What_messages_might_we_discern_from_the (1).docx

1
What messages might we discern from the
recurrence of the ninth of November and
other significant occasions in German
history from 1848 to the present?
By Julian Scutts
Copyright Julian scutts 2024

From November the ninth in 1918, when
Philipp Scheidemann, without full official
backing, declared the establishment of the
German Republic,
to November the ninth in 1989, when
Guenter Schabowski, without full clearance
from the East German government, stated
at a press conference that with immediate
effect East Berliners were allowed entry to
West Berlin.
By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1989-1109-030 / Lehmann, Thomas / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA
3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5424805

TOPICS
Robert Blum, Martyr in the Cause of Establishing a Unified and
Democratic German Nation
From November the Ninth to November the Eleventh in 1918: The
Three Days that Changed Germany and the World Forever.
And What Part did November the Eighth Play in German History
since 1918?
Why didn't Hitler's hostility towards Jews and Communists fully
surface before the fall of the Bavarian Soviet Republic in May
1919 ?
From Rose Monday to Ash Wednesday in 1933
And What about Von Hindenburg’s Part in the Fall of the Weimar
Republic?
With the Kristallnacht on November the Ninth in Mind - a Review
of the Course of Anti-Semitism Since this Term was Coined by
Wilhelm Marr
Konrad Adenauer – ‘Der Alte’
Back to the Ninth of November: 1989, the Fall of the Berlin Wall
and Remaining Questions about the State of Germany and the
World“
…And the Message?

Robert Blum, Martyr in the Cause of Establishing a Unified
and Democratic German Nation
November 9 has become widely known as Germany's Schicksalstag -
day of destiny- particularly since the opening of the Berlin Wall on that
date in 1989 when the recurrence of events of historical moment on
November 9 finally earned widespread recognition as some kind of
phenomenon, for on the same day in the year the beginning German
Republic was proclaimed, Hitler and Ludendorff mounted an attempt to
overthrow the same Republic and, most ominously, the so-called Reichs-
Kristallnacht took place in 1938, this being the state-organized
destruction of synagogues and Jewish property that pointed the way to
the Holocaust. Add to all this a less well-known date in German history,
the execution of Robert Blum in Viennain1848, which marked the
crushing of the first opportunity for the establishment of a
democratic framework within which German states could work together
towards peace, security and ultimate unity.
Robert Blum was born on November 10, 1807 in Cologne. His family
circumstances were harsh but after working in various trades he found
secure employment in a theatre company and then scope for self-
education and the development of writing skills which included writing
poetry dedicated to the cause of liberty and social justice. His political
involvement brought him into leading positions within the movement
towards political and constitutional reform of the German
Confederation and promoted him to the office of delegate to the Diet
of 1848 held in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, where he played a
prominent and influential role. He was a Radical Liberal in terms of the
party-political spectrum of the times but he was in no sense an
extremist or demagogue. He eschewed Prussian ethnocentric
militarism, recourse to violence as a vehicle of protest and remained a
Catholic, through one who rejected certain forms of rigid
authoritarianism and clerical intransigence. He went to Vienna during an

outburst or revolutionary foment which provoked a severe
counterrevolutionary reaction. The regime arrested Blum on charges of
terrorist activity and despite his right to immunity as a delegate to the
Frankfurt Diet he was condemned to death and executed on
November 9. Can we connect the dots between the historical
occurrences noted above? The tragic failure of the bid to reform the
constitution of the German Confederation in 1848 set the scene for
the chain of events that led to world war, the rise of Hitler and the
Holocaust. On the other hand, the opening of the Berlin Wall brought
the end of the Cold War but much remains to be done before we can
talk of the dawning of a new age.
From November the Ninth to November the Eleventh in
1918: The Three Days that Changed Germany and the
World Forever.

On the ninth of November 1918 Kaiser Wilhelm lost the position of
Germany's head of state when Prince Max von Baden, the German
Empire's last chancellor, transferred the powers of his office to
Friedrich Ebert, the leader of a three-party coalition of parties - his
party, the SPD (Social Democrats), the Catholic Centre Party and the
German Liberal Party - which had attained a dominant position in the
Reichstag. On the same day Philipp Scheidemann, a leading member of
the SPD, declared from a window of the Reichstag that the Kaiser had
abdicated. The fact that the Kaiser had not truly done so made no
difference. The German monarchy was over for good.
On the following day Ebert received an unexpected phone call from
General Wilhelm Groener the head of the joint military command
structure that exercised authority over the German armed forces in
the Kaiser's name, although the Kaiser was by now the Emperor in name
only. The war was not over, albeit only a day off. but its end was
imminent. The western allies had made it clear that there would be no
peace settlement as long as Wilhelm was still on the throne, Groener
made a surprising proposal. The military would defend the prospective
government - on certain conditions, of course, chief among them being
an acceptance that the military should retain independence from civil
control and would thus pose 'a state within the state.' The parties
agreed that Ebert's provisional regime would draw up a constitution
that ensured that a future president could suspend the normal
parliamentary process ‘in the case of need' as when a revolution
threatened or any situation arose that the President saw as dangerous.
Was this deal a sensible arrangement or a pact with the devil that
promised short-term benefits but denied the attainment of long-term
goals? Clearly a new government would have to rely on military support
of some kind in a period of massive change and volatile politics with the
radical wing of the socialist movement under the direction of Karl
Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg lurching towards the Russian soviet
model of state control.

In one way or another the Kaiser, von Hindenburg, Ludendorff and
Groener himself endorsed the Ebert-Groener deal, though its terms
were not revealed to the public until 1925. However, those named
above interpreted its import in very different ways. To Ludendorff the
deal offered a chance to lumber the new parliament with responsibility
for expected reverses that Ebert and his coalition would inevitably
have to suffer in their dealings with the western allies and when
contending with social unrest. Besides, the deal would also divert
attention from the failure of von Hindenburg and Ludendorff in the
conduct of the war by pinning blame on certain 'treacherous elements'
that undermined the patriotic war effort. The so-called 'stab-in-the
back- myth' was already in the making. Groener himself, I contend, did
not share in this cynical construction if we take his subsequent career
as a loyal servant of the Weimar Republic into account., in which role
he did his best to resist the inroads of Nazi influence.
On the eleventh of November Matteas Erzberger, the leader of the
Catholic Centre party, signed the document that certified his
acceptance of the Armistice provisions on behalf of the German nation
and thus acknowledged his country's defeat after over four years of
horrendous warfare. In view of his assassination on August 28 in 1921
by agents of an ultra-nationalist paramilitary group, a successor of the
infamous Ehrhardt Brigade which had orchestrated the murders of
Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg on the 15th of January in 1919,
he also signed his own death warrant.
If any three people became the chief objects of the most intense
hatred in the minds of ultra-nationalists at the end of the Great War
three candidates for this dubious honour stand out: Karl Liebknecht,
Rosa Luxembourg and, yes, Philipp Erzberger, neither a socialist nor a
Jew. Though swept up by pro-war enthusiasm in 1914 he came round to
the recognition that continued warfare proved futile and injurious to

the true interests of the suffering German people. Ebert, who had
enough trouble on his hands anyway , must have felt slightly relieved
that no member of his own party would incur the odium that attached
to any German who endorsed the Armistice's provisions, however
necessary and however inevitable such a humiliation was, even in the
eyes of the Kaiser, von Hindenburg and Ludendorff.
The Ebert-Groener deal could not itself have encouraged the culture
of violence and intrigue that marred not least the reputation of the
SPD itself during 1919 and 1920 as its terms were not made public, but
those who led contingents of the Freikorps down the path of murder
and terrorism were under the impression that they could continue their
activities with impunity when judges, soldiers and politicians turned a
blind eye to their criminal pursuits. Gustav Noske, the first minister of
home security in the provisional government, sided with the forces of
reaction and brutal suppression rather than with workers and
defenders of parliamentary government as when the short-lived Kapp
Putsch took place to be followed immediately by the crushing of the
Ruhr workers' rebellion with ruthless energy.
The stresses caused by popular resentment as the Versailles Treaty,
the tensions of a situation close to civil war and the spectre of the
Rhineland's secession from Berlin frittered away the initial
advantages enjoyed by the SPD-led 'coalition of the three colours of
democracy, (black for the Catholic Centre Party, red for the SPD and
gold for the Free German Democrats (the colours that composed the
symbol of hope for a unified and democratic Germany since 1848). In
the first election of the Weimar Republic the SPD could now muster
less than forty per cent of the electorate's votes, which made it
increasingly difficult to form viable majorities in parliament, if at all.
Were the seeds of the Weimar Republic's decline and fall sown before
its establishment, perhaps even during the three-day period of

transition from November the Ninth until to November 11 and the end
of what once went by the name of 'The Great War'?
And What Part did November the Eighth Play in German
History since 1918?
November the Ninth has gone down in history as Germany's 'day of
destiny.' On the ninth of November the Kaiser was forced into
retirement and Germany adopted a republican form of government. On

the ninth of November Hitler and General von Ludendorff failed in
their attempt to stage a coup d'etat in Bavaria. Again on this date the
so-called ‘Reichs-Kristallnacht’ against Jews was staged and, on a
brighter note, the Berlin Wall was breached, allowing East Berliners
the freedom to enter the western half of their city, which in turn set
the premise for German reunification. But what about November the
eighth? Events that occurred in Germany on that date, though less
sensational in the impact they created than those I have just cited,
were hardly less important and consequential in the long term. Indeed,
the failure of the Hitler-Ludendorff putsch marked the decisive
inflection point in the course of German history between the
establishment of the Weimar Republic and Hitler's seizure of power in
1933.Though the date of the so-called Beer Hall putsch is placed on
the ninth of November, by the close of the eighth of November it
seemed that Hitler and Ludendorff were on the point of achieving
their goal. Those who composed the ruling triumvirate of the Bavarian
government were held as hostages in the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall,
one of Munich's largest meeting places of the drinking classes, that
had been surrounded by heavily armed members of the SA. The head
of the triumvirate, Gustav Ritter von Kahr vacillated over the decision
to back the putsch but, in Hitler's view at least, was moving in Hitler
and Ludendorff's direction. There was more than one reason as to why
the coup failed on the follow
to clinch a deal with the government triumvirate and Ludendorff
released them somewhat too early for his own good. Though von Kahr
fully shared Hitler's at1itude to Jews and the acceptance of
Germany's defeat, he was first and foremost a Bavarian nationalist and
therefore ill-disposed to accept the authority of Ludendorff, a prime
representative of the Prussian military establishment. Leading Catholic
tradition alists withheld support of the putschist cause at a decisive
moment. The events to which I ascribe such great significance both
occurred in Bavaria at a juncture in history when it was by no means
certain that Germany would preserve its unity. Powerful secessionist

