Warrant for Genocide

The myth of Jews as children of the Devil, mysterious, uncanny and possessed of sinister powers, has persisted since the second century, when they were accused of killing Christian children, torturing the consecrated wafer and poisoning wells. In his history of the demonizing of Jewry, British academic Cohn (The Pursuit of the Millennium), describes the modern adaptation of that myth as promulgated through the turn-of-the-century forgery “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” This document was purported to plan Jewish domination of the globe through control of political parties, banks, the press and public opinion, “casting a net of gold and steel around the world.” Although soon to be proven a blatant hoax by the Berne trial in 1935, the “Protocols” sold 120,000 copies in Germany in one year and helped convince 17 million Germans to vote Nazi in 1933. Cohn shows how the fiction of a Jewish conspiracy then combined with volkisch-racist ideology to produce the Holocaust: civilization needed to be rescued from this dark, earthbound race by the “world of good, of light, incarnated in blond, blue-eyed people” marching under the sun-god’s symbol, the swastika. This, Cohn argues, with convincing evidence, was the justification used for murdering two thirds of all the Jews in Europe. Long out of print, Cohn’s book, complete with a new afterword and extended extracts from the “Protocols” in the appendix, is a well-documented, accessible introduction to a key factor in the history of the Holocaust.