Page 111

chancellor or minister, although many held important offices and subordinate ministerial posts in the empire and its principalities. Bismarck's memoirs are said to provide the best evidence. What Jews outwardly professed was that they were democrats and supporters of the opposition party, while their newspapers called for socialism.

German Jews regarded the World War as a holy war. The Jewish writer A. H. Fried stated this openly in his book A View of Peace, issued in December 1918 while the republican revolution was under way: "We Jews come with hearts full of gratitude to the democrats of the West who achieved victory, for in that victory lay joy for us and security for our lives."

Walter Rathenau, the emperor's Jewish friend who controlled economic conditions during the war, related in his book The Emperor: Reflections in 1919 that he met an old friend at the beginning of the war. Both were pessimistic. Before his friend had finished speaking, however, he said: "When the moment comes in which the emperor is victorious and you see him passing with his white-clad horsemen on their gray steeds beneath the Brandenburg Gate, on that day world history will lose its mind." In this man, who prided himself on the emperor's friendship, the author sees new proof