trends were at work not only in Bavaria but also -and more pressingly -
in the Rhineland where Conrad Adenauer and fellow Rhinelanders
advocated the establishment of an independent Rhineland under French
protection. There were calls for the independence of Saxony too. With
such a background in mind we note that Kurt Eisner, both a reputed
Jewish intellectual and a popular and widely admired radical socialist
became the president of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. It
must be admitted, however, that he lacked the practical skills required
of a state leader in his crucial position, a lack shared by those who
followed him in that capacity. They were philosophers and in the case
of Ernst Toller they installed an inspired poet but they were not
competent leaders of state. Their poor example
between themselves and the more moderate SPD. By the way, It is not
generally appreciated that the aristocratic order of the German
empire collapsed not in Berlin but in Munich, not with the overthrow of
the Hohenzollern dynasty but with that of the Wittelsbachs. Further
to being a member of the Social Democratic Party, which was bad
enough from a certain point of view, Eisner was also a proponent of its
most radical wing. a man who had opposed any support of the German
war effort, which he did on the basis of the perceived need to defend
international workers' solidarity. His convictions entailed his
imprisonment for opposing national security and the German war
effort. Worse still in the eyes of extreme nationalists, he maintained
the ultimate heresy , the position that Germany was chiefly to blame
for starting the Great War and was thus ready to accept the terms
that the victorious allies would impose on Germany after the war. For
this there was a bitter consequence. He was assassinated in
Februaryi919 by Anton Graf von Arco, a man who laid great stress on
his military and aristocratic prowess and saw himself as an avenger of
injury to German and Bavarian honour Even so, the Bavarian Soviet
Republic was not immediately brought down. The assassin got off
lightly in court. as did many another terrorist or hitman on the
extreme right of German politics.

Among the most notorious elements in this category were members of
breakaway members of in the Freikorps, a loose confederation of
disaffected servicemen who believed that socialists and Communists
had brought about Germany's defeat in the Great War, Amid the
uneasy and ambiguous compromise between the German High Command
and the new republican government militant activists on the politically
right side of the postwar scene could rest assured that their
elimination of leftist politicians would not call down severe punishments
in courts of law. This proved to be the case when a group of ten
military men in their self-appointed role of defenders of the authority
of the state brutally murdered Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht,
leaders of the Spartacus or Communist faction, while 'escorting them'
to police headquarters in Berlin in January 1919. At the ensuing court
martial the ringleader Captain Waldemar Pabst, first general staff
officer of a recently formed crack division of the Prussian army, and
immediate followers were acquitted while two subaltern servicemen
received relatively mild sentences as it could not be denied that
Liebknecht and Luxembourg must have received ‘unduly rough handling’
during their transfer towards the police headquarters. The party of
radical socialists movement never truly recovered from the blow,
despised as much by the SPD minister of the Interior Gustav Noske as
by General von Hindenburg.
We return to the Bavarian Soviet Republic which lingered on for
several months in1919 until it fell victim as much to its inner
weaknesses and the ideological infighting of its membership as to the
intervention of hostile external forces when Gustav Noske ordered the
invasion of Bavaria by the German army, thus 'killing two birds with one
stone,' that is to say: by extinguishing the Bavarian Soviet Republic
and by bringing Bavaria back into the fold of a seemingly united
Germany. Even today Bavarians are proud of being citizens of the

'Freistaat Bayern. They may be less proud of the fact that for no fault
of their own Bavaria was the stamping ground of the early Nazis. Most
of those who became leading National-Socialists had been Hitler's
cronies during the party's Bavarian interlude. The list merely begins
with Hess, Himmler, Roehm, Rosenberg and Goering. Goebbels, a
Rhinelander, poses a notable exception and he did have certain
misgivings about being fully committed to Hitler's Bavaria-based new
movement before dispelling them entirely. Hitler learned from the
Beer Putsch fiasco that the way to destroying democracy lay in
exploiting the apparatus of the democratic state as a weapon against
itself. The trauma of his first attempt to take control of the German
state left a mark though. He never forgave von Kahr for thwarting the
plan to take over the Bavarian state. The score was settled on the
'Night of the Long Knives’ in June 1934.
Why didn't Hitler's hostility towards Jews and Communists
fully surface before the fall of the Bavarian Soviet Republic
in May 1919?
Why did Hitler develop such an extreme and ultimately insane hatred
of Jews that it led him to a policy of extermination? Many have

pondered this question but its enormity has obstructed the path to a
full answer. We cannot assign a date to any documented expression of
this hatred before September in 1919. Before this date Hitler had
already been living in Bavaria for nine or so months without expressing
in written form any strong views on Jews or socialist revolutionaries.
Quite to the contrary, he represented his army battalion in liaison with
the government of the Bavarian Soviet Republic under the leadership
of Dr. Kurt Eisner, an erudite Jew from who had refused to endorse
the German war effort and had been sent to prison as a consequence.
Reddit / History
https://preview.redd.it/jelrblzs45l71.jpg?auto=webp&s=53dc4baecba563540cd4e7
41177424fd4c872d1f
There is convincing photographic evidence (see above) that Hitler
attended Eisner's funeral in February 1919 after the Bavarian
president's assassination by the hand of an anti-revolutionary military
officer. Opinions differ as to the reason for Hitler’s putative
attendance: a voluntary decision to attend, a military obligation or his
possible role of an undercover agent. Hitler did not join forces with
those who later became his partners in the early days of the Nazi

movement, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess and Hermann Goering, when
they were active members of paramilitary Freikorps groups that
sought to overthrow the Bavarian Republic after it remained in power
after Eisner's death under the leadership of Jewish intellectuals and
literati, most notably among them the poet Ernst Toller.
When the German interior minister Gustav Noske ordered overthrow
of the Bavarian Republic Hitler did not encourage his followers to take
sides. Why then his sudden conversion to rabid anti-Semitism soon
after the fall of the Bavarian Republic? This culminated in his anti-
Semitic polemic that he composed at the behest of Captain Karl Mayr,
the commander of the 6th Battalion of the guards regiment in Munich
and the head of the "Education and Propaganda Department" of the
Bavarian Reichswehr. In this capacity Mayr recruited Hitler as an
undercover agent in early June 1919 and opened the way to his political
career that began when he took control of Anton Drexler's German
Workers' party and reconstituted this as the National Socialist
German Workers Party.
Two divergent views of this issue stand out. Those on the side of
rightwing opinion contend that Hitler was a socialist at heart from the
beginning of his political career and simply moved from one brand of
socialism to another at a time when socialism was riven by internecine
conflicts. After all, other prominent Nazis had flirted with Communist
notions in their earlier years, notably Joseph Goebbels and Roland
Freisler. On the opposite side of this debate the eminent historian Ian
Kershaw argues that, initially at least, Hitler was an opportunist who
found in the regular German army a sound basis for security and
advancement. After the fall of the Bavarian Republic he threw his lot
with the army and its policy of rooting out socialists and Communists
wherever they could be found. All essentials that composed Hitler's
fanatical worldview gelled irreversibly once he took control of the

German Workers Party which he had joined in his role as an undercover
agent in the service of the army.
The present conversation over the question as to whether Hitler was a
'socialist' or not seems to reflect the process of polarization that has
grown apace in recent years. If Hitler was a socialist, so some of those
in the neocon camp will argue, today's socialists can be cast as neo-
fascists or the like.
From Rose Monday to Ash Wednesday in 1933
The term Hitler's 'Machtergreifung' suggests by the very use of the
word meaning 'seizure' that Hitler became the dictator of Germany in
one fell swoop, possibly in the course of an hour or a day. In fact the
series of events that led to Hitler's dictatorship were part of a

process, not a single event. I suggest that this process passed through
three stages, each of which did begin on a certain day, namely: The
30th of January when Reichs President Paul von Hindenburg appointed
Adolf Hitler to the position of Reichs Chancellor. The 28th of
February, when in response to the outbreak of the Reichstag fire on
the previous day, a 'state of emergency' was instated by activating
Article 48 in the Weimar constitution, which withdrew the core civil
rights so essential for the maintenance of a democratic state in
Germany. Finally the coup de grace, the 23rd. of March when the
Reichstag, now a rump after the Communist delegates had been
expelled from the chamber, passed the Enabling Law. Though this did
not abolish the Reichstag altogether, it robbed the parliament of all
effective power and entitled Hitler to rule by decree from then
onwards. At the beginning of first stage in this threefold process
Hitler addressed the German nation in a radio broadcast and declared
that he would make Germany great again by taking measures to boost
the German economy and build up its military forces without regard to
the terms of the Versailles Treaty. To the surprise and dismay to his
prospective coalition partner, Alfred Hugenberg, the leader of the
German Liberal People's Party (DLVP), Hitler, on the point of receiving
the chancellorship, announced his intention to dissolve the Reichstag
and call for a general election to be held on the 5th of March. At this
point Hugenberg threatened to withdraw from the imminent coalition
as he feared that his small party would be cut to pieces by the fallout
of the election on the 5th of March. He did overcome his misgivings,
however, on the expectation that he and von Hindenburg could always
counter any effort on Hitler's part to dominate the government. The
DLVP held nine ministerial seats in new government while only two
fellow members of the National-Socialist Party would join Hitler as
members of his cabinet. Hugenberg also calculated that Hitler needed
the DLVP to achieve his goal of being able to dispense with
parliamentary control altogether by the passing of the Enabling Act, a
provision anchored in the Constitution of the Weimar Republic, that

