ANTI-SEMITISM.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, more and more European countries enacted first-time legislation protecting Jewish rights. Despite this formal emancipation, the product of rising liberalism, Jews of the fin de siècle were confronted with a vigorous revival of anti-Semitism. Christian anti-Judaism, which was primarily religious in inspiration, had never been entirely free of racist tendencies. But around the turn of the century the racial component of Jew hatred started playing a more pronounced role and developed into the most important feature of modern anti-Semitism.

With the aid of social Darwinist and pseudobiological arguments, anti-Semites began to view Jews as a distinct "race," which not even baptism could change. Whether a person had ancestors who belonged to the Jewish religion was key. If so, then Jewish identity was established for all time. Nationalists especially, who regarded Jews as a "state within a state," seized upon this biological weltanschauung to place Jews outside society.

In addition to the attempt to forge a "national identity," anti-Semites and anti-Semitic movements also used Jews as a screen on which to project their own anxieties. Jews represented the negative aspects of urbanization and industrialization and were regarded as champions of liberalism, capitalism, materialism, socialism, and above all bolshevism. Both aspects, the attempt to artificially create a national identity and the desire to construct an explanatory model for intractable social problems, again and again played a major role, alone or in combination, in twentieth-century anti-Semitism.

BOLSHEVISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM

The October Revolution of 1917 and the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in Russia sent shockwaves around the world. Many feared political instability and economic loss. During World War I, on 30 August 1918, the Dutch diplomat Willem Jacob Oudendijk, the individual charged by the British with negotiating the evacuation of Britain's subjects from revolutionary Russia, declared:

I consider that the immediate suppression of Bolshevism is the greatest issue now before the world, not even excluding the war which is still raging, and unless … Bolshevism is nipped in the bud immediately it is bound to spread in one form or another over Europe and the whole world as it is organised and worked by Jews who have no nationality, and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things. The only manner in which this danger could be averted would be collective action on the part of all powers. ("Withdrawal of Missions and Consuls," pp. 678–679)

The notion that bolshevism was "Jewish" was shared in the highest places. On 8 February 1920Winston Churchill argued, in an article titled "Zionism versus Bolshevism" in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, that Jews were behind world revolutions everywhere:

This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt [the Illuminati founder Adam Weishaupt] to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg [sic] (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.… It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century, and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.

It is not surprising that the revolution held a strong appeal for parts of the Jewish population of tsarist Russia. Around the turn of the century some 5.2 million Jews lived there, accounting for 4.1 percent of Russia's population and almost half the world's Jews. They were the most oppressed population group in the tsarist empire, and the Bolsheviks initially presented themselves as a radical movement of emancipation. Jews were not the only ones to be so attracted. Other ethnic and national groups, such as Poles and Georgians, for example, were also "overrepresented" among the Bolsheviks.

The identification of bolshevism with Jewry is inaccurate: there were even more Jews among the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries than among the Bolsheviks. As well, Jews could be found among the staunchest opponents of bolshevism. It was a Jewish woman, the Social Revolutionary Fanya Kaplan, whose attempted assassination of Vladimir Ilich Lenin on 30 August 1918 left the Bolshevik leader seriously wounded. On the same day, another Jewish Social Revolutionary, the student Leonid Kannegisser, succeeded in killing Moisei Uritsky, the Petrograd chief of the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka. Both events marked the beginning of the Red Terror. The equation of Jewry with bolshevism is further refuted by the fact that religious Jews were immediately confronted with the negative aspects of the revolution. The October Revolution, it is true, made anti-Semitism a punishable offense. At the same time, however, the Bolsheviks had declared a war on religion, thus also on Judaism.

In the period between the two world wars the whole of Europe saw the rise of nationalist movements that were nearly always anti-Semitic. The situation was particularly troubling in the newly created state of Poland (1918), where Jews accounted for 10 percent of the population. The frontier established in the Treaty of Riga between Poland and Russia in March 1921 left 38 percent of Poland's population composed of minorities, with Jews, Ukrainians, White Ruthenians, and Germans constituting the largest groups. At the time, Polish nationalists assumed that the integration of the Slavic Ukrainians and White Russians could be advanced by means of assimilation; Jews and Germans, on the other hand, were regarded as unsuited for integration.

