Statements like these didn’t just allow the Nazis to promote their virulent anti-Semitism. They also helped link their racial anti-Semitism with their eugenic beliefs – or, in Nazi terminology, ‘racial hygiene’. The connection between ‘racial hygiene’ and the persecution of the Jews was not immediately apparent at the start of the Third Reich, but the two ideas were always intertwined for the Nazis. For just as they thought it was essential that Jewish blood was not allowed to mix with ‘Aryan’ blood so it was also vital that those ‘Aryans’ who were the weakest were not allowed to breed at all. Just as, to use Walther Darré’s analogy, a Nazi believer would not mate a Hanover horse with an inferior breed of horse, he would not mate a healthy Hanover horse with a sick one.
So important to Hitler was this belief that only healthy ‘Aryan’ Germans should be allowed to reproduce that at the 1929 Nuremberg party conference he had warned: ‘Through our modern sentimental humanitarianism, we make an effort to maintain the weak at the expense of the healthy … Criminals are allowed to reproduce, degenerates are laboriously coddled in an artificial way. Thus we slowly grow the weak and kill the strong.’15 He even went as far as to say: ‘If Germany gained a million children a year and eliminated 700,000–800,000 of the weakest, then the final result would probably be an increase in strength. The most dangerous thing is for us to cut ourselves off from the natural process of selection …’ The idea that Hitler was suggesting in 1929 – just four years before he became Chancellor – the possibility of murdering seven or eight out of every ten new babies born in Germany is hugely revealing. For Hitler, the creation of the völkische state meant, in principle, killing enormous numbers of ‘weak’ Germans.
Given his belief that Germany should be genetically remodelled, it was scarcely surprising that less than six months after he came to power Hitler signed the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring. This legislation called for Genetic Health Courts to order the compulsory sterilization of any individual who had one of a number of named disorders. Some of these disorders were not ‘genetic’ at all, and allowed Germans deemed socially undesirable, such as alcoholics, to be sterilized.
The Nazis were not the first to pass legislation on forced sterilization – many states in America had already done so – but they did push the idea forward with greater zeal than anyone else. Paul Eggert, from the Rhineland, for instance, was forcibly sterilized as a child under this legislation. He did not have a ‘genetic’ illness, but was simply an objectionable citizen as far as the Nazis were concerned. He came from a deprived background and his father was an alcoholic. As a child he begged from local farmers, and if he didn’t return home with food then his father beat him. Eventually, as he puts it, ‘the [local] people had enough of it.’16 So he was taken away from his parents and put in a special children’s home near Dortmund where he was told that he needed to have a hernia operation. It wasn’t until after the war that he learnt that he had not had an operation for a hernia, but had been sterilized.
From Hitler’s perspective, the sterilization law was only a beginning. While the new legislation meant that future generations would be spared the ‘burden’, as he saw it, of caring for some of the state’s most needy citizens, it did not deal with the immediate situation. Hitler’s own aspirations were encapsulated in the film Opfer der Vergangenheit (Victims of the Past), released in 1937. This documentary, shown in every cinema in Germany, argued for the killing of the mentally disabled. There were two reasons, the film’s commentary said, why this action was necessary. First, because it offended the ‘Creator’s law of natural selection and order’ to keep these people alive, and second, because ‘the money it takes to care for these people could be put to better use helping strong and healthy children.’17
Some German doctors approved of this murderous idea. In 1935 the psychiatrist Dr Karl Knab wrote that German ‘asylums’ contained not just ‘idiots on the lowest level’ but ‘spiritual ruins’. Moreover, this ‘patient material … as mere cost-occasioning ballast, should be eradicated by being killed in a painless fashion’. This was ‘justifiable’, said Dr Knab, for financial reasons in the context of ‘a nation fighting for its very existence’.18
Gerhard Wagner, Reich Doctors’ Leader, spoke in support of Opfer der Vergangenheit at the film’s premiere. He, more than anyone, knew his Führer’s own views on this subject, since in 1935 Hitler had told him that during a future war they should plan on murdering the seriously mentally ill.19 It is significant that Hitler believed that a forthcoming war would allow him to pursue such a radical course of action – not least because it would be under cover of this war that he would also preside over the mass extermination of the Jews.