could only come into force if two thirds of delegates present in the
chamber voted it in. In accord with the motto "If you can't break a
racket, join it,'' Hugenberg, already a highly influential press baron in
his own right, relished the prospect of enhancing his standing in the
world of big business.
The coffers of the Nazi party were exhausted due to outlays required
by two general elections in 1932. Hermann Goering, the minister
without portfolio in Hitler's cabinet also had a dab hand in the art of
wheeling and dealing with the high and mighty in business and high
finance and thus was well qualified to play the role of the Nazi's public
relations man. Furthermore he held the honorary title of President of
the Reichstag, a privilege awarded to the party with the most seats in
parliament. This position allowed him the use of his official residence
as a suitable venue for 'the secret meeting of the 20th of February.'
Before coming onto that subject, I point to an ugly aspect of Goering's
character that was at first obscured by his apparent affability and
charm. In a short time he would become the head of Prussian police
force and this held the lion's share of the aggregate of all police
departments in Germany. In due course he founded the Gestapo. The
Nazis. ability to control the police was reinforced by Wilhelm Frick,
Minister of the Interior in Hitler's cabinet. With full police backing
Hitler was no longer solely dependent on the involvement of the
disreputable SA storm troopers in the work of intimidating those who
were ready to stand up to Hitler's demolition of the Weimar Republic
and democratic rights. Hitler had only two Nazi colleagues in his
cabinet but this smallness of number was offset be the strategic
significance of the mandates they held. However, Hitler did not want
to shake von Hindenburg and Hugenberg out of their complaisant belief
that he posed no great danger to their interests. Indeed, at this
juncture Hitler could not afford to blatantly affront the sensitivities
of prospective voters in the middle ground between the extremes of
right and left. For much the same reason he had toned down the more

frenzied expressions of anti-Semitic hostility in the two 1932 election
campaigns. SA operatives were already undertaking covert operations
against members of the Communist party and vocal defenders of
democracy but they had to tread warily when dealing with Konrad
Adenauer, the mayor of Cologne. On the 17th of February Hitler
visited Cologne to attend a local gathering of the Nazi party. An SA
contingent placed swastika symbols along the sides of the Deutz Bridge
that connected the old city of Cologne to Deutz, originally a separate
town on the right bank of the Rhine. Adenauer ordered the removal of
the offending flags on legal grounds as Hitler's visit was occasioned by
a matter of concern to the Nazi party but not to the German nation as
a whole. Hitler, though infuriated by what to him was an act of outright
defiance, hesitated to call upon the SA to deal with Adenauer in the
customary way. It was only in the following March that Adenauer was
forced to leave Cologne under the threat of a belated strike by the
SA, and only on the 17th of June that he was finally dismissed from his
office. Cologne and the surrounding Rhineland and region of Westphalia
were areas where the National-Socialists came off worst in the 1932
general elections, gaining as little as about 20 % of the total vote.
Joseph Goebbels, a Rhinelander himself, was particularly sensitive to
the mood in his native region and would later advise against the use of
brutal force against the Archbishop of Muenster, Clemens August Graf
von Galen, after his moral influence had curbed (but not fully
extinguished) the Nazi's use of euthanasia and forced sterilization
against mentally or physically handicapped German children.
It is now Monday the twentieth of February, the date of a secret
meeting attended by Hermann Goering, Hitler himself and twenty
prominent and highly influential representatives of German industry
and its banking and financial sectors. They owned or directed
companies with prestigious names that included Krupp, Siemens, IG
Farben, Opel and Telefunken and they held many a purse string in their
hands as a result. The purpose of the meeting was quite simply that of

raising funds for the benefit of the Nazi party to the tune of three
million Reichsmarks, as suggested at the end of the meeting. In fact
the sum of all donations amounted to 'only' 2,07,100 Reichmarks, which
may have been a disappointment to some, though not to Joseph
Goebbels. He rejoiced on hearing news of the success achieved by the
fundraising operation and looked forward to the replacement of the
drab furnishings and decor of his headquarters by something more
impressive and dignified. Hitler, dressed like an business executive in a
smart well-tailored suit, delivered a lengthy speech which included an
assurance that he fully respected the principle of the inviolability of
private property and a promise to invest heavily in the manufacture of
armaments, in mining and civil engineering, as in the industrial concerns
and companies governed by members of his audience. Furthermore, he
emphasized his hostility to the Communist party, which he intended to
crush completely Gustav Krupp endorsed the contents of Hitler's
speech and welcomed Hitler's affirmation concerning the sanctity of
private property and capitalist enterprise. Finally, the participants
were given details of the ways and means of making their respective
contributions. Some of the companies represented at the secret
meeting would in later years involve themselves in the exploitation of
slave labour and, in the case of a subsidiary firm owned by IG Farben,
the production of Zyklon B, supposedly for use as 'a pesticide.' In such
cases there was no longer a place for making excuses based on the
argument that there was no way for anyone foresee the evils Hitler
and the Nazis had in store.
We now come to second and most decisive stage of Hitler's
Machtergreifung. It began on the 27th of February in reaction to the
Reichstag fire that occurred after nightfall, but what happened during
daylight hours on that day? Not that much unless you happened to be in
the area of Cologne. It was Rose Monday after two years of economic
paucity when the festivity had to be cancelled. The same day marked
the beginning of the month of Adar in the Jewish religious calendar.

The highpoint of this month is the festival of Purim that
commemorates the dramatic events recorded to the book of Esther in
the Bible. The narrative of this book tells of a wicked plot against the
Jews of Persia. Haman, the instigator of this plot. laid plans to destroy
the entire Jewish community on an appointed day but this evil design
was thwarted by Esther, the king's beloved consort and a Jewess. The
story is widely held to be the first case in history of an attempt to
eradicate all Jews by perpetrating a holocaust.
We now turn our attention to an event that occurred after nightfall on
the 27th of February, the infamous conflagration that signaled the end
of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of Hitler's rule. Around nine
o'clock p.m. people began noticing indications of fire within the
Reichstag building. The police and fire brigade were duly notified.
Goering was at the scene very early when the police arrested a young
Dutchman, Marinus van der Lubbe, on a charge of arson. Van der Lubbe
admitted that he had laid the fire and added that he had done so out
of his personal convictions as a convinced Communist without the
assistance or encouragement of accomplices. The very mention of the
word 'Communist' was enough to prompt Goering to assert that the
entire Communist party was behind a conspiracy to burn down the
Reichstag and unleash a Communist revolution. He omitted any
reference to van der Lubbe's denial that he had any accomplices. If
these didn't exist Goering would have to invent them. Three Bulgarian
Communists were accused of aiding van der Lubbe on the night of the
27th. of February but when van der Lubbe's case came up for trial
before the Supreme Court in September 1933 the presiding judge
found insufficient evidence to find the Bulgarian defendants guilty.
This verdict so angered Hitler that the infamous Volksgericht (People'
Court) was established for the purpose of dealing with so-called
'political crimes.' Short of a forensically based legal foundation for
asserting that the Communist Party in toto had instigated the fire,
Hitler claimed as though in a flash of inspired insight that the fire was

a message from heaven to the effect that 'the Communists' were
about to launch a massive attack against the state and the German
people. It was dangerous for anyone else to claim the authority of
prophetic insight when making a pronouncement on the Reichstag fire.
A certain self-proclaimed mystic foresaw a 'great blaze' in the area of
the Reichstag before the fire actually broke out. The man in question
had assumed the identity of a Dane with name of Erik Jan Hanussen.
Hitler was impressed by his aura of spirituality and learned from him
useful techniques in speech delivery and quasi-theatrical gesturing.
When Hanussen could no longer conceal his Jewish origins he was
ejected from Nazi circles and assassinated by a death squad. Had he
heard too much on the grapevine or was he really able to tell the
future? It is strange how revolutionary times produce sinister figures
like Joseph Balsamo, Rasputin and Hanussen. On the following day
President Paul von Hindenburg accepted Goering's assertion that the
fire was the work of the Communists uncritically and without demur.
His signature headed those of Hitler and Wilhelm Frick on the
document that abrogated parts of the Weimar constitution that were
supposed to safeguard basic human rights. The question as to who
really started the fire has never found an incontestable answer but if
one is guided by the principle indicated by the Latin tag 'Cui bono' (who
has the most to gain), one may well suspect that Goering had a hand in
the matter of the Reichstag fire, directly or indirectly. On the 28th of
February Paul von Hindenburg authorized the introduction of what
came to be known as the Reichstag Fire Decree. Under its provisions
essential civil rights were annulled, namely habeas corpus, freedom of
the press, freedom of public assembly and protection from arbitrary
arrest. On March the 3rd.one of the first to fall victim to the new
order was Ernst Thaelmann the leader of the Communist Party, who
became an early inmate of the newly created mode of detention, the
concentration camp. The Communists could still take part in the
election on March 5 but only in keeping with a ploy to weaken the SPD.
After the election Communist delegates were denied entry to

parliamentary sessions, which after the fire were held in an opera
theatre. The scene was now set for the inauguration of the third stage
of Hitler's Machtergreifung.
On 23 March the Reichstag voted away its legitimacy as Germany's
legislative body In accordance with article 48 of the Weimar
Constitution. This stipulated that a two thirds majority of votes cast
by deputies in the chamber permitted the chancellor to rule by decree
without deference to a Reichstag that had now become a mere
platform for inconsequential speeches and an organ of propaganda. The
majority of two thirds was made possible by the exclusion of all
Communist deputies and the fact that the SPD could not muster
enough votes to block the passing of the Enabling decree. Even the
Centrum party voted for the measure in a tide of anti-Communist panic,
some of its delegates not wishing to rock the boat when the prospect
of the Reichskonkordat between the Vatican and the German Reich was
very much in their minds. As from the end of March anti-Jewish
measures limiting access to schools, the learned professions,
government posts and medical facilities came into effect On the rare
occasion that von Hindenburg objected to Nazi intrusions into civil life
he reversed a decree that retracted from Jewish veterans medals
bestowed on them in recognition their acts of valour during the First
World War. The SA began harassing Jewish store shopkeepers by such
acts as daubing the slogan 'Don't buy Jewish goods' on shop windows.
By July 14th the regime had eliminated the last tokens of democracy in
Germany, dissolved trade unions and all non-Nazi political parties and
youth organizations.
One institution still remained outside the total control of Hitler and
the Nazis - the army headed by one of Hitler's most determined
adversaries General Kurt von Schleicher, Hitler 's immediate
predecessor in the office of chancellor. Hitler and von Hindenberg
were aware of the danger that the military could stage a coup

d'etat, especially as it resented the freedom of action accorded to
the SA seen as a private army of its own. Hitler waited until June 30th.
in 1934 before killing two birds with one stone by arresting and
executing the leadership of the SA in the course of ‘the Night of the
Long Knives’ and also by ordering a death squad to assassinate
Schleicher. After the death of President von Hindenburg in 1934
Hitler reached the pinnacle of power by becoming the Fuehrer and in
that capacity he was both chancellor and head of state. All members of
the armed force were obliged to swear an idolatrous oath of
unconditional obedience to Hitler in person. The Machtergreifung was
now complete.
DR. ROLAND FREISLER THE HANGING JUDGE OF THE
NAZI REGIME

