What do you think?
Rate this book
The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality
The Crime of My Very Existence investigates a rarely considered yet critical dimension of anti-Semitism that was instrumental in the conception and perpetration of the the association of Jews with criminality. Drawing from a rich body of documentary evidence, including memoirs and little-studied photographs, Michael Berkowitz traces the myths and realities pertinent to the discourse on "Jewish criminality" from the eighteenth century through the Weimar Republic, into the complex Nazi assault on the Jews, and extending into postwar Europe.
- GenresHolocaust
Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Read
March 27, 2018This review is outstanding, revelatory, but do I need to read the book now?
May 8, 2026
Michael Berkowitz opens his study with a billboard that Hitler's Germany posted for all to read: "Judentum ist Verbrechertum," meaning that to be Jewish was to be criminal by definition. This was the foundational accusation of the Nazi state, and Berkowitz traces it with an archivist's tenacity from its pre-Nazi warm-up acts, the Barmat and Sklarek scandals of the Weimar Republic, through Der Stürmer's cartoon galleries of Jewish "thieves" and the pseudo-statistical charts that Nazi criminologists commissioned to make the libel look respectable.
A regime selling itself as a "war on crime" needed criminals, and it manufactured them wholesale from a people whose actual crime was existence. The book follows this accusation into the ghettos of Warsaw, Lodz, and Kovno, where Jews forced by Nazi decree to steal bread or barter for medicine found the crime label sewn onto them as literally as the yellow star on their coats.
In the concentration camps, the color-coded triangle system sorted arrivals into ranked categories of guilt, with Jews sharing the dock with green-triangle "professional criminals" while SS men committed unclassified atrocities with full institutional sanction.
Berkowitz then pivots to one of the more baroque episodes of the entire war, the counterfeiting operation at Sachsenhausen in which 140 Jewish prisoners produced British pounds so convincing that Britain had to withdraw an entire currency series after the liberation.
The third act belongs to the displaced persons camps of postwar Germany, where survivors living in UNRRA-administered enclaves found themselves accused, by American officers and German civilians alike, of running the black market they had been driven into by German shopkeepers who withheld food from them on any terms. Berkowitz closes the circle by documenting the DP police forces at Feldafing, Landsberg, Zeilsheim, and dozens of other camps, Jewish men in uniform drilling for inspection before Eleanor Roosevelt and Generals Eisenhower and Patton, insisting with their very posture that the century's most audacious crime-labeling campaign had produced, in the end, the wrong verdict.
What anti-Semites say about Jews reveals everything about anti-Semites and very little about Jews. This book is a concentrated exhibit. The Nazis ran a protection racket on a civilizational scale: declare the victims criminal, then criminalize them in fact by stripping away every legal protection, and finally cite their responses to starvation and persecution as proof of the original charge. The libel manufactured its own evidence. That is brilliant evil.
Berkowitz writes with the controlled fury of a Jewish scholar who has read too many forged statistics and survived too many woke faculty meetings. The book deserves a wide readership, and the century it describes deserves a long trial.
Today the same libel circulates in university lecture halls, on social media feeds, and in the chambers of elected bodies, with Jews collectively accused of orchestrating wars, controlling banks, and engineering genocides, the same medieval inventory of sins in a contemporary font.
After the attempted genocide of October 7, 2023, Jewish students on campuses from Columbia to Amsterdam found themselves held personally responsible for the military decisions of a sovereign state, a standard of collective guilt applied with a speed and venom reserved exclusively for Jews.
The Sklarek logic, whereby the acrions of a few Jews indict all Jews, had only updated its distribution platform. In France, Jewish schools operate behind security barriers. In Britain, synagogues require police details on high holidays. In the United States, the FBI records Jews as the most frequent targets of religiously motivated hate crimes, year after year, despite representing under two percent of the population. Berkowitz showed how the crime label was welded onto a people to justify persecuting them. The weld survived the liberation, was painted over at Nuremberg, and the paint is visibly peeling.
Meanwhile, the actual genocide philophers, the actual terrorists, the abusers of women, the slave holders, the criminals who steal aid from their own people, the lynchers, the beheaders, the racists, the rapists, the kidnappers, the full blown criminals, all get sympathy chants, TikTok followers, politicians who praise them and commencement speech applause. What a tipsy world!
❤️ 🇮🇱
A regime selling itself as a "war on crime" needed criminals, and it manufactured them wholesale from a people whose actual crime was existence. The book follows this accusation into the ghettos of Warsaw, Lodz, and Kovno, where Jews forced by Nazi decree to steal bread or barter for medicine found the crime label sewn onto them as literally as the yellow star on their coats.
In the concentration camps, the color-coded triangle system sorted arrivals into ranked categories of guilt, with Jews sharing the dock with green-triangle "professional criminals" while SS men committed unclassified atrocities with full institutional sanction.
Berkowitz then pivots to one of the more baroque episodes of the entire war, the counterfeiting operation at Sachsenhausen in which 140 Jewish prisoners produced British pounds so convincing that Britain had to withdraw an entire currency series after the liberation.
