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BY STEPHEN F. EISENMAN


For many people, the question is inflammatory. The crimes of the
German Nazis were of such magnitude that comparison with any other
historical violence is invidious. The genocide of the Jews was
deliberate and methodical and intended to eliminate every last one.
The goal was the same with the Romani and Sinti people. By comparison,
the Israelis – currently accused of genocide — are rank amateurs. They
have so far killed some 35,000 Palestinians in Gaza out of a
population of 2.3 million.

But the question, “Can Jews be Nazis?” is nevertheless important for challenging claims of moral inoculation by virtue of the Jewish
experience of the Holocaust. If Israeli leaders are indeed committing
a genocide in Gaza – as seems the case — they inhabit the same moral
universe as the German Nazis, regardless of the suffering of past
generations. In addition to the 35,000 killed, the war in Gaza has
injured another 75,000 and displaced 2 million. Most of the victims
are women and children – how can their deaths be justified? Israeli
cabinet ministers, Knesset members, military personnel, and police
have all freely spoken of their wish to force Palestinians into Egypt, establish Jewish-only settlements in Gaza, and even use an atomic bomb
to kill everyone in the Gaza strip. (U.S. senator Lindsay Graham
recently also suggested using a nuclear weapon against Gaza.)

Last week, the Israeli government suspended food and fuel deliveries
to Gaza as collective punishment for a Hamas rocket attack that killed
four soldiers. Such retribution is banned under Article 33 of the
Fourth Geneva Convention, by which Israel is bound. It also violates
the teaching of the Hebrew prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel – “The person
who sins; only he shall die.” One of the Hebrew sages, Hillel the
Elder, reiterated the point in the Mishna, the “oral” Torah: “Each by
his own sin will die’.

The 1948 U.N. Convention on the Crime of Genocide, describes it as
“the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic,
racial, or religious group.” By that definition, Israel has joined the
club of violators and is subject to international sanction. When the International Criminal Court levels charges of genocide against Prime
Minister Netanyahu, National Security Minister Ben-Gvir, Defense
Minister Gallant, IDF Chief of Staff Halevi, and Finance Minister
Smotrich – indictments could be announced any day — the men will be
subject to arrest by all convention signatories, including the U.S.
(Genocide is also prohibited under U.S. law, but to be prosecutable,
the crime must be committed in the U.S. or by U.S. nationals.) The
punishment for genocide is 30 years imprisonment, or in exceptional circumstances, life in prison. If Netanyahu manages to avoid trial for corruption in Israel, and if he lives long enough (he’s 74), he could
be arrested and held in detention at an ICC facility outside the Hague
in Scheveningen. His jailers there are unlikely to let him to indulge
his taste for pink champagne and Cuban cigars.

Jewish Nazis in Nazi Germany

“Can jews be Nazis?” is also an historical question. To that, the
answer is yes. Though membership in the German Nazi party was barred
to Jews, thousands joined the Luftwaffe, Wehrmacht, and Kriegsmarine
in the 1930s. They did so for the same reasons as other Germans: To
serve the fatherland, forge a career, and continue a family tradition
of military service. After passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Jews
were barred from enlistment, but some managed to hide their ethnic
origins (and lack of a foreskin), or else obtain papers from Nazi
Party officials attesting to their deutschblütigkeit. One colonel in
the Wehrmacht, Ernst Bloch, a Mischlinge (half-Jewish person) received
the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross for bravery, the highest award
given to military and paramilitary officers in Nazi Germany. His
Judaism remained undetected until 1944, when he came to the attention
of SS chief Henrich Himmler. A few weeks later, he received the
following letter from his superior, major general Wilhelm Burgdorf,
deputy chief of the Wehrmacht personnel office: “The Führer has
decided as of 31 January 1945 to discharge you from active duty. It is
an honor to thank you on behalf of the Führer for your service
rendered during war and peace for our people and fatherland. I wish
you all the best for the future. Heil Hitler.” The wonder is not that
Bloch was detected after so long, but that he was apparently surprised
at his dismissal. A few weeks later, he joined the Volkssturm
(people’s militia) and was killed during the Soviet invasion of
Berlin. There were thousand of other Jews, not all Mischlinge who
attained high roles in the German military. Twenty of them were
awarded the Iron Cross.

In all, thousands of Jews in Germany and occupied Europe – out of a
population of about 9.5 million — assisted the Nazi regime in some
way. Most did so under duress. Jewish ghetto councils, or Judenräte, established by Nazi officials in Poland, Lithuania and elsewhere, were
tasked with distributing limited provisions of food and medicine,
recruiting forced laborers, confiscating Jewish property, and
supervising the Jewish ghetto police. By 1942 or ’43, some Judenräte
and ghetto police were directly assisting local Nazis by identifying
resistance leaders and organizing Jews for deportation to the death
camps. The Jewish police could be cruel, especially the “13 Group,”
established in Warsaw in 1940. They ran their own prison and reported
directly to the Gestapo. Nevertheless, given the threats and ambient
violence – refusal to comply with Gestapo orders usually meant death —
it’s difficult to cast judgement on cooperating Jews. By the end of
the war, the vast majority of them were dead.

