Source: Saul Friedlaender, Chapter 3 in: Nazi Germany and the Jews , Vol. I - The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, (New York 1997), p. 73-112.
III
Whereas ordinary racial anti-Semitism is one element within a wider racist world view, in redemptive anti-Semitism the struggle against the Jews is the dominant aspect of a world view in which other racist themes are but secondary appendages.
Redemptive anti-Semitism was born from the fear of racial degeneration and the religious belief in redemption. The main cause of degeneration and the religious belief in redemption. The main cause of degeneration was the penetration of the Jews into the German body politic, into German society, and into the German bloodstream. Germanhood and the Aryan world were on the path to perdition if the struggle against the Jews was not joined; this was to be a struggle to the death. Redemption would come as liberation from the Jews - as their expulsion, possibly their annihilation.
This new anti-Semitism has been depicted as part and parcel of the revolutionary fervour of the early nineteenth century, particularly of the revolutionary spirit of 1848. But it should be pointed out that the main bearers of the new anti-Jewish mystique had all turned against their revolutionary pasts; when Judaism was mentioned in their revolutionary writings, it was in a purely metaphorical sense (mainly as representing Mammon or ΓÇ£the LawΓÇ¥), and whatever revolutionary terminology remained in their new anti-Semitism was meant as ΓÇ£radical change,ΓÇ¥ as ΓÇ£redemptionΓÇ¥ in a strongly religious sense, or, more precisely, in a racial-religious sense 63 .
Various themes of redemptive anti-Semitism can be found in voelkisch ideology in general, but the run-of-the-mill voelkisch obsessions were usually too down-to-earth in their goals to belong to the redemptive sphere. Among the voelkisch ideologues, only the philosopher Eugen Duehring and the biblical scholar Paul de Lagarde came close to this sort of anti-Semitic eschatological worldview. The source of the new trend has to be sought elsewhere, in that meeting point of German Christianity, neromanticism, the mystical cult of sacred Aryan blood, and ultraconservative nationalism: the Bayreuth circle.
I intentionally single out the Bayreuth circle rather than Richard Wagner himself. Although redemptive anti-Semitism derived its impact from the spirit of Bayreuth, and the spirit of Bayreuth would have been non-existent without Richard Wagner, the depth of his personal commitment to this brand of apocalyptic anti-Semitism remains somewhat contradictory. That Wagner's anti-Semitism was a constant and growing obsession after the 1851 publication of his Das Judentum in der Musik ( Judaism in Music ) is unquestionable. That the maestro saw Jewish machinations hidden in every nook and cranny of the new German Reich is notorious. That the redemption theme became the leitmotiv of Wagner's ideology and work during the last years of his life is no less generally accepted. Finally, that the disappearance of the Jews was one of the central elements of his vision of redemption seems also well established. But what, in Wagner's message, was the concrete meaning of such a disappearance? Did it mean the abolition of the Jewish spirit, the vanishing of the Jews as a separate and identifiable cultural and ethnic group, or did redemption imply the actual physical elimination of the Jews? This last interpretation has been argued by, among others, historians such as Robert W. Gutman, Hartmut Zelinsky, and Paul Lawrence Rose 64 . The last in particular identifies Wagner's ΓÇ£revolutionary anti-SemitismΓÇ¥ and its supposedly exterminatory streak with the composer's revolutionary ardor of 1848.
