The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  The greatest threat to Aryan purity, as it had always been, was posed by the Jew, who was responsible for all Germany’s misfortunes. Hitler devoted a chapter of Mein Kampf to a fantastic history of the Jews, drawing on every racist stereotype, myth, and crackpot theory that had circulated in the Vienna of his youth. Invoking the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, he claimed that the Jews were engaged in a global conspiracy to undermine existing states and cultures, and to seize world power. The Jews were the very incarnation of evil, parasites that feasted on the blood of their racially superior hosts. Germany’s otherwise inexplicable collapse in the Great War was due to its “failure to recognize the racial problem and especially the Jewish menace.” The old Reich’s downfall was not the result of setbacks on the battlefield but “was brought about by that power which prepared these defeats by systematically over many decades robbing our people of the political and moral instincts and forces which alone make nations capable and hence worthy of existence.”

  Germany, all Europe, stood on the cusp of a great precipice; the Jewish revolution that would lead to world domination was imminent. The Jews were behind Bolshevism, liberalism, plutocratic capitalism, and pacifism, but “in gaining political power the Jew casts off the few cloaks that he still wears. . . . The democratic people’s Jew becomes the blood Jew and tyrant over peoples,” enslaving them, depriving them of their freedom and their strength. But “a racially pure people that is conscious of its blood can never be enslaved by the Jew,” and raising that racial consciousness was the first task of National Socialism.

  That last point was particularly crucial since Germany, Hitler believed, was the last best racial hope of humankind, and it was threatened by a world teeming with dangers. Racial regeneration of the German people was a precondition for a powerful state that would guarantee Germany’s racial survival and would allow it to assert itself in a world driven by merciless racial struggle. Although the Nazi campaigns of the pre-1933 era had focused largely on the economic and political failures of the Weimar system, mass unemployment, and the threat of Bolshevism, the party’s ultimate aim, as became quickly apparent upon Hitler’s assumption of power, was to launch a racial revolution.

  The outlines of such a vision had been there all along, in the pages of Mein Kampf, in innumerable party publications, and campaign speeches without number, but it still came as something of a surprise, even a shock to some, that among the myriad, fantastic, and contradictory promises made by the Nazis before 1933, eliminating Jews from German life would emerge as the defining element in Hitler’s agenda. But this shouldn’t have been a surprise. Fanatical racial anti-Semitism lay at the very core of National Socialist ideology and remained Hitler’s most enduring and passionate obsession. If the German people were not ready for his radical vision before 1933—and both he and Goebbels were convinced they were not—he could wait. But once in power, the Nazis did not hesitate to begin translating that racial fixation into policy. National Socialist racial thinking followed two inextricably interwoven threads in which ferocious hatred of Jews commingled with a pseudoscientific biological interpretation of the dynamics of world history. Anti-Semitism was the most visible and vicious component of Nazi racial policy, but it represented only one dimension of a broader racist agenda. Brutal, gutter anti-Semitism, found in the pages of Der Stürmer and in the ranks of the SA, merged with an obsession with eugenics, referred to in the Nazi lexicon as “racial hygiene.” The pseudoscientific approach to issues of race was articulated in a variety of Nazi publications such as the People and Race, New People, the SS’s The Black Corps, and numerous medical journals. This spurious “scientific” racism was enthusiastically adopted by the SS, which viewed itself as the ideological vanguard of National Socialism, standing above the sort of vulgar Jew baiting found among the party’s militants and the SA.

  With Hitler installed in the chancellor’s office, the Nazis wasted little time in initiating a series of measures aimed at “cleansing the body of the people.” This was to be accomplished by purging “racially inferior” elements from German life—from Jews and Gypsies to the mentally defective, the physically handicapped, and finally to the “socially deviant.” The National Socialist regime viewed itself as a “therapeutic state” that would guarantee public health through racially driven policies of pronatalism, compulsory sterilization, and finally, in 1939, a top secret program of euthanasia.

