Philosophical Witnessing: The Holocaust as Presence

8. The Jewish Declaration of War against the Nazis

« 8 » The Jewish Declaration of War against the Nazis In addition to the large decisions and actions that drove the Nazi genocide , the history of the Holocaust includes numerous small-scale “episodes ”�initiatives, transactions, scenarios, confluences�that although sounding now in a minor key, reflect in their combination of improbability , cruelty, and (often) irony, the harsh and arbitrary edges of the larger 126 vs. the unspeakable atrocity of which they are part. Both improbability and irony figure in the episode described here that is still generally unknown, and about which even those aware of its occurrence usually know few of the details involved in it. For good reason. At the beginning of the events in which he had a part, Theodore N. Kaufman, the principal actor in them�as much an anti-hero as any fictional character of literature�was unknown outside his immediate circle (which was also unknown); when the sequence of events he set in motion ended, a little more than two years later, he disappeared from public sight as completely as he had been invisible before . Nor did the events he initiated�through his unlikely role in them as author�affect in a significant, let alone decisive measure the “Final Solution ” that was itself being set in motion at about the same time, beginning in 1941, reaching its greatest intensity in 1942, and continuing until the end of the war. And yet, Kaufman’s writings made their way quickly from slight and local origins, the effort of an amateur author and a vanity press in Newark, New Jersey, to the highest echelons of the Nazi regime in Berlin, thence to the German army and the German public, illuminated for a moment at these crossings in the spotlight not of local but of world history. More than sixty years later, with Kaufman’s writings now scattered and rare (rarely sought or found), the way in which his private, clumsily formulated declaration of war against Germany underwent a transformation into a public, quasi-official declaration, regarded seriously by some the most prominent agents in a conflict that remains itself distinctive in the history of war, warrants consideration at least for that part of its history. At the very least, the Kaufman affair highlights the startling combination of contingency and arbitrariness that conspired with more predictable elements of historical causality to mark the procession of the Third Reich as a whole. The very idea of a Jewish “Declaration of War” against the Nazis conveys its own improbability. How could a relatively small group of people without a country or army, its few members scattered across countries and continents, “declare war” as anything more than a metaphor, or even more probably, hyperbole? And how could one member of that group with no special standing within it speak as representing the community even metaphorically, when those with standing could promise little agreement even on the most pressing and one-sided issues? But against these reservations , as against other appeals to reason or evidence, the history and social The Jewish Declaration of War against the Nazis 127 dynamics of Nazi ideology would go its own way. Thus, a recurrent motif in Nazi rhetoric pre-dating Kaufman’s appearance on the scene emerged still more strongly with the Nazi accession to power in January 1933: first, with Jewish disenfranchisement inside Germany, soon evolving into sporadic killings and other physical abuse, the growing network of concentration camps, the pogrom of Kristallnacht; thence, beginning in 1941, the full-scale genocide both within and outside Germany’s borders. All this was, in the Nazi portrayal of it, not an assault on the Jews, but a counterattack , recourse to self-defense against the war-by-other-means that the Jews had been successfully waging in the world and particularly against Germany at least since the debacle (for Germany) of World War I. It was the Jews, Hitler prophesied in his annual address on January 30, 1939, as he marked the sixth anniversary of his accession to power, who would be responsible for any more conventionally recognizable world war that might yet occur, and which he then made certain would occur in September of that same year. Did he or anyone else need a stronger or more accurate term than “war” for the corruption of culture, the undermining of the national consciousness, of economic justice, and of racial purity that the Jews, as Nazi ideology looked dolefully...