Jewish Dominance in Pre-Nazi Germany

Pre-Nazi Germany is yet another of the dramatic examples of the rise of
Jewish economic influence and control in European countries, in this case violently
ended by the Nazi destruction of German Jewry. Jews numbered at most
about one per cent of the German population between 1871 and 1933, and this
percentage had been steadily declining [GORDON, p. 8] but by the end of the
eighteenth century, “a high proportion of the landed and liquid wealth in Prussia
was in the hands of either nobles or Jews.” [HERTZ, p. 36] By 1908, 12 of the
20 richest Berliners were of Jewish ancestry, as were 11 of the 25 richest people
in Prussia. [MOSSE, W., 1987, p. 208] Of the top 200 Prussian millionaires, 55
were Jewish. Of the top 800, 190 were of Jewish extraction. [MOSSE, p. 30] 41%
of Prussian iron and scrap iron firms, and 57% of other metal businesses were
owned by Jews. [GORDON, p. 11] Although Jews in 1903 were only 0.74% of
the labor force in Prussia, 27% of all Prussian lawyers were Jews, as were 10%
of apprenticed lawyers, 47% of magistrates, and 30% of all higher ranks of the
judiciary. [GORDON, p. 13]

By the 1930s, 46% of German Jews were self-employed. [KOTKIN, p. 43] In
1932, six million Germans were unemployed. [RUBENSTEIN, R.L., p. 117] In
the town of Sonderburg, in the Rhineland area of Germany, “of the five largest
employers, two were Jewish firms; in one case, the Jewish-owned mill employed
hundreds of Gentile workers – as many as 20 percent of the working adult labor
force. In a very real sense, the Gentile community depended on Jews for
employment and for retail goods.” [HENRY, F., p. 52]

Gentile fortunes in Germany and its environs were based in landownership
and agriculture; Jewish fortunes were founded upon banking and finance.
[MOSSE p. 206] In Berlin, by the eighteenth century, “the income of Jews in the
middle of the Jewish tax scale would be about three times higher than the average
Berliner. The middle of the Jewish tax scale would thus be approximately
equal to the top ten per cent of Berlin households.” [LOWENSTEIN] The average
income of Jews in pre-Nazi Germany was 3.2 times higher than the rest of
the population. [NIEWYK, p. 16] “At the end of the eighteenth century 400
Jewish families formed one of the wealthiest groups in Berlin … In Bavaria, in
1808, 80% of government loans were endorsed and negotiated by Jews.”
[ARENDT, p. 17] By 1914 the Jews of Berlin – 5 per cent of that city’s population
– paid over a third of its taxes [MOSSE, W., 1987, p. 13] and there were “a
large number of domestic servants in the two most important Jewish areas of
Berlin during the 1920’s.” [GORDON, p. 15]

In 1923, 150 of the 161 privately-owned banks in Berlin were Jewish; [GORDON,
p. 11] “In Berlin alone,” notes Jewish author Edwin Black, “about 75% of
the attorneys, and nearly as many doctors, were Jewish.” [BLACK, p. 58] “All the
major Berlin department stores – Wertheim, Herman Tietz, N. Israel,
KaDeWe,” says Jewish author Peter Wyden, “were the properties of Jews. All the
principal newspaper publishers and thirteen of the drama critics were Jews.
Garment manufacturing, a major industry, was generally known to be in Jewish
hands.” [WYDEN, p. 21] “In Germany,” says Nachum Gidal, “Jews above all
developed the setting up of department stores, the manufacture and readymade
ladies and gentlemen’s clothing, the tobacco, leather, and fur industries
and the new film industry.” [GIDAL, p. 17]