  The Nazis initiated their racial offensive in the spring of 1933 with a barrage of decrees aimed at eliminating Jews from participation in the life of the nation. Against a backdrop of daily harassment, humiliation, and violence against Jews, the Nazis introduced the Civil Service Law in April, with its Aryan Paragraph that declared that anyone with one Jewish grandparent was not an Aryan and hence was to be retired from the civil service. (In May all non-Aryan public employees were dismissed.) Regional and local governments soon followed suit. A follow-up decree in March limited non-Aryan access to the practice of medicine, and another, the Law to Prevent the Overcrowding in German Schools and Universities, restricted the matriculation of new Jewish students in any German school or university to 1.5 percent of the total applicants. At no educational institution could Jews constitute more than 5 percent of the total student body. The boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1 was an attempt to incite the public to displays of anti-Jewish sentiment, though the public response was disappointing.

  In June a decree prohibited Jews from working as dentists or dental technicians in public insurance programs, then another extended that ban to Germans in the medical field who were married to non-Aryans. In September the Hereditary Farm Law prohibited Jews from owning land or engaging in agriculture. The Aryan Paragraph was also extended to the armed forces, banning Jews from conscription and prohibiting Jews already in the military from serving as officers. Later measures were introduced that sought to drive Jews from the press, especially forbidding Jews from working as newspaper editors, just as Goebbels’s newly created Reich Culture Chamber took steps to expunge Jews from all areas of German cultural life. These laws promulgated at the national level represented only the tip of the iceberg; states, municipalities, and private institutions imposed additional restrictions on the Jewish community so that numerous regional variations existed. These laws served another purpose: through them, Achim Gercke, a specialist on racial matters in the Interior Ministry, argued “the entire national community becomes enlightened about the Jewish question; it learns that the national community is a community of blood; for the first time it understands race thinking and, instead of an overly theoretical approach to the Jewish question, it is confronted with a concrete solution.”

  Already in 1933 Germans were expected to carry a “racial passport” (Ahnenpass) to prove their pure “Aryan” heritage. This quasi-official document was not issued by the state, but given the mounting offensive against the Jews, many felt it behooved them to establish proof of their undiluted Aryan identity. Germans feverishly researched their ancestry, scouring municipal archives, church records, and census reports to establish a family tree at least through their grandparents’ generation. SS personnel and their wives were required to prove their Aryan bloodlines back to 1800, and many nervous Germans thought it prudent to do the same, desperately hoping not to unearth a long-forgotten Jewish relative lurking in their past. Genealogists were in great demand. But just what constituted an “Aryan” remained unclear. Did the Civil Service Law’s definition of non-Aryan apply to all areas of German life? Was that the criterion to be used in every instance? “I looked up Aryans in the encyclopedia,” one puzzled woman reported to the authorities. “They live in Asia. We don’t have relatives there, we’re from Prenzlau.”

  At the same time, the regime introduced another set of laws and regulations that would dramatically affect not only the tiny Jewish community but the entire Volk. In June 1933, Wilhelm Frick established a Committee of Experts for Population and Racial Policy within his Interior Ministry. Its immediate tas
k was to prepare the public for a planned law permitting compulsory sterilization of persons suffering from “hereditarily determined” disabilities. In the last days of Weimar, the Prussian government, influenced by similar laws in a number of states in the United States, had considered legislation that would have allowed sterilization of the “hereditarily ill,” but this draft law, like the American versions, applied to a limited number of medical conditions and required the consent of the person in question or a legal guardian. On July 14, 1933, Frick announced the Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases, which differed in crucial ways from the draft Weimar legislation. The law dictated sterilization for individuals suffering from a significantly expanded list of allegedly inherited medical defects: schizophrenia, manic depression, hereditary blindness or deafness, hereditary epilepsy, and serious physical deformities. It was also compulsory. As the law made brutally clear, “if the court finally decides upon sterilization, the operation must be performed even if it is against the wishes of the person to be sterilized. . . . In so far as other measures prove insufficient, the use of force is permissible.”

