The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  Nazi racial hygienists offered secondary school teachers advice on how to organize their instruction on racial matters. One sample assignment for students was to compose an essay on “How We Can Learn to Recognize a Person’s Race.” Students were required, among other things, to

  summarize the spiritual characteristics of the individual races. . . . What are the expressions, gestures, and movements which allow us to make conclusion as to the attitude of the racial soul? Determine also the physical features which go hand in hand with specific racial soul characteristics of the individual figures. Try to discover the intrinsic nature of the racial soul through the characters in stories and poetical works. Collect propaganda posters and caricatures for your race book and arrange them according to a racial scheme. . . . Observe people whose special racial features have drawn your attention also with respect to their bearing when moving or when speaking. Observe their expressions and gestures. Observe the Jew: his way of walking, his bearing, gestures, and movements when talking. What strikes you about the way a Jew talks and sings? What are the occupations engaged in by the Jews of your acquaintance?

  The ultimate goal of this intense indoctrination was to condition Germans to think racially, to view the world through a biological lens, and to infuse German society with a new racial ethos. Germans were constantly reminded that they were no longer merely Germans; they were Aryans, and their first duty was to the Volk, defined in racial terms. Doctors, too, needed to adjust their priorities. They were no longer tending to the individual but to the Volk. There was no higher moral obligation. In this new biological society there could be no outmoded sympathy for the weak or for the racially inferior. Feelings of “false humanity,” “exaggerated pity,” and brotherly love were no longer operable values. As Walter Gross, a major figure in the articulation and implementation of Nazi racial policy, explained in a radio broadcast to the nation in July 1933, “the [Nazi] revolution that has just begun not only creates new political norms, but also new human beings and a new understanding of history. . . . New values and judgments change our views of not only the future but of the past.” Borrowing terminology from Nietzsche, he explained that “this transvaluation of values marks our times and justifies it as a genuine spiritual revolution.” He called on Germans to join him in “a crusade” to create “a new moral order.”

  To further justify the sterilization measures, the regime launched a public relations campaign emphasizing that “we do not stand alone,” pointing out that the United States, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland had similar laws, neglecting, of course, to mention that in each case sterilization was voluntary. The campaign also stressed the staggering financial burden the German taxpayer was compelled to bear in caring for the severely handicapped. With stunning callousness, the Nazis produced photographs of desperately disabled children juxtaposed with rosy-cheeked healthy children, accompanied by charts that purported to document the exorbitant costs of maintaining the unfit. These illustrated charts appeared in newspapers, journals, and as posters, ostensibly documenting the drain posed by the disabled on the economy and reminding taxpayers that they were footing the bill for this false “humanitarianism”—and that in a stressful time of economic recovery. As one poster frankly stated, “The genetically ill damage the community. The healthy preserve the Volk.”

  To coordinate and unify all schooling and propaganda in the areas of population and racial matters, the Nazis created the Office of Racial Policy (Rassenpolitisches Amt) in May 1934. The Rassenpolitisches Amt was a party office, not a formal government department or ministry, but its influence reached into every corner of German life. Headed by the fanatical physician Walter Gross, it would become one of the most important organizations in the Third Reich. In addition to maintaining an ongoing campaign to “enlighten” the public on racial matters, it operated a training school for doctors and medical students and provided instruction for members of the SS. More than any other agency it carried Nazi racial ideology into the public arena. The range of its activities was breathtaking. In one three-month period in 1938, it sponsored 1,106 public meetings attended by 173,870 people and held 5,172 school functions in which a total of 330,972 pupils participated. It organized thousands of week-long retreats and seminars for party members; it produced 350 films whose explicit message was to belittle the “soft-headed humanism” of those who harbored moral reservations about sterilization, a message also carried in its glossy illustrated journal, New People. By 1939 it was staffed by 3,600 workers.

