CHAPTER XI - POGROM IX: HITLER

(i)

After many centuries of pogrom, emancipation at last came to the Jews of Western Europe. The first event in this process seems to have been the readmission of Jews into England by Cromwell. The influence of the French Revolution subsequently helped to produce a more tolerant climate for them; and their emancipation proper took place during the Industrial Revolution.

Until Europe ceased to be wholly Catholic the problem set by Jewry was that of a minority whose specific religious and cultural differences created a tension within whatever majority group it found itself. This tension was resolved in normal times by isolating Jews in ghettoes. Here they pursued their own life, followed their Talmud, organised their education, and maintained their language. Outside the ghetto they were distinguished by their clothes and by their special markings.

In abnormal times of pogrom we have noted the strange amalgam of despair and of desperation which was the lot of medieval Europe in crises brought on by plagues, famine, war and corruption in Church and in State. At such times sorely tried groups or minorities, smouldering under the weight of adversity, would burst into a flame of pogrom against Jews when the lash of misfortune drove them into the phantom world on the fringes of faith and of reason.

Now in the last two centuries the climate has changed, but both Jewry and Christendom have paid a price. But before we calculate that price we must first try to understand what happened when the gates of the ghettoes began to open.

The newly emancipated Jew, granted legal if not social tolerance, was bewildered by the new free environment built up by a Gentile culture so different from his. The Jews entered it with an education, a language, a set of customs, a view of their destiny, a view of life and a sense of history which was exclusively their own. Debarred by feudalism from the guilds, forbidden the professions, passed over by the Renaissance they now faced the problem of how to be assimilated by a suspicious majority still nourished on residues of prejudice and resentment from the past days of religious unity in Europe.

Assimilation proceeded along the following lines. They learned the language of the country of their adoption. Slowly they infiltrated into trades, and bit by bit, through mixed marriages and a slow forgetting of their customs and traditions, the old sharp line of demarcation between town and ghetto, Jew and Gentile, was blurred.

This process was assisted (but as we shall see only apparently) by the fact that many Gentiles had ceased to be Catholics. Many of them were now Christians, a blanket term which the Apostles would not have been able to understand in its modern meaning. This term now meant not one Church but a multiplicity of -isms. For the ordinary man it meant the loss of a central authority that could ease the burden of personal responsibilities. It meant the loss of guidance, and the emergence of contradictory religions offering their rival brands of goodness and of truth. It meant confusion and then scepticism and later guilt, since most men wanted to be good but did not know how to be good, when not one of the splinter sects could agree on the means to be good. The differences between the Churches were—and are—more profound than their similarities, and faced with rival claims the average man moved from confusion to scepticism. A climate of tolerance arose because truth became relative, and in this climate the Jew had his being.

The Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and revolutionary thinkers such as Marx, Darwin and Freud all helped the Gentile in the matter of religious tolerance towards the Jew, but hindered the Jew desperately in the new systems that came to take the place of religion.

These new systems were those of capitalism and of science. Modern science began roughly three hundred years ago and its bases were three postulates which were not matters of argument, but simply an outlook which brought some certainty of a kind to a world which was losing most of its spiritual values. They were these:

(1) Statements of fact should be based not on unsupported authority but on observation.

(2) The physical world is a self-acting, self-regulating, self-perpetuating machine needing no First Cause to explain it.

(3) The earth is not the centre of the Universe. Man is not its purpose. What is “purpose” anyway?

The difference between this outlook and the one that existed before the Reformation is simple to state. United Christendom had believed that the world of the spirit was more important than that of matter, and hence that spiritual values were the only absolute ones.

The new outlook flatly contradicted spiritual values (what is purpose anyway?) and implied that the only value worth while was in manipulating environment to give man knowledge and power over it and thus make him “happy” (a spiritual value really which cannot be measured, weighed, dissected or put on the slide of a microscope).