  Shortly after the introduction of the sterilization law, Interior Minister Frick sought to explain the rationale behind the new policy in a national radio broadcast. His message was blunt. In earlier times, the laws of nature had ensured that the weak would perish before reaching reproductive age, but with the advances in modern medicine, the weak had been artificially kept alive, a development that had damaged the long-term health of the people. It was now a moral obligation for the state to fulfill “nature’s wishes,” and it was the duty of the individual to comply with the new order of things.

  To implement this invasive system, the regime enacted the Unification of Health Affairs Law, which brought the entire public health system under Nazi control. Local health officials, appointed by the regime, were empowered to monitor the genetic health of citizens and to issue certificates of genetic health. They were also authorized to order the sterilization of individuals who were genetically tainted. Hospitals, asylums, welfare organizations, and physicians were required by law to submit the names of patients who would fall into one of these categories. In 1934, 181 Hereditary Health Courts, each staffed by two physicians and one lawyer, were attached to the civil courts to examine the cases reported. Their proceedings were secret, and although the law established an appeal process, barely 3 percent of such appeals were successful.

  In addition to these criteria, an intelligence test, based on dubious scientific criteria, was administered to those thought to be “feeble-minded.” It asked questions such as: Where are you? Where do you live? Who was Bismarck? Luther? When is it Christmas? How many days in the week? Reflecting on this test years later, Hitler wryly commented that having seen the questions, “at least three-quarters of [them] . . . would have defeated my own good mother. One I recall was: ‘Why does a ship made of steel float in the water?’ If this system had been introduced before my birth, I am pretty sure I should never have been born at all.” Feeble-mindedness provided the most common grounds for sterilization, especially when in 1934 the diagnosis was expanded to a new, more ambiguous category: “moral feeble-mindedness.” This new designation covered an elastic list of deviants: chronic alcoholics, habitual criminals, vagrants, and “the anti-community-minded,” among others. Women who had many sexual partners, for example, were declared morally feeble-minded and would be sterilized. Men exhibiting similar “promiscuous” behavior were not. Women were sterilized by undergoing an operation to tie their fallopian tubes, while men underwent vasectomy or, in some cases, castration. Abortions were forbidden by law, but in dealing with the genetically unfit, the regime quietly allowed it. An amendment to the sterilization law in June 1935 allowed abortions for “hereditarily ill” women within the first six months of pregnancy.

  The law made no mention of sterilization on racial grounds, and Jews were not specifically targeted. Even Germans armed with a racial passport found themselves subjected to Nazi racial oversight. In 1935 the Interior Ministry drafted a law that would require all prospective newlyweds to obtain an official certificate of genetic health from local public health authorities. Couples who could not or would not produce a certificate of health were declared ineligible for government marriage loans, tax deductions, and other benefits. And failure to present a certificate of health might also prompt an official investigation into their backgrounds, and who knew what that would turn up. Might an ordinary childhood illness be interpreted as a hereditary flaw? Would it be enough to prohibit the marriage, or worse, lead to compulsory sterilization? If the marriage was allowed, couples were incessantly reminded of their racial duty. Beginning in 1936, newlyweds were presented a copy of Mein Kampf as well as pamphlets with advice on how to maintain good racial stock. Most of the prescriptive literature was couched in strictly “scientific” terms, but others, such as “The Ten Commandments for Selecting a Mate,” invoked both National Socialist ideology and religion. “1. Remember you are German. 2. If you are genetically healthy, you shall not remain unmarried. 3. Keep your body pure. 4. Keep your soul and mind pure. 5. As a German, select only a mate with Nordic blood. 6. When you select a mate, ask about ancestry. 7. Health is the precondition for external beauty. 8. Marry only for love. 9. Don’t select a playmate. Choose a partner for life. 10. Hope for as many children as possible.”