Most Polish politicians were highly unsympathetic toward their minorities and tried to enforce an ethnically defined national identity. Stanislaw Grabski, the foreign policy spokesman for the Polish parliament and later minister of culture, explained, in a speech in Poznan in 1919: "We want to base our relationships on love, but there is one kind of love for countrymen and another for aliens. Their percentage among us is definitely too high.… The foreign element will have to see if it will not be better off elsewhere. Polish land for the Poles!" (Blanke, p. 89).

Both the Polish Catholic Church and the Camp of National Unity, the government party created in 1937, pursued aggressively anti-Semitic policies, and even more so after Hitler's advent to power in 1933 and the death of Marshal Józef Pi?sudski in 1935. August Cardinal Hlond represented the cold and hostile attitude of the Vatican vis-à-vis the Jews. His pastoral letter of 1936 called for an economic boycott of Jewish shops and defined Jews as "freethinkers [who] constitute the vanguard of atheism, Bolshevism, and revolution" (Lendvai, p. 213).

The avowed aim of Polish nationalists was the expulsion of all Jews from Poland because in their eyes Jews could not be Poles. In 1938 the Polish ambassador to Germany, Józef Lipski, reporting a conversation he had had with Hitler, told Józef Beck, the Polish minister of foreign affairs: "That he [Hitler] has in mind an idea for settling the Jewish problem by way of emigration to the colonies in accordance with an understanding with Poland, Hungary, and possibly also Romania (at which point I told him that if he finds such a solution we will erect him a beautiful monument in Warsaw)" (Lipski, p. 411).

WEIMAR GERMANY

In the eyes of German nationalists, Jews, who comprised less than 1 percent of Germany's population, became the scapegoats for the lost war and the ensuing economic misery. The Spartacist uprising that broke out in Berlin in 1919 under the leadership of Karl Liebknecht (who was not Jewish) and Rosa Luxemburg only served to reinforce this perception. It quickly became clear that this revolt, like those of the other council republics (Räterepubliken) that had been proclaimed in the revolutionary year of 1919, was doomed to fail. German revanchist elements however, immediately seized up on this opportunity to agitate against "Jewish bolshevism."

But not only the council republics were seen as "Jewish." According to Germany's nationalists, the Weimar Republic, proclaimed on 9 November 1918, was also a "Jewish republic." On 24 June 1922 Walther Rathenau, Germany's foreign minister, was assassinated by members of one of the Freikorps. In World War I, Rathenau, himself an ardent nationalist, had been in charge of the German war economy. Nonetheless, many regarded him as a "Jewish politician favoring appeasement" ("jüdischer Erfüllungspolitiker") who had betrayed Germany to the Allies. This murder marked a turning point in the political anti-Semitism of Germany, which from then on became increasingly more aggressive.

In the Weimar Republic, anti-Semitism did not only come from the right but also from the left. The Kommunistische Partei Deutschland (KPD, Communist Party of Germany) was not a party with an anti-Semitic worldview. On the contrary, until the November pogroms of 1938 it hardly paid any attention to the "Jewish Question." But in its attempt to attract the votes of workers and the petty bourgeoisie, the party did make use of anti-Jewish stereotypes by linking capitalism and Jewry. Oft-heard epithets were "stock market Jews," "Jewish finance capital," "Jewish racketeers," or "Jewish jobbers" (Haury, p. 282; author's translation).

An intense struggle took place in the Weimar Republic between the National Socialists (NSDAP) and the KPD to win over the proletariat and the middle classes. This struggle was carried on with variable success. Already in Mein Kampf, his autobiography and political manifesto, which was published in two volumes in 1925 and 1927, Adolf Hitler had written with satisfaction that from the very early years of the NSDAP "tens of thousands of Marxists were induced to make their way back to the Volksgemeinschaft [the folk community] to become fighters for an imminent and free German Reich" (vol. 2, p. 557; author's translation).

The nationalistically tinged anticapitalism of the Communist Party also made it easier for National Socialists to form temporary alliances with the KPD. The first time this came about was in the so-called Schlageter course. Launched in 1923 by the Comintern (Communist International) functionary Karl Radek, the Schlageter course was an attempt to wrest control of nationalistic feelings.

