Chapter 4 of Ruth Wodak and JohnRichardson (eds.) (2013). Analysing FascistDiscourse. European Fascism in Talk and Text.London: Routledge (pp. 56-72).

The Reception of Antisemitic Imagery inNazi Germany and Popular Opinion—Lessonsfor Today

Andreas Musolff

Prophecy, Metaphor and Genocide

On 30 January 1939, in his annual speech to celebrate the

anniversary of his “seizure of power” on 30 January 1933, Adolf

Hitler issued the infamous announcement that if “international

finance Jewry” succeeded in “precipitating the nations into a

world war”, the result would “not be the Bolshevization of the

earth and with it the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation

[Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe” (Domarus 1965: 1058;

translations of this and the following German examples by A.

1

Musolff). It was the climax of an extended passage, in which

Hitler portrayed Germany as a nation that over the centuries had

allowed the Jews who “had nothing of their own, except for

political and sanitary diseases” to infiltrate and sponge off it

until they had turned the Germans into “beggars in their own

country” (Domarus 1965: 1056–1057). He insisted that the condition

for any “satisfactory” solution of the “Jewish question” in

Germany had to be the end of the misconception “that the good Lord

had meant the Jewish nation to live off of the body and productive

work of other nations”; otherwise, Jewry might “succumb to a

crisis of unimaginable severity” (Domarus 1965: 1057). This

prediction was followed by the “prophecy” quoted earlier and was

completed by the scornful, ironic advice that the Jews had “better

take heed”, for the “laughter” with which they had allegedly

greeted his previous prophecies was “already sticking in their

throats” (Domarus 1965: 1058).

With hindsight, it is almost impossible not to read Hitler’s

“prophetic” threat as a kind of précis of things to come, framed

within his own ideological perspective of blaming the Jews in

advance for what he wanted to do to them. Many historians have

therefore interpreted Hitler’s 1939 “prophecy” as an explicit

announcement of his genocidal intentions (Friedländer 1998: 310;

Kershaw 2000: 152–153; Burleigh 2001: 340; Longerich 2003: 70–71;

2

Evans 2005: 604–605; Herf 2006: 5–6). If we look at the speech in

its historical context, that is, without imputing to his audience

the knowledge of what happened afterwards, however, the prophecy

seems only to reiterate Hitler’s view of Jews as parasites on the

body of the German people, which he had outlined more than a decade

earlier in Mein Kampf (Bein 1965; Chilton 2005; Musolff 2007, 2010:

23–42; Rash 2006: 155–156). Within the context of the speech, the

“prophecy” repeats the preceding warning of an unprecedented

“crisis” to which Jewry would succumb and specifies only one

further condition—the outbreak of a world war. Given the

contemporaries awareness of the fact that war between Nazi Germany

and a multinational, if not worldwide, coalition had only narrowly

been avoided in the preceding year and was still looming because

of border disputes with Poland, the conditions for the enactment

of the genocidal prophecy could be seen as close to being

fulfilled. But did the contemporaries understand it in that way?

Even such an astute observer as the linguist Victor

Klemperer, who survived Nazi rule thanks to his status of being

married to a non-Jewish wife and who later published the first

seminal account of Nazi rhetoric, Lingua Tertii Imperii (Klemperer

[1975], 2000), seems to have attached no particularly ominous

significance to the passage; in his secret diary, published a

half-century later, he noted the speech only as an instance of

3

Hitler’s trick “to make all his enemies into Jews” (Klemperer

1995, 1: 461). The 1939 speech is also mentioned in the reports of

the clandestine Social Democratic Party’s underground organisation

(SOPADE) and in the secret records of popular opinion compiled by

the GESTAPO and the SS intelligence “Security Service” (SD), but

neither of these noted any specific realisation by members of the

populace that the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany would soon

enter a new, exterminatory phase growing out of the prophecy

speech (Behnken 1980, 6: 123; Kulka and Jäckel 2004: 386).

