disrupt society—the side of the workers and the side

of the employers. “They [i.e., the Jews]both pursue

one common policyand a single aim. MosesKohn on
the one side encourages his association to refuse
the workers’ demands, while his brother Isaac in the
factory incites the massesand shouts, ‘Look at them!
They only want to oppress you! Shake off your fetters
…’ His brother takes care that the fetters are well
and truly forged.”7 Hitler was also conscious that he was
speaking to an audience in the heart of Catholic
Bavaria and so was even prepared, in the context
of the fight against the Jews,to compare the
nascent Nazi movement to Jesus and his disciples. “My
feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord
and Saviour as a fighter,” Hitler said in April 1922.
“It points me to the man who, once in loneliness,
surroundedby a few followers, recognised these Jews for
what they were and summoned men to fight against them
and who—God’s truth!—wasgreatest not as a sufferer
but as a fighter. In boundless love as a
Christian and as a man I read the passage [in
the Bible] whichtells us how the Lord at last rose in
His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the
Temple the broodof vipers and adders.”8 Itis
extremely unlikely that Hitler was, even at this stage,
a Christian as he claimed. But large numbers of
his audience certainly were. And it waspossible for them
to make other personal—and blasphemous— comparisons
between Jesus and Hitler. For example, that both
leaders had waited until they were thirty years old
before beginning their “mission,” and that both promised
redemption from the suffering of the moment. In order
to support such viewsthe Nazis—not surprisingly— ignored
the historical record and claimed that Jesus was
not Jewish. Hitler was doing nothing out of the
ordinary in attempting to paint the Jews as responsible
for Germany’s misfortune. At the time, they were a
convenient and popular scapegoat for many on the extreme
Right. As Professor Christopher Browning explains,
“Just aboutevery ailment in Germany can be tied to
the Jews:reparations, predatory Jews as financiers, and
national humiliation.The Jews were also [portrayed as] the
weakness behind the homefront, the profiteers who didn’t
fight in the war. Liberalism—considered to be a
Jewish product—emancipation, equality before the law,
Soviets and Judeo-Bolshevism, all make viable a far
more radical and far more widespreadanti-Semitism that
has political clout … So no warning signals go
up and no alarmbells go off
when Hitler becomes obsessed aboutthe Jews,because he’s
making in an extreme form arguments that are, one might
say, already in a kind of form. So, Hitler’s
certainly appealing to Germans to end economic
distress, to end political gridlock, to make Germany
strong and proud internationally and to end the
disintegration of German culture, and for him this
is all tied together with anti-Semitism.”9 Hitler, from the
very beginning, was also contemptuous of democracy,
ridiculing the notion that “the people governs.”10 What
was needed, he said, was not democracy, but one
determined individual who would ariseand restore strong
leadership to Germany. And he was explicit about the
central political idea that this strong leader ought
to pursue in order to rescue Germany—a
national renewal based on classlessness and race.
Hitler demanded that all but “Aryans” should be
excluded from German citizenship. (Again, the idea that
there was a distinct “Aryan” subset of Caucasian
people, or that this Nordic-typegroupwas somehow a
“superior race,”was not original, but had been
proselytised by a number of racial theorisers before
the First World War.) Once Germany consisted only of
these “Aryan” people—and the vast majority of the
current population of Germany were already “Aryan,”
according to Hitler—then Germany could become a
nation of one “race,” and in the process, all
class distinctions could be eliminated. “And then we said to
ourselves: there are no such things as classes: they
cannot be. Class means caste and caste means
race.”11 This call for “all true Germans” to work
together to make a new Germany was particularly
attractive to young Bavarians like Emil Klein. “This party
wanted to eradicate class differences,” he says. “[The
existing order was] the working class here, the bourgeoisie
here and the middle-classes here. These were deeply
ingrained concepts that split the nation. So that was an
important point for me, one that I liked—‘the nationhas
to be united!’ That was already clear to me as
a young man— it was self-evidentthat there wasn’t
a working class here and a middle class there.”12
And linked to this idea was the notion that
“international high finance, the financial power of
Jewry,” had to be eliminated. Believing in the
fantasy Hitler peddled, Klein was convinced that this power
stemmed in part from New York. “Wall Street was
always being mentioned.” What Emil Klein and others
who heardthese early speeches