I have often been in my life a prophet and was mostly laughed at. In the time of the struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish people who merely heard my prophecies with a smile, that I would one day take over the leadership of the state and thus of the entire nation, and then along with much else also bring the Jewish problem to a solution. I believe that the loud laughs have stuck in the throat of the Jews in Germany.
I want to be a prophet again. If international Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed, once again, to bring the nations into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the globe and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.62
He identified the Jews with the spirit of Communism. He referred to the famous phrase at the end of The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Marx and Engels, “Workers of the world unite,” as “Jewish words.” Hitler suggested an alternative motto: “Productive members of all nations recognize your common enemy!”
In this diatribe he emphasized once more the purported links between the Jews and the Bolsheviks. They were one enemy, with the Jews supposedly behind the threat of war. But it was he above all who wanted war and worked to make it come about. Indeed he was disappointed to be deprived of it at the Munich conference in 1938.
The World War would soon enough come and by Hitler’s design. It would give him the pretext he yearned for and believed he needed to set about the destruction of both the Jews and Bolshevism.
21
“CLEANSING” THE GERMAN BODY POLITIC
Hitler believed in the popularized theory of eugenics, a concept coined in the 1880s by Sir Francis Galton, a half cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton concluded that “physique, ability, and character” were hereditary, as were “intellect, zeal, and devotion to work.” He and his successors in this field thought that inheritance needed help, however, and proposed offering assistance to couples likely to bear fit children. The other side of this program was to prevent the “dysgenic,” or unfit (mentally, physically, behaviorally), from propagating.
The eugenics movement was international in scope and varied from place to place. In the United States, programs based on eugenics were backed by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Beginning in 1899, ten states followed Indiana, which began sterilizing the mentally handicapped to ensure that the “inferior” did not gain the upper hand. German scientists were impressed by America’s compulsory sterilization, a practice upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927. The annual rate of such procedures until 1930 was around two hundred to six hundred per year, but in the next decade grew to two thousand to four thousand per year.1
In the Soviet Union during the 1920s, A. S. Serebrovsky, a Marxist proponent of eugenics, thought that central planning would make it possible to breed desirable qualities. He invented the concept of the “gene pool” and suggested that “one talented and valuable producer could have up to 1,000 children.”
That theory was taken up by Hermann J. Muller, an American scientist who moved from Texas to the Soviet Union in 1933. A great admirer of Stalin, Muller considered the USSR the ideal place to apply eugenics and in 1935 revived Serebrovsky’s artificial insemination schemes. He thought it possible for the majority of the population to acquire the “innate quality” of men like Lenin, Newton, and Leonardo.2
Writing to Stalin in May 1936, Muller professed great confidence “in the ultimate Bolshevik triumph throughout all possible spheres of human endeavor.” He declared it feasible to reproduce “transcendently superior individuals” and guarantee the triumph of Bolshevism. Stalin was not impressed. But a group around T. D. Lysenko, an unqualified quack and a leading light in Soviet science thanks to Stalin’s patronage, concluded that eugenics, genetics, and Fascism were all cut from the same cloth. Stalin had had enough. Muller had to flee and decided to say nothing about his experiences in the USSR “for fear of alienating Western leftists from his eugenics.”3
In the Third Reich eugenics came to inform a wide array of policies, from welfare and family planning to fighting crime, social problems, and chronic-care patients. It would be used to mold the racially fit society and be accompanied by anti-Semitism, which would drive out the Jews.
RACIAL HYGIENE
The German variation of eugenics, called racial hygiene, was formulated by Alfred Ploetz at the beginning of the twentieth century. A physician who had practiced in the United States, Ploetz concluded that disease and defects of character were hereditary. He decided to work in this area instead of pursuing the “Sisyphean labor” of treating medical problems after they arose. Like many who believed in eugenics, he thought that social welfare and health insurance made the situation worse by helping the weak. He worried that indiscriminate marriage would lead to social and biological degeneration. Long before the Nazis came to power, racial hygiene had already “become a scientific orthodoxy in the German medical community.”4
In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that “incurably sick people” should not be allowed “to contaminate the remaining healthy ones” and that “defective people” should be prevented from propagating.5 He spelled out how he would use eugenics. In 1929 at the Nuremberg Party rally he called it disastrous for the state to interfere in the process of natural selection. He was appalled that the mentally handicapped and criminals were allowed to procreate and that “degenerates” were helped to survive. “Thus we slowly raise the weaker and kill off the stronger.” This “false pity” had to stop. His inclination was to destroy the weak, as supposedly had been done in ancient Sparta. But euthanasia was too radical for German public opinion and had to wait until the war years before it was tried.6
Sterilization was illegal in Germany until July 14, 1933, when the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases was enacted.7It can be traced, almost verbatim, to the California sterilization act of 1909.8
