The ‘Anti-Semitism Expert’ and His Nazi Mentor
In an interview that was conducted in 1990, Bosl was asked about the Nazi period. In response, he went so far as to present himself as part of the resistance. He kept silent about his membership in the Nazi party and the other Nazi organizations and he said nothing about his collaboration in the project sponsored by the SS-Ahnenerbe. “In fact, I passed these formative years quietly,” Bosl said,
I withdrew into myself, since I had been very strongly influenced by the anti-Hitler attitude of my parents. And I worked on my doctoral thesis. I was not around anywhere in those years. I worked on my doctoral thesis. And then, in 1938, I obtained my doctorate and, as that went very well, I immediately decided to ask Karl Alexander von Müller to direct my habilitation.
The “habilitation” is the highest qualification that can be obtained in the German academic system. Bosl proudly refers to his association with Karl Alexander von Müller. As it so happens, von Müller was a highly influential academic at the time — and a National Socialist. He had been a personal acquaintance of Hitler since the early 1920s and he was the brother-in-law of Gottfried Feder, one of the early ideologues of the Nazi movement.
In her 2005 study “Im Schatten des Dritten Reichs,” the historian Anne Christine Nagel writes about Bosl:
Bosl joined the NSDAP [the Nazi party] in 1933 and he joined the SA at the same time. In 1934, he added membership in the NSLB [the National Socialist Teachers Association]. …Contrary to his self-representation, Bosl did anything but take his distance from the regime after the Nazis’ seizure of power. As a member of the party from the very first hours [of the Nazi regime] … and as the director of various seminars on questions of national politics, he was notably active in militating for the goals of National Socialism. …For years, he played a leading role in the National Socialist Teachers Association.
Wolfgang Benz is one of Germany’s best known historians of National Socialism and a frequent commentator in the German media on Germany’s troubled relation to its Nazi past. But it would seem that for over forty years, he himself kept silent about the Nazi career of his dissertation director Karl Bosl.
Today, Benz minimizes the danger of Islamic anti-Semitism and of Islamic jihad as such. He has even gone so far as to equate anti-Semitism and “Islamophobia.” He thus not only displays a completely false assessment of the contemporary political situation. He also relativizes the singularity of the Nazis’ mass murder of European Jews and implicitly encourages a new form of historical revisionism.
How seriously can one take an “anti-Semitism expert” and director of the Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism who commemorates the history of Nazi anti-Semitism, but whose memory fails as soon as it is a matter of his own personal history?
The above article is adapted from an article that first appeared in German. The English translation is by John Rosenthal.
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.