Antisemitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism
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67 This change of the official motto can be found in the Organisationsbuch der NSDAP, p. 7.
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68 See Heiden, op. cit., p. 722.—Hitler stated in a speech of November 23, 1937, before the future political leaders at the Ordensburg Sonthofen: Not “ridiculously small tribes, tiny countries, slates or dynasties ...but only races [can] function as world conquerors. A race, however—at least in the conscious sense—we still have to become” (see Hitlers Tischgespräche, p. 445).—In complete harmony with this by no means accidental phrasing is a decree of August 9, 1941, in which Hitler prohibited the further use of the term “German race” because it would lead to the “sacrifice of the racial idea as such in favor of a mere nationality principle, and to the destruction of important conceptual preconditions of our whole racial and folk policy” (Verfügungen, Anordnungen, Bekanntgaben). It is obvious that the concept of a German race would have constituted an impediment to the progressive “selection” and extermination of undesirable parts among the German population which in those very years was being planned for the future.
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69 Himmler consequently “very soon formed a Germanic SS in the various countries” whom he told: “We do not expect you to become German out of opportunism. But we do expect you to subordinate your national ideal to the greater racial and historical ideal, to the Germanic Reich” (Heiden, op. cit.). Its future task would be to form through “the most copious breeding” a “racial superstratum” which in another twenty to thirty years would “present the whole of Europe with its leading class” (Himmler’s speech at the meeting of the SS Major Generals at Posen in 1943, in Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 558 ff.).
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70 Himmler, ibid., p. 572.
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71 Deutscher, op. cit., describes Stalin’s remarkable “sensibility to all those psychological undercurrents ...of which he set himself up as a mouthpiece” (p. 292). “The very name of Trotsky’s theory, ‘permanent revolution,’ sounded like an ominous warning to a tired generation.... Stalin appealed directly to the horror of risk and uncertainty that had taken possession of many Bolsheviks” (p. 291).
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72 Thus Hitler could afford to use the favorite cliché “decent Jew” once he had begun to exterminate them, namely, in December, 1941, in the Tischgespräche, p. 346.
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73 Hitler, therefore, speaking to members of the General Staff (Blomberg, Fritsch, Raeder) and high-ranking civilians (Neurath, Göring) in November, 1937, could permit himself to state openly that he heeded depopulated space and reject the idea of conquering alien peoples. That this would automatically result in a policy of exterminating such peoples was evidently not realized by any one of his listeners.
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74 This began with an order in July, 1934, by which the SS was elevated to the rank of an independent organization within the NSDAP, and completed by a top secret decree of August, 1938, which declared that the SS special formations, the Death Head Units and the Shock Troops (Verfügungstruppen) were neither part of the army nor of the police; the Death Head Units had “to clear up special tasks of police nature” and the Shock Troops were “a standing armed unit exclusively at my disposal” (Nazi Conspiracy, III, 459). Two subsequent decrees of October, 1939, and April, 1940, established special jurisdiction in general matters for all SS members (ibid., II, 184). From then on all pamphlets issued by the SS indoctrination office carry such notations as “Solely for use of the police,” “Not for publication,” “Exclusively for leaders and those entrusted with ideological education.” It would be worth while to compile a bibliography of the voluminous secret literature, which includes a great many legislative measures, that was printed during the Nazi era. Interestingly enough, there is not a single SA booklet among this type of literature, and this is probably the most conclusive proof that after 1934 the SA ceased to be an elite formation.
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75 Compare Franz Borkenau, “Die neue Komintern,” in Der Monat, Berlin, 1949, Heft 4.
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76 Instances are too obvious and too numerous to be quoted. This tactic, however, should not be simply identified with the enormous lack of faithfulness and truthfulness which all biographers of Hitler and Stalin report as outstanding traits of their character.
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77 See the Circular Letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to ali German authorities abroad of January, 1939, in Nazi Conspiracy, VI, 87 ff.
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78 In 1940, the Nazi government decreed that offenses ranging from high treason against the Reich to “malicious agitatorial utterances against leading persons of the State or the Nazi Party” should be punished with retroactive force in all German occupied territories, no matter whether they had been committed by Germans or by natives of these countries. See Giles, op. cit.—For the disastrous consequences of the Nazi “Siedlungspolitik” in Poland and the Ukraine, see Trial, op. cit., Vols. XXVI and XXIX.
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79 The term is Kravchenko’s, op. cit., p. 303, who, describing conditions in Russia after the superpurge of 1936-1938, remarks: “Had a foreign conqueror taken over the machinery of Soviet life ...the change could hardly have been more thorough or more cruel.”
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80 Hitler contemplated during the war the introduction of a National Health Bill: “After national X-ray examination, the Fuehrer is to be given a list of sick persons, particularly those with lung and heart diseases. On the basis of the new Reich Health Law ...these families will no longer be able to remain among the public and can no longer be allowed to produce children. What will happen to these families will be the subject of further orders of the Fuehrer.” It does not need much imagination to guess what these further orders would have been. The number of people no longer allowed “to remain among the public” would have formed a considerable portion of the German population (Nazi Conspiracy, VI, 175).
