Paper delivered as a Mellon Sawyer Lecture at Yale Genocide Studies Program on October 15, 1998 (2)
Introduction
To understand the relevance and importance of genocide studies one need go no further than one's own home computer. Just do a search of the WWW and you will see the history of the best documented of all genocides, the Holocaust, denied and revised by dozens of individuals and groups throughout the world. This is, in essence, the subject of my talk. The ability and power of various forms of media, in this case placed in the hands of trusted government officials, to produce unquestioned beliefs in masses of individuals despite great quantities of documentation to the contrary.
We have all seen enough TV and read enough about the genocidal war in the former Yugoslavia to contend, that the use of carefully staged propaganda can turn one against his own next-door neighbor. This "produced reality" - perceived as reality itself - plays a decisive role in creating the preconditions for genocide. These conditions consist of, but are not limited to, the ability of ordinary people to actively or tacitly take part in the killing of fellow citizens because they are "different" and pose a "threat."
Ironically, it was the viewing of live television from Croatia and Serbia in the autumn of 1991 - during the fierce battles over Vukovar and Ossiek - which finally convinced me of the viability of my own research findings, even though this has put me into serious and fundamental conflict with some of the world's most accomplished historians (3) Nevertheless, I believe that Hitler's order for the final solution was given in conjunction with his approval of the final cut of the film Der Ewige Jude in May-June 1940 (not 1941).
The Conflict of Paradigms
Today, most scholars agree that the media has a great influence on politics. This is especially true for television. I also believe, that most scholars would agree that there are at least two different levels on which this influence can be seen: One is the way that the media can influence the decision-making process from within the political system; this is a kind of reaction to the social reconstruction of reality (4) in the media. The other is the influence of the media upon attitudes among the general public. I just have to point to the effects of the media on public opinion and policy in the Vietnam and the Gulf Wars.
And yet, exactly this knowledge does not seem to be taken into consideration by scholars of the Third Reich, even though we have a lot of proof concerning the importance the Nazis themselves ascribed to propaganda and media. We do have many specialists, who produce valuable research of the history of propaganda, but exactly because they are considered to be "specialists", their findings and evaluations remain unused by mainstream historians. These mainstream historians prefer other types of "proof", i.e. written evidence, and they simply do regard only such textual evidence as genuine. They are trained to process the existing written evidence through a filter of source-critical methodology, and then to reconstruct historical events from the "hard" evidence that remains. In this mechanistic view, there is little room to accept the "actors of history" as persons of flesh and blood who might be influenced by what they saw, experienced and felt - and not only by what they did read or write. These people did not - as we would prefer them to do - always act according to logical thinking, but very often they operated in accordance with sudden basic personal emotions. The mechanistic concept is thus here in sheer contrast to the sociological notion about "the social reconstruction of reality", which forms the emotional background of those individuals, who make decisions - and to the psychological notion of the importance of visual perception to each individual's "social reconstruction of reality".
In other words, we need to integrate historical, sociological and psychological knowledge, if we wish to further develop Genocide Studies - and perhaps even other disciplines of the Humanities and the Social Sciences.
Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen have coined the expression "genocidal mentality" in a book with the same title as "a mind-set that includes individual and collective willingness to produce, deploy, and, according to certain standards of necessity, use weapons known to destroy entire human populations." (5)
It is noteworthy, they point to propaganda as a key factor in creating the social conditions for genocide, but it is perhaps even more noteworthy, that they here stay on a more pejorative level and do not develop their thinking further. And to judge from other publications on genocide there does seem to be a need for empirical research to support such observations - or at least to combine actual existing research from specialists in propaganda with the works of genocide scholars.
As I eventually have come to see it, the problems might be even bigger than just a matter of establishing contact between two different areas of interest. I strongly believe that we have to speak about a conflict of paradigms. I think, that we here are touching upon a fundamental problem of Human Science - understood as an integrated discipline or theory, trying to explain the complexity of human behavior - which has become apparent because of the possibilities of modern media to document and communicate in a very precise way. It has become a question of "produced scholarly reality" - or should I be scholastic and call it "scholarly produced reality" instead?
In other words: We are used to - and trained in - the belief of written evidence. A proper scholarly publication ought still to be a book, which should have as many footnotes as possible linking us to other printed material. Why?
Is it not so, that the quality of the research depends on the scholars themselves, on their abilities and their honesty and integrity - as well as on their ability to present their findings in such a way that it can be evaluated by other scholars? It all depends - more or less on their personal "social construction of reality".
The tradition of the Humanities as a scientific discipline was established in Europe at a time, when Theology (i.e. dogmatic interpretation of the Bible with needs for documentation from the Scriptures themselves) set the standards for the universities. Writing and printing was almost the only way to communicate with other scholars. But now there are different ways to communicate scholarly knowledge - and the whole structure of audience has changed. Therefore we need, in my opinion, to principally rethink the whole process of documentation as well as our traditional concept of "evidence" in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
It is on the crossroad of these very complex questions, observations and perspectives that we now have arrive at the presentation of my case: "The Eternal Jew" - A Blueprint for Genocide in the Nazi Film Archives.
