An Institution of Nazi Statesmanship: Friedrich Pollock's Theoretical Contribution to the Study of Anti-Semitism

This text is Friedrich Pollock's typescript of a public lecture he delivered at the luncheon session of the National Annual Meeting of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, on April 29, 1944, in Washington, DC. In his lecture Pollock lays out a new concept of a political anti-Semitism that he distinguishes not only from premodern Christian anti-Judaism but also from nineteenth-century racialist discourse. Under National Socialism, anti-Semitism was transformed from an attitude, based on personal convictions, to an “institution of Nazi statesmanship.” For Pollock, anti-Semitic ideology appears to be initially a liberal phenomenon, an expression of a “false consciousness,” while in Nazi Germany the extermination of the Jews became a political institution, a pillar of the state.