The term ‘the hanging judge’ traditionally refers to Judge Jeffreys’
(George Jeffreys, Ist Baron) on account of his ruthless manner of
conducting ‘the bloody assize’ after the battle of Sedgemoor in 1685. It
was not so much the unusually high number of those he sent to the
gallows as his habit of sarcastically taunting the accused with personal
insults and giving way to fits of rage during court proceedings that
earned him an evil reputation. If any other judge could set Jeffreys to
school in the matter of cruel and vindictive behaviour in a courtroom I
suggest that Roland Freisler fits the bill.
As the chief prosecutor at the Volksgericht (People’s Court) in Berlin
Freisler harangued notable opponents of the Nazi regime; chief among
them were: Count Claus von Stauffenberg, whose role in the abortive
attempt to assassinate Hitler on the 20th
of July in 1944 is celebrated
throughout the world / Sophie Scholl, a student and leader of the
‘Weisse Rose’ (White Rose) intellectual resistance cell that distributed
anti-Nazi pamphlets by mail/ Count Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, whose
reference to ‘murders’ in Poland committed by German occupying forces
prompted Freisler to call him a ‘shabby rogue’ (schaebiger Lump)
/General Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, a conspirator involved in

the assassination attempt of the 20th
of July, who was forced to keep a
grip of loose-fitting trousers when standing in the court and incur
Freisler’s reproach that he was ‘a dirty old man.’ These highlights of the
proceedings were filmed for the purpose of propaganda and ‘public
enlightenment.’ A telling moment was caught on camera when Freisler
boldly declared that he did not need to consult a tome of statuary law
to justify his accusations as the instincts of a good Nazi alone allowed
him to sniff out a man’s guilt.
Freisler could get away with such shocking utterances as the People’s
Court constituted a law unto itself, being a separate entity alongside the
regular legal system, for which perhaps the Court of Star Chamber in
England offered a distant and tenuous precedent. However, it was
primarily the logical product of Hitler’s totalitarian outlook and the
opportunity of learning from the techniques employed by Mussolini and
Stalin to eliminate dissidents and potential rivals within their respective
domains. As briefly mentioned in the previous section of this paper, in
the Hitler established the system of the People’s Court as early as 1934
in reaction to the alleged failure of an established court to fully comply
with Hitler’s position regarding the cause of the Reichstag fire, for
which he held the Communists fully responsible. Besides, the Nazi’s
theory of the German state as the inseparable union of Volk and Reich
left no room for an independent judiciary as that which lies within the
terms of the separation of powers as construed by Montesquieu and the
founders of the American constitution.
As it happened, Freisler followed at first hand the sessions of the
infamous Moscow show trials, which as part of the Great Purge
contributed to the liquidation of those in the Communist party and the

armed forces whom Stalin considered to be his real or potential enemies.
He had learned Russian when a prisoner of war in Russia during the First
World War and even acquired the unofficial title of ‘commissar’ on the
strength of his service as an administrator or monitor, perhaps in a
manner analogous to that of a ‘Kapo’ in German concentration camps. He
might even have entertained sympathies with the Bolshevik cause at the
early stage of the Russian Revolution. Be that as it may, he never quite
lived down suspicions concerning his early exposure to Communist ideas
and thus never gained Hitler’s full confidence. Hitler was also suspicious
of Freisler’s brother Oswald, who, though a member of the Nazi party,
seemed a little too eager to offer his legal services to defendants during
trials at the People’s Court. Perhaps Roland Freisler’s zeal as a
prosecutor owed something to his need to establish his National-
Socialist credentials beyond any reasonable doubt. Never a popular
figure, he died during an air raid in February 1945. One comment made
by a person on the scene to the effect that he got his just deserts was
not challenged by others present.
In keeping with the wording of this paper’s title I draw attention to an
eerie connection between Judge Jeffries and Roland Freisler. Both
condemned defendants to death but not solely on the basis of any crime
they themselves had committed. It sufficed that the persons in question
were either a spouse or sibling of someone whom the court would have
arraigned had it had an opportunity. Stalin had legally endorsed this use
of vicarious punishment as a permissible device in show trials and military
tribunals.
Elfriede Scholz, the sister of the famed novelist Erich Maria Remarque,
so much hated by the Nazis on account of his novel Im Westen Nichts

Neues / All Quiet on the Western Front, was brought before the
People’s Court on a charge of advocating a defeatist attitude as to the
chances of Germany winning the war, a charge based on the evidence of
an eavesdropping neighbour. Her supposed offence did not incur the
death penalty automatically, but so that the cause of her fate would be
plain to all, Freisler told her explicitly that her brother might have
escaped the court’s jurisdiction but she would not be so fortunate.
Judge Jeffreys sentenced Lady Alice Lisle to death on the charge of
giving overnight refuge to two combatants who had taken part in the
Battle of Sedgemoor. Again, as in the case of Elfriede Scholz, the
penalty for her alleged crime did not necessarily entail the death
penalty. In fact Jeffreys delayed the date of her execution by a week,
which allowed King James II the opportunity to commute her sentence,
but to no avail. There are arguments that Jeffreys’ harsh judgments
simply reflected the intransigent and vengeful policy of King James, who
showed no clemency towards his adversaries, including his nephew, the
Duke of Monmouth. Again we must seek the true underlying motive for
Alice’s condemnation. Her husband Sir John Lisle was a signatory to the
execution of King Charles in 1649. He had fled to Switzerland where he
lived out his remaining years until he was assassinated, probably by a
royalist agent. Perhaps the most egregious execution that paid the price
that would have been paid by an absentee defendant was that of The
Blessed Margaret Pole, for in this instance she had not even a trumped-
up charge to face. She was simply guilty of being the mother of an enemy
of Henry VIII. In recognition of her innocence she was declared a
martyr by the Roman Catholic Church.

In modern times at least, Roland Freisler represents the clearest
example of a case that shows how far the course of justice can be
perverted, but he did not stand alone. Even to this day a judge in
Germany does not enjoy quite the same measure of the unqualified
respect a judge in another European country might expect. As a body
German legal professionals, from judges to ordinary lawyers, offered
little or no resistance to the encroachments of the Nazi takeover of
every organ of the state. Indeed, Freisler himself did much to Nazify
the German legal system before he presided at the People’s Court. Even
after the war judges known for the complicity in Nazi injustices came
off more or less scot-free, ‘with a black eye’ at most. A scandal arose
when Freisler’s widow was awarded the full pension benefits as though
her late husband had served as judge in a reputable manner.
‘Apart from all that,’ Freisler possessed a lucid and agile mind with a
grasp of the complexities and subtleties to be mastered by a top jurist
such as he. Some of his definitions and expert findings remain on the
statute book to this very day. One thing is clear. The strength of a
democratic state depends on the independence and integrity of its
judicial system and those operating and defending it.

AND WHAT ABOUT HINDENBURG’S PART IN THE FALL OF
THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC?
Hitler was able to overthrow the Weimar Republic and install a
dictatorship for two main reasons. After appointing Hitler to the
office of Reichs Chancellor, President Hindenburg supported almost
every measure Hitler needed to achieve his aim. Hindenburg was free
to invoke Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution without let or
hindrance whenever it suited him. Hitler's contributions to the fall of
the Weimar Republic are well documented and exhaustively researched
while Hindenburg's part in bringing about this fall has received
relatively little attention. Hindenburg and Ludendorff effectively took
over control of the German government in 1916 after the fall of
Bethman-Hollweg and maintained their dominant position until the
collapse of the German war machine in 1918 forced them to admit to
the Kaiser that the Germany had lost the war. This ignominious
outcome did not tarnish Hindenburg's image as a symbol of Prussia's
glorious military tradition . Ludendorff was not so fortunate for he
took some of blame for Germany's defeat. The 'dagger in the back'
theory, which posited that 'the enemy within, ' Bolsheviks,
revolutionaries and their fellow travellers, undermined the German war
effort on the home front, also deflected unwanted attention from any
part Hindenburg may have played in the fall of the Kaiser's empire.
After the end of the war Hindenburg retired from public life in good
grace with his reputation fully in tact, if not considerably enhanced. As
a convinced monarchist the abhorred the Weimar Republic and all its
works. In this matter he was not alone; in military and nationalist
circles the 'dagger in the back' theory found overwhelming acceptance.
The Communists, or Sparticans, were the worst offenders of all for
they had refused to support Germany's entry into the First World
War. Ludendorff for his part entered the fray of violent political
action when he joined Hitler in an attempt to stage the so-called 'beer

hall putsch' and take Munich by storm. This attempt failed but the
episode indicated that old-guard nationalists like Ludendorff sensed a
need to join forces with a novel brand of nationalism with a strong
appeal to a working class and middle class clientele. Hitler learned his
lesson from the failure of the putsch and decided to use the
instruments of the democratic system against itself, again the system
itself. In this regard he found a willing partner with another
prestigious militarist, General Paul von Hindenburg. The putsch
presented but one of many serious challenges to the young republic,
among the others hyperinflation and the assassination of notable
representatives of liberal democracy or the political left. This trend
began as soon as the Weimar Republic was born. Rosa Luxembourg and
Karl Liebknecht, the leaders of the newly formed Communist party,
were among the first victims in its wake. Were their deaths solely the
result of German ultra-nationalists? Luxembourg and Liebknecht
refused to join the parliamentary process and took their grievance to
the streets ofBerlin. Though both offshoots of a once unified socialist
movement, the Communists and SPD were locked into a bitter
ideological battle that shattered any hope of an alliance against their
common foes on the right. Indeed, Noske, the SPD interior minister,
unleashed elements within the paramilitary Freikorps, a collection of
de-mobbed soldiers with a revanchist attitude, against the Communist
party in a manner that bears comparison with the role of the Black and
Tans in Ireland. Under the aegis of the same authority Hitler served as
an undercover agent before, in the course of his investigations, he
became the leader of a radical workers' party and moulded this into
the NSDAP, the National Socialist Party.
As a consequence of the troubles that plagued the nascent Weimar
Republic, strong, even draconian, measures were deemed to be
necessary and written into the new republic's constitution. With this
background in mind we should understand why the Weimar Constitution
contained the provisions stipulated in Article 48. that basic civil rights

