Hitler's identification with Haman, and even before that with Haman’s ancestor Amalek, was fully justified

Did you know that Hitler yemach shemo was obsessed with Purim? Well, I didn’t either, until I came across an entire chapter devoted to the subject in Rabbi Raphael Shore’s new book, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Jew (about which I’ll be writing at much greater length in the near future).

When Hitler declared war on the United States, in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor — as misbegotten a decision for him as Haman’s decision to build a gallows 50 amos high upon which to hang Mordechai proved for him — he accused President Roosevelt and the Jews of “preparing a second Purim.” In a radio address to the nation in early 1944, when the Allies were already bombing Berlin, Hitler warned of a “second triumphant Purim festival” if the Nazis lost.

Most remarkably, the Nazis fully identified with Haman. Historian Martin Gilbert, in his magisterial The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, details how in Eastern Europe, the Nazis carried out mass murders of Jews near to Purim on the calendar, or on Purim itself.

And on at least two occasions, ten Jews were hung on Purim day to avenge the ten sons of Haman. In the Polish town of Zdunska Wola, 30 miles west of Lodz, the Gestapo demanded from the Jewish Council ten young healthy Jews “for work.” Subsequently, the Jewish Council was ordered to bring them to a place where the gallows had already been prepared and to hang them with their own hands. All the Jews of the town were forced to watch the sight of their fellow Jews writhing on the gallows.

In the Polish city of Piotrkow, on Purim day, the Jews legally living in the ghetto were told that there would be an exchange of ten Jews, who had to possess university degrees, for ten Germans living on a settlement in Palestine. That evening, the Jews thus selected were driven to the Jewish cemetery to be executed. But there turned out to be only eight, so the cemetery watchman and his wife were added to bring the total of those executed to ten — again in revenge for the ten sons of Haman.

HITLER’S IDENTIFICATION with Haman, and even before that with Haman’s ancestor Amalek, was fully justified. And not just because he, like Haman, sought to “destroy, to kill, and to exterminate all the Jews.” As early as 1920, Hitler wrote that the great war with the Jews would only be won when every single Jew was killed, because if even one survived, the race would be reconstituted.

Amalek is the great denier of Hashgachah Pratis and sower of doubt in Hashem in the world. When the entire world trembled before the Jews after Yetzias Mitzrayim, Amalek attacked and thereby cooled of the bath (of fear of Hashem and His people). In that first battle, Amalek cut off the sign of the covenant between Hashem and the Jewish People and cast it defiantly heavenward. Amalek’s descendant Haman believed everything depended on chance, and famously cast lots to determine the day for the destruction of the Jews.

Hitler too believed in a universe governed solely by chance, specifically an evolutionary process driven by random mutations and natural selection. He transferred that view to the social realm and was an ardent proponent of Social Darwinism, the view that mankind develops through the survival of the fittest in a state of perpetual war.

As such, he despised all religion — “humanitarianism” — and the belief that mankind is subject to a Divine moral code. His hatred of the Jews was that they had inflicted the “wound” of morality upon mankind. Christianity was only a slightly less repugnant stepchild of Judaism in his eyes. A popular song of the Hitler Youth went: “We need no stinkin’ Christian virtue.”

STILL, HITLER ENTERTAINED a niggling doubt that perhaps “destiny desires the final victory of this little nation.” One of the first and ugliest Nazi propaganda films, The Eternal Jew, expressed precisely that point. Though it is a ceaseless catalogue of disgusting images of Jews throughout the ages, its very title captures the fear that the Jews are indeed eternal. That is why Purim played such an outsized role in Hitler’s thought, for it provided proof of Hashem’s providential protection of the Jewish People.

Hitler did not live to see the final downfall of the Thousand Year Reich, but one of his most vicious henchmen, Julius Streicher yemach shemo, publisher of the notorious Der Stürmer, did. Streicher was tried at Nuremberg for having promulgated Jewish hatred so vile that it incited the Germans to crimes against humanity.

He was hanged along with nine other Nazi war criminals, the last of the ten followers of Haman to be led to the gallows. (In the listing of the ten sons of Haman in the Megillah, three letters are written smaller than the others: tav, shin, and zayin, which are equal in value to the last three digits in 5707, the Hebrew year in which Streicher was executed.) Like Pharaoh at Yam Suf, Hashem kept him alive long enough to understand clearly the truth of what Hitler only suspected: Hashem’s divine protection of His chosen people.

As Streicher was about to be hanged — a hanging that was bungled and extended his agony — he shouted out, “Purimfest 1946!”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1053. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)