In Judaism in Music , the annihilation of the Jew (and the pamphlet's notorious final words: ΓÇ£the redemption of Ahasuerus - going under!ΓÇ¥) most probably means the annihilation of the Jewish spirit. In this finale the maestro heaps dithyrambic praise upon the political writer Ludwig Boerne, a Jew who in his eyes exemplified the redemption from Jewishness into ΓÇ£genuine manhoodΓÇ¥ by ΓÇ£ceasing to be a Jew.ΓÇ¥ 65 Boerne's example is manifestly the path to be collectively followed. But Wagner's writings of the late 1870s and the 1880s and the redemptive symbolism of the Ring and especially of Parsifal , are indeed extraordinarily ambiguous whenever the Jewish theme directly or indirectly appears. Whether redemption from erotic lust, from worldly carvings, from the struggles for power is achieved, as in the Ring , by way of self-annihilation or, as in Parsifal , by mystical purification and the rebirth of a sanctified Germanic Christendom, the Jew rthe symbol of the worldly lures that keep humanity in shackles. Thus the redemptive struggle had to be a total struggle, and the Jew, like the evil and unredeemable Klingsor in Parsifal , had to disappear. In Siegfried the allusion is even more direct: The Germanic hero Siegfried kills the repulsive Nibelung dwarf Mime, whom Wagner himself identifies, according to Cosima Wagner's diaries, as a ΓÇ£ Juedling. ΓÇ¥ 66 All in all the relation between Siegfried and Mime, overloaded with the most telling symbolism, was probably meant as a fierce anti-Semitic allegory of the relation between German and Jew - and of the ultimate fate of the Jew 67 . Even the Master's jokes, like his ΓÇ£wishΓÇ¥ that all Jews be burned at a performance of Lessing's Nathan the Wise 68 , expressed the underlying intensity of his exterminatory fantasies. And yet, Wagner's ideas about the Jews remained inconsistent, and the number of Jews in his entourage, from the pianists Carl Tausig and Josef Rubinstein to the conductor Hermann Levi and the impresario Angelo Neuman, is well known. Indeed, Wagner's behavior toward Levi was often overtly sadistic, and Rubinstein was a notoriously self-hating Jew. Yet these Jews belonged to the maestro's close entourage, and, more significant, Wagner gave Neumann considerable leeway regarding the handling of contracts and performances of his works: No consistently fanatical anti-Semite would have allowed such a massive compromise.
Although Wagner himself embraced the theoretical racism of the French essayist Arthur de Gobineau, the intellectual foundation of redemptive anti-Semitism were mainly fostered and elaborated by the other Bayreuthians, especially after the composer's death, during the reign of his widow, Cosima: Hans von Wolzogen, Ludwig Scheemann, and, first and foremost, the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain. In a classic study of the Bayreuth Circle, Winfried Schueler defined Bayreuth's special significance within the anti-Semitic movement and Chamberlain's own decisive contribution: It is in the nature of anti-Semitic ideologies to use a more or less prominent friend-foe model. What nonetheless gives Bayreuth's anti-Semitism an unmistakably particular aspect is the resoluteness with which the opposition between Germandom and Jewry is raised to the position of the central theme of world history. In Chamberlain's Foundations [his 1899 magnum opus, The Foundation of the Nineteenth Century ] this dualistic image of history finds its tersest formulation.' 69
In line with Bayreuth's oft-repeated leitmotiv, Chamberlain called for the birth of a German-Christian religion, a Christianity cleansed of its Jewish spirit, as the sole basis for regeneration. In other words, the redemption of Aryan Christianity would be achieved only through the elimination of the Jew. But even here it is not entirely clear whether or not the redemptive struggle against the Jews was to be waged against the Jewish spirit only. In the closing lines of volume 1, after stating that in the nineteenth century, amid a chaos of mixed breeds, the two ΓÇ£pureΓÇ¥ races that stood facing each other were the Jews and the German, Chamberlain writes: No arguing about ΓÇ£humanityΓÇ¥ can alter the fact that this means a struggle. Where the struggle is not waged with cannon-balls, it goes on silently in the heart of society.... But this struggle, silent though it be, is above all others a struggle for life and death.' 70 Chamberlain probably did not knowwhat he meant by this in terms of concrete action, but he undoubtedly offered the most systematic formulation of what he considered the fundamental struggle shaping the course of world history.
Three years after the publication of Chamberlain's Foundations , the Frankfurter Zeitung had to admit that it has caused more of a ferment than any other appearance on the book market in recent years.' 71 By 1915 the book had sold more than one hundred thousand copies and was being widely referred to. As the years went by, Chamberlain, who in 1908 had married Richard and Cosima Wagner's daughter, Eva, became ever more obsessed with the ΓÇ£Jewish question.ΓÇ¥ In nightmares, he reported, he saw himself kidnapped by Jews and sentenced to death 72 . My lawyer friend in Munich,' he informed an old acquaintance, tells me that there is no living being whom the Jews hate more than me.' 73 The war, and even more so the early years of the Weimar Republic, drove his obsession to its utmost limits. Hitler visited him in Bayreuth in 1923: The by now paralysed prophet of redemptive anti-Semitism was granted the supreme happiness of meeting - and recognising as such - Germany's saviour from the Jews 74 .