could be suspended in the event of a breakdown of public safety or the
threat of a major insurrection. It was left to the president's
discretionary powers to judge whether such measures as the
dissolution of the Reichstag and the suspension of civil liberties were
called for. Friedrich Ebert, the first president of the Weimar
Republic, made ample use of Article 48 but limited himself to short-
term suspensions of civil rights before restoring them as soon as
possible. As a Social Democrat he had every reason to protect the
republic which his party more than any other had worked to establish.
Things changed fundamentally after the death of Friedrich-Ebert in
1925. when the first presidential election took place. Now it was that
Hindenburg reentered the world of politics and not without evoking
feelings of trepidation throughout the international community. How
would a man of great influence perform his presidential duties without
prejudice if he himself believed that Germany should return to a
monarchal and authoritarian form of government? His main opponent
was a member of Catholic Center Party with the support of the SPD.
ErnstThaelmann, the Communist leader, was also a candidate and his
intervention may have snatched away vitally needed votes from the
SPD. Germany enjoyed the so-called 'golden years of the Weimar
Republic.' The country was at least spared the tribulations that
afflicted the nation at the beginning and at the end of the republic.
The conservative German (DLVB), the party, with which Hitler formed
a coalition just before his total seizure of power, became the second
largest party in a general election, but as time crept on towards the
thirties, its backward looking plea to re-establish the monarchy lost
appeal among prospective voters with a working class and petit
bourgeois background.1932 saw a second presidential election and two
general elections. In the aftermath of the Wall Street crash voters
turned in droves to the NSDAP (the Nazis) taking a 37 and 34 share of
the vote. Hitler, who acquired German citizenship by the skin of his
teeth, challenged the incumbent for the highest prize in the state, the
presidency. To judge by his disparaging references to Hitler as a

'Bohemian corporal' and a 'post office worker,' Hindenburg regarded
Hitler with little respect. However, he envied Hitler's appeal to
conservative-minded and disaffected voters who should have voted for
him. As Hindenburg put it himself, he had to rely on 'Sozis' and
'Katholen' if he was going to win the election. This he did, which meant
that Hitler won Hindenburg's respect, as a vote-catcher at least. As
subsequent events would show all too clearly, Hindenburg did not
object in the slightest to Hitler's anti-democratic agenda and
endorsed it all the way. The flaws that wrecked the Weimar Republic
resembled those which caused the downfall of the Kaiser. The
President replaced the Kaiser and the position of the Reichs chancellor
depended on the support and favourable disposition of the Kaiser. The
fact that Bismarck achieved great results as the German Reichskanzler
could not save him in the end from Wilhelm II's personal decision to
dismiss him. The Weimar Republic was neither a presidential democracy
in which the legislature served as a counterbalance to the power of the
head of state, nor was it a parliamentary democracy on the
Westminster model.

With the Kristallnacht on November the Ninth in Mind - a
Review of the Course of Anti-Semitism Since this Term
was Coined by Wilhelm Marr
FIRST A TIME-SPANNING DIALOGUE TO COMMEMORATE THE
KRISTALLNACHT IN 1938
Herchel Feibel Grynszpan(German: Hermann Grünspan, a Polish Jew
born on 28March 1921, shot and killed the German diplomat Ernst vom
Rath on 7 November 1938in Paris. The Nazis used this assassination as
a pretext to launch the Kristallnacht ,,making out that the pogrom was
the spontaneous result of‘Volkszorn, ’the (German) people’s(implicitly
‘fully understandable’) outrage.
’
The Shoemaker's Last
Born the same day in 1880,the two didn't seem to have much else in
common,one would have thought:
The one was baptized, the other circumcised. one was the best in
class, the other came last. The one was clever and gifted, the other
was good with his hands. The one became a schoolmaster, the other the
maker and mender of shoes. From time to time the clever one needed
new shoes- walking shoes, dancing shoes and smart black ones.
Shoemaker: Mazal tov! My regards to the bride. Though you're a goy,
I'll break you a glass. Later the clever one returned to ask if he could

shorten the tongues of his mother-in-law's shoes.
Schoolmaster:
Thomas will need a size larger this time.
Shoemaker:
How their feet grow!
Schoolmaster:
And a new pair for Heidi. They say there will be war.
Shoemaker:
My brother Joe has volunteered for the front.
Schoolmaster:
Could you heel and sole these?
Shoemaker:
Let's hope it will be over, come spring.
Schoolmaster:
I need new laces.
Shoemaker:
Joe says it's hell in those trenches.
Schoolmaster:
Thank God it all ended before Thomas was old enough to fight.
Shoemaker:
Perhaps now they'll beat their swords into ploughshares.
Schoolmaster:
I doubt that, Aaron. There'll always be war. You know, in some ways
it's even worse now. How much are those?
Shoemaker:
One million five-hundred thousand Reichmarks. I'll take tobacco or
coffee in lieu.
Schoolmaster:
It's about time they cleared the streets of those brown-shirts, those
ruffians!

Shoemaker:
Maybe it'll be better when the employment situation improves.
Schoolmaster:
It's good to know that somebody still believes inhuman nature, Aaron. I
like those with the silver lining.
Shoemaker:
You know we are closed tomorrow and Thursday. It's the Jewish New
Year.
Schoolmaster:
That stooge! He won't last a year.
Shoemaker:
These rubber stick-on soles are all the rage. Shoes last longer that
way.
Schoolmaster:
So the family has left, thank God. Aren't you going, too?
Shoemaker:
Somebody's got to earn a living, and who needs an old cobbler over
there? Maybe the worst will soon be over. World opinion must carry
some weight. I'll have them ready to collect after dark.
Schoolmaster:
Stay at home tonight. That death in Paris will bring the packs out. But
not seeming to hear the crescendo of hate, Aaron hammer away on the
shoe laid on his last, until he was deafened by breaking glass.
Was it so surprising they remained friends to the last?
_______________________
Wilhelm Marr has gone done in history as the man who probably coined
and certainly propagated the term 'anti-Semitic' throughout the world
after publishing a booklet entitled Der Weg zum Siege des

Germanenthums über das Judenthum (The Way to Victory of
Germanism over Judaism) in 1879. it was his avowed aim to focus on
what he and many others saw as the Jewish question in a manner that
did not presuppose any particular religious or philosophical premise but
rather adopted a supposedly 'scientific' approach to this matter. He
argued that from Roman times the Jews posed a distinct ethnic group
that understood itself to be the victims of oppression by a surrounding
majority and therefore under the necessity to outwit and undermine
the forces that were against it.
Marr concluded that Germans had to defend themselves from
overbearing Jewish control if they were to survive as a people and
nation. He founded the Anti-Semitic league as a means of popularizing
his position throughout Germany. In this regard he did not greatly
succeed but he did succeed in promoting the word 'anti-Semitic’ and
related words among those who were well placed to wield great
influence, notably the court chaplain Adolf Stoecke, the noted
nationalist historian and politician, Heinrich von Treitschke and those
who organized the so-called anti-Semitic petition that garnered several
thousand signatures. Treitschke's decision to urge university students
to add their signatures to the petition enraged the great historian
Theodor Mommsen, a doughty. defender of minorities in the German
Empire.
In short, the advocates of anti-Semitism fell into distinct groups, one
headed by Luther thumping Adolf Stoecke on the basis of Christian
beliefs, one furthered by von Treitschke in the academic world and the
group composed of so-called anti-Semitic hooligans that arose from
Marr's anti-Semite league. Indeed, there was an extreme case of anti-
Semitic violence when a synagogue was destroyed by fire in the region

of Saxony..
The course of anti-Semitic activism advocated by the emergent anti-
Semitic movements varied. Marr pleaded for the exclusion of Jews
from German life altogether, implicitly their expulsion therefore.
Treitschke insisted on the banishment of Jews from participating in all
forms of officialdom and from positions of influence in education and
the higher professions. These demands headed the anti-Semitic
petition. At this time we also see the emergence of political parties
that sought entry into the Reichstag under the banner of anti-
Semitism. Such parties continued to be represented in the Reichstag
throughout the remainder of the German Empire's duration but with
little to show for it in statistical terms, gaining at most 3 percent of
the electorate's votes.
Strange as it may seem, Marr had not always been a radical exponent
of hostile views directed against Jews. Back in 1862 Marr published a
book entitled Der Judenspiegel. (A Mirror to the Jews). For the main
part it presented the parody of a survey of the Hebrew Bible with the
intent of adducing evidence of Jewish moral failures and devious
characteristics. Thus Joseph becomes a grain hoarding cartel boss and
King David a marauding brigand., it concludes, however, that Jews were
perfectly entitled to enjoy most common benefits from living in Prussia
and elsewhere as long as they did not have a hand in government and
civic administration. He couched his arguments in socio-economic terms
just as Karl Marx had in 1842 when he published "Zur Judenfrage' (On
the Jewish Question). Marx opposed the position taken by Bruno Bauer
on Judaism which advocated the extinction of Judaism along with
religion in general. Marx was not so dogmatic on that point and pleaded
that Jews as human beings should not be singled out for persecution.

He was of Jewish extraction after all.
There is a remarkable contrast between the relatively restrained
attitude to Jews as evinced in Spiegel and the radical call for the total
suppression of Judaism that he announced in 1879. What explains this?
A new ingredient is found in Marr's later expressions of anti-Semitism
that was absent in the Judenspiegel., in a word 'race.'
The word lay at the centre of the thesis put forward by Joseph
Arthur de Gobineau in 1852 when he published his 'Essay on the
Inequality of the Human Races.' In this he aimed to rebuff the central
ideals of the French Revolution and replaced them by a new triad of
supremacy, inequality and division. The 14th of July marked not only
the fall of the Bastille but also his own birthday, a quirk that prompted
him to observe that even opposites meet at times, In his scheme of
thought the white Aryans posed the highest form of humanity above
the Black and Asian races. He denounced the mixture of races as a
source of degeneracy. Only the pure Nordic Aryans located in Germany
were entitled to claim the status of ‘the master race’. The greater the
contamination of Aryan blood by inferior races, the lower the resulting
progeny on his racial scale. Gobineau's ideas seeped into the
mainstream of European culture and left trace seven in poetry.
Baudelaire’s poem 'Cain et Abel' introverts the story of the brothers
in the Bible so as to present the race of Abel as a symbol of upper-
class domination and the race of Cain as a symbol of the oppressed
lower class.
It is not clear at what time the spirit of Gobineau's racist theory
entered the soul of Wilhelm Marr. I would suggest shortly after the
creation of German Empire and the outbreak of the first economic

crisis it suffered, the crash of 1873. This event prompted Marr to
write a pamphlet blaming the Jews for the crisis. On this occasion
Marr's polemics did not seriously affect the political climate. Other
matters were then uppermost in people's minds, such as migration and
Church-State relations. Bismarck owed his great successes in war and
peace in large part to the advice and financial expertise of Gerson von
Bleichroeder, his Jewish Banker.

