Hitler in Hell

by Martin van Creveld

  Ironically, the term “degenerate” (entartet) owed its popularity to a Jew, Max Nordau. A physician by trade, a Zionist and close friend of Theodor Herzl, back in 1892 he published a famous book by that title. This did not prevent our policies from coming under sharp attack by foreigners. After 1945 native Germans, eager to lick the victor’s boots, also chimed in. Some went directly from praising our art to denouncing it, showing you how hypocritical people can be! Nazi art was bad and did not merit serious attention or study, they claimed. Nazi art was Nazi propaganda, they claimed. As if the same had not been true of ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, ecclesiastical, and Renaissance art, in fact almost any kind of art from the earliest times on. All except “art for art’s sake,” of the kind first invented by bourgeois philistines in the nineteenth century and later misused by so many lunatics in our own.

  That is why, sitting here in Hell, I was gratified to learn that thousands of paintings and sculptures dating to the Third Reich are being kept under lock and key both in museums and private collections. Not necessarily, as some people both in Germany and abroad frankly admitted, because they are unsightly. But out of fear that “ordinary people” everywhere, rejecting the critics and following my lead, would like them too much! If so, no wonder. Whatever else one may say about our artistic productions, at any rate they were of such a nature that the man on the street could understand what he saw without a need for all kinds of learned, and often fraudulent, intermediaries to teach him. Some objects, traded in a sort of underground market, fetch very high prices indeed. Serves those snobs, our critics, right.

  In sum, what we wanted was to extend the rule of our Weltanschauung, not just over the realm of politics but over every aspect of the community’s life. Even more, we wanted to amalgamate politics with the community and to return the former into the bosom of the latter, where they originated and where, by right, they belong. In a certain way, what we wanted was politics as reflected in that famous American painting of a town hall meeting, all in an environment kept as pristine and healthy, and rendered as beautiful, as we could make it. And, yes, we were going to shut up anyone and anything that stood in our way in reaching toward these high ideals. “Totalitarianism” is what our critics, and we ourselves following Mussolini, called this. But they and we used the term in different ways. To them it was the denial of individual caprice, the worst thing anyone could do. To us, on the contrary, it was the immersion of the individual into the community so as to give meaning to his life and to make him an integral part of it, the best thing there is.

  I did not attend a gymnasium, and I am no classical scholar. But I am told that, turning in this direction, we could claim, as one of our predecessors, no less a philosopher than Plato. He, too, was an enemy of individualism. Not only did he precede us in trying to abolish the struggle between richness and poverty, but his whole purpose was to eliminate the difference between “mine” and “thine” even to the point that children were taken from their parents and reared by the community! He, too, opposed what a famous twentieth-century scholar called “the open society.” Using every technological means available at the time, we made our regime as all embracing, as totalitarian, as we could. My only regret is that, not having enough time, we did not make it more totalitarian still.

  14. The Racial Question

  To serve the people, as I tried my best to do from the beginning of my political career to my last hour on earth, is a good and noble thing to do. But which people? The obvious answer is, my people. That, incidentally, was the answer given by good old Kaiser Franz Joseph. Early in the World War, some of his advisers wondered why he had allowed some Jewish refugees from Galicia to camp in the Hofgarten. He answered that they, too, were his people.

  But he was wrong. Whether his words constituted deliberate treason to the German race, as was so often the case on other occasions in the history of the dynasty to which he belonged, or were the outcome of misplaced kindness, I shall not try to judge. The important point is that the host of lesser breeds—Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Poles, Slovenians, Croats, Bosnians, the lot—over whom it was his fate to reign were not his people. Nor were they the people of anyone else. As they never ceased telling anyone who would and who would not listen, they were their own and their own alone. The Czechs in particular were notorious in this respect. And the Jews! As even some Israelis complain, in the whole of history no one has ever been more racist than the rabbis. Compared to their millennia-old efforts to maintain the purity of their race, we were babes in the wood. In the words of one well-known Zionist agitator, Zeev Jabotinsky, whose name I came across for the first time here in Hell, “My love is reserved for my own people alone.” To be sure, he did not say this because they were good and noble. In fact he devoted much of his life to a hopeless attempt to make them so. He said it simply and solely because they were his people.

  My case was entirely different. I did not serve just any people. Let alone a people made up of subhuman criminals. Rather, I served the noblest people—race, to use that much derogated term—that has ever appeared on the face of this planet. Namely, the Nordic-Germanic-Aryan one. The salt of the earth. The only one capable of producing high culture. The only one that was human in the full sense of the word. This was the race Providence had called me to protect and to lead to new heights of splendor. I for my part was going to do my duty. Right to the end, without any ifs, ands, and buts.

  As I wrote earlier, the beginning of my understanding of how big the problem was went back to my days in Vienna. It was there that I first encountered Jews and recognized them as a separate race. As a result, all efforts to “integrate”—at that time, we used to say, Germanize—them were doomed to failure. The Jews, I now understood, were bound to remain what their biology had made them. The more rights we gave them, the more insolent they became.