Albert Leo Schlageter had fought with the right-wing Freikorps. Charged with engaging in sabotage by the French occupying force, he was sentenced to death and executed on 26 May 1923. Karl Radek was a member of the presidium of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in charge of KPD's political instruction. On 20 June 1923, at a plenary session of the committee, Radek praised Schlageter as a "martyr to German nationalism" and a "courageous soldier of the counterrevolution." Radek, who was Jewish, declared: "If the people matters to the nation, then the nation will matter to the people."

This nationalist course reached its high point with an address by the KPD official Ruth Fischer to students on 25 July 1923. Fischer, herself of Jewish ancestry, proclaimed, with regard to Schlageter's death:

You are protesting against Jewish capitalism, gentlemen? Whoever protests against Jewish capitalism, gentlemen, is already a class warrior, whether he knows it or not. You are against Jewish capital and want to bring down the stock exchange jobbers. That's all right. Stamp on the Jewish capitalists, string them up from the lampposts, trample them underfoot. But, gentlemen, what do you think of major capitalists like Stinnes, Klöckner …? (Haury, p. 283)

The KPD pursued an aggressive anticapitalist course that made no distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish capital on the one hand, but on the other did exploit anti-Semitic stereotypes. The Schlageter course lasted only a few months and was abandoned for the sake of Soviet foreign policy.

THE THIRD REICH

The alliances between the NSDAP and the KPD were short-lived and exclusively tactical in nature. With the Nazi assumption of power in 1933, German society was subjected to totalitarian control, and thousands of communists promptly disappeared into the concentration camps.

National Socialists endeavored to create an ethnically homogeneous nation by exploiting late-nineteenth-century racist thinking. Point four of the party program of the NSDAP of 24 February 1920 stated, unequivocally, that Jews could not be Germans: "None but members of the nation [Volksgenossen] may be citizens. None but those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the nation" (author's translation). The National Socialists increasingly began referring to Jews as "bacillus," "bacteria," "parasites," or "poison."

Hitler's anti-Semitism was motivated not only by racism, antibolshevism, and anticapitalism; he also construed a connection with Christian anti-Semitism. In Mein Kampf he asserted:

If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the peoples of this world, his crown will be the dance of death of humanity and this planet will, as it did millions of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men. Eternal Nature inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands. Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. (pp. 69–70)

Shortly after Hitler came to power, legislation was enacted excluding Jews from society. This legislation, which the overwhelming majority of the German population did nothing to protest, would become the immediate prelude to a genocide of unprecedented magnitude.

The Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor banning marriage between Jews and non-Jews was passed on 15 September 1935. A November supplementary decree to the Reich Citizenship Law stated that all Jews, including quarter- and half-Jews, were no longer citizens of the Reich but Staatsangehörige (subjects of the state). The law deprived Jews of their basic rights as citizens, including the right to vote, and in 1936 Jews were excluded from all professional jobs.

During the night of 9–10 November 1938, the SS and the mob went on a rampage throughout Germany, Austria, and Sudetenland, attacking Jews wherever they could find them. During this so-called Kristallnacht, or the "Night of Broken Glass," hundreds of synagogues were destroyed and set on fire, thousands of Jewish residences and stores vandalized and looted. At least ninety-one people were murdered and many were mistreated. In the days thereafter more than thirty thousand male Jews were rounded up by the Gestapo and the SS and interned in the concentration camps of Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen. Most of them were only let go after they had signed a statement declaring themselves prepared to "emigrate."

From Kristallnacht it was but a small step to the so-called Endlösung der Judenfrage (the final solution of the Jewish question). Streamlining the mass murder of millions of Jews was the objective of the Wannsee Conference, held in Berlin on 20 January 1942 and chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, one of the main architects of the Holocaust (Shoah). The number of Jewish lives claimed by the Shoah has been put at approximately six million (the number cited by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum).

It has been said that the history that led up to the Shoah had by and large been concealed from the German population. This is only partly true, not only because regular troops also had been involved in the preparations for the mass murders in the east, but more so because Hitler had openly alluded to the Holocaust early on. Looking back to World War I, he declared in Mein Kampf, with regard to what he characterized as a Jewish-led "Marxist delusion":

If, at the beginning and during the War, twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrews who were corrupting the nation had been forced to submit to poison-gas, just as hundreds of thousands of our best German workers from every social stratum and from every profession had to endure it in the field, then the millions of sacrifices made at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: If twelve thousand of these rogues had been eliminated in proper time probably the lives of a million decent men, who would have been of value to Germany in the future, might have been saved. (vol. 2, p. 772)

What is more, on 30 January 1939, in a speech to the Reichstag, he stated: "If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."

