In February this year AfriForum took Julius Malema and the Economic Freedom Fighters to the Equality Court in an attempt to interdict the further singing of Dubul’ ibhunu (shoot the boer/farmer) and the propagation of other ‘hate speech’. According to transcripts of EFF meetings submitted by AfriForum in their original complaint, Malema, who was restrained by a prior mediation agreement made court order in 2012, would commonly sing “Shoot to kill… kill, Nomazane… Kiss the boer… the farmer.” His EFF supporters meanwhile, who were not, would simply sing “Kill the Boers the farmers.”

Under cross examination by AfriForum’s counsel, Advocate Mark Oppenheimer, Malema defended the song Dubul’ ibhunu[1] saying it did not bear a “literal” meaning. Rather the farmer or “amaBoer” was the “face of land dispossession”. The struggle of the EFF, Malema explained, was “against a system of oppression that has robbed us of our land and our economy. And that is what we are engaged in.”

This argument was supported by the evidence of Dr Liz Gunner, a SOAS-trained academic now working at the University of Johannesburg, who was called to testify by the EFF’s legal team. In a 2015 academic paper she had described dubul’ ibhunu as “one of a domain of possible songs, chants, slogans, a shifting store of cultural capital which could be drawn on to affirm and give courage for the project at hand.”

She stated in court that the song had originally been used by Malema to press for what she called “land reform” and it had a role in “bringing about a just society through re-syncing land”. By this Gunner presumably meant the expropriation without compensation of white-owned land in South Africa, something Malema has demanded since his time as ANC Youth League leader. She too denied that the song had any “injunction to kill as an action”.

At one stage during her cross-examination the question of anti-Jewish songs that may (or may not) have been sung in national socialist Germany came up. Dr Gunner commented that whether such songs were sung, and what they led to, was not something that she was prepared to comment on, given that “you would have to look at the history of song within that particular social and political context. What I have tried to do is to take the history and the use of song in our society.”

The discussion then ended there, and this question went unanswered. This was a pity, for if you wish to find an answer to the fundamental question of whether - and if so how - music and song can be used to foment racial hatred and harm, the German experience would seem to be an obvious place to begin one’s inquiry.

I

One challenge in making historical comparisons is to identify the most relevant time and place. Germany’s ‘national revolution’ of March and April 1933 is certainly an illuminating period to study; one problem being that the country’s troubled democracy collapsed so rapidly into totalitarian dictatorship that there could be no legal contestation of what the national socialist movement was doing. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

In Germany it was regarded, from March 1933, as punishable “atrocity propaganda” for any Jewish organisation or individual in the country to openly complain of discrimination at the hands of the national socialist movement. Jewish individuals and organisations within Germany were placed under crushing pressure to disavow reports of any maltreatment of the Jews (real or exaggerated), while the true situation in the country had to be quietly and privately communicated to diplomats, journalists, and visitors passing through.

In one case in late 1933, the administrative head of the Jewish community in Breslau, the capital of Lower Silesia, former Judge Ernst Rechnitz, was prosecuted (along with the author Albert Rosenthal) for an article in the Jewish community newspaper, edited by Rechnitz, which had mentioned the dwindling opportunities afforded Jews in Germany, and the racial animus directed against them. It would not do, the prosecutor had argued, for “Jews to allow the impression to prevail that equal protection is not afforded them in the Third Reich”. The judge agreed and sentenced Rechnitz and Rosenthal to fifteen months in jail.

Due to a strange quirk of history in German Upper Silesia - whose capital Oppeln lay only 80km southeast of Breslau - the situation was quite different. This region had a special political status due to the May 1922 Geneva Convention, signed by Poland and Germany, by which minority rights in the whole of Upper Silesia, then being divided between the two nations, would be protected for fifteen years following partition.

The main purpose of the convention as it related to minority rights at the time it was drafted, was that the rights of the German-speakers in Polish Upper Silesia in the east would be protected, as would the Polish-speaking minority in German Upper Silesia in the west. But protections for religious minorities were cut-and-pasted into the document from a 1919 Polish treaty, almost as a formality.

One article in the convention stated that “all German nationals shall be equal before the law and enjoy the same civic and political rights without distinction of race, language or religion”, another that “authorities and officials may not treat nationals belonging to minorities with contempt nor omit to protect them against punishable acts”, and so on. For fifteen years, up until July 1937, a Mixed Commission would be in place to oversee the implementation of the agreement.