  Starting as early as 1919, the Jewish question also played an important part in my political efforts. I did not just rant away as so many others did. The better I understood what we were facing, the better able I was to tailor my exertions to the occasion and to the audiences I was addressing. As Schacht’s differences with me indicated, there was no point in raising the issue with industrialists and financiers. There were quite a number of Jews among them, and they understood the problem. But they had, or thought they had, more important issues to deal with. Ditto the officer corps, especially the senior officers. Many never quite understood what I was trying to do.

  As Jewish “social scientists” themselves have often said, many Jews were Luftmenschen, “air men,” or transients. Very few worked with their hands either in the towns or, much less, the countryside. So few were capable of manual labor that it became one of the objectives of the movement that calls itself Zionism to force more of them do so! To no avail, it is needless to say. This being the situation, few workers had much to do with them. A few hotheads apart, the workers did not care much about the Jews either. Those among whom anti-Semitism was most useful, politically speaking, were the petit bourgeois: small farmers, shopkeepers, salespeople, white collar employees, and so on. They were the ones, in other words, with whom the Jews competed and whom they exploited. After the 1929 economic crisis, large numbers of people who had experienced downward social mobility or feared doing so in the near future started taking the same line. It was they who bore the full brunt of what one president of the State of Israel, Shimon Peres, speaking of his own country, called “swinish capitalism.” He ought to know.

  It is my unalterable conviction that race provides the key to history. I also believe that race alone can provide a sound basis on which to build a community, large or small. That is why, having seized power, we lost no time in dealing with the problem. Our goal was simple: to neutralize people of foreign blood and to get rid of them. We wanted to do this not only because they were swine but because we feared the corrupting influence of miscegenation. Early on, our attempts to do so were clumsy and amateurish. SA men and Hitler Jugend members, acting m
ore or less on their own initiative, beat up or humiliated Jews they met in the streets. Here and there they also plundered and destroyed shops, took care of Jewish men who had slept with Aryan women and Aryan women who willingly polluted their bodies by sleeping with Jewish men, and the like. The police stood by, watching the goings-on but doing nothing to stop them. What these spontaneous attacks did prove, though, was that the racial instincts of those who perpetrated them, the young in particular, had remained sound.

  But they did not usually meet with the approval of the majority of our Volk. We ourselves learned this during the boycott of Jewish businesses Goebbels organized for 1 April 1933. We had expected foreigners to criticize us. After all, that was what they were doing most of the time. What we did not expect was the reaction of many ordinary “good Germans.” They felt ashamed; they looked the other way. Some even tried to argue with the brave SA men who were guarding the shops and preventing clients from going inside. A few—very few—went so far as to defy the boycott and to go on with their business in spite of it. The situation on the night of 10-11 November 1938, the so-called Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Crystal) was broadly similar. Again, the first target was not people but property in the form of synagogues, shops, and other businesses. All over Germany they were looted and burned. About 1,000-2,500 Jews were either killed or died as a result of being rounded up and sent to concentration camps. The rest of those arrested, about 30,000 in number, were released after a relatively short stay on the condition that they leave Germany immediately.

  We had every right to do what we did. After all, we were avenging the death of one of our diplomats, Ernst von Rath, who had been shot by a Jew-boy in Paris. Here and there bystanders cheered our actions. However, the German people as a whole remained aloof at best and adverse at worst. From Göring down, our economists and financiers were also aghast. They thought they would have to compensate the owners of insured property—that, in the end, we were able to prevent—and also that the pogrom would put obstacles in front of our foreign trade. All in all, the operation was not a success. That is why we did not repeat it. Nor did I overlook the fact that, both in 1933 and in 1938, the organizing brain had been Goebbels. I continued to trust him, but made sure he would not repeat the same error.

  Sobered by these experiences, we changed our methods. Spontaneous, unorganized anti-Semitic actions by individuals were brought under control, though they were never completely eliminated. In their place, we mounted what must surely have been the most intensive, most sustained propaganda campaign in the whole of history. It started in kindergarten and never let up; among the means we used were graffiti, leaflets, posters, and newspapers. Particularly noteworthy in this respect was the Stürmer. Much as the self-proclaimed “better circles” despised our campaign, in this respect it did an excellent job, as did magazines, books, every sort of game, radio, film, public addresses, and popular rallies. All showed the Jews for what they were: greedy hogs out to swindle the German people and to corrupt it as much as they could. Here I must hand it to Goebbels. Hating Jews as much as any man alive, he made sure that much of his propaganda was directed against them.

  The other tool we used was legislation. No sooner had we seized power than I had Frick, as Minister of Internal Affairs, start drafting what later became the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Directed against the Jews as well as other non-Aryans, it enabled us to fire not only professional civil servants but professors, teachers, and judges as well. Shortly thereafter we extended the law to include lawyers, notaries, physicians, and tax consultants. Most of these were professions in which the number of Jews was proportionally much greater than in the population. They had weaseled their way in; now it was our task to ferret them out. At the last moment Hindenburg gave us a little trouble. He insisted that those who had fought at the front during the World War should be exempted. The same applied to long-term civil servants and to those who had lost a father or son in combat. We had no choice but to accept these compromises. Not, however, for very long.