The Case
The evidence on trial is the Nazi propaganda film, "Der ewige Jude," which was produced between October 4, 1939, and September 3, 1940 (6). It was a so-called "documentary" and had its first public screening on November 28, 1940. It was supported by state-controlled media, but rather few paid to see it. However, a lot of school youth and soldiers saw the film in compulsory screenings - this included members of the SS and others who were charged with implementing and conducting the Final Solution. Later, a Dutch, a French and an international version were produced. Today, the film is a "cult film" among Neo-Nazis and Anti-Semites throughout the world and is acclaimed by these groups to be the best documentary on Jews ever made.
Many film historians have interpreted this film as a deliberate call for the Holocaust. In 1968 the noted German-Swedish film historian Erwin Leiser proclaimed that it should "turn brave citizens into willing mass- murderers" (7). When considering the Holocaust such an evaluation is seemingly encumbered with one big problem - chronology. "Der ewige Jude" was produced in 1940, yet most historians today regard 1941 as the decisive year. Historians, however, have all but ignored the film and its content even though it was the single biggest effort undertaken by the Third Reich to legitimize and promote anti-Semitism in the German public.
When I started my research back in 1970, I set out to show that Leiser's conclusions were based on hindsight and did not stand a proper source-critical analysis of the film, its production and distribution history. I was certain, that I could not find any positive evidence in support of his claim. However, I was proved utterly wrong, because what came out of a virtual frame-by-frame analysis, my collection of sources on the production and talks with people who participated in making the film, indicated beyond any doubt, that the film was made to create a genocidal mentality, directed against the Jews and that the responsible persons knew it. Moreover, the sources for the production history of "Der ewige Jude" revealed that the final version was a joint product made by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. The "Fuehrer" followed the production of the film very closely, gave ideas and ordered several recuts. The main responsibility for the film, however, definitely lies with Joseph Goebbels. Or to be even more concrete: When Goebbels made the film, it was primarily in order to regain Hitler's confidence after some personal set-backs and to convince the "Fuehrer" of the necessity to take the final decision to kill the Jews. And when Hitler finally endorsed the film for public screening, he in a sense signed the order, which all scholars of the Holocaust have tried to locate. The reason for not having found such a written order is - in my view - very simple. It was not a written document which the scholars ought to have been looking for. It was a film.
Both Hitler and Goebbels understood the importance of film as a means of political communication and as a big step towards the final solution. Therefore, they both used to watch the Newsreel each week before it was shown to the Public. On October 4, 1939, Goebbels initiated the production of the propaganda film, which would become "Der Ewige Jude." The very next day, he outlined the concept to two prominent members of his staff. The script was developed by Dr. Eberhard Taubert, Head of anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic activities, while Dr. Fritz Hippler, Head of the Film Department, was sent to Poland to film Orthodox Jewry in the ghetto of Lodz.
In the evening of October 16, 1939, Hippler presented Goebbles with about 30 minutes of rushes, showing allegedly Jewish ritual slaughter of cows, calves and sheep. Although Goebbels himself had ordered these recordings to be particularly cruel to animals - which they were - he was nevertheless deeply shocked by what he saw. He wrote in his diary the next morning: "Scenes so horrific and brutal in their explicitness that one's blood runs cold. One shudders at such barbarism. This Jewry must be annihilated." (8)
Goebbels showed these rushes to Hitler and others present at Hitler's dinner table on October 28, 1939. According to his diary they were all "deeply shocked." (9) And in estimating the effect on Hitler one should not forget his attitude towards animals: he was a lover of animals and almost religiously vegetarian. (10). To Adolf Hitler these scenes - and later the whole film, in which they were used as the emotional climax - can only have reinforced his paranoid anti-Semitism and his latent wish to exterminate the Jews.
On October 31, 1939, Goebbels personally went to Lodz to see for himself. He summarized his impressions in his diary: "They are no longer human beings, but animals. It is, therefore, also no humanitarian task, but a task for the surgeon. One has got to cut here and that most radically. Or Europe will vanish one day due to the Jewish disease." (11)
According to his diary, Goebbels was explicitly confirmed in this opinion by Hitler, when he reported on his visit to Poland on November 2, 1939: "Above all my description of the Jewish problem finds his (i.e. Hitler's) total approval. The Jew is garbage. Rather a clinical than a social matter." (12)
It certainly became the task of "Der ewige Jude" to "prove" this exterministic view on Jewry to all those Germans who did not as yet share these sentiments. And during the following weeks and months entries in Goebbels' diary document how intensely he worked on this film, and how important both he and Hitler considered it to be. Thus, in his diary on November 18, 1939: "I inform the Fuehrer about our Jew film. He gives some ideas for it. On the whole, Film is a very valuable propaganda medium for us just now."(13)
It should be noted that both Goebbels and Hitler regarded themselves as experts on film propaganda. On December 11, 1939, the "Fuehrer" angrily criticized Goebbels for bad filmmaking and for not having made proper anti-Semitic film (14). The final version of "Der ewige Jude" is therefore also to be seen as Goebbels' answer to this rebuke as well as a cynical proof of his total loyalty towards his beloved "Fuehrer", whom he far superceded in hate to the Jews and in anti-Semitic initiatives.
