11
The ‘Elevation’ of the German People
On the domestic front, Hitler’s position grew ever more secure. Germany was now a one-party state. ‘We are in the middle of the slow completion of the total state,’ Hitler told his Reichsstatthalter in early July 1933. The task ahead, he announced, was to create a ‘legal basis’ for this ‘total National Socialist state’.1 A week later, the NSDAP was declared to be the only political party in the Reich. A series of measures designed to ensure the penetration of the state by the party followed in the second half of the year; these were largely unsuccessful, leaving unfinished business to the very end of the Reich. In late September 1933, Hitler announced his intention ‘to bring the National Socialist party gradually into the federal authority’.2 Rudolf Hess, the deputy Führer of the NSDAP, began to play an ever greater role in the meetings of the Reich cabinet and in government more generally.3 In December 1933, this tendency found expression in the ‘Law to Secure the Unity of Party and State’, whose very name seemed to embody the symbiosis between the two.
Despite these steps, Hitler believed that the Nazification of the state was not the solution. He wanted to maintain the effectiveness of the administration and economy, and to prevent interference by party-appointed incompetents. He therefore spent much of the summer and autumn of 1933 telling the party leadership to ease off on the enforcement of Nazism at the local level if this cut across economic productivity and the smooth functioning of the state. When asked by Hess whether the entire ‘state apparatus’ should be staffed exclusively by party members, he replied simply ‘that that was not necessary’.4 Underlying Hitler’s scepticism about the value of Nazification by party-book was a much broader crisis of identity in the movement throughout the spring and summer of 1933.5 Until then the NSDAP, though large, had been smaller than the SPD. It was in Hitler’s mind an elite group, tested through adversity, and therefore entitled to a leadership role in the Third Reich.
With the takeover of power, however, and especially after the March 1933 Reichstag elections, the NSDAP was flooded with membership applications by careerists, sarcastically known as ‘March victims’, although the largest number of entrants were actually registered in May.6 Hitler feared the ‘embourgeoisement’ of the party and its dilution by ‘opportunists’. He had, in fact, anticipated this problem in Mein Kampf, where he distinguished between revolutionary ‘members’ and more passive ‘supporters’; he had even envisaged an immediate ban on new members after the seizure of power.7 There was also the question of what the future role of the general party organization should be now that power had been attained. Surely not governance, as this was now in the hands of the Nazis running the state, or individual Nazi executive institutions. Surely not propaganda, as this was the domain of Goebbels and his Propaganda Ministry. On 1 May 1933, the party announced that it would accept no further applications until 1937. The contradiction, though, was plain. How could one demand the penetration of the party into all walks of life and government while at the same time closing the lists to new members?
Hitler resolved this tension through a deep programme of domestic transformation in Germany. There was no point in ‘coordinating’ everything, he explained, somewhat tactlessly given that he was speaking to the imperial commissars, if one did not have the ‘right man’ to execute it.8 At one level, Hitler was merely stressing the importance of finding the most qualified candidate for a post, rather than simply appointing a Nazi time-server. At another level, however, Hitler was making a much broader point about the supposed need to transform German society in a more fundamental way. He wanted not simply outward conformity, but inner acceptance and reproduction of the new order, and for that greater ‘racial’ coherence was necessary. This is what Hitler meant when he told an audience of SA men in Kiel in the early summer of 1933 that ‘we must continue the struggle for the soul of the German person’.9 Germans, he was suggesting, would need to learn what the Anglo-Americans had long since mastered, which was the achievement of national cohesion not through threats or bribes, but through instinct.
Here, Hitler believed that he had a mountain to climb. The sense of German fragility and racial weakness, which had stalked his writings and speeches throughout the 1920s, continued to haunt him after 1933. Hitler’s view of the German people as it actually existed was deeply unflattering. He was deeply conscious of their poverty and ignorance. Hitler despaired of the low civilizational level of the average ‘unwashed’ recruit in his remarks to the Reichswehr leadership. ‘It is a fact that racially lower-ranking people have to be forced into culture,’ he remarked, and the filth of many German recruits reflected the fact that they were more likely to sympathize with equally degraded foreigners than with their own fellow countrymen.10 Moreover, far from being racially pure, Hitler told an audience of major industrialists in the autumn of 1933, the German people were ‘a combined nation, which is made up of many different groups and parts’ and contained ‘many people’ who were completely ‘unsuited’ for a higher culture.11 Hitler’s attitude towards the Germans was affectionate to be sure, but also highly condescending. Racially fragmented, liable to be easily manipulated by the Jews and foreign propaganda, and vulnerable to the blandishments of American popular culture, his German Volk left a lot to be desired.
One way of creating the desired ‘racial state’12 was to eliminate the negative. Here, Hitler’s main target was German Jewry, agents in his mind of foreign subversion and internal racial decomposition. Their systematic exclusion began with the ‘Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service’ in early April 1933, and other measures followed. There were many agencies and individuals at work here, of course, but Hitler was in control at all times, either driving the process forward or refusing to be bounced into ‘premature’ action by over-zealous bureaucrats or party leaders.13 The war on the Jews proceeded slowly, partly because, as we have seen, Hitler did not want to alienate the outside world unnecessarily, and partly because of the intricate definitional issues involved. Removing ‘full’ Jews was one thing, but what about the so-called half and quarter Jews? Hitler was reluctant to condemn the hundreds of thousands of people involved out of hand, because by his reckoning so much ‘valuable’ blood was mixed in with what he thought of as the dross. Even on his own terms, of course, Hitler’s laws were riddled with contradictions, because while he would come to define a ‘Jew’ as someone with two ‘Jewish’ grandparents, this ‘scientific’ assessment was based on the religious affiliation of the ancestors concerned and not their supposed ‘racial’ category, which would have been impossible to establish anyway.