By 1823, the Bavarian government owed 23% of its public debt to Jews; as
early as 1818, there was growing complaint about excessive Jewish influence in
Germany. One German writer, Garlieb Merkel, noted that while the “German
peoples had, in many years of political disaster lost their precious political
rights and had diminished in stature, [Jews] had increased their wealth at a terrifying
rate. They knew how gain equality with Christians everywhere and they
zealously set about developing this equality into further privileges.” “This statement
of Merkel has some truth in it,” says scholar Jacob Katz, “Jews had
exploited, economically and socially, the new status they had achieved in the
past generation.” [KATZ, From, p. 94] With formal emancipation, the Jews of
Berlin, complained Merkel, “now bought up every house afforded for sale in the
main streets and filled the cities with their shops. The Jews had long dominated
in financial deals and trade in bills. Now they led in occupations such as the
book trade … Almost all the country homes on both sides of the Tiergarten, the
Berliners only place of recreation, had passed into Jewish hands … The Jews has
made their gains at the expense of other citizens.” [KATZ, From, p. 94-95]
The Jewish-French intellectual, Bernard Lazare, noted in 1894 that:
“In Germany [Jewish] activity was exceedingly great. They were at the
bottom of legislation favorable to the carrying on of banking and exchange,
the practice of usury and speculation. It was they who profited
by the abolition, in 1867, of the ancient laws limiting the rate of interest.

They were active in bringing about the enactment of the law of June
1870, which exempted stock companies from government supervision.
After the Franco-German War, they were among the boldest speculators,
and at a time when German capitalists were carried away by a passion
for the creation of industrial combinations, they acted a no less
important part than had the Jews of France, from 1830 to 1848. Their
activity persisted until the financial panic of 1873, when the country
squires and the small traders who had been ruined by the excesses of this
Grunder Periode in which the Jew had played the most important part,
gave themselves up to the most violent anti-Semitism, such, indeed, as
proceeds only from injured interests.” [LAZARE, p. 166]

With the rise of consolidated corporations in the late 1800’s and early
1900’s, says W. E. Mosse, a Jewish scholar, “a picture emerges of a number of
[German] companies with significant Jewish representation in the top positions,
which constitutes something of a network with certain common features
and common interests.” [MOSSE, W., 1987, p. 219] For those men with “multiple
board memberships” in a variety of major companies, 18 men had more
than 21 board positions each. Of these 18, 10 were Jewish. [MOSSE, p. 257]
“The distribution of these Jewish board members among major companies
shows a distinctive interlocking pattern.” [MOSSE, W., 1987, p. 253]
This typical business formulation had been evidenced in the German elite
some years earlier when Jews tried to gain acceptance into Masonic lodges.

Jacob Katz notes that:
“Members of the lodge were expected to communicate with each other
on equal footing. Jews, so the complaint ran, tended to cluster together
whenever they appeared in the lodge, creating a subgroup, a clique.
Similar observances were made in other quarters as well. I do not think
this accusation was a figment of their imagination with no basis in fact.
Jewish historical experience, as well as Jewish concepts and practices,
created a mentality functioning as a factor of cohesion among Jews and
thereby as a barrier between them and non-Jews.” [KATZ, RoGH, p. 5]

Many German Jews were known to have, at least officially, converted to
Christianity. Like the Spanish Marranos, this was often merely expeditious. As
the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine observed, baptism was “the ticket of
admission into German culture.” [VARON, p. 10] Heine himself, notes Nahum
Goldmann, “was a very good Jew at the end of his life and [his] conversion to
Christianity was only a formality.” [GOLDMANN, N., 1978, p. 66] Popular
German Jewish author Emil (born Cohen) Ludwig’s “conversion to Christianity
had been merely an effort to buy the respect of Germans.” [MOSSE, G.,
1985, p. 26] “Often one submitted [to baptism],” notes Adam Weisberger, “as
an opportunistic matter of convenience … A Jewish origin was a handicap but
one which baptism could remedy.” [WEISBERGER, A., 1997, p. 48] (Even in
America, noted James Yaffe, reflecting a theme, “Serge Koussevitzky, Eugene
Ormandy, and Pierre Monteux, all Jews, had to convert to Christianity in order
to reach the top of the symphony world.”) [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 52]

