Was Slaughter of Jews Embraced by Germans?

[TomCADem]

7. NY Times - The Jew Who Fought to Stay German (During Nazi Germany)

Think of Kushner, Cohn, Carson and other racial and religious minorities who continue to support the Trump administration. Likewise, the question is why so many Jews did not leave Germany when Hitler came to power.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/22/specials/elon-klemperer.html

Even after Hitler's victory in the elections of 1933, Klemperer continued to consider himself a German patriot, referring often to his Deutschtum, or German-ness. ("I am forever German, a German 'nationalist,' " he wrote in July 1935. "The Nazis are un-German.&quot A year after being compelled, to his utter horror, to display the yellow Judenstern on his outer coat, he wrote: "I am now fighting the hardest battle for my Deutschtum. I must hold on to it: I am German. The others are not. I must hold on to it. The spirit decides, not the blood. I must hold on to it: Zionism on my part would have been a comedy which baptism was not."

Like many completely assimilated Jews in Wilhelminian and Weimar Germany, he believed that Germans were, as he put it, a "chosen people," culturally and politically superior to others. "I still feel more shame than fear," he wrote in 1934. "Shame for Germany."

Convincing themselves somehow that Nazism would not last, Victor and Eva Klemperer did not emigrate, as his brothers and cousin did. He and his wife even decided in 1935 to build themselves a little house in the village of Dolzschen in the hills above Dresden. At this time they already had to comply with a new Nazi ordinance that all country houses must have a tilted "Germanic" gable (flat roofs were verboten as alien, or "decadent" Bauhaus). The house, though small, had one room large enough to accommodate Eva's grand piano. Klemperer must have been one of the very few people of Jewish origin in Nazi Germany who invested most of their savings in German real estate at a time when others were running for their lives. He deluded himself that converts and war veterans like himself would be spared. Much later he would write: "I escaped, I dug myself into my profession. I held my lectures and obsessively overlooked the fact that the benches before me grew emptier and emptier."

Summarily dismissed from his post as a professor at the university, he filled his free time with getting a driver's license and buying a car, in which he and his wife toured the lovely countryside of Thuringen and Sachsen. In 1937, still proud of the Distinguished Service Medal he had won in World War I, he confessed: "I myself have had too much nationalism in me and I am now being punished for it." In 1938 he felt chastised by the recent Nuremberg racial laws and yet, after driving with his wife through the lovely hill country southeast of Dresden, he noted, "How beautiful this Germany might have been if one could still feel German and be proud of being one." In 1942, already a slave worker relegated to a kind of ghetto on the outskirts of Dresden, he assured one of his fellow inmates that "fanaticism" was "un-German" by definition.