The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  Does this confirm the thesis that most ordinary Germans were anti-Semites? No. At most, denouncers amounted to just 2 per cent of the population. What it does suggest is that anti-Semitic legislation was a powerful weapon in the hands of a minority of Germans: the morally vacuous lawyers who drafted and implemented it, the Gestapo zealots who enforced it, and the odious sneaks who supplied the Gestapo with incriminating information. There was one major stumbling block for this unholy trinity, however. The legacy of decades of intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles was a substantial group of people who defied clear-cut racial categorization because they had only one Jewish parent, or fewer than four Jewish grandparents. Were they Jews? Characteristically, when he was presented with four alternative drafts of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, Hitler chose the least radical, but struck out a crucial sentence – ‘This law is only valid for full Jews’. This created the potential for a broad interpretation of the new law and was welcomed by the party rank-and-file at Nuremberg. The result was interminable arguments between the Ministry of the Interior and party representatives about degrees of Jewishness. While Frick was willing to exempt anyone with fewer than three Jewish grandparents from legal discrimination, Wagner wished to include those with just two Jewish grandparents as well, so that only ‘quarter Jews’ (with one Jewish grandparent) could be given the status of ‘Reich citizens’. The First Supplementary Decree of the Reich Citizenship Law, issued in November 1935, represented a victory for Frick, in that it defined a Jew as ‘anyone who is descended from at least three grandparents who were racially full Jews’ and ‘an individual of mixed Jewish blood (Mischling)’ as anyone ‘descended from one or two grandparents who were racially full Jews’. It also marked a retreat for the party’s racial theorists, in that the decree explicitly identified ‘membership of the Jewish religious community’ as the criterion for determining a grandparent’s race. However, someone with only two Jewish grandparents could still be categorized as a Jew if he or she belonged to the Jewish religious community, married another Jew or was the issue of a mixed marriage or sexual relationship which post-dated the Nuremberg Laws. And the power to distinguish between so-called ‘Mischlinge of the first degree’ (individuals with two Jewish grandparents) and those ‘of the second degree’ (one Jewish grandparent) was given to ‘racial experts’, who were empowered to take physical as well as religious factors into account. A further modification of the legal status of Mischlinge followed in December 1938, when a distinction was introduced between couples with children in which ‘the father is a German and the mother a Jewess’, those in which ‘the father is a Jew and the mother a German’ and those without children. Childless couples with a Jewish male partner were ‘to be proceeded against as if they were full-blooded Jews’. There was an explicit incentive for the non-Jewish wives in such cases to divorce their husbands. In the end, however, bureaucratic inertia prevented the majority of German Mischlinge from being categorized as Jews. This was a source of considerable frustration to the likes of Richard Schulenburg, Oberkriminalsekretär of the Krefeld Gestapo, who thirsted to make his small part of the folk-community 100 per cent ‘Jew-free’s (judenrein).

  The Nuremberg Laws, needless to say, were only a part of the Nazis’ efforts to preserve and enhance the biological purity of the Aryan race. Jews were not the only ‘alien’ group to be victims of escalating discrimination. The provisions of the Nuremberg Laws were also extended to Germany’s 30,000 Sinti and Roma – so-called gypsies – whose fate became the preoccupation of a Reich Central Office for the Fight against the Gypsy Nuisance, established as part of the Reich Criminal Police Office in 1938. The mentally ill were the first group to be subjected to compulsory sterilization under the terms of the July 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Progeny. Between 1933 and 1945 at least 320,000 people were sterilized on the basis of this law, including sufferers from schizophrenia, manic depression, epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea, deafness, deformity and even chronic alcoholism. In 1935 the law was amended to allow abortion up to the end of the second trimester for pregnant mentally ill women. Still Hitler was not content. As early as 1935, he told a senior Nazi medic that ‘if war should break out, he would take up the euthanasia question and implement it’. In fact, he did not even wait for the war. In July 1939 he initiated what became known as the Aktion T-4. It was, he said, ‘right that the worthless lives of seriously ill mental patients should be got rid of.’ Here, as with the persecution of the Jews and Gypsies, the regime encountered little popular resistance and some active support. In a poll of 200 parents of mentally retarded children conducted in Saxony, 73 per cent had answered ‘yes’ to the question: ‘Would you agree to the painless curtailment of the life of your child if experts had established that it was suffering from incurable idiocy?’ Some parents actually petitioned Hitler to allow their abnormal children to be killed. Apart from the Catholic Bishop Clemens von Galen, whose sermons against the euthanasia programme in July and August 1941 led to a temporary halt in the killings, only a handful of other individuals openly challenged ‘the principle that you can kill “unproductive” human beings’. Others who objected turn out, on closer inspection, merely to have disliked the procedures involved. Some wished for formal legality – a proper decree and public ‘sentencing’; others (especially those living near the asylums) simply wanted the killing to be carried out less obtrusively.

