Later in the same issue, La Civiltà cattolica reported on the recent Nazi congress in Nuremberg, held in September 1936. “With indefatigable tenacity,” Hitler told the crowd, “the Jewish revolutionary headquarters prepares world revolution.” After citing these remarks, the journal quoted, without comment, Hitler’s assertion that 98 percent of the top positions in Russia were “in the hands of the Jews.” In the years leading up to the Holocaust, both the Nazis and the Jesuit journal would keep hammering on this claim. [54]
Yet of 417 members of the highest leadership bodies in the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s, only 6 percent came from Jewish backgrounds, and this figure dropped sharply in the 1930s, not least because Stalin’s purge trials had strong anti-Semitic undertones. In 1938, while La Civiltà cattolica and the Nazi government continued to warn that almost all the leaders of the USSR were Jewish, the most powerful body in the Soviet government, the nine-man Politburo, had only one member of Jewish origin. Of the thirty-seven members of the USSR Presidium, one came from a Jewish background. [55]
[55] 'Herf (2006, pp. 95–96) cites the important work of Pinkus 1988 on this topic.'
Pincus, Benjamin. 1988. The Jews of the Soviet Union. New York: Cambridge University Press.
