"More German than the Germans" was a satirical or pejorative phrase used to describe the extreme degree of cultural assimilation among German Jews prior to World War II and the Holocaust. Originally, the comment was a "common sneer aimed at people" who had "thrown off the faith of their forefathers and adopted the garb of their Fatherland". [1] The German assimilation, following the Enlightenment, was "unprecedented". [2] The quote is sometimes ascribed to Chaim Weizmann. [3]
Following the Enlightenment, many European Jews regarded Germany as a particularly desirable place to live, "a place of refuge, in comparison to Russia and Romania" where antisemitism was extremely virulent and violent, and even France, where the Enlightenment had begun. [3] German Jews began to immerse themselves in German culture and the arts, playing a full and even leading role in society. By the twentieth century, the German Jews had reached a state of Bildung und Besitz (i.e., cultivation and wealth). [3]
Jewish women played a major role in the process of forming German-Jewish identity. Since they understood that Jews can hold both Jewish and national identities, Jewish women raised loyal families to Germany in the Imperial era. They served as mediators of Bildung within their homes and families, while simultaneously serving as agents of tradition. [4] Many Jewish women continued to keep kosher homes, attend synagogue on the Sabbath, and perform other Jewish rituals. In this light, Jews could be regular men and women on the streets and Jews in their homes, as suggested by Enlightenment advocator Yehuda Leib Gordon. [5]
Furthermore, Jewish women were instrumental in forming the social positions of Jews and their sense of "Germanness." [6] They encouraged their children to acculturate through their dress, speech and education and appreciated German entertainment and literature. Jewish women sent their children to music lessons and advanced secular schools. Thus, by combining German bourgeois practice and Jewish heritage, they formed a German-Jewish identity that balanced integration and tradition. Jewish women helped their families look, act, and feel like other Germans while remaining Jewish. [7] Their actions allowed Jews to ultimately receive the description of being "more German than the Germans."
Kurt Singer (born 1885, died 1944 in Theresienstadt concentration camp), was a conductor, musician, musicologist, and neurologist. He was described by his daughter as "more German than the Germans", as he earned an Iron Cross for his gallantry in World War I, was music editor for a Berlin newspaper, and published research on German folk songs, Richard Wagner and Anton Bruckner. [8]
British scholar Nikolaus Pevsner was described as "more German than the Germans" for his support of Goebbels' drive for "pure non-decadent German art" and was reported as saying, of the Nazis in 1933, "I want this movement to succeed. There is no alternative but chaos ... there are things worse than Hitlerism". [9]
German Jew Betty Lipton described German-Jewish identity after emancipation in "At Home in Berlin." She wrote that her family kept a kosher home, attended synagogue, and was a part of Berlin's tight-knit Jewish community. Simultaneously, her family was loyal to Germany. In 1914, they displayed the largest black, white, and red flag on their whole street. [10] This short account portrays why Jewish families were often described as "more German than the Germans."
Julius Hirsch, who was convinced the Nazis would not harm him as he had fought valiantly in the Imperial German Army for four years (for which he had been awarded the Iron Cross) and had played for the Germany national football team. He was ultimately proven wrong: the ultimate award for his services to the nation was his deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp on 1 March 1943. Although there is no record of his death date, in the absence of any signs of life hereafter, it is assumed he did not survive the war. [11] He had divorced his non-Jewish wife in the hope of saving her and his children from Nazi persecution, but his half-Jewish children were ultimately also deported to Theresienstadt in February 1945; unlike their father they survived the war, as they were liberated by the Allies in May 1945.
Fritz Haber, a German-Jewish chemist who in 1918 received (together with Carl Bosch) the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the invention of the Haber-Bosch process, a key ingredient for the production of modern fertilizers; [12] [13] It is estimated that one-third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this supports nearly half of the world's population.
However, Haber, a known German nationalist, is also known for his work weaponizing chlorine, and he led the team developing gases used for chemical warfare in World War I. A downside of his work however is the invention of Zyklon B, the main gas used in extermination camp gas chambers during the Holocaust.