The third act belongs to the displaced persons camps of postwar Germany, where survivors living in UNRRA-administered enclaves found themselves accused, by American officers and German civilians alike, of running the black market they had been driven into by German shopkeepers who withheld food from them on any terms. Berkowitz closes the circle by documenting the DP police forces at Feldafing, Landsberg, Zeilsheim, and dozens of other camps, Jewish men in uniform drilling for inspection before Eleanor Roosevelt and Generals Eisenhower and Patton, insisting with their very posture that the century's most audacious crime-labeling campaign had produced, in the end, the wrong verdict.
What anti-Semites say about Jews reveals everything about anti-Semites and very little about Jews. This book is a concentrated exhibit. The Nazis ran a protection racket on a civilizational scale: declare the victims criminal, then criminalize them in fact by stripping away every legal protection, and finally cite their responses to starvation and persecution as proof of the original charge. The libel manufactured its own evidence. That is brilliant evil.
Berkowitz writes with the controlled fury of a Jewish scholar who has read too many forged statistics and survived too many woke faculty meetings. The book deserves a wide readership, and the century it describes deserves a long trial.
Today the same libel circulates in university lecture halls, on social media feeds, and in the chambers of elected bodies, with Jews collectively accused of orchestrating wars, controlling banks, and engineering genocides, the same medieval inventory of sins in a contemporary font.
After the attempted genocide of October 7, 2023, Jewish students on campuses from Columbia to Amsterdam found themselves held personally responsible for the military decisions of a sovereign state, a standard of collective guilt applied with a speed and venom reserved exclusively for Jews.
The Sklarek logic, whereby the acrions of a few Jews indict all Jews, had only updated its distribution platform. In France, Jewish schools operate behind security barriers. In Britain, synagogues require police details on high holidays. In the United States, the FBI records Jews as the most frequent targets of religiously motivated hate crimes, year after year, despite representing under two percent of the population. Berkowitz showed how the crime label was welded onto a people to justify persecuting them. The weld survived the liberation, was painted over at Nuremberg, and the paint is visibly peeling.
Meanwhile, the actual genocide philophers, the actual terrorists, the abusers of women, the slave holders, the criminals who steal aid from their own people, the lynchers, the beheaders, the racists, the rapists, the kidnappers, the full blown criminals, all get sympathy chants, TikTok followers, politicians who praise them and commencement speech applause. What a tipsy world!
❤️ 🇮🇱
December 27, 2016
The Nazi Campaign to Delegitimize the Jews
The Nazis, contends Berkowitz, used the metaphor of criminality both as cover and justification for their policy of ethnic cleansing, making it an essential component of their anti-Jewish propaganda. Constant repetition and the use of visual imagery had the effect of embedding Jewish criminality as a meme, and with it the notion that as criminals the rights of Jews were slim to nonexistent. To facilitate this projection, head braces were developed to guarantee that the angle of mug shots of Jewish prisoners would emphasize a criminal nature. Nazi laws, some not even published, made it difficult for a Jew not to be guilty of some violation, whether it was walking with one's hands in one's pocket along the river or attempting to emigrate without registering every single possession or possession of sums larger than pocket change. In most cases these were just pretexts which were dispensed with in the mass arrests and executions that followed.
Berkowitz also looks at the conditions in the camps and the role of the Judenrat and other prisoners in controlling the Jewish population of the enforced ghettos and in the camps. Often the Nazis would select people of poor character as their intermediaries, then exploit the optics of a situation that they themselves had created as evidence of innate Jewish evil, citing evidence how they dealt with each other. Ironically, when it came to the camps, some Jewish prisoners were saved from selection for the gas chambers, even at the last minute, because they had entered the camps as prisoners rather than Jews.
In the last year of the war, with few Jews left, the Nazis worried that the younger generation would lose their enthusiasm for National Socialism's mission, and so they turned to vilifying Zionism. It is interesting to note that this idea was floated by Alfred Rosenberg but did not get approved into the general propaganda mill. The Nazis knew the lack of power and influence of the Zionist movement through the Ha-avera Agreement, and had completely infiltrated their intelligence network. They did not consider Zionism a credible threat, instead focusing on World Jewry as puppeteering Bolsheviks and Capitalists. However in February 1944 both Helmut Sundermann and Otto Dietrich (rather than rival Goebbels who showed little interest in this line ) began to draw on the work of one Wolf Meyer-Christian who had been focusing on Zionism since the Peel Commission of '37 and in turn promoted the works of analyst Giselher Wirsing ("English, Jews, Arabs in Palestine, 1938). With prescience Wirsing proclaims that neither pan-Arabism nor pan-Islamism are likely to succeed in the short term without Nazi help. In 1944 Meyer-Christian offers that anti-Semitism is not only foundational to National Socialism and one of the Nazis most potent tools, but going forward should also be part of a post war strategy.