Even among the wealthy assimilationists to German society in the Jewish
communities “mixed marriages were the exception rather than the rule and the
Jews continued to live a life apart. They interacted with non-Jews in their professional
lives, but very seldom in private.” [TRAVERSO, p. 15] This model even
parallels the wealthy German-Jewish situation in the United States in the same
era: “The social solidarity [in America] was no way better exemplified and furthered
than by the tendency – common to all unified elite – to intermarry …
[SUPPLE, p. 80] … German-Jewish investment banking [in the U. S.] in the late
19th century … was … based upon the proliferation of kinship groups … it
seems possible to say that the German-Jewish groups had a strategic role to play
in the providing of capital from Germany for American industrial development.”
[SUPPLE, p. 84-85] By 1937 nine of America’s richest 60 families were
Jewish, including the Guggenheims, Lehmans, Warburgs, Kahns, Schiffs, Blumenthals,
Friedsams, Rosenwalds, and Baruchs. [GOLDSTEIN, D. p. 101]

Stephen Birmingham notes that the insularity of the wealthy Jewish strata in
America: “For forty-five years after its founding in 1867, Kuhn, Loeb, and Company
had no partners who were not related by blood or marriage to the Loeb-
Kuhn-Wolff family complex. For nearly fifty years after Goldman, Sachs was
founded, all partners were members of the intermarried Goldman and Sachs
family. The Lehmans hardly seemed to need intermarriage at all: until 1924,
nearly 75 years after the firm was founded, all the partners were named Lehman.”
[BIRMINGHAM, p. 9-10]

By 1907-08 Jews had a conspicuous presence in the corporate sector of the
German economy. Despite representing only one per cent of the German population,
20 per cent of the largest companies had a “substantial” Jewish involvement.
A further 16 per cent had “significant’ Jewish management. [MOSSE, W.,
1987, p. 273] Examining the very largest companies, W. E. Mosse notes that
over two-thirds of such firms had a “significant Jewish component.” Of the
most powerful corporate organizations in Germany, only 7.7 per cent were
“without some degree of Jewish participation.” [MOSSE, p. 273, 274] In 1913,
fifteen Jews held 211 seats on boards of German banks; by 1928 this number
was 718. In that same year Jews represented 80% of the leading members of the
Berlin stock exchange. Five years later the Nazis expelled 85% of all stockbrokers
because of “race.” [GORDON, p. 12]

In the pre-World War II Weimar Republic of Germany that fell to the Nazis,
11% of Germany’s doctors were Jews, and 16% of its lawyers. [MOSSE, p. 26]
By 1909-10, about one-fourth of the teachers at German universities were of
Jewish descent. [GORDON, p. 13] As elsewhere, an expediential prerequisite
for advancement was at least superficial conversion to Christianity. “Those who
were baptized,” says Nachum Gidal, “were then eligible to be appointed to professional
chairs.” [GIDAL, p. 17] “In the spring of 1933,” notes Anthony Heilbut,
“Hitler shocked the world by dismissing from their jobs the titans of
German scholarship, the vast majority of whom were Jewish.” [HEILBUT,
p. 23] (Adolf Hitler’s family doctor had been Jewish. Hitler’s sister was even
once employed by the Mensa Academica Judaica in Vienna. Hitler was awarded
a medal of honor for his deeds in World War I; the award was reportedly expedited
by a Jewish army officer, Hugo Gutmann.) [GOLDBERG, M., 1976, p. 38-
39]