IV
The impact of the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution on the European imagination was stronger than that of any other event since the French Revolution. Mass death, shattering political upheavals and visions of catastrophes to come fueled the pervasive apocalyptic mood that settled over Europe 75 . Beyond nationalist exacerbation in several countries, the hopes, fears, and hatreds of millions crystallised along the main political divide that would run through the history of the following decades: fear of revolution on one side, demand for it on the other. Those who feared the revolution frequently identified its leaders with the Jews. Now the proof for the Jewish world conspiracy was incontrovertible: Jewry was about to destroy all established order, annihilate Christianity, and impose its dominion. In her 1921 book, World Revolution , the English historian Nesta Webster asked, who are... the authors of the Plot?....What is their ultimate object in wishing to destroy civilization? What do they hope to gain by it? It is this apparent absence of motive, this seemingly aimless campaign of destruction carried on by the Bolsheviks of Russia, that has led many people to believe in the theory of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity.' 76 Webster was among these believers, and so, in his own way, at the time, was Thomas Mann. We also spoke of the type of Russian Jew, the leader of the world revolutionary movement,' Mann wrote in his diary on May 2, 1918, recording a conversation with Ernst Bertram, that explosive mixture of Jewish intellectual radicalism and Slavic Christian enthusiasm.' He added: A world that still retains an instinct of self-preservation must act against such people with all the energy that can be mobilised and with the swiftness of martial law.' 77
The most explosive ideological mixture present in post war Germany was a fusion of constant fear of the Red menace with nationalist resentment born of defeat. The two elements seemed to be related, and the chaotic occurrences that marked the early months of the post-Imperial regime seemed to confirm the worst suspicions and fuel the fires of hatred.
Two months after Germany's defeat, the extreme left-wing revolutionary Spartacists attempted to seize power in Berlin. The uprising failed, and on the evening of January 15, 1919, its main leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, probably having been betrayed, were arrested at their hiding place in Berlin-Wilmersdorf 78 . They were brought to the Eden Hotel, the headquarters of the Garde-Kavallerie-Schuetzen-Division, where they were interrogated by a Captain Pabst. Liebknecht was led out first, taken by car to the Tiergarten, and ΓÇ£shot while trying to escape.ΓÇ¥ Luxemburg, already brutally beaten at the Eden, was dragged out half dead, moved from one car to another, and then shot. Her body was thrown into the Landwehrkanal, where it remained until March. A military tribunal acquitted most of the officers directly involved in the murders (sentencing only two of them to minimal imprisonment), and Defense Minister Gustav Noske, a Social Democrat, duly signed these unlikely verdicts. Rosa Luxemburg and her closest companions among the Berlin Spartacists, Leo Jogisches and Paul Levi, were Jews.
The prominence of Jews among the leaders of the revolution in Bavaria added fuel to the already passionate anti-Semitic hatred of the Right as did their role among the Berlin Spartacists. It was Kurt Eisner, the Jewish leaderof the Independent Socialist Party (USPD) in Bavaria, who toppled the Wittelsbach dynasty, which for centuries had given Bavaria its kings. During his short term as prime minister, Eisner added enemies by publishing incriminating archives regarding Germany's responsibility for the outbreak of the war and appealing to the German people to help in rebuilding devastated areas of enemy territory, which was simply interpreted as a call for the enslavement of Germans from children to old people, [who would] be obliged to carry stones for the war-torn areas.' 79
On February 21, 1919, Eisner was assassinated by Count Anton Arco-Valley, a right-wing law student. After a brief interim government of majority Socialists, the first of two Republics of the Councils was established. In fact only a minority among the leaders of the Bavarian republics were of Jewish origin, but some of their most visible personalities could identified as such 80 .
