(This takes approx. ten minutes to read.)

Judaism is home to a great deal of ceremonial and ritual objects that have all sorts of rules for usage. I already bespoke one of them; no ritual object is more upsetting to witness others abuse than a Sefer Torah, which is why I have neglected to discuss these others until now. Nonetheless, even though I am not an Abrahamist, the ways wherein the Fascists abused these is almost as awe-inducing. We can get an approximation of how Jewish witnesses must have felt by imagining somebody intentionally abusing our own prized possessions.

Before I continue, I want to share a quote from Gilmer W. Blackburn’s Education in the Third Reich, pages 51–2:

[The German Fascists] subdivided the human races into three categories: culture-creators, culture-bearers, and culture-destroyers. Germanic culture-creators combined “Greek spirit plus Germanic technology,” according to Hitler. The […] Jews were culture-destroyers.⁶⁰

I want you to keep this in mind as you read about the following incidents.

Quoting Edith Raim’s Nazi Crimes against Jews and German Post-War Justice, pages 200–6:

In Vallendar, Jewish men were attending a prayer service when members of the Nazi Party Koblenz (NSDAP-Gauleitung Koblenz) appeared and forced them to stand at the wall of the synagogue with their prayer shawls and ridicule the Jewish prayer rites. A civil servant (Regierungs­­oberinspektor) and Nazi Party functionary (NSDAP-Organisationsleiter) took photographs of the event, though the photographs were considered botched.²³⁹

Pews, chairs and carpets were destroyed, chandeliers, altar and Mikvah (ritual bath) demolished in the presence of the assembled Jewish population. The Jews were then taken by cattle car to Koblenz; in their absence the synagogue was burned down on the night of November 12–13, 1938.²⁴⁰

[…]

In Wilhelmshaven, objects allegedly taken from the synagogue were exhibited in the street for further scrutiny[.] One picture particularly struck a newspaper journalist as he reported on the occasion: the biblical David’s “cowardly” “Jewish slaying” of the giant Goliath.²⁴⁶ Breaking from Christian tradition, the [Third Reich] portrayed David as a cowardly killer.

[…]

Five days before the pogrom, after a drinking binge, the drunken offenders broke into the local synagogue through a window in search of a statue of Moses which was allegedly located there. Unsurprisingly, due to the ban in the Hebrew Bible on depictions of humans no such sculpture was found. The intruders thus stole a pillow with honorary decorations and ridiculed it until the police confiscated it.

Ritual objects from the synagogue, which was first damaged and later burned down, were used in a mocking parade. When in summer 1939 the local Nazi Party leader took the metal items from the synagogue to Andernach to be sold as scrap, he mockingly affixed the Star of David from the synagogue to his truck.²⁵¹

Stars of David on synagogues always attracted particular attention because of their symbolic character. At the instigation of the mayor of Königstein, a member of the fire brigade who had a reputation as a daredevil picked the Star of David off the roof of the synagogue.²⁵²

At the risk of his life, a teenager climbed the dome of the synagogue in Mainz and removed the Star of David with a metal saw. He tore away the star to the applause of a jeering crowd. The star was later taken by the SS to the rooms of the SS-Standarte.²⁵³

During the arson of the morgue at the Jewish cemetery in Osternburg,²⁵⁴ as well as during the devastation of the mortuary in Niederbieber,²⁵⁵ the Star of David was removed from the roof.

In Wallau, ritual objects were loaded onto the hearse belonging to the Jewish community and carted through the town before being burned on the sports field.²⁵⁶ In Dromersheim, the furniture from the synagogue was heaped on a hand truck and burned in a field.²⁵⁷

In Hof a municipal car and two company cars were decorated with ritual objects from the synagogue and driven through town as a parade — accompanied by music and some 70 to 90 SS-men. The objects were burned near the river Saale while the SS held hands and sang an SS chant (“SS-Treuelied”).²⁵⁸ In Haren, storm troopers from the Emsland camps paraded through town with a Star of David and sang anti-Semitic songs.²⁵⁹

A certain perverse curiosity drove a Nazi Party functionary (NSDAP-Blockleiter) to return at night to the still smouldering synagogue in Solingen, where he and a storm trooper (SA-Mann) rummaged through the ashes and rubble in search of a “Talmud,” as both of them had heard a lot about the book.²⁶⁰ The NSDAP propaganda functionary of Bentheim took a “Talmud” in German as he intended to read it, but instead delivered it promptly to the Grenzpolizeikommissariat (border police) Bentheim.²⁶¹