The first cut of January 8, 1940, contained only "Jewish" scenes (including a vivid juxtaposition of Jews and swarms of rats). It climaxed with the explicit bloody slaughter scenes. Hitler, however, turned this version down on January 11, 1940. In the subsequent versions a re-cut quotation of Hitler's notorious speech of January 30, 1939 was added. It was presented as the "Fuehrer's own, public "prophecy" of the future fate of the Jews after one hour of allegedly true "documentation" showing how they had destroyed German society and culture. The quotation that 'if a war should start, the consequence would be "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe"' was thus "hammered" into and reinforced in Hitler's own mind by constant repetition, as he viewed Goebbels' progressive versions. It became the "prophecy", to which the "Fuehrer" would return again and again.
A protocol of a test screening before top propagandists from all branches of the Third Reich on March 1, 1940 shows, how "Der ewige Jude" was tested the way commercials are tested today before being shown on television. An important side-purpose of this screening was to further radicalize the mentality of the opinion-makers of the German society by means of the slaughter scenes.
According to the rolling titles at the beginning of the final version, "Der ewige Jude" was a "film document" which "shows us Jews the way they really are, before they conceal themselves behind the mask of the civilized European." By means of seeing for themselves the German people would here at last "comprehend the truth of Jewry". And according to the commentary to the slaughter scenes - read by the authoritative speaker of the UFA Newsreels - "these pictures prove the cruelty of this form of slaughter. It reveals the character of a race which conceals its brutality beneath the cloak of pious religious practices." And the film concluded: "The eternal law of nature, to keep one's race pure, is the legacy which the National Socialist movement bequeaths to the German people forever. It is with this resolve that the unified German people march into the future."
By means of a shot-to-shot analysis of the film, I have been able to expose its cynical lies and manipulations. This analysis demonstrates first of all, how "Der ewige Jude" was embedded in the traditions of anti-Semitic propaganda. One could call it the filming of traditional anti-Judaism, but at the same time it is much more. Anyone, who has participated actively in film or TV production, will know how difficult it is to produce or reproduce exactly the message that one wants to communicate. And yet, a frame-by-frame analysis of "Der ewige Jude" also proves how meticulously the message of this film was constructed down to the very last detail. People with film- or television experience can also tell about the power of the medium, because the production from a certain point starts to lead its own life and become an independent partner of the production team. There exists enough technical evidence from the production story of "Der ewige Jude" to argue that this was the case here.
For instance, this technical evidence indicates the scrutiny with which the research was carried out, that the makers themselves considered the film to be "scientific" (although they all knew that it was a propaganda film with high priority). At least their research in the so-called "Institut zum Studium der Judenfrage" enabled them to make themselves believe that the film was a "true" representation of reality. Therefore, as the production advanced, Goebbels must have put Hitler under psychological pressure for making a move - as the self-imposed "Savior" of the German people - by means of the screenings of the film, which were Hitler's only concrete confrontations with Jews after the campaign in Poland.
When the "Fuehrer" finally approved the film on May 20, 1940, it must have - as a visualized and structured externalization of his own, more vague thinking - become identical with his own "social construction of reality". It had ended up as an X-ray of Hitler own anti-Semitism - and what he wanted to be the "inner picture" with the Germans, when they heard the word "Jude" (Jew).
Therefore, the film "Der ewige Jude" constitutes an extremely important - and to a large degree still unknown and unused - source to the History of the Holocaust and a documentation of the way genocidal thinking emerges and spreads by means of "produced reality" in reality-like media.
As a means of social communication, the climax of this film can only be understood as the "Führer"'s unspoken, yet incontrovertible Sentence of Death upon the Jews. Or to use the conceptual notion of Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen: When Hitler approved the film, he crossed the "Threshold of Genocide." (15).
In order to evaluate when, how and why the "Fuehrer" took the ultimate decision and invested Heinrich Himmler with the responsibility for the planning and execution of the Holocaust, we have to look into the personal psychology of Adolf Hitler (16). Hitler certainly was a psychopath, but even psychopaths are human beings, who act according to their individual "social construction of reality". A comprehensive analysis of decisions that actually were taken personally by Hitler, demonstrates the methodological need to understand them as results of psychodynamic development and to distinguish between at least two separate aspects:
a) The reasons behind a decision, which in this case would be as
visualized in "Der ewige Jude".
b) The exact moment, when Hitler made a decision - because it has
become clear to me, how much his actual decision-making was
emotionally influenced ("prompted") by what he had most recently experienced.
As outlined and discussed in great detail in my book "The Fuehrer-Myth", which is unfortunately still only available in Danish, this approach has led me to conclude that his pattern of behavior as a politician can be explained to a surprisingly high-degree by means of modern theories on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In my view, Hitler's behavior during the Campaign in France in May and June 1940 can only be characterized as "ritual acts of obsession", as one would find with a person suffering from PTSD. (17) He was specifically clearly more interested in visiting the battlefields of World War I than in the ongoing World War II, and here he - in his own mind - again and again received "confirmations" of the "mission", that he believed "Providence" had invested him with in Pasewalk on November 10, 1918, when he became blind for the second time and decided to become a politician.