Exacerbated right-wing opinion accused these Jewish leaders of being responsible for the main atrocity committed by the Reds: the shooting of hostages in the cellar of the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich. To this day the exact sequence of events is unclear. Apparently, on April 26, 1919, seven activists of the radical anti-Semitic Thule Society, among them its secretary, Countess Heila von Westarp, were detained at the organisation's office. Two officers of the Bavarian Army and a Jewish artist named Ernst Berger were added to the seven Thule members. On April 30, after news reached Munich, that the counter-revolutionary volunteer units, the Free Corps of Franz Freiherr Ritter von Epp, had killed Red prisoners in the town of Starnberg, the commander of the Red forces, a former navy man named Rudold Egelhofer, ordered the shooting of the hostages. These executions, an isolated atrocity, became the quintessential illustration of Jewish Bolshevik terror in Germany; in the words of British historian Reginald Phelps, this murder of hostages goes far to explain... the passionate wave of anti-Semitism that spread because the deed was alleged to represent the vengeance of ΓÇ£Jewish Soviet leadersΓÇ¥ ...on anti-Semitic foes.' Needless to say, the fact that Egelhofer and ΓÇ£all those directly connected with the shootingΓÇ¥ were not Jews, and that one of the victims was Jewish, did not change these perceptions in the least 81 .
The impact of the situation in Berlin and Bavaria was amplified by revolutionary agitation in other parts of Germany. According to the pro-Nazi French historian Jacques Benoist-Mechin, revolutionaries of Jewish background were no less active in various other regional upheavals: In Magdeburg, it is Brandes; in Dresden, Lipinsky, Geyer, and Fleissner; in the Ruhr, Markus and Levinsohn; in Bremerhaven and Kiel, Gruenewalde and Kohn; in the Palatinate, Lilienthal and Heine.' 82 What is important here is not the accuracy of every detail but the widespread attitude it expressed.
These events in Germany were perceived in relation to simultaneous upheavals in Hungary: the establishment of Bela Kun's Soviet Republic and the fact that the ΓÇ£JewishΓÇ¥ presence was even more massive there than in Berlin and Munich. The British historian of Central Europe R. W. Seton-Watson noted in May 1919: Anti-Semitic feeling is growing steadily in Budapest (which is not surprising, considering that not only the whole Government, save 2, and 28 out of the 36 ministerial commissioners are Jews, but also a laproportof the Red officers).' 83 Some of these revolutionaries, such as the notorious Tibor Szamuely, were indeed downright sinister figures 84 . Finally, the massive disproportion of leaders of Jewish origin among the Bolsheviks themselves seemed to give cogency to what had become a pervasive myth that spread and resonated throughout the Western world 85 .
There was no mystery in the fact that Jews joined the revolutionary left in large numbers. These men and women belonged to the generation of newly emancipated Jews who had abandoned the framework of religious tradition for the ideas and ideals of rationalism and, more often than not, or socialism (or Zionism). Their political choices derived both from the discrimination to which they had been subjected, mainly in Russia but also in Central Europe, and from the appeal of the socialist message of equality. In the new socialist world, all of suffering humanity would be redeemed, and with that, the Jewish stigma would disappear. It was, for at least some of these ΓÇ£non-Jewish Jews,ΓÇ¥ 86 a vision of a secularised messianism, which may have sounded like a distant echo of the massage of the Prophets they no longer recognised. In fact, almost all of them were actually hostile, in the name of revolutionary universalism, to anything Jewish. In no way did they represent the political tendencies of the great majority of the Central and Western European Jewish populations, which were politically liberal or close to the Social Democrats, only a fraction was decidedly conservative. For example, the German Democratic Party, favoured by most German Jews, was the very epitome of the liberal centre of the political scene 87 . Much of this was ignored by the non-Jewish public. Particularly in Germany the nationalist camp's accumulated hatred needed a pretext and a target for its outpourings. And so it pounced on the revolutionary Jews.
Rosa Luxemburg and the Jewish leaders in Bavaria represented the threat of Jewish revolution. For the nationalists the appointment of a number of Jewish cabinet ministers and other high officials proved that the hated republic was indeed in Jewish hands; the Right could point to Hugo Haase, Otto Landsberg, Hugo Preuss, Eugen Schiffer, Emanuel Wurm, Oskar Cohn, and to the most visible Jewish minister of all, Walther Rathenau 88 . Rosa Luxemburg had been murdered on January 15, 1919; Walther Rathenau, appointed foreign minister barely six months before, was assassinated on June 25, 1922.