It would be difficult to imagine in 1922 that the Jews of Germany, a highly assimilated, economically successful, and politically influential minority, in one of the most civilised nations in Europe - now a pure democracy with a finely crafted constitution - would come under any kind of existential threat. Yet two years before, in early 1920, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) had been founded in Munich, Bavaria.

The NSDAP’s leader, the semi-educated former corporal Adolf Hitler, soon attracted notice for his virulent but clownish anti-Jewish rhetoric. His deeply felt expressions of historical grievance, and his message that the Jews were to blame for all Germany’s misfortunes, seemed to exert a magnetic appeal on members of the “small middle class”, as well as students and intellectuals. The movement’s thuggish paramilitary arm led by Ernst Röhm - the Sturmabteilung (SA) or brownshirts - gained equal notoriety for its violent attacks on and intimidation of the movement’s political rivals.

One of the key slogans of the movement was “Deutschland erwache!” (“Germany awake!”) This originated from a 1919 poem by Dietrich Eckart, a founder of the NSDAP and mentor to Hitler, which called for bells to be rung across Germany in warning at the imminent storm, and for the nation to awake to its peril, “for Jewry appears to capture the realm” (“Judas erscheint, das Reich zu gewinnen”).

The NSDAP had adopted an “unalterable” 25-point programme on 25th February 1920, in the Hofbräuhaus-Festsaal, which excluded the Jewish minority from the concept of the German people and sought the ejection of this “alien race” from Germany’s state, media, judiciary, and economic life.

By 1932 this once fringe and widely derided party had become by far the most popular and powerful in Germany, with the greatest number of delegates in the Reichstag (though with a plurality not a majority). On 30th January 1933 the NSDAP’s popular mandate was recognised and Hitler was made Chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg, and the leader of a coalition cabinet in which NSDAP members were a minority. In the elections of 5^th March 1933, the NSDAP won 44% of the vote and its coalition partners 8%.

In the “national revolution” that followed the National Socialist movement, having secured almost total political dominance, now started giving effect to the 1920 programme as it related to the Jews.

Through the course of mid-to-late March 1933 the SA’s Kämpfer (“Fighters”) physically expelled the Jews from public offices. The SA units on the street would follow their cries of Deutschland erwache! with “Juda verrecke!” (“Perish Juda!”) On 1^st April 1933 the SA enforced a one-day boycott of Jewish-owned businesses and professional practices. And through the course of April a raft of anti-Jewish laws were issued the stated intention of which was to exclude the Jews from state employment (including the judiciary) and impose a numerus clausus in the professions, schools and universities.

II

The April Laws and other anti-Semitic actions ran into conflict in Upper Silesia with the provisions of the 1922 convention.[2] This point was raised by Franz Bernheim, a refugee from the area, who submitted a petition to the League of Nations Council where, after some back and forth, the German delegation chose not to defend the imposition of anti-Jewish measures in the region by stating that “should infractions of the provisions of the Geneva convention have occurred in German Upper Silesia, this can only have been the result of errors committed by subordinate organs acting in erroneous interpretation of the law”.[3]

The concern of the German foreign office was that if Germany openly breached the provisions of 1922 convention as it related to the Jews in German Upper Silesia, this would allow the Poles to flout the protections the convention afforded the substantial German minority in Polish Upper Silesia.

In June 1933 an Association of Synagogue Congregations was formed to press the case of the Jewish community in Upper Silesia. In August Dr Arthur Kochmann and Dr Georg Weissman, both lawyers, and Mr David Behrendt, a businessman, presented a complaint to the Reich Foreign Office listing 47 different forms of mistreatment of the Jews in Upper Silesia, which it argued were in violation of the 1922 Geneva convention.[4]

After receiving no response, the Association sent a letter of complaint to Geneva in September and proceeded to file the first of a string of legal complaints with the Mixed Commission. This commission was headed during its fifteen-year life by Felix Calonder, a former Swiss president, believer in minority rights, and an avowed liberal. Calonder put pressure on the authorities to abide by the provisions of the convention and in August 1934 the NSDAP President of Upper Silesia issued a proclamation declaring invalid “all laws and decrees enacted after April 1, 1933, and in the future, insofar as they contain exceptional measures for persons of non-Aryan descent”. This proclamation was later extended to cover the Nuremberg laws of 1935.