Of course, we cannot know exactly what went on in Hitler's mind when he visited Langemarck, Wervicq, Compiegne, Soissons or Paris. We can only try to reconstruct his feelings from what he actually did during these visits and what he did and said afterwards - and compare these deductions with an over-all picture of his psychology and pattern of behavior. Psychological explanations are, however, not in high esteem with historians, although modern psychology and psychiatry through brain-scanning etc. definitely has strengthened the value of empirical observations and of theoretical frameworks during the last 10 years.
Hitler's visits to his own battlefields of World War I (18) can be seen as symbolic "reenactments" or even "revocations" of his personal war trauma (as well as of Germany's). Here the former orderly could witness with his own eyes, how he - by means of war - had accomplished the first part of his task of creating a new and powerful Germany, which he had set out to do during his traumatic experience in Pasewalk. On June 1, 1940, Hitler was celebrated by his soldiers as a victorious "Fuehrer-God" at Langemarck - the key symbol for the fallen German soldiers in WW I, which even had the same memorial day as he himself: November 10. The newsreel report and the photos present this event as a kind of "resurrection" (19). Hitler then paid a visit to La Montagne near Wervicq, where he had lost his visual ability for the first time in October 1918. The next day he told General von Rundstedt, that he hoped England would soon "come to its senses", so that he could commence his "real task" and march against "Bolshevik Russia".
If one accepts the notion of Yehuda Bauer (20), that the war against the Soviet Union from Hitler's point of view was a war against the Jews, this remark could be the first evidence of a decision, taken at Wervicq. A more important piece of evidence would be a secret "Fuehrer-decree" of June 5, 1940, which made it possible to cancel all German laws representing legal obstacles to total warfare. (21) This move can hardly have been fully justified by the second phase of the campaign in France, which started that day, but must be seen in connection with a decision in principle to attack Soviet Russia. On June 6 Hitler gave his new Fuehrer Headquarters (FHQ) the symbolic name "Wolfsschlucht" (Wolf's Gorge), referring to the German national opera "Der Freischütz" by Carl Maria von Weber, where the Wolf's Gorge is both a symbol of German spirit and the setting of a Faustian pact with the Devil. A week later (he had just approved the newsreel on Langemarck and heard of the surrender of Paris) he gave his next FHQ in Southwest Germany the name of "Tannenberg", thus indicating a campaign against Soviet Russia as his next step in the war.
Driving back to the "Wolfsschlucht" after the "reenactment/ revocation" of the armistice of WW I in Compiègne on June 21, Hitler visited the site near Soissons where he had been awarded his Iron Cross 1st Class - his personal "token" - by his Jewish superior officer, Hugo Gutmann (and where he soon was to install a new FHQ, which he called "Wolfsschlucht 2"). Then - on the evening of June 22, 1940 - he received the official capitulation of France. From a psychological point of view this would have acted as the final "confirmation" to Hitler of his "pact" with "Providence", which would make him carry out the decision taken at Wervicq and by oral order invest Heinrich Himmler with the task of annihilating all European Jews.
Despite extensive research I have found no conclusive evidence to refute such an early date of a direct order to Himmler, which I have deduced from an analysis of Hitler's traumatic pattern of behavior and a content analysis of "Der ewige Jude". However, I find corroboration of this early date in the book by "Richard Breitman on Himmler as the "Architect of Genocide", although I disagree with his notion of Himmler being the man who took the initiatives (22).
As I see it, all written sources which have been used as arguments for a later date can just as well be interpreted as evidence regarding a "twisted road" of implementation, following an explanatory model with a still more impatient Fuehrer, a reluctant Himmler and an eager subordinate, Reinhard Heydrich. There is even one - although highly controversial (23) - source, namely Himmler's masseur Felix Kersten, who relates, that Himmler got the order from Hitler "immediately after the capitulation of France" - and that Himmler explicitly blamed Goebbels as the person who had made Hitler take the decision (24). This testimony would match my conclusions concerning "Der ewige Jude" as an X-ray of the decision-making process, where the "produced reality" of the film became part of the "social construction of reality" within both decision-makers and perpetrators (cf. Goebbels' own reaction to the rushes with ritual slaughter on October 16, 1939: "This Jewry must be annihilated").
On January 30, 1941 (i.e. just after the public screening of "Der ewige Jude" all over Germany) Hitler once more reminded his audience in a radio-broadcast speech, how he had always been right in his earlier "prophecies". Then for the first time since 1939 - but many more similar occasions with almost verbatim quotations were now to follow - he recalled his prophecy of the annihilation of the Jews. In doing so, the "Fuehrer" virtually gave his oral, public affirmation of the call for genocide expressed and legitimized in the film, especially as he now claimed to have said it at the very outbreak of the war: It was the dreadful images of the "inhumanity" of the Jews that the members of the "Master Race" were expected to recall when they heard these speeches - thus leaving it up to them to implement the "prophecy".
By using this subtle way of conveying his Will as a distant "Fuehrer-God", Hitler followed the strategy he had himself outlined on November 10, 1938 (the 20th Anniversary of his traumatic experience in Pasewalk), while commenting upon the Kristallnacht Program the night before: Now issues of foreign policy - which in Hitler's mind would also include the "Jewish Question" - should "be presented in such a way that in the mind of the broad masses there would gradually and totally automatically evolve the conviction: What one cannot solve benignly, one has to solve with violence because it cannot go on like that."
