Fear and Suspicion of “The Other” on the Rise in Nazi Germany

by Samuel Z. Anvil

This is how the liberals media might have reported from Nazi Germany toward the end of World War II.

Fear and Suspicion of “The Other” on the Rise in Nazi Germany

BERLIN (November 5, 1944) – Nazi Party officials have expressed fear that the stream of embarrassing revelations from relocation camps in Poland could further endanger the precarious rapprochement slowly emerging between German Jews and the much beleaguered political leadership of this country, now suffering through the fifth year of a devastating war with its increasingly militant neighbors.
Nazi Party officials are reluctant to speak publicly about what many perceive as a delicate problem – how to respond to the Jewish community’s criticism of camp management, and the whispered anonymous charges, thus far unsubstantiated, of the alleged mistreatment of Jewish workers.
But off the record, party officials are increasingly pessimistic about the future of Jewish-Nazi relations. “I wonder,” one senior official told me over a mug of watered-down rationed lager in the darkened air raid shelter of a local tavern as we awaited the deafening onslaught of what has become the nightly ritual of Allied carpet-bombing, “if we will ever be able to restore the level of happy trust and optimism of the first few months of the Thousand Year Reich.”
“There have, unfortunately,” he continued, as we listened for the drone of Allied bombers overhead, circling before dropping their thousands of tons of deadly payload on the frightened civilians huddling in crowded subway stations and dank air raid shelters below, “always been elements among the Jews who have not been eager to grasp the hand of friendship. We have tried, through re-education, through encouraging Jews to move with all their belongings to areas where they might be better able to isolate these extremists and prevent their poisonous hatred of the Fatherland from infecting all the Jewish people, but as you know, the definition of extremist is that nothing you do for him is ever enough. And now, with these so-called scandals emerging from the re-education facilities, I fear that the little progress we have made will evaporate - poof! This is a great danger for the Jews as well. They have to be strong, and resist these manipulations, or we cannot be held responsible for what might happen.”
“The stories we’ve been hearing,” I asked, trying as best I could to ignore the tension – thick enough to be cut by a knife – in this dark underground room where women and crying children held each other tight among the scurrying rats as they waited for the terrifying bombs to fall around them in what the League of Nations might have called War Crimes, “suggest that there are serious problems of mismanagement of human resources at these industrial campuses, or as the Jews call them, 'concentration camps.'”
“Always,” the official replied modestly, “in any industrial effort of any size, there are problems of mismanagement that are eventually corrected through the good faith efforts of all people to work together for the common good. But it seems that the Jews are focusing on the negative, and using these temporary problems as an excuse to throw up their hands and to give up. If they will only wait patiently, I assure you that soon there will be no more Jews to complain, I mean, that there will be no more for the Jews to complain about. Forgive please my bad English. You understand what I mean of course.”
“Of course,” I reassured him. “English can be a confusing language. I humbly and sincerely apologize that I don’t speak the noble German language of Goethe and Schiller.”
Our conversation was cut short by the first bomb that fell, perhaps not more than a few hundred feet away, possibly a direct hit on what might be a nearby orphanage, probably traumatizing the next generation of little Germans, ending forever the feeling of good will that once pervaded this long-suffering society, still reeling from the staggering indemnification penalties imposed by the triumphalist militaristic coalition that tore the ancient Prussian Empire to shreds and left in its place a people forever scarred by its brutal encounter with the rampant, merciless unbridled patriotism of the American heartland.