Quite so. There might not have been a Holocaust. But there was one. The Nazi regime without a Holocaust exists nowhere but in the imagination.
Not unimaginable, then. Anti-Communist, anti-Slavic, aggressive and expansionist, harking on a glorious past (Barbarossa, oh the irony), the firm hand of a Real Leader after two nightmarish decades, anti-semitic but not murderously so, it could have worked its way into power the way it did. Anti-semitism could have stopped at exclusion (Nuremberg Laws and Civil Society Laws) and encouragement to leave.
The anti-semitism was rabid, though, and one has to wonder why.
What you are doing is imagining a Nazi Germany innocent of the Holocaust and then comparing that with the antisemitism of the Catholic Church ...
Sorry, you've lost me completely there. I'm not comparing Catholic anti-semitism to anything - I'm saying it encouraged the normalisation of explicit anti-semitism in political discourse and the legitimisation of exclusionary policies. The sort of policies that were subsequently implemented with the Nuremberg Laws and exclusion of Jews from public institutions. In Austria this was achieved; in other democracies not so much. Apart from Poland, of course. They need watching as well.
but as you rightly say - and this is exactly my point: And it did not lead to that in Catholic countries except where they were occupied by the Nazi regime.
The Croatians got into it all on their own, with great eagerness. And thereby hang some Vatican tales, but we're already diverging enough.
Of course it sinned by grave commission. But there was no Holocaust.
The Holocaust was by no means something the Catholic Church wanted. It must have utterly horrified them that what they (by my argument) had sown had brought forth this whirlwind - and of course they knew. One of the best intelligence networks humanity's ever known.
My argument is that people brought up in the political ambience of
fin-de-siecle Austria, and that was one where explicit anti-semitism and exclusionary policies were legitimate, took matters on to the Holocaust. Dose those people with some Social Darwinism to dislodge their faith and that's what you can end up with.
I have made the point, the importance of which you deny, that Jewish officers were appointed both in Catholic Bavaria and Austria, but not in Prussia. This really is very significant, as regimes are always careful of whom they entrust with military force.
The Prussian army was not concerned that its officers might go rogue and march his division off to, say, Palestine. A famously, not to say notoriously, disciplened outfit, the Prussian Army, with an officer corps drawn almost exclusively from the landed nobility, or "Junker" class as they were known. Not many Jews amongst the Prussian landed nobility, nor many carpenter's sons for that matter.
The Austrian army was a very different matter, being multi-ethnic by nature and open to people working their way up. The Bavarians I don't know so much about in that period, didn't get a speaking part really (clearing your throat re[eatedly doesn't count).
It is true, as you state, that Karl Lueger was an anti-Semite, and that he was treated as an inspiration by Hitler in later years. His anti-Semitism was an element of his political populism, and was not reflected in any murderous or violent onslaughts on Vienna's Jewish citizens. See
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Lueger
Indeed not, and I doubt he intended them. If he had he wouldn't have sounded off about themanyway, any more than the Nazis did before their coup. He did exclude Jews from any public appointment or job that he legally could. It's that separation of Jews from Christian society that the Vatican wanted to restore, not their annihilation. There are, apparently, good theological reasons for having Jews around to point at as bad examples.
As noted in the second quotation, these sorts of ideas, and the use of populist anti-Semitism in the formation of political parties was being practiced not only in Catholic German lands, but in Protestant Prussia too, and by staunch Protestants, as related in
this wiki article.
Those efforts ran into the sand. By 1900 political anti-semitism was widely regarded as barbarous by democracies, something for Russians and Poles. Only in Austria, and in some peculiar localities, did it continue.
I explain that by Catholic influence on a ramshackle political edifice and an Empire going nowhere but back.