The final two chapters considers the of the book considers the situation of Jews as displaced persons (DPs) in the aftermath of the war, concentration on the American Zone. Total number of Jewish DPs were estimated at 250,000, with about half under the Americans. Though liberated, many were still interred due to a perceived threat of Jewish disease (typhoid, STDs) and Jewish crime. Again Jews are portrayed as negatively as criminals, largely because of their participation in the black and grey markets. Abe Klausner, a Jewish Army Chaplain, was candid about the problems in the camps and communicated with the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee on the need for rehabilitation programs. However he failed to see these activities themselves as rehabilitative and took a rather straight laced view towards "rooting out the problem" On the other hand, Philip Bernstein, an advisor to Generals Joseph McNarney, Lucious Clay and Mark Clark emphasized the use of clemency and understanding. The Jews who had survived had done so largely by subverting the unbending rules that had been applied against them. Moreover Jewish "criminality" was no different than any other group, with the interesting exception of 50% lower rates of violent crime. Bernstein inverted the accusation "Why are there so many Jewish criminals" into "to what extent is Judaism responsible for the prevention of crime and delinquency among Jews." As such he was able to add some degree of sensitivity to the handling of relations between the American Occupation forces and their post war use of German policing wrt Jewish survivors.
A worthwhile read to understand how anti-Semitic tactics can be made to resonate and persist by the repetition of false labels. The insights on the social structure of the DPs after the war were both unexpected from the title and extremely interesting as this is a topic that is rarely covered.
The Nazis, contends Berkowitz, used the metaphor of criminality both as cover and justification for their policy of ethnic cleansing, making it an essential component of their anti-Jewish propaganda. Constant repetition and the use of visual imagery had the effect of embedding Jewish criminality as a meme, and with it the notion that as criminals the rights of Jews were slim to nonexistent. To facilitate this projection, head braces were developed to guarantee that the angle of mug shots of Jewish prisoners would emphasize a criminal nature. Nazi laws, some not even published, made it difficult for a Jew not to be guilty of some violation, whether it was walking with one's hands in one's pocket along the river or attempting to emigrate without registering every single possession or possession of sums larger than pocket change. In most cases these were just pretexts which were dispensed with in the mass arrests and executions that followed.
Berkowitz also looks at the conditions in the camps and the role of the Judenrat and other prisoners in controlling the Jewish population of the enforced ghettos and in the camps. Often the Nazis would select people of poor character as their intermediaries, then exploit the optics of a situation that they themselves had created as evidence of innate Jewish evil, citing evidence how they dealt with each other. Ironically, when it came to the camps, some Jewish prisoners were saved from selection for the gas chambers, even at the last minute, because they had entered the camps as prisoners rather than Jews.
In the last year of the war, with few Jews left, the Nazis worried that the younger generation would lose their enthusiasm for National Socialism's mission, and so they turned to vilifying Zionism. It is interesting to note that this idea was floated by Alfred Rosenberg but did not get approved into the general propaganda mill. The Nazis knew the lack of power and influence of the Zionist movement through the Ha-avera Agreement, and had completely infiltrated their intelligence network. They did not consider Zionism a credible threat, instead focusing on World Jewry as puppeteering Bolsheviks and Capitalists. However in February 1944 both Helmut Sundermann and Otto Dietrich (rather than rival Goebbels who showed little interest in this line ) began to draw on the work of one Wolf Meyer-Christian who had been focusing on Zionism since the Peel Commission of '37 and in turn promoted the works of analyst Giselher Wirsing ("English, Jews, Arabs in Palestine, 1938). With prescience Wirsing proclaims that neither pan-Arabism nor pan-Islamism are likely to succeed in the short term without Nazi help. In 1944 Meyer-Christian offers that anti-Semitism is not only foundational to National Socialism and one of the Nazis most potent tools, but going forward should also be part of a post war strategy.
The final two chapters considers the of the book considers the situation of Jews as displaced persons (DPs) in the aftermath of the war, concentration on the American Zone. Total number of Jewish DPs were estimated at 250,000, with about half under the Americans. Though liberated, many were still interred due to a perceived threat of Jewish disease (typhoid, STDs) and Jewish crime. Again Jews are portrayed as negatively as criminals, largely because of their participation in the black and grey markets. Abe Klausner, a Jewish Army Chaplain, was candid about the problems in the camps and communicated with the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee on the need for rehabilitation programs. However he failed to see these activities themselves as rehabilitative and took a rather straight laced view towards "rooting out the problem" On the other hand, Philip Bernstein, an advisor to Generals Joseph McNarney, Lucious Clay and Mark Clark emphasized the use of clemency and understanding. The Jews who had survived had done so largely by subverting the unbending rules that had been applied against them. Moreover Jewish "criminality" was no different than any other group, with the interesting exception of 50% lower rates of violent crime. Bernstein inverted the accusation "Why are there so many Jewish criminals" into "to what extent is Judaism responsible for the prevention of crime and delinquency among Jews." As such he was able to add some degree of sensitivity to the handling of relations between the American Occupation forces and their post war use of German policing wrt Jewish survivors.
A worthwhile read to understand how anti-Semitic tactics can be made to resonate and persist by the repetition of false labels. The insights on the social structure of the DPs after the war were both unexpected from the title and extremely interesting as this is a topic that is rarely covered.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews