(4) Almost all Germans were opposed to the Third Reich and nobody in Germany knew anything about the murder of the Jews but the Jews themselves were really responsible for the Holocaust.
(5) Ariel Sharon is worse than Hitler and the Israelis are Nazis. America supports Israel only because Jews control the American government and media.
For the first time in my life then I became conscious of anti-Semitism. Sure anti-Semitism exists elsewhere in the world but nowhere have the consequences been as devastating as in Germany.
Looking at it as objectively as possible 2002 has been a banner year for anti-Semitism in Germany. Synagogues have been firebombed Jewish cemeteries desecrated the No. 1 best-selling novel Martin Walser’s Death of a Critic is a thinly-veiled roman a clef containing a vicious anti-Semitic attack on Germany?s best-known literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki (who is a survivor of both the Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz); the Free Democrat Party has unofficially adopted anti-Semitism as a campaign tactic to attract Germany’s sizeable Muslim minority; and German revisionist historians now are beginning to define German perpetration of World War II and the Holocaust not as crimes against humanity but as early battles (with regrettable but understandable excesses) in the Cold War against communism.
The situation is so bad that German Jews are advised not to wear anything in public that would identify them as Jewish because their safety cannot be guaranteed.
How can this be? Isn’t this the New Germany that’s gone 57 years without a Holocaust or even a pogrom where truth justice and the German way prevail amidst economic wealth a high standard of living that is the envy of their European neighbors and a constitution guaranteeing freedom for everyone regardless of race creed or national origin? What’s changed? The answer is: absolutely nothing.
My thesis is quite simple. While Germany no longer has the military power to enforce the racist ideology of the Nazis and while all extreme manifestations of Nazism are officially outlawed the internal conditions — that is the attitudes worldview and cultural assumptions — that led to the rise of Nazism in Germany are still present because they constitute the basic components of German identity. Nazism was not an aberration; it was the distillation of the German psyche into its essential elements. External Nazism may have been utterly defeated in May of 1945; internal Nazism however remains and will always remain a potential threat as long as there exists a political and/or cultural entity known as Germany.
Now hold on a second I hear many people saying. You can’t possibly claim that Germans are as anti-Semitic today as they were during the years 1933-1945. It is true that Germany today is much different than during the Third Reich. What is different is that due to its total defeat by the Allies Germany today is a client state of America and must do its bidding. That means repression of overt anti-Semitism. It’s bad for business.
The other thing that has changed is that even though Hitler lost World War II he was phenomenally successful in carrying out his ideological agenda. Germany indeed virtually all of Europe is essentially Judenfrei (free of Jews) today due to the efficiency and zeal of the Germans as they perpetrated the Holocaust during the Third Reich. In fact a very convincing case can be made that Nazism is one of the most successful political programs of all time. It accomplished more of its goals in a shorter amount of time than any other comparable political movement and permanently changed the face and political structure of several continents. Germany is wealthy stable relentlessly bourgeois and for all intents and purposes free of Jews.