The Jewish community would file numerous complaints to the Mixed Commission, about various infringements of the 1922 convention, and Calonder would then intervene to compel the authorities to halt these, and they would truculently comply. In this way, between 1934 and July 1937, when the Mixed Commission’s mandate expired, Jewish community of Upper Silesia was shielded from the worst of the anti-Semitic contagion sweeping across the Reich. The region was described as a Naturschutzgebiet (nature reserve) for the Jews - where the 10 000 strong Jewish community in the region could go on with their lives in a manner still bearing some resemblance to what it had been for Jews in Germany before the national revolution of 1933.

The original 47-point complaint of August 1933 is significant then as it carefully lays out – from within the Reich itself - numerous breaches of the rights to equal treatment, and equal protection under the law, of Jews in German Upper Silesia at the time (though these were obviously applicable elsewhere as well). These largely relate to the discriminatory actions, both official and unofficial, taken against Jewish lawyers, students, pupils, pharmacists, businessmen, market traders, businessmen, notaries, shopkeepers, dentists, veterinarians, judges, tax consultants, and so on.

The complaint also raised issues around racial propaganda against the Jews. These included the NSDAP newspaper in the region running “harsh attacks” on the Jews and “portraying them as contemptible” and calling for consumer boycotts of Jewish businesspeople. Two further points though related, of all matters, to the singing of songs.

III

In an article in the British journal Music & Letters published in January 1935 William Saunders noted that Germany’s national revolution in 1933 had been awash in a “mass of song”, with one of the chief manifestations of the national socialist movement “a certain creative impulse towards lyrical production. The whole of the Reich has been deluged with small Liederbücher, mainly for the use of the various bodies of Storm Troops.”

In his article Saunders presented a number of notable examples of the songs of the movement – such as Das Horst Wessel Lied and Heil Hitler Dir!  – and concluded by praising the “inherent musical sense” of the German people that had been put on display. Through the course of the national revolution the whole Reich had been transformed into a veritable ‘nest of singing birds’, he wrote. This was all to the good, he suggested. “A nation that can sing, as Germany is doing all through her triumphs and troubles, has little to fear, even from her own so-called rulers, and dictators. And when all is said and done, what she sings matters not a bit.”

The Jewish community in Upper Silesia held a contrary view. It regarded the songs of the SA, which were now being formally taught to schoolchildren, as profoundly disturbing. Point 13 of the August 1933 complaint stated: “SA units gather in the streets and sing songs that aim to incite the population against the Jews” and point 14 that “Schools are required to introduce SA songbooks containing anti-Jewish songs, and pupils are required to purchase them.”

One of the collective complaints subsequently submitted to Colander was against the “defamation of the Jewish minority” by NSDAP propaganda in the press and at meetings, “attacking Jews, singing anti-Jewish songs without police intervention.” [5]

The songbook being referred to in the August 1933 complaint was probably the SA Liederbuch published in 1933 (or possibly one of the variants put out by SA units in the regions). It runs to 293 pages, with some additional pages for songs to be added with musical notation. At 12,5cm by 10cm it could fit in a pocket.[6]

It begins with a foreword by the then SA Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm. Addressing the Kameraden of the SA and SS, Röhm writes that just as the SA’s service regulations sought to unify the thousands of SA units into one body, the objective of the songbook was to proclaim, through the same songs, a unifying bond to the same Idee. The song speaks to the heart, more than the written or spoken word, he noted. Everywhere where SA Kameraden marched in Germany, in the same brown uniform, and spreading the same worldview, the same songs of freedom and fatherland would ring out.

A number of poems follow, mostly by Dietrich Eckart, one of which is an anti-Semitic ode. The first song (page 15) is the NSDAP anthem “Das Horst Wessel lied”. The section containing “SA Songs” follows soon after running from page 21 to 121.

These songs contain repeated references exhorting SA members to bravely fight to free Germany from Knechtschaft or Sklaverei, meaning serfdom, servitude or bondage. The “face” of the oppressor, when it materialises, is invariably the Jews or Jewry or Jewish capital or Jewish money or Jewish power; or, more metaphorically, Juda, Judas, Judas Thron (Juda’s throne), or Burg Zion (fortress Zion).

One of the earliest NSDAP songs was the Kampflied der Nationalsozialisten (Battle song of the National Socialists). It appears on page 113 of the songbook. It was written in 1922 by Kleo Peyer, a national socialist student activist, at the time he was leading protests against the appointment of “a Jew” (Samuel Steinherz) as Rector of Karl Ferdinand’s University in Prague, Czechoslovakia.