After the war, many Germans claimed, disingenuously, “not to

have known” about the Holocaust as the central genocidal project

of the Nazi regime and that statements such as the 1939 prophecy

or the ubiquitous slogans that announced or demanded the

extermination and annihilation of Jewry had been too vague or too

figurative to be taken seriously (Longerich 2006). Whilst this

blanket claim of ignorance has been falsified (Kershaw 1983; Kulka

and Rodrigue 1984; Hilberg 1992; Bankier 1992, 1996; Schoeps 1996;

Gellately 2001; Longerich 2006), the argument that the imagery of

an extermination of political enemies as parasites (Parasiten,

Schmarotzer) could be misunderstood as wild, hyperbolic rhetoric may

seem at first sight plausible. After all, sociohygienic and -

biological metaphors have been used in political discourse for

more than two millennia and by so many different speakers that

4

general conclusions about their political bias are difficult to

draw (Sontag 1978; Guldin 2000; Musolff 2010). With regard to the

contemporary recipients of Nazi propaganda during the “Third

Reich”, we also have to take into consideration that any

interpretations and warnings that linked the use of such imagery

by Nazi leaders to genocide and war were consistently denied and

denounced by the state authorities as “atrocity propaganda”

(Schmitz-Berning 2000: 283–286). It is therefore by no means a

trivial question to ask whether the German population of the 1930s

and 1940s took the antisemitic metaphors of Nazi propaganda and

ideology seriously, that is, as a programme for genocide. If the

answer turns out to be negative, the imagery will have to be

judged as incidental to the genocide and as irrelevant for any

evaluation of the degree of popular knowledge about it; if it is

positive, the role of imagery as a means of guiding genocidal

policies may have to be reassessed.

This chapter attempts to contribute to providing such an

answer by analysing the impact of antisemitic parasite metaphors on

German popular discourse. Our approach is informed by Critical

Discourse Analysis and Discourse History (Wodak 2007; Wodak and

Chilton 2005; Reisigl and Wodak 2009), Cognitive Metaphor Analysis

(Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1996; Charteris-Black 2004, 2005)

and, last, Discourse-oriented Metaphor Analysis, which attempts to

5

integrate the insights of the Cognitive and Discourse Approaches

by situating the cognitive effects of language data in their

historical and discursive-narrative context, in which they gain

social force as action-guiding concepts (Musolff 2004, 2006;

Zinken 2007; Semino 2008; Sperber and Wilson 2008; Zinken,

Hellsten and Nerlich 2008; Musolff and Zinken 2009; Wilson 2011).

Discourse metaphors and the narrative-argumentative scenarios that

they evoke play a particularly significant role in communication

insofar as they suggest specific courses of action as “default”

options/solutions and attach socioethical evaluations to them,

such as the “necessity” of eliminating parasites, which is transferred

from the physical/medical sphere to that of social/political

actions.

Hitler’s prophecy quoted earlier can thus be seen as

representing the “outcome” of a scenario in which Jews, identified

as a separate “race”, were depicted as a parasitic threat to the

health of the German nation, which was conceptualised as a human

body. The Jews as parasites had supposedly infected the national

body, and Hitler’s regime saw itself as the healer who, by 1939, had

already largely achieved the isolation of the parasite. However, other

European nations were still being infected and, as a result, were

turning against Germany. Germany would therefore have to fight and

overcome them and make sure that the parasite would no longer be

6

capable of infecting any other nation; that is, it had to be

annihilated completely. This scenario can be summarized as

containing a schema of infection-crisis-therapy, with the parasitic Jewish

enemy-race on the one hand and the healing agent, that is, Nazism and

Nazi-led Germany, as implacable antagonists on the other. The

scenario outcome would be an apocalyptic confrontation, in which

the healing forces of good would win over the forces of evil and

save and redeem the nations of Europe and, on a global scale, the

whole world.

Preparing the German Public for theGenocide: Nazi Antisemitic Imagery,1933–1939

Antisemitic policies were at the top of the Nazi government’s

agenda right from the start of their rule. Soon after Hitler’s

appointment as Chancellor of the Reich at the end of January 1933

had been confirmed in the elections of 5 March (which gave the

National Socialists and their coalition partner, the German

National People’s Party, a parliamentary majority and the chance

to gain dictatorial powers through the so-called Enabling law),

Hitler, Goebbels and Julius Streicher, the Franconian Gauleiter and

editor of the rabidly antisemitic newspaper “The Stormer” (Der

7

Stürmer), organised the first nationwide boycott of Jewish

businesses, on 1 April 1933. In his retrospective explanation of

the action on 6 April, the new minister for “Public Enlightenment

and Propaganda”, Joseph Goebbels, referred to the Jews explicitly

as “an alien, separate people with parasitic characteristics”,

intent on sabotaging the urgent national healing process (Schmitz-

Berning 2000: 463).

The boycott was, of course, terrifying to Jewish people in

Germany. Victor Klemperer felt as if he was experiencing “a pogrom

in the deepest Middle Ages or tsarist Russia” (Klemperer 1995, 1:

15). In combination with the start of professional discrimination,

harassment in the street, arbitrary arrests and the withdrawal of

protection by the police and the courts, the boycott helped to

drive 37,000 Jews out of Germany within the year (Evans 2005: 15).

