“Gott mit uns”?

The first work quoted below was published whilst the First World War was still raging:

‘Houston Chamberlain, one of the best known of [the popular German writers, has written] . . . a ponderous compilation entitled Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts [The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century], for which he is said to have been paid a large sum out of the privy purse by his appreciative Emperor. This work gratifies German pride beyond all measure, and has therefore been very successful, though as a matter of fact, the author's views are not at all original. In a fawning way he reiterates the statements that Germany is the foremost of nations, and bitterly regrets that in former invasions:

“The Teuton has not exterminated his enemies root and branch wherever he has stretched out his conquering arm . . .”

‘The traditional methods for organizing conquest are [seen as being] rather slow, and so an ingenious professor by the name of Vierordt has written an article for the Badische Landeszeitung [‘Baden State Newspaper’] to show the urgent necessity of killing off Germany's enemies by the million in order that conquered territories may be transformed into deserts, to be populated subsequently by virtuous Germans.

‘These publications give most interesting indications with regard to the mentality of their authors, who long for a far more complete destruction of Europe that that which took place in Attila's day. [And who] would no doubt organize the unravished portions of the Continent into immense factories, where the unsparing lash of the Prussian corporal would keep millions of serfs toiling to enrich the Germans in general and the professors in particular.’

(From: The Psychology of the Great War, by Gustave Le Bon, translated by E. Andrews; published New York, The Macmillan Company, 1916. pp. 164, 166).

In a chapter on ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II and German anti-semitism’ in one of his works on the Kaiser, John Röhl clarifies the different levels of anti-semitism suffered by the Jews in Germany between unification in 1871 and the Götterdämmerung of 1945. He classifies them as ranging from the first (lower) form being: ‘the anti-semitism of the salon, consisting of personal prejudice and collective but still informal discrimination’; and finally at the other extreme (number five): ‘there is the ultimate horror, the anti-semitism of extermination, the anti-semitism of the holocaust.’

And he then goes on to write that: ‘In examining the anti-semitism of Kaiser Wilhelm II, we shall need to be mindful of these five different types of anti-semitism. The baneful truth, however, is that at one time or another in the course of his long life he subscribed to all five.’

Röhl writes that after his abdication and flight to exile in Holland the Kaiser wrote the following to General August von Mackensen on 2 December 1919:

“The deepest, most disgusting shame ever perpetrated by a people in history, the Germans have done onto themselves. Egged on and misled by the tribe of Juda whom they hated, who were guests among them! That was their thanks! Let no German ever forget this, nor rest until these parasites have been destroyed and exterminated [vertilgt und ausgerottet] from German Soil! This poisonous mushroom on the German oak-tree!”

Röhl then goes on:

‘He [the Kaiser] called for a ‘regular international all-worlds pogrom à la Russe’ as ‘the best cure’. ‘Jews and Mosquitoes’ were ‘a nuisance that humanity must get rid of in some way or other’, he proclaimed, and added, again in his own hand: ‘I believe the best would be gas!’ [From notes: ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II to Poultney Bigelow, 15 August 1929. Bigelow Papers, New York Public Library. Two years earlier, Wilhelm had instructed a member of his entourage to ask Fritz Haber whether the Totalvergasung [‘Total Gasification’] of large cities had become a practicable possibility. Wilhelm von Dommes to Fritz Haber, 14 June 1927, Gutssche, Ein Kaiser im Exil, p. 92.’]

(From: The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany, by John C. G. Röhl, Cambridge University Press, 1994 [originally published in Germany as Kaiser, Hof und Staat: Wilhelm II. Und die deutsche Politik by Verlag C. H. Beck, Munich 1987]; p. 194-195, p. 210, and notes p. 266).

In line with extremist Germanic thought of the time the Kaiser didn’t envision genocide as being solely reserved and warranted by the Jews as Röhl writes:

‘In September 1914, after the German victory at Tannenberg, the Kaiser proposed that the 90,000 Russian prisoners of war be driven onto a barren spit of land in the Baltic and kept there till they died of thirst and hunger: it was left to one of his generals to point out that that would be ‘genocide’.’ [From notes: ‘Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller, diary entry for 4 September 1914, BA-MA Freiburg. This entry was omitted in Walter Görlitz (ed.), Regierte der Kaiser? Kreigstagebücher, Aufzeichnungen und Briefe des Chefs des Marine-Kabinetts Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller 1914-1918 (Göttingen 1959), pp. 54f.’] (ibid. p. 207, and notes p. 229)

The following is from a late eighteenth-century work first published in 1796:

'Thus the wars, in which the tyrants of the European world are to be subdued, with their widely scattered partisans, being of such mighty influence in deciding the condition of the human race, are foretold, in several parts of the apocalypse, and under different emblems. Such appears to be the import of THE HARVEST and THE VINTAGE, described in the xivth chapter [of the Revelation].’

According to this prophetic interpretation the subduing of these ‘tyrants of the European world’ (also being ‘the enemies of the church and the adversaries of [God’s] people’) would consist of:

‘two most signal slaughters, between which some space of time would intervene, which agreeably to analogy may be represented by the interval, which separates a harvest from a vintage.’

During the second of these ‘two most signal slaughters’ the grapes are described not just as being solely ‘ripe’ but as now being ‘fully ripe’. To continue from the quoted work:

‘The symbolic grapes are described as fully ripe “That is,” says Vitringa, “the period of the divine forbearance had expired, and villanies, no longer to be tolerated, had arisen to their utmost height. The measure of crimes was filled up. — Punishment therefore could no longer be deferred, but the destroyers of the earth were at length to be destroyed, and were in their turn to meet with their reward.” ’

(From: Illustrations of Prophecy, by the Rev Joseph Towers; published London, MDCCXCVI [1796]*. pp. 298, 300).

*For lengthier quotes from this work by the Rev Joseph Towers see the World War Armageddon blog posts ‘The two world wars; & the “Harvest of the earth”, from April 2010; and ‘The best laid schemes of FROGS and men . . .’ from March 2010.