Background: The "Aryan Law" was a piece of legislation the Nazis implemented early in Hitler's rule to drive Jews out of the professions. This 54-page pamphlet summarizes the law and argues for its beneficial effects. It was designed for mass distribution. The bulk of the pamphlet provides figures to show that Jews were over-represented in various populations. It then claims this is the result of Jewish arrogance, and that Germany was saved by Hitler from a Jewish takeover. This is a good example of early Nazi anti-Semitism. It claims Jews are being treated well, and that only their intolerable presumption is being restricted.

 

 

 

The National Socialist Racial Standpoint

 

In discussing the Jewish Question, even today one encounters resistance and misunderstandings, especially in intellectual circles. This can only be explained by the intellectual education of the political past. This is especially evident when one discusses the fundamental issues.

Whenever a new thought arises in the world and calls people to practical action, the old world resists because it feels its foundations threatened. Its old standpoint has ruled for decades, and it looks uncomprehendingly at a new idea that does not fit into the accustomed patterns of thinking. That is natural. When the new idea and worldview are truly revolutionary, they are on a different level of human thought and feeling, and there can be no compromise. Its realization depends on people who support it, and who are ready to fight to transform the life of the individual and of the nation in every way.

For a long time, people at home and abroad claimed that National Socialism meant war at any price. Only gradually is it becoming clear that a stable Germany, one that needs peace for decades to build itself up economically and agriculturally, is a surer guarantee of peace than a nation torn apart by party conflicts, which is a constant source of political unrest. The new Germany's racial thinking is the hardest element for many to understand, encountering rejection and misunderstanding. Some of it is the result of the honest misunderstanding of the old liberal outlook, but some of it is also the result of a conscious attempt to encircle Germany. Before the war the danger was seen as the "militaristic Empire." Today, the racial outlook is seen as a threat to all human culture and civilization, making necessary a unified front of all those nations whose dignity is threatened by German barbarism. That is the approach today of those foreign circles interested in isolating Germany.

In the long run, no idea is better suited to guarantee peace between nations than National Socialist racial thinking, which calls for the furtherance and maintenance of one's own race and one's own people, and supports similar efforts on the part of other nations. Such mutual respect which requires respect both for one's own nation and that of others rejects the forcible conquest of other nations, and history shows that it is useless as well. Imperialist strivings are rejected from the start, since they would mean an overlapping of one's own activities with those of others.

There can be no doubt that, as in so many other areas, human generations develop in unified ways. But humanity finds its deepest meaning when the outward elements are determined by the character and spiritual characteristics that find their visible expression in race and nationality. No thought or feeling, if it is genuine and deep, can escape its racial boundaries.

One of the fundamental principles of the National Socialist worldview is that there are not universal human principles, such as the Pan-European idea in politics or the idea of a human soup in racial terms. Judgments are only possible from life, which is racially determined. Being interested in and caring for one's kind is not to disparage foreign peoples and races. The Jews are responsible for charges that Germany puts all other peoples and races on earth on a lower level. Just as one cannot say that one animal or plant is better than another, one cannot make an objective value judgment between Europeans and Mongols. Their thinking and feeling about essential matters are different, which means they will have different cultures. We have our values, other peoples have theirs. Every variety of custom and culture is colored by the race or group from which produces it, as are judgments of such matters.

Lasting peace is possible based on the consciousness of the ethnic or racial distinctiveness of each nation, and a recognition of their mutual right to existence rather than on the maintenance of some sort of power position. The new Germany that views its own race and ethnicity positively must therefore distinguish within its territory between one race and another, between one people and another. Mixing of blood harms both sides. Race is an issue for every people if they are to live according to their nature. The German people is not so arrogant as to believe that it is the chosen people. The familiar quotation from Geibel, "The world should enjoy German ways," should be understood in the context of the dreams of world betterment of those past days.

The National Socialist racial viewpoint has clear consequences for the relationship between Germans and Jews. People have often said that National Socialism's approach to the racial question is purely negative and destructive, and that its essential characteristic is radical anti-Semitism. One must grant that we made the Jewish question clearer than anyone else, and taught an entire generation that had been taught to see all people the same to recognize the importance of the Jewish question not only for our people, but for the entire world. Our treatment of the Jewish problem in the years before we took power must be seen as the political education of the German people, which had lost its racial instincts to a dangerous degree.

The question took on its own nature in Germany, Many citizens had their eyes opened, and the simultaneous appeal to all the heroic and manly virtues of the German man resulted in a racial selection of political fighters who today stand at the head of the new state. Formerly, the Jewish question, as seen by the state, was a matter of complete equality and the unhindered immigration of Jews from the East. This is the best proof of how racial feeling and consciousness had been lost. Our tone was not purely negative or the simple rejection of others, rather the emphasis was on the positive values of our own people. This does require noting that Jewry through its Marxist class struggle leadership role and its international financial measures aimed at Germany supported every kind of anti-national action in the cultural and political fields. Jewry should not complain if its anti-German activities, which have no counterpart in any other country, call forth from the people the defensive reaction of anti-Semitism.

 

Germans and Jews

 

The starting point of the discussion is the scientific fact that the Jew is different than the German. This is neither arrogant nor boastful, it simply is the way things are. For us, the Jewish question is a question between two peoples. Its characteristics are determined by the racially determined differences between the two, and through the unusual sociological and numerical development of Jewry in the course of its history, developments that are particularly evident in the last decades through a constantly growing process of foreign infiltration that has reached an intolerable level for the German people.