Almost 80% of department and chain store business in pre-war Germany
were Jewish, 40% of wholesale textile firms, and 60% of the wholesale and retail
clothing business. By 1895, 56% of German Jews were involved in commerce;
correspondingly, only 10% of non-Jewish Germans were in this field.
[TRAVERSO, p.15] By the 1930s, Jews controlled 90% of the world’s fur trade,
reflected in an important yearly auction in Leipzig. [BLACK, p. 131] “Jews were
also important in the wholesale metal business and retail grocery business.” In
Upper Silesia more than half of the local industry – coal, iron, steel, petroleum,
et al – was owned or directed by Jews before 1933. [NIEWYK, p. 13-14] “The
coal and iron industry of Upper Silesia,” says Sidney Osborne, “– the second
largest in Germany – was almost the exclusive creation of a handful of Jews.”
[OSBORNE, S., 1939, p. 18]

This area included the Jewish-owned iron company owned by Mortiz Friedlander,
Sinai Levy and David Lowenfeld; the “well-known iron and steel works,
Bismarkshutte” which was founded by two Jewish merchants; an “extensive iron
pipe and tube works” owned by Mortiz Hahn and Simon Huldschinsky; the
Upper Silesian Iron Industry (with branches Tubenhutte and Baildonhutte);
“one of the largest enamel works” in Germany; Ferrum, and iron and steel firm;
the Upper Silesian Zinc Foundries company; the “coke-oven industry Gluckauf;
the Upper Silesian Coke and Chemical Works; and coal mining (Otto Friedlander).
[OSBORNE, S., 1939, p. 18] “Other important industries in Jewish
hands,” adds Sidney Osborne,
“were leather, textiles, and cigarette factories, the Portland cement
and lime industry, and important iron and lumber interests. This account
of Jewish enterprise in Upper Silesia is given with some particularity
because it was more or less typical of what was going on in other
industrial regions of Germany.” [OSBORNE, S., 1939, p. 19]

“The Hirsch copper works in Halberstadt…”, notes Nachum Gidal,
“[became] the most important copper and brass works in Europe. The works
was still owned by the Orthodox family until 1933. In the basic materials industry,
Fritz von Friedlander-Fuld (1858-1917) was outstanding with his Silesian
enterprises … [comprising] a group of major firms. Friedlander-Fuld was
responsible for building up the coke industry in Germany … Closely linked
with the coke industry was the petroleum industry, led by general director M.
Melamid … The founder of the Silesian iron industry (Caro-Hegenschedt) was
George von Caro … His brother Oskar Caro … is regarded as the founder of
the German enamel industry. Mortiz von der Porten … spearheaded the aluminum
sector in Germany.” [GIDAL, p. 266] Wilhelm Von Gutmann’s Gebruder
Gutmann Industries “was the largest single factor in the coal industry of the
Austro-Hungarian empire.” [GREENBERG, M., p. 70] Philip Rosenthal
founded “the most famous porcelain factory in Selb in Bavaria.” [GIDAL,
p. 267] Albert Balin “played an outstanding part in the building up of the German
merchant fleet … Under his guidance [the Hamburg-America line] developed
into Europe’s leading shipping company.” Walter Rathenau was president
of the “Siemens works, the largest electricity company in Germany.” [GIDAL,
p. 266-268]

In the 1930s, notes Ian Kershaw, during Nazi efforts to politicize the German
peasants against Jews in the Alzenau district,
“Jewish-owned cigar factories dominated local industry … Jews in
fact owned most of the twenty-nine factories, with a combined work
force of 2,206 women and 280 men … In the countryside … the main
issue was the remaining dominance in many areas of the Jewish cattle
dealer, the traditional middle-man and purveyor of credit for untold
numbers of German peasants … [As late as 1935,] the wholesale cattle
trade in Ebermannstadt was … still ‘to a good ninety percent’ in Jewish
hands.” [KERSHAW, p. 241-242]