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81 The total number of Russian dead in four years of war is estimated at between 12 and 21 million. Stalin exterminated in a single year in the Ukraine alone about 8 million people (estimate). See Communism in Action. U. S. Government. Washington, 1946, House Document No. 754, pp. 140-141.—Unlike the Nazi regime which kept rather accurate accounts on the number of its victims, there are no reliable figures for the millions of people who were killed in the Russian system. Nevertheless the following estimate, quoted by Souvarine, op. cit., p. 669, carries some weight insofar as it stems from Walter Krivitsky, who had direct access to the information contained in the GPU files. According to these figures the census of 1937 in the Soviet Union, which Soviet statisticians had expected to reach 171 million persons, showed that there were actually only 145 millions. This would point to a loss in population of 26 millions, a figure which does not include the losses quoted above.
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82 Deutscher, op. cit., p. 256.
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83 B. Souvarine, op. cit., p. 605, quotes Stalin as saying at the height of terror in 1937: “You must reach the understanding that of all the precious assets existing in the world, the most precious and decisive are the cadres.” All reports show that in Soviet Russia the secret police must be regarded as the real elite formation of the party. Characteristic for this nature of the police is that since the early twenties NKVD agents were “not recruited on a voluntary basis,” but drawn from the ranks of the party. Furthermore, “the NKVD could not be chosen as a career” (see Beck and Godin, op. cit., p. 160).
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84 Quoted from Heiden, op. cit., p. 311.
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85 According to reports of the last meeting. Hitler decided to commit suicide after he had learned that the SS troops could no longer be trusted. See H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, 1947, pp. 116 ff.
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86 Hitler frequently commented on the relationship between state and party, and always emphasized that not the state, but the race, or the “united folk community,” was of primary importance (cf. the afore-quoted speech, reprinted as annex to the Tischgespräche). In his speech at the Nuremberg Parteitag of 1935, he gave this theory its most succinct expression: “It is not the state that commands us, but we who command the state.” It is self-evident that, in practice, such powers of command are possible only if the institutions of the party remain independent from those of the state.
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86a Otto Gauweiler, Rechtseinrichtungen and Rechtsaufgaben der Bewegung, 1939, notes expressly that Himmler’s special position as Reichsfuehrer-SS and head of the German police rested on the fact that the police administration had achieved “a genuine unity of party and state” which was not even attempted anywhere else in the government.
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87 During the peasant revolts of the twenties in Russia, Voroshilov allegedly refused the support of the Red Army; this led to the introduction of special divisions of the GPU for punitive expeditions. Sec Ciliga, op. cit., p. 95.
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88 In 1935, the Gestapo agents abroad received 20 million marks while the regular espionage service of the Reichswehr had to get along with a budget of 8 million. See Pierre Dehillotte, Gestapo, Paris, 1940, p. II.
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89 See Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 616 ff.
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90 See note 62.
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91 Maurice Laporte, Histoire de VOkhrana, Paris, 1935, rightly called the method of provocation “the foundation stone” of the secret police (p. 19).
In Soviet Russia, provocation, far from being the secret weapon of the secret police, has been used as the widely propagandized public method of the regime to gauge the temper of public opinion. The reluctance of the population to avail itself of the periodically recurring invitations to criticize or react to “liberal” interludes in the terror regime shows that such gestures are understood as provocation on a mass scale. Provocation has indeed become the totalitarian version of public opinion polls.
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92 Interesting in this respect are the attempts made by Nazi civil servants in Germany to reduce the competence and the personnel of the Gestapo on the ground that Nazification of the country had been achieved, so that Himmler, who on the contrary wanted to expand the secret services at this moment (around 1934), had to exaggerate the danger coming from the “internal enemies.” See Nazi Conspiracy, II, 259; V, 205; 111, 547.
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93 See Gallier-Boissière, Mysteries of the French Secret Police, 1938, p. 234.
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94 It seems, after all, no accident that the foundation of the Okhrana in 1880 ushered in a period of unsurpassed revolutionary activities in Russia. In order to prove its usefulness, it had occasionally to organize murders, and its agents “served despite themselves the ideas of those whom they denounced....If a pamphlet was distributed by a police agent or if the execution of a minister was organized by an Azev—the result was the same” (M. Laporte, op. cit., p. 25). The more important executions moreover seem to have been police jobs—Stolypin and von Plehve. Decisive for the revolutionary tradition was the fact that in times of calm the police agents had to “stir up anew the energies and stimulate the zeal” of the revolutionaries (ibid., p. 71).
See also Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made A Revolution: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, 1948, who calls this phenomenon “Police Socialism.”
