Nazi Opera Conspiracies: A Kinship with the Goldhagen Hypothesis and Occult Reich Conspiracy Theories

Of all writings that help us to understand the historical background to Richard Wagner's views on the Jews, there are perhaps few more enlightening than Ordinary Germans and the Longest Hatred found in the book Rereading German History by Sir Richard J. Evans: a brilliant and spellbinding collection of essays that make for essential background reading for anyone who wishes to read or write about Richard Wagner in historical context. Yet the essay in question is not about Wagner at all—rather it is a detailed critique of political scientist, Daniel Goldhagen's wildly sensationalist piece of populist pseudo-history, Hitler's Willing Executioners. Yet Wagner scarcely rates a single mention in this particular essay by Evans. So why then, you might wonder, would this essay be so important and illuminating about Richard Wagner? The answer lies in the fact that both Nazi opera conspiracy theorists and Goldhagen locate the origins of the Final Solution predominantly in German cultural sources predating the rise of National Socialism—it being an unmentioned dogmatic methodological assumption that such culturally based explanations are a priori not only perfectly justified, but somehow inexplicably the only possible way of looking at history.

Unless stated otherwise, all quotations from Evans are from the digital edition of this book (no real page numbers provided in the Kindle eBook version, but the quotes can be easily found with a digital search).

Here, in Evans' words, lies the crux of Goldhagen's argument:

Goldhagen argues that Germans killed Jews in their millions because they enjoyed doing it, and they enjoyed doing it because their minds and emotions were eaten up by a murderous, all-consuming hatred of Jews that had been pervasive in German political culture for decades, even centuries past (pp. 31-2). Ultimately, says Goldhagen, it is this history of genocidal antisemitism that explains the German mass murder of Europe's Jews, nothing else can.  

In his own critique of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, Norman Finkelstein identified its monocausal methodology as its principle underlying presumptive methodological weakness, where the Final Solution is claimed to have an exclusively cultural origins: the longstanding German cultural tradition of delight in murdering Jews.  In his critique, Finkelstein identified between two different types of Holocaust literature:

Holocaust scholarship, which tends to be historical and multicausal, and Holocaust literature, which tends to be ahistorical and monocausal" (Finkelstein: A Nation on Trial: 88). I reckon the former as "solid scholarly research," the latter as "largely devoid of scholarly interest."  

Goldhagen's true distinction is to argue that German anti-Semitism was not only an integral, but rather that it was the sufficient condition for perpetrating the extermination of the Jews: "With regard to the motivational cause of the Holocaust, for the vast majority of perpetrators, a monocausal explanation does suffice" (Hitler's Willing Executioners: 416, cf. 455, 582 n42).

In this sense, Nazi opera conspiracy theories are the ultimate logical consequence of Goldhagenism, where the monocausal origin of the Holocaust is localised in toto to a single point of cultural origin: Wagnerian opera. It provides the ultimate justification for Goldhagen's central thesis that:

Genocide was immanent in the conversation of German society. It was immanent in its language and emotion. It was immanent in the structure of cognition. 

Hitler's Willing Executioners, p.449

And immanent in works of art, such as those of Wagner, which are allegedly deeply pervaded with this "structure of cognition". Once this monocausal paradigm is accepted, Wagner's operas are all conveniently and retrospectively reinterpreted to forcibly fit into the structure of the Goldhagen thesis; and, in a circular argument, the interpretations then proffered as "incontestable" evidence of its "immanent" validity.

Evans describes Goldhagen's claims to extraordinary originality in uncovering an arresting new insight previously denied to academic historians:

It is a bold scholar, therefore, who claims, as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen does in his book Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), to have found an entirely new answer to the question of how it was that Germans rather than some other European people turned antisemitic prejudice into mass murder. Goldhagen's book has attracted widespread media attention, making its author, a junior professor of political science at Harvard, a celebrity overnight. It has made the best-seller lists in Britain and America and stayed there for some months, outselling in the process almost every other book that has been published on the Third Reich. Its arguments have thus in all probability become extremely influential, not just among students but above all among the wider reading public. For a book that originated in a Ph.D. thesis, this is no mean achievement. 

Unfortunately for media pop celebrity, Goldhagen, to those who are more familiar with the history of the academic historiographic literature on the subject, he failed to say a single thing that was new:

This is a bold and arresting thesis, though it is not new. Much the same was said during the Second World War by anti-German propagandists such as Robert Vansittart or Rohan Butler, who traced back German antisemitism—and much more—to Luther and beyond; a similar argument was put forward by the proponents of the notion of a German 'mind' or 'character' in the 1960s [citation to Peter Viereck's 1960s revised edition of Metapolitics], and by William L. Shirer in his popular history of Nazism. 

In other words, Goldhagenism is actually just old hat to historians, and thoroughly unoriginal. Goldhagen is just a more extreme expression of the same tired old theory tracing National Socialism to exclusively cultural origins—of the sort that had appeared in the literature around the 1940s-60s. Academic historians have, since then, long moved on—something which Goldhagen seems to be blissfully unaware of in retracing old ground. There are few things that annoy academic reviewers more than rather green newcomers who overconfidently proclaim their originality simply because their woeful ignorance of the published body of literature leads them to rehash tired old ideas as though they had enlightened upon them themselves through sheer force of original genius.

