"My knowledge of German was improving," writes David Irving in his autobiography, referring to the months he spent in the Ruhr in 1959-60 as a steelworker. "I read picture magazines and talked more with the other workers. I discovered that, like most Germans, they had two opinions: the politically correct one and the one they expressed in private to their mates on the furnace stage. Their views on the Jews were unflattering. Under a pseudonym [Peter Stonier] I wrote an article on the hidden opinions of the German workers I had met; The Jewish Chronicle seemed obsessed with such topics, and published it at once. "

Our thanks to reader Tom Koch for locating and mailing this text to us, posted Saturday, June 16, 2007. It was the only time that Mr Irving ever wrote under a pseudonym.
 

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What the Germans Really Think

From Peter Stonier [David Irving]
Essen

FIVE feet away from me on the other side of an 18-inch thick water-cooled door, 250 tons of steel was slowly cooking at a temperature of around 3,000°F. The loudspeakers behind us crackled along the length of the furnace stage. "Achtung! Furnace No. 5 will be tapped in four minutes' time."

They repeated their message, then fell silent. The man working next to me in the furnace crew, a 55-year-old refugee from East Germany mopped the brown and sticky beads of sweat from his bare shoulders, and shouted to me: "If I had my way, furnace No.5 would be full of the bloody Jews and not with H.S.B. steel just about now." The rest of the crew laughed their appreciation of his sense of humour. To me, as an Englishman, however, the lingering, smouldering hate for the Jews that is still in Germany is not an object of fun. It is an object of patient exhaustive research and inquiry.

Goebbels's Seeds

Why are the German workers still anti-Jewish? How deep are the roots grown from the seeds of hate sown by Goebbels? Have the plants decayed and died, or are these seeds of antisemitism so virulent that, once sown, they can, like a bed of nettles, never be completely eradicated, but will continue to push out their ugly blooms into the damp winds of modern Western Germany?

Many investigators and journalists have visited Germany since the war and tried to find the answers to these questions; their findings have been confusing and often contradictory. Some have reported that they see evidence of a lasting hatred for the Jews; others are deceived by the blandly innocent expressions of the German workers as they assure them that there is now no antisemitism in their hearts.

"Oh, no," they are told, "All that sort of thing finished in 1945, you know ..." and the confused correspondent returns to his country with the "sincere belief" that at last a change has come about in Germany and that at last the Germans have begun to accept the Jews as Mitbürger as fellow-citizens. And he simply can't understand what went wrong in Cologne on Christmas Eve, or what was the cause of the waves of antisemitism that swept across Germany as a result. And it must have been the work of a few illiterate and adolescent hooligans.

"Rats Are Leaving"

Well, I know something different. For eight months I worked in one of Germany's biggest steel plants, studying the ten thousand men who worked around me, their attitudes and opinions. I had the advantage, perhaps unfair, that the men knew me as a workmate and not as a journalist or investigator. The immediate result of that was that they said things in front of me that they would not have dreamt of saying or dared to say outside the works gates.

One day last January Zvi Azaria, leader of the Cologne Synagogue, remarked in the German Press that the Jews would never be able to live peacefully in Germany, and many who had returned were now fleeing once again. On the same day I had to make a three-hour journey by car from Hanover to the Ruhr; as was my custom, instead of travelling by train, I "hitched" a lift at the side of the road. My driver was a 30-year-old engineer from the mammoth DEMAG factory in Duisburg. He could't remember his father; his mother had been killed in one of the heavy bombing raids on the Ruhr. "So the Jews are pulling out for good," he said, with an unpretty grin. "The rats are leaving the sinking ship. Now, perhaps, we shall be able to see who has been gnawing the holes in the hull..." He had not joined the Deutsche Reichspartei yet, he explained, because it was on the verge of being declared an illegal organisation. But he was ready to do so.

Most Germans can and do tell stories of alleged Jewish corruption during the years of the depression under the Weimar Government. In Lübeck a brick-factory owner gave me a handful of Reichsmark notes, some thousands of marks in all. At one time, be explained, they represented his life's savings. Now they are, of course, worthless. "If I'd wanted to I could have sold these to Jewish money-changers for 10 per cent of their face value," he said. "The Government had given orders that all these notes abroad were to be honoured 100 per cent with the new notes. But they shut their eyes while Jewish money-changers posted the old notes to their friends and business colleagues abroad for resale to the Weimar Government. I wasn't going to let any Jew get away with my life's savings." But that same evening, on Christmas Day, he was politely and, of course, publicly deploring the desecration of the Cologne Synagogue, together with his respectable neighbours.

