Antisemitism among non-Germans during WWII

Factual Questions
1

I’m reading Our Hidden Lives, a book composed of diaries kept by a group of British citizens shortly after WWII. I came into the book anticipating a bit of Antisemitism, given the times, but had not at all expected just how bad it was. More than one of the diary writers have written things like “I wish the war had gone on just a little longer so the Germans could have killed more Jews.”

These are very ordinary working people - not a fringe group or overly political on one side or another. If it had been only one character, I would have probably written the comment off as one person’s racist beliefs. But I’ve read the same comment in two or three people’s diaries, and they also mentioned times where friends or spouses said the same thing. At the same time, they despise the Germans for all the horrors they did during the war.

What’s the roots of all this antisemitism? Is it just a historical trend, or was Nazi propaganda widespread enough that it got to Britain? We talk about racism today, but from what I’ve been reading, we don’t have anything on these post-war people. I know people who are racist against one group or another, but not to the point where they’d make comments about how they all should be killed. “Make them go back to where they came from” seems to be about as harsh as it gets among the common (racist) person.

2

Somewhat relevant. There was a riot, The Battle of Cable Street, that pitted Oswald Mosley’s fascist blackshirts against 300,000 Jews, Communists, trade-unionists and anti-Fascists in 1936. The rioters managed to get the Fascist march halted. It’s largely seen as a victory of the common man over anti-semitism and racism.

Here’s some newsreel of the riot (Youtube).

3

Consider that antisemitism was the European equivalent of racism at that time. There were very few people from other ethnic minorities around at the time in most places, port cities excepted. Think back also to the prevailing attitudes towards African Americans of the same period in the US.

4

Antisemitism was endemic throughout Europe. It had the usual roots, and was exacerbated by the Depression; there were enough Jewish bankers and Jewish Communists to make it easy to paint both groups as being Jewish by nature. The fact that Jews were different – due to religion alone – made them suspect.

It’s part of human nature, alas.

5

[QUOTE=Athena]
What’s the roots of all this antisemitism? Is it just a historical trend…?
[/QUOTE]

Absolutely. Google on antisemitism history. Here’s a good start.

6

Anti-semitism was pretty much endemic to Europe from the 12th century onwards. (It appeared before that, but only in scattered places.)

I suspect that a fair amount of the anti-semitic rhetoric coming out of Germany during the 1930s tended to whip up the attitude a bit more, but it was always part of the European background noise. At the turn of the 20th century it became a big deal in France with the Dreyfus Affair (with attitudes that, unfortunately, foreshadowed some of the French behavior in WWII, when far too many French were complicit in helping the Nazis round up their countrymen). Poland was virulently anti-semitic. (Some people have speculated that the placing of the death camps in Poland had as much to do with locating them where there would be no outcry as getting them off German soil. I have never seen specific evidence of that.) The U.S. had its sufficient share of anti-semitic rhetoric in the 1930s, with idiots such as Fr. Coughlin and others.

My understanding (subject to correction) is that the Dutch and the Italians were not rabidly anti-semitic. The Danes actually organized a move to get all the Danish Jews out of the country to Sweden rather than surrendering them to the Nazis.

Here is George Orwell’s 1945 essay on Anti-semitism in England.

7

This is an anecdote and my only cite is my pretty face…

I have a friend who is in her mid-30s and recently moved here from Poland a couple years ago. She is a Catholic Pole and while I’m not sure if she implicity hates Jews, she will tell you that Catholic Poles hate Jewish Poles because during the war(s?) the Jews sat back and “took it,” or hid, from the Germans while the non-Jews went out and fought and got killed to save Poland.

8

Wow, that’s amazing, considering that the entire Jewish population of Poland was extirminated, root and branch.

9

Yeah, they took it all right – took it right in the shorts! I bet the Jewish Poles would hate the Catholic Poles for doing such a shitty job of fighting, except – oh, wait, there aren’t any Jewish Poles left. No disrespect to you, ZipperJJ, but that’s probably the stupidest example of misplaced hatred I’ve ever heard.