The first stanza reads:

Wir sind das Heer vom Hakenkreuz, hebt hoch die roten Fahnen!
Der deutschen Arbeit wollen wir den Weg zur Freiheit bahnen!

[We are the army of the hooked cross, raise the red flags high! We want to pave the way to freedom for German workers.]

The next stanza then goes:

“Wir schließen keinen Bruderpakt mit Juden und mit Welschen,
weil sie den Freiheitsbrief des deutschen Volkes fälschen.”

[“We do not close any fraternal pact with the Jews or the French, as they are falsifying the freedom letter of the German people.”]

Another song (page 42) begins with:

Du Deutschland liegst in Banden, versklavt auf ewige Zeit,
wir wollen für dich kämpfen, bis dass du bist befreit.

[You Germany lie in fetters, enslaved for an eternal time,
we want to fight for you, until you are liberated.]

The song proceeds to exhort those fighting for freedom to have courage and press onwards: “Don’t hesitate! Don’t hesitate! Don’t hesitate! Let the Jewish pack (of hounds) cry out, so that one day the Third Reich will arise, and the Hitler flag fly over it.”

The song “Wir tragen stolz das Hakenkreuz“ contains the lyrics:

„Grossdeutschland ist das Vaterland und wir sind keine Knechte.
Lieb Vaterland, bald bist du frei und frei mit deinen Söhnen
von Fremdherrschaft und henkerei, kein Feind soll dich verhöhnen.“

[“Greater Germany is the Fatherland, and we are not serfs/servants.
Dear Fatherland, soon you will be free and, with your sons,
free from foreign domination and the hangman’s noose, and no enemy shall mock you.”]

The song concludes with the call:

“Lieb Vaterland, bald bist du frei, du Land Germaniens Eichen.
Burg Zion wankt beim Feldgeschrei and fällt von unseren Streichen.“

[“Dear Fatherland, the land of Germania’s oak trees, soon you will be free.
Fortress Zion totters before our battle cries, and collapses on our blows.”]

There are three particularly venomous anti-Jewish ‘SA songs’ in the songbook. The theme that the Germany was politically and economically oppressed by the Jews was given extensive treatment in the poem/song “Gab’s darum eine Hermannschlacht” (page 56). This was based upon an old nineteenth century poem put to music which had initially been directed against the French, but which had been altered by the SA in Breslau, with the Jews substituted in as the historical enemy:

[Is this why Hermann fought his battle [against the Romans],
and we fought all those wars against the Turks [in the battles defending Vienna],
so that today Germanness should succumb to Jewish power?
Was this why we fought the People’s Battle on the Leipzig field [against Napoleon and the French]
so that we nonetheless must wear chains welded from Jewish money

Oh no! We still stand firmly at odds [with them] and do need to beg;
still German uprightness exists and good German customs.
Should Jewry attack with deceit and tricks, with us good faith applies,
and what we hold dear and what we own, no Jews shall rob us of.

They may want to erect foreign rule in our country,
but still German strength will annihilate their lying-web.
Yes, even were they to enchain half of the world against us,
we will, despite Jewish-money, save the German people’s ways

German lands to German sons, not to the Jewish riffraff!
No longer the farmer in bondage to the Jew, free German courts and judges!
We stand united to protect ourselves and resist, and we demand our rights,
We want to be free Germans and not Jewry's serfs.]

It was noted very soon after the party’s foundation that the NSDAP wished to “get rid of all Jews and foreigners”. In his 1927 commentary on the NSDAP’s programme one of the party’s founder members, Gottfried Feder, confirmed that “Antisemitism demands the expulsion of the Jew from our State and our economic life.” This call was openly expressed in two songs. In Auf, Kameraden, schließt die Reihen! (Up comrades, close ranks!), on page 23. The song begins with a call to fight in Hitler’s brown army for Germany’s freedom. The second stanza then goes:

Herren sollen im deutschen Reiche, künftig auch nur Deutsche sein!
Judischer Würger du entweiche! Unser Volk sei stark und rein.
Judischer Würger du entweiche, unser Volk sei stark und rein.

[In the future, only German masters in Germany!
Run away you Jewish stranglers, our people are strong and pure.
Run away you Jewish stranglers, our people are strong and pure.]