In place of the older view which exaggerated man’s freedom, yet saw him as master of his fate and captain of his soul who steered the ship of life to the ports of heaven, the new view saw him as not free but determined by heredity, by environment, by chance, by forces of his unconscious, by his mammalian endowment, and by the inexorable laws of profit and loss.

It was into this world that the Jew had to be assimilated. There were, however, difficulties in the way of assimilation. With the readmission of Jews into England round about 1650 the West-East migrations of the Jews were checked. The possibility of escaping pogrom suddenly ceased to be important and the migrations of scattered bodies of the nation were reversed. Eastern Jews now moved westwards bringing simpler and deeper religious beliefs to the Jewish communities in the West and checking the growth of materialism among them. This revival would probably not have lasted very long, but its importance is that it served to remind the Western majorities of the peculiar, distinctive character of the minority among them, who contrary to the current of the times did believe that men had a purpose, and that they had a special purpose and a special destiny, ordained for them by God.

The new world of science was emphatically one in which scientific discoveries were turned to practical advantage. As soon as man began to explore his environment by manipulating it successfully a revolution was possible in industry, and with the Industrial Revolution modern capitalism may be said to have been born. In this new world the Jew was destined to play a vital part. And in this new world of material things, as in the old world of spiritual values, he was to become a phantom figure.

To appreciate his role one must remember that in the old world religion was dynamic and industry was static; and that in the new industry became dynamic and religion became static. In the old world manual labourers (there were no machines) enjoyed a low standard of living but high security; in the new their standard of living would reach in a few generations a height undreamed of by the average man before the Renaissance. But the insecurity of the modern worker would be very high. The essence of capitalism is free competition and rivalry. Because religion is static, ethics are relative; it is diamond cut diamond—Darwinism translated into profit and loss where the weakest goes to the wall, and where, in a Marxist sense, men see their life history as written by the inexorable laws of profit and loss.

Both worlds share, in fact, the same common drive—the acquisitive, goal-seeking instinct in man—which in the one sought dynamically its treasure in heaven and in the other its treasure on earth. Prayer and fasting were the old-world recipes, production and sale are the new-world ones; but whereas there was no individual competition in the old world, it is the very essence of the new. In the old world this ethos transformed the professions and the trades. A stonemason would gladly work for life on a great cathedral he might never see completed. He would work in the full tradition of craftsmanship. The new world has little place for craftsmen. Saleability and production lines are more important, and throughout the professions and the trades has come great insecurity. A strike here, an economic failure there, a boom, a slump, a glut and the creative destruction which is the consequence of industrial competition spreads downwards from the captains of industry to the serfs who work their machines.

No man, of course, is an island. What industrialists, capitalists and workers have to pay as the price for economic advancement—the fears, frustrations, the violence done to charity, the permission given to avarice, the insecurity bred by strikes, the ruthlessness let loose by competition—is part of the environment they bequeath to their wives and children. When times are good this is reflected in the family pattern. The standard of living is rising; people are in hot pursuit of the rising standard and the optimism of a culture on the crest of an economic wave is reflected in the rise in its birth-rate. But where the standard is falling or is only static, so that a country has to fight a slump, again the indication shows in a falling birth-rate.

These are some of the disadvantages inherent in capitalism. That there are many advantages goes without saying. But to understand the German pogrom we must emphasise—at the risk of being one-sided and reactionary—the collective insecurity which can fall on an industrial society and drive it into a phantom world—temporarily and reversibly—as really as the Rhinelanders were during the Black Death.

We must also endeavour to understand how little suited is modern Western man to deal with collective insecurity when his religion is static and decaying. Religion is not only a code of truth; it is a code of behaviour. The old world saw God as Infinite Goodness, the source and destiny of man. Because it believed that God was Infinite Love, capable of being loved by man during his short life on earth and during his endless life after death, it had a motive for being good and for observing the moral code. In the new world, the code of truth has become distorted and is in process of disappearing. The moral residues, however, still remain and are kept, as long as virtue is not too difficult, partly out of moral instinct, partly out of enlightened self-interest, partly out of fear of the civil law, and partly out of respect for what the neighbours think. When a dictate of conscience becomes hard and difficult for many in society, by common consent it no longer obliges. We no longer have a motive strong enough to override the difficulty. Thus we would all say that a good mother cares for her unborn child. But if there is a risk to the mother’s health we countenance an abortion.