Similar moral and legal complexity concerns Kapos and Sonderkommandos.
The former were concentration or death-camp prisoners recruited to
supervise and direct other prisoners. They were generally, but not
always, selected from criminal-inmates to reduce the likelihood that
they would feel solidarity with their charges. Kapos were accorded
privileges in exchange for their services and their brutality:
separate quarters, better food, and civilian clothes. If someone
selected to be Kapo refused service, he would generally be returned to
the ranks of regular prisoners, and somebody else appointed to take
his place. Thus, it’s easy to see why so few resisted recruitment – if
there was always someone available for the job, a prisoner would ask
himself: “Why shouldn’t it be me, why shouldn’t I survive?”?

Sonderkommandos were death-camp workers, such as at
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Sobibor, who cleared the gas
chambers of bodies, put them in the crematoria, and disposed of the
incinerated remains. The men who did this were generally recruited
immediately upon arrival at the camps and would be shot or gassed at
once if they refused. The work was of course unspeakable, and the
Nazis made sure that it was unspoken; the Sonderkommandos were
segregated from other prisoners to conceal the latter’s fate, and
nearly all were themselves killed in an effort to hide the facts of
the Holocaust from the world. A few survived however, and the tales
they told exposed the harrowing of Hell. To call them collaborators
would be to inflict posthumous punishment upon people whose souls were
already shattered.

American Jewish Nazis

There is nothing funnier than a Jewish Nazi. That’s the unavoidable
conclusion of any survey of post-War American comedy. In 1940, the
popular Three Stooges (all Jewish), starred in the short film, You
Nazty Spy in which Moe Howard plays a wallpaper hanger who somehow
becomes Hailstone, the Hitler-mustachioed leader of the nation of
Moronika. Two years later, the radio and TV comic Jack Benny (Jewish)
starred with Carol Lombard in To Be or Not to Be (1942), directed by
Ernst Lubitsch (Jewish). Benny plays Joseph Tura, a Polish stage actor
who dresses up as a Gestapo officer to obtain a list of civilians
targeted for Nazi reprisals. (It’s a very complicated plot.)

Immediately after the war, there were a spate of war movies with Jews
playing Nazi roles, but few were comedies. Within about a decade, that
began to change. On Your Show of Shows (1954) Sid Caesar (Jewish) and
Howard Morris (Jewish) performed an eight-minute sketch called The
German General in which Howard helps dress Caesar in his elaborate
uniform – military tunic, medals, epaulets, sash, sword, and peaked
hat — while both speak in pseudo-German (mixed with Yiddish)
double-talk. I won’t give away punch line if you haven’t seen it.
(Click on the link!) A decade later, Peter Sellers (Jewish) played a
former Nazi, now an American nuclear weapons expert in the black comic
Dr. Strangelove directed by Stanley Kubrick (Jewish). And in 1967, in
what is perhaps the pinnacle of American, Jewish comedy, Mel Brooks
(Jewish) wrote and directed The Producers, with a mainly Jewish cast
either playing Nazis or abetting them. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder
(both Jewish) are the two producers who aim to mount a Broadway
musical so tasteless that it closes in one night, allowing them to
pocket all their investors’ money. Kenneth Mars (Jewish) plays Franz
Liebkind, the Nazi-helmet wearing author of the play “Springtime for
Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden,” and Dick
Shawn (Jewish) is the hippy-dippy Fuhrer who steals the show and makes Springtime a success. During the Busby Berkeley-style production
number before the play’s intermission, Brooks sings a single line,
dubbing for one of the dancers in the chorus: “Don’t be stupid, be a
smarty! Come and join the Nazi Party!”

At about the same time, there premiered a television comedy – I’m
ashamed to admit it was one of my childhood favorites – called Hogan’s
Heroes about a group of American GIs in a German POW camp, Stalag 13.
The premise of the show is that the Nazis are comic buffoons, and the
Americans are crafty and carefree, running an espionage and sabotage
outfit from their barracks. The commandant of the camp, Colonel Klink
was played by Werner Klemperer, the Jewish son of the great German
conductor and composer, Otto Klemperer, and cousin of the literary
scholar and diarist Victor Klemperer, whose three-volume journal of
life under the Third Reich, I Shall Bear Witness, To the Bitter End,
and The Lesser Evil is one of the essential testaments of the period.
The incompetent and good-natured character of Sergeant Schultz, whose oft-repeated catchphrase was “I see nothing, I hear nothing, I know
nothing,” was played by the Ukraine-born John Banner (Jewish). He lost
much of his family in the Holocaust, as did Robert Clary (Jewish), who
played Corporal Louis LeBeau. Clary survived Buchenwald, while 12
other members of his immediate family were sent to Auschwitz, where
they were all murdered. How he managed to keep his composure in that
show – which ran for six seasons until 1971 – one can only guess.