More than once over its history, the German people has absorbed foreign elements, but they were racially identical or similar population groups, as for example was the case with the Huguenots. With the Jews, things are fundamentally different. They are seen everywhere as foreigners, and see themselves that way as well. Walter Rathenau said it most clearly as early as 1897: "How strange! In the middle of German life there is a separate, foreign tribe that that stands out in every way with its hot-tempered behavior. An Asiatic horde has settled on the sands of Mark Brandenburg." Einstein said something in 1931: "I have to laugh when I hear the phrase 'German citizen of the Jewish faith.' [A leading German Jewish organization had this name.] These citizens first of all want nothing to do with my poor Eastern European brothers, and second do not want to be sons of my (Jewish) people, but only members of the Jewish cultural community. Is that honest? Can a non-Jew respect such people? I am not a German citizen. I am a Jew, and am happy to belong to the Jewish people."

The most remarkable thing about Jewry is that it has not disappeared over the millennia, even though it lacks its own territory and language. Even more remarkable is that it lacks the main characteristic of a minority population, its own pockets of settlement to which it could if necessary retreat. Only time will tell if Palestine will someday fill this gap. That question is made more difficult by the fact that the Arabs maintain their claim on Palestine. Whatever the twists of history, the Jew has always remained the same, whether as a grain speculator in ancient Rome or as a bank or stock exchange potentate in the modern era. They were always able to control the wealth of whole nations. Nations and peoples once their contemporaries have vanished, leaving only words and crumbled monuments behind; only the Jew remains. In ancient days we see him carrying on his business in the trading centers of the Mediterranean. In the Middle Ages he provided money for German nobles and free cities. Today he rules the banks and stock exchanges of the whole world, forcing the nations under the yoke of financial capitalism. The power of this people of 15 million rests on these international relations. This is how they seem to fulfill the commandment of Jehovah — the world domination of the chosen people.

The secret of the Jewish people, which has enabled them to survive through all of history's twists and turns, is that it has always recognized the laws of blood, even anchoring them in the laws of its religion. The consciousness of blood and family that believing Jews have has been stronger than all the other forces of history, giving us a unique example of a people without its own land and language, which still meets the criteria for being a people, and which has outlasted many other peoples.

This historic manifestation of Jewry, which is unique, brings to the fore the question of the relationship between the host and guest peoples. It has been answered in differing ways throughout history, depending on the worldview and thinking then predominant.

Since the Jews were dispersed they have been held together by the laws of their religion and their faith that they were the chosen people. Until the middle of the 18th century, Germans and Jews lived apart from each other. The Jews had no opportunity to become involved in the religious of political-intellectual life of their host people. On the other hand, they could practice their own customs without interference. They had their own religion and their own laws. During the Middle Ages, the Ghetto was the way Jewry could maintain itself in the midst of other peoples and fulfill its Jewish duties, which grew out of its race, origins and laws. The values and ideals of other peoples were not affected. This separation was only possible because the views of the host people were as strong as those of the Jews. According to the writer Grau: "There was no racial defilement or baptism, no attempt to join a nation that one could never be a member of, and no attempt to intellectually silence the host people." In the Ghetto of the Middle Ages, the Jew developed his nature and characteristics, which were later to become significant, while maintaining the community of blood and race. The latter is particularly important, since the strict physical separation between the host and guest peoples maintained the foreign nature that we daily see so clearly, now that the barriers between have long since fallen.

Even in the Middle Ages, the m most important thing was not the difference between the Christian and Mosaic faiths. Rather, there was on the one hand the natural sense that the Jew was of a foreign race, and on the other hand the strict law of blood which demanded a clear separation if the Jews were to fulfill Jehovah's mission, which had guided them from the beginning. Just this has always been kept in the background by historians, who present the Ghetto as a tolerated asylum for Jewish martyrs persecuted on account of their faith. There is a gap to be filled here. The task of historians writing from our new viewpoint will be to examine the portrait of the Ghetto of the Middle Ages to discover its importance for the development of Jewry and the relationship between the guest and host peoples. Even the Jewish side is demanding that. O. Karbach criticizes historical writing because it "in significant ways conceals the historical fact that the Jews in the centuries before their emancipation possessed a legal standing that was better than the greater part of the rest of the population, namely complete or partial agricultural freedom. (Ordnung in der Judenfrage, edited by E. Czermak, Reinhold, Vienna, 1933).

The barriers between Germans and Jews fell as a result of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The path to Jewish world domination would take a different direction than pious, observant Jews had expected. Emancipation made it possible to build Jewish dominance through secular means. With the disappearance of racial consciousness, only religious differences seemed to remain. It seemed at the time unjust to give someone a preferred position only because of his religious beliefs, which are an entirely personal matter. At the time, this was tied to a belief in human equality and freedom. It was revolutionary. It shattered the church dogmas that had ruled for centuries and was the foundation of liberal thinking during the last two hundred years. The new goal was humanity itself, and nothing stood in the way of racial mixing. Some had the quiet hope that assimilation would mean the absorption of Jewry. Jewry itself, however, was more than willing to use the opportunities of religious assimilation, which opened the path to all important positions, even to political leadership. As H. Heine said, "baptism was the ticket to European culture." Gradually, an intermixing with the German people developed, particularly in its cultural elite. Foreign blood infiltrated to a degree that we realize only today now that the "Law to Reestablish a Professional Bureaucracy" has exposed numerous sources of foreign blood. This process has greatly accelerated during the last fourteen years.

 

 

This has been an excerpt from a work titled "The Aryan Law" by Professor Randall Bytwerk. His permission has been given to reproduce part of it, the full
work can be viewed, and is recommended reading, at this site