Evans tackles Goldhagen's arguments in the following passage:

Goldhagen, however, asserts that these men [involved in the execution of Jews] were murderers because they were antisemites. He admits that he has no evidence of actual statements by the men to this effect, neither from the time before they enlisted, nor from the period when they carried out their campaign of mass extermination (p. 255), so he has to fall back on the circular argument that they were antisemites because they murdered Jews. Beyond this, he asserts that they were antisemites because they were Germans. This is where the real weaknesses of the book begin. Goldhagen asserts that German society as a whole had been deeply antisemitic since the Middle Ages. The tradition of Christian antisemitism was reinforced by Luther, and further strengthened in the nineteenth Century by the rise of German nationalism, which defined Germanness from the outset against the 'otherness' of the Jew (pp. 44-5). By the late nineteenth Century, antisemitism was not only all-pervasive but also exterminatory. To be antisemitic in Germany meant to will the physical annihilation of the Jews. It was a doctrine, Goldhagen claims, that was adhered to by the vast majority of Germans throughout modern history. 

My bold emphasis

You can immediately see how this relates to Richard Wagner, whose name is perpetually evoked as a definitive case in point to conclusively "prove" that by the late nineteenth century exterminationist anti-Semitism was all-pervasive in nineteenth century German culture: "To be antisemitic in Germany meant to will the physical annihilation of the Jews". Wagner is thus automatically mentioned as allegedly "incontestable" proof that this was unquestionably the case. Because Wagner was anti-Semitic, we are told that he willed the physical annihilation (Untergang) of the Jews. Wagner demanded the extermination (Untergang) of the Jews, and Hitler was as obedient as a dog in carrying out his Master's orders. Wagner is considered the ultimate proof of the eternal validity of the Goldhagen hypothesis that Germans are all psychopaths culturally conditioned to thoroughly enjoy murdering Jews.

Evans goes on:

Levy declared: I know of no case where genocide was proposed as a systematic solution to the Jewish question before 1914. Rare threats of physical violence came in the form of 'jokes' or fantasies or poorly veiled wishes, usually appeared as parenthetical remarks, and in almost every case were subject to denial, disavowal, and wide public disapproval.

One such joke, is of course, the one recorded by Cosima in which Wagner laughed viciously at the death of Jews in a fire during a performance of Lessing's Nathan the Wise. It is Cosima herself who tells us that the utterance was meant as a joke and a private one at that, never intended for public airing. It is another instance where it is asserted that Wagner willed the physical annihilation of the Jews. Evans further tells us that:

As Rosemarie Leuschen-Seppel showed in her Standard monograph on the Social Democrats' confrontation with the 'Jewish Question' and the Antisemitic Parties in Imperial Germany (1978), the Party believed that Judaism would disappear along with other religions after the socialist revolution, and Jews would therefore be completely assimilated into German society. The alleged defects of the 'Jewish character', which Party literature conceded might have some substance in reality, were in its view the product of social influences and discrimination dating from the Middle Ages, and would vanish  after the socialist revolution as well. 

My bold emphasis 

The view of the Social Democrats here is very close to that of Wagner, who utterly refused to have anything to do with the right-wing anti-Semitism of Adolf Stöcker or Bernard Förster. Like Friedrich Engels, Wagner emphatically rejected the rather vicious left-wing anti-Semitism of Eugene Dühring, who was himself a Social Democrat party member. Evans tells us:

After the publication of Engels's Anti-Dühring, the Party resisted the temptation of equating Jews with capitalists, and indeed devoted a great deal of attention to the plight of the poverty-stricken Jewish Proletariat in Russia and in Congress Poland. The open expression of antisemitic views, allusions or phrases was never tolerated at Party Congresses or meetings. 

Like Engels, Richard Wagner rejected Dühring who in turn wrote a lengthy
polemic directed at Wagner more or less accusing him of being a Jew-lover

Wagner alludes in Judaism in Music to the common idea that the Jewish character had degenerated due to centuries of the "social influences and discrimination" under what Wagner denounced in the essay as German "räuberische Roh[h]eit" (predatory bestiality—Rohheit is modern spelling, Roheit is old German spelling):

Wagner spoke of "the historical misery of the Jews and the predatory bestiality [räuberische Rohheit] of Christian Germanic tyrants towards the sons of Israel"
"das geschichtliche Elend der Juden und die räuberische Rohheit der christlich-germanischen Gewalthaber den Söhnen Israels"

It is all part of Wagner's regeneration theory that the path towards regaining the lost humanity of the homeless Jews was either through their assimilation to become Germans who could then call their Fatherland home, or through Zionism (the establishment of what Wagner calls a "jerusalemisches Reich", a Jerusalemic empire):

In this, Wagner fully anticipates Theodor Herzl who also accepted that the Jewish character had degenerated through centuries of oppression, but differed from Wagner in claiming that the only true path to the regeneration of Jewish nobility was through nationhood rather than assimilation. It is even possible that the inspiration for Herzl's regenerationist Zionism came directly from Wagner himself.