German Music Banned

Not all the causes of antisemitism are rooted so far back in the past. A variety of reasons are mentioned by the German workers, from the alleged banning of the music of certain German composers from the Israeli concert halls and radio programmes to the notorious so-called Morgenthau Plan, which received heavy publicity from Goebbels during the closing stages of the war. One of the workers who had been in a Ruhr flak battery told me of the posters he remembered having seen pasted on the concrete walls of the emplacements. "In the event of an allied victory all male Germans will be sterilised. That is the Morgenthau Plan." These stories are widely believed in Germany, and there is little or no counter-propaganda from the Government. Few workers know the exact details of the Endlösung der Judenfrage; most of them can quote the figure of six million Jews exterminated but all of them doubt its veracity. Many of the workers add that six million was not enough.

Relations With Israel

Particular criticism is reserved for the German Government's subservience to Israel in questions of reparations and compensation payments. Even Alfried Krupp has agreed to make a small token payment as compensation for using Jewish slave labour. As one worker said to me: "Some Jews were made to work during the war and they never got over the shock. They have been demanding compensation ever since." None of the workers could tell me what happened to these Jews during their period of enslavement.

Much of the anti-Jewish clamour is being directed solely at the rate of compensation. The provincial Government of North Rhine-Westphalia, for example, which includes the whole of the Ruhr territory, is paying at the rate of 11.3 per cent of its total income (based on last year's figures) directly for compensation to the Jews. Legitimate demands for compensation are interpreted as "Jewish vengeance-seeking"; moreover, the German Government, in its zeal for impressing the outside world that it is taking a firm stand against the Jew-baiters, is achieving the very opposite effect, in the long run, to that which is really wanted. While harsh penalties are undoubtedly approved of by foreign observers, in Germany they are met with renewed expressions of hatred for the Jews and even with fresh outbreaks of violence.

Particularly acid comment was passed in Germany on two recent cases. In the first, a local Government official, slightly drunk, greeted two grim strangers in a Berlin pub with a jovial "Heil Hitler!" The strangers, however, turned out to be plain-clothes detectives, and two days later, sacked from his post, the man began a 17-month sentence that shook even those who had been previously outspoken against antisemitism.

That prison sentence was severe but in conformity with the new laws of Federal Germany. What did, however, raise a storm of protest among the men on my shift was that two weeks later almost the same thing happened: in another Berlin pub a man gave the Hitler salute, was taken to the same police headquarters, and then mysteriously released. He was, reported the newspaper Die Welt next day, of the Jewish faith.

Israeli Students

This extraordinary case seemed to be just what the workers had been waiting for, and the next day the talk in the steel mill was of nothing else. All the old criticism of "one law for the Jews and another law for you and me" came out, and feelings ran dangerously high.

As if to add insult to injury, a few days later almost the same thing happened again. During an anti-Nazi rally in Berlin six youths were arrested for carrying banners with Communist slogans. Two hours later, all were released. The police had discovered, reported the newspapers gleefully, that two of them were student visitors from Israel.

The German Government in its attempts to satisfy world opinion of the firm line it is taking, seems to be ignoring the effects of its actions. The result is that during the last four or five months private criticism of the Jews has mounted steadily, through no fault of the Jews. The sole guilty party is the German Government. But what is most remarkable about the strength of this wave of antisemitism is that in all Germany there are how barely 30,000 Jews.

Antisemitic Jokes

Indeed, in the city where I was working in the Ruhr there are only two of them, and everybody knows them by name, and just where they live. ... Nevertheless, this senseless hounding of the Jews is continued in the workers' conversations. One popular story is the "joke" about two young Germans sitting together in a Berlin prison cell. One had written "Juden 'Raus" on a wall, the other had written "Juden 'Rein." One asks the other: "Well, then, what is it the Jews want, if they want to be neither in nor out?" He asks the second prisoner: "Where did you write 'In With the Jews' then?" The other replies: "On a gasometer." There is a roar of laughter from the workers when they hear this story -- I heard it three times before I had left Germany -- and then the other workers tell their "funny" anti-Jewish stories. These are the same men who outside the works gates will protest when any foreign correspondent suggests that it was possible that the Germans did in fact murder the Jews during war.

The German has two faces, the second one is an unpretty one for the Judenfreund to examine.

As one man who spent the better of his life studying the Germans put it to me: "The German Government's measures to combat antisemitism are met with the unqualified approval of the mass of the German workers, who then resume their former attitude towards the Jewish race ... one of hostility."

© David Irving 1960