Hitler in Hell

by Martin van Creveld

  But getting rid of non-Aryan blood was just part of the story. Our aim was not merely to purify the race and to maintain it unsullied, but to improve it as much as we could. In this we were anything but unique. The idea of breeding people in the same way as we breed, say, pigeons and horses goes back at least as far as Plato. Darwin had something to say about it, as did his half cousin, the famous polymath Francis Dalton. Starting around 1880, it was very much in the air. Not only in Germany, but in all West-European countries as well as the U.S. Two different paths were available for the purpose. The first was to mate superior males with superior females so as to produce superior offspring. The second was to sterilize or, if necessary, destroy life unworthy of living.

  We never went very far in the first direction. In fact, we did much less than the government of Singapore, which at one point set up a state-run marriage bureau to encourage women with academic degrees to marry. The prohibition on mixed marriages apart, essentially all we tried to do was to ensure that people would not marry partners with hereditary diseases. Thus the process of artificial selection, to the extent that it worked at all, was essentially negative. The other part of our program was more successful or, at any rate, more active. We set up special committees whose task was to identify all sorts of inferior people suffering from incurable hereditary diseases. As experience accumulated, the exact nature of the regulations changed; we included feeble-mindedness as well as alcoholism. Such people were sterilized so they would not pass their problems to their offspring. Over a period of twelve years, the total number is said to have been around 200,000. Nor, once again, were we by any means the only ones who carried out such measures. Others included the U.S.—who were actually the pioneers—and Switzerland. Proportionally speaking, the largest program was the Swedish one. Ere it was terminated in 1975, it took care of 63,000 people, all under the auspices of those great humanitarians, the Social Democratic Party.

  It was shortly before the outbreak of World War II that one of my physicians, Dr. Karl Brandt, drew my attention to a related problem. A married couple had sent him some horrible photographs showing a horribly deformed baby they, through no fault of their own, had given life to. In the letter they wrote they begged me, as Führer and Reichskanzler, to help them deal with the problem. In addition to Brandt I consulted Philip Bouhler, the Chief of my Party Chancellery. Thereupon I gave my consent to the campaign later known as T-4, after the address of the building in Berlin’s Tiergartenstrasse, which housed the headquarters in charge.

  The procedure was similar to the one we used in the case of sterilization. Teams were sent to mental asylums, homes for the feeble-minded, and, where appropriate, the homes of families with problematic offspring. But not all the work was done by officialdom from above. Far from it! As I just said, the original impetus was created by two unfortunate parents. In many other cases people told on their neighbors. Quite a few of those who did so were Protestant priests; that was typical of them, I should say. Next, special committees made up of physicians, psychiatrists, lawyers, and social workers decided who should live and who should die. The patients were gathered, loaded onto buses with sealed windows, taken to specially prepared centers far from populated areas, and given a merciful death by gas or injection. Later, their families would be informed that they had died of this disease or that.

  Besides, we had little choice. This, after all, was wartime. Our best efforts notwithstanding, food was in short supply, and its quality was deteriorating. The same applied to hospital beds and medical supplies. Doctors and nurses had their hands full looking after the wounded. Should we really have allowed them to go short just to keep all kinds of monstrosities alive? Still, we worked to find better solutions. One promising line of research was meant to discover methods to identify all kinds of birth-defects while the fetus was still in the womb. That, of course, would lead to an abortion; though whether it should be voluntary or obligatory was a question we never got around to discussing.

  We did our best to proceed in secret. Nevertheless, T-4 encountered considerable opposition on the part of the people and, even more so, the Catholic Church, whose German heads voiced their antiquated, rather maudlin, doctrines concerning the “sanctity” of human life. Any human life, except, until a few centuries ago, that of people who opposed its doctrines and were executed as heretics! The strongest voice was that of the Bishop of Münster, Clement August von Galen. His sermon was picked up by the English. They reprinted it and had the Royal Air Force drop it over Germany in the form of leaflets. Many of my men wanted to hang him. I, however, decided that the resulting outrage would be more than the man was worth. First, because the issue was relatively minor; and second, because he never attacked National Socialism as such. Instead, I would settle accounts with him after the war. Meanwhile, so strong was the opposition that we had to suspend the campaign until greater precautions to preserve secrecy could be put in place. To us, however, this was a matter of principle. In the heile Welt (wholesome world) we were building there was no room for all sorts of degenerates.

  Some of the relevant research was done in the concentration camps. In them our physicians enjoyed unlimited access to every kind of human flotsam and jetsam. There were people whose lives were expendable if not actually harmful to the community. Prominent among the physicians in question was the excellent Dr. Josef Mengele in Auschwitz. Like Eichmann, Mengele has been demonized after 1945. Consequently, he had to spend the last decades of his life in hiding from the Jews and their agents. In reality he was small fry, never rising any higher than SS Captain. During my life on earth I never heard of him. Judging by what I later learned about his medical experiments, though, he seems to have been on the right track.

