ANNHILATION OF "SELFISH INDIVIDUALSIM"

Regarding the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt stated that anti-Semitism "explains everything and therefore nothing." Similarly, the term "racism" tells us nothing. The question is: "What was the meaning of "the Jew" in the minds of Hitler and other Nazis?" What idea did the Jew represent? In their passionate desire to destroy Jews, what were the Nazis trying to destroy?

My analysis below of a judgment by the Cologne Labor Court tells the story.

Jews were equated with "selfish individualism," that is--with the unwillingness or inability to assimilate into a national community. Hitler believed that everyone had to be part of a national community. Jews, however, according to Hitler, were genetically incapable of uniting with a community.

There was only one solution, therefore, to the "Jewish problem"--and that was "total annihilation." What was being annihilated was the will or desire to separate from the national community. 

The following judgment by the Cologne Labor Court (January 21, 1941) denied the claim of Jewish employees to a vacation (Noakes & Pridham, 2001):

The precondition for the claim to a vacation—membership of the plant community—does not exist. A Jew cannot be a member of the plant community on account of his whole racial tendency, which is geared to forwarding his personal interests and securing economic advantages.

Jews could not be members of the community because of their tendency to "forward personal interest" and "secure economic advantages." This tendency was believed to be racially given. In other wrods, the Nazis believed that a psychological characteristic of the Jews was part of their genetic make-up (and therefore could not be modified).

 Hitler stated that it was “beside the point whether the individual Jew is ‘decent’ or not." In other words, his condemnation of the Jews was not based on his evaluation of their personal characteristics. Rather, Hitler believed, the Jew carried within himself "those characteristics which Nature has given him.”

By virtue of this racially inherited tendency toward “forwarding personal interests and securing economic advantages,” Jews were imagined to be incapable of participating in the life of a community. The demonic Jewish characteristic--racially given or genetically inherited—was selfish individualism, that is, the inability to sacrifice for a national community. Jews completely lacked, Hitler said,  the conception of “an activity which builds up the life of the community.”

Nazi scholarship declared (Aronsfeld, 1985) that the "peculiar characteristic of Judaism" was its “hostility to human society,” which meant that there could be “no solution to the Jewish question.” A true understanding of Jews insisted on their “total annihilation.”

RICHARD KOENIGSBERTG