Joseph Goebbels had heard his "Fuehrer-God" and lit the flames of the Holocaust by means of the "produced reality" of "Der ewige Jude".
Video-demonstration
In order to give you an impression of the "power of the visuals", which on the one hand is my key argument and on the other hand is so difficult to argue with just words, I am now going to show you the crucial 20 min of a television program, made by the experienced documentary director Esben Høilund Carlsen for Danish public service station TV2 and based on my Danish book on the Fuehrer-Myth. The TV series is called "Atawolf - the Adolf Hitler Riddle" and consisted of four parts, 40 min. each, with the titles: 1. Fate, 2. The Women, 3. The Apostle and 4. The Jews.
What I am going to show to you derives from this last program. It should be noted, that I made the translation and dubbing on a private budget, but I do hope, that you nevertheless will understand it better than if it were in Danish.
[video, Atawolf - The Riddle of Adolf Hitler, part four, appr. 11:23 (In Mein Kampf Hitler now calls Vienna...) - appr. 30:10 (... for the whole company of Germany)].
(Begin Film Script)
- In Mein Kampf Hitler now calls Vienna of his youth "The City of Incest" and now describes it as full of dirt and inflammation:
"When one just made a careful cut into such an abscess, one found - like the worms in a rotten corpse - a little Jew, often blinded by the sudden light."
From his 15 years of distance he mixes in a sovereign way the contrasts to one single picture, where rich and poor are described as one and the same type. They live closely together and look poor, but in reality they are wealthy and influential. They really do look like this. When they act like this, they have disguised themselves. They are deeply religious and immoral at the same time.
It is certain, that none of the friends from Hitler's youth has ever heard him speak like this. The shift of attitude occurs during the war.
And now he speaks about the contribution of the Jews in the following way:
"If at the beginning of the war one only had kept 12-15,000 of these destroyers of people under poison gas, then the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain."
Something has changed, and this change has something to do with the poison gas and with the decoration of bravery, the Iron Cross First Class.
Although Hitler in his later political career had every reason to refer to his participation in the war, he is not bearing his Iron Cross in the beginning. It only arrives on his jacket in 1927 - but then in order to stay. Hitler, however, still had a biased relationship with the man who awarded him this distinction, Hugo Gutmann. On the one hand he made sure, that all pictures of him were removed from German archives. On the other hand he suddenly invited him to a private meeting during the Party Rally in 1936 - i.e. the year after the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws, that made it almost impossible for Jews to live in Germany.
After the "Night of Broken Glass" Gutmann fled to America, where he settled down on 605 Clara Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, under the name of Henry G. Grant.
He is mentioned in this newspaper article from August 6, 1941, but also in America he remains face-less. No photo can be found, and the interview closes like this:
"My past is totally forgotten, and all I wish to do now, is to live peacefully and to sell some type-writers."
As late as in 1941 Hitler again refers to Gutmann as the very reason why he did not wear his order during the first nine years:
"We had a Jew in the regiment, Gutmann, a coward without comparison. He wore the Iron Cross First Class. It was revolting and an infamy."
What really happened between these two men is still a riddle, but what actually did happen, was apparently decisive for Hitler's policy towards the Jews.
From 1918 Hitler kept a distance from these "destroyers of the people" - with three exceptions. The first one was the alleged meeting with Gutmann in 1936. The second one was a Jewish female cook, whom he kept at the Berghof because of her particularly tasty vegetarian dishes. And the third one was a mistake.
This little girl, Berhardine, was because of her blond beauty chosen to give the Fuehrer flowers on his birthday for several years, photographed and published as a post card. Suddenly, she was replaced by older members of Bund Deutscher Mädel. Berhardine had turned out to be a quarter Jewess, and the big machine was set in motion in order to get all pictures back.
The role as Hitler's favorite child was taken over by the eldest daughter of the Goebbels-family, Helga, who ironically was dark-haired. Reality constantly had the bad habit of not matching Hitler's stereotyped patterns.
It was Helga's father who had initiated the "Night of Broken Glass" in 1938, because he had fallen into disgrace with the Fuehrer. The event frightened the surrounding world, which was disappointing to Hitler. Uncle Adolf wanted to have public support for his view of the Jews, and the responsibility for this task was handed over to Helga's father. Goebbels now put his money on the most powerful medium of the time.
In Germany of the 1930's film was mainly used for comedies and dancing movies as well as for naive enlightenment as here, where the Swastica flag waves over the little farm, and where the blond children are helping their father with the harvest.
But suddenly the geese cackle, because the evil capitalist turns up. He has loaned money to the farmer and now reclaims it back, or the farm has to be sold by compulsory sale. The profit is used on women of easy virtue and on black musicians in shabby nightclubs.
Now more refined methods of propaganda were to be applied. Goebbels first released the melodrama "Jew Süss". Also rather naive in style, but below the surface one finds a lot of the main, traditional issues of anti-semitism. And even today the German authorities are only allowing to show 180 seconds from the film in TV productions.