The reason Jewish Nazis are funny is that with the few exceptions
noted above, Jews could not be Nazis. So, a Jewish Nazi is both a
contradiction in terms, and an affront to anti-Semites hell-bent on
destroying them. In Freudian terms, the laughter arises from the short-circuiting or release of psychic energy (cathexis) that occurs
when the logical chain – Nazi killer creates Jewish victim — is
broken. The same violation of expectation and laughter follows from
Woody Allen’s famous stand-up routine about the Klan, performed from
1962-64. One day, he tells his audience, he was in the Deep South, and
some friends invited him to a costume party. He rarely goes to such
things, he says, but decided to make an exception and go as a ghost,
dressed in a white sheet. But on his way to the party, he is picked up
by a car with three other men dressed in sheets and hoods. They are
obviously Ku Klux Klansmen who mistake him for one of them. He tries
to make small talk (about grits), but soon slips up and they discover
Woody’s Jewish identity. Just on the point of being lynched, he makes
such an eloquent plea for universal tolerance, that the Klansmen
decide to let him go and contribute $2,000 for Israel bonds.

No joke

But the sell-by date for funny, Jewish Nazis is by now well past. What
happens when Jews really do become Nazis – not party members, Klansmen
or terrorists, but just Jews who, like some other Americans, embrace
hatred, violence, racism and war? When Henry Kissinger was called a
Nazi during the Nixon years and after, it was no joke. His
indifference to mass murder was well-known. After his death, Ron
Jacobs in Counterpunch offered the following summary:

“The list of murderous atrocities for which Henry Kissinger was in
some part responsible is rivaled only by Adolf Hitler in 20th-century
history. That list begins with the secret bombing of Cambodia, the
genocide in Timor, the coup in Chile and the subsequent decades of
fascist rule. It continues from there. If asked, I would argue that
the primary difference between Hitler and Kissinger was the
calculating and dispassionate manner in which Kissinger dispatched
people to their deaths. Indeed, when asked about whether or not the
bombing of Cambodia was effective, Kissinger responded by saying,
“Whether we got it right or not is really secondary.” The deaths of
more than a hundred thousand Cambodians in the bombing (and the
subsequent coup and murderous campaign of the Khmer Rouge after the
defeat of Saigon) were inconsequential in his mind.”

There have been many other, though perhaps lesser Jewish Nazis than
Kissinger, that is, men and women indifferent to human suffering, and
complicit in murder, genocide, and ecocide. They include Elliot
Abrams, Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for human rights
and humanitarian affairs. He helped cover up or even facilitated
genocidal attacks upon campesinos in El Salvador, Honduras, and
Guatemala. He was also a key planner for the Iran-Contra affair, which illegally shipped arms and money to the terrorist contras in
Nicaragua.

Madeleine Albright, U.S. Secretary of State under President Clinton,
was architect of the Iraq sanctions that killed millions. In 1995
alone, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, more
than half a million Iraqi children died from illness and starvation
due to the sanctions. When asked by Leslie Stahl if the price was
worth it, she replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the
price? We think the price is worth it.”

Stephen Miller, former special advisor to Trump, was champion of the
Muslim travel ban and architect of the policy that separated children
from their migrant parents. Lately he has been plotting a new
anti-immigrant “blitz” if Trump is elected again. “Any activists who
doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest,” Miller said, “are
making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal
powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown. The
immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.” Miller has
been busy lately, accusing of anti-Semitism anyone sympathetic to the
plight of Gazans.

And on it goes. Jewish university chancellor Gene Block at UCLA
allowed a gang of non-student thugs, a veritable Freikorps, to riot
and attack peaceful anti-war student protestors. The violent mob was
partly funded and abetted by Jessica Seinfeld, wife of the famous
comedian. Another Jewish billionaire, Bill Ackman, also offered
support for the UCLA counter-protesters, before withdrawing it when
press and public responses to it turned soured. (He also funded
raucous, pro-Israeli rallies at George Washington University and
elsewhere.)

The point of this is not is not to say that wealthy and powerful Jews
are uniquely abetting a genocide in Gaza or are masterminds behind
global criminality. Those are versions of the anti-Semitic canards
that enabled the rise of fascism and Nazism and that still animate the far-right in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. Jews comprise just 2.4
per cent of the U.S. population and 0.2% of the global population and
have little sway over anything, anywhere, except in Israel and
Palestine. There, a faction of far-right leaders has gained political
and ideological sway over a small, but militarily powerful nation now
hell-bent on genocide. They are proud decedents of the terrorist Irgun
and Herut parties (which evolved into Likud), denounced by Hannah
Arendt, Albert Einstein and others at the time as “closely akin in
[their] organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal
to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” No more and apparently no less than
any other community, Jews today are prey to fascist and Nazi ideation,
despite their own catastrophic experience with it. That makes the
heroism of Jewish protestors – students and faculty alike – at UCLA,
USC, Columbia and dozens of other colleges and universities across the
country all the more noteworthy and necessary. It’s also why
journalists, politicians, business leaders and the rest of us have the obligation to speak up loudly against fascism, genocide, and war in
Gaza and wherever else it occurs.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/05/17/can-jews-be-nazis/

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