The ‘Anti-Semitism Expert’ and His Nazi Mentor
In December 2008, Berlin’s influential Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism came in for sharp criticism for holding a conference titled “Conceptions of the Muslim as Enemy — Conceptions of the Jew as Enemy.” Critics accused the center and its director, Wolfgang Benz, of equating contemporary “Islamophobia” with historical anti-Semitism.
In response, Benz would insist that he had never proposed any such equivalence. But, as detailed in my PJ Media report here, the wording of Benz’s preface to the 2008 edition of the Center’s yearbook makes clear that he was doing literally and precisely that. For Benz, “Islamophobia” was, in effect, the newest form of the “oldest hatred.” In the meanwhile, Benz has continued to defend his analysis. Thus, earlier this month, he published a new article in Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung on the alleged “parallels” between “Anti-Semites and the Enemies of Islam.”
Now, the German political scientist Clemens Heni has called attention to research revealing that Benz’s dissertation director, the historian Karl Bosl, was a committed Nazi who as late as January 1945 participated in a conference held at the birthplace of Adolf Hitler in the Austrian town of Braunau am Inn. Moreover, Bosl’s own intellectual mentor, Karl Alexander von Müller, was not only a Nazi, but indeed a personal acquaintance of Hitler and the brother-in-law of none other than Gottfried Feder: one of the founders and chief ideologues of what would become the National Socialist party.
John Rosenthal
The Bavarian historian Karl Bosl (1908-1993) is still honored in Germany today. Bosl is honored in Germany even though he was a member of the National Socialist party, as well as of other Nazi organizations like the paramilitary SA and the National Socialist Teachers Association, and despite the fact that he collaborated with the SS’s infamous research institute, the “Ahnenerbe.”
Thus, on November 11, 2008, a “Prof.-Dr.-Karl Bosl Square” was dedicated in the Bavarian town of Cham. On July 6, 2009, the Bavarian Philologists Association for the first time awarded its new “Karl-Bosl-Medal.” One of those to honor Bosl is Wolfgang Benz, the director of the Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism (ZfA) at the Technical University in Berlin. As the publicity materials for a November 2009 lecture by Benz remind us, Benz wrote his doctoral thesis under Bosl’s direction. He defended the thesis in 1968. Twenty years later, in 1988, Benz contributed an essay to a Festschrift published in Bosl’s honor on the occasion of the latter’s eightieth birthday.
Is Karl Bosl a respectable German scholar who merits the high esteem in which he appears to be held by his student Wolfgang Benz? Let us consider some of the details of Bosl’s career in the Third Reich.
In an essay that was published in the year 2000, the historian Bernd-A. Rusinek notes that in 1938 Bosl submitted an application to participate in a project sponsored by the SS’s “German Ancestral Heritage Society” or “Ahnenerbe.” The “Ahnenerbe” was, in effect, the “research” arm of the SS, devoted to providing a pseudo-scientific foundation to the Nazis’ myth of “Aryan” superiority. The project for which Bosl applied was titled “Forest and Tree in Aryan-Germanic Spiritual and Cultural History.” Bosl’s application was accepted. According to Rusinek, Bosl was one of several “National Socialist hardliners” to participate in the SS project.
In January 1945, Bosl participated in what Rusinek has called “presumably the last historians conference of the ‘Third Reich.’” “The conference … took place on the 16th and 17th [of January] in Braunau am Inn,” Rusinek writes, “in the very house in which the ‘Führer’ was born.” Rusinek concludes: “As judged by Bosl’s own statements, by the assessment of the SD [the SS intelligence service or “Sicherheitsdienst”], as well as by his activities, everything points to the fact that he was a convinced National Socialist all the way up till Spring 1945.”
In the same manner in which the scientific whores of Climategate pimped their academic expertise for personal gain, so too have many social scientists.
Surely the academic crime of omission from the likes of Benz should disqualify him as an unbiased expert on anti-semitism.
Alas, the professorial academy has become so severely compromised that rendering Benz unfit to act as a spokesman on anti-semitism is to literally whistle past the graveyard-the Jewish ones to be exact.
Hang on there, Clemens-
I’m the last person on earth to defend Nazis, or the filthy practice of trying to equate Nazi antisemitism to mythical “Islamophobia.” But this piece reads like and extended exercise in guilt-by-association.
Sure, Bosl was a Nazi: does that mean all his students automatically are crypto-Nazis? Bosl may have bought into Himmler’s mystical-Aryanism crap, but he also was an eminent historian and continued to do good work for decades in the Bundesrepublik. The fact that Ferdinand Porsche and Willy Messerschmitt and Werner von Braun were all Nazis doesn’t make their engineering invalid, or their proteges Stormfronters.
It would be far better just to attack Benz directly for his shameless dhimmitude- a patholgy which seems to have infected most of the European intelligentsia.
“In defense of Islam” should be the title of this age. I have never witnessed a more astounding array of individuals and groups determined to portray the ideology of Islam as misunderstood and maligned.
Each revelation of the perpetrators who are determined to bolster this ideology of hate, death, coerced and forced conversion shines a light brighter and brighter on the deceit we seemed so willingly to have swallowed. Perhaps the reality is, that whom we consider strange bedfellows, on closer examination are not so strange.
The Nazis were at times confused over whether “the Jew” was invidious for being superior (in the modern marketplace and professions) or inferior (racially). German Jews were on the whole successful people which was no doubt at times confounding for racial theorists who had to see modernity as pathological and the traditional, especially martial, virtues as “Aryan” and under threat. Sounds like Herr Benz shares something of the confusion. Antisemitism is at root the resentment of those deemed to be leading history (malevolently), not those who we fear are taking it back to the dark ages. Not all “prejudice” or “racism” is alike. Judeophobia is something quite distinct.
“Conceptions of the Muslim as Enemy — Conceptions of the Jew as Enemy.”
When one tries to make the two equivalent, we run unto problems.
1)Back in the 1930s, Jews didn’t crash airlines into buildings, commit suicide bombings, or and behead Muslims or Christians in the name of their religion. IOW, Muslims have earned dislike much more than the Jews did.
2) Bigotry today is much stronger on the Muslim side than on the Jewish side.
there’s a reason only some people are called heroes, out of 5 billion of us on earth. mostly everyone is scared and paralyzed. this guy is just an average, ordinary person who is frightened of moslems and wants to be noted as a “friend”. why not. they are murderers. and they are all over europe, fanatical, weird, malign and very bold. anyone not moslem is an enemy.
if jews are going to prevail we will have to make sure their heads explode. no one else is going to do it, besides heroes,that is.