KONRAD ADENAUER, 'DER ALTE'
The first political joke I learned in Germany:
Adenauer to grandchild: What do you want to be when you're grown up,
dear child?
Answer: Federal Chancellor, Granddad.
Adenauer: But we already have a Federal Chancellor, don't we?
Konrad Adenauer was born in 1876. In his childhood he experienced life
in Germany during the heyday of` Bismarck's power and influence. In
his youth he witnessed the fall of Bismarck and the arrival of an age of
military pomp and Prussian glory under the reign of Wilhelm II. In his
prime of life the First World War broke out. At 45 he found himself in
the midst of an acute social and economic crisis at very heart of his
native Rhineland when urban warfare was raging in the Ruhr area. No
wonder he contemplated the secession of the Rhineland from the rest
of Germany where in his opinion Prussianism held an all too dominant
influence. Now into his early fifties and the long-time mayor of
Cologne, he defied Hitler by ordering the removal of swastika flags
strung along the Deutzer Bridge over the Rhine. On reaching a
pensionable age he languished in a concentration camp. To cut a long
story short, it was only at the age of 73, when those blessed with the
attainment of a ripe old age should enjoy the pleasures of retirement,
that Adenauer became the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of
Germany, the occasion that launched him into world fame and thus
earned him a permanent place in worldwide public consciousness. Nor
did his progress end there. At 84, President Biden take note, he ran
for the office of Federal Chancellor in the first general election to be
held in West Germany after the war. Does Adenauer deserve only
praise and honour in other matters? With political opponents,

and even with close political associates, he could prove peevish not to
say vindictive at times, as in the case with his dealings with Ludwig
Erhard, the finance minister to whom many attribute the success of
'the German economic miracle.' Perhaps he unwittingly internalized
precisely those elements of Prussianism that he so keenly opposed.
Does Adenauer deserve only praise and honour in other matters? He is
more vulnerable to criticism for things he did in his pre-war years, his
willingness to abandon the Rhineland to the French sphere of influence,
his readiness to countenance tactical alliances between his Center
Party and the National Socialists in the vain hope that shared
responsibility would somehow tame the Nazis, but even Heinrich
Bruenning, as leader of the Center Party, was also prepared to go so
far. The events that attend Hitler's Machtergreifung, his seizure of
power, including the issue of his order to pull down the swastika flags
mentioned earlier disabused Adenauer of any notion that there could
be any kind of political dialogue with the Nazis. Then there is the
reproach that Adenauer was bigoted when dealing with Prussians and
even Protestants and non-Catholics in general. True, he did not want to
open the Center Party to the membership of non-Catholics, nor was he
ready to cooperate with Gustav Stresemann, by no means a typical
'Prussian.' and his Liberal Party despite the latter's great contribution
to improved relations between Germany and its former enemies. After
the war Adenauer made up for his former frostiness with political
opponents, whether Socialist, Communist or simply 'Prussian.' The
newly formed CDU imposed no limitations to membership and candidacy.
Adenauer took a bold step when meeting the leadership of the Soviet
Union to negotiate the release of the remaining German prisoners of
war in the Soviet state. Did Adenauer have reservations about
encouraging German re-unification? Yes, but out of the recognition
that a premature reunification before defining the Federal Republic's
status with the Western alliance, would lead his nation into a state of
mishmash and contention between conflicting political forces.

Subsequent events proved him right as East German regions became
states within the existent framework of the Federal Republic without
confronting insurmountable obstacles, difficult enough as these were. I
do not think, however that Adenauer would have been so sanguine about
Berlin, the former Prussian capital, becoming the centre of a reunified
Germany. Having rejected his early secessionist leanings during the
Weimar Republic, Adenauer at least assured that his Rhineland would
be the political and cultural hub of West Germany in preference to
Frankfurt am Main, the leading contestant for this role. He would have
preferred to see a smaller and closely knit European Union based on
the Franco-German accords much after the model proposed by General
de Gaulle, instead of the arguably bloated and discordant European
Union of the present day. De Gaulle also warned against unnecessarily
being at loggerheads with the Russians and against being over-reliant
on the United States in matters of vital interest. It seems that Donald
Rumsfeld's "New Europeans' have taken over, and however
understandable their anger with their Russian neighbours on account of
their historic grievances, intemperance and unrelenting ire provide no
safe guidance through the present perilous times.

Back to the Ninth of November: 1989, the Fall of the Berlin Wall
and Remaining Questions about the State of Germany and the
World“
We have the fairy tales by heart” (Dylan Thomas)
Those old enough will recall the euphoria which took hold not only
among Germans but throughout the world on that day, the ninth of
November in 1989, when the wall dividing west and east Berlin “came
tumbling down ”metaphorically speaking. A new world was about to
arise. The forces of democracy and enlightened capitalism were
triumphant over doctrinaire Soviet communism. Thank you Mr.
Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and the longsuffering and
courageous citizens of eastern Europe. The good news spread to the
Middle East. Suddenly, I remember it well, Israeli Jews trusted
Palestinian Arab taxi drivers to take them as passengers over long
distances. Germany was “the happiest nation” in the world and all
because an East Berlin functionary made an announcement for which he
had no official backing to the effect that East Berliners could visit
West Berlin that very evening.
A similar hasty act of making a statement that should have been
cleared by the relevant authority also occurred on the ninth of
November when Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the new German
Republic in 1918.The breathtaking end of the Cold War was not the end
of the story. So Kipling was wrong after all when declaring that “East is
East and West is West and ne’er the twain shall meet.“ The chasm
separating East and West since the era of Constantine was no more.
Russia was part of Europe again, just as General Charles de Gaulle had
so forcefully advocated. Russia would surely know her place as a
moderately powerful and influential nation that would have much to
gain by being a cooperative and pliant partner of the West, which
entertained no aggressive or hostile designs to curtail Russia’s

legitimate needs. Russia’s concessions on the status of Berlin and its
realistic acceptance of its diminished role in Eastern Europe deserved
a measure of gratitude. Russia’s retreat would not invite NATO to
move into the province formerly dominated by the Soviet Union and
perish any thought that NATO would adopt an adversarial posture
against Russia herself! Moscow, in any case, had too much chew on to
think of reviving its past glory as the victor over Napoleon and Hitler.
Everybody was invited to the great celebration of rebirth, or almost
everyone. One fairy was not on the invitation list, and that fairy was
History. It was wrong to slight her, as subsequent events were to
prove. Mind you, this oversight was altogether understandable at the
time as it was generally assumed in those days that History had taken
ill and was probably dead already. Notable academics and highly
regarded pundits said so and they were surely the ones to know. On
October the third 1990 Germany was reunited. In the April of that
year I remember driving with a friend to East Germany in the spring of
1990. It was eerie. Everything seemed to be suspended in a state of
limbo. The massive system of high fences and barriers dividing the two
parts of German bore witness to the futility of trying to hold back the
tide of history. We stopped for a moment at the check point where an
officer with a distant dazed look casually beckoned us to move on
without so much as a glance at our papers.
We visited Weimar and Jena,where as former students of German
literature we delighted in visiting Goethe’s house and other locations
linked to the life and work of Goethe and Schiller. A short drive to the
site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp changed our mood
understandably enough. Those iron word welded into the main
gate:“Jedem das Seine: (”To everyone according to his lot") History
again.

We managed to benefit from the highly favorable exchange rate of
five East German marks to one Deutschmark, privately of course. Only
one person I met was unhappy at the prospect of reunification. At Jena
and Weimar the vista presented by beautiful architecture in the
classical style found no olfactory equivalent in the ubiquitous and
penetrating stench produced by the fuel of East Germany’s answer to
the people’s car, the Trabant. .Problems started to arise very early and
it was obvious they would. It was not going to be easy to unite two
populations, the one schooled in economic freedom and the Western
sense of democracy, the other subject to the restraints of Marxist
ideology as applied by a secretive and oppressive political elite. Then
The structures of industry and administration were different in
fundamental respects. Here was no time to waste evidently, standing
idly by while evolutionary forces would gradually do their
work. The East-Mark achieved parity with the Deutschmark on a one to
one basis. How wonderful, or so it seemed to a great many East German
citizens who had amassed fat savings accounts. Apart from saving it,
what else was there to do with what was to all intents and purposes
funny money in a hermetically enclosed economy where prices, wages
and rents were pegged at artificially low rates and stringent controls
were in place banning genuine convertibility and purchasing power on
the open market? Corn in Egypt! What a windfall! There was helicopter
cash too to the tune of a hundred Deutschmarks per citizen. You could
now get real money in exchange of your East-Marks. The result was -
unsurprisingly enough –a short-lived but massive binge. What seemed
so good to consumers was poison for the greater part of East German
industry (which, all things considered, had done okay despite the
burden laid on it by the Soviet Union). Totally uncompetitive with West
German industry on the one-to-one basis mentioned above, segments of
East German industry were palmed off “for an apple and an egg” as a
common phrase in German goes ,to astute Western bargain hunters,
some of whom might be more pertinently described as unscrupulous
exploiters and predators. East Germany had a good side too,