  Like all organizations in Nazi Germany, it found competitors at every turn: the SS maintained its own racial section, as did the Propaganda Ministry, the party’s Office for Public Health, the Interior Ministry, the Labor Front, the Physicians League, and the Education Ministry, which authorized the National Socialist Teachers League to organize retraining camps to equip teachers with educational material on heredity and race for the classroom. It is estimated that 215,000 of the Reich’s 300,000 teachers attended these retreats at fifty-six regional camps and national centers that combined athletics, military exercises, and instruction in the National Socialist ideology. Even the army established an office to deal with racial affairs. By 1934 German society was thoroughly immersed in organizations and events devoted to Nazi racial indoctrination. There was no escape from it, no way to shut it out.

  In 1934, the first year in which the sterilization law went into full effect, 56,000 sterilizations were performed. In subsequent years the pace did not slacken. Between 1934 and 1939 the number of sterilizations performed averaged 50,000 per year, almost equally divided between women and men. There was no public dissent or opposition. By 1941 between 350,000 and 400,000 involuntary sterilizations had been performed in the Reich. Hitler was a strong advocate of the program but early expressed the view that euthanasia would be more effective in ridding the Volk of its weakest elements. Such an undertaking, he observed, would be best undertaken under the cover of war, and if war came, he would authorize a nationwide program of euthanasia.

  In 1939 he commissioned Dr. Karl Brandt to appoint an advisory committee to prepare for the selection and extermination of physically deformed and mentally defective children. In the chilling terminology of the National Socialist state, these candidates for liquidation represented “le-bensunwertes Leben”—“life unworthy of life”—and should be eliminated to improve the racial health of the Volk. Hitler’s Chancellery would be directly responsible for the operation, which was to take place in the utmost secrecy. According to the plan, physicians were required to report to local health authorities all cases of newborns with congenital defects or deformities of any kind. Doctors were also to register any child under their care up to the age of three suffering from these conditions. Lengthy questionnaires were then sent to the Berlin headquarters, located in a villa at Tiergartenstrasse 4, from which the entire operation derived its code name, T4. There they were evaluated by a committee of three physicians who would mark those chosen for “selection” with a plus sign, those allowed to live with a minus sign. The committee never examined the children in person or made follow-up inquiries with local doctors. The decisions were made solely on the basis of the questionnaires. The children selected were transported to one of twenty-eight specially equipped medical institutions. Parents were told that the transport to these facilities was necessary to improve treatment for their child. No visitations were permitted.

  Methods of killing varied—lethal injections and gassing were the most common. Six of the hospitals were equipped with specially constructed gas chambers, where the first experiments with poison gas took place. At some installations the children slowly starved; in others they were left unattended in unheated rooms to die of exposure, allowing the doctors to maintain that death came of natural causes. Within a year the age parameters of the program expanded, so that children up to seven, then eight, twelve, and finally seventeen years of age could be killed.

  In July 1939, the program came to include the adult populati
on. People who might have been sterilized under the old program would now be disposed of once and for all. In 1940, specially equipped gas vans were developed that could move from installation to installation. Victims were herded into the enclosed vans and carbon monoxide introduced. Dr. Leonardo Conti, working with Brandt, had drafted a plan for the extermination of all Germany’s mental patients as well as those with severe physical handicaps. It was administered by Philipp Bouhler, head of the Führer Chancellery, operating under the cover of an ad hoc front organization, the Committee for the Scientific Treatment of Severe, Genetically Determined Illness.