  Nor did the end of the war and the destruction of National-Socialist Germany bring the enterprise to an end. To the contrary, I am told that, partly building on our efforts, over the last few decades physicians have made very great progress in this direction. The number of tests, and of the birth-defects they can uncover, now runs into the dozens. Scarcely a week passes without some new one being announced. Whatever people may say about me in other respects, my contribution to this work is something of which I am, and have every right to be, proud.

  As well as enhancing the quality of the race, we also wanted to increase its numbers. Most of what I have to say about the ways we tackled that problem will be found in the next chapter. Here, however, I want to mention two programs we put in place. Both were designed and managed by Himmler, who was always very interested in this kind of thing. Neither was very important in terms of the numbers affected. But both pointed to the way in which I, and even more so he, hoped to shape these things in the future. The first was Lebensborn. In the overheated popular imagination, Lebensborn was a sort of supervised brothel system where young unmarried German girls could have themselves impregnated by selected SS studs. That, however, was nonsense, possibly spread by Himmler for his own ends.

  The real nature of Lebensborn was very different. Himmler was what we Germans call a Prinzipenreiter, a man very much concerned with principled behavior. I suppose it was the teacher in him; throughout his life, there were few things he liked doing more than lecturing his subordinates. One thing he always worried about was the fate of illegitimate children born to healthy German women who would, as a result, be lost to the nation. He wanted to ensure, as far as possible, that every drop of Germanic blood would count regardless of whether or not its mother wore a wedding ring. The idea met with a lot of opposition. Most of it came from decent married women who feared that the distinction between them and unmarried mothers would be lost. Their fears were not without reason. Beginning with the introduction of the pill during the 1960s, so loose has sexual morality become as to make one wonder whether there are still any decent women who are not sluts left.

  But those things were still to come. Beginning in the late 1930s, Himmler set up a number of centers where “girls in trouble,” as the euphemism goes, could turn, provided, of cou
rse, they and the fathers were of healthy racial stock and free of hereditary diseases. They would spend the last weeks of pregnancy in a safe environment where, contrary to legend, no strange men were admitted. There they would give birth and be taught the rudiments of child care before being sent on their way. Himmler, in his capacity as Chief of the German Police, would also provide them with the necessary papers and the like. Later the program, having been extended into the occupied territories in the West, set up homes where women pregnant with the offspring of German soldiers could turn. Subsequent historians have estimated the total number of children who were saved in this way at 12,000 or so. Of those, two-thirds were born to German mothers and the rest to Aryan women of other nationalities.

  The second program was much larger. It consisted of taking away Aryan, but non-German, children from their parents and having them raised as Germans by German families. On 15 May 1940 Himmler prepared a memorandum for me on the topic. I cannot remember it—at the time I had a few other things on my mind. But he claimed it had my “full approval.” The title was “Racially Pure Children of Foreign People in the East.” That meant, at that time, chiefly Poland. They would, provided their parents agreed and as a condition for receiving a good education unavailable in their native lands, be removed to Germany and brought up as Germans. “Cruel and tragic as this may be in each individual case,” Himmler reasoned, “if, from inner conviction, one rejects the Bolshevik method of physical extermination as un-German and impossible, then this method is still the mildest and the best.” I am not sure what happened next. But I am told that, as the war went on, several hundreds of thousands—the figures differ—of racially fit children were in fact taken away from their families, placed with German ones, and raised as Germans. Good for them, I suppose.

  Some years ago, an American historian published a book about my “willing executioners” that generated a lot of noise. In it he put forward his thesis that the German people as a whole were permeated by what he called “eliminationist anti-Semitism.” He also stated that they gladly cooperated with our racial program, especially its Jewish component. I wish things had been that simple! In fact, the program did meet with considerable assent among broad swaths of the nation. But by no means did everyone approve. And even those who agreed that the Jews had to go were often reluctant to get involved in the dirty work which alone could lead us to that goal. Or else why does the worthy historian think we had to put in place a gigantic propaganda machine and run it for years on end? We had to proceed carefully, step by step, lest we should find ourselves saddled with the kinds of problems that attended both the 1933 boycott and the 1938 Crystal Night.

  Those two were just the tip of the iceberg. Every time we wanted to do away with this or that Jew, some good German nobly stepped forward to defend him. All the other Jews, he would readily admit, were swine. But this one was a first-class Jew, and therefore deserved to be exempted from the measures we had in mind. One of the Jew-defenders most active in this field was none other than Frau Wagner. Another, it turns out, was Göring’s brother Albert! Göring himself was also involved to some extent. It was not that he liked Jews—he did not. But, accomplished extortionist that he was, he saw many opportunities to make a profit. In one notorious case, in return for some valuable paintings, he allowed the widow of a Jewish art-dealer in Amsterdam to get away to Switzerland. Another family he helped was that of Moritz Ballin, the founder and owner of a famous furniture-producing firm in Munich. He probably did that because one of its female members had helped save his life when he was wounded during the 1923 Putsch. I myself made up my mind to ignore all of the appeals of which I was made aware. But even I did not have one hundred percent success, I must confess.