In the general population, the boycott met with widespread

indifference (Friedländer 1998: 22–23), and it is difficult to

determine to what extent the specifically antisemitic measures

were distinguished in public perception from the simultaneous

repression of Communists, Social Democrats and other political

enemies of the Nazis, which accounted for the vast majority of

arrests, killings and the approximately 100,000 incarcerations

over the course of 1933. Even the parasite stigma was not exclusively

applied to Jewish people but was used to describe all those who

8

did not conform to the Nazi vision of a homogeneous society,

including political adversaries, so-called gypsies and other

marginalised groups (beggars, vagrants, prostitutes), criminals

and sexual “deviants”, that is, homosexuals (Gellately 2001: 48–

49, 67, 80–83, 184–188). However, in order to target the Jews as

much as possible, official police reports and Nazi press and party

discourse routinely highlighted their supposed involvement in all

kinds of criminal activities (Gellately 2001: 49). Even the

alleged near coup d’état by leaders of the Nazi storm troopers

(SA) in June 1934, which was invented to justify their killing—

presented as the burning out of a tumour and the destruction of

parasites—was linked to Jewish co-conspirators in the emigrant press

(Domarus 1965: 421–422; Klemperer 1995, 1: 121). In this way, Jews

were made to appear as the core parasite group behind each and every

danger to the state.

At the Nuremberg Party rally of the following year, the Nazis

announced (and made the Reichstag immediately pass) laws to

exclude all sociopolitical parasites from the people’s body in the form

of laws “for the Protection of German Blood and Honour”, which

excluded Jews from German citizenship and from marriage or sexual

relations with Germans (Kershaw 1999: 568–573; Friedländer 1998:

146–170; Longerich 2006: 92–100). The SD and resistance reports

this time indicated tacit approval among the German public because

9

the legislation was expected “to restore calm to the streets and

put an end to behaviour [by Nazi thugs!] that was besmirching

Germany’s image as a civilized country” (Bankier 1996: 77). The

“Nuremberg laws” themselves were overcomplicated and even

contradictory because the supposed “racial” heredity was solely

defined in terms of one’s ancestor’s religion. The resulting

calculations of degrees of blood admixture became the subject of

endless debates among Nazi administrators up to and even beyond

the “Wannsee conference” of 20 January 1942, which coordinated the

then already ongoing genocide (Pätzold and Schwarz 1992; Roseman

2002: 55–107; Browning 2004: 411–427; Friedländer 2007: 349–343).

Notwithstanding these problems of definition, the laws ensured

that from 1935 onward “proof that one was not of Jewish origin or

did not belong to any ‘less valuable’ group became essential for a

normal existence in the Third Reich” (Friedländer 1998: 153).

Furthermore, the exclusion of Jews from German society could

be used as a basis for further criminalising any personal

relationships between Jews and non-Jews as “race defilement”

(Przyrembel 2003). Lurid depictions of alleged acts of rape and

seduction of non-Jewish girls and women by Jews had always formed

part of antisemitic Nazi propaganda, such as Hitler’s Mein Kampf

(1933: 357) and Streicher’s The Stormer, but now the Reich’s legal

experts went to considerable lengths to describe and define

10

precisely all activities that might be subsumed under the label of

“race defilement”; party members and ordinary citizens eagerly

used these descriptions as an opportunity to engage in the

rewarding business of denunciation (Gellately 2001: 134–145; Evans

2005: 550–554). In order to fit the facts to the stereotype of

“the Jew” as a sexual predator, the Nazis did not shy away from

enacting, as it were, relevant matching behaviour. The Social

Democrats’ secret reports mention, for instance, the

“coincidental” public kissing of a Jewish GP by two female

patients to effect his arrest as a race defiler and the case of a 15-

year-old Jewish boy and his 13-year-old non-Jewish sweetheart who

were chased by Nazis into a dark corridor to arrest them (and,

later, the boy’s parents) for attempted rape (Behnken 1980, 2:

1037, 1042). As part of nationwide campaigns against Jewish “race

defilement”, alleged race offenders were paraded through streets

and publicly humiliated before being taken to concentration camps

(Schoenberner 1980: 35; Evans 2005: 551–553). The general link

“Jewish parasitism—criminality” was thus further specified and

linked with criminal sexuality.

The climax of the Nazi pre-war anti-Jewish actions was the

so-called Crystal Night pogrom of 9–10 November 1938, staged by

GESTAPO, SA and SS as a supposedly spontaneous outbreak of popular

fury over the assassination of a German Embassy official in Paris.