Meanwhile, compulsory sterilization was carried out in Germany on an enormous scale – between 300,000 and 400,000 people suffered as a result.20 This led to a seismic shift in the role of the medical profession. No longer was the sole interest of doctors the health of their patients. If doctors decided they wished to sterilize a patient under the criteria set by the new legislation, they were legally obliged to ignore their patient’s objections. Gerhard Wagner saw no conflict of interest here, because he believed the prime consideration for doctors should be the wellbeing of the nation.21 As a consequence, the Nazis claimed that doctors had a greater responsibility than previously – no longer ministering merely to the needs of the individual, but now to the entire Volkskörper, the body of the people, all in pursuit of the goal of the ‘völkische state’.22
What the ‘völkische state’ represented was a country in which the state now had the legal right to question every life choice that you made. Nazis could inquire into your detailed family background to determine whom you could and could not marry in order to assess whether or not you had the ‘right’ to reproduce. If you became pregnant and the baby you carried was deemed racially useful, you were forbidden from having an abortion. No longer could you choose not to work; that would make you ‘work shy’ and liable to ‘protective custody’. You could not even choose your friends, for if your neighbours disapproved of the company you kept you could be denounced as ‘asocial’ – someone who was not a reliable member of the racial community.
Yet, despite all of these restrictions, the majority of Germans still supported Hitler. In the 1934 referendum on the merging of the posts of President and Chancellor, for example, 88 per cent of the electorate wanted Hitler to become head of state after Hindenburg’s death. At the elections in 1936, which also contained a referendum question asking if voters approved of Hitler’s action in ordering the military reoccupation of Germany’s Rhineland, support for the Nazis was more than 98 per cent. These elections, we should remember, were held in a non-democratic state with none of the safeguards present in truly free elections, and the data cannot be used to imply a precise statistical level of support for the regime – but nonetheless the results remain enlightening. It is easy to see why the leading scholar on Hitler concludes from all the available evidence that the 1936 result represented ‘an overhelming show of acclamation for Hitler’.23 Many Germans in the 1930s would no doubt have agreed with Erna Krantz, who, looking back after the war, said, ‘It was, I thought, a better time [than today]. To say this is of course taking a risk. But I’ll say it anyway.’24
For a young woman like Erna Krantz in the 1930s it was not just a question of the positives of life under the Nazis outweighing the negatives. To a large extent the negatives of the regime as we see it – the concentration camps, the isolation of minority groups targeted by the Nazis and so on – were perceived as part of the positive. The concentration camps were thought necessary to remove the undesirables from the streets; the new racial-based teaching was welcomed as it told the young they were special; and as for the exclusion of the Jews, well, as the banker Johannes Zahn says, there was a perception among a section of the population that they had ‘gone too far’25 in Germany. So as long as you conformed to the Nazi ideal – and millions of Germans did just that – it w
as possible to enjoy yourself in Hitler’s Third Reich during the 1930s. Many of those who did would later say that they had no idea that the persecution of the Jews, encapsulated in the Nuremberg Laws and other restrictive legislation, would lead to the Holocaust. And while in one sense that is true – there is no evidence at this point that Hitler had a blueprint for what was to come – it is also misleading. Because a fundamental reason that millions of Germans could enjoy life in Hitler’s Germany was that they enthusiastically supported the racial theories that were at the core of Nazi thought. They embraced the idea that they were better than others. As a consequence, it was possible to treat as lesser human beings those they were told weren’t like them. The argument was not about others being inferior – that was accepted by large numbers of people – the argument was about how these ‘lesser’ people should be treated.
As for the Jews, the Nuremberg Laws confirmed that they were to be excluded from the new Germany. Increasingly, Jews confined themselves to their own communities. There, life was tolerable for many of them. Günther Ruschin, a teenager living in the heart of the Jewish community in Berlin, remembers that he had a ‘good home’ and ‘we had no difficulties … We went to [a Jewish] school, we came home.’ His father, who had fought in the German Army during the First World War, was a cantor at the local synagogue and ‘told everybody, I’m a German Jew, nothing will happen to me’.26
Günther’s father, along with many other German Jews, remained convinced that it would be best for them all to remain at home, safe – as he saw it – within the Jewish community in Berlin. And, broadly speaking, the evidence around them from the summer of 1935 to the summer of 1937 seemed to support that view. Though there were still isolated actions against Jews, and regulations further excluding the Jews continued to be issued – for example, from October 1936 civil servants were banned from visiting Jewish doctors – there was no systematic mass violence against the German Jews. But what many took to be a sign of the regime settling down was merely a pause before the implementation of more radical measures.