Jews were likewise dramatically over represented in every sphere of aca
demic enterprise, from philosophy to science. “Jews were also the most influential
critics of drama, art, music, and books as well as the owners of the most
important art galleries and theatres.” [GOLDBERG, p. 26] In the Berlin of 1930,
80% of the theatre directors were Jewish and they authored 75% of the produced
plays. [MACDONALD, p. 125] Many prominent actors, actresses, and
moviemakers were Jewish. Some Jewish scholars, like Walter Laquer, have even
went so far as to claim that without Jewish influence the culture of the pre-Nazi
Weimar Republic “would not have existed.” [TRAVERSO, p. 12] “Jews,” says
Laquer, “were prominent among Expressionist poets, among the novelists of
the 1920’s, among the theatrical producers and, for a while, among the leading
figures of cinema.” [LAQUER, p. 73] “Jewish names,” notes Nachum Gidal,
“were numerous among the pioneers of film and the film industry,” [GIDAL,
p. 370] including Paul Davidson and Herman Fellner who founded “the first
German film company.” [GIDAL, p. 370]

Frederick Grunfeld romanticizes the Jewish road from an economic base to
enormous influence upon German popular culture:
“The shoe-factory generation regularly produced and nurtured a
brood of scribes, artists, intellectuals. Else Lasker-Schuler was the
daughter of an investment banker, Carl Sternheim the son of a banker
and newspaper publisher, Walter Benjaim of an antique dealer, Alfred
Neumann of a lumber merchant, Stefan Zweig of a textile manufacturer,
Franz Kafka of a haberdashery wholesaler, Herman Bloch of a cotton-
mill owner; Theodore Lessing and Walter Hasenclver were sons of
doctors and grandsons of manufacturers, and so on, in an orderly and
predictable procession from the department store into the library, the
theatre and the concert hall.” [GRUNFELD, F., 1996, p. 28-29]
Most of the members of the famously influential “Frankfurt School” of politics,
philosophy, and culture were also Jewish – Max Horkheimer, Herbert
Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock, and many others. Frederick Grunfeld argues that
these people did not really experience anti-Semitism in pre-Nazi Germany.
Why? “All of these privileged witnesses … came from well-to-do families of the
upper middle class, for whom money had always been a talisman against the
cruder forms of prejudice.” [GRUNFELD, F., 1996, p. 17]

Although such people were from affluent families, socialism and communism
were often the world views they championed. “What today we are apt to
call Weimar culture,” notes Jewish scholar Werner Mosse, “was largely the creation
of left-wing intellectuals, among whom there was such a disproportionate
number of Jews that Weimar culture has been called, somewhat snidely, an
internal Jewish dialogue.” [MOSSE, W., 1985, p. 22] “In twentieth century Germany
where the Jews formed less than one percent of the nation’s population,”
observes Istvan Deak,
“Jews were responsible for a great part of German culture. The owners
of three of Germany’s greatest newspaper houses; the editors of the Vossiche
Zeitung and Berliner Tagleblatt; most book publishers; the owners
and editors of the Neue Rundschau and other distinguished literary mag
azines; the owners of Germany’s greatest art galleries were all Jews. Jews
played a major part in theatre and in the film industry as producers, directors,
and actors. Many of Germany’s best composers, musicians, artists,
sculptors, and architects were Jews. Their participation in literary
criticism and in literature were enormous: practically all the great critics
and many novelists, poets, dramatists, and essayists of the Weimar Republic
were Jews … If cultural contributions by Jews were far out of proportion
to their numerical strength, their participation in left-wing
intellectual activities were even more disproportionate.” [DEAK, p. 28]
By the 1920s German critics like Theodore Fritsch, Hans Blucher, and Adolf
Bartel were influential in the growing German complaint that German culture
was dominated by Jews. [TRAVERSO] A German Jew, Moritz Goldstein, had
poured fuel on the issue of Jewish dominance by writing a much-discussed article
in 1913 in which he wrote that Jews essentially ran German culture, from an
almost complete monopoly of Berlin newspapers and dominance of German theatre,
music, and literature. [LAQUER, p. 74] “German cultural life seems to be
passing increasingly into Jewish hands,” Goldstein wrote, “… We Jews are administering
the spiritual property of a nation which denies us our right and our ability
to do so.” [GRUNFELD, F., 1996, p. 21] Even in the nineteenth century the
German composer, and nationalist, Richard Wagner, was horrified to realize the
large number of Jews in his audiences, as well as in the receptions for him afterward.
[TRAVERSO, p. 12]