In society at large technology preserves us from stress and camouflages our insecurity. If there should be a breakdown in the technology our vulnerability becomes apparent. At such times the moral residues do not seem sufficiently strong to buttress our egos in dealing with the control of our primordial instincts. Altruism gives place to self-preservation; society becomes a herd; and in our desperation we look for a whipping-boy on whom to vent our frustration and spite. At such times we become the victims of our materialism, which is only just. Our actions then are little more than the fruit of bodily chemistry and of blind animality. This is the price we pay for abandoning so easily the hard-won values of civilisation—the spiritual ones that religion alone can forge. We turn the clock of evolution backwards.

(ii)

It is in this post-Christian world that we must try to see the new position of the Jew, a world in which he shares secularisation with the Gentile, in which he is being grudgingly assimilated by Gentiles but still retaining his distinctive characteristics, a new world of capital in which he will play a decisive part, a world whose societies in many places are structured on the willed absence of God. The theoretical possibility of pogrom grows smaller; but in practice the most dreadful of all the pogroms will be let loose—the pogrom of human nature when the braking influence of Divine Grace is rejected, a pogrom, red in tooth and claw, that will bring the axioms of biology and of the jungle to its support, when the strong turn on the weak and the supermen turn the clock of evolution back to pre-Adamite days when the reptiles ruled the earth.

(iii)

In the new world of capital the Jew was tailored for the part. For six centuries he had had imposed upon him the role of financier. He had been the unwilling nucleus of the medieval exchequers of the Kings of England and of France. He had helped again, by force of circumstance, in financing the Crusades. For centuries during the Christian ban on usury he had been the sole master in Europe of economic principles. His whole life and the experience of his fathers and of his sons had conditioned him to ruthless competition. When the new world of capitalism was in its infancy he was in maturity. The remnants of the static guilds—the merchant tailors, the candlemakers and so on—soon disappeared as the emancipated Jews poured their fiery genius into furniture, linoleum, hosiery and the rest. Such inevitable destruction cannot take place without incurring the mistrust and suspicion of the vanishing race of craftsmen. It was not only here in these trades that the emancipated Jew shone—we have only to look at the credit titles in Hollywood films, at the names of doctors on the medical register, at lawyer’s names on the legal register, to think of names like Mendelssohn, Spinoza, Bergson, Kafka and Chagall (music, philosophy, poetry and painting), of Einstein and Freud and others to appreciate how in a few centuries the genius of the Jew has vibrated in a Europe that is mentally tired.

But those other avenues of expression of the national genius were not at first available when the doors of the ghetto opened. The only avenues available were those of capital and commerce, for which the Jew had been conditioned for centuries. His emancipation unfortunately coincided with the rise of capitalism, and all those who suffered from the birth pangs of its competitiveness and the insecurity that followed were too ready to identify the Jew with their misfortune. In men’s minds he passed from being the instrument of the new world into being its cause. To see a new class emerging and making the new world of capitalism its natural home, out-thinking and outmatching its fumbling Gentile competitors, was a perception which would touch the cues of past experience, of past hatreds which would be reinforced by present envy. An anti-Semitic feeling was inevitably begotten. But that is not yet pogrom.