In Germany the law applied initially to congenital feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic depression, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea, hereditary blindness or deafness, serious physical deformities, and severe alcoholism. The German government set up “hereditary health courts” consisting of a judge and two doctors. They read the files but did not examine the person. Approximately 200,000 women and the same number of men were sterilized in the course of the program, nearly all against their will. Some 5,000, mostly women, died as a result of the procedures. Not only medical but social criteria were used in the decisions, and factors like undesired behavior, even unruliness or promiscuity, could lead to sterilization.9
Long before he achieved power, Hitler wanted to sterilize criminals, particularly repeat sex offenders. He was persuaded to promulgate a separate law in November 1933. In the meantime, the radical eugenicists Arthur Gütt and Ernst Rüdin (medical experts in the Ministry of the Interior) fought to extend the sterilization program to those considered to have a “hereditary criminal disposition.” They argued for a broadened concept of feeblemindedness to include not only the criterion of intelligence but also “disturbances in emotions, will, drives, [or] ethical sentiments.” Anyone deemed suffering from “ethical defects” or “inability to develop a proper understanding of the order of human society” could be considered feebleminded, and sterilized.10 Twenty-five percent of the men sterilized under the program had a criminal record.11
Eugenics found its way into a wide array of public policies and was propagated by a host of new institutions and professionals. The police gave particular attention to the work of Dr. Robert Ritter, who took for his field of study the racial-biological makeup of criminals and later grew interested in Gypsies and Jehovah’s Witnesses.12
In the United States, Fortune magazine reported that 66 percent of those surveyed in 1937 favored compulsory sterilization of habitual criminals.13 In Germany the principle of sterilization was rejected by many Catholics, although more generally the law was believed to be a good remedy for dealing with habitual criminals or sex offenders. There was reluctance to see these mea
sures applied across the board.
Some eugenics programs, however, were received positively, as can be seen in the acceptance of marriage loans introduced in an act to reduce unemployment on June 1, 1933. Couples were offered on average six hundred Reichsmarks interest free. That was a sum industrial workers would earn in four or five months. The money would be paid on condition that the couple passed racial and medical tests and that the female spouse left her job. Not long after, with the aim of encouraging larger families, the regime added that the debt would be reduced by one-quarter on the birth of each new child.14 Between August 1933 and January 1937 alone, 700,000 couples took out the loan. The birthrate, about which population experts were long worried, grew every year from 1933 to the outbreak of the war. British experts at the time said this development was “spectacular,” particularly because birthrates were falling in so many countries. Not only did organizations for women become the largest voluntary ones in Germany, but the birthrate as well offered an even “surer measure of the popularity of the regime’s policies towards women and the family.”15
“ANTISOCIAL ELEMENTS”
Hitler’s regime pursued an array of individuals, including beggars, the chronically unemployed, charity cases, alcoholics, tramps, and others on the margin of society. What was new was not so much the attitude of the government and German society as the Third Reich’s determination to act. The more hard-nosed approach to all “crime” won the regime a great deal of support.
The Nazi police and justice system grew more radical over time. On December 14, 1937, the Ministry of the Interior issued a “fundamental decree on the preventive police battle against criminality;” the community had to be protected “from all parasites.” The newly reorganized Kripo was empowered to put in “preventive custody” any persons deemed “asocial” or “professional or habitual criminals.”16 In early 1938 the Kripo began to assert independence from the courts. It claimed to be carrying out the will of the führer and to require no further authorization.
The definition of the asocials kept expanding and by April 1938 included all those “who through minor, but oft-repeated, infractions of the law demonstrate that they will not comply with the social order that is a fundamental condition of a National Socialist state, for example, beggars, vagrants, (Gypsies), prostitutes, drunkards, those with contagious diseases, particularly sexually transmitted diseases, who evade the measures taken by the public health authorities.” Also falling under the definition were “persons, regardless of any previous conviction, who evade the obligation to work and are dependent on the public for their maintenance, for example, the work-shy, work evaders, drunkards.” The Gestapo carried out the first “asocial action” at the end of April 1938 and sent about two thousand to the Buchenwald concentration camp.17
In June 1938 the Kripo “asocial” campaign apprehended around fifteen hundred Jews, the first time such a large group was singled out and sent to a concentration camp.18 Between June 13 and 18 the Kripo arrested a minimum of two hundred non-Jews in each police district, including tramps, beggars, Gypsies, and pimps.19 As usual the police exceeded the quota of three thousand and arrested well over ten thousand.
These actions conformed to Hitler’s wishes, but economic considerations also played a role. The cheap labor of the long list of asocials and others would be used in concentration camps to finance the burgeoning SS empire. The push to use prisoners in new SS enterprises—such as the German Earth and Stone Works, founded in April 1938—came from an agreement reached between Himmler and Albert Speer, the general construction inspector.20 It is possible that Hitler brought Himmler and Speer together at the end of 1937 or early in 1938, but Speer in any case was anxious for the provision of cheap building materials and saw the opportunity, through the SS exploitation of prisoners, to get it.21 The combination of ideology, racism, economics, and raw ambition had deadly consequences for untold thousands who eventually slaved in SS camps.