Prior to becoming the father of Zionism, Herzl had strictly followed Wagner along the assimilationist path. Herzl belonged amongst those Jews that Wagner mentions as having properly understood his essay, when he states that rather than merely seeing in it an expression of medieval Jew-hatred, that "the more elevated Jews approved of the matter" (jedenfalls nahm sich das höhere Judentum die Sache an). Herzl clearly considered himself one of these more elevated Jews who shared Wagner's idea that the Jews had so severely degenerated through centuries of bestial treatment by Germans, that the task of regenerating their lost humanity would be a difficult one. Judaism in Music forms part of Wagner's Regeneration Scripts (Regenerationsschriften). The notion that Wagner advocated Jewish assimilation as a path to regeneration might come as a shock to those raised on the usual fantastic Nazi opera conspiracy mythology surrounding Wagner, but we know definitively that this the case because Wagner said so. He uses that exact word "Assimilation" in the German text:

Wagner calls for "Assimilation" of the Jews
From an original 1869 reprinting of Judaism in Music

Yet, bizarrely, people continue to read the word "assimilation" as "extermination". The context of the occurrence of the word "Assimilation" is as follows:

In contrast, if we were to assimilate this element in this way—so that in cooperation with us, it develops the higher education of our nobler human faculties—it is apparent that it is preferable not to conceal the difficulties of this assimilation, but that only the most open disclosure of this would be conducive to it. 

Soll dagegen dieses Element uns in der Weise assimiliert werden, daß es mit uns gemeinschaftlich der höheren Ausbildung unsrer edleren menschlichen Anlagen zureife, so ist es ersichtlich, daß nicht die Verdeckung der Schwierigkeiten dieser Assimilation, sondern nur die offenste Aufdeckung derselben hierzu förderlich sein kann. 

From later explanatory addendum to Judaism in Music (my bold emphasis)

The best explanation of this is given to us by historian Joachim Fest:

Even the famous sentence about the Redemption of Ahasvar that concludes the essay about "Judaism in Music" means nothing less than the annulment [Aufhebung] of the peculiar role of the Jews in society through the transformation of their relationship. First through revolution, the opposites of Jew and non-Jew are annulled in an aesthetic world-order, where they will emerge "united and without difference" from one another. Seen from the standpoint of predominantly pre-revolutionary thinking, he saw in the Jews, not a biological element, but rather a symptom of the illness of a materialist civilisation, where once it has been overcome, the Jews are freed of the daemonic power that drives civilisation to its decay. With Hitler it is totally different. He thought of all Jews as being undeliverable from the stigma bound to their ancestry and blood, from which they could never get away. 

From Joachim Fest's essay in Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich. My translation.

It is even asserted that Wagner republished Judaism in Music because he wanted to emphasise how he wanted it known how badly he wished all Jews to be exterminated, whereas in fact, in the reprint he has an addendum in which he distances himself from interpretations of his essays as an expression of Medieval Jew-hatred (mittelalterliche Judenhass) that is "so shameful in an age of Enlightenment" (für unsere aufgeklärten Zeiten so schmachvoll):

Wagner denounces readings of his essay as an expression of "Medieval Jew-hatred"

Evans in fact warns against conflating assimilationism with exterminationism, as though to say that all calls for assimilation can be accepted ipso facto as an expression of genocidal and exterminatory anti-Semitism:

In any case, to equate the desire to assimilate the Jews into German society by giving them civil equality with the kind of racial antisemitism that demanded precisely the opposite—namely, their exclusion from civil society—is to blur crucial distinctions.

Wagner too makes it explicit that he wants Jew and German to become "united and without difference":

"thus will be be united and without difference!"
From original 1869 printing of Judaism in Music

Yet, there is no doubt that from a modern post-Holocaust perspective the sort of aggressive assimilationism demanded by Wagner would tend to be interpreted as being anti-Semitic, rather than just anti-Judaic as Saul Friedländer states, since it denies them the right to a separate ethnic and religious identity. Nonetheless, however one reads it, it remains simply unallowable to make sweeping black-and-white proclamations to the effect that all varieties of anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism can only possibly be exterminationist, and that no shades of grey along a continuum can ever exist. While the modern accepted consensus is one of ethnic and religious pluralism, it must further be kept in mind that this was not a view that was widespread in Wagner's time, where some liberals wanted to totally exclude Catholics, for example, from civil society. Evans tells us that:

German liberals were not so kind to Catholics, the abrogation of whose religious freedoms and civil rights they actively supported during the so-called Kulturkampf and whom they consistently regarded thereafter as primitive, backward and superstitious, in sharp contrast to their much less negative attitude towards Jews.

The difference with Wagner here is that he was equally as hostile to Catholicism as he was to the Jews—even though he counted amongst his friends both Jews and Catholics. But it is as implausible to call Wagner's anti-Semitism exterminatory as it is to call his vehement anti-Catholicism exterminatory. However, ideologically opposed to them he may have been, exterminatory elimination of particular religious confessions is something simply alien to Wagner's staunchly pacifist ideology, in which violence inflicted on any sentient being—even animals—was condemned outright as a form of rapacious barbarism. That is the reason why Parsifal is called an abject fool, as yet unenlightened by compassion for all sentient creatures, for having killed a swan in the first act of the opera.