The Germans began to make good on his threat almost immediately after the surprise attack on Poland on 1 September 1939. As of 23 November 1939 all Jews over the age of six had to wear a Star of David on the left side of their chest. Thousands of Jews perished at the hands of Einsatzgruppen in random killings in the open or died as a consequence of enforced ghettoization.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 the Einsatzgruppen went all out. The principal targets of these mobile killing squads, which were divided into smaller units called Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos, were communist officers, officials, intellectuals, prisoners of war, Romanies (Gypsies), and Jews. In conjunction with collaborators and with the assistance of the Wehrmacht, they murdered approximately 1.5 million people, the vast majority of whom were Jews.

The desire to carry out the murders with greater efficiency led to the creation of the death camps. From 1941 to 1942 millions of Jews were being murdered with industrial methods by gassing in camps like Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Majdanek. The Shoah was a German enterprise, but not all of the killers were German. Willing executioners came forward in Slovakia and Poland, the Baltic republics, Hungary and Croatia, Rumania and Ruthenia. In Paul Lendvai's words, "clerical and traditional Jew-hatred, economic jealousy, social protest, and nationalist resentment all help to explain the powerful current of indifference and the absence of any appreciable reaction when Hitler embarked on the 'final solution' of the Jewish Question in Eastern Europe" (p. 64).

In occupied western Europe as well, the Germans could count on cooperation rooted in ideological affinity or indifference to the fate of the Jews. In France the puppet government of Vichy (1940–1944), presided over by Marshal Philippe Pétain, an anticommunist and a national hero, collaborated with Nazi Germany. Jews were rounded up by the French police and sent to a transit camp in the Parisian suburb of Drancy, from which they were deported. In all, 75,000 French Jews died in the East (Hilberg, p. 339).

In the Netherlands, the Dutch civil service actively participated in the preparations for the deportation of Dutch Jewry. After Queen Wilhelmina and the cabinet fled the country, several permanent secretaries approved the "declarations of Aryan origin." Many Jews were betrayed by "ordinary Dutchmen" out of greed and personal enrichment. It was Dutch policemen who arrested the Jews. And it was the Dutch military police that guarded them in the Westerbork transit camp, from which they were deported to their deaths by Dutch railroad personnel. In all, one hundred thousand were murdered.

It is also difficult to maintain that the fate of the Jewish deportees was completely unknown in western Europe. Even a girl like Anne Frank, who lived in hiding, came to believe the worst. In a diary entry dated 9 October 1942, she writes: "If even in Holland it is this bad, how will they live in the far and barbarian regions where they are being sent? We assume that most of them will be killed. The English radio speaks of gassing. Maybe that is after all the quickest method of dying. I am completely upset" (p. 35).

ANTI-ZIONISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM

Shortly after the Holocaust, Jews were once again confronted with politically organized anti-Judaism, this time under the banner of anti-Zionism. In the 1950s purges took place in communist parties throughout the Eastern bloc. Such purges may be regarded as pseudo revolutions, the object being the political control of the population. The authorities next fell back on deeply ingrained anti-Jewish stereotypes. After all, only Jews could be "Zionists," and all Jews were suspected of "Zionism." In order to counter the charge of anti-Semitism the party cadres declared that they differentiated between good "hard working Jews" and poisonous "Jewish Zionists."

Officially Zionism was seen, as Joseph Stalin put it, as a "reactionary nationalist current, which found support in the Jewish bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia and the backward layers of the Jewish working class. The Zionists attempted to isolate the Jewish working masses from the common struggle of the proletariat" (p. 364). It was at the trial of the Hungarian foreign minister László Rajk in September 1949 that Zionism was first injected into the accusations against party members. Rajk was not Jewish but three of his codefendants were, as was Mátyás Rákosi, the ruthless party leader, who fondly described himself as "Stalin's best Hungarian disciple."