Anti-Semitism is inevitable. In our day of heightened nationalism any successful minority whose prowess outshines that of the host nation will inevitably create a group tension. Blaming others for our own failures is a human occupational disease, especially if they are successful, especially if they are a minority, and most especially if they belong distinctively to another race which we believe to be inferior to our own. In the socially ideal world of the scientific humanist this, of course, should not happen. But the humanist forgets that social ideals demand a considerable amount of self-sacrifice on the part of the community who has to live up to them. In the rat-race imposed upon us by the competitive demands of capitalism there is not enough energy left all round to sustain our hard-won ideals, especially in the post-Christian world where modern man, the spiritual orphan, is bidden to hoist himself upwards by his boot-straps and fight against the gravity of his animality pulling him down into the jungle from which God has raised him. To those who have had the good fortune to be endowed with a good heredity and who have been brought up wealthily and well this may seem slightly absurd and extreme. The Hitler pogrom will teach them a lesson, or they can learn it themselves by living on less than two thousand calories a day for a year in a slum and seeing how human they feel at the end of it. It is time to see how anti-Semitism in Europe turned into pogrom in Germany.

(iv)

A thorough exploration of all the factors which predisposed Germany to the acceptance of Nazidom and its anti-Semitism is beyond the scope of this short book. One would have to go back to the failure of the Roman general Varrus at the Rhine and the subsequent isolation of Nordic Europe from Roman influence at the beginning of the Christian era.

Somewhat arbitrarily we begin at the Treaty of Versailles in 1918, with a few prefatory remarks. Germany’s frontiers have always been ill-defined. The criterion of nationhood has not been territory—at least on the fringes—but language and culture (Volkstum). In addition, the collapse of the First Reich—that of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806—was the endpoint of a movement away from national unity. At that time there were in Germany no less than 314 territorial states, each independent of the other. By the time of the Second Reich under Bismarck’s rule this number had been reduced to twenty-five.

In this movement towards national unity Germany lagged far behind her European neighbours. Democracy was a long time coming to Germany. The first real attempt to introduce it came with the formation of the Weimar Republic after World War I, but this was doomed from the outset, if only because it was based on the model of democracy that existed among the hated and victorious Western Powers. As if by way of compensation this politically immature and potentially divided country was engrossed with the dream of German unity. Unity was more important to it than freedom, and its lack of political consciousness made it prone to seek security from non-constitutional monarchs, princes and—later—dictators.

As the home of the Reformation, Germany suffered also from the multiple divisions of Lutheranism and from the absence of a single creed. Moreover the one factor which united different Protestant confessions was their unanimity in opposing Catholicism, which belonged to about a third of the population. The religious and political factors put together mean that Germany had moved farther in religious indifference than her neighbours, and had evolved less in the notion of the rights of individuals and the rights of nations. These conclusions are verified in the contempt that the Third Reich showed for the Churches, for neighbouring nations and for its Jewish inhabitants.

In the northern state of Prussia, especially, there had been no true assimilation of Christianity, nor was there any eagerness to embrace Western conceptions of democracy. They remained a people closer to force, blood and iron, to militarism and the glorification of the State than any other territory in Europe. It was one of the tragedies of Germany that dominating influence passed to this State which lived in Christian twilight, and whose sabre-rattling Junkers were only too eager for an opportunity to prove to the West that German blood, sacrifice and military efficiency were the outward signs of intrinsic Aryan greatness.

To these prefatory remarks we must add that romanticism in Germany has always triumphed over reason. Sentiment, when allied to intuition, may produce a Beethoven and a Mozart, but it can also produce a Hitler and a Rosenberg. They themselves were the products and the reductiones ad absurdum of philosophers and poets who lived in an ideal world that was far removed from life. They and their party were a group of Nietzschean supermen, masters of a totalitarian State, of the State as worshipped by Fichte (he defined the Jews as a State within a State), as deified by Hegel, and made the cradle of superior Teutonic blood by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a naturalised German, who condemned the Christian Churches because they make all men Jews and thus introduce the culture of inferior blood into the superior culture of the German race.

Soon after 1918 Adolf Hitler enters decisively into the life of a politically immature, susceptible, reason-distrusting, highly nationalistic people who desire above all things to prove the greatness of a united Germany to those Western nations who had shattered their dream of a pan-German empire that stretched from Berlin to Baghdad.