More on topic, Google “pogrom” for tons o’information on violent anti-semitism in Europe, dating back to the Roman Empire.

10

[QUOTE=tomndebb]
Anti-semitism was pretty much endemic to Europe from the 12th century onwards. (It appeared before that, but only in scattered places.).
[/QUOTE]
And it’s my opinion that many of our immigrants from Europe brought it with them.

I well remember a barracks discussion in WWII when one sterling representative of the “Greatest Generation” spoke on the subject. He said that sure, Hitler was bad, but he certainly knew how to handle the Jews. And there was no protest from the participants.

Our US anti-semitism didn’t take the form of pogroms, or official government policy, but it was widespread. And a lot of it still is.

11

[QUOTE=ZipperJJ]
I have a friend who is in her mid-30s and recently moved here from Poland a couple years ago. She is a Catholic Pole and while I’m not sure if she implicity hates Jews, she will tell you that Catholic Poles hate Jewish Poles because during the war(s?) the Jews sat back and “took it,” or hid, from the Germans while the non-Jews went out and fought and got killed to save Poland.
[/QUOTE]

There was a large segment of Catholic Poles who virulently hated Jews long before a single German soldier set foot in Poland. Your friend has a very weak understanding of Polish history. Polish anti-semitism didn’t begin or end with the war.

12

[QUOTE=tomndebb]
At the turn of the 20th century it became a big deal in France with the Dreyfus Affair (with attitudes that, unfortunately, foreshadowed some of the French behavior in WWII, when far too many French were complicit in helping the Nazis round up their countrymen).
[/QUOTE]
And even well after the war. Nobel laurate Eric Kandel mentions the devoted anti-Semitism he encountered as a visiting research scientist in France in the early Sixties. And while anti-Semitic fascism is most strongly associated with Germany and Italy (not so much with Franco’s Spain, which at times provide asylum to Jewish refugees), nations like Belgium, Poland, and the Baltics demonstrated rabid anti-Semitism long before the war. Austria, of course, was essentially unrepentant in its capitulation to Nazi Germany and virulent anti-Semitism long before Germany threatened to annex it, and was never “de-Nazified” after the war the way Germany was; indeed, many of the leaders of the Austrian Nazi movement retained positions of high authority, and the Jewish community in Austria never recovered from the flight of Jews prior to WWII.

And today–aside from the sometimes hysterical proclaimations from the Anti-Defamation League–anti-Semitism and persecuation of people of Jewish faith or culture is rampant in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Even in the United States anti-Semitic fevor runs pretty high among conservative Catholics, Fundamentalist Protestants, Muslems, and blacks. On whatever absurd basis, anti-Semitism is alive and well even in modern, supposedly liberal, industrialized nations.

The roots of anti-Semitism stretch back at least to the Roman era, and probably before; for as much grief as the Jews take in the Old Testament, they give just as well, and they are, of course, God’s Chosen, an enviable position. From a cultural standpoint, Jewish culture places high value on both literacy (in both the religious and secular sense) and financial vitality and tend to support themselves as a somewhat insular community, limiting interchange and integration with non-Jews to formalized or commercial exchange; as a result, they tend to be in the upper echelons of intellectualism and commerce, even when, like Shylock, they’re considered otherwise undesirable. This serves to make them a convenient scapegoat any time you wish to raise the ire of the working class for fun and profit, a lesson not lost on the Soviet Communists, who frequently blamed their problems on the essentially powerless Jews.

Stranger

13

[QUOTE=mks57]
There was a large segment of Catholic Poles who virulently hated Jews long before a single German soldier set foot in Poland. Your friend has a very weak understanding of Polish history. Polish anti-semitism didn’t begin or end with the war.
[/QUOTE]

This is true, but I want to mention one thing. At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum and memorial in Jerusalem, there is an Avenue of the Righteous, a celebration of the righteous among the nations who risked their own lives to protect Jews during the Holocaust. Trees are planted for each person (or group of people), with a small plaque at the base of each tree describing the person (or people), their nationality, and a short description of their actions. It’s very moving.