Although Jews, as 1% of the German population, represented a negligible
electoral power, by the early twentieth century their economic and social impact
was considerable in the political sphere. Jewish-funded lawyers, for instance, were
instrumental in securing fines against, or jail terms, for right wing politicians,
often for disorderly conduct charges or libel. [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 27] Even
“the police commissioner of Berlin during part of the period of Nazi agitation for
power was a Jew, Dr. Bernhard Weiss.” [GOLDBERG, M. H. 1979, p. 121] “In
1933,” says Anthony Heilbut, “[Jews] were only five hundred thousand of Germany’s
sixty-four million people, and one-third of these lived in Berlin. Jews had
infiltrated many areas of German life, particularly the media, through the newspapers
they owned and edited, as well as the movies they wrote and produced.”
[HEILBUT, p. 25] Before World War I, two of the most important German newspapers
– the National-Zeitung of Berlin and the Franfurter Zeitung – were owned
and edited by Jews. [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 25] 13 of 21 daily newspapers in Berlin
in the 1870’s were Jewish-owned, among them the only three that focused on
political satire. [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 25] In the pre-Nazi era of the Weimar
Republic, three of Germany’s important newspapers were Jewish-owned – the
Vossiche Zeitung, the Berliner Tageblatt (founded in 1872 by Rudolf Mosse and
Georg Davidsohn) and the Frankfurter Zeitung (Heinrich Simon/Leopold Sonnemann).
(The eventual president of the World Zionist Organization, Nahum
Goldmann, began writing for the Frankfurt paper when he was 15 years old).
[GOLDMANN, N., 1978, p. 16] The newspapers Grenzboten and Ostdeutsche
Post were also owned by a Jewish media mogul, Ignaz Kuranda. [ROTH, C., 1940,
p. 142] The two largest publishing houses in Germany – the Ullstein, and Mosse
companies – were also owned by Jews, as were a number of smaller ones. [GINSBERG,
B., 1993, p. 26] Rudolf Mosse, the founder of the Mosse company, and a
colleague also began “building up an advertising bureau which soon overtook the
former leaders, the English advertising agencies, and had 275 branches worldwide.”
[GIDAL, p. 272] In the late 1800s Leopold Ullstein “launched the Berliner
Morgenpost, which built up a circulation of six hundred thousand, the largest in
Germany, but perhaps his most dramatic breakthrough came with the Berliner
Illustrierte Zeitung which by 1894 had a circulation of two million … Ullstein had
five sons, all of whom developed different branches of his enterprise. By the ‘thirties
they were not only the biggest newspaper group in Germany, but they also
published books, magazines, dress patterns and music. They also had their own
news agency, picture service, film studio and even a zoo to serve their children’s
papers.” [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 70]

The Jewish-owned Landhoffs book publishing firm was also a “book trade
dynasty,” [LOTTMAN, p. 51] as was the Springers company. “Not just the principals
of the [Springers] firm,” notes Business History, “but many of the distinguished
scientists among their authors and editors were Jewish.’ [SHAW, C.,
p. 214] Leading “avant-garde” publishing firms included the Jewish houses of
S. Fischer, Kurt Wolff, Georg Bondi, Erich Reiss, and the Malik Verlag.
[LAQUER, p. 73] “Bote and Bote was Germany’s largest music publisher and
ran a concert agency as well … Both Rutter and Loening in Frankfurt am Main
and the Deutsche Verlegsantalt in Stuttgart were founded by Jews, as were the
later publishing houses of Erich, Reiss, Brandus, and a number of specialist
presses.” [GIDAL, p. 35]

