Whoopi, Race & the Holocaust

What the Nazis believed about blood and soil, race and Jews, and why they believed it

On Monday’s (January 31, 2022) edition of the popular ABC morning talk show “The View,” in a discussion with her co-hosts about the controversy over the Tennessee school board’s removal of the graphic novel Maus, which deals with the Holocaust in, well, graphic language and images, Whoopi Goldberg blurted out:

Personally, I'm shocked because given the story of Maus, I'm surprised that that's what made you uncomfortable—the fact that there was some nudity. It's about the Holocaust—the killing of 6 million people, but that didn’t bother you? If you’re going to do this, then let’s be truthful about it. Because the Holocaust isn’t about race. No, it’s not about race.

As the other hosts began to object with, for example, Ana Navarro countering that the genocide was "about white supremacy...and going after Jews and gypsies and Roma," Goldberg double-downed:

These are two white groups of people, this is white people doing it to white people, so y’all going to fight amongst yourselves. … It's not about race. It's about man's inhumanity to man. That's what it's about. … The minute you turn it into race, it goes down this alley. Let's talk about it for what it is—it's how people treat each other. It's a problem. It doesn't matter if you're Black or white because Black, white, Jews — everybody….

This being 2022 Goldberg was pounced on and denounced on social media, with the predictable cries for her termination, leading her to issue an explanation and apology on (where else?) Twitter:

“I stand corrected.” “I’m sorry.” “My sincerest apologies.” You might think this would suffice to bury the controversy, inasmuch as no one can possibly think that Whoopi Goldberg unconsciously harbors anti-Semitic feelings that slipped out in a talkshow equivalent of the now discredited Implicit Association Test purported to reveal that we’re all racists, misogynists, and bigots. But no. Continued calls for her banishment led the President of ABC, Kim Godwin, to suspend Whoopi for two weeks for “her wrong and hurtful comments.” Why two weeks? “While Whoopi has apologized, I’ve asked her to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of her comments. The entire ABC News organization stands in solidarity with our Jewish colleagues, friends, family and communities.” I guess two weeks is enough reflective time to educate oneself on the Holocaust, a subject to which scholars devote entire careers.

What’s going on here? Whoopi herself offered some insight on Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show that night, explaining that “I feel, being black, when we talk about race it’s a very different thing to me. As a black person I think of race as something I can see. So I see you and I know what race you are.” Now, where would Whoopi Goldberg get the idea that race and racism is all about blackness? Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, offered this insightful observation:

The only explanation that I have for it is that there is a new definition of racism that has been put out there in the public recently that defines racism exclusively as the targeting of people of color. And obviously history teaches us otherwise.

Exactly. If you narrow the focus of race and racism to people of color only, which is what the Black Lives Matter and Antiracism movements have been doing for the past several years, we shouldn’t be surprised when people of color like Whoopi Goldberg reflect that point of view.

How did the Nazis think of race? I wrote about this in Denying History (co-authored with Alex Grobman) in the context of discussing the Wannsee Conference Protocol on the Endlösung, or Final Solution, to the Jewish question, in which Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann and a dozen other who’s who of the Nazi hierarchy, outlined how and especially why extermination was the only solution after working most of their prisoners to death:

The remnant that eventually remains will require suitable treatment; because it will without doubt represent the most resistant part, it consists of a natural selection [Natürliche Auslese] that could, on its release, become the germ-cell of a new Jewish revival. (Witness the experience of history.)

Here Eichmann and his fellow exterminationists were thinking in a social Darwinian sense that Jews who did not die of starvation and overwork would be the most resistant, meaning that they would be the fittest, and that should this new population of naturally selected Jews survive they might, in Eichmann’s words, “become the germ-cell of a new Jewish revival.” Commenting on Eichmann’s reference to social Darwinism, the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould remarked:

Natürliche Auslese is the standard German translation of Darwin’s “natural selection.” To think that the key phrase of my professional world lies so perversely violated in the very heart of the chief operative paragraph in the most evil document ever written!

