Editing Wilhelm Marr (section)

=== League of antisemites ===
[[Image:Bookcover-1880-Marr-German uber Juden.jpg|left|thumb|Cover page of ''Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum'']]
Marr rejected the premise of assimilation as a means for Jews to become Germans. In his pamphlet ''Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum'' (The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism,<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1797|title = GHDI - Document}}</ref> 1879) he introduced the idea that Germans and Jews were locked in a longstanding conflict, the origins of which he attributed to race—and that the Jews were winning. He argued that [[Jewish emancipation]] resulting from German [[liberalism]] had allowed the Jews to control German finance and industry. Furthermore, since this conflict was based on the different qualities of the Jewish and German races, it could not be resolved even by the total [[cultural assimilation|assimilation]] of the Jewish population. 

According to Marr, the struggle between Jews and Germans would only be resolved by the victory of one and the ultimate death of the other. A Jewish victory, he concluded, would result in ''finis Germaniae'' (the end of the German people). To prevent this from happening, in 1879 Marr founded the League of Antisemites (Antisemiten-Liga), the first German organization committed specifically to combating the alleged threat to Germany posed by the Jews and advocating their forced removal from the country.

The [[Pan-German League]], founded in 1891, originally allowed for the membership of Jews, provided they were fully assimilated into German culture. It was only in 1912, eight years after Marr's death, that the League declared racism as an underlying principle. Nevertheless, Marr was a major link in the evolving chain of German racism that erupted into [[genocide]] during the Nazi era.

According to [[Moshe Zimmermann]] in ''Wilhelm Marr: The Patriarch of Anti-Semitism'', a book written 100 years after the fact, toward the end of his life Marr came to renounce antisemitism, arguing that social upheaval in Germany had been the result of the Industrial Revolution and conflict between political movements. This book was never published by Marr, only as text cited by Zimmermann.<ref name="zim">Moshe Zimmermann, ''Wilhelm Marr: The Patriarch of Anti-Semitism'', Oxford University Press, USA, 1986, pp. 9.</ref>