  Cleansing the Volk was a multifaceted undertaking. In 1937 the so-called Rhineland bastards were compulsorily sterilized by Gestapo Special Commission No. 3, after Göring had referred the matter to Dr Wilhelm Abel of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Heredity and Eugenics. Homosexuals were manifestly of no racial value; between 1934 and 1938 the number prosecuted annually under Paragraph 175 of the Reich Criminal Code rose by a factor of ten to 8,000. Since criminality was viewed as hereditary, those who broke the law were also targeted as asocial. The November 1933 Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals authorized the castration of sexual offenders.

  The obverse of all this was the effort to encourage the right sort of Germans to breed in the right sort of way. For racial purification involved not only the exclusion of those deemed to be Volksfremd but also the multiplication of racially healthy Volksgenossen. The Reich Agriculture Minister, Walther Darré, made the parallel with stud farming explicit when he wrote: ‘Just as we breed our Hanoverian horses using a few pure stallions and mares, so we will once again breed pure Nordic Germans.’ The Nazi eugenicists had all manner of ingenious ideas to boost Aryan procreation. The Law for the Reduction of Unemployment (June 1933) introduced marriage loans for couples who did not both work; the debts, which were intended to finance the purchase of consumer durables, were cancelled if the wife produced four children. A special handbook was made available to nubile young couples. In among the handy housekeeping tips and recipes, it contained a useful list of ‘Ten Commandments for Choosing a Spouse’:

  Remember that you are German.

  If of sound stock, do not remain unwed.

  Keep your body pure.

  Keep spirit and soul pure.

  As a German, choose someone of German or Nordic blood for your partner.

  When choosing your spouse, look into their lineage.

  Health is a precondition of external beauty.

  Marry only out of love.

  Seek not a playmate but a partner in marriage.

  Wish for as many children as possible.

  There was also the German Mothers’ medal, awarded to any woman who over-fulfilled her quota as a medium for the propagation of Aryan blood. In a kind of childbearing Olympics, mothers were rewarded with gold, silver or bronze medals depending on how many children they had. Jews and other ‘ethnic aliens’ were, needless to say, ineligible. In order to make sure that only the right sort performed these feats of procreation, couples intending to marry had to secure certificates of suitability. Here was another way in which the professionals extended thei
r competence under the Third Reich. Doctors could determine who was fit to breed. Hereditary Health Courts could order the sterilization of those deemed unfit, a procedure which, quite apart from its intended result, was in itself both painful and dangerous. And officials like Karl Astel of the Thuringian Office for Racial Matters could compile information that would ultimately allow racial profiling of the entire population.

  Yet, despite all these inducements, stud farming turned out to be harder with humans than with horses. It greatly worried Himmler that his own SS men were not naturally attracted to the right racial types:

  I see in our marriage requests [he complained] that our men frequently marry in a complete misunderstanding of what marriage means. With the requests I often ask myself, ‘My God, must that one of all people marry an SS man’ – this chit of misfortune and this twisted, in some cases impossible shape who might marry a small eastern Jew, a small Mongolian – for that such a girl would be good. In by far the greater number of instances, these concern radiant, good-looking men.