  Parents and loved ones received a standardized form letter regretfully informing them that their son or daughter, brother or sister had died suddenly of pneumonia, brain edema, appendicitis, or other fabricated causes. Due to concerns about an epidemic, the letters read, the bodies were cremated immediately. They would receive their loved one’s ashes in due course. After a time, suspicions began to be raised when relatives came to notice that other families received the identical letter with the identical cause of death and the identical date. Rumors spread, and one local police official even made arrests at one of the hospitals, only to be informed that the policy came directly from the Führer. As a result of rising public suspicions, Martin Bormann ordered T4 personnel to draft a number of different form letters, and the furor died down until July 1941, when Cardinal Clemens von Galen of Münster, in a series of blistering sermons, made public charges of forced euthanasia. The state’s policy of euthanasia was “pure murder,” he argued, and his sermons sparked a public sensation. The program was temporarily suspended, but by that point plans were already being made for a far more drastic solution. In fact, after a brief pause, the program resumed its operations and continued to 1945. By the time T4 was briefly suspended on July 14, 1941, 70,000 German adults and 20,000 “racially valueless children” had been exterminated. It is estimated that by the end of the war, the euthanasia program had claimed 200,000 victims in Germany and beyond.

  The Third Reich’s commitment to “racial hygiene” was cold-blooded and callous, rendered no less vicious by its claim to “objectivity” and its veneer of pseudoscience. Nazi anti-Semitism blended that same biological fixation with a venomous hatred that only grew more intense as the regime matured. Both obsessions were inextricably intertwined and mutually reinforcing, an ideological fusion that found explicit expression in the so-called Nuremberg Laws of 1935. Throughout 1934 the regime refined its eugenics and anti-Semitic legislation, chipping away at the exemptions for Jewish war veterans that Hindenburg had insisted upon. To their chagrin, the Nazis had discovered that those exemptions turned out to be the rule rather than the exception. Given their relentless propaganda claims that Jews had shirked their duty during the Great War, the Nazis were nonplussed to discover that 100,000 Jews had served in the military, 78,000 at the front; 12,000 Jews had died in combat, and 30,000 had received decorations for bravery. The result was that 60 percent of Jewish doctors, lawyers, teachers, and other civil servants were exempt from the Aryan Paragraph of the Civil Service Law. Not to be deterred by inconvenient facts, the regime began a rollback of those exemptions that continued piecemeal until, by the close of 1938, there were none.

  After the initial burst of racial legislation in 1933–34, a relative lull in the campaign against the Jews followed—at least on the national level. No major new discriminatory laws were enacted, but the violent anti-Semitic rhetoric of the regime remained as savage as ever. “We know him, the Jew,” Himmler thundered at a public ceremony for German farmers in 1935, “this people composed of the waste products of all the people and nations of this planet on which it has imprinted the features of its Jewish blood, the people whose goal is the domination of the world, whose breath is destruction, whose will is extermination, whose religion is atheism, whose idea is Bolshevism.”

  The regime’s reluctance to take radical action against the Jews during 1934 into the early months of 1935 was the result of a number of different factors, some domestic, others in the realm of foreign relations. The crisis with the SA and its violent resolution in the summer of 1934 absorbed much of the regime’s energy at home, while Hitler’s decision to withdraw from the League of Nations in October 1933 and subsequent complicity in a failed coup d’état by Austrian Nazis in July 1934 put a weak Germany in an increasingly isolated international position. With a plebiscite scheduled for the Saar region to determine whether the strategically important area in the west would vote to return to Germany after fifteen years of League of Nations administration, Hitler meant to emphasize the stability of the Third Reich and downplay Nazi radicalism that might frighten away many who were not committed Nazis.

  Rather than issuing new discriminatory laws, the regime tolerated, indeed, tacitly encouraged the Storm Troopers and party militants to step up grassroots harassment of Jews, and in the spring of 1935, following Hitler’s landslide victory in the Saar plebiscite (90.8 percent of the vote), a new wave of anti-Semitic violence swept across the country. Local radicals organized demonstrations before Jewish shops, shattered their windows, assaulted their owners, and threatened shoppers who dared enter them. They accosted Jews on the streets, fired shots into Jewish homes, painted anti-Semitic slogans—“Death to the Jews,” “Jew Perish”—on walls, vandalized synagogues, overturned gravestones in Jewish cemeteries; they intimidated Jewish children on their way to school and branded anyone who associated with them as “a slave of the Jews” (Judenknecht). To the police they reported the names of Jews and their Aryan partners suspected of having a romantic or intimate relationship—which was, at this time, a violation of no existing law. To all of this, the regime turned a benevolent eye. Party leaders viewed these independent actions against Jews as a much needed safety valve for radical elements of the party who were frustrated by what they considered the slow pace of the state’s anti-Semitic actions. A stepped-up campaign against the Jews would then provide the Storm Troopers with a new mission and revive their flagging spirits, much shaken in the wake of the Röhm purge.

