Steed Analyzes Nazis’ Faith in Ascent Through ‘Aryanism’

Wickhum Steed, former correspondent of the London Times at Berlin, Rome and Vienna, and finally its editor, explains the true nature of Hitlerism and to what extent it may be a menace to peace in his book, "Hitler, Whence and Whither?"

A series of articles, of which this is the fifth, will be published daily in The Jewish Daily Bulletin from the chapter, "Germanism and Jewry."

Now the fundamental idea of the Hitlerite movement is that the pre-eminent position to which Germany has a right in the world can be assured only by a return to the Nordic purity of its "Aryan" origin. The Hitlerite "Third Empire" (as distinguished from the First, or Holy Roman Empire–of which Voltaire naughtily said that it was neither Holy nor Roman nor an Emipre–and from the Second, Hohenzollern, Empire of 1871-1918) must be founded solely upon race, and must unite in one realm all human beings of German race, and none but these. This community of blood, sole source of national energy, is what the Hitlerites mean by "Volkstum."

The "Volkstum," the Germanic blood-community, comprises everything that is authentically German and unites the vital forces of the race.

This supreme treasure of the Germanic race, pure "Aryan" blood, the international forces represented by the Jews are accused of striving, with diabolical skill and tenacity, to destroy. Among their foulest ideas Hitler enumerates those of Parliamentary Democracy and of human equality.

PRINCIPLE IS ARISTOCRATIC

The German "Aryan" principle is, ex hypothesi, aristocratic, since the Aryan race is an aristocracy among races and therefore entitled to rule the world. Inasmuch as Christianity is adulterated by many false conceptions, it is necessary to Germanize Christianity. In 1924, the Germanic "Aryan" writer, von Wendrin, discovered that the mystery behind the Christian Scriptures is that Christ (whose name is to be written "Krist") is none other than the Scandinavian deity, Baldur. Notions like these explain the recent subjugation of the Protestant German Churches by a Hitlerite group known as "German Christians"–against whom three thousand Protestant pastors, under the leadership of their elected Bishop, Dr. von Bodelschwingh, have been in revolt.

These dissentient pastors hold, with St. Paul, that in Christianity there is no place for racial discrimination, "neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, "bond nor free," whereas the "German Christians" maintain that baptism alone is not enough to make a German Christian unless he is an authentic "Aryan," and that the Jewish spirit must disappear from Christianity, the Old Testament reduced to a Nazi version of the Gospel according to St. Mark.

The ideal, which the "German Christians" have already sought to realize, would be to replace the Cross by the Swastika. In fact, the "Aryan" Germanic Christian doctrine goes to prove that the "Aryan race" and the primitive religion of the Germans (who represent that race) alone embody the true spirit of Christianity.

From these premises the Hitlerite indictment of the Jews naturally follows. In the Jew all the elements inimical to Germanic idealism are bound up. His critical and skeptical spirit undermines every healthy principle. He is the supreme Marxist whose international heresy foments revolutions and the ruin of States, so that he may enrich himself with the spoils. He, too, is the supreme capitalist, greedy of gain, careless of the people’s needs. Without real roots in any land, he is a ubiquitous and agile parasite, the creator of a false art, of a falsely objective science, and the destroyer of culture. He is the enemy of the human race, the enemy of God Himself, the enemy of the Light, the cloud that hides from the "Aryan" race the Sun which is its symbol.

Some may think I exaggerate. If so, they have but to study current Nazi literature or, in default of time to do this, to read Mr. Edgar Mowrer’s chapter "Perish the Jew!" in his book Germany Puts The Clock Back. The Nazi song-book for the Storm Troops contains several samples one of which runs:– So stand the storm battalions Ready for racial fight,

Only when Jews lie bleeding,

Can we be truly free.

Another and most popular refrain sung by Nazi students is:–Wenn’s Judenblut vom Messer

spritzt,

Dann geht’s nochmal so gut. (When Jewish blood spurts from the knife Then things go twice as well.)

"THE TAPEWORM"

Or, to cite the elegant language of Count Ernst zu Reventlow, a noble Nordic Nazi Prussian, "The Jew is the tapeworm in the human organism, and it is our duty to exterminate him."

The professing Jews in Germany number 565,000, or less than one per cent. of the total population. What have these 565,000 or, for that matter–if the baptized and assimilated Jews and Jewesses of Germany and their descendants be added–the million or two million German Jews, to say in self-defense? Roughly, they plead the signal services they have rendered Germany where they have been established since the fourth century, at latest. Jews were present at the Court of Charlemagne in the eighth and ninth centuries and had permission to build synagogues and keep their own cemeteries. Though, during the Middle Ages, and through the Renaissance and the Reformation, full citizen rights were withheld from them, the reforms at the end of the eighteenth centuries gave them full equality, and the Prussian Edict of 1847, as well as the Constitution of the North German Confederation in 1869, confirmed it.

JEWISH PROPORTION DOWN

So far from being a growing danger to the German people the proportion of Jews to Germans has decreased during the past fifty or sixty years. Even in the chief cities, where the Jews mostly live, it fell, for instance, at Hamburg from 4.5 per cent, of the population in 1866 to 1.75 in 1925. Like-wise in Berlin the Jewish proportion was 5.5 per cent, in 1871 and only 4.3 per cent, in 1925. Since the Jews were long debarred from the ownership of land, and in the Middle Ages non-Jews were forbidden to lend money on interest, it was natural that the Jews should have taken refuge in urban pursuits such as trade and money-lending. But as soon as the German guilds of craftsmen ceased to have a monopoly of craftsmanship, thousands of Jews became craftsmen and have long possessed a Craftsman’s Association of their own. As for the alleged monopolization of trade by big Jewish businesses, the great majority of Jewish concerns belong to one man or his family, and the proportion of such concerns to those owned by non-Jews is at most six per cent.