But nowhere in the Eastern bloc was "anti-Semitism after Auschwitz" more in evidence than in the eastern part of Germany, where the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was established under the auspices of the Soviet Union. From the very beginning, the East German communists of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), recognizing the necessity of legitimizing their "antifascist" state vis-à-vis the Federal Republic (West Germany), the allied countries of the Warsaw Pact, and its own population, embarked on a "national" course. This accounts for the extremely aggressive character of its nationalistic, "anticosmopolitan," and anti-Western campaigns.

Rudolf Slánský was a Jew and the general secretary of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia. In 1952 Slánský and his so-called group were accused of "Zionist conspiracy." On 20 December 1952, the SED issued a proclamation with the "lessons from the trial against the group of plotters around Slánský." In the matter of anti-Jewish stereotypes, this proclamation showed strong affinities with the nationalist KPD traditions of the Weimar Republic. The proclamation contained the following statement from the Central Committee of the SED:

Sailing under the Jewish-nationalistic flag, and disguised as a Zionist organization and as diplomats of the American vassal government of Israel, these American agents practiced their trade. The Morgenthau-Acheson plan which came to light at the Prague trial makes it abundantly clear that American imperialism organizes and supports its espionage and sabotage activities in the People's republics via the state of Israel with the assistance of Zionist organizations. ("Lehren aus dem Prozess," p. 51; author's translation)

The same proclamation accused the German communist Paul Merker of being an agent of Zionism who acted "in the same way as the criminals in Czechoslovakia." During his exile in Mexico between 1942 and 1946, Merker had taken the fate of the Jews to heart, demanding the German state pay restitution to Jewish Germans. The GDR neither acceded to this demand nor thanked him for his efforts. The proclamation stated:

It can no longer be doubted that Merker is an agent of the U.S. financial oligarchy, whose demand for compensation for Jewish properties is only designed to infiltrate U.S. financial capital into Germany. That is the real reason for his Zionism.… He demands the displacement of German national wealth with the words: "The compensation for the harm that has been done to Jewish citizens will be given both to those who return and to those who want to stay abroad." Merker illicitly transformed the maximum profits squeezed out of German and foreign workers by monopoly capitalists into alleged property of the Jewish people. In reality "Aryanization" of this capital merely transferred the profits of "Jewish" monopoly capitalists to "Aryan" monopoly capitalists. (pp. 55–56)

The Arab-Israeli Six-Day War in June 1967 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 by Soviet, East German, Polish, Hungarian, and Bulgarian army units marked the beginning of new anti-Zionist campaigns initiated by Moscow, East Berlin, and Warsaw. On 6 September 1968 the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal published a report that demonstrated that the continuities between the GDR and the Third Reich even extended to personnel. The official stand of the entire Eastern bloc during the war was distinctly pro-Arab and anti-Israel. However, it struck Wiesenthal that the news service of the GDR was particularly biased and anti-Israel. Wiesenthal noticed that the use of words in the press and propaganda of the GDR deviated from the commentary of other Communist Party–led countries. Some utterances corresponded literally to remarks in former National Socialist newspapers and journals. It did not take very long for it to be confirmed that some of the regular contributors of the anti-Israel articles in the East German press were the same people who had written about the "Jewish peril" during the Third Reich.

On 14 July 1967, for example, a cartoon appeared in the Berliner Zeitung, depicting a flying Moshe Dayan, with his hands stretched out toward Gaza and Jerusalem. Next to him stood Adolf Hitler, shown in an advanced state of decomposition, encouraging Dayan with the words: "Carry on, colleague Dayan!" It was apparent to Wiesenthal that there were Nazis on the editorial staff of several East German newspapers and magazines (Wiesenthal, pp. 20, 26–38).

Despite its antifascist credo, the SED took no responsibility whatsoever for the German role in the Holocaust. On the contrary, the East German population subsequently was declared the victor and victim of "fascism," while the Holocaust itself received scant attention. In this way the GDR was able to avoid dealing with feelings of guilt. Latent anti-Jewish feelings were further reinforced by anti-Zionist campaigns rife with insinuations that Jews desired to infiltrate, sabotage, and exploit the East German state.

NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM: SIAMESE TWINS?

