11 Novembre: Guillaume II voulait l'extermination des 'parasites' juifs

En ce jour de la commémoration de l'armistice de 1918 qui mit fin aux combats de la Première Guerre Mondiale, il convient de rappeler qu'Hitler ne fut pas le seul Européen à appeler avec force à l'exterminer les Juifs.  Le Kaiser Guillaume II ne demandait pas autre chose.  Or il est probable que lors des commémorations on évitera d'aborder la question de l'antisémitisme féroce voire exterminateur de nombreux acteurs de premier plan de cette période: Nicholas II, François-Ferdinand, Erich Ludendorff etc.

John C. G. Röhl (extraits de The Kaiser and his Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany. 1995. CUP):

In the bitterness of exile Kaiser Wilhelm II made the final dreadful leap to the anti-semitism of extermination. 'The Hebrew race', he wrote in English to an American friend,

are my most inveterate enemies at home and abroad; they remain what they are and always were: the forgers of lies and the masterminds governing unrest, revolution, upheaval by spreading infamy with the help of their poisoned, caustic, satyrical [sic] spirit. If the world once wakes up it should mete out to them the punishment in store for them, which they deserve

On 2, December 1919, he wrote manu proprio to General August von Mackensen, referring to his own abdication:

The deepest, most disgusting shame ever perpetrated by a people in history, the Germans have done onto themselves. Egged on and misled by the tribe of Juda' whom they hated, who were guests among them! That was their thanks! Let no German ever forget this, nor rest until these parasites have been destroyed and exterminated [vertilgt und ausgerottetl from German soil! This poisonous mushroom on the German oak-tree!

He called for a 'regular international all-worlds pogrom à la Russe' as 'the best cure'. Jews and Mosquitoes' were 'a nuisance that humanity must get rid of in some way or other', he proclaimed, and added, again in his own hand: 'I believe the best would be gas.' 

It seems difficult to come to any other conclusion than that from the age of twenty to the age of eighty, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who ruled over Germany for thirty crucial years between Bismarck and Hitler, was a staunch antisemite, and that his anti-semitism formed a central element of his outlook on the world. The fact that, in November 1938, he privately expressed disgust at the 'gangsterism' of the Kristallnacht cannot outweigh the mass of evidence now available on his deeply held anti-Jewish attitudes, especially when it is remembered that even Himmler was outraged by the mindless violence of that dark night. [...]

With his forced abdication in November 1918, the last German Kaiser embraced world conspiracy theories of the bizarrest kind and, in what seems like a logical extension of his earlier anti-semitism, called for the extermination of the Jews.

John C. G. Röhl (né le 31 mai 1938 à Londres) est un historien britannique reconnu comme l'un des plus grands experts de la période wilhelmienne.  Voir sa biographie en anglais sur Wikipédia.

Avec son cousin Nicolas II de Russie, grand inspirateur de pogroms.