11

It included the burning of synagogues and Jewish shops in cities,

towns and villages up and down the country and the ransacking of

homes and violence that cost hundreds of lives and led to the

arrests of about 30,000 Jewish men (Obst 1991; Gilbert 2007).

Reactions among the German public, as registered by the Social

Democrat resistance groups as well as by the SD, ranged from

isolated offers of help, open protests over displays of shame and

fear of negative foreign reactions to collusion in the looting and

profiteering from stolen Jewish property (Behnken 1980, 5: 1204–

1211, 6: 211–226; Bankier 1996: 86–88, Friedländer 1998: 295–198;

Gellately 2001: 127–129; Kershaw 2005: 587–592; Aly 2005: 58–63).

Violence and destruction were as open as possible to “intimidate

as many Jews as possible into leaving Germany” (Evans 2005: 581).

Notwithstanding this ostentatious brutality, the official Nazi

newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, claimed that “not a single hair had

been touched on a Jewish head” (Völkischer Beobachter, 11 November

1938).

Such a brazen denial can hardly be explained as a purposeful

attempt at “covering up” the extreme violence against Jews vis-à-

vis either the German or the world public. Why, then, did the

Nazis understate so grotesquely the pogrom’s main aspect— the

threat of violent injury and death? The historian Marion Kaplan

proposes to explain this paradox by characterising the Nazi

12

persecution’s aim as that of transforming the victims “into the

object of a general, hateful taboo” (Kaplan 1998: 44). The

“failure” to mention Kristallnacht’s deadly violence against Jews in

the official discourse conveyed the “knowledge” that the victims

could be attacked and killed and that this knowledge itself was

unmentionable at the same time.

Still, the unrestricted persecution of Jews still had to be

propagated and justified in order to become effective, and it was

here that the parasite-therapy metaphor played a crucial role. It

provided the discursive frame in which the

annihilation/elimination of the European Jews was “mentionable”

after all, by way of analogy. The destruction of biological

parasites is a legitimate concern in the context of hygiene and

medicine. Its analogical counterpart, the annihilation of

sociopolitical parasites (i.e., Jews in the Nazi ideological system)

“borrowed”, as it were, these implications of a therapeutic purpose

as an implicit pseudo-justification for the genocide (Musolff

2010: 35–42). The analogy enabled its users to announce and even

brag about policies that they could not admit to in literal terms.

This paradoxical structure of taboo-based public communication

also characterized Hitler’s prophecy of the Holocaust in terms of

the annihilation of the Jewish parasite “race” in Europe in his

speech of 30 January 1939. On the basis of the parasite-annihilation

13

scenario, Hitler contrived to talk openly about the “destruction

of the European Jews” (Hilberg 2003), without once breaking the

taboo of mentioning mass murder or genocide.

‘Fulfilling the Prophecy’: HolocaustRhetoric, 1940–1942

Hitler repeated his 1939 annihilation prophecy many times, and it

was shown in the widely released propaganda film “The Eternal Jew”

(Der ewige Jude) from 1940, which presented it as the obvious

solution to the problem of Jews, who were directly likened to

disease-spreading rats (Hornshøj-Møller 1995; Mannes 1999; Welch

2007: 245–253). In the anniversary speech of 30 January 1941,

Hitler proudly repeated his prediction that “the whole of Jewry

[would soon] have ceased to play a role in Europe” (Domarus 1965:

1663). One nation after another was, he claimed, accepting Nazi

Germany’s “understanding of race”; only British politicians, due

to “softening of the brain” caused by Jewish emigrants, were still

unable to see this “truth”, but he hoped that even they would soon

come around to his view and recognize the Jews as their main enemy

(Domarus 1965: 1663–1664).

The underlying assumption for his boastful threat was, of

course, Hitler’s belief in German superiority over all enemy

14

powers, which was based on the victories over Poland, the Benelux

countries, France, Denmark and Norway. Annihilating European Jewry

and winning the war were the combined objectives of the seemingly

unstoppable German offensive. Once the attack against the Soviet

Union was under way beginning in June 1941, the Nazi regime saw

this twin goal coming tantalisingly close: together with the

initial victories on the battlefield, the invasion delivered an

additional 2.5 million Jews into their hands. During the late

summer and autumn of 1941, SS Einsatzgruppen, Police Reserve

Battalions and Wehrmacht troops, with the support of parts of the

indigenous population, started mass killings that quickly

escalated to murders of whole regional Jewish communities

(Browning 1992: 86–121, 2004: 309–352; Matthäus 2004: 253–308). In

these murder campaigns, Hitler’s prophecy, linked to references to

Jews as parasites, appeared time and again in letters of

perpetrators and training journals for Order Police units

(Browning 2001: 179, 2004: 299–300). Triumphantly, Goebbels wrote

in his weekly magazine Das Reich in November 1941 that the prophecy

was in the process of being fulfilled. As a result of the then

newly introduced stigmatization of the “Star of David” sign,

Goebbels gloated, even the Jewish parasites who had survived in

Germany so far would no longer be able to hide under their

“mimicry”, and anyone who felt, let alone showed, compassion or

15

solidarity with them was just as much an “enemy of the nation” as

they and should also be forced to wear the “Star of David” stigma

and suffer the same treatment (Goebbels 1942: 85–87).