In the early twenty-first century, overt anti-Semitism on the part of all authoritative political and social organizations is strictly taboo and thoroughly repudiated. Even so, at the beginning of the 1990s approximately 10 to 25 percent of the population in western industrialized countries harbored anti-Semitic sentiments (Haury, p. 123). The phrase secondary anti-Semitism came into use to refer to an attitude that views "Auschwitz" as a blot on a nation's history (Germany, France, Poland, and so on), for which contemporary Jews then receive the blame. Often this inclination not to forgive Jews for "Auschwitz" is of a piece with the desire to deny the Holocaust or to "relativize" it. This relativization of the Holocaust is especially popular among adherents of a political-cultural movement known as the New Right, who resort to it frequently.

New Right intellectuals are attempting to bring about a cultural revolution by smashing taboos and turning the arguments on their head. This school of thought originated in France and was founded in 1968 by Alain de Benoist, whose Groupement de Recherche et d'Études sur la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE) set the tone for the New Right throughout Europe. De Benoist has claimed to be neither right-nor left-wing, but his writings make clear that his overall philosophy combines elements of right-wing extremism and conservatism. The European New Right is not a homogeneous movement with a unified ideology. The typical supporter is anti-Western, antiliberal, anti-communist, anti-American, and, above all, anti-multicultural. Although de Benoist has distanced himself from anti-Semitism, the arguments of his followers have not always been free from anti-Semitic overtones.

One of the most prominent examples of New Right agitation in Europe came to the fore in the so-called Historikerstreit, an academic controversy fought out in the German media in the middle of the 1980s. The Historikerstreit grew out of the New Right historian Ernst Nolte's claim that in the totalitarian troika of National Socialism, fascism, and Marxism-Leninism, National Socialism was a reaction to Stalinism. In Nolte's view, communism constituted the original and National Socialism a copy, more or less.

Nolte and his sympathizers perceived a causal connection between the mass murders of the Russian Revolution and the crimes of Nazi Germany. "Auschwitz," according to this reasoning, was a reaction born of fear, the fear that the destruction unleashed by bolshevism might spread and come to Germany. In other words, Stalin and his regime were partly responsible for the creation of the Third Reich. Hence, for Nolte, "Auschwitz" and the "gulag" were equally criminal, apart from, as he put it, the "technical procedure of gassing"(p. 45).

Indeed, at first glance there are similarities between the two political systems. What class was for Lenin and Stalin, race was for the Nazis. What capitalists were for the Communist Party, Jewry was for Hitler. For the Soviets the New Man was the proletarian. The Nazis rejected the proletarian in favor of the Aryan. In addition, Hitler and Stalin had concluded a nonaggression pact from which it could be deduced that the two dictators were "blood brothers." But opponents of this theory of totalitarianism contend that the equation of the two dictatorships as opposed to their comparison is highly problematical.

In National Socialism the principle of human inequality rooted in biology was raised to the level of dogma. In communism—to judge by its ideology, at least—the principle of equality was central. National Socialism was by definition German nationalist, whereas communism—again according to its ideology—was internationalist. Stalinism was not the essence but the perversion of communism. In National Socialism, however, doctrine and reality coincided. To put it in the words of the Italian writer and concentration camp survivor Primo Levi: "One can't imagine Nazism without gas chambers, but one can imagine Communism without camps."

The mass murder perpetrated by National Socialism was carried out meticulously, dutifully, "in an orderly fashion," and with industrial methods. Ideologically this genocide was a mixture of the rational and irrational. On the one hand, individuals often were relegated to the status of Untermenschen—subhumans—and employed as slave labor in German industries. On the other hand, they were the victims of a deeply antimodern irrationalism, a perverse nationalism, and a unique racial delusion whose roots stretched back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both the quantity and the quality of National Socialism's organized mass murder made the Third Reich unique, despite similarities with Stalin's Soviet Union—all the more so because Hitler's assumption of power was legitimized by the electorate.

The views of Nolte and others not only were of historiographical interest but also served a political goal. In order to create a "post-Auschwitz national identity," Nolte and his sympathizers strove to "neutralize" Auschwitz by placing the Third Reich and Stalinism in the same box. Once accepted, it then becomes easier to take up the "Jewish part" in bolshevism. Taking it one step further, Nolte reasoned that it might be legitimate to argue that Hitler was entitled to intern German Jews as prisoners of war: had not Chaim Weizmann announced in September 1939 that Jews all over the world would fight on the side of England?

