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Jenninger then turned to Hitler's world view, which he called a
"so-called
Weltanschauung
without an original thought," filled with
biological racism focused on hatred oftheJews, antimodernism, and
visions of an original agrarian society to be realized in the
Lebensraum
of the East. Hitler's real contribution, Jenninger pointed out, lay in
the "further coarsening, simplification, and brutalization" of ideas
taken from others, and in the "fanatical obsession and mass psycho–
logical ability" with which he became National Socialism's most im–
portant propagandist. Jenninger recalled that Hitler saw in the Jews
the cause of all evil: they were the November criminals of 1918, capi–
talists, bolsheviks, freemasons, liberals, democrats, and in general
the cause of Germany's military, political, economic and social
disasters:
History [for Hitler] was reduced to a battle of the races : between
Aryans and the Jew, between "Germanic" culture contributors
and 'Jewish sub-humans.' The salvation of the German people
and the decisive defeat of the despoilers of humanity could take
place only as the salvation of the world from Jewish blood as the
evil principle of history.
The counterimage to the Jew was the warrior and farmer, battling
the Asiatic hordes and extending German culture and race. "So,
while the atom bomb was being built elsewhere , Himmler and
others announced these ideas bordering on idiocy with the reassur–
ing monotony of a lunatic."
In
passages that would bring a smile of
recognition to any mildly informed reader of psychoanalytic studies
of Nazi ideology, Jenninger recounted and attacked Hitler's "insane
images" of dark-haired, hooked-nosed Jews raping white, blonde–
haired Germanic women. Hitler's hatred of the Jews dominated him
to the last.
J enninger then turned to the Holocaust. The attack on the
Soviet Union offered Hitler the opportunity to accomplish both of
his goals: attain
Lebensraum
in the East, and realize "'destruction of
the Jewish race in Europe' which he had publicly announced on
January 30, 1939." The words
Kommissarbefehl
and
Einsatzgruppen
prefigured a "gigantic murder."
In
the months following June 22,
1941, thousands of Jewish men, women, and children were shot by
Einsatzgruppen
active behind the lines. The "final solution" began
long before it was announced at the Wannsee Conference on
January 20, 1942. Then came death factories, gas chambers, ovens,
and 'gas wagons.'
(
