It did happen here

Notes from Munich, where Nazism began

The Old Town of Munich — the Aldstadt — isn’t very old.

The American and British World War 2 air raids here were not as deadly as those on Dresden or Berlin. Still, they destroyed 70 percent of Munich. Most buildings in the Aldstadt are post-war reconstructions.

As they should be. As Abraham Lincoln said during his Second Inaugural, while Union armies rampaged through the South:

Woe unto the world because of offenses, for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh¹…

The demolition of Nazi Germany wasn’t winner’s justice. It was merely justice. It was necessary militarily, to win a vicious war that Germany began, and morally, to punish the German nation for its unforgivable crimes.

Including the most unforgivable, the Holocaust.

—

(Not always fun. Always necessary. Please support my work.)

—

I am in Munich now, as you have guessed. I stopped here on my way home from the drug policy summit in Budapest. I hadn’t visited Germany in a while, and Munich is a pleasant, rich city, though the days are short and the nights are cold this time of year.

But to be a Jew in Germany is to forever have one word on your mind:

How?

Which is to say, how did this happen, how did so many your grandfathers and great-grandfathers decide that eliminating an entire religion of people — millions and millions of Jews — was the right idea? That God would smile upon them for doing so?

Germans are hard-working, reliable, smart, honorable, bookish, polite, a bit dour. Few countries run truer to stereotype. And yet… and yet…

How?

—

(Hitler and senior Nazi officials march through Munich in November 1936 to commemorate his first effort to seize power in 1923.)

SOURCE

—

World War 2 would have been an epic disaster for Germany even if the Nazis hadn’t decided to kill all the Jews. The Holocaust left a moral stain that even now remains.

Or maybe, at this point, it’s no longer a stain but the opposite, a faded spot on the wall — an absence of valor and morality that can never be filled. Blaming Germans today for what happened 85 years ago is unfair. No living German is old enough to have been part of the Holocaust.

Truly, I am not trying to blame, just to understand: How? And why?

Because underlying those questions is one that seems ever more urgent: could this ever happen again?

—

The second-largest synagogue in the world sits in central Budapest. I saw it this week. It’s empty now, a museum. But it looks a lot like a church, right down to the pulpits on its pillars. The resemblance is no accident. It was built in the mid-19th century, when urban Jews all over Europe were trying to assimilate, to leave behind a millennium of prejudice against Judaism. European democracy was beginning to flower. Countries were dropping their laws against Jews.

The Jews tried to respond in kind.

A lot of them became the equivalent of reform Jews in the United States. They got rid of the bushy hats and the big beards their rural cousins wore. They spoke Hungarian, or German, or French. They signed up for military service — almost 2 percent of the population of Munich’s Jews died serving in the German army during World War 1.

They thought that if they were good, patriotic citizens they would be fully accepted, or at the least that the worst days of hate and antisemitism would be behind them.

They were wrong. They couldn’t have been more wrong.

How?

The shortest, best answer is that there is no answer. There are technical explanations for decisions that Hitler and other officials made as the Holocaust was gaining steam. But there is no answer.

—

(He said what he meant, and he meant what he said.)

—

The United States doesn’t have a tortured history with Jews.

Sure, Jews faced prejudice through the 1950s, but mostly on the individual level, though some elite institutions had exclusionary policies. The United States didn’t have pogroms, and it certainly didn’t have institutionalized hate. The original American sin is slavery, as Lincoln knew, not antisemitism.

Jews have never had to try to be Americans. They’ve just been Americans, like everyone else who comes to the United States and wants to be American.

Yet open antisemitism has suddenly exploded in the United States, first from the left and now increasingly from the right. Obviously, Israel’s war in Gaza has fueled this new antisemitic wave, but it predates 2023. It has reached new heights lately with the mainstreaming of Nick Fuentes, who once called Hitler “awesome.”

Precisely because the United States does not have a history of pogroms and Jew-killing, it is possible the right-wing provocateurs are simply cosplaying, that they think this kind of antisemitism is just another way to act tough.

I’d like to believe that thought. It’s comforting.

But I don’t, not really. It feels like Fuentes and his friends aren’t posing. It feels like they really do hate Jews — not for Jewish success, not because some American Jews loudly support Israel (though many others loudly oppose it), but because they are Jews.

—

(Trying to answer the hard questions. With your help.)

—

That is the antisemitism that found such fertile ground in Munich in 1919, and then spread like a cancer across Germany and then Europe in the years that followed, with a few notable exceptions. The antisemitism wasn’t about power. It wasn’t about “rootless cosmopolitans” or wealthy bankers or debauched intellectuals. The shtetl Jews of Eastern Europe whom the Germans fed by the millions into the gas chambers couldn’t have been less powerful. (One great Holocaust irony is that many Jews who escaped were German or Austrian elites, exactly the people Hitler and the Nazis supposedly hated the most. They saw what was happening up close and had the money to get out before doing so became impossible.)

Hitler’s antisemitism was about making Jews the other, a hated, subhuman group that somehow — though how was never exactly clear — was responsible for all society’s problems.

I can’t believe that kind of naked antisemitism will ever catch fire in the United States. I don’t believe it will ever catch fire in the United States. And it remains mostly noise. Antisemitic violence has increased, but no one is proposing antisemitic laws or policies (I cannot believe I have to write that).

Still, open antisemitism has come further, faster, than I ever expected.

I wish I had some idea how to turn that tide.

I don’t. The United States is not the Weimar Republic. It is wealthy and powerful and has been a democracy for almost 240 years. Even with our income inequality, most Americans live reasonably well.

Yet the country feels angry, much too angry given its material comforts, and this new antisemitism is a firebell in the night.

From Munich, I hear it more clearly than ever.

1. The fuller relevant section of the Second Inaugural:

The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses, for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come but which having continued through His appointed time He now wills to remove and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him.

Fondly do we hope ~ fervently do we pray ~ that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’