  15. The German Woman

  I am, as everyone knows, an incorrigible racist. A racist, as everyone knows, is the worst thing anyone can be. That, of course, does not disturb me in the slightest. Though tactically flexible, I have never surrendered one iota of my principles. Not when I was a penniless semi-vagabond in Vienna. Not when I was on trial for treason. Not when I was one of the most powerful men in the world. And I have no intention of doing so in the future either. But racism has one implication which, we National Socialists apart, only a few people seem to have grasped in full measure. To wit, the fact that it all depends on, and revolves around, women.

  Women are the mothers of the race. Any race, including the one to which my people and I belong. Only women can make sure that a race should keep itself pure, multiply, and develop so as to fulfill the destiny Providence had laid down for it. Or why else did the Jewish rabbis always count descent by way of the mother? Without women, their readiness to love and to conceive and to bear and to deliver and to suckle and to raise and to sacrifice and to suffer, a race is doomed to be overcome by its neighbors, fall behind in the struggle for existence, and disappear.

  That is why the women of any race, and the German race more than any other, are the most precious treasure of all. As the mathematics of reproduction shows all too clearly, compared with them, men always have been and still are expendable. At all costs, women must be sheltered and protected from the full harshness of life. How else can they perform the task nature has designed them for? If nothing else works, this must be done even against their own will, by barring them from the activities, fields, and professions for which they are not suited.

  Watching the world from Hell, I still believe the best a woman can do is to have children. She should preferably do this in conjunction with a husband, but if necessary without one—a point on which many feminists seem to agree with me. Doing so, she will benefit both herself—recent experiments with other mammalian females confirm the mental and physical boost that pregnancy gives them—and the people to which she belongs, without which she is nothing. For confirmation, just look at what is happening in Europe and, more recently, the U.S. So low is the birthrate in both that they are flooded with immigrants, almost always ones of inferior stock. Once admitted, they breed like rabbits. As history shows, these people are entirely incapable of creating anything that passes for culture. What they call their language is simply a series of grunts; their only contribution to the community is to rape native women and to kill one another as well as members of the surrounding society which, through its thoroughly mistaken policies, has given them shelter.

  In contrast, a childless woman is the most superfluous, least needed, creature in the entire world. So much so that she is in more than slight danger of going entirely off her head unless, of course, she can find satisfaction by looking after the children of some other woman. Quite a few women have always done this, and many still do. Often, the childless woman is also the unhappiest one. Ask the English writer Virginia Woolf who, not having children and being a lesbian to boot, named her cottage “Mad Misery” and ended by drowning herself in a river. Or even recall, if you are willing to go back that far into the Old Testament, the Jewish woman Rachel telling her husband, Jacob, “Give me sons, or else I will die.” Women’s tendency, so prevalent in today’s “developed” world, to postpone the birth of their first child until they are well past their thirtieth birthday only benefits the fertility clinics on the one hand and the adoption agencies on the other. Everyone else pays and suffers.

  We National Socialists have always been aware of these problems. In part, that was because no Party’s program was more deeply rooted in biological reality. Not for nothing did proportionally more physicians join our ranks than did the members of any other profession. Partly it happened because, for us, nothing was more important than strengthening our nation and our race as much as we could. That is why, almost from the beginning, one of our most important objectives was to protect women—racially fit women, needless to say. We wanted to empower them—not by turning them into second-rate men, but by providing them with the opportunity to have children and to raise them as they deserved to do and as the children themselves deserved to be. Doing so does not mean to belittle, or to despise, or to disc
riminate against, or to exploit. To the contrary, it means to respect and to cherish and to adore and to worship women as proper men should. As I, for example, did my mother.

  So what was the real position of women in the Third Reich? To answer this question, let me briefly explain the state of German feminism before we took power. We had a very wide variety of feminist groups: a Catholic Frauenbund, a Protestant Frauenbund, as well as conservative, liberal, socialist, communist, colonial, and Jewish Frauenbünde, to name but a few. The total number of women’s organizations has been estimated at no fewer than 230.

  Some of these organizations were liberal and campaigned in favor of “equal rights” for women. Others opposed such rights in the name of motherhood and even blamed the Republic for having enfranchised women. Some supported abortion rights; others opposed them. Others still advocated the compulsory sterilization of unfit people. It was interesting to watch how, during the last years before 1933, the socialist and liberal women’s movements, the same which demanded “equal rights” for women, lost power and adherents. Conversely, those promoting motherhood and demanding greater attention to the needs of mothers gained them. At that time, the term “feminist” itself was becoming anathema to many women.