  Scientific quackery also fused with Nazi prudery in advice literature. “In free love,” one Nazi racial hygienist wrote, “the mutual impulse to union is contained exclusively in erotic feelings, the confluence of the germ plasma endowments of both parents is left exclusively to chance, whereas monogamy, through the elaboration of perceptible biological hereditary stocks, enables human reason to bring together high-grade hereditary stocks for human breeding and to exterminate hereditary stocks of inferior grade. In this context free love means the admission of inferior biological ancestry to human breeding and the necessary squandering of high-grade germ endowments, whereas monogamy at least offers the opportunity for biological selection and preservation of high-grade germ plasma.”

  In seizing control of the public health system, the Nazis had little trouble recruiting support from Germany’s internationally respected medical community. Doctors, part of the German social elite, had gravitated toward National Socialism early, becoming the most overrepresented profession in the Nazi party before Hitler’s assumption of power, far surpassing lawyers, teachers, and university professors. Many, especially young doctors, were happy to see Jewish competitors purged; many were deeply conservative and harbored anti-Semitic views and many were taken with Nazi ideas on race, eugenics, and preventive medicine. But the German medical profession, like the Nazi regime it served, was hardly a monolith. Many physicians were attracted by the Nazis’ aggressive approach to public health, their emphasis on prenatal care, on a healthy work environment, on physical fitness, on diet, and the regime’s efforts to curb alcohol and tobacco consumption. German scientists, concerned about asbestos in the workplace, were impressed by the regime’s Beauty of Labor program, which sought to create a healthy workplace. The Third Reich also launched what historian of science Robert E. Proctor has called a “war against cancer.” German medical scientists were leaders in identifying the link between tobacco and cancer; others researched the connection between diet and cancer, endorsing the consumption of fresh, organically grown vegetables and whole wheat bread.

  These concerns found support from the nonsmoking, teetotaling, vegetarian Führer. Hitler endorsed a diet of raw vegetables and grains, and his private conversations were sprinkled with declamations, some of them crackpot, some prescient, about a healthy lifestyle. “In countries like Bulgaria,” he claimed, “where people live on polenta, yoghurt, and other such foods . . . men live to a greater age than in our part of the world.” Germans should eat more fish, less meat, as in Italy and the Mediterranean countries. “Japanese wrestlers, who are amongst the strongest men in the world, feed almo
st exclusively on vegetables. The same is true of a Turkish porter, who can move a piano by himself.” Abhorring smoking, he even toyed with the idea of ending soldiers’ cigarette ration during the war but wisely decided against it. None of these initiatives was very successful, but the regime was actively promoting a healthy new lifestyle for the Volksgemeinschaft.

  For all of these reasons, German doctors quickly fell into line with the new order. They wrote ideologically tinged articles on eugenics in professional journals; they taught courses in racial hygiene, and they participated without demur in the regime’s new racially directed health system. Medical professional organizations were quickly coordinated, coming under the control of the National Socialist Physicians League, whose membership catapulted from 2,800 in 1932 to 11,000 by October 1933 as eager doctors clambered to get onboard. By 1934 the backlog of doctors waiting to join the league was so great that newcomers were advised to hold their application until those already awaiting admission were processed. In that same year, medical schools began requiring courses in racial hygiene, and serious medical journals published a steady stream of articles on eugenics. Racial hygiene also became a required subject at universities. In 1933 only one university had a faculty position in racial hygiene or eugenics; by 1935 more than a dozen of Germany’s most prestigious universities had appointed professors offering courses in the subject.

  Already in 1933 Prussian educational authorities required that instruction in racial studies be added to the curriculum, and soon all German states followed Berlin’s example. Secondary schools were required to teach heredity, racial science, and family as well as population policies. The essentials of these subjects were to be integrated into instruction in biology. Students were being groomed to think in biological categories, to distinguish between “valuable life” and its lesser, “degenerate” forms. Classrooms, indeed all of public discourse, resounded with fatuous theories about Aryan, Germanic, and Nordic peoples, the last of whom were highly praised by the Nazis.