As Dr. David Silberklang and Prof. Dan Michman have stated, the main
principles of Nazi ideology were interlinked with an extremely hostile
and negative perception of the Jews. In the following video,
Prof. Otto Dov Kulka, one of the leading researchers on Nazi
antisemitism, will present a short paper on the centrality of antisemitism in
Nazi ideology and its unique redemptive nature. For your convenience, a link to
the printed version of the paper appears below.
Many scholarly works written on National Socialism have reached the conclusion that
antisemitism played a vital role in the ideology and policy of Nazi Germany.
Of all the ideological and political ingredients that went into the making of
Hitler's outlook, antisemitism, in its broader sense, appears to be not only
the one consistent and immutable element, it also bridges such seemingly
contradictory leanings as anti-Marxism and anti-capitalism, the struggle against
democracy and modernism, and the basic anti-Christian disposition. The same is
true of the conceptual bearing and functional significance of these
apparent contradictions in foreign policy and war aims of Nazi Germany:
anti-Bolshevism, conceived as determining the inevitable struggle against
the Soviet Union, anti-democracy as a basic motive for the war against the Western
Powers - France Britain and the United States. Yet Hitler consistently portrays
this ideological war in the international arena as an extension
of the struggle that the National Socialist movement had waged, from its
inception, against its ideological and political enemies within Germany itself:
Jewish Marxism, Jewish parliamentary democracy, Jewish Liberalism and even the so-called
"Political churches" and the Jewish foundations of Christianity.
The fundamental idea of Judaism, namely the unity of the world and the equality of
all human beings -- a conception that spread within Judeo-Christian
civilization, and was manifested in a secular form as the universalistic ideas
of democracy, liberalism and socialism -- was diametrically opposed to
the National Socialist world view: its belief in the inequality of the races, their
hierarchy, and their eternal struggle of survival and annihilation. In keeping
with the core of its ideology, the Nazi redemptive antisemitism and its
teleological aim of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” and the destruction
of the “Jewish spirit,” should be regarded as an attempt to change the
course of human history. Only in this sense and through this perspective can
one attempt to propose an explanation regarding both the historical and
substantive import of Nazi antisemitism and the “Final Solution.”
I wish to conclude this paper by two quotations of Hitler's declaration made
on February 17, 1942, the time when the mass annihilation of European Jews, the
so called “Final Solution,” began to take its horrifying dimensions. I quote:
The Jew who fraudulently introduced Christianity into the ancient world - in
order to ruin it - reopened the same breach in modern
times, this time taking as his pretext the social question. Just as Saul
changed into St. Paul, Mardochai became Karl Marx.” And further on: "Peace can result
only from nature's order (in German Naturordnung).
The condition of this order is that there is a hierarchy among nations. It is
Jewry that always destroys this order. A people that is rid of its Jews,
returns spontaneously to nature's order."