particularly in providing for free preschool care of children, a great
benefit to working mothers. All that went by the wayside. The United
Germany did retain from East Germany a handy traffic sign, a green
arrow pointing to the right allowing traffic to take a turn when the
lights stood at red. Too many young people in former East Germany may
have understood this as a subliminal message in the wrong way.
The man most widely reputed to have been the architect of German
unity was Hans-Dietrich Genscher, popularly known as “Genschman,”
depicted in caricatures as a figure rolling into one elements drawn from
Batman, Superman and Grandpa, an elderly benign vampire that figured
in “The Munsters,” a popular TV series, in recognition of his large
pointed ears. Like Talleyrand years before him, Genscher as West
Germany’s Foreign Secretary was sure to turn up at many a major
international conference or summit meeting on the winning side
regardless of changes in government. His most characteristic article of
clothing was his yellow v-neck pullover declaring his allegiance to the
Free Democratic Party, the FDP, with its liberal economic agenda.
Though small in terms of its command of seats in the Federal Diet, it
exercised totally disproportionate decision-making powers by being the
slight weight that tipped the scales, thus deciding who would govern
for the next four years. As Home Secretary and later Foreign
Secretary Genscher himself held the levers of Party, the FDP, with its
liberal economic agenda. Though small in terms of its command of seats
in the Federal Diet, it exercised totally disproportionate decision-
making powers by being the slight weight that tipped the scales, thus
deciding who would govern for the next four years. As Home Secretary
and later Foreign Secretary Genscher himself held the levers of power
like no other, even the Chancellor. In effect he was the kingmaker –or
unmaker. Some have surmised that Genscher in his competence as
Home Secretary was somewhat lackadaisical in efforts to alarm Willy
Brandt about the danger of retaining Günter Guillaume, a suspected
East German spy, as his personal aide in the chancellery. The Guillaume

affair led to Brandt’s resignation in November 1974. There was,
however, no shadow of doubt in 1982 that Genscher in league with
Count Otto von Lambsdorff deserted Helmut Schmidt in support of
Helmut Kohl, who had lodged a constructive vote of no confidence at
the Federal Diet in the November of 1982.Genscher pleaded that
throughout all the vagaries of politics he had only the true interests of
the German people at heart. He was born in the vicinity of Halle on the
eastern side of Germany and emigrated to the Federal Republic in
1952.With this background he was well placed to understand attitudes
that prevailed in both parts of Germany as he labored to reconcile
their differences. Furthermore, he was a skilled negotiator on the
public stage and a shrewd wheeler dealer behind the scenes. Always at
the right place at the right time, he played a cardinal role in guiding
developments in 1989 that culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall. Of
course, there were others who deserve the title of an architect of
German unity, Egon Bahr, Willy Brandt and Helmut Kohl, but Genscher,
if anyone, remained the architect of German unity.
Strange then that in 1991 the same man unleashed the process that led
inexorably to the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. Why did the unity of
one nation have to entail the dismemberment of another? Genscher
explained this paradox quite simply. German unity was based on the
universal principle that every people had the right to establish its
independence and sovereign nationhood. What was true for Germans
was equally true for Slovenians, Croats and Bosnians. To begin with at
least, Germany’s allies and friends in the EC, the USA and the United
Nations were not quite so sanguine as Genscher himself about
recognizing Slovenia and Croatia by Christmas in 1991,that is to say,
before the establishment of a general internationally agreed
framework for the settlement of the Yugoslavian question scheduled
for discussions to take place in the following year. Forebodings of
troubles ahead were entertained by Lord Carrington and Warren
Christopher, who later referred darkly to “Genscher’s war.” The real

crunch came with Bosnian independence in the March of 1992. Croatia
and Slovenia were relatively well defined entities in terms of cultural
and religious homogeneity. Bosnia was not, as the very mention of the
word‘ Sarajevo’ broadcasts to all and sundry. But Sarajevo was for
history books, being no longer relevant for the purposes of the new
age. Yugoslavian diplomats, correctly enough, pointed out that the
provinces of Yugoslavia were subject to a constitution that allowed for
the secession of any province on the condition that this was approved
by all the other provinces of the nation. It now meant that national
constitutions could be overruled by a caucus of powerful nations, not
just by the United Nations, if any portion of the populace legitimized
their wish for independence on the basis of a referendum. The
significance of this precedent was not lost on the Russian president
years later. It is right and proper to condemn the cruel and inhuman
actions of rabid nationalists, tin pot dictators and war criminals, but
such harsh criticism is best voiced by those who have had no part in
creating the conditions under which the same atrocities they so
vociferously condemn are predictable and next to inevitable.
The aftermath: the briefest summary. When we compare the situation
in the Balkans in 1991 with the state of affairs in that area in 1999. we
may well wonder at the radical changes that occurred in the meantime.
"The West," by which I mean the USA, Britain, France and Germany,
had become aggressively hostile to Serbia.-Yugoslavia, the former ally
of these countries, except for Germany of course, during the world
wars of the twentieth century. No doubt, Serbia-Yugoslavia had
incurred the understandable wrath of its opponents by its inflicting or
condoning atrocities again defenceless civilians, though the Serbs were
not the only ones to do so. Even so, we note a certain asymmetry
between the punishment meted out to Serbia and the official
justification for this punishment. Take Kosovo. The motive behind the
decision to separate the Kosovo from Serbia was to protect innocent
civilians at a certain crucial juncture in the Balkan conflict but this

separation was permanent and irreversible. The bombardment of
Belgrade by NATO certainly struck the Russians as a provocation, but
not only Russians were taken aback by so drastic a measure. Taking a
broad view of the situation at this time we can see the final stage of
the Balkan war as part of a wider process involving military intervention
ostensibly for the sake of a humanitarian cause that also happened to
bring about the fall of a regime, a notable case of this phenomenon
being the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi. Such interventions produce an
asymmetric effect in that the largely predictable aftermath of such
interventions produces at least as much suffering as they were
intended to prevent, if not very much more. From the point of view of
ordinary citizens in Europe and America precipitate military
interventions of the kind mentioned above are counterproductive, to
say the least. Guido Westerwelle, the German Minister of Foreign
Affairs, was harshly criticized for not wholeheartedly backing
Germany's NATO allies during the campaign against Gaddafi. NATO
solidarity: good, suppressing qualms of those whose conscience leads
them to uphold firm principles: bad. Let us pray that the good fairy will
awaken us in good time before something nasty happens. (see opening
lines).

THE AFTERMATH
The old issue of judging who was to blame for precipitating the First
World War has returned to the arena of academic debate and even
entered into the arena of public debate and hot polemics. The scale of
this development reflects a profound search for new bearings in a
world where the conflict between ‘western democracies and the forces
of authoritarianism has reached a point of acute crisis. Again Germany
is caught in the middle. Gone is a Germany guided and shepherded by
‘Mutti’ Merkel, who promoted a policy of international cooperation and
European unity within a framework where the Russian Federation and
China also had a place. In the post-Merkel era a new narrative is
replacing the old one together with its interpretation of the history of
the twentieth century according to which Hitler was the central villain
and the genocide of six million Jews posed a unique and incomparable
instance of the violation of human rights. The credo that informed
German politics committed Germany to renouncing militarism in all its
forms and constantly demonstrating that the nation had made amends
for the Nazi past. This credo is now out of date. Now is the time to
integrate Germany within the consolidated West in opposition to
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Stalin jostles with Hitler in the role of
the central villain in the history of the twentieth century while the
genocide of Europe’s Jewish population viewed as the ultimate measure
of crimes against humanity yields ground to the alleged genocide
committed against the people of Ukraine during Stalin’s collectivization
of Ukraine’s farming infrastructure .Even in literary and academic
circles the so-call ‘Jewish question’ remains unresolved as the cut and
thrust off challenge and counter-challenge between the Jewish-Polish
‘literary pope’ Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Martin Walser and Gunter Grass
show all too clearly. Within the context of the present discussion we
pursue relevant issues in the following essays.

“Only a Film” – Two television film productions and their
contribution to the ongoing debate about the causes of the
First World War.
Q & A on the Origin of the Term ‘Genocide’ and Why this
Remains the Subject of Intense Debate
Why has ‘the Jewish Question‘ become a Matter of
Acrimonious Discord in German Literary and Academic
Circles?
The outbreak of the First World War was the Pandora's Box of the
Twentieth Century. No amount of counterfactual speculation can
assure us what course world history might have taken if the chauffeur
driving a certain car had not taken the wrong turning or, having done
so, had not been advised of his error straight away by the man who
had invited Archduke Franz Ferdinand to visit Sarajevo, planned the
route of the ill-fated motorcade and had failed totally to provide
adequate security arrangements to protect Archduke Ferdinand; who
had moreover exposed the archduke to extreme danger by having him
parade though Sarajevo on Saint Vitus Day of all days, for this
commemorated the Battle of Kosovo when the Serbs were defeated by
the Turks; who, far for being reprimanded for gross negligence, was
rewarded by high honor and given a leading role in the invasion of
Serbia when it came. I refer to Oskar Potiorek, the governor of Bosnia
in 1914.

The sinister implications of these and other anomalies surrounding the
assassination in Sarajevo were not lost on the Austrian film producer
Andreas Prochaska, who in collaboration with the screenwriter Martin
Ambrosch made the film entitled Das Attentat Sarajevo 1914, which
incorporated features of a documentary and detective thriller. We
share the perspective of Leo Pfeffer, the judge assigned with the
prickly task of cross-examining the young men who had played a part in
the plot to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand with a view to filing
a report that was expected to establish the complicity of the Serbian
state in aiding and abetting the mission of Gavrilo Princip and his
companions in crime. However, he is soon struck by certain facts than
run counter to the expected conclusions and as a result is thrown into
an intense inner conflict. Can he endorse a statement that is to be used
as a part of a pretext for war? At last he does so under pressure but
salves his conscience by presenting his minority report on the current
situation as he sees it.
Does the film keep within the bounds of historical truth? True enough,
a Leo Pfeffer did lead the investigation into the background of the
assassination of the royal couple and there can be no doubt that he was
aware of the geopolitical environment in which he found himself. The
conflict of conscience with which he contended according to the film
adds a strong element of human interest to the film if seen from a
dramatist’s point of view, but there is scant evidence that the real Leo
Pfeffer saw himself as a potential saviour of the world.
Two characters in the film find no basis in the details of historical
fact but they play an important role as those who personify and

condense the general tensions and fears of the time. The pursuit of
investigation leads Pfeffer to the residence of the a leading local
patrician who happens to be an ethnic Serb and here he meets his
daughter, Marija Jeftanovic. She informs Pfeffer, and us in the
audience into the bargain, about the situation of the Bosnian Serbs
and the true reason why the leaders of Austria-Hungary and the
German Empire are bent on invading Serbia. Here material interests of
industrial entrepreneurs join forces with military strategists who see
Serbia as an obstacle in the way of the realization a grand design to
extend the military and economic power of the Central Powers to
Baghdad and the Indian Ocean. Pfeffer’s and Marija’s brief love affair
adds a touch of glamour to the film with little or no bearing on the
course of history.
There is another fictional character to consider, the sinister Dr.
Sattler. He embodies the aggressive nationalism of those who
envisaged the creation of a German world empire and he even has
traits of a proto-Nazi extreme nationalist. Though a friend of Pfeffer,
he distains his Jewish roots and seems to be fishing in the murky
waters of crime and illegal drug trafficking combined with efforts to
infiltrate the main Serbian militant organization the Black Hand, to
which the assailants under investigation belong. Implicitly we are led
to speculate about precisely who is involved in the assassination of
Franz Ferdinand; only the teenage assassins, who may have been the
unwitting agents of a sinister conspiracy the extent of which was not
known to them?
Is Das Attentat Sarajevo 1914 just a common or garden thriller with a
historical backdrop, or does it have something worthwhile to
contribute to the discussion of the causes of the First World War?