Before anyone goes and calls Wagner's rejection of ethnic and religious pluralism proto-Nazism, it should be recalled that in those days even socialists envisioned a society in which religious pluralism would be supplanted by a common secular and socialist humanism where religion would be relegated to the past as the "opiate of the people". Assimilationism, whether that of the Social Democrats or Wagner, could hardly be argued to be exactly the same thing as exterminationist anti-Semitism. In those days, assimilationism was a doctrine widely held by the progressive and liberal side of politics. That said, it must be admitted that assimilation, as much as extermination, would result in the Untergang of Judaism, and the disappearance of a unique Jewish ethnic and religious identity. This is why Wagner goes on and on about the supposed degenerate state of the Jews resulting from centuries of mistreatment, and presses the importance of urgent cure ("regeneration") for their fallen state. However, that is exactly the point of the Ahasver metaphor which Wagner ends Judaism in Music with: the salvation of Jews through an Untergang or downfall of Judaism and their assimilation into the body of Christ through their acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah. It is a view that Wagner clearly persists with right till the end of his life when he writes:

The blood of the Saviour flowing from his head, from his wounds on the cross—who would commit such an outrage as to ask whether it might belong to the white or any other race?

Das Blut des Heilandes, von seinem Haupte, aus seinen Wunden am Kreuze fließend, — wer wollte frevelnd fragen, ob es der weißen, oder welcher Rasse sonst angehörte?  

Wagner: Heldentum und Christentum, 1881. My translation

In the same essay, Wagner welcomes the prospect of all races becoming ever the same through intermixing (Vermischung):

. . . a possibility of the sameness of all people through the intermixing of ever similar growing races . . . a oneness only conceivable through a commonly agreed moral ground, just as we must think that the True Christianity calls us to carry out.

. . . eine mögliche Gleichheit aller, durch ihre Vermischung sich ähnlich gewordener Racen uns gewiss zunächst nicht einer ästethischen Weltordnung zuführen würde, diese Gleichheit dagegen einzig aber uns dadurch denkbar ist, dass sie sich auf den Gewinn einer allgemeinen moralischen Übereinstimmung gründet, wie das wahrhaftige Christenthum sie auszubilden uns berufen dünken muss.    

Wagner: Heldentum und Christentum, 1881. My translation 

Wagner ends this essay with an unequivocal condemnation of Gobineau's "naturalistically" justified world-order, in which the supposed master races dominated so-called lower races, as being "totally immoral":

we have to keep a hold of the fact that the effectiveness of the noblest races' domination and exploitation of the lower races, justified in a naturalistic sense, has founded a totally immoral [unmoralische] world-order . . .

[wir haben] das festzuhalten, daß, wie die Wirksamkeit der edlesten Race durch ihre, im natürlichen Sinne durchaus gerechtfertigte, Beherrschung und Ausbeutung der niedrigen Racen, eine schlechthin unmoralische Weltordnung begründet hat . . . 

Wagner: Heldentum und Christentum, 1881. My translation

Wagner condemned Gobineau's proto-Nazi racist world-order [Weltordnung] as being "totally immoral" [schlechthin unmoralisch] From the original printing of Heldenthum und Christenthum, 1881

"immoral" (unmoralisch)
From the original printing of Heldenthum und Christenthum, 1881. My translation

Wagner further asserts the unity of the human species (die Einheit der menschlichen Gattung):

"The unity of the human species"
From the original printing of Heldenthum und Christenthum, 1881

Wagner openly welcomes the possibility that one day everyone could possibly become the same (eine mögliche Gleichheit aller) through intermixing:

"a possibility of the sameness of all [people]"
From the original printing of Heldenthum und Christenthum, 1881

A oneness of humanity arrived at through racial intermixing (Vermischung):

Wagner welcomes "intermixing" of races
From the original printing of Heldenthum und Christenthum, 1881

The absurdity of the situation is that readers come to Wagner with the supposedly infallible prejudgement that everything he said can only possibly be an unequivocal demand for Jewish extermination and racial purity—that even clear statements to the exact contrary are read as "incontestable" evidence of how widespread proto-Nazism was in nineteenth century German Romanticism.

The real problem is that people are so utterly fixated on clinging to a Goldhagenist reading of German history that they would do anything to prove the theory that the longstanding bloodlust to see Jews murdered even pervasively expressed itself in German Romantic art. The refusal to accept a more critical and cautious reading of Wagner's writings is grounded upon the myopic inability to see German history from anything other than a rigidly Goldhagenist paradigm, which is dogmatically asserted to be "incontestable". Given how the example of Richard Wagner is universally held up as smoking gun evidence to the eternal veracity of Goldhagenism, such interpretations of Wagner are defended with a frightfully dogged tenaciousness, since without it a major cornerstone of the Goldhagen hypothesis collapses. The only way towards a genuinely critical academic reading of Wagner's theoretical works is by first undermining the Goldhagenist culture-centric framework in order to evoke a significant paradigm shift.