(v)

At the time of his appearance we must understand that under the New Constitution total democracy had been given to Germany. The masses, who had no political experience, suddenly found themselves with the power of suffrage and with democratic rights. There was no democratic tradition to give them guidance and they were not in any case favoured by economic fortune and by that stability in affairs which fosters the growth of social responsibility.

Postwar Germany was intensely disorganised from every point of view. Smarting under the wounds of defeat, their Kaiser in exile, their arms disgraced, their dangerous national pride scarred, they were too vulnerable to the overwhelming feelings of insecurity which subsequent events deepened and prolonged. Wave upon wave of strikes hit the nation. Its life savings vanished overnight with inflation.¹ The time was ripe for revolution and for Marxism. In the winter of its discontent Germany, confused, mortified and bitterly divided, found a focus of hope in the Nazi party which offered to its despair the dream of being the masters of the world.

In 1928 there were eighty thousand members of the Nazi party. By 1931 this membership had increased tenfold. In the elections of 1932 the Nazis polled 13,400,000 votes. Unemployment figures then were just under five million. In this social despair the party was born.

In a way the people of that time were not dissimilar to the Jews in times of their national crisis. Then, as we have seen in the Jerusalem pogrom, the emergence of some striking and dominating figure served to crystallise the latent dream of greatness and upon his prophetic personality was projected the image of Messias. The compensatory dream of the divided German nation had always been its proven superiority to other races, and now, in its darkest hour, appeared the Messianic figure of Hitler, the modern Frederick II, the new Bismarck, the new crooked shepherd of a desperate flock in need of work and of food, but above all of hope and a salve to injured pride.

His recipe was simple. To the young man he said, “Join the party and I will make you a hero”; to the nation he said, “Vote my party in and I will give Germany greatness.” To this end he could, with his surprising intuition, organise mass rallies and torch-light processions and impress his susceptible and discontented watchers to the degree that they would ignore their reason and bow to sentiment, to unbridled patriotism, to the ego-consoling notion that their hour was about to strike, and disperse them to their homes drunk with a vision of their future greatness. To a sick people he gave a national religion, with articles of faith wrapped up as slogans. He gave them a scapegoat, the Jews, and he offered them leadership and unity. They had a Messias in him and a devil in the Jews. As far as the masses were concerned this was a State baptism on their right to hate.

Anti-Semitism was, of course, a fundamental plank in the Nazi platform.² With care its propagandists enlarged on the implications of international Jewry, which had plotted the war and then stabbed the nation in the back. This gave the discontented masses a scapegoat which absolved them from failure in the war. It pacified the Army and the generals and served as a rallying-point for the uniting of a divided nation. This enemy was in their midst, and yet distinct from them, for though he spoke their language and had fought in their war his blood was different from the blood of true Aryans.

Nazism was essentially a religion of the masses. We find in it no coherent logical system, for it was anti-rational, based on the one hand on the exaltation and intoxication it could give the masses when its incessant propaganda convinced them that they were the master race; based on the other on blind hatred of the Jews, whom its propaganda presented as the scapegoat upon whom their failures could be laid, and to whom those failures could be referred.

How far this nationalism could go is indicated in Article IV of the 1920 Nazi programme which declared that the Churches would be free and respected, as long as they threatened neither the morale of the German race nor the existence of the State. The party committed itself to the combating of “Jewish materialism” and to subordinating all religious life to the interests of the State. In Mein Kampf Hitler demanded of the Churches that they should accept anti-Semitism, repudiate the Old Testament and focus their attention exclusively on the national movement.

The anti-rational character of the movement is well shown in Rosenberg’s book The Myth of the Twentieth Century. The party philosopher argues that intuition reveals to the German the mystery of his race. The subconscious of the German, if he will but listen, calls him with the deep voices of his race and blood. It bids him be a true son of the nation and a servant of the community. Let him listen to “abstract intellectualism” and he will silence the voices of the blood and separate himself from his true nature. He will be seduced by the Black Internationals who are shaped by reason, be it Greek, Christian, liberal or socialist.

