Rick Spence

What appears to have happened is this. Sibotendorf had organized the Thule Society. That didn't have, you know, that had tried to oppose... There's actually a brief period of time in which the communists actually take over Munich, the Bavarian Soviet Republic, which doesn't last very long, and eventually the army and volunteers put this down.

While that's going on, by the way, Hitler is actually sitting in the... barracks in Munich wearing a red armband because he is technically part of the soldiers who have gone over to the Bavarian Soviet Republic. He seems to have had flexible interests in this case.

So once order is restored, so to speak, the army comes in and decide that, well, one of the things we need, we need to have people who can lecture soldiers on patriotic topics. And so there is a particular captain by the name of Karl Mayer who sort of spots Hitler. He later describes him as like a stray dog looking for a master. Hitler has a knack for public speaking.

Other soldiers will listen to him. Some people can do that. Some people can't. Mayer decides that he's a good person. candidate for further training. And so, yes, they bring him in. They turned him into what's called a Weimann, a kind of liaison man. He's an army propagandist. And then you've got this little outfit called the German Workers' Party.

And essentially what happens is that Hitler is sent in to take over leadership of that, which is what happens. He shows up, he attends a meeting. There are like 50 people there. By the way, the topic of the first meeting he's at is how and why capitalism should be abolished, which is not what you might well expect.

Because remember, the German Workers' Party is trying to cast itself as a counter-Bolshevism. So it's not saying that capitalism is great, which is important. No, capitalism is evil. We agree upon that. We just agree it has to be destroyed from a nationalist point of view as opposed from some sort of strange internationalist point of view.

So Hitler is essentially, as I see it, sent in by the army as their trained man to assume leadership within this small party and to use it for the army's patriotic propaganda campaign. And is his season doing so, even to the name change to the National Socialist or German Workers' Party? I mean, really, what sounds more red than that?

Well, it's a huge topic. Where does anti-Semitism come from? Let's start with that term itself, a term which I have really grown increasingly to dislike because it doesn't actually say what it means. Anti-Semitism is anti-Jewism. That's all it is. I'm not sure whether there has ever existed a person who hated Jews, Arabs, and Maltese equally. Okay, that's kind of hard to imagine. I don't know.

But that's technically what that would mean, because let's face it, most Semites are Arabs. So if you're an anti-Semite, then you don't seem to distinguish Jews from Arabs. It makes no sense. The origin of the term is invented by, guess what, an anti-Semite. A guy in the 1870s, a German journalist by the name of Wilhelm Marr, who is...

Wouldn't you know it, part Jewish himself, and who decides that you really need a better term than Judenhass, Jew hate, which was the term, because that just sounds so, you know, inelegant, doesn't it? Okay. What do you want to call yourself? A Jew hater or an anti-Semite? See? See? Anti-Semitism, it's got that ism part at the end of it, which means it's a system of belief.

Anything that has an ism must somehow be scientific and important. It's all part of the 19th century obsession with trying to bring science into something or the other. So we're going to get rid of Jew hate and we're going to turn it into anti-Semitism. And we're only going to be talking about Jews, but we'll never actually say that. And somehow...

The invention of a Jew-hater to disguise the fact that he's a Jew-hater, even though he's partly Jewish, by inventing the term anti-Semitism worked because everybody has bought it and repeated it ever since. So, I don't know, maybe just because anti-Jewism would just be, is it too direct in some way? Do we have difficulty confronting actually what it is that we're talking about?

Well, the question then comes, what exactly do you hate about Jews? And a lot of this has to do with If you go back part of the 19th century, if Jews were hated, they were hated for religious reasons. In Christian Europe, they were hated because they weren't Christians. And they existed as the only kind of significant religious minority. But other than that, they tended to live separately.

They had little economic influence. Jews tended to live in shtetls in the East, ghettos elsewhere. Some were involved in banking and business, but they sort of remained segregated from much of society. That changes when you get to the 19th century and with what's called Jewish emancipation.

And that means that between about 1800 and 1850, most European countries drop the various legal or social restrictions against Jews. They are assimilated into the general society. So ideally, you stop being a German Jew and you become a Jewish German. Those are two very different important concepts. And what that does, of course, is that it opens up the professions, business world elsewhere.

So Jews move who had been largely within those realms to begin with. They already had a good deal of experience in banking and business. And they move into those areas and professions and become quite visible. And that's what then creates anti-Semitism. Because in some way that is seen as part of the changes that have taken place. And there are a lot of things going on here.

Part of it has to do with the kind of wrenching social and economic changes that took place with industrialization. So one of the things to keep in mind is that in the process of industrialization, just like today, whole classes of people were made extinct economically. Craftsmen, for instance.

So when factories came along and began to produce things with machines, all the craftspeople who had made those things previously are now unemployed or go to work as wage labor in factories. So there are winners and losers. in industrialization.

And what people saw in Germany and elsewhere is that among this new sort of rising capitalist elite, among these new professions, among the bureaucrats that are coming out of these burgeoning states, there were visibly a fair number of Jews. So in some way, the rise of Jews in the minds of many people were connected to all of the other bad things that were going on.

You know, the world was changing in a way we don't like. And seemingly, the Jews are prospering while I am not. And that was true in Germany as well. Jews became highly visible in the professions. They became very visible in banking. They became visible in legal profession. They became visible in the medical profession.