The objection I can imagine that many readers would have to just such a more critical and cautious reading of Wagner is that it is merely my own personal fantasy and that I am just an absurd Wagner "apologist" who should be ignored since every fool knows that it is simply "incontestable" that Wagner wanted the extermination of the Jews. For example, I found the following "quotations" in a lurid populist Occult Reich conspiracy book:

Wagner described the Jews as 'the devil incarnate of human decadence' [no bibliographic citation] and called for 'a Final Solution' to 'the Jewish problem' [no bibliographic citation]. 

From section entitled Pagan Revivalism and Völkisch Christianity in The Nazi Occult War: Hitler's Compact with the Forces of Evil by Michael Fitzgerald (Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2013).

As is usual in non-academic publications, no primary bibliographic source citations for these quotes are given—because they are fictional. It is very similar to the often repeated quote attributed to Hitler that goes "whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must understand Wagner"—again entirely apocryphal, as no primary source for the quote has ever been found, yet it is repeated endlessly in both Occult Reich conspiracy literature such as that by Fitzgerald, as well as in Nazi opera conspiracy literature.

Sadly, even Pulitzer Prize winning right-wing historian Peter Viereck is hardly better than populist Occult Reich conspiracy theorists. In addition to repeating the quote "whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must understand Wagner" several times without once giving us a primary source citation in his book Metapolitics, Viereck too makes up other fictional quotes of his own. For example, Viereck claims that Hitler stated in Mein Kampf that his "favourite reading" consisted of the "political compositions of Richard Wagner".  The citation is to p69 of the 13th edition of Mein Kampf, Munich 1934. I have meticulously checked the source citation in Mein Kampf and no matter how carefully I look, Hitler says nothing even remotely resembling this either on p69, or anywhere else in the book. As is usual in Nazi opera conspiracy literature, Viereck has totally made the quote up. Readers are duly invited to thoroughly search word by word through Mein Kampf for themselves to confirm this.

Another lurid Occult Reich conspiracy book goes to the trouble of making up an extensive non-existent quote, allegedly from Mein Kampf, but an extensive search of multiple editions of the Mein Kampf in the original German version failed to locate it:

'When I hear Wagner it seems to me that I hear rhythms of a bygone world. I imagine to myself that one day science will discover in the waves set in motion by the Rheingold secret mutual relations connected with the order of the world.' 

ADOLF HITLER, MEIN KAMPF  [From The Nazis and the Occult: The Dark Forces Unleashed by the Third Reich by Paul Roland. No page number in Mein Kampf cited, because but no such passage exists in the book. Readers are invited to hunt through Mein Kampf all they like to try to locate this quote. It actually comes from Hitler's Table Talk, a potentially problematic source.]

Immediately after this fictional "quote", Roland goes on to claim that Wagner was an evil magician casting his Satanic spell over National Socialism:

Wagner provided the musical setting for Hitler's vision of German global domination. His epic melodramas are a granite monument in music to the grandeur of Aryan superiority and sacrifice. Without Wagner's Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) tempered with pastoral interludes, Nazism would not have acquired its mythic undertones. 

Both Theodor Reuss, a practitioner of Tantric sex magick [sic], and Sar Peladan, the French writer on the occult, believe that Wagner was an intuitive magician. 

From The Nazis and the Occult: The Dark Forces Unleashed by the Third Reich by Paul Roland.  

It is exactly the same sort of lurid and speculative nonsense found in Nazi opera conspiracy theories. Joachim Köhler tells us that:

[In] the last radio address [Hitler] gave to the country, in January 1945, he repeated: 'Only he who gave this task can release me from it.'...

The nature of this task was certainly not to pursue a set of political aims, that is, to arrange the political and social realities of the time in the interests of the nation whose Chancellor he was. Reality meant for him the task of transforming the world into a Wagnerian drama... 

Köhler: Wagner's Hitler: the Prophet and his Disciple, p270 (my emphases)

Köhler believes that Hitler announced on public radio that he was under the demonic influence of the "intuitive magick" of Wagner who controlled him like a puppet from the beyond the grave, forcing him to commit a diabolical act of grand opera on the world's stage. Only "he"—namely Wagner—could "release him from" his "task". Wagner allegedly "gave" Hitler the grand operatic task of staging the Untergang of the Jews. The whole of the Dritte Reich was under the total demonic control of Wagner—the evil magician—manipulating every detail from beyond the grave. Nazi opera conspiracy theories are clearly first cousin to Occult Reich Satanist conspiracy theories—as well as a close relation to Nazi UFO conspiracy theories:

Highly likely many would decry my attempts to debunk this sort of lurid and sensationalist nonsense by accusing me of positing a "revisionist" interpretation of Wagner, a revisionist history as blind to the "self-evident" truth as Holocaust deniers are to the "incontestable" facts staring them in the face. Yet my critical reading of Wagner is shared by none other than the great Holocaust scholar Saul Friedländer:

However, on the previous page [of Judaism in Music], in which Wagner call upon the Jews to follow the example of Börne in order to give up for the sake of "the redemption into genuine human beings", he clearly says that the vanishing of their social, cultural, and religious idiosyncrasies will restore them into a universal and redeemed humanity. In this interpretation of redemption there still echoes Wagner's revolutionary ideals of his age. One can interpret Wagner's first anti-Judaic pamphlet not as a call for the annihilation of the Jews, but rather read it as the appeal for the elevation of Judaism as a culture, in order to remove the "Jewish spirit" ... Can the Jews be liberated of their "Jewish spirit" like Börne? To Hitler it must have all seemed ideologically unacceptable.  

