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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (21988)	3/23/2002 7:24:16 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

To blame Kristallnacht on Munich, and to be scrupulously intellectually honest about it, one would have to say that "but for Munich, there would have been no Kristallnacht." The flaw in that argument is that one then must explain away the anti-Jewish legislation prior to Munich, e.g., the Reich Citizenship Law of 1935, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor of 13 September 1935, the boycott of Jewish businesses, and all the rest of the systematic stripping away of civil rights of the Jews, and exclusion from all public interaction with non-Jews in every social sphere. The unpleasant fact is that Hitler always planned to exterminate all the Jews in Europe from the very beginning. One only has to read Mein Kampf to realize this. Mein Kampf was the best selling book in Germany from 1933 on. If I had been a German Jew and read it after Hitler took power, I would have taken it seriously. The history of Hitler and the Nazi party after 1933 is of escalation. Every step of the way, he did something that one would have thought unthinkable, and got away with it, and did the next thing, and so on. After Kristallnacht, Goering blew his top because German insurance companies had to compensate the Jewish business owners for the losses. Further, it bothered him to see perfectly good property destroyed. He had all jurisdiction for Jews transferred to him. Jews were definitely treated worse after Kristallnacht, but it seems clear to me that the Germans were trying to get the Jews to leave Germany, but leave their property behind. They wanted the Jews' property and money to finance the party and the rearmament. I believe the reason Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 rather than waiting until 1940, as the generals wanted, was in large part because they had run out of money, so wanted to loot the Poles. It was a vampire economy, a kleptocracy. They mistreated the Jews because they believed that the Jews had money that they could steal. So - would the Germans have treated the Jews any differently but for Munich? I think not. This may sound like blaming the victims, but the Jews really appeased Hitler. He knew he could get away with murder, literally, and that the Jews would not fight back. In Berlin, the Jews willingly paid to remove the razed synagogues and turned the property over to the Germans to use as parks. Everybody appeased Hitler, for all the good it did them.