However, after the defeat of the German offensive near Moscow

and the entry of the United States into the war, in December 1941,

the strategic context of the war and the genocidal campaign

changed. The USSR, which the Nazis had supposed to be an easy

target and victim allegedly because it was being ruled by Jews,

had shown its ability to fight back successfully, and the war

coalition against Germany had been strengthened immeasurably. At

the very least, the war would last for a considerably longer

period than envisaged and involved more risks. The genocidal

“solution” of the “Jewish problem” thus also became more difficult

and at the same time more urgent as a prerequisite for final

victory. This new urgency was reflected in Hitler’s anniversary

speech on 30 January 1942, when he presented the alternative that

the war could end either “with the obliteration of the Aryan

peoples” or with “the disappearance of Jewry from Europe” (Domarus

1965: 1828–1829). His response to the rhetorical question—which

outcome would it be?—was to recite his prophecy of “annihilation”,

this time embellished with a reference to the “ancient Jewish law

‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’” (Domarus 1965:

1829). According to the SD reports, the speech was praised;

16

specifically, the accusations against the Jews and the emphasis on

the “eye for an eye” phrase were interpreted as an indication that

the Führer’s “fight against the Jew was being conducted with utmost

consequence to its end” (Kulka and Jäckel 2004: 485). Of course,

we cannot take the SD observation data at face value: to some

extent, the popular support is likely to have been the “required”

response, which the SD were keen to elicit so as to document

support for the regime in a time of crisis, but at the very least

the reports show that the “updated” annihilation message had been

received, even if again couched in rhetoric- and metaphor-laden

language.

During the whole year of 1942, with the mass murder of Jews

and military offensives in Russia advancing relentlessly, Hitler

continued to boast of his prophecy and to emphasize its

consequences with sadistic pleasure. At the end of September, with

the 6th Army poised to conquer Stalingrad, he harked back to the

alleged mockery of his prophecy by the Jews in Germany before he

came to power, a topic that had figured also in the prophecy. He

wondered “whether by now there were any left who were still

laughing at him” and promised that they would soon stop, not just

in Germany but “everywhere” (Hitler, speech on 30 September, in

Domarus 1965: 1920). Saul Friedländer rightly calls the prophecy’s

function by this time that of a “mantra announcing to all and

17

sundry that the fate of the Jews was sealed and soon none would

remain” (Friedländer 2007: 402). It served as a quasi-magical

incantation to reassert the double strategy of war and genocide.

Victory on the battlefield made the deportation and subsequent

murder of European Jews possible, and the genocide guaranteed that

there would be no contamination or loss of German strength on account

of any remaining parasites.

Racial Annihilation as an Insuranceagainst Total Defeat? HolocaustRhetoric, 1943–1945

However, with the catastrophic turnaround in Germany’s military

fortunes at the battles of El Alamein and Stalingrad in late 1942

and early 1943, the strategic context changed once more. In

addition, the mass murder of millions of Jews was by now becoming

widely known in Germany through dissemination of soldiers’

eyewitness and participant accounts to relatives and friends

(Kulka and Jäckel 2004: 486, 489, 491, 510, 528–531, 533; Neitzel

and Welzer 2011: 145–192). At the same time, Hitler’s and

Goebbels’s public references to the 1939 prophecy disappeared.

With military victory becoming less likely if not impossible, the

nexus between the prophecy’s twin goals—military victory and the

18

annihilation of the European Jews—had to be redefined. Instead of

emphasising the triumphant prospect of a double—military and

genocidal—victory over all enemies, the Nazi leaders now stressed

the necessity of the genocide as a means to avoid defeat. Of

course, this position still fitted their racist worldview, which

held that any Jewish person alive was a deadly parasitic threat whose

annihilation was necessary under all circumstances (Jäckel 1981;

Herf 2006). What was new was that this “defensive” motivation of

racial parasite annihilation was now resolutely foregrounded.