Saul Friedländer: Hitler und Wagner from Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich. My translation from the published German version.

Friedländer reminds us that not a single leading figure in the National Socialist movement ever once quoted from Wagner's Judaism in Music, which Friedländer notably calls an "anti-Judaic pamphlet" rather than an anti-Semitic one. No evidence exists that Hitler ever read the essay, and no copy of it exists in Hitler's private library. Yet this does not stop Nazi opera conspiracy theorists and Occult Reich conspiracy theorists from repeatedly claiming without the slightest shred of evidence that Hitler "knew every word" of the essay and that the core dogma of the National Socialism intentionalist plot for genocide was based entirely on it. 

Professor Friedländer's is hardly a voice to be ignored since, since in addition to being a Holocaust survivor himself, he is the immensely respected author of one of largest and most comprehensive academic studies of the Holocaust ever published. His is truly an authoritative voice to be reckoned within the field of Holocaust studies. It would be absurd to compare such a major academic historian to a Holocaust denier for offering a more critical academic reading of Wagner. Friedländer makes it very clear that Wagner's liberal assimilationism would have been considered "ideologically unacceptable" to the National Socialists. Little surprisingly, Friedländer was one of the many academic historians around the world who expressed criticisms highly dismissive of Goldhagen.

Furthermore, someone as previously violently hostile to Wagner as Paul Rose now agrees with Friedländer's interpretation:

What did Wagner mean by Untergang? Is he speaking metaphorically? Or did he mean a physical Untergang? I tend towards the opinion that Wagner thought in 1850 in the first line of a self-destruction of the Jewish identity and less of a physical destruction through violence. 

From p289 of Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich. My translation.

Note that Wagner called for the Selbstvernichtung (self-annihilation) of the Jews through their voluntary acceptance of assimilation into Christian society—the fate of Ahasverus.

Whatever the case, however dated Wagner's assimilationism might be regarded today, relative to the sociopolitical discourse of his era, it still fell on the progressive and liberal side of politics. Nor is this to try to defend such a dated position as being of relevance in our day and age. It is merely an attempt to understand Wagner relative to the background of the socially normative thinking of his age, rather than falsely reading it as though it were something written in the sociopolitical context of the 1940s, almost a century after the publication of Judaism in Music. Even then, no matter how dated Wagner's ideas might have been by the early-mid twentieth century, they are still far less backward and barbaric than the frightfully regressive "Medieval Jew-hatred" and "predatory bestiality" advocated by the National Socialists.

Evans goes on to sternly criticise Goldhagen's wholesale villainization of all Germans as being psychopathic murderers who perversely delighted in murdering Jews, as being a kind of reverse racism. Evans quotes the Hungarian-born journalist Gitta Sereny as calling Goldhagen's book "a hymn of hate to the Germans". Does this sound familiar to readers? Because that is exactly what Israeli historian Na'ama Sheffi identified in an interview with Die Zeit as the singular emotion driving the widespread Wagner-hatred, in which he is virtually accused of having single-handedly causing WWII and the Holocaust: "we hate the Germans". It is exactly the same emotion that drives Goldhagen, who would most probably be an enthusiastic supporter of Nazi opera conspiracies—and quite likely Occult Reich conspiracies too. Evans then makes a critical point:

In a curious way, what Goldhagen is doing is endorsing the view relentlessly propagated by Hitler and Goebbels that the German people were deeply antisemitic from the outset; indeed he explicitly praises Hitler for his insight into the depth of the Germans' feelings on this matter (p. 443). His book constitutes a craven surrender to the Nazi view of German history. 

My bold emphasis 

It is the same surrender to Nazi propaganda that constitutes the very essence of Nazi opera conspiracy theories, since the National Socialists claimed that their thinking was inspired by the traditions of German and European culture—such as Martin Luther, Wagner, Beethoven and Shakespeare. This was merely a malicious propagandist attempt to give themselves false airs of cultural legitimacy. Any characterisation of National Socialism as an inspired Wagnerian movement likewise "constitutes a craven surrender to the Nazi view of German history". It is for this reason that the Frankfurt School philosopher, Ernst Bloch said:

With the names of Wagner and Nietzsche for example, it has gone so far that they are only spoken of by educated anti-fascists in connection with the Nazis.  ... Thereby the really Nazi germinal positions in Wagner and Nietzsche are emphasised on the one hand through dreadful exaggerations, above all by omission of all of the other elements in Wagner and Nietzsche ... Here an all too exaggerated archeology no longer troubles itself with the temporal and historical context. ... The music of the Nazis is not the Prelude to the Mastersingers, but rather the Horst-Wessel-Lied; they deserve credit for nothing else, and no more can or should be given to them. 

