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Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)
It was as though he was so filled with hatred that he no longer knew where to direct his bitterness.
That was familiar. It was the hatred of oneself included in a blind fury at a senseless world. It was our Jewish hatred.[1]
The Compulsion is Levin’s second autobiographical work and was, I suspect, written to repair the damage to his reputation that his embroilment in the Anne Frank project had caused. I have no way of determining whether his story is true or not, so I’ll just summarize his version of events.
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4 comments
Thank you for putting these pieces together. I really struggle to comprehend the psychopathy of Meyer Levin. A beast. To paraphrase Golda Meir, I suppose he’ll never forgive the Germans and the Nazis for making him have these fantasies of wanting to rape all those girls. Utterly repellent and perverse in the extreme.
Yeah. I went into this research thinking that maybe I would find some clues concerning the diary affair, but I certainly wasn’t prepared for the sheer hatred and insanity of the guy. He is almost like a caricature. (Fittingly, his nickname during his press days in Europe was “Superjew”.)
Oh dear. What was going on in that warped organ between his ears? This character’s picture should be in the dictionary for the word “mattoid”.
I knew a family that had been upper-bourgeois Berlin Jews before the war. The behavior of their father, with regard to refusing to emigrate to America in the 1930s, parallels that of Otto Frank. Both were well connected with Americans; Otto had his Nathan Straus, Jr., while the Julius B___ I speak of knew Herbert Hoover from their days in post-World War famine relief. Hoover would eventually pull strings to get Julius’s wife, children and other relations admitted to America in 1940 (from Holland, to which they had temporarily decamped from Germany).
Julius however stayed behind in Berlin, organizing protests against the government’s anti-Jewish strictures. If this sounds foolhardy and even suicidal, in Julius’s case it wasn’t, or not quite. He had been the attorney for Hermann Goering’s stepfather, and could still ring up the Reichsmarschall on the phone. So it seems they cut him a lot of slack. Eventually, a year or so into the War, they put him into Sachsenhausen for being a nuisance. And there, some months later, he died or was executed, or possibly killed himself.
Both Otto and Julius had special privileges during the Nazi time, having been officers in the 1914-18 Kaiser’s army. This too made them virtually untouchable. It’s no coincidence that Otto Frank was the one member of his family to survive the war. A secular Jew who did not look Jewish, and whose main enterprise was selling foodstuffs to the Wehrmacht, Otto was in a very different position from Mrs. Frank and their daughters Margot and Annelise, who would be spotted immediately on the street, as Jewish-looking, at least. That was a main reason for moving his family into the Achterhuis in Amsterdam in 1942. Another reason was his financial interest in the Opekta company for which he was the now-silent partner (and which firm was the reason why he’d stayed in Europe in the first place). He was fairly confident that business colleagues and neighbors—and the German clients as well—would not betray him, as indeed they did not, for two years at least.
The foregoing notes about Otto likely account for a lot of Meyer Levin’s paranoia and hostility. Otto was the Jew who didn’t look or act Jewish (in Meyer’s judgment), moved smoothly through the better social circles, and so inevitably would have contempt for a little shtetl product like Meyer Levin. Moreover Otto Frank had not only been a successful businessman, he was one who for years made money from the Nazis.
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