  In order to rectify this, he began to intervene in SS officers’ matrimonial decision-making. Not only did new recruits have to trace their pure German ancestry back five generations; they were allowed to marry only partners approved as racially suitable by Himmler himself. And they were then exhorted to have at least four children, ‘the minimum necessary for a good and healthy marriage’. Children of the SS were supposed to undergo an alternative form of baptism with SS standard-bearers instead of clergy officiating, and a portrait of Hitler rather than a font as the focal point of the ceremony. The prize for producing a seventh child was to have the Reichsführer himself as its godfather. In a further departure from traditional social conventions, Himmler came to believe that Aryan types should also be encouraged to breed out of wedlock. It was he who inspired the Lebensborn (literally ‘source of life’) programme, which was designed to allow SS officers to sire children with selected concubines located in fifteen delivery suites-cum-kindergartens. Himmler was quite explicit about the objective of all this: ‘To establish the Nordic race again in and around Germany and… from this seed bed [to] produce a race of 200 million.’ ‘It must be a matter of course that we have children,’ he declared in 1943. ‘It must be a matter of course that the most copious breeding should be from this racial elite of the German people. In 20 or 30 years we must really be able to provide the whole of Europe with its ruling class.’

  Of course, not everyone in the Nazi regime subscribed to such notions. But that did not greatly matter. For there were other, more mercenary reasons for backing racial persecution. The German Jews were few, no doubt, but they were on average relatively well off. What simpler way to raise cash for rearmament – or simply to line the pockets of the Nazi leadership – than to steal it in the name of Aryanization? In the year from April 1938 the number of Jewish-owned businesses in Germany declined from 40,000 to 15,000. The boardrooms of corporate Germany saw surreal meetings at which Jewish directors – who were the founders of a firm or the founder’s heirs – stepped down, bequeathing their seats and shares to Aryan colleagues who, if they privately pledged to act as no more than trustees, often found it convenient to forget those pledges. The events of November 1938 illustrated the developing nexus between hatred and cupidity. On November 9, 1938, at Hitler’s instigation, Nazi thugs vandalized, ransacked or burned down nearly two hundred synagogues and thousands of Jewish businesses in towns all over Germany. Jewish cemeteries were desecrated and individual Jews beaten up; around ninety were killed. Some 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to labour camps, though most were released later. The pretext for this massive pogrom was the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, an official at the German embassy in Paris, by a seventeen-year-old Jew named Herschel Grynszpan, whose Polish parents had been deported from Hanover by the Nazis. This was a pogrom worthy of Russia in 1905, though with far more overt state direction. To Göring, however, the violence was also a fiscal opportunity. In the aftermath, a heavy ‘collective fine’ of a billion marks was levied on the German Jewish community to pay for the damage done, as if the Jews themselves had perpetrated it. The November 9 Reichskristallnacht – an allusion to the broken glass that littered the streets afterwards – was a significant moment, revealing not only the violent urge at the root of the regime’s policy towards the Jews, but also the complicity of those Germans who did not feel hatred towards the Jews, merely indifference.

  Nazi anti-Semitism was ‘something new in the history of the world,’ wrote the perceptive liberal journalist Sebastian Haffner in 1940, ‘an attempt to deny humans the solidarity of every species that enables it to survive; to turn human predatory instincts, that are normally directed against animals, against members of their own species, and to make a whole nation into a pack of hunting hounds’:

  It shows how ridiculous the attitude is… that the anti-Semitism of the Nazis is a small side issue, at worst a minor blemish on the movement, which one can regret or accept, according to one’s personal feelings for the Jews, and of ‘little significance compared to the great national issues’. In reality these ‘great national issues’ are unimportant day-to-day matters, the ephemeral business of a transitional period in European history – while the Nazis’ anti-Semitism is a fundamental danger and raises the spectre of the downfall of humanity.