It begins as a parody of the Weimar Republic, the predecessor of Hitler's Third Reich. A decadent duke needs money and borrows it from an evil Jew, who has his safe full of jewelry. But soon some of Hitler's own - delayed - observations from Vienna become visible. The archetypical Jew disguises himself as "German" - and thus becomes twice as dangerous - and his claims to the duke literally hollows out the state.
Hitler's own mix of ragged proletariat and super capitalism becomes apparent here, too. In a totally illogical manner the egoistic Jew Süss triumphs, other Jews can move into the capital of the state, and they arrive immediately in rags and tatters.
The Jew furthermore rudely aims for a blond beauty - sexual relations between Aryans and Jews were already strictly forbidden - and at the climax of the drama he forces her to say yes by means of having her fiancé tortured. She gives in, but takes her own life afterwards. A motive with a long tradition in German literature, the so-called "Virgin Tragedy".
At last Justice is accomplished. The evil Jew is sentenced to death and hung up in a cage.
The reason why the story of the film is so closely connected with Hitler's own contradictory view of Jewry, is the fact, that Goebbels at this time was in disgrace and desperately wanted to regain the Fuehrer's confidence. It was e.g. the Minister of Propaganda himself, who wrote these closing "words of wisdom":
Sturm: "May our descendants adhere definitively to this law, because it will save them a lot of trouble with their estates and lives and with the blood of their children and children's children."
The film was a big success at the box-offices, and Hitler saw it often in his favorite cinema, namely the hall with the big panoramic window on Berghof, where he gladly saw two or three films per night.
But Goebbels' biggest effort was the documentary "The Eternal Jew", which not only was to argue against the Jews, but directly prove their noxiousness and convince the German people about the justification of their total annihilation.
A key inspiration came from Hitler's speech to the press in Munich the day after the "Night of Broken Glass", where he had said:
"It is not necessary to make propaganda for violence as such, but to elucidate certain thing in such a way, that the inner voice of the people begin to call for violence."
As director of the production Goebbels chose Fritz Hippler, who soon felt the breath of the Führer behind the project:
Hippler: "Hitler wanted with this film to prove that the Jews were a parasitic race in man-kind which was to be separated from the rest of the human beings."
The first difficulty, with which director Hippler was confronted, was, that Germany at that time - autumn 1939 - was largely cleansed of Jews, who looked the way, Hitler wanted them to look. The film team had to go to Lodz in Poland, and the director again and again had to instruct the Jews to act as "real Jews".
And once more Hitler's own illogical couplings appear: Jews live in shabby hovels, are dirty and not able to create a proper civilized life, as the speaker claims, but they also do live in houses like this!
This is the way, they really look like. When they are dressed in European clothes, it is a dangerous disguise. Jewish schools are described as nurseries for parasites and rebels, and the rabbis as masters in the art of dissimulation. The synagogues are blinds for the black market.
Hitler was exhilarated, but lacked more powerful arguments. The director then got hold of a two year old information film, "Fight the rat", and Goebbels wrote the commentary:
"Everywhere, where rats appear, they bring annihilation, destroy man-made things and places as well as food. In this manner they spread diseases like plague, lepra, typhus, cholera, dysentery etc. They are cunning, cowardish and cruel and act mostly in huge crowds. Just like the Jews in man-kind".
In order to further please Hitler, an almost religious vegetarian and lover of animals, Goebbels included a so-called "Shehitah", a ritual Jewish slaughter, where the animal is put to death by cutting through the arteries of the throat. The big problem was, that this slaughter method had been strictly forbidden in the Third Reich.
Here, too, the shootings had to be made in Lodz under protest from the local German authorities. The compelled extras are clearly not happy with the situation, but they are instructed to smile to the camera.
When Hitler saw the scene, he himself had ordered, he was furious. Here was the final proof of the inhumanity of the Jews. But he was not yet content with the film, because it lacked suggestions to a "solution" of the problem.
Then Goebbels got the brilliant idea to include the Fuehrer himself in the film. After the slaughter sequence there is a cut to Hitler's speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, where he most clearly takes a stand on WHAT is going to happen with the Jews.
Hitler: "If the international financial Jewry in or outside Europe should succeed once more to throw the nations into a world war, then the result would not be the Bolshevization of the world and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"
Note, how Hitler's mix of rich and poor Jews now has led to an amalgamation of international capitalism and Bolshevism, as if they were one and the same thing.
This film put its mark on a whole generation of Germans, many of whom actually considered Jews as a kind of noxious animal, which had to be fought, and a great number of ordinary citizens participated in the battle without major resentments. Some of them let even themselves be photographed or filmed while doing their "exciting" job.
The Fuehrer had used his usual tactics. He had thrown out an oral bull of excommunication and returned to his mountains, where he awaited results. Even at the cafés people knew that the Jews were to be annihilated, but how? The big problem for Nazi bureaucracy was, that there did not exist a written order. It had examined the idea of removing all Jews to Madagascar, but Hitler put an end to these plans in November 1940. Himmler claimed - with a strange mixture of pride and disgust - that Hitler already in June 1940 had given him the commandment on the physical extermination of the Jews. Himmler found the order "un-Germanic" and had only reluctantly accepted it.