Where did the Nazis get their ideas about racial purity and eugenics? According to historian Walter Laqueur, “the doctrine of Hitler’s movement was neither a mere propaganda trick nor the outpouring of a small group of unbalanced minds. On the contrary, Nazism is based on a body of intellectual doctrine that goes back for at least a century.” Historian George Mosse, in his meticulous study of Nazi culture, demonstrates that National Socialism and the Nazi rise to power “would have all come to naught if the world view itself had not reflected already existing prejudices among the people,” namely “the ideology of race, blood, and soil.” Here are just two rather startling example of the kind of racist ideology found in Germany, wherein we can see the seeds of the Wannsee Protocol. The first comes from a March 6, 1895, Reichstag speech by Hermann Ahlwardt in favor of legislation to close Germany’s borders to “Israelites who are not citizens of the Reich,” entitled “The Semitic Versus the Teutonic Race.” Ahlwardt concluded:

It is certainly true that there are Jews in our country of whom nothing adverse can be said. Nevertheless, the Jews as a whole must be considered harmful, for the racial traits of this people are of a kind that in the long run do not agree with the racial traits of the Teutons. Every Jew who at this very moment has not as yet transgressed is likely to do so at some future time under given circumstances because his racial characteristics drive him on in that direction. We hold the view that the Jews are a different race, a different people with entirely different character traits.

The second is the Racists’ Decalogue, also called the “Ten German Commandments of Lawful Self-Defense” (or Antisemiten-Katechismus), published in 1893, which spells out loud and clear how Jews were to be treated:

1. Be proud of being a German and strive earnestly and steadily to practice the inherited virtues of our people, courage, faithfulness, and veracity, and to inspire and develop these virtues in thy children.

2. Thou shalt know that though, together with all thy fellow Germans, regardless of faith or creed, has a common implacable foe. His name is Jew.

3. Though shalt keep thy blood pure. Consider it a crime to soil the noble Aryan breed of thy people by mingling it with the Jewish breed.

4. Thou shalt be helpful to thy fellow German and further him in all matters not counter to the German conscience, the more so if he be pressed by the Jews.

5. Thou shalt have no social intercourse with the Jew.

6. Thou shalt have no business relations with the Jew.

7. Though shalt drive the Jews from thy own breast and take no example from Jewish tricks and Jewish wiles.

8. Thou shalt not entrust thy rights to a Jewish lawyer, nor thy body to a Jewish physician, nor thy children to a Jewish teacher lest thy honor, body, and soul suffer harm.

9. Thou shalt not lend ear nor give credence to the Jew. Keep away all Jewish writings from thy German home and hearth lest their lingering poison may unnerve and corrupt thyself and thy family.

10. Thou shalt use no violence against the Jews because it is unworthy of thee and against the law. But if a Jew attack thee, ward off his Semitic insolence with German wrath.

In response to the Whoopi Goldberg controversy, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum issued a tweet showing a historical chart representing the racial distinctions the Nazis made between different groups. According to the chart, the only racially pure people are those who have four German grandparents (the four white circles in the first column on the left). German citizens with three or four Jewish ancestors (first and second column on the right) were Jews. The second and third column from the left represent the Mischlinge (mixed-blood) categories, depending on the number of Jewish ancestors they had.

The racial theories of social Darwinism gave the Nazis the scientific sanction they needed to make their racist ideology seem wholly rational and their actions justifiable in defense against what they considered to be a real threat to their nation and their culture. Consider these passages from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in the chapter on nation and race:

The whole of nature is a powerful struggle between the strong and the weak….

A stronger race will drive out the weak, for the vital urge in its ultimate form will, time and again, burst all the absurd fetters of the so-called humanity of individuals, in order to replace it by the humanity of Nature which destroys the weak to give his place to the strong.…

[I]n every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples the result was the end of the cultured people. North America, whose population consists in by far the largest part of Germanic elements who mixed but little with the lower colored peoples, shows a different humanity and culture from Central and South America, where the predominantly Latin immigrants often mixed with the aborigines on a large scale….

The Aryan gave up the purity of his blood and therefore he also lost his place in the Paradise which he had created for himself. He became submerged in the race-mixture, he gradually lost his cultural ability till…he began to resemble more the subjected and aborigines than his ancestors….

Blood-mixing, with the lowering of the racial level caused by it, is the sole cause of the dying-off of old cultures; for the people do not perish by lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is contained only in the pure blood. All that is not race in this world is trash.

This racist ideology did not spring from a conquered nation defending itself against a foreign invader. Germans were sterilizing and killing fellow Germans. By classifying Jews as untermenschen (subhumans)—as “colored” and therefore not pure white, or Aryan—and linking eugenics to an already virulent anti-Semitism, the Nazis arrived at the Final Solution.