other, in two countries, on two continents?
No coincidence, I assured him. Hitler had
caused a revival of the ‘Protocols’. There was
ample proof that the Nazi propaganda machine
targeted the ‘Protocols’ as their strongest
argument in the attempt to convince the world
that the Jews constituted a grave danger not
only to world peace, but to the very existence of
legitimate Christian governments. Here is what
they will do to you, the Nazis cried, if they are
not dealt with. The Weltdienst in Erfurt, headed
by Ulrich Fleishauer, was given the task of
promoting the ‘Protocols’ around the world, as
part of their anti-Semitic drive to de-legitimize
the Jews and place them beyond the pale of
legitimate human society. The unsuspecting
world, and even the naive Jewish communities,
perceived this phenomenon as yet another
routine outburst of anti-Semitism. Blaming the
Jews was not a newly invented tactic; Jews had
been persecuted and even massacred before;
this wave will pass, like all its predecessors,
they tried to convince themselves. Not only was
there no premonition of the coming Holocaust,
but there was no suspicion that the’Protocols’
were more than just another tool in the hands
of anti-Semites. The idea that Hitler was not
only using the ‘Protocols’ as a tool against the
Jews, but had actually adopted the so called
Jewish plan of world domination, would have
sounded preposterous, had anybody voiced it
in those first years of the Nazi regime. Nobody
in his right mind would have dared announce
that Hitler was using the ‘Protocols’ not only
as a common denominator which would serve
as a basis for the organization of Nazi parties
in other countries, based on the logic that both
Jews and anti-Semitism existed everywhere, but
that he was using the ‘Protocols’ to mask his
own plan to attain world domination. They could
not have known of the conversation with Hitler,
reported by Hermann Rauschning in his book
Hitler Speaks. ‘I have read the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion’, Hitler told him, ‘it simply
appalled me. The stealthiness of the enemy, and
his ubiquity! I saw at once that we must copy
it - in our own way, of course.’
In 1934 Jews were not aware of the
approaching disaster. Like the law-abiding
citizens that they were, they thought that they
could combat the Nazis in courts of law. Reading
the record of the orderly conduct of the trials,
the polite questions put to Nazi bigots, who
were openly uttering the most unspeakable libels
against Jews, and the learned and well reasoned
judgments, I suddenly thought of a man carefully
and meticulously plugging up a small hole in
his boat, not realizing that in no time at all a
huge wave would sweep it and throw it on the
rocks, with no survivors.
• The second part of Hadassa Ben-Itto’s
account of the Grahamstown libel trial,
dealing with the first part of the trial itself,
will appear in the Pesach 2016 issue of
Jewish Affairs and the final instalment in
the Rosh Hashanah 2016 issue.
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