On 30 January 1943, when the anniversary of the Nazi power

seizure coincided with the capitulation of the 6th German Army at

Stalingrad, Hitler’s radio speech, which was read out by Goebbels,

stated that only National Socialism could put an end to the

“tearing apart” (zerfleischen) and “decomposing” (zersetzen) of humanity

perpetrated by “the Jew” (Domarus 1965: 1978). The same imagery of

decomposition was used by Goebbels in his “total war” speech of 18

February 1943 at the “Sports Palace” in Berlin, in which he

interpreted the loss of the 6th Army as a brave “sacrifice” that

had to be redeemed by the nation’s fighting on with “total”

commitment, lest an apocalyptic alternative to German victory

should become reality:

Behind the advancing Soviet divisions we can already seethe Jewish execution commandos and behind them we see

19

the terror, the spectre of millions starving andcomplete anarchy in Europe. International Jewry thusproves itself to be the devilish ferment ofdecomposition, feeling as it does an outright cynicalpleasure in plunging the world into the deepest chaosand causing the demise of age-old civilizations, whichit never had a part in. (Goebbels 1971, 2: 178–179)

In his “total war” speech, Goebbels thus reinterpreted the

Soviet victory as a “negative proof” of the

death-by-parasite/decomposition scenario. In his perspective, the defeat

at Stalingrad showed what a defeat of the German forces would

result in, namely the destruction of human civilization at the

hands of the Jewish parasite. This detailed depiction of the

potential apocalyptic outcome of the war was, of course, still

linked to the “reassurance” that Germany had a chance to avoid it:

if the nation followed the Führer unquestioningly and intensified

its war effort, it would still win. The radical measures to stop

the Jewish infection and the further sacrifices that the whole of the

nation would have to make were accordingly likened by Goebbels to

a “surgical intervention” that might look gruesome but was

necessary “to heal the patient” (Goebbels 1971, 2: 182, 188). The

speech was meant to defeat defeatism inside Germany and to

convince the enemies that hopes of a German surrender were futile

(Fetscher 1998; Kallis 2005: 130–137). Klemperer, who read it in a

20

Dresden newspaper (to which he had clandestine access through a

sympathetic lawyer), noted the implicit double threat to Jewish

and non-Jewish Germans: the former were already stigmatized as

“killable” parasites; the latter were vulnerable to the same stigma

the moment they were deemed to stand in the way of the “total war”

effort (Klemperer 1995, 2: 332–333). For all his insistence on the

certainty of a Nazi victory, Goebbels’s appeal to optimism by way

of an apocalyptic warning underlined the real possibility of

defeat and decomposition.

Such a “disingenuous” reading of Goebbels’s speech and Nazi

propaganda in general was not confined to the few surviving Jews

but was becoming widespread even in the majority German

population, as SD reports show. The impact of the Allied bombing

campaign was commonly perceived as “revenge” for the persecution

of the Jews (Bankier 1992: 144–146; Kulka and Jäckel 2004: 503,

526, 528, 540). When Goebbels tried to utilize the discovery of

the human remains of thousands of Polish officers in Katyn killed

on Stalin’s orders as “proof of Bolshevik-Jewish atrocities” in

1943, the publicity given to the finds created fear of Soviet-

Jewish revenge atrocities that would follow a defeat of Germany

and led to damning comparisons between the Katyn murders and the

German “treatment” of Jews (Kulka and Jäckel 2004: 516–520, 525).

In order to compare and equally condemn the murders, people had to

21

know what “annihilation of the Jewish parasite” referred to—mass

murder. Even Goebbels’s last large-scale campaign to reinforce the

vilification of Jews under the label The Jew as World Parasite, in 1944,

elicited ambivalent, at best “politically correct” responses

(Kulka and Jäckel 2004: 524–525, 535, 537, 540, 547). One SD

report from Franconia even spelt out the apocalyptic outcome as

the digest of general opinion: “people are convinced that in case

of a victory of the others, Jewry will pounce on the German

people’s body and will make real all its devilish and bestial

plans, as publicized by our press” (Kulka and Jäckel 2004: 543).

