From a racial standpoint the Poles contain essentially almost the same racial strains as the Germans, although the proportions of the individual races are different. The nordic-phalian racial type is certainly fairly strongly present… That is the result of the strong strain of German blood which the Polish population of this area have received through the Polonization (Verpolung) of the Germans… On the other hand, the eastern Balt racial strain is present in the Polish population to a far greater degree than in the German population. Moreover, in addition to dinaric, westisch and ostisch strains, there are also some fairly primitive ostisch types about whom one must have grave doubts as to whether they can be regarded as identical to homo alpinus… There is in my view some justification… to term these groups ‘Lapponoids’.
Equipped with such jargon, RuSHA experts known as ‘integration assessors’ (Einigungsprüfer) had to try to distinguish ‘pure or predominantly nordic and phalian types, who are first class in terms of their genetic health and social efficiency’ (Group I) from ‘balanced crosses with a significant proportion of nordic, phalian or dinaric race, with a small addition of other European races who are satisfactory in terms of their genetic health and social efficiency’ (Group II); ‘crosses in which westisch, ostisch or east Baltic racial strains are predominant, but in whom elements of the nordic, phalian or dinarian race are still clearly visible and who are therefore considered to be just adequate as a balanced cross’ (Group III+); ‘crosses in which westisch, ostisch or east Baltic racial strains are predominant, in which however nordic, phalian or dinarian race are still faintly discernible’ (Group III); ‘racially pure ostisch and east Baltic types, unbalanced crosses of the European races’ (Group IV); and finally ‘racial crosses with non-European races and alien races’. By the end of 1943 this bizarre but potentially lethal exercise in racial categorization had largely been completed. Of the 9.5 million people in the incorporated territories, 370,000 were already Reich Germans, a further 353,000 were acknowledged asfully fledged ethnic Germans, 1.7 million were Poles who had satisfied the criteria for inclusion in Groups I and II (and hence automatically became Reich citizens) and 1.6 million were Poles in Group III (who could become citizens only on a case-by-case basis and even then remained subject to discrimination). The rest were either in the fourth category or ‘asocial’. As ‘protected members of the German Reich’ they were likely to end up in concentration camps.
What these policies meant in practice can be illustrated once again with the example of Zamość. In all, as many as 30,000 children were removed from the Zamość area, of whom 4,454 were deemed ‘racially valuable’ enough to be sent to Germany. The majority were sent to concentration camps. On December 13 and December 16, 1942, transports containing 718 Poles from Zamość arrived at Auschwitz. All the children among them were killed by phenol injection as part of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele’s sadistic medical experiments. Two of his victims were the twin sisters Maria and Czeslawa Krajewski. They were just fifteen years old when they were murdered – for the ‘crime’ of being insufficiently Aryan.
MORDOR
The war not only created new opportunities for Nazi racial policy abroad. It also permitted a radicalization within Germany. From 1933 until 1939, for example, the Gestapo had harassed the 832 Jews still living in the Rhineland town of Krefeld with increasing zeal. Though they accounted for less than one per cent of the population, they provided the Gestapo with one in ten of their cases before 1936 and one in three thereafter. In over two-fifths of cases, the individuals concerned were taken into ‘protective custody’ – which put them beyond the reach of what remained of the established legal system – and sent to concentration camps. Nevertheless, it was only after the outbreak of war that Krefeld’s Jewish community could systematically be wiped out. By the summer of 1942, nearly all of them had been deported to their deaths, beginning with the first transport to the Łódź ghetto in October 1941. This escalation manifested itself throughout Germany, as anti-Jewish policy was increasingly implemented outside the regular judicial process. In November 1939, for example, a Jew accused of sexual offences against a German girl was simply shot by the police without reference to courts.