The point: a huge number of the trees were planted for Polish people. HUGE. Okay, I’ve googled it, and by FAR, Polish people make up for the largest national group so honored. Link. Poland (6,004) beats out the number two country, the Netherlands, by about 1,500.

14

Missed the edit window. I thought about mentioning this in the previous post, but I didn’t want to make EVERYTHING be about me (and Bulgaria), but then I thought, what the hell, this is a good story.

So, I’ve done some research on this for a project I’m working on, and it’s hard to pin down an exact reason (there are some wildly contradictory claims on different websites), but during the Holocaust, Bulgaria - which was occupied by the Nazis - never deported its Jewish population. This is certainly at least partly due to protests, by citizens and especially by prominent parliamentarian Dimitar Peshev. I’ve also read that the Bulgarian Orthodox Church fought the deportations successfully; in one case, the Patriarch of Plovdiv went to the king and told him that if the deportation trains arrived to take away the Jews of Plovdiv, he’d lie down on the railroad tracks. The result was that the Jewish population of Bulgaria was roughly the same after WW2 as it was before.

Of course, knowing Bulgarians, it seems possible to me that they just couldn’t get their shit together. (Haha! I kid. Sort of.)

15

Kyla,

You should keep in mind, though, that Poland had the largest percentage of Jews in Europe (about 10% IIRC). Out of the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, 3 million were Polish. That’s 90% of the Polish Jews (cite).
So, the Polish population had more “chance” to save Jews, so to speak…

As for Bulgaria, they did save their Jewish population. But I’ve always heard it being attributed to King Boris.

16

[QUOTE=tomndebb]
The U.S. had its sufficient share of anti-semitic rhetoric in the 1930s, with idiots such as Fr. Coughlin and others..
[/QUOTE]
Others included some members of the isolationist movement just before the war, such as “America First” leader Charles Lindbergh - who had this to say on September 11, 1941:

““The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war,” he told a Des Moines audience, “are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration. Behind these groups, but of lesser importance, are a number of capitalists, Anglophiles, and intellectuals who believe that their future, and the future of mankind, depends upon the domination of the British Empire …These war agitators comprise only a small minority of our people; but they control a tremendous influence.” Of the Jews he said “it is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany… But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences (bolding added). Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation… Their greatest danger to this country is in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.”[86] Lindbergh’s threat was obvious. Its most unfortunate aspect was his (perhaps unconscious) paraphrasing of Hitler’s “warning” delivered in the Reichstag in 1939. “If international finance Jewry in and outside of Europe should succeed in thrusting the nations once again into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and with it the victory of Jewry, but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.”[87] Softened for an American audience, Lindbergh’s words were unmistakably, and uncomfortably, similar.”

17

[QUOTE=Kyla]
Of course, knowing Bulgarians, it seems possible to me that they just couldn’t get their shit together. (Haha! I kid. Sort of.)
[/QUOTE]

Knowing a few Bulgarians myself the first thing that popped into my mind was a somewhat fucked up explanation of “Of course, without the Jews who would they blame for all their problems!” (I kid. Sort of. :wink: )

18

[QUOTE=groman]
Knowing a few Bulgarians myself the first thing that popped into my mind was a somewhat fucked up explanation of “Of course, without the Jews who would they blame for all their problems!” (I kid. Sort of. :wink: )
[/QUOTE]
And without Bulgarians, who would the Libyans blame for their problems?

19

For a book about the Bulgarian Jews see Beyond Hitler’s Grasp: The Heroic Rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews by Michael Bar-Zohar. The Amazon.com editorial review summarizes the book as follows:

20

Charles Lindburgh?