Himmler closely followed some experiments with the so-called "mercy-killings" of mentally ill Germans, which were carried out by Hitler's doctor Karl Brandt and the Party Executive Philipp Bouhler. They discovered that the poison gas Cyclon-B provided the most efficient way of killing.
As the pressure on Himmler gradually grew, he more and more needed the hands of his masseur Felix Kersten to ease his stomach pains ever more frequently. However, at his side the SS-chief also had a man, who understood, in what direction things were going, and who was not so afraid, like his boss, to take initiatives, namely Reinhard Heydrich.
Heydrich was placed in the "Reichssicherheitshauptamt" together with his close staff-member, Adolf Eichmann. They had supervised the transports to Poland and they had made the calculations of the Madagascar-project.
According to Eichmann's statement during the later trial in Jerusalem they listened to Hitler's speeches and guessed what to do next. Heydrich came up all the time with new suggestions. Already in 1938 he had suggested the introduction of a special sign for Jews, but at that time Hitler had rejected the idea.
Now the yellow star had become obligatory in the ghettoes in occupied Poland - and from September 1941 the same applied for Germany. It was Heydrich, who had set up the rules of the game for the final selection, and now he took the final, decisive initiative.
On January 20, 1942, he sends out invitations to a conference in this villa in Berlin-Wannsee. Here, the precise contents of the vague notion of The Final Solution is going to be administratively defined - and the responsibilities are to be spread out from a secret SS-project to a common corporate policy of the whole company of Germany.
(End of Film Script)
Consequences
As I said before the screening, my analysis has made me suggest a new and very precise chronology with three key moments:
a)
Hitler's final approval of "Der ewige Jude" on May 20, 1940,
as the moment which provoked the Holocaust decision.
b)
Hitler's visit to Wervicq on June 1, 1940, as the moment
where he took the Holocaust decision.
c) The official capitulation of France on June 22, 1940, as the
moment when he invested Himmler with the responsibility for
carrying out the genocide.
I am most certainly aware of the fact that this chronology seems to be in severe conflict with the explanatory frame-works which have evolved from many years of intense historical debate on the issue among some of the world's leading scholars.
The big debate between "intentionalists" and "functionalists" has largely been based on written evidence. An over-all explanation must, however, also be able to account for all kinds of available evidence, including non-written sources like "Der ewige Jude", which until to-day has hardly been included in this debate. And as I see it, the explanation suggested here integrates both "intentionalist" and "functionalist" arguments.
The main difference from most other approaches and explanations is to be found in my shift of focus. I am arguing from an analysis of the process of creating and developing a genocidal mentality instead of arguing from the development of the executive system that carried out the mass-murder. I am interested in the minds and the mentality of the decision-makers, leading up to the decision, and in the way that they communicated the murderous mentality to the actual perpetrators. Other scholars are concentrating on the establishing of the killing machine and the way the Holocaust finally was carried out.
I am an intentionalist, when I claim that both Goebbels and Hitler hated the Jews so much, that they wanted to kill them all, but I have also deliberately pointed out the difference between the way these men arrived at this decision. Goebbels was the advisor and did not have the authority, which Hitler had as the "Fuehrer-God". I have shown how Goebbels by the means of "produced reality" made - one might even say "brainwashed" - Hitler to take the ultimate decision to get rid of the Jews.
And yet I am also a functionalist, because of my description of how Hitler himself mainly used the media to have his decision carried out by willing executioners and accepted by the by-standers. The explanatory model behind this point-of-view is a still more impatient Fuehrer, who does not wish to be seen directly tied to the Holocaust, a Heinrich Himmler, who remains reluctant to the extent that he could and as long as he dared - and an eager subordinate, Reinhard Heydrich, who became the real architect behind the "Final Solution", because he saw this as a key to general influence and to becoming Hitler's successor.
As I mentioned earlier, a test of the validity of my explanation would be my date of Hitler's order to Himmler on June 22, 1940. I have tried to find conclusive evidence to refute this early date. But to me, it seems, that all written sources which have been used as arguments for a later date can just as well be interpreted as evidence in support of the "twisted road of implementation", described here. And I have pointed to the testimony of Felix Kersten, who related, that Himmler got the order from Hitler "immediately after the capitulation of France". According to Kersten, Himmler even explicitly blamed Goebbels as the person who had made Hitler take the decision. As I see it, this testimony matches exactly my conclusions concerning the role of Goebbels, who used "Der ewige Jude" as his means to make Hitler take the ultimate decision. There is no reason to dismiss Kersten's account on this point even though he has been proved wrong on other issues (25)
"Produced Reality" as Documentation
Although "Der ewige Jude" was produced almost sixty years ago, the German government still considers the film to be so dangerous that it is forbidden to show the film in public with the exception of university teachers who are allowed to use it as part of their teaching. Why are the German authorities afraid? Are they afraid that the propaganda is so strong that it might be conceived as a real documentary with a certain amount of true reality in it?