For Victor Klemperer, too, despite the partial protection of his mixed marriage, the coming of war meant an acceleration in the pace of his social exclusion. In 1940 he was forced to relinquish the home he had built in the village of Dölzchen and to move into a crowded ‘Jews’ House’ in Dresden. He was banned from public parks. The following year he was imprisoned for a week for failing to observe blackout regulations. He was taxed into penury. He was even banned from smoking. From September 1941 he was obliged to wear the yellow star.* Each successive diminution in his rights as a citizen forced Klemperer to re-examine his attitude towards the country and culture he had once considered his own. As early as 1937 he had come to ‘believe ever more strongly that Hitler really does embody the soul of the German people, that he really stands for “Germany” and that he will consequently maintain himself and justifiably maintain himself’. Five years later that feeling of alienation had intensified. Discrimination by now was starting to undermine Klemperer’s health. While his wife trudged around in search of potatoes, he was forced despite his age and heart condition to clear snow from the streets and then to toil in a factory. His clothes and shoes were literally disintegrating. His living quarters had shrunk to little more than a cupboard. But these discomforts were as nothing compared with the fear – which constantly grew – of being searched, beaten, arrested, even murdered. ‘I can no longer believe in the completely un-German character of National Socialism,’ he reflected in June 1942, ‘it is home-grown, a malignant growth out of German flesh, a strain of cancer.’
True, not all Germans were afflicted by this disease. In June 1943 Klemperer remarked in his diaries on the ‘altogether comradely, easygoing, often really warm behaviour of the male and female workers towards the Jews… they are certainly not Jew-haters’. On several occasions he recorded how people (particularly middle-aged workers with Social Democrat or Communist backgrounds) signalled their sympathy, if only by shaking his hand and muttering encouragement. But such incidents were clearly outnumbered by occasions when perfect strangers abused him in the street. For example: ‘A group of boys on bicycles, 14 or 15 years of age… overtake me: “He’ll get shot in the back of the head… I’ll pull the trigger… He’ll be hanged on the gallows – stock exchange racketeer.”’ It is significant that the majority of these incidents involved young Germans – evidence, in Klemperer’s eyes, of the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda in the schools and Hitler Youth. It is also evidence that ordinary Germans were well aware of the violence the regime was perpetrating against Jews, if not its precise nature.
It was not only Jews who fell victim to what has been called the Third Reich’s ‘cumulative radicalization’. As we have seen, the murder of mentally ill Germans had begun even before the outbreak of war with the Aktion T-4 (see Chapter 7). The process was accelerated under wartime conditions; significantly, Hitler’s personal order authorizing the ‘euthanasia’ policy was dated September 1, 1939. The case of the asylum in Hadamar, north-west of Frankfurt, makes it clear just how overtly the Nazi state was now capable of committing murder. Between January and August 1941 more than 10,000 people were put to death there in a specially constructed gas chamber in the cellar, most of them mental patients transported from other psychiatric hospitals. Although the policy was supposed to be secret, local people knew perfectly well what was being done. As the president of the higher state court in Frankfurt reported to the Reich Minister of Justice, ‘even children call out when such transport cars pass: “There are some more to be gassed.”’ The smoke from the crematorium chimney was clearly visible hanging over the town. The personnel from the asylum were shunned by the local populace when they came to drink in local pubs after work. The Bishop of Limburg, in whose diocese Hadamar lay, followed Bishop Galen’s lead in protesting at what was being done. H
e too noted the absence of secrecy. Local schoolchildren referred to the buses that brought patients to Hadamar as ‘murder-boxes’ and taunted one another by shouting: ‘You’re crazy; you’ll be sent to the baking oven in Hadamar.’ A particular source of local concern was that elderly people would be next: ‘After the feebleminded have been finished off,’ local people were heard to say, ‘the next useless eaters whose turn will come are the old people.’ These complaints led to a suspension of the killings and the decommissioning of the gas chambers, but this proved to be only a tactical pause. Later in the war Hadamar once again became a slaughterhouse, though this time the victims were around 500 Poles and Russians, allegedly sufferers from tuberculosis. Because the smoke from the crematorium was seen as having precipitated the earlier protest, these victims of Nazism were given lethal injections, or orally administered drug overdoses, and buried in the asylum grounds.
