Propaganda, Fear Lead to Holocaust
Sentiments of renowned, popular Germans bring racial hatred to Jews
Feb 17, 2007
In the opinion of famous German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883), Jews were attempting to control and modernize the old, orthodox world. This sentiment is expressed by Wagner’s view that all art emerged from the artist’s rootedness in the Volk. To him, the Jew, being an eternal stranger, could not be artistically creative. Wagner’s anti-Semitism had little to do with political motives and was not based on Judaism as a religion. He was one of the first to base his hatred on race.
Another prominent anti-Semite, Adolf Stoecker (1835-1909), did much to further anti-Jewish sentiment. Stoecker was a man of high social credential, a man of the cloth and chaplain to the Imperial Court, thus a man of great influence. Stoecker established the Christian Social Worker’s Party in 1878 to counter the support of the Social Democratic Party. Jews were an important part of the Social Democrats because of the party having advocated equality and assimilation of the Jews. Stoecker sought to counter the Social Democrats because of their anti-Christian influence. For Stoecker, possibly an even larger problem with the Jews was their control and use of the press, which would become an ever growing tenet of anti-Semitism. Such perceived elements of their platform would cause the Social Democratic Party to play an increasingly larger role in the development of anti-Semitism. Stoecker saw a great storm brewing between Germans and Jews if the climate between them did not change.
Another issue that furthered the development of anti-Semitism was the publication and worldwide distribution of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion around 1900. Though a complete fabrication, the Protocols were successful because of their purported Jewish authorship and the explicit appeal to the worldwide notion of a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. The Protocols contained many statements about Jewish shrewdness, fraud, cunning and even treason in order to attain their goal of world domination. These fears would intensify even further in the years that followed World War I and the establishment of the Weimar government.
The Weimar Republic and its government proved unsuccessful from the outset. The Ancien Regime was quickly torn down and replaced with a parliamentary democracy that was widely unpopular. The pre-existing bureaucratic infrastructure was left in place and was reluctant to accept the new Western democracy. Thus, the mechanisms responsible for carrying out the daily governance of the country were ineffective. The German economy was devastated by the war and the peace settlement. Rising inflation and periods of economic depression placed added stress on the new government. The Social Democratic Party and their democratic principles began to rise to prominence.
That new prominence was not entirely positive. After the German surrender, the assignment of guilt, and the restrictions placed on Germany by the Allied Powers, Germans looked for a place to lay blame. They found such a place with the Jews. Fingers were pointed at the Jews and the Social Democratic Party of which they were a large part. The repeated economic crises and social, economic and political prominence of Jews all guided anti-Semitic sentiment to a new high level. Volkish groups surfaced throughout Germany; the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP) was one of these groups. One of the men who formed the nucleus of the NSDAP was Adolf Hitler.
This article is the second in a series of the events in Germany leading to the Holocaust. Also see the first article, Origin of the Holocaust in Germany.
