Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Ideological Soldier of the Third Reich: Ideological Soldier of the Third Reich, by Peter R. Black. 1984

No Mystification of Nazi Anti-Semitism: It was Comparable to Old Germano-Austrian Anti-Slavism

This book is an excellent antidote to the usual tendency of portraying the Nazi hatred of Jews as something qualitatively different from hatreds against non-Jews.

PRE-NAZI ANTI-SEMITIC AND ANTI-SLAVIC AUSTRIAN ATTITUDES WENT HAND IN HAND

Author Peter R. Black traces the career of Ernst Kaltenbrunner up to his hanging after Nuremberg. Nazi-type ideology long predated Hitler, notably in 19th-century Austria: “Germans in Austria were particularly sensitive about their nationality in a multinational state that was not only modernizing its economic and social structure, but also appeared, in doing so, to be sacrificing German interests to Slavs, “antinational’ Catholics, and international socialists. Consequently, many of them developed a strong susceptibility to the virulent anti-Semitism and the obsession with racial purity propagated by the volkisch nationalists.” (p. 19). “Beyond hatred of the Slavs and contempt for Liberals, Austrian kleindeutsch nationalism was intensely anticlerical.” (p. 15). “No doubt a particularly virulent strain of volkisch nationalism infected Kaltenbrunner as a member of the German-Austrian middle class in the Habsburg state. Hitler himself carried the disease whose most obvious symptoms were racial nationalism, anti-Semitism, and Slavophobia.” (pp. 282-283).

EXISTENTIAL ENEMIES: THE NAZIS SAW THE SLAVS AND THE JEWS QUITE SIMILARLY

In common with other Nazis, Kaltenbrunner saw Slavs as well as Jews as enemies of the Germans in a collective sense, and not by virtue of what they did but for who they WERE: “Kaltenbrunner suggested that the Security Police handle the prosecutions on the following principle: `One must consider…that the Pole or Soviet Russian represents by virtue of his existence a danger for the German racial order [Volksordung] and that it is therefore not so important to find a suitable punishment for the crime committed…as to prevent him from presenting any further danger to the German racial order.'” (p. 141). Clearly, the Slav was an existential enemy just as was the Jew.

Nazi genocidal methods against the Slavic untermenschen, while generally more passive than those against the Jews (at least through the duration of the war), were no less real, and are summarized by Black: “Like the volkisch nationalists of the nineteenth century, the Nazis viewed the Eastern European peoples–especially the Slavs–as morally, socially, intellectually, and physically inferior. Fearing as well that the Slavs were reproducing more rapidly than the Germans, the Nazis planned to gradually reduce the numbers of Slavs through extermination, deportation, slave labor, and inadequate supplies of food and medicine…Provisions on criminality, abortions, and racial selection represented initial guidelines for the treatment of `inferior’ races and foreshadowed the grim future that the Slavs and other East Europeans could expect under Nazi rule.” (p. 142)

As for the Jews, Black comments: “In February 1944, the RSHA chief discovered that the tiny Amsterdam community of Sephardic Jews (numbering 370) had not been included in the deportations from Holland. Experts at the Reich commissar for the occupied territories of the Netherlands explained that the Sephardim were not ‘genuine’ Jews.” (p. 155). Kaltenbrunner did, and ordered their destruction. Oddly enough, this was never carried out, and these Jews survived the war (pp. 155-156). This turn of events undermines Holocaust-uniqueness arguments, as it shows that the Nazis did not necessarily have a unilateral policy of killing all possible Jews–in either theory or practice.

ATHEISM OF THE NAZIS

Kaltenbrunner rejected Christianity while retaining belief in “God” as a personification of nature. (pp. 146-147). The Nazis avoided open conflict with the Church, against which they generally had considerable antipathy, for strictly tactical reasons applicable to the duration of the war. (pp. 147-149).

NAZISM SUPERCEDED CAPITALISM. NAZI EQUALITY AND NAZI INEQUALITY

Black implicitly corrects the mischaracterization of Nazism as a form of capitalism: “The National Socialists proposed to sweep aside all traditional inequalities–birth, status, wealth, inheritance, class, education–and to impose in their place a single standard of inequality: that of race. Under the leadership of the Fuhrer, all persons of ‘Germanic-Aryan’ origin were to be equal to one another and equally superior to members of other races.” (p. 167).

ANTI-HITLER GERMANS INSIGNIFICANT: NO MORAL CREDIT TO THE JULY 1944 WOULD-BE HITLER ASSASSINS

Against the frequent hagiography directed at the anti-Hitler conspirators of July 20, 1944, Black points out that many of them remained committed Nazis. (p. 163). They only disapproved of recent developments involving Hitler.