Nazi propaganda could thus be judged to have been successful in

establishing the notion of “the Jew” as a deadly parasitic threat to the

German people’s body in popular opinion, but only at the expense of

producing a national nightmare. Even Hitler’s own use of the

metaphor of the defence of the national body against the Jewish /parasites seems to

have been affected by the lack of a plausible victorious outcome

after Stalingrad. In his public speeches, which became rarer and

were only broadcast, he continued to allege a disastrous impact of

the Jewish parasite on those European and non-European nations that

did not dare to combat the Jewish “bacteria” or “pestilence” but

timidly “stroked” and submitted to them (e.g. Domarus 1965: 2083–

2084, 2196–2197, 2203–2224). Of course, he maintained that Germany

would be exempt from the apocalyptic fate of such nations and that

22

the urgency of its crisis was at the same time the symptom of its

impending recovery (Domarus 1965: 2196). However, in the context of

the desperate military-political situation of 1944–45, the parasite-

annihilation scenario could have only contradictory outcomes: the

submission of more and more nations to the Jewish parasite (as manifested in the

enemy advances in Europe) or Nazi Germany’s redemption by way of a

miraculous rescue from the parasite-induced crisis. This contradiction was

insoluble.

Our discourse-historical overview of the use of the parasite

metaphor complex during the “Third Reich” has identified some

continuities but also significant changes in its discursive

manifestation. Whilst the ideological core belief—the view of Jews

as parasites on the body of the nation—remained the same among the Nazi

leadership during their rule, the public presentation of the

therapy-through-parasite-annihilation scenario changed in relation to the

contextual conditions of its public reception in Germany. Three

main phases can be distinguished in its discourse “career”. From

1933 to the start of 1939, the parasite metaphor was propagated

continuously in order to establish in the public mind the

strongest possible link between Jews and topics of illness-

infection-decomposition, sexual depravity and criminality and to

justify the ever-escalating legal and socioeconomic measures

designed to destroy Jewish presence in Germany. At the same time,

23

however, the Nazi leaders were still camouflaging their intentions

and denying any accusations of racism as figments of “atrocity

propaganda”. This pretence was still kept up even on the occasion

of the “Crystal Night” pogrom: whilst the outright violence of SA,

SS and GESTAPO against Jews and the hate-filled rhetoric of Nazi

speeches left no doubt about the desired outcome of eliminating

Jews in Germany altogether, official government statements and the

state-controlled media claimed that “not a hair had been touched

on a Jew’s head”.

All this changed with the imminence of a second “World War”,

which enabled Hitler to link the parasite-annihilation scenario to the

prediction of the complete destruction of European Jewry in case

of war in the “prophecy” of 30 January 1939. The prophecy’s

reiteration and referencing in speeches up to autumn 1942 marks

the second phase of the Nazis’ publicly announcing the genocide-

in-progress as fulfilment of the promised victory over the world

pestilence/world parasite. From the SD and SOPADE reports and from

Klemperer’s notes it is evident that these speeches and their

reinforcement by the party-controlled media were received by an

audience that, if they had not thought about the meaning of the

“annihilation” prophecy earlier, started to become familiar with

the—still unofficial—knowledge that the “final solution” of the

parasite-therapy lay in genocide and that viewed the impact of the

24

Allied war effort as “revenge” for Germany’s murder of the Jews.

Plain descriptive or evaluative vocabulary (e.g. “mass killing”,

“murder”, “gassing”) remained officially taboo, but, by mid-war,

the biomedical terminology as applied to Jews had become so

transparent that any “camouflage” effect must have been minimal.

After the defeat at Stalingrad, Hitler’s boastful references

to the double fulfilment of the 1939 prophecy—military victory and

annihilation of the Jew/parasite—ceased. Strategic developments were

from now on conceptualized in terms of defending the German

fatherland and Europe. Their only link to the “Jewish question”

was the abstract notion that “the Jew” was the secret power behind

all enemy forces and their activities. Parasite imagery was kept

being used, but its popular reception now took place in the

context of impending military collapse, which drastically

contradicted the previously envisaged victorious outcome. The

propaganda function of the parasite-annihilation scenario thus changed

again: formerly it had announced the imminent completion of

racial-cum-military triumph; now it presented the destruction of

“the Jew” as a last-ditch defensive survival strategy. Given the

knowledge of the genocide and the imminence of Germany’s military

collapse, a disingenuous reading of this outcome as an involuntary

prediction of complete defeat became, as we know from the secret

reports on popular opinion, ever more widespread. Hitler’s

25

prophecy about racial/national parasite annihilation had made the

German populace into accomplices and, at the same time, hostages

of their own national catastrophe.