In this type of nationalism there is no room for international movements—Catholic or Jewish. The true Christ, he argues, is a hero and an Aryan; a true servant of the idea of community. This primitive Christianity, he explains, had been judaised by Paul of Tarsus. The original content, the true Christianity, leads us, by violence if necessary, to heroic superhumanity. Indeed the main purpose of history belongs to the North of Europe, the true centre of creation, the home of that superior race which is the source of all civilisations, not least of that Galilean world in which Christ lived and suffered.

Hitler himself furnishes evidence on his Messianic complex. To Hermann Rauschning he communicates in 1933 some of his thoughts on religion. Germany, he said, believes in the God of Nature, in God who reveals Himself by the German people, in whose blood is their destiny. It is German blood that matters, not the blood of the Christian Redeemer; the Swastika and not the Cross. Christmas will celebrate the birth of German heroism, Easter its resurrection.

In a speech at Godesberg in 1933 he affirmed that “German unity must be guaranteed by a new conception of the world which Christianity in its present form can no longer supply”. Creation, he ranted, is not yet finished. A rejuvenation of the world is possible, but only through Germany. On such Wagnerian grandeur he fed his frustrated people until they must have seen themselves as Parsifal awakening the sleeping kingdom of the Grail. At any rate in 1933 he and his party were fatefully voted into power.

(vi)

By 1937 the Nazi propaganda machine had led the misguided people across the frontiers of the phantom world. In Easter of that year a special edition of Der Stürmer (a weekly edited by the Jew-baiter, Julius Streicher³) was published on the theme of the Aryan Jesus Christ, forerunner of Adolf Hitler.

Christ is presented as a non-Jew who was a courageous opponent of Judaism. His religion, Christianity, was one of the greatest anti-Semitical movements of all time.

“Christ’s crucifixion was the greatest ritual murder of all time ... today everyone understands how Jews are accustomed, in connection with Purim and Passover, to kill non-Jews and use their blood for ritual purposes....

[However] Hitler has brought about not only the greatest event in German history, but the greatest event in Christian history as well. It is a matter of God and religion. A matter of life or death for non-Jewish mankind. All who join in this struggle are at once both Germans and Christians. But all who hold aloof, or work against National Socialism secretly, are traitors, servants of Bolshevism, Judases. Two thousand years ago Christ climbed Calvary and breathed out His life on the Cross amidst the scornful laughter of the Jews. Things are different today. Germany celebrates her resurrection, and the whole non-Jewish world wakes with her. Soon, very soon, we shall be celebrating a true Easter.”

That Easter was to come in a few short years at Belsen and Auschwitz and other horror camps. The reader will have noticed the recurrence of the standard pogrom charges against Jews—the murderers of Christ—the ritual murderers of non-Jews—the enemies of the State.

And now one more quotation from another ad-mass periodical, Durchbruch. Late in 1936 it pleaded:

“German people! Whenever you meet in German streets or on German mountain peaks the figure of the Cross, reflect that it is not Christ who hangs there. It is our people whom they have hung there; our people degraded to be slaves of the Asiatic-Semitic lust for power, slaves and playthings of a world-wide priestcraft. There hangs the soul of Germany. ... It is no son of the Jewish race, this Christ, but a true German such as you or I. That face cries out accusingly for a race which has once believed in the Cross and has itself been crucified for it. German citizens, be on your guard; this Cross is falling. See that it is completely cast down, that German men once again may be strong and powerful and never again succumb to this disease! May the power of German life and joy, of German morals and faith, reign once again on German ground! German mankind has risen from the tomb bearing still the marks of torture! Never allow them to be forgotten. The Cross must fall if Germany is to live!”⁴

Under the guise of nationalism the sheep are led docilely to pastures of paganism. It was Christianity which put the nation on the Cross. Now is the time for the new religion of revenge which will be the exact opposite of the command to love one’s neighbour.