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95 Hans Frank, who later became Governor General of Poland, made a typical differentiation between a person “dangerous to the State” and a person who is “hostile to the State.” The former implies an objective quality which is independent of will and behavior; the political police of the Nazis is concerned not just with actions hostile Co the state but with “all attempts—no matter what their aim—which in their effects endanger the State.” See Deutsches Verwaltungsrecht, pp. 420-430. Translation quoted from Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 881 ff.—In the words of Maunz, op. cit., p. 44: “By eliminating dangerous persons, the security measure ...means to ward off a state of danger to the national community, independently of any offense that may have been committed by these persons. [It is a question of] warding off an objective danger.”
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96 R. Hoehn, a Nazi jurist and member of the SS, said in an obituary on Reinhard Heydrich, who prior to his rule of Czechoslovakia had been one of the closest collaborators with Himmler: He regarded his opponents “not as individuals but as carriers of tendencies endangering the state and therefore beyond the pale of the national community.” In Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of June 6, 1942; quoted from E. Kohn-Bramstedt, Dictatorship and Political Police, London, 1945.
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97 As early as 1941, during a staff meeting in Hitler’s headquarters, it was proposed to impose upon the Polish population those regulations by which the Jews had been prepared for the extermination camps: change of names if these were of German origin; death sentences for sexual intercourse between Germans and Poles (Rassen-schande); obligation to wear a P-sign in Germany similar to the Yellow Star for Jews. See Nazi Conspiracy, VIII, 237 ff., and Hans Frank’s diary in Trial, op. cit., XXIX, 683. Naturally, the Poles themselves soon began to worry about what would happen to them when the Nazis had finished the extermination of the Jews (Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 916).—For Hitler’s plans regarding the German people, see note 80.
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98 Beck and Codin, op. cit., p. 87. speak of the “objective characteristics” which invited arrest in the USSR; among them was membership in the NKVD (p. 153). Subjective insight into the objective necessity of arrest and confession could most easily be achieved with former members of the secret police. In the words of an ex-NKVD agent: “My superiors know me and my work well enough, and if the party and the NKVD now require me to confess to such things they must have good reasons for what they are doing. My duty as a loyal Soviet citizen is not to withhold the confession required of me” (ibid., p. 231).
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99 Well known is the situation in France where ministers lived in constant fear of the secret “dossiers” of the police. For the situation in Czarist Russia, see Laporte, op. cit., pp. 22-23: “Eventually the Okhrana will wield a power far superior to the power of the more regular authorities.... The Okhrana ...will inform the Czar only of what it chooses to.”
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100 “Unlike the Okhrana, which had been a state within a state, the GPU is a department of the Soviet government;...and its activities are much less independent” (Roger N. Baldwin, “Political Police,” in Encyclopedia of Social Sciences).
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101 Typical of the concept of the suspect is the following story related by C. Pobyedonostzev in L’Autocratie Russe: Mémoires politiques, correspondence officiele et documents inédits ... 1881-1894, Paris, 1927: General Cherevin of the Okhrana is asked, because the opposing party has hired a Jewish lawyer, to intervene in favor of a lady who is about to lose a lawsuit. Says the General: “The same night I ordered the arrest of this cursed Jew and held him as a so-called politically suspect person.... After all, could I treat in the same manner friends and a dirty Jew who may be innocent today but who was guilty yesterday or will be guilty tomorrow?”
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102 The charges in the Moscow Trials “were based ...on a grotesquely brutalized and distorting anticipation of possible developments. [Stalin’s] reasoning probably developed along the following lines: they may want to overthrow me in a crisis—I shall charge them with having made the attempt....A change of government may weaken Russia’s fighting capacity; and if they succeed, they may be compelled to sign a truce with Hitler, and perhaps even agree to a cession of territory....I shall accuse them of having entered already into a treacherous alliance with Germany and ceded Soviet territory.” This is I. Deutscher’s brilliant explanation of the Moscow Trials, op. cit., p. 377.
A good example of the Nazi version of the possible crime can be found in Hans Frank, op. at.: “A complete catalogue of attempts ‘dangerous to the State’ can never be drawn up because it can never be foreseen what may endanger the leadership and the people some time in the future.” (Translation quoted from Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 881.)
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103 The criminal methods of the secret police are of course no monopoly of the French tradition. In Austria, for example, the feared political police under Maria Theresa was organized by Kaunitz from the cadres of the so-called “chastity commissars” who used to live by blackmail. See Moritz Bermann, Maria Theresia and Kaiser Joseph II, Vienna-Leipzig, 1881. I owe this reference to Robert Pick.
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104 That the huge police organization is paid with profits from slave labor is certain; surprising is that the police budget seems not even entirely covered by it; Kravchenko, op. cit., mentions special taxes, imposed by the NKVD on convicted citizens who continue to live and work in freedom.
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105 See Fritz Thyssen, I Paid Hitler. London, 1941.
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106 See Nazi Conspiracy, I, 916-917.—The economic activity of the SS was consolidated in a central office for economic and administrative affairs. To the Treasury and Internal Revenue, the SS declared its financial assets as “party property earmarked for special purposes” (letter of May 5, 1943, quoted from M. Wolfson, Uebersicht der Gliederung verhrecherischer Nazi-Organisationen. Omgus, December, 1947).