The same message is to be found in the song “Heil Hitler Dir” which was composed by the Dresden-based NSDAP musician and conductor Bruno C. Schestak in 1927 and dedicated to Hitler. It can be found on page 39 of the songbook:

[Germany awake from your bad dream,
don't give alien Jews room in your realm!
We will fight for your resurrection,
Aryan blood shall not go under!

All these hypocrites, we´ll throw them out,
Jewry get out of our German house!
Once our native soil is cleansed and pure,
we shall be happy and united.

We are the fighters of the N.S.D.A.P.
Faithful Germans at heart,
in battle firm and tough,
We have given ourselves to the hooked crosses,
Heil to our Führer: Heil Hitler to you!]

The song Wenn Hitlers Braune Garde threatens that all traitors will be crushed - the Black, the Red, the Jews and Communists - when the liberation storm sweeps over Germany. "[W]oe to every enemy, who is not able to flee ("dann wehe jedem Gegner, der nich nicht mehr flüchten kann".) Brüder in Zechen und Gruben follows up an anti-Semitic reference with the line "the day of revenge will come, and then we will be free." 

Reading through the book there seems to be no song calling for the physical destruction of German Jewry. Except there are. On page 20 appears the infamous NSDAP call to arms, “Siehst du im Osten das Morgenrot. (Volk ans Gewehr.)”

This song had been composed by Arno Pardun, a member of the NSDAP Berlin at the end of 1931 and dedicated to Dr Joseph Goebbels, then Berlin NSDAP chief. It was first performed by an SA unit in Berlin in early 1932. It would go on to become one of the most well-known and widely sung songs of the Third Reich.

The song as it appears in the SA Liederbuch contains no reference to the Jews. The first line of the second stanza contains the complaint that the German people had been oppressed. This is then followed by the line „Das Blut unserer Brüder färbte den Land, um heilige Recht betrogen.“ “The blood of our brethren, cheated of sacred rights, stained the land.” The last line of the final stanza, before the refrain, contains an apparently innocent call to “Ende die Not!” (End the hardship!”)

Members of the SA, SS and Hitler Youth would all have known this was an expurgated version, and not the one to be sung, whether in Upper Silesia or elsewhere. It was not the version related by Saunders in his article, or the one included in the later SS Liederbuch, or in the songbook issued to the German soldiers that they took with them to war in 1939, or the version that was submitted as evidence before the Nuremberg Tribunal.

In this, the unexpurgated version, the Jews are indicted, condemned and sentenced… For years the German people were subjugated (geknechtet) and cheated, the second stanza reads, while “Traitors and Jews made their profits, claiming legions of victims.”

The song then concludes with the lines:

Ob Bürger, ob Bauer, ob Arbeitsmann,
sie schwingen das Schwert und den Hammer.
Für Hitler, für Freiheit, für Arbeit und Brot,
Deutschland erwache! Und Juda - den Tod!

“Whether citizen, or farmer, or working man,
they swing the sword or hammer,
For Hitler, for freedom, for work and bread,
Germany awake! And to Jewry - death!”

Then on page 114 there is the the song "Wir sind die Sturmkolonnen". This goes as follows:

Erst stehn die Sturmkolonen
zum letzen Kampf bereit.
Erst wenn die Feinde schweigen
erst dann sind wir befreit.

"The Storm columns stand ready,
for the final fight. 
When the enemy falls silent,
Then we will be free."

The actual song as commonly sung by SA members in the late 1920s and early 1930s ran as follows:

So stehen die Sturmkolonnen
zum Rassenkampf bereit.
Erst wenn die Juden bluten,
Erst dann sind wir befreit.

"So stand the storm columns,
ready for racial war.
Only when the Jews bleed
Only then will we be freed."

IV

In an account written from exile in Tel-Aviv in 1940 Georg Weissman noted that on the matter of anti-Semitic propaganda (of which the SA songs formed part) Calonder intervened in particular on the basis of Article 83 of the Geneva convention which required the governments of Germany and Poland to “assure full and complete protection of life and liberty to all inhabitants of the plebiscite territory without distinction of birth, nationality, language, race or religion.”

It was clear that the damage that had been done was “mostly irreparable” and that the purpose of the complaints was in essence “only to prevent future violations”. The Jewish community managed however to secure a ban in 1934 on the sale and distribution in Upper Silesia of Julius Streicher’s notorious anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer.