But perhaps the literary epitome of this trope would be Ernst Lissauer, a German-Jewish poet and dramatist who is most remembered for the anti-British slogan Gott strafe England (= may God punish England) during World War I. He also wrote the poem Hassgesang gegen England (lit. "Hate song against England", better known as "Hymn of Hate"). Lissauer was described as a passionate German nationalist, with Stefan Zweig penning that "Germany was his world and the more Germanic anything was, the more it delighted him." [14] He was ultimately forced into self-exile in Austria when the Nazis came to power in 1933, and in 1936 he wrote about himself: "To the Germans I am a Jew masked as a German; to the Jew a German faithless to Israel." [15]
A Judenrat was an administrative body established in German-occupied Europe during World War II which purported to represent a Jewish community in dealings with the Nazi authorities. The Germans required Jews to form Judenräte across the occupied territories at local and sometimes national levels.
The history of the Jews in the United States goes back to the 1600s and 1700s. There have been Jewish communities in the United States since colonial times, with individuals living in various cities before the American Revolution. Early Jewish communities were primarily composed of Sephardi immigrants from Brazil, Amsterdam, or England, many of them fleeing the Inquisition.
The history of the Jews in Germany goes back at least to the year 321 CE, and continued through the Early Middle Ages and High Middle Ages when Jewish immigrants founded the Ashkenazi Jewish community. The community survived under Charlemagne, but suffered during the Crusades. Accusations of well poisoning during the Black Death (1346–53) led to mass slaughter of German Jews, while others fled in large numbers to Poland. The Jewish communities of the cities of Mainz, Speyer and Worms became the center of Jewish life during medieval times. "This was a golden age as area bishops protected the Jews, resulting in increased trade and prosperity."
Theresienstadt Ghetto was established by the SS during World War II in the fortress town of Terezín, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Theresienstadt served as a waystation to the extermination camps. Its conditions were deliberately engineered to hasten the death of its prisoners, and the ghetto also served a propaganda role. Unlike other ghettos, the exploitation of forced labor was not economically significant.
The history of the Jews in Austria begun after the exodus of Jews from Judea under Roman occupation. There have been Jews in Austria since the 3rd century CE. Over the course of many centuries, the political status of the community rose and fell many times: during certain periods, the Jewish community prospered and enjoyed political equality, and during other periods it suffered pogroms, deportations to concentration camps and mass murder, and antisemitism. The Holocaust drastically reduced the Jewish community in Austria and only 8,140 Jews remained in Austria according to the 2001 census. Today, Austria has a Jewish population of 10,300 and a total of 33,000 when including any Austrian with at least one Jewish grandparent.
The Jewish question was a wide-ranging debate in 19th- and 20th-century Europe that pertained to the appropriate status and treatment of Jews. The debate, which was similar to other "national questions", dealt with the civil, legal, national, and political status of Jews as a minority within society, particularly in Europe during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
The history of the Jews in the Netherlands largely dates to the late 16th century and 17th century, when Sephardic Jews from Portugal and Spain began to settle in Amsterdam and a few other Dutch cities, because the Netherlands was an unusual center of religious tolerance. Since Portuguese Jews had not lived under rabbinic authority for decades, the first generation of those embracing their ancestral religion had to be formally instructed in Jewish belief and practice. This contrasts with Ashkenazi Jews from central Europe, who, although persecuted, lived in organized communities. Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was referred to as the "Dutch Jerusalem" for its importance as a center of Jewish life. In the mid 17th century, Ashkenazi Jews from central and eastern Europe migrated. Both groups migrated for reasons of religious liberty, to escape persecution, now able to live openly as Jews in separate organized, autonomous Jewish communities under rabbinic authority. They were also drawn by the economic opportunities in the Netherlands, a major hub in world trade.
Names of the Holocaust vary based on context. "The Holocaust" is the name commonly applied in English since the mid-1940s to the systematic extermination of six million Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II.
The history of the Jews during World War II is almost synonymous with the persecution and murder of Jews which was committed on an unprecedented scale in Europe and European North Africa. The massive scale of the Holocaust which happened during World War II greatly affected the Jewish people and world public opinion, which only understood the dimensions of the Final Solution after the war. The genocide, known as HaShoah in Hebrew, aimed at the elimination of the Jewish people on the European continent. It was a broadly organized operation led by Nazi Germany, in which approximately six million Jews were murdered methodically and with horrifying cruelty. Although the Holocaust was organized by the highest levels of the Nazi German government, the vast majority of Jews murdered were not German, but were instead residents of countries invaded by the Nazis after 1938. Of the approximately 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, approximately 160,000 to 180,000 were German Jews. During the Holocaust in occupied Poland, more than one million Jews were murdered in gas chambers of the Auschwitz concentration camp alone. The murder of the Jews of Europe affected Jewish communities in Albania, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Channel Islands, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Libya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.