When it became necessary to suspend the ‘euthanasia’ campaign, its perpetrators lost little time in applying their techniques elsewhere. Concentration camps like Buchenwald were preferable to mental hospitals because they were located further from centres of population. (Buchenwald, surrounded by trees as the name suggests, was in the Ettersburg forest outside Weimar; it was invisible even from the nearby Ettersburg Castle.) By 1941 doctors like Friedrich Mennecke were routinely selecting prisoners there and in other camps as ‘unworthy of life’ purely on the grounds of their racial origins or ‘asocial’ behaviour. One such victim was Charlotte Capell, a forty-seven-year-old nurse from Breslau, who was condemned to death for ‘persistent racial defilement’ and ‘hid[ing] her Jewish origin behind Catholicism [by hanging] a Christian cross around her neck’. Another was Christine Lehmann from Duisburg, who was sent to Auschwitz after being identified as a ‘half-gypsy’ (Zigeunermischling) and found guilty of ‘asocial’ and ‘community endangering’ behaviour, namely a ‘marriagelike relationship’ with a German man. Marlies Müller, an unmarried Jewish servant, was condemned to be gassed for ‘continual racial defilement with German soldiers’, compounded by her ‘insolence and laziness’ in the camp where she had been held after her arrest.
Such was the ethos of the new empire that was taking shape in Europe. It was based on an ideology not merely of racial hierarchy and segregation but of sweeping ethnic transformation, to be achieved by the systematic and unrestrained use of violence against civilians in conquered territory and at home. To be sure, all empires – and indeed most states of any size – involve some measure of violence and subjugation. To end the Iraqi insurgency of 1920, to take just one example, the British had relied on a combination of aerial bombardment and punitive village-burning expeditions. Indeed, they had contemplated using mustard gas too, though supplies had proved to be unavailable. Churchill, no faint heart in these matters, was shocked by the actions of some trigger-happy pilots and vengeful ground troops, just as he had been dismayed by the Amritsar Massacre in India the year before. As Churchill freely acknowledged, British rule in the Middle East and India rested ultimately on soldiers, guns and ‘the whole apparatus of scientific war’. But he made it clear on numerous occasions that he regarded British power as being fundamentally constrained by the rule of law and the sovereignty of parliament. Mowing down civilians, as he put it, was ‘not the British way of doing business’. As Macaulay had put it a century before, ‘the most frightful of all spectacles [was] the strength of civilisation without its mercy’. In the face of the Quit India movement of 1942, to be sure, the British did not hesitate to use force, but this was in the face of a wave of riots, strikes, attacks on communications and other acts of sabotage.* The leaders of the nationalist Congress were jailed but they were not murdered, as they surely would have been had the Germans or the Japanese been running India. And it is worth noting that this took place after Sir Stafford Cripps† had explicitly proposed that after the war a self-governing India be set up within the British Commonwealth under an Indianized Executive Council acting as a British-style Cabinet, with an elected constituent assembly renegotiating the terms of the new Anglo-Indian relationship, up to and including the possibility of provincial non-accession to the Commonwealth (leaving the way open to independence for a Muslim Pakistan). The British aim, as Cripps said, was ‘to give India full self-government at the earliest possible moment’.
Facile comparisons between British rule in India and Hitler’s empire in Europe, or for that matter Stalin’s Soviet Union, are sometimes drawn. Indeed, as we shall see, Hitler drew them himself (see Chapter 14). To be sure, the British had no illusions about their position in wartime India. ‘For the duration of the war and probably for some time after,’ wrote the Military Secretary of the India Office in 1943, ‘India must be considered as an occupied and hostile country.’But there is a profound difference between, for example, the famine that struck India in 1943 and the systematic mass murder of civilians that was undertaken as a deliberate policy by the Nazis in Europe after 1939. It is undeniable that a combination of incompetence, complacency and indifference, tinged with resentment of the previous year’s riots, ensured that the official response to the 1943 famine was woefully inadequate. Yet the famine began with a cyclone and the loss of imports from Japanese-occupied Burma, not with an order from Churchill to starve Bengalis. Hitler’s imperialism, as we have seen, was quite different in character. Ashe had already explained to the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax in 1937, his approach to the problem of Indian nationalism would have been to ‘shoot Gandhi, and if that does not suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members of Congress; and if that does not suffice, shoot 200 and so on until order is established’. Even Mussolini, whose imperialism was in some respects more old-fashioned than Hitler’s, not only enthusiastically ordered the use of mustard gas in the conquest of Abyssinia but also bombarded his Viceroy there, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, with instructions to shoot ‘all rebels made prisoner’, to ‘finish off rebels’ with gas and to ‘initiate and systematically conduct [a] policy of terror and extermination against rebels and populations in complicity with them’.