One reason for the relative inaction of the regime in relation to the Jews during this period was Hitler’s desire to ensure the success of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In the United States there had been calls – supported by public figures like Mayor La Guardia of New York – for America to boycott the games. But the president of the American Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, convinced the American Athletic Union to send a team to Berlin. With the participation not just of the Americans, but forty-eight other countries, the Berlin games were a coup for the Third Reich. Not only did Germany win the most medals, but the event was a propaganda triumph for the Nazis, as they succeeded in subverting the Olympic ideal and turning it into a vehicle for the aggrandizement of their racist state. The Nazi message was encapsulated in the opening images of Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the games, Olympia, in which the Olympic torch is carried into the Berlin Olympic stadium by a blond-haired athlete, the epitome of the ‘Aryan’ ideal, and welcomed by Nazi salutes.
Even more extraordinary, from the perspective of today, is the assessment of Hitler made by the former British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, after he had visited the Berghof, Hitler’s Alpine retreat near Berchtesgaden, in September 1936. Writing in the Daily Express, Lloyd George said that Hitler was ‘a born leader of men. A magnetic dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose, a resolute will, and a dauntless heart.’27 He had observed that Hitler was worshipped as a ‘national hero who has saved his country from utter despondence and degradation’. In Germany, Lloyd George had detected ‘a passion for unity’ and now ‘Catholic and Protestant, Prussian and Bavarian, employer and workman, rich and poor, have been consolidated into one people.’ He wrote that ‘There was a revivalist atmosphere. It has had an extraordinary effect in unifying the nation.’ As a result ‘the people are more cheerful.’
What, one might ask, about the German Jews? Lloyd George knew that they were subject to persecution within Germany – he even made a passing reference to it in his article.28 So how could he say that ‘the people are more cheerful’ – unless, perhaps, he did not consider German Jews truly ‘German’? The very possibility of this might appear surprising, given that Lloyd George had supported the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 in which the British government had said that they viewed ‘with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. However, the exact motives of the politicians behind the Declaration have long been the subject of controversy. Indeed, one historian has concluded that ‘the men who sired it [the Balfour Declaration] were Christian and Zionist and, in many cases, anti-Semitic. They believed the Jews controlled the world.’29
In Britain, Lloyd George was not alone in lauding Hitler despite the Nazi persecution of the Jews. While it is certainly the case that neo-Nazi beliefs never became widespread in the country – Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists did not come close to achieving an electoral breakthrough in the 1930s – there was still a good deal of casual anti-Semitism. For instance, Johannes Zahn, the German banker, remembers hearing anti-Semitic remarks from British financiers on a trip to London.30 As for Eugene Leviné, he believes that he encountered more anti-Semitism in Britain in the 1930s than he had experienced in Germany in the 1920s. ‘I feel that in the social way the English are more anti-Semitic [than the Germans]. As people so often very kindly say, “After all, we don’t gas Jews.” No … but they certainly don’t let them join their golf club. And, if you say to people with whom you’re quite friendly, why won’t they let so and so into a golf club? [they answer] “Well you see, dear, if you let one of them in, they’ll bring all their friends.” ’31 Sentiments against admitting Jews from abroad could also be detected in newspapers – a Sunday Express editorial in 1938, for example, announced that ‘just now there is a big influx of foreign Jews into Britain. They are over-running our country.’32
The prejudice that the Jews were a group apart – as described by Eugene Leviné – was behind much of the anti-Semitic rhetoric. As for Lloyd George, he appears to have subscribed to the view that the Jews were immensely powerful and operated across national boundaries – a view also held in an extreme way by Adolf Hitler.33 Such common ground may have helped Lloyd George form his eulogistic assessment of the German leader – we can’t know for sure. What is certain is that while in the afterglow of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Hitler had been able to charm Lloyd George and reassure him about Germany’s development, the following year he would present an altogether different face to the world.