With the rise of German fascism, in 1933 a retired United States Department
official, Edward House, told a new ambassador to Berlin: “You should try
to ameliorate Jewish suffering. [The Nazis] are clearly wrong and even terrible,
but the Jews should not be allowed to dominate economic or intellectual life in
Berlin as they have for a long time.” [GROSE, p. 97-98] Anthony Heilbut notes
a joke that was a favorite of Albert Einstein’s, “in which an émigré asks a friend
if he is homesick for Berlin, and the other replies: ‘What for? I’m not Jewish.’”
[HEILBUT, p. 46]

Jews were also vastly over represented as editors and reporters in German
journalism. “Unfortunately,” says Sarah Gordon, “many of them tended to use
their works as vehicles to oppose or criticize prevalent German values.” [GORDON,
p. 14] Among these critics of German society was Kurt Tucholsky,
“whose biting satire made him a hero of the more cosmopolitan segments of
the German middle class. The son of a successful Jewish businessman-lawyer,
Tucholsky flayed Germans and German values mercilessly. By the late 1920s, he
had decided that Germany was hopeless and that middle-class Germans were
either idiots or positively evil.” [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 85] Germans,
assessed prominent Jewish pianist Arthur Rubinstein in the 1930s, “are not a
musical people. They accept the heavy, pedantic music of Pfitzner, Reger and
Bruckner with their long-winded ‘developments,’ just as they enjoy a stodgy
meal of sauerkraut and sausages.” [SACHS, D., 1992, p. 21]

On one hand, Jews were increasingly perceived to have strangleholds on the
German social, cultural and economic system. On the other, in the political
field, Richard Rubenstein notes that
“Marxism was seen by conservative Europe as Jewish in origin and
leadership, a view that was reinforced in Germany by the three successive
left wing regimes that succeeded the Bavarian royal house of Wittelsbach
from November 7, 1918 to May 1, 1919, at the end of World
War I. In Munich, the city that did more than any other to give birth to
[Hitler’s] National Socialism, and in the era in which Hitler first joined
the miniscule party, a series of politically naive, left-wing Jewish leaders
attempted ineffectually to bring about an enduring socialist revolution
in Catholic, conservative Bavaria.” [RUBENSTEIN, p. 113]

“As Robert Michel pointed out in his classic Political Parties,” note Stanley
Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, “Jews at that time [late 1800s] were playing a key role in socialist parties
in almost every European country in which they had settled in any
numbers.” [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 84]

In Germany, these included Daniel deLeon, a Sephardic Jew who headed the
Socialist Labor Party. DeLeon “attempted to conceal his Jewish background,
pretending that he was descended from an aristocratic family of Catholic background.”
[ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 95]

At the influential Die Weltbuhne left-wing intellectual journal in pre-Hitler
Germany, 42 of 68 writers “whose identity could be established” were found to
be of Jewish descent. Two more were “half-Jews” and three others were married
to Jewish women. But, notes Isak Deak, “only a few of the Weltbuhne circle
openly acknowledged that they were Jews … Die Weltbuhne was in this respect
not unique; Jews published, edited, and to a great part wrote the other left-wing
intellectual magazines … Jews created the left-wing intellectual movement in
Germany.” [DEAK, p. 24-25, 29]

In increasing political turmoil between World Wars I and II, and amidst the
rise of Nazism and a growing perception that the communist movement would
destroy tradition German culture and values, left-leaning Jewish politicians
who were assassinated included Bavarian premiere Kurt Eisner, Eugen Levin
(the chairman of the Executive Assembly of the Second Munich Soviet Republic),
and German Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau.