Historians have sometimes represented the Nazi empire as if its extreme violence had an ultimately self-defeating character. This is not how it appeared at the time. From a British vantage point, the ruthlessness of German imperialism was at once appalling and deeply impressive. So enfeebled did their own colonial imperium seem by comparison that relatively few Englishmen consciously considered themselves to be fighting to preserve it. Rather, they imagined themselves fighting for an idealized England. On leave, Geoffrey Wellum, an eighteen-year-old Battle of Britain pilot, yearned to go away ‘deep into the country and get lost, to the type of place I sometimes dream about, somewhere with sun-drenched water meadows and grazing cattle, hedges, meandering streams and so forth’. As he flew, he looked down on ‘the rolling colourful countryside, English countryside, surely a green and pleasant land [with] small cars on small roads passing through small villages’. The difference in scale with the grandiose visions of the Nazis could scarcely have been more complete. J. R. R. Tolkien always denied that his Lord of the Rings trilogy, conceived during the First World War and largely written during the Second, was an allegory of contemporary events. Yet, as he conceded, it was certainly applicable to them. ‘The Shire’, with its thatched cottages, dappled sunlight and babbling brooks, was England precisely as she imagined herself in 1940 – not a mighty world empire, but an innocent rural backwater, albeit one acutely vulnerable to contamination from outside. Mordor was the totalitarian antithesis, a blasted industrial hell, ‘bored and tunnelled by teeming broods of evil things’, spewing forth monstrous hordes and devilish weaponry; a realm of slaves and of camps. Like Tolkien’s hobbits, the English considered themselves the plucky little underdogs pitted against an all-knowing, all-powerful foe. The Lord of the Rings is a fairy story, in its author’s own phrase, but one that was ‘quickened to full life by war’ – indeed, Tolkien himself also referred to the work as ‘a history of the Great
War of the Ring’ and a homage ‘to England; to my country’. It is a celebration of ‘the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds’ – and in that respect a quite different kind of Ring saga from the Wagnerian version revered by Hitler.
The odds did indeed look well-nigh impossible. By the spring of 1941 the best encouragement Alan Brooke could give himself was that Hitler might abandon his efforts to defeat Britain and ‘thrust into Russia’ instead. Strikingly, however, in his diaries Brooke did not expect even this to give Britain much relief: ‘Whatever the next thrust may be on the continent it is certain that the process of attempted strangulation will continue full blast with attacks on trade routes, Western Approaches, Western Ports and industry. If these attempts are sufficiently successful eventually invasion will be attempted.’ He did not expect the Soviets to hold out against a German invasion for longer than ‘3 or 4 months’. Others in London put the likely duration of Russian resistance at three or four weeks; the expectation was that the Wehrmacht would go through the Red Army ‘like a knife through butter’. Churchill himself expected that the Soviets would ‘assuredly be defeated’. Those now seem excessively pessimistic judgements. Given the staggering negligence of the man running the Soviet Union, however, it was far from unreasonable. Empires, it has already been noted, rely on collaboration as much as on coercion. One of the supreme ironies of the Second World War was that in its first two years Hitler’s empire found no more loyal collaborator than Josef Stalin.
12
Through the Looking Glass
[There are] two breeds of Bolshevism… there is nothing to choose between the philosophies of Moscow and Berlin.
The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Page 51