Wickham 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 fourth, will be published daily in The Jewish Daily Bulletin from the chapter, “Germanism and Jewry.”
For better or for worse the Zionist movement took a long step forward when, in November, 1917 the late Lord Balfour, as British Foreign Secretary, issued his famous declaration in favor of the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. The wisdom of that declaration has often been challenged, and in some quarters is challenged even today. Without entering now into the reasons for it, with which I was well acquainted at the time, I wish only to say that they were politically and morally cogent, and that, apart from their rightness or wrongness, no stroke of British policy was felt by Germany to have been shrewder than the British espousal of the Jewish national cause. Nor do I wish to enquire what connection, if any, there may be between the present German onslaught upon Jewry and the establishment of the Jewish National Home in Palestine. German anti-Semitism, as I have shown, had long been a rank and a rancorous growth. In 1913, more than a year before the War, a German writer, who called himself “Daniel Frymann.” published at Munich a book entitled Wenn ich der Kaiser War (If I Were Emperor).
“IF I WERE EMPEROR”
Hitler, who was then at Munich, may well have read it. It ran through a dozen editions in a few weeks. Its author declared that, if he were the Kaiser, he would immediately expel all Jews not possessing German citizenship; degrade to the status of tolerated aliens all Jews and descendants of Jews, whether of pure blood or mixed who possessed German citizenship and had been registered as Jews in 1871; exclude Jews, baptized and unbaptized, from all public offices, the legal profession. the army and navy, the directorships of banks and theatres, the ownership and editorship of newspapers, and journalism in general. In addition, he would deprive Jews of the franchise, of eligibility to parliament, of the right to own land or to lend money on landed mortgages, and would levy upon them, as aliens, double taxation. It was a question, he exclaimed, of “saving the German soul.”
The Anti-Jewish decrees issued and enforced by the Hitlerite government in Germany since last spring suggest that these recommendations may have been taken as its official program. I was reminded of them some two years ago when Herr Hitler’s chief representative in London called upon me to explain that Hitler had no intentio of “pogroming” the Jews but intended merely to deprive German Jews of all their civil rights. I enquired whether Hitler had consulted the Jews about the difference between an inhuman pogrom and the more humane treatment which Hitler contemplated. So I fear I retorted; “Yes, deprive them of all civil rights first, and ‘pogrom,’ or squeeze the life out of them afterwards when they will have no means of redress.”
“GERMAN SOUL” MUST BE SAVED
On the one hand we have therefore the idea, which Hitler’s book, “Mein Kampf,” and the whole Nazi literature loudly proclaim, that the “German soul” must be saved from the insidious and corrupting influence of Jewry; and, on the other, a question of human right, irrespective of race or religion. Only those who deny that the Jews are human beings or, at any rate, human beings of “Aryan” rank, can admit the thesis that, in order to save the soul of a hypothetically superior race, they must be treated as helots, if not as the scum of the earth.
To my weak mind there seems to be an inherent contradiction between the claim that–to quote once more the Nazi Minister of Justice, Dr. Frank–“the blood substance of the Germanic race constitutes so pre-eminent and unique an asset of the world as a whole that we should be justified in counting it the duty of the entire human race, in thankfulness, to safeguard this basic Germanic element,” and the implication that this precious Germanic blood is so feeble a fluid that only the most drastic protective measures can save it from dire pollution. Or are Germanic Germans jealous of the Jewish belief that Jewry is the “chosen race,” the salt of the earth, selected by Jehovah for the highest human mission, and do they therefore wish to set up Germanic “Aryans” as a counter-“chosen race” entrusted by Odin with a sublimer mission–that of establishing by sword the lofty rule of Nordic heroes over the lesser breeds of mankind? I may be guilty of deep impiety in both directions, for I am incorrigibly skeptical about “chosen races” of any sort, and am not even disposed to bow down in speechless awe before “God’s Englishmen.” There is a rough saying in my native East Anglia, “Handsome is as handsome does” and this, I think, sums up my creed on race problems.
Yet Hitlerite treatment of the German Jews raises a formidable issue. Is there no justification for the conduct of a party and a Government in killing, ostracizing, and reducing to effective servitude the members of a race which, whatever its shortcomings, has in the past rendered immeasurable service to Germany? If we accept the Hitlerite assertions–assertions deliberately unweakened by any attempt at analysis or proof–we may admit that the indictment is forcible. It is, moreover, an indictment that cannot be dissevered from the doctrine of “Aryan” Germanism on which it is based. We need to face it squarely; and in so doing to remember that its main postulate, that of “Aryan” Nordic superiority, may be utterly unfounded.
On this point one of the leading authorities, if not the highest authority, upon prehistorical archaelogy in Great Britain, Professor Gordon Childe of the University of Edinburgh, wrote an important letter to The Times last July. He declared that, scientifically, all the talk about an “Aryan race” is arrant nonsense. Three thousand years before the Christian era, he added, the Sumerians, the Egyptians, and the nameless but certainly pre-Aryan people of the Indus Valley, created the civilization of which, through the Greeks and the Romans, and by more devious channels, we are the heirs. And by civilization I mean not simply material culture … but also political organization and science.
At the date in question the ancestors of the Germans and Anglo-Saxons were filthy savages picking up shellfish on the shores of the Baltic. There is not a trace of Aryan elements in any sense … among the creators of civilized life. It is indeed doubtful whether the people who spoke the Aryan tongue were yet in existence when the oriental civilizations were founded.
… Aryan, originally, was a linguistic term and denoted the speakers of a certain group of languages. No less an authority than Max Muller pointed out that to speak of an Aryan race was as absurd as to talk of a brachycephalic (or broad-skulled) dictionary. Languages are characterisic of peoples–groups united by community of tradition and culture but not necessarily of blood. Race, on the contrary, is a physical term. Nazi “philosophy” confuses these two distinct concepts. Distortions of the science of pre-history in Germany have to some extent encouraged this confusion. That is perhaps sufficient excuse for a professor of prehistory in Great Britain to insist upon the distinction.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