The assertion that National Socialism and communism were Siamese twins also sparked fierce discussions in France. There, the Black Book of Communism (Livre noir du communisme) by xsthe ex-Maoist Stéphane Courtois, appeared in 1997. In it, the author concluded: "But the intransigent facts demonstrate that Communist regimes have victimized approximately 100 million people in contrast to the approximately 25 million victims of the Nazis" (p. 15). Courtois's opponents argued that this "history with a calculator" drew an inaccurate picture, inasmuch as executions, deliberate or accidental famines, along with epidemics were added up without differentiating among them. Moreover, many found that a comparison between communism and capitalism would have provided a more realistic picture than that between communism and National Socialism.

Nowhere in western Europe, however, was the political exploitation of the equation of communism and National Socialism more pronounced than in Germany. As a result of German unification in 1990, the country not only had to confront the legacy of East German communism; the unification also affected the way in which people started looking at the National Socialist past.

In January 2004 the vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Dr. Salomon Korn, ceased collaborating with the Stiftung Sächsische Gedenkstätten, the Saxon government agency that deals with the reconstitution of camps into museums. First used by the Nazis, some of these former concentration camps were subsequently taken over by the Soviet Union and the East German authorities. Korn was protesting the policy of implied moral equivalence that treated the political prisoners of the GDR and people persecuted by the Nazis as though they were the same. Some East German officials seemed to regard the Soviet Russian occupation of East Germany as a punishment for "Auschwitz," a punishment that might be said to have ended with the unification of the two Germanys. Korn even spoke about a "renationalization" of public commemorative policies.

Many agreed with Korn that the politics of equating communism, including its GDR variant, with National Socialism had started immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. As early as 1991, for example, a special brochure issued by the camp museum in Sachsenhausen near Berlin stated: "Sachsenhausen is first and foremost the scene of National Socialist and SS crimes; but it is also a place where crimes were committed in the name of another ideology, with no less inexorable consequences. The creed of National Socialism and of communism was the same: the opponent must be destroyed."

Encouraged by an international climate in which the Third Reich was being equated with communism, the German Christian Democratic politician Martin Hohmann went one up on Ernst Nolte in breaking a taboo. Amid the celebrations of German Unity Day, 3 October 2003, he insinuated that Jews could just as well be regarded as a "nation of perpetrators" (Tätervolk) as Germans. After all, he argued, in the first phase of the Russian Revolution, which cost the lives of millions of people, many Jews were involved in terrorist activities.

Like Nolte, Hohmann attempted to articulate a post-Auschwitz national identity that, along with its anti-Semitic undertones, could be derived from the equation "communism equals National Socialism." With this it became much simpler to point to "Jewish guilt" and "national victimization." Vigorous protests and intense media attention in Germany led to Hohmann's expulsion from the party, but it was nonetheless clear that a considerable minority supported his views.

In the early twenty-first century such viewpoints can be found in many postcommunist countries in central and eastern Europe, where they are extremely popular and politically acceptable. Soviet rule and the struggle for national independence often are the main topics of history and politics. The German occupation, collaboration, and the Holocaust are treated as occurrences of secondary importance, while much of the criticism is directed at bolshevism, which continues to be associated with Jewry. This is especially true for the Baltic states, Poland, and Ukraine.

The president of Estonia, Arnold Rüütel, in 2005 refused to attend the commemorations of the sixtieth anniversary celebrations of the end of World War II in Moscow. He declared that we must do everything to see to it that the Holocaust and the "Holodomor," that is, the "Great Famine-Genocide" perpetrated by Stalin in the 1930s on the rural population of Ukraine, will never be repeated. Vaira Vike-Freiberga, the president of Latvia, did commemorate the Holocaust but at the same time lionized the men from Latvia who were "abused as cannon fodder" in the Waffen-SS. These soldiers are widely honored as national resistance fighters against bolshevism.

National conservative and New Right politicians throughout Europe applaud the equation of National Socialism and bolshevism. It remains to be seen, however, whether such a "positively differentiated" perception of anticommunist and anti-Semitic nationalists in the interbellum will not lead to increased anti-Semitism.

See alsoAuschwitz-Birkenau; Babi Yar; Concentration Camps; Einsatzgruppen; Frank, Anne; Genocide; Holocaust; Kristallnacht; Nuremberg Laws; Slánský Trial; Warsaw Ghetto; Wiesenthal, Simon; Zionism.

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Jan Herman Brinks