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This article examines Theodor Fritsch (1852-1933), a leading figure among the radical antisemites in Germany during the 1880s, who promulgated a "scientific" and "racial" form of antisemitism radically different from traditional Christian Jew-hatred. From 1907 until his death, Fritsch edited the Handbook of the Jewish Question (Handbuch der Judenfrage), which was published by his publishing house Hammer-Verlag in 49 editions until 1944. The Handbook was a compendium of extremist antisemitic reflections on topics such as the Bible and the Talmud, the Jewish roots ofChristianity with particular emphasis on the toxic Jewish influence on the Catholic Church, and the relationship between Judaism and Freemasonry. At the time, sundry financial crises from the Berlin stock exchange collapse in 1873 to the Great Depression were blamed on Jewish manipulation. Germany's defeat in the First World War and the subsequent peace agreements were seen as the result ofa Franco-Jewish conspiracy. Germany is presented as the sole stronghold against a world Jewish conspiracy, thereby combining radical antisemitism with a virulent nationalism, which for all its threadbare scholarship and muddled thinking, was to provide the foundations of National Socialist "Racial Studies" (Rassenkunde).
Introduction
In 1935, a group of Berlin Zehlendorf's most distinguished residents, among them Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, and Gertrud Scholtz-Klink assembled in what is now the Lindenthaler Allee to witness the unveiling of a statue dedicated to the memory of the antisemitic mastermind Theodor Fritsch. Leni Riefensthal and Ernst Udet were also present when the local mayor Walter Helfenstein pulled the cord to reveal a statue by Arthur Wellmann, a local sculptor of modest talent, in the form of a naked muscle-bound Germanic youth wielding a huge hammer. A repulsive amalgam of the reptilian and the feline cowered at his feet. In Germany's first public monument to antisemitism, Siegfried is shown slaughtering the Jewish Fafner. In 1943, this horrific statue was melted down to make weapons. Two years later the Theodor-Fritsch-Allee resumed its former name.1
Emil Theodor Fritsche was born on his father's farm in Wiedemar, Saxony, in 1852, the sixth of seven children, four of whom died in childhood. He trained as a mechanical engineer and die caster, first in nearby Delitzsch and gained a diploma in the Royal Technical Institute in Berlin Charlottenburg in 1875.2 In...