German anti-Semitism 'deep-rooted' in society

When I visited Dachau, the museum displayed cartoons and commentary dating back to the 19th Century showing stark contempt and derision towards Jews. That was supposed to demonstrate the most recent historical allusion of antisemitism that was to become the basis for The Holocaust. You can find antisemitic references in Germany and Europe generally as far back as the Dark Ages and the Renaissance. The Church, of course, didn't help matters.

Ever has it been thus - nothing changes except enough time has passed now so that the younger generation doesn't have to embarass Uncle Fritz by asking him "what did you do doing the war, Uncle?". Poland is even worse - it has been extremely anti-semitic for centuries, and since the war not much has changed (except that most of the pesky Polish Jews were 'processed', so they aren't so much of an irritant now).

You show your ignorance of Polish history. Kazimierz Wielki (Casimir the Great, who is on the 100 zloty note) decreed and enforced tolerance toward the Jews and made them welcome in Poland. See his Wiki at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_III_the_Great

Now as is the case in every society, there are tolerant, accepting people and there are racist bigots. And unfortunately, more than a few racist bigots have had their say in Poland as well. Probably the most telling statistic is the demographics though. If you look at the Pale of Settlement, the area where Jews lived because, well, they were ethnically cleansed from everywhere else, you will see that it coincides with the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth at its greatest extent.

you'll see that the 'tolerance to the Jews' decreed by him vanished pretty soon after. The history of the Jews in the Pale is one of essentially unlimited antipathy at best and pogroms at worst. The fact that they were ordered to live there because no one else wanted them didn't equal being loved by their ethnic neighbors.

It's sad to think that being ignored and left to the poverty in the shtetls was the best they could do.

...in an excerpt from his book The Eliminationists while discussing the killed cat incident in Arkansas:
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/just-another-isolated-incident-arkan

The term's first significant use came from historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his controversial text, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, where it appears extensively and plays a central role in his thesis that "eliminationist antisemitism" had a unique life in German culture and eventually was the driving force behind the Holocaust. In the text, Goldhagen never provides a concise definition of the word, but rather constructs a massively detailed description of the eliminationist mindset:

The eliminationist mind-set that characterized virtually all who spoke out on the "Jewish Problem" from the end of the eighteenth century onward was another constant in Germans' thinking about Jews. For Germany to be properly ordered, regulated, and, for many, safeguarded, Jewishness had to be eliminated from German society. What "elimination" -- in the sense of successfully ridding Germany of Jewishness -- meant, and the manner in which this was to be done, was unclear and hazy to many, and found no consensus during the period of modern German antisemitism. But the necessity of the elimination of Jewishness was clear to all. It followed from the conception of the Jews as alien invaders of the German body social. If two people are conceived of as binary opposites, with the qualities of goodness inhering in one people, and those of evil in the other, then the exorcism of that evil from the shared social and temporal space, by whatever means, would be urgent, an imperative. "The German Volk," asserted one antisemite before the midpoint of the century, "needs only to topple the Jew" in order to become "united and free."

Hitler's Willing Executioners is an important and impressive piece of scholarship, particularly in the extent to which it catalogues the willing participation of the "ordinary" citizenry in so many murderous acts, as well as in the hatemongering that precipitated them. And his identification of "eliminationism" as a central impulse of the Nazi project was not only borne out in spades by the evidence, but was an important insight into the underlying psychology of fascism.

The eliminationist project is in many ways the signature of fascism, partly because it proceeds naturally from fascism's embrace of what Oxford Brookes scholar Roger Griffin calls palingenesis, or a Phoenix-like national rebirth, as its core myth. And the Nazi example clearly demonstrates how eliminationist rhetoric has consistently preceded, and heralded, the eventual assumption of the eliminationist project – indeed, it has played a critical role in giving permission for it to proceed, essentially creating the cultural and psychological conditions that enable the subsequent violence.

What on Earth does the Jewish community in Germany make of the flurry of headlines this week that described substantial anti-Semitism, and how have they reacted to plans to publish extracts from Mein Kampf?

Here, they live in the land that produced the Holocaust, and a rigorous academic study indicates that one in five Germans has at least a "latent" antipathy towards Jews.

Separately, a British publisher planned to put extracts from Hitler's manifesto on news stands and only held back as a court in Bavaria got involved.

You would expect loud and righteous outrage - but you would be wrong. Certainly, some groups have voiced anger but they have often been outside Germany.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16708340

"one in five Germans has at least a "latent" antipathy towards Jews."

Scary.