Nazism was a [phenomenon] that could not function without a constitutive “other.” This was already recognized during the war. Franz Neumann, in his study of the structure and practice of [German Fascism], argued that the domestic political value of antisemitism could never permit the “complete extermination of the Jews.” As he put it, “the foe cannot and must not disappear; he must always be held in readiness as a scapegoat for all the evils originating in the socio‐political system.”¹³

Around the same time, the Polish Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, writing in the straitened circumstances of the Warsaw ghetto, expressed the belief that the Nazis would have to allow at least some Jews to live, for without them they would lose their “Jewish argument.”¹⁴

Even ordinary Germans who supported the [Axis’s] anti‐Jewish policies were aware of this problem. In 1942, a letter sent to the antisemitic journal, Der Stürmer, pointed out that:

the number of people on the street who are wearing the yellow Star of David and the word “Jew” have fortunately been declining in recent days. In the process, however, the younger generation is being denied the repellant visual impression that that Jew makes in daily life.

I therefore suggest that, next to the monkey cages in the zoo, a second roomy cage should be established, one part of which can house a Jewish family with typical Jewish traits: flat feet, hooked noses, black hair, bent posture, throbbing lips, a concealed glance, thick eyelids; the other part of which can house a family that is Jewish but does not look like it. Further strategies of separation according to gender could also be undertaken. A plaque would point out that all types of gradations appear between the two groups.¹⁵

This private suggestion insisted that the only way to compensate for the effects of the [Axis’s] deportation program was to keep a small number of Jews alive as negative examples for ordinary Germans.

In so doing, the suggestion implied that, at least to some degree, [Fascist] antisemitism was ultimately tactical in function. This belief dates back to Hermannn Rauschning’s conversations with Hitler from the 1930s. Responding to Rauschning’s question as to whether the Jews should be destroyed, Hitler allegedly answered in the negative, declaring “then we would have to invent them. One requires a visible enemy, not an invisible one.”¹⁶

Similarly, Jean‐Paul Sartre declared in his famous essay about antisemitism that “if the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.” “The antisemite,” he insisted, “is in the unhappy position of having a vital need for the very enemy he wishes to destroy.”¹⁷

Such observations help clarify some of the functional aspects of [European Fascism], but they fail to explain the larger question of why, if antisemitism was merely tactical, it ultimately resulted in a systematic program of mass murder.

In answering this question, it is important to recognize that the [Axis] sought, at one and the same time, to preserve the Jews in memory while physically exterminating them. This paradoxical reality was demonstrated by many projects in the Third Reich that were closely linked to the régime’s policies of persecution, theft, expulsion, and extermination.

(Emphasis added.)

Coincidentally, the Fascists made a propaganda poster that read ‘The last non‐coloured Frenchmen are the great attraction of the Parisian Zoo’… the trend of anticommunists unconsciously leaving behind evidence of their own atrocities and thinking, while supplying “evidence” of our atrocities and thinking in the form of cartoons, is something that has never stopped.