Jewish assimilation refers either to the gradual cultural assimilation and social integration of Jews in their surrounding culture or to an ideological program in the age of emancipation promoting conformity as a potential solution to historic Jewish marginalization.
Paradise Camp is a 1986 documentary film about Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, written and directed by Australians Paul Rea and Frank Heimans, respectively. Czechoslovakian Jews were first told that Theresienstadt was a community established for their safety. They quickly recognized it as a ghetto and concentration camp.
Of the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust, two million were women. Between 1941 and 1945, Jewish women were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps or hiding to avoid capture by the Nazis under Adolf Hitler's regime in Germany. They were also sexually harassed, raped, verbally abused, beaten, and used for Nazi human experimentation. Jewish women had a sizable and distinct role in the resistance and partisan groups.
Pauline Wengeroff (1833–1916), born Pessele Epstein, was the author of a first-of-its kind memoir by a Jewish woman, in which she refracts a period in Jewish history—the emergence and unfolding of Jewish modernity in nineteenth-century Russian Poland—through the experience of women and families.
David Sorkin is the Lucy G. Moses professor of Jewish history at Yale University. Sorkin specializes in the intersection of Jewish and European history, and has published several prominent books including Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries.
On 21 August 1943, during the liquidation of the Białystok Ghetto, about 1,200 Jewish children were put on trains and taken to Theresienstadt concentration camp, where they were held in isolation from other prisoners. On 5 October, they were told that they would be sent to Switzerland in exchange for German prisoners of war. Instead, the train went to Auschwitz concentration camp where all were murdered in gas chambers. The reason for the unusual route of the transport is still debated by scholars; it is believed to be connected to Nazi–Jewish negotiations ongoing at the time and the intervention of Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, who feared that the children would settle in Palestine.
"Like sheep to the slaughter" is a phrase that refers to the idea that Jews went passively to their deaths during the Holocaust. It derives from a similar phrase in the Hebrew Bible that favorably depicts martyrdom in both the Jewish and Christian religious traditions. Opposition to the phrase became associated with Jewish nationalism due to its use in Josippon and by Jewish self-defense groups after the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. During the Holocaust, Abba Kovner and other Jewish resistance leaders used the phrase to exhort Jews to fight back. In postwar Israel, some demonized Holocaust survivors as having gone "like sheep to the slaughter" while armed resistance was glorified. The phrase was taken to mean that Jews had not tried to save their own lives, and consequently were partly responsible for their own suffering and death. This myth, which has become less prominent over time, is frequently criticized by historians, theologians, and survivors as a form of victim blaming.
The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia resulted in the deportation, dispossession, and murder of most of the pre-World War II population of Jews in the Czech lands that were annexed by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945.
The question of how much knowledge German civilians had about the Holocaust whilst it was happening has been studied and debated by historians. In Nazi Germany, it was an open secret among the population by 1943, Peter Longerich argues, but some authors place it even earlier. After the war, many Germans claimed that they were ignorant of the crimes perpetrated by the Nazi regime, a claim associated with the stereotypical phrase "Davon haben wir nichts gewusst".
Marion Kaplan is Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at New York University. She is a three-time winner of the National Jewish Book Award for her non-fiction writing about German-Jewish history, Jewish refugees, and Holocaust history. Established in 1950, these awards recognize outstanding achievement in Jewish writing and research.
The international Jewish conspiracy or the world Jewish conspiracy has been described as "one of the most widespread and long-running conspiracy theories". Although it typically claims that a malevolent, usually global Jewish circle, referred to as International Jewry, conspires for world domination, the theory's content is extremely variable, which helps explain its wide distribution and long duration. It was popularized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century especially by the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Among the beliefs that posit an international Jewish conspiracy are Jewish Bolshevism, Cultural Marxism, Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory, White genocide conspiracy theory and Holocaust denial. The Nazi leadership's belief in an international Jewish conspiracy that it blamed for starting World War II and controlling the Allied powers was key to their decision to launch the Final Solution, which culminated in the Holocaust.