From Über Wuzerln des Nazismus (1939). In the Suhrkamp Verlag edition of his works: Politische Messungen, Pestzeit, Vormärz, p.319-320

Mit den Namen Wagner und Nietzsche beispielsweiser ist es soweit, daß sie fast nur noch im Nazi-Zusammenhang und in keinem anderen den gebildeten Anti-Faschisten ... von der Zunge gehen. Dadurch werden zwar auf der einen Seite die wirklichen Nazi-Keimstellen in Wagner und Nietzsche betont, jedoch durch heillose Übertreibung, vor allem Auslassung aller anderen Elemente bei Wagner und Nietzsche ... Hier mühen sich allzu übertriebene Archäologen überhaupt nicht mehr um den sehr verschiedenen Zeitindex, historischen Zusammenhang.  ... Die Musik der Nazis ist nicht das Vorspiel zu den Meistersingern, sondern das Horst-Wessel-Lied; andere Ehre haben sie nicht, andere kann und soll ihnen nicht gegeben werden.

In other words, to concede anything of Wagner's to the National Socialists constitutes a "craven surrender" to their propaganda. Given the fact that the mythology of Nazi opera conspiracy theories has become part of the founding national myth of the state of Israel, it must be conceded that modern Israel is founded upon a dogma that has as its heart and core, a "craven surrender" to Nazi propaganda. In it we can see reflected everything that is wrong with Israel today and its "predatory bestiality" towards the Palestinian people along with censorship of Theodor Herzl's favourite composer, Wagner—an act reminiscent of Nazi book burnings. Little surprising when Zubin Mehta played Wagner in Israel he was subjected to comments widely received as being racist from deputy minister to the Israeli prime minister, Dov Shilansky, who told Mehta to go back home to India.

Goldhagen has other habits that will be familiar to those similarly exasperated by Nazi opera conspiracy theorists:

Goldhagen's case is not strengthened by the vehemence of his condemnation of those historians whose views differ from his. To write off other people's arguments, often without much evidence, as 'absurd', 'specious', 'self-evidently false', 'erroneous', 'untenable', 'mistakes', and to adorn his own arguments repeatedly with adjectives such as 'incontestable', is no substitute for reasoned argument, and does not convince. This is the language of dogmatism, not scholarship. It betrays a disturbing arrogance that is of a piece with the exaggerated claims for novelty which Goldhagen makes in the Introduction.   

My emphasis

Goldhagen continues to this day to tirelessly trumpet his supremely "incontestable" infallibility on his personal website. It exactly mirrors the same sort of arrogant claim to absolute infallibility made by Nazi opera conspiracy theorists. Like Goldhagen, their dogmatic failures come from a total lack of awareness of the current academic status of historiography in the field:

How can we explain this startling failure of scholarship in a book which after all began its life as a Harvard dissertation? It is surely relevant to note that it was supervised and examined not by historians but by political scientists, whose knowledge of the empirical aspects of the subject was clearly limited. It is significant that the prize it was given in 1994 was the Gabriel Almond Award of the American Political Science Association; it was not given any prizes by historians. ... Not surprisingly, for all its resonance in the press, serious British specialists in German history, including Ian Kershaw and Arnold Paucker, condemned the book as ignorant and simplistic at a symposium held at the German Historical Institute in London on 21 May 1996. 

My emphasis

If a political scientist such as Goldhagen is considered "a startling failure of scholarship" what then of all of the Nazi opera conspiracy theorists churning out an endless stream of what is hardly better than Nazi UFO literature in "academic" cultural and musicological publications on Wagner? Sadly the situation there is unlikely to improve for decades to come. This sort of "startling failure of scholarship" seems to be the norm outside of academic historiography whenever non-historians tackle the subject of National Socialism, and it is not long before the discourse deteriorates to the level of lurid Occult Reich and Nazi UFO conspiracies—Goldhagenist historiography and Nazi opera conspiracies coming out of political science and cultural studies departments being scarcely any different to these, other than in having the fake veneer of academic respectability.

Above all, Evans points out how large the yawning gulf is between academic and populist literature on the Dritte Reich era remains. Unfortunately, the populist literature is full of the most ridiculous Nazi UFO conspiracies, lurid occult Reich fairy tales—and Nazi opera conspiracies:

In this sense, the debate over the book has opened up yet again the gulf between academic and popular history. The most popular general history of Nazi Germany is still William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), which takes a similar line to that of Goldhagen, and repeats wartime propaganda about the pervasiveness of antisemitism, racism, militarism and authoritarianism in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German culture. For all its academic trappings, its political-science jargon and its modish postmodernist insistence on the primacy of ideas and beliefs in history, Goldhagen's book, which is said to have sold some 40,000 copies within a couple of months of its publication, falls very much into the same category. Hence the agonized objections of so many American academics, amongst whom the book's theses have been overwhelmingly  rejected. ... With the exception of a few non-specialists like Simon Schama, professional historians in America too, on the whole rejected the book and its arguments.

