To combat pre-Shoah hatred
A yellow CV sticker translates as ‘Hatred of Jews arises from envy, stupidity and incompetence’ and (left) German infantrymen near Verdun in northern France, scene of a bloody battle between French and German troops bers at the front. Antisemites, including Hitler, would continue to accuse them of being shirkers.
The C.V. was helpless in the face of popular antisemitism and mainstream intellectual antisemitism, justifying racism and genocide, which pervaded Europe in the century prior to the Holocaust.
The C.V. did not diminish the influence of intellectual antisemites who justified the destruction of European Jewry, including Jakob Friedrich Fries, Heinrich von Treitschke, Eugen Karl Dühring and Paul de Lagarde. C.V. efforts to prove antisemites wrong might even have encouraged Jewhatred, rousing suspicions of non-Jews as to why Jews needed the C.V. to protest so emphatically their patriotism. It is striking how widespread, not just in Germany, prejudice of all kinds was in the decades before the Holocaust.
In Germany, “enemies” were everywhere - including the “barbaric” Russians and especially the “decadent”French. France reciprocated with its own hatreds, quite apart from the Jews, among whom the Germans and the Italians took first place.
In England, similar language was common: in World War I, Rudyard Kipling condemned the Germans as “germs of any disease” and after the Russian Revolution, Churchill attacked Bolshevism as a “plague bacillus”.
Even the C.V. itself, committed as it was to fighting prejudice, inadvertently revealed that it had absorbed popular German prejudices, not excluding the Jews.
Its official paper, Im Deutschen Reich, condemned “Russian malice, French thirst for revenge, English deviousness”, and “Serbian lust for murder.”
The aforementioned Eugen Fuchs used even stronger language, as befitted a “German down to my bones”: “murderous Russia”, “insidious England”, “bloodthirsty France”, even Japan’s “yellow highway robbers.”
Contempt for foreign countries and ethnic groups contributed to both world wars. As prejudice was widespread, it could not easily be seen as an evil to be eradicated; consequently, many warnings were ignored and Jews remained loyal to their hate-filled Fatherland.
Zionism, which created at least the possibility of Jewish self-defence against antisemitism, was rejected by