anti-Semitism Christian anti-Semitism European History WW II

JEWS IN PRE-WAR EUROPE: ‘IN THE CAGE, TRYING TO GET OUT’…….

 

It’s a myth that most Jews refused to leave Europe, when doors are slammed elsewhere as the anvil drops, what was one to do?

That Poles wanted to help Jews emigrate to (then) Palestine wasn’t an act of philosemitism, but stemmed from their deep dislike of Jews. One must remember, that if not for deep seated antisemitism that existed (and still does) in the countries neighboring Nazi Germany, which led to the turning of a blind eye to Hitler’s evil schemes, the history from that period might have been different.

NOTE: As a matter of fact, as my good buddy TINSC always says, ”if not for antisemitism, the War Against Israel (WAI) could not exist.”

‘In the Cage, Trying to Get Out’

snyder_1-102413.jpg
Imagno/Getty Images

Herschel Grynszpan at his first interrogation, one day after he shot the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath at the German embassy in Paris, November 8, 1938

Herschel Grynszpan shot the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris on November 7, 1938. The Nazis claimed that the young man was an agent of the international Jewish conspiracy, and that his act of murder was an early salvo in the “Jewish War” against Germany. In fact, he was a confused and angry teenager who, like thousands of European Jews in late 1938, was unwanted both in Poland, where he was a citizen, and in Germany, which he knew as home. Both Germany and Poland were pursuing policies designed to get rid of Jews, Berlin with deadly but hidden purpose, Warsaw with cynicism and calculation. Anti-Semitism, however, did not unite the two governments but rather ruined their mutual relations. People like Grynszpan were caught in the middle. He was the victim not of German-Polish agreement but of a growing German-Polish conflict.

In Poland in 1938, an authoritarian clique in power had to deal with public anti-Semitism as well as opposition from an anti-Semitic party, the National Democrats, that had never run the state by itself and organized pogroms as a challenge to public order. There were three million Jews in Poland, a tenth of the total population, a third of the urban population. There were about as many Jews in the Polish cities of Warsaw and Łódz as there were in all of Germany, or for that matter in all of Palestine.

In domestic policy the Polish regime copied some of the tactics of the National Democrats, founding a ruling party that did not admit Jews and presenting mass Jewish emigration as a goal of foreign policy. Polish leaders supported the establishment of a state of Israel with the most expansive possible boundaries. In secret the foreign ministry and the ministry of defense supported the right-wing Zionist militants of Betar and Irgun. Young Jewish men were trained on Polish military bases and then sent back to Palestine to make trouble for the British Empire in the hardly hidden hope that the British could be driven out, or at least induced to permit mass emigration of Jews from Poland.

In Germany, Hitler had already made Jews second-class citizens and proclaimed his hatred of them and his intention to eliminate them. The Nazi leadership was far more anti-Semitic than the general population, for whom Jewish matters in general had little salience. Less than 1 percent of the German population was Jewish, and most German Jews would be induced to emigrate by repression and theft. “World Jewry,” the wraith that haunted Hitler’s speeches, was mostly present, even in the Nazi mind, beyond the borders. In 1938 Hitler, Göring, and Ribbentrop confused Polish leaders by proposing to them as common interests a war against the Soviet Union and the deportation of the Jews.

The Poles, though fearful of Soviet power and desirous of reducing their Jewish population, did not see how those two goals could be pursued at the same time. Surely a large-scale continental war would disrupt any plan for Jews to emigrate? The group of Polish “colonels” who ruled the country, though quite cynical after their own fashion, could not begin to anticipate where Hitler’s logic would lead after 1938: toward the mass killing of Jews under the cover of war.

In any event, German policy in 1938 was bringing Jews to Poland rather than drawing them away. After the German annexation of Austria (or Anschluss) in March 1938, some twenty thousand Jews with Polish citizenship living in Austria tried to return to Poland. After humiliating pogroms, Austrian Jews were subjected to a systematic policy of expropriation and forced emigration devised by Adolf Eichmann. As these methods were then applied to German Jews, Polish diplomats feared that the tens of thousands of Polish Jews living in Germany would also seek to return. The foreign ministry decided to exclude Polish Jews abroad from the protection of the Polish state.

More here. H/T Iivi anna Masso

[subscribe2]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.