Rathenau's murderers - Erwin Kern (aged twenty-four) and Hermann Fischer (twenty-six), both members of a Free Corps unit called Naval Brigade Ehrhardt, and their accomplices Ernst Werner Techow (twenty-one), his brother Gerd (sixteen), and Ernst von Salomon, also a former Free Corps member - were, in Salomon's words, ΓÇ£young men from good families.ΓÇ¥ 89 At their trial Techow declared that Rathenau was one of the Elders of Zion 90 .
The canonical text of the Jewish-conspiracy theorists, Protocols of the Elders of Zion , was secretly fabricated in the mid-1890s by order of Piotr Rachkovsky, chief of the Paris office of the Okhrana, the czarist secret police 91 . The Protocols comprised elements of two works from the 1860s, a French anti-Napoleon III pamphlet and a German anti-Semitic novel, Biarritz , by one Hermann Goedsche 92 . the entire concoction was meant to fight the spread of liberalism inside the Russian Empire. Rachkovsky was merely following the rich tradition of attributing worldwide conspiracies to Jews.
References:
63 The argument for the definition of this new anti-Semitic current as ΓÇ£revolutionary anti-SemitismΓÇ¥ has been made in Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Anti-Semitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, N.J., 1990). See in particular Rose's argument about Wagner, pp. 358ff., as well as in idem, Wagner: Race and Revolution (New Haven, Conn., 1992).
64 See Robert W. Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind and His Music (New York, 1968), mainly pp. 389ΓÇô441; Hartmut Zelinsky, Richard Wagner: Ein deutsches Thema 1876ΓÇô1976 , 3rd ed. (Vienna, 1983); Rose, Wagner , mainly pp. 135ΓÇô70.
65 Richard Wagner's Prose Works , vol. 3 (London, 1894; reprint, New York, 1966), p. 100.
66 Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebuecher , vol. 4 [1881ΓÇô83], (Munich, 1982), p. 734.
67 Gustav Mahler remarked that Mime's music parodied bodily characteristics that were supposedly Jewish. For a study of the anti-Jewish imagery in Wagner's musical oeuvre, see Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln, Neb., 1995. For the Mahler remark, see ibid., p. 28.
68 Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebuecher , p. 852.
69 Winfried Schueler, Der Bayreuther Kreis von seiner Entstehung bis zum Ausgang der Wilhelminischen Ära (Muenster, 1971), p. 256.
70 Houston Stewart C, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century , vol. 1 (1st English ed., 1910; reprint, New York, 1968) p. 578.
71 Geoffrey Field, Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Cahmberlain (NYork, 1981), p. 225.
72 Ibid., p. 326.
73 Ibid.
74 On Hitler's visit to Chamberlain, see ibid., p. 436.
75 Some historians have emphasised the similarities of the reactions to the war all over Europe. See mainly Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, England, 1995), others have pointed to the differences: the rise of an anti-war sentiment in France, that of a genocidal mood in Germany. See Bartov, Murder in Our Midst , mainly chap. 2. But an immense literature recognises the apocalyptic post war mood as such.
76 Nesta H. Webster, World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilization (London, 1921), p. 293.
77 Thomas Mann, Tagebuecher 1918ΓÇô1921 , ed. Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt am Main, 1979), p. 223.
78 The details that follow are taken from Peter Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg , vol. 2 (Oxford, 1966), pp. 772ff.
79 Friedlaender, ΓÇ£Political Transformations,ΓÇ¥ p. 159.
80 Among the twenty-seven members of the government of the Bavarian Republic of the Councils, eight of the most influential were of Jewish origin: Eugen Levine-Nissen, Towia Axelrod, Frida Rubiner (alias Friedjung), Ernst Toller, Erich Muehsam, Gustav Landauer, Ernst Niekisch, Arnold Wadler. Hans-Helmuth Knuetter, Die Juden und die Deutsche Linke in der Weimarer Republik, 1918ΓÇô1933 (Duesseldorf, 1971), p. 118.
81 Reginald H. Phelps, ΓÇ£'Before Hitler Came': Thule Society and Germanenorden,ΓÇ¥ Journal of Modern History 35 (1963), pp. 253ΓÇô54.
