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Politics : Canadian Political Free-for-All -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: el_gaviero who wrote (3894)	4/12/2004 5:36:01 PM
From: SofaSpud	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 38220

... anti-Semitism in the Germany of the 1930s was rational. The Jews were as prominent in German communism as they were in Russian. If German communists had come to power, it is very reasonable to suppose that millions of ethnic Germans would have been murdered. It's certainly true that Lenin allowed some Jews to have important roles in the early Soviet years, even if Stalin subsequently came to persecute them. But I think you overstate the link between German anti-Semitism and the communist/Soviet threat. The literature on Hitler's early years seems pretty consistent that it was in pre-WWI Vienna that Hitler picked up the particularly vile strain of anti-Semitism that was well established there, long before anyone outside of Russia had heard of Bolsheviks. Could the two fears have reinforced each other? Sure: Rosa Luxemborg was a Jew and a dangerous communist revolutionary in Germany after WWI. I would think it a fair statement to say that fear of communists during the inter-war period in Germany was rational. But it's facile to cloak already-established and virulent anti-Semitism with the respectability of anti-Communism. Moreover, the communists were effectively crushed by 1934. Hence a pogrom, such as the one that began with Kristallnacht a couple of years later, was in that context bereft of justification.