  With the benefit of hindsight, we are bound to ask ourselves why a man like Victor Klemperer failed to discern the approaching calamity. Why did the Jews of Germany, and indeed of Europe, not flee sooner to avoid the hellish fate that Hitler had in mind for them? In fact, a substantial proportion did precisely that. In 1933 around 38,000 left the country, followed by 22,000 in 1934 and 21,000 in 1935. Over 200 of the country’s 800 Jewish professors departed, of whom twenty were Nobel laureates. Albert Einstein had already left in 1932 in disgust at Nazi attacks on his ‘Jewish physics’. The exodus quickened after the ‘Night of Broken Glass’. In 1938 40,000 Jews left Germany; nearly twice that number left in 1939. By the time voluntary departures ceased to be possible, there were little more than 160,000 Jews left in Germany, less than 30 per cent of the pre-1933 figure. It is often forgotten how successful the Nazi policy of encouraging emigration was, though it would probably have achieved even more had it not been for the high taxes levied by Schacht on those leaving Germany.

  As we have seen, Nazism was a political religion and Hitler delighted in playing the part of prophet. ‘If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe’, he declared in a speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, ‘should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of Europe, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!’ As its context makes clear, however, this was as much a threat designed to induce further emigration as a prophecy of a coming genocide.

  WHERE TO GO?

  Nevertheless, it is not hard to see why a man like Klemperer, who considered himself so emphatically a German, chose to stay. Even as late as 1939, it was by no means clear that the Nazis were the worst anti-Semites in continental Europe. Nor was their racial state at this stage unique in the world.

  In neighbouring Poland, for example, there was no shortage of newspaper articles that could equally well have appeared in the Nazi Völkische Beobachter. As early as August 1934, an author writing underthe pseudonym ‘Swastika’ in the Catholic newspaper Pro Christo argued: ‘We should count as a Jew not only the follower of the Talmud… but every human being who has Jewish blood in his veins… Only a person who can prove that there were no ancestors of Jewish race in his family for at least five generations can be consideredto be genuinely Aryan.’ ‘Jews are so terribly alien to us, alien and unpleasant, that they are a race apart,’ a contributor to Kultura wrote in September 1936. ‘They irritate us and all their traits grate against our sensibilities. Their oriental impetuosity, argumentativeness, specific mode of thought, the set of their eyes, the shape of their ears, the winking of their eye
lids, the line of their lips, everything. In families of mixed blood we detect the traces of these features to the third or forth generation and beyond.’ Some nationalists like Stefan Kosicki, editor of the Gazeta Warszawaska, began calling for the expulsion of the Jews. Others went further. Already in December 1938 the daily Mały dziennik was calling for ‘war’ on the Jews, before ‘the Jewish rope’ strangled Poland. The National Democrat (Endek) leader Roman Dmowski prophesied an ‘international pogrom of the Jews’ which would bring an ‘end to the Jewish chapter of history’. Nor was anti-Semitic violence purely verbal. There had already been pogroms in Wilno (Vilnius) in 1934, Grodno in 1935, Przytyk and Minsk in 1936 and Brzesc (Brest) in 1937. In 1936 Zygmunt Szymanowski, a professor of bacteriology at the University of Warsaw, was shocked by the conduct of Endek students in Warsaw and Lwów, who assaulted Jewish students between lectures. In the mid-thirties, between one and two thousand Jews suffered injuries in attacks; perhaps as many as thirty were killed.

  Neither the Catholic Church nor the Polish government wholly condoned such violence, it is true. Yet Cardinal Hlond’s pastoral letter of February 1936 had scarcely been calculated to dampen down Polish anti-Semitism. ‘It is a fact’, he declared,

  that Jews oppose the Catholic Church, are steeped in free-thinking, and represent the avant-garde of the atheist movement, the Bolshevik movement, and subversive action. The Jews have a disastrous effect on morality and their publishing-houses dispense pornography… Jews commit fraud, usury, and are involved in trade in human beings.