4 - Antisemitism and the Historical Memory of the Second World War

Summary

AFTER 1945 the governments of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands officially outlawed political expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment. Yet antisemitic attitudes and behaviour continued to fester within the general population. Calls for national unity existed alongside deep-seated popular hostilities towards ‘the Other’, which were reinforced by the return of ‘racial’ deportees and the arrival of Jewish refugees from eastern Europe.

While articles and public speeches by local communists occasionally contained crude depictions of their political enemies in Jewish communities at home and abroad as materialistic and money-grubbing capitalists, the most virulent expressions of antisemitism in the immediate post-war period could be found in the pages of the semi-legal and underground fascist and neo-Nazi press that circulated in the major cities of western Europe. In France in the late 1940s and early 1950s, for example, the extreme right-wing journals Écrits de Paris and Paroles françaises, which claimed circulations of 30,000 and 100,000 respectively, denounced Jews and Freemasons for seeking to undermine the nation. According to the director of the Ligue Internationale Contre l’Antisémitisme (LICA), an organization that had been created in the 1920s with branches in both France and Belgium, the rabidly antisemitic newspaper Europe-Amérique published in Brussels sold 250,000 copies in French-speaking countries in Europe. From time to time, neo-fascist movements would emerge from the shadows to demonstrate their power and influence. In 1951, for example, fascist and neo-Nazi groups from across Europe met in Zurich and issued a statement defending ‘people of the European white race’ while denouncing communism and what it called ‘Judeo-American capitalism’. Two years later 300 delegates attended a follow-up meeting in Paris.

Antisemitic attitudes persisted in respectable right-wing intellectual circles as well. In the late 1940s the writer and journalist Albert Kuyle, who had spurred the revival of Dutch prose in the interwar period, disgorged anti- Jewish invectives in Catholic journals and newspapers. In France, the prominent philosopher Gabriel Marcel, who would later preach the need for interfaith dialogue, published a notorious article in the Catholic journal Témoignage chrétien shortly after liberation urging government authorities and professionals to guard against foreign ‘encroachment’ into French society. The writers Maurice Bardèche in France, Per Engdahl in Sweden, and Paul Von Tienen in the Netherlands were frequent contributors to the journal Nation Europe, published in Coburg, which routinely denounced Jews for seeking to corrupt continental values.