  The law was passed on 7 April 1933. It was, I am proud to say, the first official attempt in a hundred years to resist what is has since become known as “integration.” What is is, in reality, is the bastardization of the Aryan race. But it did not go nearly far enough. The most difficult problem was to determine who was a Jew and who was not. That is why we made every member of the population fill in a so-called Ariernachweiss (proof of being an Aryan). The form listed each person’s parents and grandparents and had to be accompanied by the appropriate documentation. We took great care to distinguish between full Jews, half Jews, and quarter Jews. A separate category included Jewish men married to non-Jewish women and the other way around.

  At the time, the population of the Reich was a little short of seventy million. Obtaining all this information, sorting it, and registering it represented a gigantic task. The more so because, especially in comparison with the U.S., our civil service was somewhat backward. It hardly used business machines, so everything had to be done by hand. At one point we even had to turn to IBM in order to administer our concentration camps! And because, owing to the need to keep the population on our side, we could not afford to make mistakes as to the identity of our target. Still, by the end of 1935 we had sufficient confidence in the quality and quantity of the information at our disposal to pass the famous Nuremberg Laws.

  The most important articles of the laws, and the supplements which followed them, were as follows. First, Jews ceased to be citizens of the Reich and were reclassified as its subjects. That meant they could no longer vote, carry any public office, or have the honor of serving in the military. Second, marriage and sexual relations between Jews and German women under forty-five years of age were prohibited. To make sure, Jews were also prohibited from employing Aryan housekeepers and cleaning ladies. Third, a whole series of professionals—lawyers, physicians etc.—were forbidden from representing or treating anyone except their fellow Jews. Fourth, all Jews and Jewesses had to add the names “Israel” and “Sara” to their given names.

  The reactions to the laws varied. Abroad, they were almost uniformly condemned. But that did not prevent several Eastern European countries from passing similar legislation. Hungary did so before the war; Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Croatia did that after it had started. All of this shows how urgent, how much in need of a solution, the problem was; it was not simply a figment of my imagination as has so often been claimed. In Germany itself some organizations anticipated our laws. They started expelling their Jewish members even before we ordered them to do so. However, the vast majority of citizens only cared about whether it applied to them. What a relief to learn that one was not Jewish! What a burden to have to report that one was! Here and there was some hanky-panky. Some women married to Jewish men swore that their children’s official fathers were not their biological ones. Some of them even found Aryan men who were prepared to support their testimony. It’s a pity we did not have the kind of DNA tests that are in use today.

  The most interesting aspect was the Jews’ own reaction. They certainly did not welcome the laws. Had they done so, then we National Socialists should have been ashamed of ourselves. The National Representation of the Jews in Germany described them as “the heaviest blow to the Jews in Germany.” Excellent! But the Jews did find some consolation in the fact that, as they believed, from this point on their status and their rights were defined in such a way as to leave little room for error or misunderstandings. This included the right to hoist Jewish colors, which was specifically protected. The outcome, they hoped, would be “a tolerable relationship” between them and the Aryan population of Germany.

  To forestall any problems with respect to the coming Berlin Olympics, we only started implementing the full rigor of the law during the second half of 1936. That apart, the remaining three years until the outbreak of the war saw comparatively little change. We took some additional steps. For example, we prohibited Jews from owning or
driving motor cars and from using public facilities such as park benches, swimming pools, hotels, and the like. We also started Aryanizing the economy by persuading companies to fire their Jewish directors, by bringing pressure to bear on individual Jews to sell their assets to Aryans, and so on.

  All in all, the combination of occasional violence, propaganda, legislation, and economic pressure worked as we had hoped it would. It was not always easy. Quite a few countries were no more eager to have the Jews than we were to keep them. One reason for that was that, the more time went on, the more successful we became in making sure they left their assets behind. In 1938 the Anschluss with Austria, which had proportionally far more Jews than Germany did, caused a major delay. But that problem too, was dealt with—largely, I later learned, thanks to a certain SD lieutenant-colonel by the name of Adolf Eichmann. He set up a most efficient office in Vienna. It worked like an assembly line, taking just eight days to shear Austria’s Jews of their property before providing them with a visa and booting them away to wherever they could go. Later, the same model was used in Germany itself. I am not sure whether Eichmann was ever properly rewarded for his efforts. He should have been.

  The Jews, who formed a little under one percent of our population, were the largest and most important component of the racial problems we faced. But they were by no means the only one. Two others were the gypsies and the mixed offspring of black French soldiers with German women who were conceived as a result of the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923-24. The former we treated more or less as we did the Jews. The latter we tried to register—by no means an easy task, since they were very good at making themselves inconspicuous and hiding. Those we caught we sterilized. Typical of us Germans, entire bureaucracies developed, and a vast correspondence ensued, to decide who should be sterilized, by what methods, and, above all, at whose expense. This operation was still ongoing when the war broke out.