  These very public acts of persecution reached a crescendo in the early months of 1935. Poisonous anti-Jewish rhetoric spewed from the party press, and a “pogrom atmosphere” settled over the country. Police in Cologne reported stones thrown through the windows of Jewish homes, Jews beaten in taverns, a synagogue trashed, its sacred objects desecrated and thrown into the street. In Rhina, a village in eastern Hesse, a gang of some twenty men, dressed in black and wearing masks, burst into a synagogue just as services were ending. Wielding rubber truncheons, they savagely attacked the male members of the congregation.

  Pressure was building among party activists for some sort of government action against interracial marriages and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews—“racial defilement” (Rassenschande), as the Nazis branded it. In Mannheim, during August, the regional Nazi paper published a steady stream of articles under such blaring headlines as “A Heidelberg Jew as Race Defiler,” “Jewish Doctor and His Jew Love Partner in Custody,” “Jewish Sadists and Race Defilers,” “Race Defilers Will Be Rooted Out.” In Kiel, movie owners announced that Jews would no longer be admitted to theaters.

  By late summer, Nazi hooliganism directed at Jews was proving unpopular with the broader German public, unsettled by the flagrant violations of the dictatorship’s much touted commitment to law and order. The chief of the state police in Aachen stated in early September that “in my district the handling of the Jewish question has provoked the greatest resentment, since the mentality of the Catholic population chiefly views Jews as human beings and only secondarily thinks to judge the matter from a racial political viewpoint.” That attitude was apparent in their tepid response to the boycott, the sterilization laws, and other National Socialist initiatives in racial policy. The good citizens, he remarked sarcastically, were actually tolerant of Jews in general and emphatically rejected actions taken against individual Jews. “In the future it is therefore advisable to av
oid independent action in dealing with the Jews.” As the Social Democratic underground in the Palatinate put it, “it is no exaggeration to say that four-fifths of the population rejects this persecution of the Jews,” but that displeasure was confined to the privacy of their homes or close family friends.

  Still, the radical, often violent actions of the party militants were also proving increasingly awkward for the government. Economics Minister Schacht was concerned that these outbursts of lawlessness and instability were having a negative impact on Germany’s international business relationships. The Nazis were also confronted with another restraint: with tourists and the world press descending on Germany for the Olympic Games in Berlin and Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1936, the regime was anxious to avoid embarrassing scenes. In August, after a particularly ugly SA rampage through the Kurfürstendamm, Berlin’s main shopping street, Hitler called a halt to this behavior. “JEWS NOT WANTED” signs, ubiquitous in shop windows only shortly before, were tucked discreetly away; the Nazi press toned down its anti-Semitic tirades; public displays of Jew baiting slipped into the background. The Third Reich wanted to make a good impression, to show the world this new, confident, well-ordered, and happy Germany.

  But given the pressure from local militants and calls for legislation regulating the status of Jews in Germany, Hitler felt that some sort of legal action was necessary for the Reich government to regain the initiative and direct militant radicalism into manageable channels. Since 1933 the Interior Ministry had been considering measures that would strip Jews of their citizenship—it had, after all, been one of the party’s original Twenty-five Points—and Hitler was quite keen on the idea. Several desultory efforts were made to draft legislation to that effect, but for a variety of reasons little progress had been made. Likewise, Roland Freisler, an influential state secretary in the Ministry of Justice and later the fanatical judge of the dreaded People’s Court, had long agitated for a law that would ban marriage between Jews and Aryans and also make sexual relations between them a criminal offense—another of Hitler’s long-cherished ideas.