Something new emerged in the 20th century in Jewish identification in Nazi Germany that had not happened before in all the many centuries of the history of the Jewish people. It was state identification for the purpose of finding and exterminating Jews.
Such identification was founded on Nazi ideology begun by the savage theoretical anti-Semitism of the German composer Wagner and brought to brutish practical realization by Hitler and his Nazi regime. The Holocaust with its six million dead Jews was the result of such identification.
One such extermination action is shown in the photograph – in the city of Kovno in Lithuania, which was occupied by the Germans in 1941.
What was it – a logical development of anti-Semitism or a return of part of mankind to a savage pre-human condition?
Is it possible to make sense of it in the light of the Torah, of Ten Commandments, of the concept of God, of the Judeо-Christian civilization?
Let’s begin with the savage philosophy of the German composer Wagner that is described precisely by the Soviet conductor Yuri Aranovich and submitted here.
The story of militant Wagnerian anti-Semitism again proves how dangerous are the ideas of racial hatred and unhealthy xenophobia, especially when they issue not from the mouths of a tipsy sausage maker, but belong to representatives of the national creative elite.
“Jews are worms, rats, flesh worms, tapeworms that must be exterminated, like a plague, to the last microbe, because there is nothing that works against them, just poisonous gases,” Wagner wrote in a letter to his wife.
In his book, one of the chapters of which Wagner called “Jewishly Evil Art,” he writes, “It would be a most profound error to separate Wagner the thinker and philosopher from Wagner the composer. Perhaps it is possible in other cases, but not in mine.”
Wagner left no doubts about what he wanted to say with his music as “the thinker and philosopher.” In a letter to Liszt in 1848, he invited him “to commit musical terrorism.” And actually, one may by rights call Wagner the first musical terrorist of our time, long before Hitler and Arafat who directed terrorism against the Jewish people.
Wagner was an ideologue of a defined movement, with a defined goal both in music and in politics and in public life.
Wagner expressed his ideology perfectly clearly in the last chapter of his sensational book and which hasn’t ceased causing heated controversy to the present day, one of the chapters of which is called “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question” (by the way, he first introduced this expression long before the Nazis). And the “final solution” is of course the complete extermination of the Jews. Wagner wrote a letter to the Bavarian parliament in which he proposed such plan for extermination of the Jews. Not one musician, and not only musicians, but also philosophers overall ever had advanced a program for the extermination of a whole race. Even Nietzsche, whom it is difficult to suspect of sympathies toward the Jews, wrote him a letter where he said that Wagner was worthy of “dying in prison, and not in his own bed” for this proposal. Nietzsche declared openly in his letter to Wagner, “You are not a man, you are simply a disease.”
Wagner saw to it his ideas were clearly understood by subsequent generations. For example, at the celebration of his 68th birthday, a year before his death, Wagner said in reply to a toast, “My baton will show future generations many more times what stand they should take.”
And this stance was freeing mankind of the Jews.
First, because “Jews are like flies and rats: the more you exterminate them, the more they procreate. There exists no means except total extermination. The Jewish race was born as the enemy of mankind and everything human. And especially the enemy of everything German. And German art cannot sleep soundly until the last Jew is exterminated.” This idea was, as Wagner himself said, “Тhe leitmotif of my life.”
The opera “Parsifal” occupied a special place in Wagner’s work. He called this opera “a testament for future generations.” In the forward to the first edition of “Parsifal,” Wagner wrote, “I am presenting in my opera ‘Parsifal’ the idea of the figure of a Christ that has been cleansed of Jewish blood.” For Wagner, “Parsifal,” as he called it himself, was an “escape from the Redeemer.”
Why does one have to escape from Christ? Wagner explained it, “Jewish blood flowed in Christ’s veins you know.” Wagner asked that before a performance of “Parsifal” a miracle play be performed on the stage in which “the body of Christ is burnt together with other Jews as a symbol of escaping from the Jew altogether.” But no one ventured similar things even in Wagner’s time.
These ideas of Wagner were adopted by the Nazi regime and there was no need to change either the melody or the words – everything fit even without it. “The final solution of the Jewish question” was the culmination of many years of Nazi anti-Jewish policy – beginning from Hitler’s early works about the need to solve the Jewish question in Europe.
After coming to power in the 1930s, the Nazis attempted to invoke a mass emigration of Jews; afterwards, efforts were undertaken for expulsion of the Jews to areas specially set-aside for it. And in 1941, the Nazis decided to exterminate the Jews physically.
In September 1919, Hitler wrote his first political paper where he declared that the Jewish problem could be decided only by the complete removal of the Jews from Europe. According to this paper, the removal of the Jews was supposed to take place without excess emotionalism, not being accompanied by pogroms and the like, but should be effected with typically German thoroughness, effectiveness and coordination. Hitler thought that the Jewish problem should be fundamental for every Nazi. He himself was possessed by it and adamant in the search for a “final solution” – a way to get rid of the Jews forever.
During all of the 1930s Hitler believed mass emigration could solve the “Jewish problem.” Anti-Jewish law, introduced in Germany beginning with Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933 and until the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939, had as its goal to urge, and later also to force the Jews to leave the country. In January 1939, Hitler appeared before the German parliament. He criticized the countries of the free world for their refusal to accept Jewish immigrants and cautioned that one of the consequences of a war might be the “disappearance” of European Jews.
In 1939, after the German invasion of Poland, 1.8 million more Jews fell under the control of Nazi Germany. Hitler did not immediately issue an order for their extermination. Instead, a plan was developed, in accordance with which all Jews living within the boundaries of the Reich should be moved to a reservation in the region of Lublin, in the Polish General Governorship. The Nazis attempted to implement this plan (“Nisko-Lublin”), but it was not realized. By spring 1940, it became clear that the Lublin program could not serve as a solution to the Jewish problem, inasmuch as there was no free territory in Poland for relocation of the Jews.
The “Madagascar” plan was the next stage of the anti-Jewish policy – a project for the deportation of all Europe’s Jews to the island of Madagascar, a French colony in Africa. However, Germany was beaten in the Battle of Britain after only several months, which made the Madagascar project impracticable.
In June 1941, Germany, violating the terms of the treaty of non-aggression between the Soviet Union and Germany (the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) invaded the USSR. Mobile death squads called Einsatzgruppen, in cooperation with units of the regular military, police elements and local collaborators, began the systematic extermination of the Soviet Union’s Jews.
Massive, systematic extermination of people was undertaken for the first time for “the solution of the Jewish problem.”
In July of that year, Hermann Goering approved preparations for “the final solution.” At the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942, the Nazis created several extermination camps, began the deportation to them of Jews and developed extermination methods. The first experiment in the use of poisonous gas was made at Auschwitz in September 1941, and camps were created in the late fall at Belzec and Chelmno. Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz supplemented the number of extermination centers in the spring of 1942. In the meantime, in December 1941, Hitler reported to his closest associates that Germany’s Jews also were subject to extermination; thereby, the policy of the “final solution” was being expanded over all the territory of Europe.
Representatives of Nazi Germany’s government and the Nazi armed forces of the SS met at the Wansee Conference in January 1942 for coordination of activities for the extermination of all Europe’s Jews to the last man.
From that moment and until the war’s end in 1945, the “final solution” was official Nazi policy and meant only one thing – the complete extermination of European Jews.
For the first time in the history of mankind, a god-man named Hitler who decided to replace the One True God with himself for everyone, proclaimed his goal to identify one racial group of mankind for the purpose of its complete physical extermination.
Just how could such a thing have happened? Just what underlay the identification of people? Identification
