"Hitler based his entire philosophy and the whole Nazi apparatus on ideas explicitly drawn from Wagner’s writings and operas"

As we saw in the previous post, part of a new series of shorter introductory study posts discussing the longest and most thoroughly researched post on this blog, the critique of Joachim Köhler's Wagner's Hitler, music journalist Anne Midgette confidently stated that:

Joachim Köhler’s chilling and exhaustively researched book “Wagner’s Hitler:  The Prophet and His Disciple”, ... makes a persuasive case for its thesis that Hitler based his entire philosophy and the whole Nazi apparatus on ideas explicitly drawn from Wagner’s writings and operas.  

Midgette: New York Times, 14th October 2001

Today, we will look at whether this sweeping assertion evincing absolute certitude proves to be true of official National Socialist policy towards the Jews.

As we saw in previous study posts in this series, modern academic historians such as Sir Richard J. Evans have concluded that:

[Wagner’s] influence on Hitler has often been exaggerated. Hitler never referred to Wagner as a source of his own antisemitism, and there is no evidence that he actually read any of Wagner’s writings. 

Sir Richard J. Evans: The Third Reich in Power (my emphasis)

No evidence exists that Hitler read or even knew of the existence of Wagner's essay, Judaism in Music. No copy of the essay exists in Hitler's private library. The famous Holocaust historian, Professor Saul Friedländer, tells us that neither Hitler, nor any other senior Party member ever quoted from this essay. Yet despite this, Köhler asserts that Hitler "without doubt knew every word" of the essay and based Party policy entirely on it. However, Wagner himself made it explicit that he wanted his essay on the Jews to be understood as a call for Jewish "assimilation":

Wagner calls for the "assimilation" of the Jews.
Text from an original 1869 printing of Judaism in Music

There will be those who will then insist that official National Socialist policy must "without doubt" therefore "certainly" have been assimilationist. After all, as Anne Midgette tells us, we can now conclude with absolute and unconditional certainly that "Hitler based his entire philosophy and the whole Nazi apparatus on ideas explicitly drawn from Wagner’s writings and operas".

One of the more recent additions to my critique of Köhler's book is a quote that comes from a statement issued by the office of Reinhard Heydrich. I do not have archival access to the original source document (*Heydrich’s Wandlungen unseres Kampfes; Munich and Berlin, 1936, p.10 ff), so unfortunately I am going to have to rely on a secondary source citation coming from the respected historian, Professor Robert Gerwarth. Gerwarth summarises the hostility of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief architects of the Final Solution, towards assimilationism:

From [Heydrich’s] vantage point, the assimilationists who refused to emigrate represented the greatest obstacle to a successful Jewish policy: ‘The assimilationists deny their Jewish origins either by claiming that they have lived in this country for generations and that they are Germans or by maintaining, after getting baptized, that they are Christians,’ thereby trying ‘to undermine Nazi principles’ [die nationalsozialistischen Grundsätze über den Haufen zu werfen]. [Citation to: Reinhard Heydrich’s Wandlungen unseres Kampfes; Munich and Berlin, 1936, p.10 ff] 

Robert Gerwarth: Hitler’s Hangman—the Life of Heydrich; p.95

Heydrich was one of the chief executioners of the Final Solution, a term that emanated from Heydrich's office.

That is to say, nothing could be more antithetical to official National Socialist state policy than that of assimilationism, a hated ideology that sought to "throw the basic principles of National Socialism overboard" (die nationalsozialistischen Grundsätze über den Haufen zu werfen). Study of original source documents originating from the very office that planned and executed the Final Solution demonstrate just how right Sir Ian Kershaw was to dismiss Köhler's theories as a "gross exaggeration and distortion" in asserting that "without doubt" the National Socialist official policy "certainly" derived in toto from Wagner's assimilationist essay on the Jews, even though not a shred of evidence exists that either Hitler or any other major Party member even knew of the essay's existence. Sir Richard J. Evans too dismissed Köhler's assertions saying that "none of this is remotely persuasive". However, it is the great Israeli Holocaust historian, Professor Saul Friedländer, both of whose parents were murdered by the Nazis, who drives the final into the coffin of Nazi opera conspiracy theories in saying that if they had read it, they would have found Wagner's ideas on the Jews to be "ideologically unacceptable".

For more details and bibliographic sources please see the full version of my critical analysis of Joachim Köhler's Wagner's Hitler: the Prophet and his Disciple.




*Postscript: I have managed to track down the full original version of Heydrich's Wandlungen Unseres Kampfes in digital format on archive.org.  The full text of the original citation used by Professor Gerwarth is as follows:

Die in Deutschland lebenden Juden gliedern sich in zwei Gruppen, die Zionisten und Assimilanten (die sich selbst bezeichnenderweise Deutsch-Juden nennen). Die Zionisten vertreten zwar einen starken Rassestandpunkt und streben mit der Auswanderung nach Palästina die Schaffung eines eigenen jüdischen Staates an, doch darf man sich dabei nicht über die grundsätzlich volksfeindliche Einstellung der Juden täuschen lassen. Die Assimilanten verleugnen ihre jüdische Rasse, indem sie entweder, auf ihre langjährige Ansässigkeit pochend, behaupten, Deutsche oder nach vollzogener Taufe Christen zu sein. Diese Assimilanten sind es vor allen Dingen, die mit allen Arten von Loyalitätserklärungen und mit der ihrer Rasse eigenen Aufdringlichkeit versuchen, die nationalsozialistischen Grundsätze über den Haufen zu werfen.