The protections the Mixed Commission and the 1922 convention afforded the Jews expired in July 1937, once the fifteen-year period was up. Ahead of this date a decree was issued to bring into effect in Upper Silesia the anti-Semitic legislation applicable elsewhere in the rest of the Reich from 15^th July 1937.

With this damm removed, the braun sturmflut swept across German Upper Silesia. In articles published in July and August 1937 Der Stürmer, which was now widely and aggressively distributed in the region, ran articles defaming the Jews in the area and setting out how they had “abused their privileges under the protection of the Geneva convention.” According to a report at the time Jewish traders and merchants were obstructed, and a boycott of Jewish shops enforced by mobs of national socialist youth. The windows of the synagogue in Beuthen were smashed up, as was the interior of the synagogue in Guttentag. Anti-Jewish slogans were put up everywhere.[7] And so ended Upper Silesia’s Naturschutzgebiet status.

V

What then are the lessons that can be drawn from this history? The first is that although it may feel jarring to associate songs with the propagation of racial hatred, given that hate is not usually an emotion associated with music (indeed, quite the opposite), it is a mistake to underestimate their danger.

As Röhm himself put it a song can “speak to the heart” or, perhaps more accurately, penetrate the soul, in a way that a more direct spoken or written appeal cannot. The most popular of these songs would also have been known, repeatedly sung, and thereby internalised, by the entire national socialist movement in Germany. This contrasts with impenetrable tracts like Hitler’s Mein Kampf or Alfred Rosenberg’s Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, which were once described as “the two great unread bestsellers of the Third Reich."

Clearly these songs were a powerful vector for spreading racial hatred and helping to psychologically prepare members of the SA and SS to inflict harm on the Jews. They were banned in Germany after World War Two, along with other NSDAP symbols and forms of propaganda, and performing them in public is punishable by a fine or up to three years’ imprisonment.

Secondly, this catch-me-if-you-can game of switching around the words of inflammatory songs when the political or legal circumstances demand it - "und Juda – den Tod!" becoming “Ende das Not!” or "Juden bluten" becoming "Feinde schweigen" – is an old, obvious, and wholly disreputable one.

Thirdly, in a new democracy the singing of songs proclaiming continued oppression at the hands of an increasingly powerless but still relatively prosperous racial minority is clearly a highly effective means of inciting and fuelling hatred against its members. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that democracy awakens and flatters a popular passion for equality but fails to provide the means to fully satisfy it, something which then breeds envy and resentment. The SA songs relentlessly poked at this wound of unrealised equality. The theme through running them was that members of the SA were fighting a heroic struggle to free Germans from servitude to the Jews, something which could ultimately only be achieved through the expulsion of that minority from Germany, or worse.

The fourth lesson is that there are many “harms” that can be done to individuals from a racial minority, short of outright murder. In March 1933 the “harm” being done to the Jews of Germany was their often-forced expulsion from state offices including the judiciary (“freie deutsche Richter!), with SA members going in, identifying suspected Jews, and then forcibly ejecting them.

One contemporary witness described how, on 11^th March 1933, “between 11am and 12, approximately a hundred Brownshirts invaded the premises of the Breslau Regional Court and searched the courtrooms and Judges’ chambers for Semites with the words ‘Out with Jews and their descendants!’ The work was diligently accomplished: A Jewish prosecutor and a Jewish judge were violently dragged out in the middle of the session, as were other Jewish judges from their chambers.”[8]

On 1^st April 1933 it was the enforcement of the anti-Jewish boycott and the subsequent laws, and informal measures, aimed at progressively driving the Jewish minority out of the professions, the universities, and the economy (“wir sind nicht der Fremden Knecht’”).

In 1938 it was the dispossession of German Jews, the final Aryanisation of the economy, and the (failed) attempt to force their expulsion from the country. As early as mid-1933 the US Consul in Berlin, George S Messersmith, told one visitor that “the Nazis are determined to confiscate all Jewish property”. This objective would only be fully declared in mid 1938, and realised after Kristallnacht on 9th/10th November 1938, when members of the SA and SS (“Juda entweiche aus unserem deutschen Haus!”) set about physically destroying the basis for continued Jewish life in Germany with practically every single Jewish shop, café, office or synagogue in the country “wrecked, burned severely or damaged.”

Given this history, to argue today that an obviously poisonous song is aimed “merely” at continued “oppression” by a racial minority, or that it is “just” aimed at securing the confiscation of that minority’s property, seems to constitute no meaningful defence of it at all.