“I will decide for myself who is a Jew here and who is not.”
A characteristic feature of moderate Reichophiles (those who are not ready to publicly zigzag with all the ensuing social consequences) is the habit of trying to whitewash exactly all the leaders of the Reich except Hitler. Like, one Führer is to blame for everything! The tactic is not new, and I can still understand Rommel’s fans in this regard. But recently I met a bunch of people on the wall at Noreen who were proving that Goering was not an anti-Semite. And here I would like to analyze the situation, Although the topic is not mine, it is very basic.
I’ll start with what many people have written about: the case of Erhad Milch and the phrase that Goering decides for himself who is a Jew in the Luftwaffe. Using it as an argument is foolish for a number of reasons.
1) This is an isolated case, and many have written that Goering “responded to all anti-Semitic attacks in this way.” No.
(2) Milch was not a Jew, strictly speaking. Only his father was a Jew, which is not enough in the eyes of the Jews themselves (Jewishness is acquired either through the mother or through conversion), and among the Nazis, the attitude towards the varying degrees of half-breeds changed repeatedly and in general was very confusing legally.
(3) Goering was not aware of this fact at first; it came to light as a result of an investigation, when Milch had already proved himself to be a faithful and useful man. That Goering did what he did shows that he was not an idiot, not his attitude toward Jews in general.
And now to the actual question.
To begin with, anti-Semitism among German nationalists did not even originate with the advent of the NSDAP. For example, the Völkische Bewegung published the anti-Semitic magazine Der Hammer as early as 1902, when Hitler was a teenager. So this phenomenon has been on the agenda since its very beginnings.
But, of course, it cannot be said that any member of the NSDAP was an anti-Semite or a committed Nazi in general. For example, when the participants in the history of Munich-1972 are called “former Nazis”, this is already a distortion: those people joined the party at the height of the war and, as teenagers, no one really asked them. In general, when the NSDAP gained strength and even more so came to power, people joined it for a variety of reasons. For the sake of a career, out of inertia, out of fear, because of the influence of loved ones, whatever. This is understandable.
But sorry, this is not Goering’s case at all.
Göring joined the NSDAP as early as 1922. And in 1923 he was already an active participant in the Beer Hall Putsch, during which he received two bullets and almost died. Moreover, at the time of the entry, he was already 29 years old – not a pale young man with burning eyes, it seemed that he was already a person who should understand what he was doing. And all 30 at the time of the coup.
Consider him a “member of the R.S.D.L.P. since 1905,” and a participant in the storming of the Winter Palace. At that time, it is unlikely that a person who was not an ideologist was ready to die in a street battle for the party – after all, it was still 11 years before coming to power. So far, with such activities, the same career can be buried rather than built. That is, if you don’t die at all.
The idea that Göring was a moron, ready to die for no matter what, is far from me. The leaders of the Reich were anything but fools, otherwise they would hardly have brought most of Europe to its knees.
This raises another question: OK, but was there any anti-Semitism in the NSDAP program in 1922? Maybe it all started later? Alas, we have no basis for discussion here: let us turn to the “Twenty-five Points” which Hitler proclaimed at the Hofbräuhaus on February 24, 1920. And which have been the official program since April 1 of the same year (a prank that went too far, yes).
The fourth (yes, the fourth, that is, one of the key) points is as follows:
“A German citizen can only be one who belongs to the German nation, in whose veins flows German blood, regardless of religious affiliation. Thus, no Jew can be classified as a member of the German nation, nor can he be a German citizen.”
That is, from the very beginning, the party postulated that the state, as the Nazis saw it, was without Jews as citizens. It was for this program, I repeat, that people went to die in November 1923 (16 Nazis died in battles with the police, but Goering was lucky to survive a serious wound).
I would like to emphasize that the program does not yet contain a word about Gypsies or Slavs, for example, but Jews have already been given a special place in it. And then it’s all about the fact that only citizens (that is, non-Jews) should hold office, and so on.
One can, of course, try to prove that Goering did not distinguish between the fourth point, but how exactly it is proved is a mystery to me, and in the long debate no one has brought up such arguments. Well, except for Milch. And also what Goering’s brother was doing (but I never understood how this had to do with Hermann himself).
And yes, the controversy took place in the context of the First World War, but again, it is not clear how to prove that Göring became infected with ideas between 1918 and 1922. Because, as I noted at the beginning, all this was not even invented by Hitler, since the very beginning of the 20th century, the “People’s Movement” has been developing precisely as an anti-Semitic one as well. The tendency of German nationalists to think this way has been evident since at least 1902, and even before the First World War, the Reichshammerbund, the Germanenorden, and other forerunners of the NSDAP appeared.
Things like this don’t happen “all of a sudden” at all. It’s a gradual process. As I have said more than once, the Holocaust was moving very slowly: in 1922, there was no talk of “let’s kill 6 million Jews.” This was not the case in 1933 or even in 1939. The real tin started only in the 40s, and even then 1941 is very different from 1944, say.
In conclusion, I would like to point out that there is nothing wrong with interest in the Reich in itself. For example, I’m a Jew, which doesn’t stop me from being uncontrollably fond of Renaissance Spain, although only the Reich was a more anti-Semitic state, really. Intelligent people are able to restrain emotions and separate things in their minds.