ANDREI S. MARKOVITS
19
ANDREI S. MARKOVITS
Terror and Clandestine Anti-Semitism:
Thoughts on German and American Reactions
to September 11, 2001
r
recall how [Hitler] would have films shown in the Reich Chan–
cellory about London burning, about the sea of fire over Warsaw,
about exploding convoys, and [1 remember] the kind of ravenous
joy that would then seize him every time. But 1 never saw him so
beside himself as when, in a delirium, he pictured New York going
down in flames. He described how the skyscrapers would be trans–
formed into gigantic burning torches, how they would collapse in
confusion, how the bursting city's reflection would stand against
the dark sky, and he said, as if finding his way back from his ecsta–
tic state, that Saur should immediately turn Messerschmidt's design
for a four-jet, long-range bomber into reality. With its range we
could inflict a thousand -fold retaliation on America for the down–
fall of
OUf
cities...
-Albert Speer,
Diary,
November
18, 1947.
A
lthough delayed by half a century, Hitler's pipe dream has now
been, at least partially, fulfilled. This passage was the first thing
that ran through my mind when I caught sight of the scenes
broadcast from New York on the morning of September
I
rth (and later
from Washington, D.C. and western Pennsylvania). It was obvious to
me-especially in the case of the World Trade Center-that there were
clear connections between Hitler's illusory wish and the motives of the
presumptive perpetrators . For even if it had not been fanatical suicide
bombers from the Arab world, as so many Germans were wishing, right
down to the last piece of irrefutable evidence, but rather homegrown
radicals
a
fa
Timothy McVeigh, the motives would have been similar:
the destruction of a "Judaized" America and New York City, the
detested center of world capitalism and globa l finance, headed by "Jew–
ish" Wall Street. By destroying New York and Washington, these circles
would have dealt the ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government), as the U.S .
federal government and all its facilities and institutions are still called
here in the relevant right-wing circles, a welcome defeat. That these
"faith-based terrorists" (to use Tony Judt's apt expression) of the American
