PROFESSOR YALE MAGRASS: JEWISH GERMS INFLICT THE GERMAN BODY

The Nazis believed Jews orchestrated an insidious plot to dominate the world. They initiated a life against death struggle between the Aryan and Jewish race--based on the belief that Jews were germs infecting the German body (politic).

Jews were conceived as the ultimate international cosmopolitans who had wandered the world without a state for 2000 years. Whereas most Europeans were rural farmers, Jews were thought to be urban money-lenders. The Nazis believed that international finance capital had brought urbanization to destroy the serenity of the rural village; to undermine tradition, and dedication to race, community and nation.

The German peasant, according to the Nazis, felt a commune with nature such that he and it were inseparable. The Aryan ingrained within the dark cold forests of Northern Europe experienced depth, intensity, a yearning for the sun. His physical make-up, light-skin, blonde, blue-eyed--reflected this yearning.  All Germans shared in this essence, constituting an organic community.

The disruption of the natural order brought on by industrialization and urbanization could not lie within "the volk”--a spiritual quality shared by all true Germans. It must have been an alien imposition. No one could have been more responsible than the representative of the trans-European nation, the Jews, within Germany’s borders.  The Jew was seen as violating volkish norms in having no organic ties; he was primarily concerned with pecuniary.  The transience of urban life was a reflection of his transiency. German volkish identity was defined in contrast to the Jew.