Could Hitler Have Avoided Confrontation with Jews?

(Austin J. App, Ph.D.)

Many people imagine that if Hitler had not quarreled with the Jews, he would have been all right and everything would have been well. For many years, I tended to think so, too. I used to say: "Hitler should have given Einstein a gold medal - and then (gone) on with his program."

I grew my first doubts after Uncle Sam invited Einstein to America. In a very short time, he proved a nuisance, a pro-Communist, a subversive; the confrontation he had had with Hitler, he soon had with Uncle Sam. I began to consider what Hitler had said to Nobel Prize Winner Max Planck: "I have nothing at all against the Jews themselves. But Jews are all Communists, and these are my enemies. . . All Jews stick together like burrs. (Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, Autum 1956, p. 439).

While pondering the notion that if Hitler had only refrained from contending with Jews, all would have been well, I chanced to hear some preacher say: "If Christ had not offended the Scribes and Pharisees, he would not have been crucified." This at first struck me as plausible. But on second thought I questioned if Christ could have remained the Messiah, could have continued to be ". . . the truth, the way, and the life." which was his mission, had he appeased the Scribes and Pharisees! Was not his mission irreconcilable with the Talmudism of the latter?

And what about Hitler? Could he have had a cozy relationship with the Jews, and yet be true to his mission: self-determination for the German people, rejection of the yoke of international bankers, squash pornography, prostitution, infuse Christian culture into the arts and theater? Could he have insisted the one percent of aliens should have not appreciably more than one percent of the professional and media positions (as, for example, under the Weimar Republic, one percent of Jews accounted for 16% of lawyers and notaries, eleven percent of physicians, 15% of realtors, but only ).01% of miners, carpenters and bricklayers)?

Would Hitler not, no matter how conciliatory he felt towards Jews, have had to initiate reforms which would have made him the object of concentrated Jewish hate, as a similar mission made of Christ? A newspaper column by one Sydney Harris, entitled "Hitler was Evil (Charlotte Observer, July 17, 1979), vitriolically suggests that no matter how fair Hitler would have tried to treat Jews, his nationalistic German policies, his real mission, would have gotten him on a collision course with Jews. Sydney Harris complains that some Germans are beginning to say: "If he had let the Jews alone and concentrated on giving us jobs and lifting the economy, he could have been a good leader of the German people."

Sydney Harris, presumably Jewish, sabotages that notion: "No, no, a thousand times no! If he had never harmed a single one (Jew). . . he still would have been an incarnation of evil. The Holocaust was not his sin; it was the sign of his sin. It was only the most visible mark of the anti-Christ."

One gasps at this outburst of Talmudic venom­p;and notices in it a parallel to hatred of the Scribes and Pharisees against Jesus of Nazareth. When the latter in a kangaroo court found no cause against him, until He said he was the Son of God. . . the Chief Priest tore his garments and cried: "Blasphemy! What further need we urge to get him crucified! He is anti-Jehovah!"

Just so now Sydney Harris and the descendants of the Scribes and Pharisees denounce Hitler the anti-Communist, the anti-pornographer, the "anti-Christ."

As the truth begins hesitantly to pierce the fog of war atrocity propaganda, it becomes increasingly evident that if Hitler had really been anti-Christ - if he had, in fact, been against Christianity and Christian culture, if specifically he had really hated the Catholic Church - he would, we can be absolutely certain, have been exalted like Stalin as a crusading hero, and the swindlers, the pornographers, Jews and atheists, would openly have supported him, as they supported Stalin, the bloodiest anti-Christ monster of all time!

This article first appeared in the August, 1978 issue of The Liberty Bell.