The Buried Nazism of Emil Nolde

Brendan and Constance Simms at the New Statesman:

With the coming of the Third Reich, Nolde let the mask drop completely. He not only denounced his fellow artist Pechstein as a “Jew” (he wasn’t), but in the summer of 1933 drafted a plan, which he later destroyed, for how to remove Jews from German society. And unfortunately for him, plenty of other evidence has survived. In the autumn of 1938, for example, Nolde wrote that one could “understand” that “the operation for the removal of the Jews, who have burrowed so deep into all peoples” could not be carried out without “a lot of pain”. Not long afterwards, Nolde wrote to the Nazi press chief Otto Dietrich that he had spent his entire life fighting against the “too-great dominance of Jews in all matters artistic”. In November 1940, he praised Hitler’s speech on the anniversary of the failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, especially the passages attacking “the Jews”.

If this was not clear enough, Nolde responded to the famous Dambuster raids in 1943, which Nazi propaganda attributed to the machinations of German-Jewish refugees, with “the war is becoming more and more ‘the Jewish War’”, adding that “they” were assiduous in pursuing their “plans for domination”.

more here.