In Kastellaun, workers from a nearby emergency camp Roth took garments and prayer books from the synagogue and brought them to the pub.²⁶² A storm trooper in Gruiten took prayer books and said disparagingly: “This trashy literature we want to take with us.”²⁶³

After the demolition of the synagogue of Rülzheim by perpetrators from Landau, local townspeople stood several hours in front of the synagogue to satisfy their curiosity as they had never observed the interior of a synagogue.²⁶⁴

An SA sergeant major took bread for the Sabbath celebration from the kitchen of rabbi Martin of Hassloch.²⁶⁵ Another man was said to have taken an altar cloth from the synagogue of Windecken as well as a book in Hebrew type. The man admitted to having visited the synagogue out of curiosity but denied the theft as the items had held no value for him.²⁶⁶

A storm trooper in Konz cited his quenchless curiosity when entering the Jewish house of prayer during the pogrom.²⁶⁷ In Krumbach, the perpetrators stole tefilin, parchment scrolls, and a mezuza.²⁶⁸ During the pogrom in Andernach, a storm trooper retrieved the wooden tablets with the Ten Commandments from the ruins of the burned-down synagogue. A couple of weeks later, he invited an SA Troop Administrator to inspect the boards with the Decalogue. Later he kept the boards behind his bathtub, from whence they eventually got “lost.”²⁶⁹

The local Nazi Party leader of Osnabrück kept a menorah hidden in a cupboard in the air raidshelter.²⁷⁰ In Mühringen the whole air raid shelter was outfitted with pews from the synagogue.²⁷¹ Others took interest in the material value of the objects: After the war, four Torah Scrolls were discovered in a dairy in Vettweiss — the silver shields, however, had been removed.²⁷²

Part of the public degradation was the mocking of Jewish rites in synagogues and in the streets. In Germany, this was and remains an offense known as religionsbeschimpfender Unfug (disrespect for religious tradition).

In St. Goar, teenagers vested themselves with prayer shawls from the house of God and roamed the streets.²⁷³ During the excesses in Euskirchen, an offender fitted himself out with a prayer robe and jumped around the synagogue in an attempt to imitate a “temple dance.”²⁷⁴ (The wording — taken from the post-war sentencing — shows how preciously little German courts knew of genuine Jewish rituals.)

A storm trooper in Quakenbrück ridiculed the Jewish religion by adorning himself with a rabbi’s gown and hat, taking a Torah Scroll into his hand and attempting to imitate Jewish worship rituals in front of the open window for the amusement of the crowd outdoors.²⁷⁵

In Hamburg-Harburg, indicted storm trooper Willy S. took a black gown and a “hymn-book” in order to imitate a rabbi, later describing it as a sort of carnival joke.²⁷⁶

Luise D., who lived opposite the synagogue in Oberlustadt, helped the perpetrators by handing them an axe with which they could break down the synagogue door. She was given several Torah Scrolls to carry outside, where she chucked them into the fire. She then adorned herself with a rabbi’s prayer scarf, performed mocking gestures, and burned it, too, along with the Ark (ritual cabinet) of the Torah shrine.²⁷⁷

A civil servant from the rural district office Saarburg, who in keeping with his official duties had received the key to the local synagogue, opened it for the Gestapo from Saarburg, which initiated the destruction. He himself entered the building and blew the ritual shofar (ram’s horn).²⁷⁸

Some context: shofarot may look and sound like simple musical instruments, but Judaism has very specific rules on how one should handle them. Most notable among them is that one needs to blow the shofar on only a few days of the year — those days being Rosh Hashanah as well as Yom Kippur — and this infrequency is ideal because it sounds more special when one finally hears it. Historically also, Jews got into serious trouble blowing shofarot at the wrong time because Gentiles mistook them as calls to arms.

Because of all this, it is a special privilege when Jews let us try their shofarot, and that is what makes this Fascist’s misappropriation so obnoxious.

In Hemmerden the yad (ritual pointer used for the reading of the Torah) was thrown on the floor.²⁷⁹ In Kempen a storm trooper, who in civil life was a member of the local employment office, stole a silver-pointed yad from the synagogue and roamed the streets, while children romped around him, boasting of his participation in the demolition and arson of the synagogue. He then proceeded to smash the shop window of the Jewish butcher Winter and a lamp in the lodgings of Sally Rath.

He went to two other Jewish flats, stealing an offertory box decorated with a Star of David from one of them. He would show the box around afterwards, claiming that because it bore the “Soviet star,” it had served to collect monies for the Soviets. The yad he kept for a few more days on his desk at the employment center.²⁸⁰

The perpetrators placed their deeds in a plethora of references and contexts. A participant in the pogrom in Oestrich who — with others — had pilfered the house of the wine trader Rosenthal, became completely drunk and threw flour and eggs out of the window shouting “Attention! Here comes German flour!” and “Look out for the German eggs!” He toasted himself by shouting “Drink German wine.”²⁸¹

An SA squad leader cut the duvets of the Hirschberger family in Rüdesheim and threw the feathers out the window, referring to the Grimm’s fairy-tale as he screamed “Mother Holle is shaking her feathers out!”²⁸² Religiously motivated anti-Judaism is evident in the words of a man who told a Jewish woman in Rüdesheim, “You nailed our savior to the cross, this is our revenge.”²⁸³ An SS man took a Hebrew Bible in his hand and uttered mockingly “The Lord saw the deeds of his son and said that it is well done.”²⁸⁴

In Ulm, the local Jews were — in a sort of perverted baptism — forced to get into an empty fountain trough.²⁸⁵ The deeds of the Nazi Party functionary from Weisweiler were clearly those of one well-acquainted with Christian rites and liturgy (he had been sexton in the church of St. Anna in Düren until 1937). He forced a 70-year-old Jew named Leyens to carry a short piece of wood (from the ruins of the prayer room) on his shoulders.

He also spit into Leyens’s face. Leyens had to carry the beam on his shoulders and walk to the market place where other objects from the prayer room such as pews, chairs, and prayer books were already being burned. From the spitting to the carrying of the beam, the march through town and the following auto-da-fe, the episode reads like a mix between Christ’s Passion and a foray through medieval Christian persecutions of heretics and Jews.²⁸⁶

Others were content with symbolic liquidations. As objects from the synagogue of Hagenbach were being burned, a man stood on the steps of the synagogue and announced: “Now we are burning the Jew.” Then he kicked a rabbi’s head covering into the fire and chucked a prayer book into the flames as in the—probably Hebrew—book “everything was written backwards.”²⁸⁷

In Nuremberg, storm troopers beheaded display dummies in several Jewish textile stores.²⁸⁸

In many cases, the Germanic Fascists also pawned off or melted Judaic candelabra, those being menorot and hanukkiot. Quoting Jacques Schuhmacher’s Nazi-Era Provenance of Museum Collections: A research guide, page 32:

As Jews were barred from virtually all professions, the machinery of dispossession was ratcheted up still further. They were ordered to surrender all precious metals in their possession, which meant taking not only bags of cutlery, but also ritual objects important to their religious practice, to [Fascist] pawn shops — which paid them a pittance in return. Once again, this haul was inspected by museum directors and curators, who were given first refusal before the rest was melted down and used to finance German rearmament.¹²⁰

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

How many ritual objects the Fascists destroyed is unknown—and shall most likely stay unknown. Some experts managed to recover damaged objects and repair them, but in many cases the damage was so extreme that there was nothing that anybody could do other than recycle the material. Quoting Elisabeth Gallas’s A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust, page 122:

Several thousand objects and scrolls […] were in very poor condition, and here Hannah Arendt recognized a specific hallmark of the [German Fascists’] approach to ritual objects: “Unlike the books which had been pretty well preserved by the Nazis, the Torah Scrolls and ritual objects bear the all too visible marks of willful destruction. More than 3,000 of the 10,000 objects can no longer be regarded as objects at all; they are merely fragments, not only beyond repair, but sometimes even beyond recognition.”³¹

It is all too tempting to explain these incidents as nothing more than simple sadism, but that would be an oversimplification. While sadistic amusement, in addition to displays of power, were two elements, the Fascists’ main goal in desecrating these objects was to send an unambiguous message to Jews: ‘You are no longer welcome here.’ If Jews would not leave, the petty bourgeois goyim would terrorise them into leaving, thereby removing potential as well as actual competitors from the economy, and freeing up resources for goyim to monopolise.