My emphasis 

  

Evans points out that even Israeli historians on the whole rejected Goldhagen's book outright, but he notes that: 

Moshe Zimmermann, ... director of the Richard Koebner Centre for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, noted that Goldhagen's views were the same as those of the Israeli general public, and therefore failed to stir up any controversy there. 

This is an important point. Where Goldhagenist views dominate, as in Israel, there the widespread acceptance of Nazi opera conspiracy theories also prevails. These two ideologies naturally tend to co-exist, because both are driven by the fundamental emotion that feeds them: "we hate the Germans". Evans summarises other Israeli historians' positions on Goldhagen's book:

Finding the book's theses 'distorting and tendentious', Zimmermann even convicted it of adopting a 'mythological or even quasi-racist definition of the concept of "Germans'", not least in its denial that German Jews, most of whom in the nineteenth century considered themselves German patriots, and many of whom fought in the German army in the First World War, were in any sense German. Similarly, Saul Friedländer, ... admitted he could not subscribe to Goldhagen's thesis that German society was already permeated by antisemitism before 1933. It was 'much too sweeping', blurred crucial distinctions between different types and degrees of antisemitism, and ignored the effects of events such as the First World War, the collapse of the German Empire, and the world economic crisis of 1929-33, in radicalizing and spreading antisemitic views. As a political scientist, said Friedländer, Goldhagen ignored the discontinuities and changes in German history over the period in question. The book ran the risk of encouraging anti-German prejudice.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler, a German historian, accused Goldhagen of "turning back the scholarly clock to the 1950s"—back to the world of Peter Viereck's Metapolitics.  In other words, in Evans' words:

There would be nothing wrong with the book if it had summarized the existing state of knowledge and taken it further by the application of new theories. The problem however, is that it falls far behind the existing state of knowledge.

All of this sounds frightfully familiar to anyone who has fought for a critical and academic study of Richard Wagner's writings against the background of a correct understanding of his own historical period, and has decried the general populist hysteria surrounding the composer. One is reminded of the philosopher Hegel's quip that it is almost impossible—even for the great Hegel—to argue against his stubborn old cleaning lady who dogmatically insists that "it always rains when I do the washing". You end up banging your head against a dogmatic populist wall driven by grossly oversimplified accounts of German history from people who have failed to gain an understand anything remoting approaching the standards of the current academic consensus in the field. The end result is a pretentious pseudo-history that rewrites history as serious historians currently understand it, in a manner hardly less malicious than Holocaust denialism. Evans tells us:

The real cause of the historians' rage is surely a feeling of impotence and frustration, as they see a pretentious piece of bad scholarship hit the bestseller lists in several countries, while the media attention lavished on it completely ignored all the sound scholarship they had been engaged in themselves for so long. But this, surely, is only what can be expected from the mass media, who have already shown in the past that selling newspapers is more important than telling the truth: as Rupert Murdoch is said to have remarked after the 'Hitler diaries', for which he had paid $1.2 million for serialization rights in the The Times and The Sunday Times, had been exposed as forgeries in 1983, 'Circulation went up and it stayed up. We didn't lose money or anything like that... After all, we are in the entertainment business'.

It is rightful outrage. However, at public appearances and meetings where Goldhagen appeared in Germany, the lay audience ironically took his side and applauded him against academic historians who debated him. That is precisely the whole game of hate and self-hate that also drives the emotional turmoil that surrounds the controversies that swirl around Nazi opera conspiracy debates. It is a kind of soap opera that has little to do with history and everything to do with populist emotional sentiment, one that happily rides roughshod over academic historiography and occupies a kind of hysterical populist fantasy world filled with Nazi UFOs, Satan worship, and bizarre opera conspiracies.

As a result, all I can say is given the fact that non-historians who write about Wagner in academia seem to lack even the most basic historiographic background about the current state of knowledge about the Dritte Reich era means that all we can expect are more and more Nazi opera conspiracy fantasies for decades yet to come. It will be futile, if not utterly impossible to attempt to deconstruct the morass of emotive hate-driven Goldhagenism dominating the field of Wagner studies, and honest academic voices who seek to displace the "academic" consensus formed by the so-called "Wagner UFO fraternity" may not have their concerns heard for a depressingly long period of time.

Yet despite it all, the fundamental emotional drive underlying Goldhagen's "hymn of hate to the Germans" is apparent to all who approach the subject critically and without hysteria. It is the very same blind emotion that literally demonises Wagner as the Satanic Dark Lord who must be dutifully hated as the total cultural embodiment of the sins of the German people. It is Israeli historian, Na'ama Sheffi, however, who says:

...ever more Israelis recognise that the Holocaust need not be forgotten without having to yell:  "we hate the Germans". 

Sheffi interview with Die Zeit

So eventually, the truth will out, but in the meanwhile the "startling failure of scholarship" represented by the dominance of the "Wagner UFO fraternity" of Nazi opera conspiracy theorists in academia will continue for some time longer, as they continue to be so blinded by all consuming hatred that they can see nothing beyond the absolute "incontestability" of their views, and viciously refuse to look outside of the square of the hate-driven paradigm to which they are captive.