Nineteen-thirty-seven was in many ways a turning point. With the Olympics behind him, Hitler’s rhetoric returned to the fevered levels it had last reached in the early 1920s in the beer halls of Bavaria. In a speech at the Nuremberg rally on 13 September 1937, he claimed that Bolshevism was ‘the greatest menace with which the culture and civilization of the human race have been threatened since the collapse of the nations in Antiquity’.34 Crucially, he raised once again the link that he believed existed between the Jews and the Bosheviks. The ‘increasing upheaval’ that the world faced, he said, was caused by the ‘rulers of Jewish Bolshevism in Moscow’. In case anyone had missed this linkage, he added, ‘when I quite intentionally present this problem as Jewish, then you, my party comrades, know that this is not an unverified assumption, but a fact proven by irrefutable evidence.’ Hitler proceeded to give his audience a history lesson – albeit a distorted and twisted one – starting with his views on ‘Russia’. (Hitler persisted in referring to ‘Russia’ even though Russia was just one of a number of republics within the Soviet Union.) He claimed that the Jews had managed to ‘penetrate’ the ruling elite in ‘Russia’ and had succeeded in ‘exterminating’ the previous leadership. The Jews were a ‘foreign race’ who had seized ‘utter control’ of Russian civilization and now wanted to use Russia as a ‘bridgehead’ to conquer other peoples.
Hitler conjured up an almost depraved fantasy, in which ‘insane masses’
supported by ‘asocials’ would go wild and take the indigenous people to the ‘scaffolds to bleed to death’. And behind all this mayhem were the Jews. That was because Jews found it necessary to ‘undertake the extermination’ of the elite within any country that they sought to control. Hitler reminded his audience that in Germany ‘we have all experienced the same thing’ – by which he meant the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, orchestrated by Communists and socialists in 1919, and the Bavarian Soviet Republic later that same year.
Hitler said that Germany had ‘a serious interest in preventing this Bolshevist plague from spreading even further in Europe’. He recalled that although Germany had fought against other European nations in the past, these wars had always been between ‘civilized’ nations. But Bolshevism was something different. The rulers in Moscow were an ‘uncivilized, Jewish-Bolshevik, international league of criminals’. The Nazis deserved praise for having prevented Jewish ‘scum’ from dictating their demands to German workers. Moreover, Germans today were ‘even better’ soldiers than before, and stood ready to confront anyone who sought to bring the Bolshevik ‘menace’ into Germany.
It was the situation in Spain, claimed Hitler, where a civil war raged, that had motivated his bellicose speech, especially since Stalin had supplied weapons and a small number of combatants to the republicans in their struggle against the nationalists. But once again Hitler was being disingenuous, for he had held these views since the early 1920s but for a whole variety of reasons had not thought it expedient to voice them so aggressively in public for years. It was all a question of tactics, as he explained to a meeting of party leaders in April 1937, six months before his bloodthirsty Nuremberg speech. In this private forum, he said that he understood why there were those who wanted stronger measures to be taken against the Jews, such as ‘marking’ Jewish businesses with a special insignia, but activists needed to recognize that his ‘main concern’ was ‘always to avoid taking a step that I might later have to retrace and not to take a step which could damage us in any way. You must understand that I always go as far as I dare – but no further. It is vital to have a sixth sense which tells you broadly: “What can I still do, what can I not do?” ’ Thus, while they all agreed about the danger the Jews posed, he always had to bear in mind what was possible at any given moment.35 It’s a speech that offers a vital insight into Hitler’s mentality – he admitted that he would like to be more radical in his persecution of the Jews, but saw that it was politically necessary to advance slowly towards his ultimate goal. Goebbels in his diary entry of 30 November 1937 reveals just what that goal was: ‘Talked about the Jewish question [with Hitler] for a long time … The Jews must be ejected from Germany, from the whole of Europe. This will take a while, but it will happen and it must happen. The Führer is completely committed to this.’36
The Holocaust: A New History Page 14