Outlook

What happened to the parasite-annihilation scenario as the ideological

and discursive centre of antisemitism and/or racism in general

after 1945? In the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s complete military

and political defeat, it was, of course, initially impossible to

maintain any such discourse, and, in the newly emerging public

spheres in East and West Germany, a thoroughgoing critique of Nazi

jargon and ideology, including its imagery, became de rigueur,

sometimes on the basis of critical political or linguistic

analysis, in other cases with the main purpose of denouncing new

adversaries as being Nazi-like (Klemperer 1975 [first published

1946]; Sternberger, Storz and Süskind 1989 [first published 1947];

Seidel and Seidel-Slotty 1961; Handt 1964; Bein 1965; Maas 1984;

Ehlich 1989; Schmitz-Berning 2000; Kopperschmidt 2003; Kämper

2005; Eitz and Stötzel 2007). The crucial role of body-, illness-, and

parasite-related metaphors in racist stigmatization and hate speech

was recognized and investigated, with Nazi ideology and discourse

providing the most infamous historical point of reference (Sontag

26

1978; Bosmajian 1983; van Dijk 1987; Hawkins 2001). Given this

tradition of critical analysis, one might be forgiven for

expecting some diminution or decrease, however slow, in the use of

such imagery, at least in countries that profess to have learnt

the “lessons from history”, in particular from Nazism.

Unfortunately, however, this does not seem to be the case at all:

hate speech couched in illness and parasite imagery still persists

(Wodak 2009): it may count as “politically incorrect” but not as

socially or legally significant (Lakoff 2000).

A relatively recent scandal about racist remarks in

Switzerland can serve to illustrate this issue. In 2008, Dominic

Lüthard, leader of the far right-wing “Party of Nationally

Oriented Swiss,” protested against the election of the Zurich-born

Whitney Toyloy as “Miss Switzerland” and against the runner-up,

Rekha Datta, because both of them, on account of their darker skin

colour, personified the “brown tumour that was eating up” free

Switzerland (Die Welt Online, 15 October 2008; Tages-Anzeiger, 2

February 2009). Whilst a local judge initially imposed a fine of

500 Swiss francs on Lüthard, the district court acquitted him

because his attack against Toyloy and Datta as personifying a

“brown tumour” did not constitute “racial discrimination” (Freitag,

3 April 2009; Tages-Anzeiger, 3 April 2009). The verdict, which was

celebrated by Lüthard and his sympathisers as a victory for free

27

speech, betrays a naïve understanding of the use of metaphors in

political speech: they are seen as “colourful” ornaments that may

be emotionally loaded and ethically reprehensible but also as

having no bearing on the core information of a statement and its

implications, for which the speaker can be held legally

responsible. By contrast, modern cognitive and pragmatic

linguistics have established that “metaphors . . . are among our

principal vehicles for understanding” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:

159) and that “metaphorical interpretations are arrived in exactly

the same way as [literal, loose, and hyperbolic] interpretations”

(Sperber and Wilson 2008: 84). Still, verbal imagery is treated

officially and in common parlance as a kind of vague, secondary

meaning that has no “truth value” in the semantic sense or legal

value in the social sphere. Little wonder, then, that the 2009

acquittal was seen as an encouragement by Lüthard to continue his

attacks in a similar vein. In 2011 he denounced the current Miss

Switzerland, Alina Buschschacher, for her Caribbean family

background, saying that she contributed to the “multicultural

decomposition” of Switzerland (Blick, 28 September 2011). Again, as

in 2009, commentators doubted that Lüthard could be successfully

prosecuted because he avoided making “factually incorrect”

statements and used only subjective imagery (Blick, 28 September

2011).

28

It seems perverse that seven decades after the historic

Holocaust and its “justification” by the Nazis in terms of the

parasite-annihilation metaphor, the depiction of “racial” others as

tumours or elements of decomposition is regarded as not explicit or

specific enough to count as racist in a legally meaningful sense.

As in the case of the parasite metaphor, the statements “X is a

tumour in Y” or “X contributes to the decomposition of Y,” made

with reference to a nation or state ( “Y”), evoke the idea of

the latter as a (human) body that is under attack from a fatal

illness and is in need of urgent therapy. This scenario provides a

narrative-argumentative frame in which the destruction of the

tumour or element of decomposition—that is, its destruction—is

considered practical and ethically necessary. In the case of a

genuine medical treatment, such an intended pragmatic inference

or, in the terminology of relevance theory, “implicature” (Sperber

and Wilson 2008: 98–99) can be inferred naturally from the

diagnostic statement. In the metaphoric-analogical application to

the state, this therapy scenario is transferred from the domain of

human medicine to that of sociopolitical entities, carrying with

it the same inference, that is, the affirmation of a necessity to

destroy the perceived threat. Judges who acquit racist hate-

speakers who use such imagery effectively pretend not to know what

a diagnosis of tumour/parasite/decomposition normally means, in order to

29

be able to negate the corresponding analogical inferences at the

metaphorical level. Critical discourse and metaphor analysis thus

still face a massive task in overcoming attitudes toward

communication that provide racists with rhetorical and legal

loopholes.

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