Maybe there is some truth in their fear, because following World War I, Thomas' famous theorem, that if people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences, sociologists have defined the social construction of reality as 'what people define as real because of their background assumptions and life experiences'. And at least neo-nazi groups all over the world regard "Der ewige Jude" as a cult film.
Propaganda can be seen as a way of creating and presenting a socially constructed reality with a clear political intention. Visual representation has always been a vital part of the social construction of reality. However, although there exists a long tradition of media studies, the importance of visual communication has been widely neglected in historical research due to the strong scholarly tradition based on written sources and literature. Today the study of pictorial propaganda is being taken increasingly seriously along with the development of mass media which is effectively able to present a combination of visual and sound communication close to reality.
Propaganda and produced reality, therefore, very much applies to the discipline of Genocide Studies where it is commonly accepted that the dehumanization of the enemy is a necessary condition for moral justification by the decision-makers to instigate a genocide, as well as for the sum of individual perpetrators to commit a mass murder and for the bystanders to silently accept it.
The process of dehumanization is a very complex one, interrelated with traditional cultural codes and myths, and passed on through socialization as well as personal experiences which can be structured through political propaganda. During the 20th century the mass media have played a crucial role in dehumanization. The features of propaganda have become increasingly emotional because the growing and visual dynamic pictorial presentation of the enemy made the viewers believe that they saw the actual 'truth' with their own eyes.
But what is documentation worth, if we do not want to see?
As I have stated earlier, I can only describe the Nazi propaganda film "Der ewige Jude" as no less than an X-ray of the decision to launch the Holocaust. Because the decision has been one of the most well-researched questions in contemporary history, the evidence and the interpretation presented here put the thesis right in the middle of a lot of fundamental and far-fetching questions about the nature of science. I would close my presentation of almost 30 years of research by summing it all up into the key question, that has been on my mind ever since I saw live-TV from the genocidal war in former Yugoslavia:
How can we integrate this X-ray of "genocidal mentality" into our knowledge of the Holocaust and thus hopefully also into a more general theory on Genocide?
REFERENCES
Yizhak Ahren et.al. (1990): "Der ewige Jude" - oder wie Goebbels hetzte. Aachen: Alano.
Ilan Avisar (1988): Screening the Holocaust. Cinema's Images of the Unimaginable. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press
Rudolph Binion (1976): Hitler among the Germans. Amsterdam: Elsevier
Richard Breitman (1991): The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf
Norbert Bromberg/Verena V. Small (1983): Hitler's psychopathology. New York: International Universities Press
Christopher R. Browning (1992): The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Philippe Burrin (1993): Hitler und die Juden. Die Entscheidung für den Völkermord. Frankfurt: Fischer
Helen Fein (1993): Genocide. A Sociological Perspective. London: Sage
Gerald Fleming (1996): Hitler and the Final Solution. Berkeley: University of California Press
Régine Mihal Friedman (1983): L'image et son Juif. La Juif dans le cinéma nazi. Paris: Payot
Fröhlich, Elke (ed.): Joseph Goebbels. Die Tagebücher. Sämtliche Fragmente. Teil I. Bd. 1-4. 1924-1941. München: K.G. Sauer.
James M. Henslin (1997): Sociology: a down-to-earth approach. 3rd edition. Boston
Ulrich Herbert (1998): Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik 1939-1945. Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch
Judith Herman (1997): Trauma and Recovery. The aftermath of violence - from domestic abuse to political terror. 2nd edition, New York: Basic Books
Fritz Hippler (1981): Die Verstrickung. Düsseldorf: Verlag Mehr Wissen.
Dorothea Hollstein (1983): "Jud Süss" und die Deutschen: Antisemitische Vorurteile im nationalsozialistischen Spielfilm. Frankfurt/Main: Ullstein
Stig Hornshøj-Møller (1995): "Der ewige Jude": Quellenkritische Analyse eines antisemitischen Propagandafilms. Göttingen: Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film.
Stig Hornshøj-Møller (1996): "Førermyten. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels og historien bag et folkemord. København (Copenhagen): Tiderne Skifter
Stig Hornshøj-Møller: Different conference papers, published on the Web-site
< http://www.holocaust-history.org/der-ewige-jude/ >
Ian Kershaw (1987): The 'Hitler Myth'. Image and Reality in the Third Reich. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Felix Kersten (1952): Totenkopf und Treue. Hamburg: Möhlich
Michael Ley (1993): Genozid und Heilserwartung. Zum nationalsozialistischen Mord am europäischen Judentum. Wien: Picus
Robert Jay Lifton/Eric Markusen (1980): The Genocidal Mentality. New York: Basic.
Eric Markusen/David Kopf (1995): The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing. Genocide and Total War in the 20th Century. Boulder: Westview
Ralf Georg Reuth (1990): Goebbels. München: Bertelsmann
Erwin Staub (1989): The Roots of Evil. The Origin of Genocide and Other Group Violence. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press
Helm Stierlein (1976): Adolf Hitler. New York: Psychohistory Press
George Victor (1998): Hitler: The Pathology of Evil. Washington: Brassey
Robert Waite (1977): The Psychopatic God. New York: Basic.
John Weiss (1996): Ideology of Death. Chicago: Dee
David Welch (1983): Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933-1945. Oxford: Clarendon