Writing in the cultural section of the Süddeutsche Zeitung Willi
Winkler dismisses any claim the film might have to being a serious
statement on the assassination in Sarajevo. It is “only a film,” after all,
for it mingles historical facts with the invention of fictional
characters, namely Dr. Sattler, in whom Winkler perceives yet another
example of the stereotypical beastly German that appears in so many
films, and Marija. What is the basis of this reasoning? Friedrich
Schiller, perhaps the initiator of the modern historical drama, not only
consented to the introduction of fictional characters into a historical
drama but allowed for the dramatic representation of events that
never could have taken place on the factual plane, for example the
accidental meeting of Queen Elizabeth and Mary Stuart in the English
countryside, which on a figurative or allegorical level exposed
underlying realities that otherwise would have remained hidden
I venture to suggest that Winkler’s readiness to dismiss as absurd
this film’s speculative foray into the murky realm of Austro-
Hungarian or German influences springs from a defensive reflex so
typical of those with an entrenched world view. The fact that various
establishments throughout history have been very selective in the
choice of evidence that serves their policies came to view in more
recent times when Tony Blair expressed dissatisfaction with the first
draft of David Kelly’s report on the supposed weapons of mass
destruction in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal. There can be no question that
the investigation into the background of the assassination was crucial
as a way of legitimizing the war policy of the Austro-Hungarian
government, a policy already formulated in the days that immediately

followed the assassination, if not before.1
In the cabinet meetings of
the Austro-Hungarian government from the 28th
of June to the fourth
of July all but the Hungarian prime minister István Tisza were for
military action. General Conrad, the highest ranking soldier in Austro-
Hungary, demanded an immediate attack. He had been raring to
“eliminate” Serbia for years with or without a convenient pretext.
Count Leopold Berchtold, the foreign minister, was more circumspect.
Quite apart from the desirability of keeping world opinion on side, he
foresaw that Italy, though a member of the Dreibund, would not join
forces with Austria in the absence of a casus foederis, that is to say,
unless any war against Serbia could be construed as defensive. As
things turned out, the report conducted under Pfeffer’s auspices
could provide no more than circumstantial evidence of Serbian
complicity, such being the fact that the weapons used by the
conspirators were drawn from Serbian military stocks; also the
assailants received backing from officers in the Serbian army
regarding weapons training and methods of entering Bosnia undetected.
In his article “Leo Pfeffer der ratlose Richter” (“Leo Pfeffer the
stymied (or clueless) judge”), Hubert Wetzel takes the film to task
from a different angle. From his point of view Pfeffer failed to bring
his assignment to a successful conclusion. But what conclusion? To one
that would undermine the project of proving Serbian complicity? No, to
the contrary, he should have proved that the charge of Serbian
complicity was well founded. According to Wetzel the truth came to
light in 1916 during the trial of Dragutin Dimitrijević, alias “Apis,”
later executed, the infamous double-dealing head of Serbian security.
1
At their tête-à- tête in Carlsbad in May 1914 Conrad and Moltke exchanged views on the course of
what they considered would be an imminent conflict in Europe and their predictions turned out to be
remarkably accurate.

It was he who supplied the young conspirators with their material
needs and set them up in Bosnia. In somewhat vague terms Wetzel tars
Apis and the entire Serbian leadership with the same brush, thus in
effect claiming there was ex post facto evidence to justify the
Austrian assertion that Serbia was behind the assassination at
Sarajevo after all. However, Wetzel paints only one side of the picture.
On the other we have to consider the probability that Nikola Pašić,
the Serbian prime minister received a tip off that the a group of
conspirators was planning an attempt on the life of Franz Ferdinand
and that as a consequence he attempted to prevent them from
crossing the Serbian-Bosnian frontier. Recognizing this failure, he
instructed the Serbian ambassador in Vienna to warn the Austrians,
albeit in rather nebulous terms, that the life of Franz Ferdinand would
be in grave danger from prospective assailants, should he not break off
the scheduled visit to Sarajevo, which was in any case a foolhardy
venture.. The warning fell on deaf ears. Incidentally, all this comes over
to us today as vaguely familiar if we recall a similar warning supposedly
given by CIA agents to U.S. security officials prior to the nine-eleven
attack on the twin towers in New York.
I stick to my initial position that the issues raised by those taking
sides in the Historikerstreit debate reverberate in the world of TV
film productions and the critical comments they arouse. Indeed,
Winkler evokes the authority of Christopher Clark, the author of Die
Schlafwandler / Wie Europa in den Ersten Weltkrieg zog (The
Sleepwalkers / How Europe Went to War in 1914), when reaffirming
the opinion that the Serbs shared a large portion of blame for the
situation that led to the First World War while somewhat
inconsistently pleading at the same time that extenuating
circumstances lessened the burden of guilt borne by the Austrians and

Germans on the premise that no one side could be singled out for
condemnation for starting a war that sprang from some kind of
European misunderstanding.
Again, it is odd that Willi Winkler refers to the “masochistic”
Viennese in connection with his critique of Das Attentat. It is one
thing to dismiss as absurd dark suspicions of Austrian and even
German involvement in the assassination in Sarajevo; it is quite another
to attribute such suspicions to mental sickness. One wonders exactly
who is being uptight here.
Bernd Fischerauer’s film Europas letzter Sommer (Europe’s Last
Summer) is a film which displays a documentary approach to questions
arising from the fateful assassination that took place in Sarajevo in
1914. It acquaints us with the main actors that guided the course of
events leading to the outbreak of the First World War and in so doing
implicitly negates theories that obfuscate the question of moral
responsibility under a fuzzy cloud of arguments about impenetrable
complexities and all-pervading miscomprehensions. A discussion of such
complexities has its place no doubt, as long as excessive brooding over
the nebulosity of things does not interfere with our common ability to
understand the motives and actions of individuals and their
immediate consequences.
The introduction of the film presents an idyllic scene on a glorious
summer day in Berlin’s Tiergarten. Demure young ladies turn to their
heads as they walk past gallant soldiers. A man whom we recognize
later as Gottlieb von Jagow, the German Foreign Secretary, rows a
boat on a lake in the company of his newlywed bride. Then the

assassination itself is depicted but only with stark brevity. At
Schönbrunn Palace Count Leopold von Berchtold, Imperial Minister for
Foreign Affairs, informs the aging emperor Franz Joseph of the
tragedy and we learn in the next scene, in which von Berchtold
discusses the situation with leading colleagues, that the emperor
accepted the bad news with cool philosophical detachment, merely
stating that Providence had taken a weight from his shoulders. After a
perfunctory admission that a crisis has arisen that threatens to
embroil Europe in a major war Berchtold broaches a discussion among
his colleagues as to future action in response to so blatant an outrage.
The participants in this discussion fall into opposed groups with Field
Marshal Franz X. J. Conrad von Hötzendorf and the diplomat Count
Ludwig Alexander G. von Hoyos advocating war with Serbia and the
Hungarian prime minister Count Istvan Tisza and the finance minister,
Chevalier Leon de Bilinski, advising caution. Berthold outlines the
strategy which, as events were to prove, would unfold in the following
weeks. In von Berchtold’s view war should be declared on Serbia but
for the sake of appearances a police investigation should first
establish the complicity of the Serbian government in the assassination
after the conclusion of which a harsh ultimatum with humiliating terms
should be imposed on Serbia. In order to protect Austria from Russia,
which would in all probability take sides with Serbia, a guarantee of
German solidarity was essential. Von Hoyas is given the assignment of
travelling to Berlin, there to present to Kaiser Wilhelm an appeal for
help from Franz Joseph and a memorandum declaring the need to act
aggressively toward Serbia. Berchtold insists that nothing should
disturb the surface calm of apparent normality in Austro-Hungary in
order not to provoke countermeasures in Serbia and Russia. The
scene switches to the office of the German chancellor von Bethmann
Hollweg in Berlin. Here we encounter Kurt Reizler, the close advisor

and confident of the Chancellor. He gleefully receives the news of the
murders in Sarajevo, promising as it does a heaven-sent opportunity
for war to be waged in furtherance of Germany's manifest destiny of
universal domination or, as he puts it himself, the achievement of “an
organic unity.” He plays the role of an obsessed ideologue and one that
is perhaps a little overdrawn as a latter-day Mephistopheles with
his cynical quips, his habit of chain smoking, his breathing down the
necks of wavering socialists as he paces behind them like a caged
panther, and with the ability of his fertile brain to invent any number
of deceptive ploys in the form of disinformation. Reizler is not the
only one to unreservedly press for war. General Erich C. A Falkenhayn,
the Prussian Minister of War, displays a supercilious and
condescending air and utters “About time” when news of Russia’s
mobilization arrives a quarter of an hour before the deadline at which
Germany would have to unilaterally declare war and open itself to being
branded the chief aggressor. Helmuth Moltke the Younger, raring to
implement the Schlieffen plan (or his whittled down version of it)
which involved invading Belgium so as to afford German armies a
corridor on their victorious march on Paris. He is depicted one as one
with an almost infantile attachment to the project of waging war on
France, not letting any opportunity slip by to mention Luxembourg as an
essential part of the imminent invasion. Disconcerted by the last-
minute misgivings of Bethmann and von Jagow due to the prospect of
Britain entering the war, he furtively and prematurely initiates the
process of mobilization and misinforms the press that Russia has
declared war on Germany. At the last moment before war breaks out
he reminds Bethmann that the process of mobilization is now
irreversible, a point later endorsed by the renowned historian A. J. P.
Taylor when observing that the strategy of war depended on keeping

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