The actual origin of the term “anti-Semitism” is credited to German author
Wilhelm Marr who wrote, in 1879, a book entitled The Victory of Judaism Over
Germany. Here is a brief excerpt, as he agitated about so much Jewish dominance
in the life of German society:

“There is no stopping them ... Are there no clear signs that the twilight of
the Jews is setting in? No. Jewry’s control of society and politics, as well
as its practical domination of the religious and ecclestical thought, is still
in the prime of its development, heading toward the realization of Jehovah’s
promise, ‘I will hand all peoples over to thee.’ By now, a sudden reversal
of this process is fundamentally impossible, for if it were, the entire
social structure, which has been so thoroughly Judaized, would collapse.
And there is no viable alternative to this social structure which could take
its place. Further, we cannot count on the help of the ‘Christian’ state.
The Jews are the ‘best citizens’ of this modern, Christian state, as it is in
perfect harmony with their interests ... It is not a pretentious prophecy
but the deepest inner conviction which I here utter. Your generation will
not pass before there will be absolutely no public office, even the highest
one, which the Jews will not have usurped. Yes, through the Jewish nation,
Germany will become a world power, a western New Palestine. And
this will happen, not through violent revolutions, but through the compliance
of the people ...

German culture has proved itself ineffective and powerless against this
foreign power. This is a fact; a brute inexorable fact. State, Church, Catholicism,
Protestantism, Creed and Dogma, all are brought low before
the Jewish tribunal, that is, the [irreverent] daily press [which the Jews
control]. [Text in brackets inserted by Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, presumably
from the context of the rest of the original Marr work] The Jews
were late in their assault on Germany, but once they started there was no
stopping them.” [MENDES-FOHR/REINHARZ, 1980, p. 271-273]

In nearby Austria, major newspapers like Neue Freie Presse (“the most prestigious
newspaper in Central Europe”) and Wiener Tagblatt were likewise
Jewish-owned. “In German-speaking Europe,” says Jacques Kornberg, “the
term ‘journalism’ and ‘Jews’ went together in people’s minds.” And, adds Kornberg,
since Jews had a reputation for “shady business practices” and “journalistic
corruption,” notions of “anti-Semitism and anti-journalism always went
hand in hand.” [KORNBERG; ROTH, C., 1940, p. 142]

In Vienna, Austria, by 1910, 62% of the lawyers were Jewish, 51% of the doctors
and dentists, and 70% of those in scientific occupations. [TRAVERSO,
p. 15] A large proportion of the rest of Viennese Jews, 40%, were merchants. A
Jewish writer from Berlin, Jakob Wasserman, in visiting Vienna in 1898,
remarked that
“I soon realized that the whole of public life was dominated by Jews…
I was amazed to see such a crowd of Jewish physicians, lawyers, clubs
men, snobs, dandies, proletarians, actors, journalists, and poets.”
[TRAVERSO, p. 28]
Jewish author Stephan Zweig claimed that nine-tenths of Viennese culture
was “promoted, nourished, or even created by Viennese Jewry.” [TRAVERSO,
p. 28] “The crowding of Jewish sons of well-to-do parents into the cultural
occupations was especially marked in Germany and Austria,” notes Hannah
Arendt, “where a great proportion of cultural institutions, like newspapers,
publishing, music, and theatre, became Jewish institutions.” [ARENDT, Origins,
p. 52] In the late nineteenth century, says Albert Lindemann, “that the
non-Jews [of Vienna] had a sense of being overwhelmed by a Jewish invasion is
… easy to understand, particularly because Jews tended to choose certain occupations
from which non-Jews were often consequently thrown out … Nearly all
the banks in the capital, and indeed in the Dual Monarchy as a whole, were
owned by Jews as were many of the most important newspapers, especially
those of mass circulation.” [LINDEMANN, p. 25] “Antisemitism,” once
observed Arthur Schnitzler, “became popular in Vienna ony when the Jews
themselves took it up.” [LEVY, A., 1993,p. 346]

From When Victims Rule, pp. 148-158

Editor's Note: After the controversy of World War II, the Zionists were able to recapture Germany and are presently in full control of their government...some would argue that they never left. I happen to agree with that conclusion.