“SEXUAL PERVERSIONS”
Hitler was prudish in his abhorrence of the “sins” of the modern big city, like pornography, homosexuality, and even immodest dress. He wrote of these matters as the “political, ethical, and moral contamination of the people” and the “poisoning of the health of the body politic.” In Mein Kampf he promised “ruthless measures” to stop syphilis, and that meant combating prostitution.22
Police were ordered from the onset of the regime to use all measures on the books (such as laws on spreading venereal diseases) to eliminate street prostitution and take control of brothels. There were sweeps of the red-light districts, with thousands arrested. Health, welfare, and youth officials helped the police. It was common to demand forced sterilization of “loose” women who were considered threats to the racial community.23
According to old friends from his time in Vienna, Hitler turned “against [homosexuality] and other sexual perversions in the big city with nausea and disgust.”24 Homosexual acts were criminalized in Germany in the nineteenth century, and the Third Reich stepped up enforcement. Although lesbianism was frowned upon, it was not perceived as a “danger to the nation’s survival,” and there was no systematic campaign against it.25 Persecution of homosexuality was reflected in court verdicts. In every year after 1933 the number of arrests increased: 948 in 1934; 2,106 in 1935; 5,320 in 1936; 8,271 in 1937; 8,562 in 1938. In the war years the numbers declined steadily, likely because so many young men were drafted.26
SINTI AND ROMA
In 1933 there were around twenty thousand Sinti and Roma, or Gypsies, in Germany. Most lived as wanderers who wanted neither a fixed home nor a regular job. Their image in Europe was not a wholesome one, for they were viewed as living off crime and having no permanent abode.
Police used measures already on the books, but they received plenty of suggestions from locals who wanted to get rid of “their Gypsies” and demanded they be sent to Dachau. Between 1935 and 1939 new “Gypsy camps” were set up in Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Magdeburg, and Berlin. These were less severe than concentration camps, but more than unpleasant.27
In October 1938 the Kripo created a new branch to deal with what Himmler called the “Gypsy plague.” According to Dr. Robert Ritter, there were two kinds of Gypsies, those of “mixed race” and “pure breeds,” and each had to be dealt with separately. That was the first time Gypsies were officially considered a race.28
The registration of the Sinti and Roma in Germany had been completed before the war. There were isolated attempts in October 1939 to attach additional train cars to the first deportations of Jews to the Lublin region of Poland. These hit-or-miss efforts were stopped by Himmler.29
Ritter’s research had concluded by early 1940 that about 90 percent of all Gypsies in the Reich were of mixed race, and hence the “worst” kind. He recommended that the “bulk of the asocial and useless Gypsies of mixed race” be forced to work in “large, migrating work camps” and be hindered from further propagating. The Gypsy population would gradually fade away, and, according to Ritter, “only then will the coming generations of the German people be really freed from this burden.”30
The Ministry of the Interior suggested to police on January 24, 1940, that the sterilization of Gypsies, including those of mixed race, was the “ultimate solution of the Gypsy problem.”31 Nothing came of this suggestion, so on April 27, 1940, the Kripo was ordered to begin “resettlement” operations. These were held up for a time but soon continued.
CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND ASOCIALS
The concentration camps seemed to be fading away in 1934; at the end of that year at most three thousand prisoners were still in the camps. By September 1935, Himmler had come up with new missions for the camps. A sign of things to come was given by Hitler at the Nuremberg Party rally of September 1935.
That rally was infamous because it introduced new laws banning marriage between Jews and non-Jews. Hitler also announced by proclamation a “struggle against the internal enemies of the nation,” one of his favorit
e themes. This time the “enemies” were defined as “Jewish Marxism and the parliamentary democracy associated with it;” “the politically and morally depraved Catholic Center Party;” and “certain elements of an unteachable, dumb, and reactionary bourgeoisie.” Radical steps were purportedly needed, even though the speech also claimed that Germany enjoyed greater security and tranquillity than ever. Hitler even highlighted improvements since his accession to power, when the country suffered the “ferment of decomposition” and “signs of decay.”32
On October 18, Hitler and Himmler decided to broaden the concepts of “enemy” and “crime” that the new secret police were supposed to fight.33 The concentration camp system and the numbers of prisoners grew thereafter.
Prior to the war, the camps held two main groups: “enemies of state” and variously defined social outsiders. In the war years the Jews would become the primary target and would endure great suffering. But in the years leading up to the war, Jews were a minority of the camp prisoners.
In Buchenwald there were 10,188 prisoners at the end of October 1938, including 1,007 “professional criminals” and 4,341 “asocials.” The Gestapo’s prisoners in the camp (3,982 persons) were Communists and other political enemies, but these included an unknown number of criminals and asocials.34
Sachsenhausen, the large camp north of Berlin, had a similar prisoner population. Between June 1938 and September 1939 the number in the camp varied from just under 6,000 to a high of around 9,000. That changed briefly in December 1938, when there were up to 12,622 people, many of whom were Jews sent there as part of the November pogrom.35 At any one point in this period more than half the prisoners were asocials. No complete figures survive of those held in preventive detention in subsequent actions, but a partial reconstruction shows 12,921 at the end of 1938; 12,221 at the end of 1939; and 13,354 at the end of 1940.36
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