They will soon be fulfilling their destiny, this new Chosen People. The geese will walk proudly into Austria, into Czechoslovakia, into Poland. In the meantime the Hitler Jugend took the command to fell the Cross quite literally. All over Germany its occupational delinquency flowered in a mass destruction of wayside crucifixes—in the dioceses of Cologne, Augsburg, Regensburg, Munster, Aachen, Limburg, Freiburg. This lasted from 1935 to 1939, and then it was time to attack the Cross in other lands.

(vii)

In 1939 there were only six concentration camps in Germany, with a population of less than fifty thousand. By the end of the war there were many hundreds of camps and millions of people had died in them.

Some of these camps were labour camps. Prisoners there worked until they could work no more. Sometimes they were sent to sick camps, such as Belsen, but more often than not they were sent to extermination camps such as Auschwitz where they were gassed and cremated.

Some camps were dual-purpose ones. Mauthausen and, again, Auschwitz are examples. Slaves arriving there were told: “You are going to work but never again will you see your families. Who enters this camp will leave it only by the chimney of the crematorium.”

Very large numbers of Jews left Auschwitz by the chimney of the crematorium. It is the badge and title of the Hitler pogrom. In the figures which follow we must beware of laying responsibility for cremating six million Jews on the whole German nation. That would be as illogical as placing the murder of Christ on the shoulders of the whole Jewish people.

The one had its Nazis and the other had its Scribes and Pharisees. Both had this in common, that they were megalomaniac leaders and the peoples they led inclined easily to frenzy and fanaticism.

The New Crusade began slowly enough with a series of enactments from Nuremberg the purpose of which was to outlaw the Jews. They were rendered stateless and refused passports, denied employment and made to wear distinctive dress.

The Outsiders, moreover, were forbidden to marry Germans—an offence against German blood and German honour, the two being the same—and were made subjects of two laws by which they could be sterilised.

These laws were applied in all countries which became by conquest part of Greater Germany. The pogrom was accelerated, however, when the great successes of 1940 drove the Nazis and the Führer even more deeply into the phantom world.

The nucleus of what now happened seems to be that the leaders of the party became convinced that the hour of Destiny was striking.

As it struck, the people chosen by Destiny to unify the world in Germanism were confronted yet again with that mysterious people chosen by God to unify the world in Christ.

Somewhere about this time Himmler sent a telegram to Auschwitz, and the gas-houses and crematoria were constructed. He and Hitler then sat down to reverse the Old Testament.

Himmler’s files reveal that in 1941, a hundred and thirty thousand Jews in Lithuania and Latvia were killed.

From Greece forty-five thousand Jews were sent to Auschwitz, gassed and cremated. By October 1942 nearly fifty thousand Jews from France had left Auschwitz by the chimneys of the crematorium. A hundred and forty thousand Jews were deported from Holland.

Two thousand were gassed and cremated at Buchenwald, whence their ashes were dispatched to their families on payment of seventy-five guilders. The rest were deported to Poland and never heard of again. The peak pogrom figure was, surely, the execution of forty-five thousand Russian Jews in mobile gas wagons within less than thirty days.

Close to this figure must be placed the gassing and cremating of forty thousand Hungarian Jews in the early summer of 1944.

The worst fate awaited the Polish Jews. Of a known prewar population of three million Polish Jews only fifty thousand could be traced after the war.⁵

The deposition of survivors at the Nuremberg trials reveal that in the last days of the war the gas-houses of Auschwitz were so busy that economies were necessary, and some Jews were cremated half conscious but alive.

Hitler and his party of true believers tried desperately to achieve their phantom dream of destroying the Demonic Hosts. But time was against them and they destroyed only two-thirds of the entire Jewish nation in Europe.

Nothing was wasted. The hair of the Jews was used for filling mattresses. Gold in their teeth went to the Reichsbank. The ashes in the crematoria were used as fertiliser.

When the Gentile world at last uncovered all this, it somehow transcended the betrayal of Poland and the deceptions of Yalta in the discovery of the horror it had been fighting. Jews never die in vain.