une 22, 1941. Hitler had signaled his intentions when he told the Reichstag on January 30, 1939:
If the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe succeed again in plunging the nations into a world war, the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth and the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race throughout Europe (Lukacs 188).
In the 1920s Hitler made the goal of making Germany Judenrein or free of Jews, a cardinal tenet of Nazi ideology. After he became Chancellor in 1933, he elevated to the level of national policy German anti-semitism which Friedlander said by 1914 was "in comparison to that of France, Austria, and Russia, . . . certainly the most extreme" (25). For centuries, the Jews in Europe had been reviled and persecuted --i.e "slaughtered, driven out, or forced into ghettos and restricted to demeaning trades," primarily because of the traditional belief that they had murdered Christ (Weiss 1). In the late 18th century Jews were emancipated in Holland, France and England --i.e. were granted full political and legal rights, but they only achieved that status later (after 1859) in Germany. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Jews in Germany made great progress, especially in the arts, finance and commerce and the liberal professions, but Goldhagen said that in Germany "the central image of the Jews held them to be malevolent, powerful, a principal . . . source of the ills that beset Germany, and therefore dangerous to the welfare of Germany" (77).
Through their campaigns of hate, terror and intimidation, the Nazis held out the Jews, only 525,000 of whom lived in Germany in 1933, less than one percent of the population, as the scapegoats for Germany's defeat in World War I, the authors of the Bolshevik threat and the cause of many of its political, economic and social problems in the 1920s and early 1930s. Jews were portrayed as evil and subhuman, a source of racial pollution of...