82 Jacques Benoist-Méchin, Histoire de l'armée allemande , vol. 2 (Paris, 1964), p. 216. Other Jewish left-wing politicians provoked no less negative reactions. On November 8, 1918, for instance, just after the break of relations between Germany and Russia, the Jewish Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Adolf Yoffe, about to leave Germany, transferred large sums of money to the Jewish Independent depury Oskar Cohn, who had become undersecretary in the Ministry of Justice. The money was meant to further revolutionary propaganda and for the acquisition of weapons. The facts soon became known and were widely discussed in the press. For the details of this transaction and of the debate in the press see Knuetter, Die Juden und die Deutsche Linke , p. 70. Possibly even more violent was the reaction of the nationalist camp to the fact that a Jewish member of the National Assembly, Georg Gothein, became chairman of the Investigation Committee on the causes of the war and, together with Oskar Cohn and Hugo Sinzheimer, was in charge of the investigation of Hindenburg and of Ludendorff. See Friedlaender, “Political Transformations,” pp. 158–61, and mainly Barbara Suchy, “The Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus (II): From the First World War to Its Dissolution in 1933,” LBIY 30 (1985): 78–79.
83 Quoted in Nathaniel Katzburg, Hungary and the Jews: Policy and Legislation 1920ΓÇô1943 (Ramat-Gan, 1981), p. 35.
84 On the revolutionary events and on the leaders of the Hungarian revolution, see in particular Rudolf L. Toekés, Béla Kun and the Hungarian Soviet Republic (New York, 1967).
85 Two French novelists, the brothers Jérôme and Jean Tharaud, chronicled the Béla Kun regime in Hungary. Their historical fantasy appeared in 1921 and translated into English in 1934, from the 64th French edition. Almost all of Béla Kun's revolutionary companions were Jews. Cf. Jérôme and Jean Tharaud, When Israel Is King (New York, 1924).
86 Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (London, 1968).
87 Hamburger and Pulzer quote two sets of statistics about the Jewish vote in Weimar Germany: According to a contemporary observer, in 1924, 42 percent of the Jews cast their ballots for the SPD, 40 percent for the DDP, 8 percent for the KDP, 5 percent for the DVP, and 2 percent for the Wirtschaftspartei; according to Arnold Paucker's inquiry of 1972, the division was the following: 64 percent DDP, 28 percent SPD, 4 percent DVP, 4 percent KPD. See Hamburger and Pulzer, ΓÇ£Jews as Voters in the Weimar Republic,ΓÇ¥ p. 48. The main point is that in both counts more than 80 percent of Jewish voters opted for progressive liberals or for the moderate left.
88 On Jewish participation in the political life of the German Republic in its early phase, see in particular Werner T. Angress, ΓÇ£Juden im politischen Leben der Revolutionszeit,ΓÇ¥ in Mosse, Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution ; idem, ΓÇ£Revolution und Demokratie: Juedische Politiker in Berlin 1918/19,ΓÇ¥ in Reinhard Ruerup, ed., Juedische Geschichte in Berlin: Essays und Studien (Berlin, 1995). On Rathenau und Ernst Schulin, Walter Rathenau: Repraesentant, Kritiker und Opfer seiner Zeit (Goettingen, 1979).
89 Ibid., p. 137.
90 Rathenau's assassins claimed further that by sponsoring the fulfilment policy demanded by the Allies Jewish minister was intent on the perdition of Germany, that he aimed at the Bolshevization of the country, that he was married to the sister of the Jewish Bolshevik leader Karl Radek, and so on. The anti-Jewish motivation of Rathenau's murderers is unquestionable. What remains unclear, though, is whether - beyond their hatred for the Jew Rathenau - his killers were instruments in the hands of ultra-right-wing groups that aimed to exploit his murder to destabilise the entire republican system. On this issue see Martin Sabrow, Der Rathenaumord: Rekonstruktion einer Verschwoerung gegen die Republik von Weimar (Munich, 1994), mainly pp. 114ff.
91 For a detailed reconstruction of the origins and spreading of the Protocols see Norman Cohn , Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London, 1967).
92 The anti-Napoleon III pamphlet was entitled ΓÇ£Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel,ΓÇ¥ and composed in Brussels in 1864 by a French liberal, Maurice Joly; the novel Biarritz , written in 1868 by the German Hermann Goedsche, alias John Ratcliff, described the secret meeting of the heads of the Tribes of Israel in a Prague cemetery to plot Jewish domination of the world.