Interestingly, there was at this point little sense of enmity towards Slavs, as such. They had not featured much in his thinking during the 1920s, and Slavophobia played no role in Hitler’s policies in the first years after 1933.14 Partly, no doubt, this was due to diplomatic sensitivities with regard to Poland, but the main reasons were ideological. Hitler had targeted Russia for expansion, not because the Slavs were inferior but because Jewry and Bolshevism had in his view rendered the state defenceless, an alleged fate which he feared would also befall Germany. Moreover, Hitler was well aware that the German Volk included many people of Polish or Czech origin. In both domestic politics and foreign policy, in fact, Hitler was much less anti-Polish than the German conservative mainstream.
The other important front in the campaign to eliminate ‘unworthy’ strands in the German national body politic was the attack on the disabled and those suffering from hereditary illnesses.15 Unlike the Jews, Hitler did not see them as foreign agents, but just as a drain on state resources and a threat to the physical and mental health of the German people. In mid July 1933, Hitler rushed through a ‘Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring’.16 This permitted the compulsory medical sterilization of those suffering from ‘hereditary’ physical or mental disabilities which might be passed on to their progeny, including blindness, deafness, schizophrenia, manic depression
and physical deformities. Its purpose, he explained to the cabinet, was to ensure that ‘hereditarily ill people’ did not ‘reproduce in large numbers’ while ‘millions of healthy children remained unborn’.17 Hitler took a close interest in the execution of these measures. When told of the number of deaths during sterilization operations, he suggested radiotherapy instead.18 Hitler’s motivation in all this was not just antipathy towards the disabled, but a concern to preserve the able-bodied. The purpose of his war on the ‘weak’ was to make Germany fit for war against the ‘strong’.
In all this, Hitler drew on many traditions within existing German eugenics, but he was particularly impressed by the American model. His inspiration was not so much the American South, but the ‘miscegenation’ and eugenics laws across the entire Union.19 The US Eugenic News remarked that ‘to one versed in the history of eugenic sterilization in America, the text of the German statute reads almost like the American model sterilization law’.20 One of Hitler’s authorities was Leon Whitney, whose book The Case for Sterilization he specifically requested. His main inspiration, however, remained Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race, who was unpopular among Nazis generally because of his sceptical view of Germans, but to whom Hitler wrote that he considered that work ‘his Bible’.21 One area where Hitler did not seek to emulate the United States was smoking, which formed such an important part of the American Dream. He refused to allow it in his presence, not even by his closest political associates, or by Eva Braun. In time, Nazi scientists conducted research into the harmful effects of tobacco, banned smoking in offices and waiting rooms (though with little success) and introduced non-smoking carriages on trains.22
The removal of supposedly harmful elements, however, was not enough for Hitler. If Germany was to have any chance of prevailing against the racially superior Angloworld, Hitler would have to accentuate the allegedly positive in German society. There would have to be a general civilizational and racial ‘elevation’ (Hebung) of the Germans in order to distil their better elements into what he regarded as ‘racial’ purity. Reversing centuries of demographic drain overseas, and confronting the cultural and socio-economic lure of the New World, the Reich would have to articulate an attractive and viable vision for German racial renewal.
Central to Hitler’s project of racial distillation and elevation were ‘standards of living’. This was partly because he feared, as he warned the Reichswehr leadership, that a ‘low standard of living’ would render Germans vulnerable to ‘Bolshevism’,23 but the main reason was that he was explicitly competing with the west, and the ‘American way of life’ in particular. The battle for the soul of the German working class was primarily fought not against the Soviet Union, but against the United States. Hitler did not share the widespread German cultural snobbery about civilization, consumption and technology. In his mind, prosperity and technological progress both reflected and increased ‘racial’ value, just as a low standard of living both accelerated racial degeneration and was the product of it. The domestic focus of the regime, therefore, was not propaganda, but consumption.24
For this reason, Hitler threw his personal prestige behind increasing German car ownership. Early on in his chancellorship, he introduced tax relief for new vehicles.25 In the spring of 1934 he instructed the bureaucracy to look into the production of an affordable ‘people’s car’.26 In a series of speeches to representatives of the German automobile industry, he praised the ‘psychological liberation’ which came with car ownership, and looked forward to a time when what had been ‘a luxury’ became ‘common property’. He lamented the fact that ‘whereas there were about 23 million cars in circulation in America, with another 3 to 4 million being produced every year, Weimar Germany had managed to put only about 450,000 on the roads and had produced about a tenth of that number in recent years. This was despite the fact that Germany had just over half the population of the United States. ‘The Ford car’, he continued, was the vehicle through which ‘millions’ or at least ‘hundreds of thousands’ could achieve the ‘elevation of their standard of living’. He therefore called upon German industry to bring ‘purchasing price and maintenance costs’ of this car into ‘a sustainable relationship to the income of the broad mass of the people’, as was already the case in the United States.27 Interestingly, Hitler did not show the same enthusiasm for lorries as a means of moving goods, putting more faith in the railways.28 The automobile was primarily an object of consumption rather than propulsion.
Next to the automobile, the aeroplane was central to the Nazi project of modernity. Here, too, Germany had to play catch-up. The British and Americans were well ahead not merely in military and naval but also in civil aviation. Hitler pushed strongly for the increased use of air travel, expressing the view that ‘in a few years nobody would even consider undertaking travel of more than 500 kilometres in anything other than an aeroplane’. He put the construction of a huge airport at the centre of his plans for the reconstruction of Berlin, arguing that it was the modern equivalent to the King of Prussia’s creation of the Unter den Linden. ‘The airport of Tempelhof’, Hitler insisted, must become ‘the largest and most beautiful civilian airport of the world’. ‘Nothing,’ Hitler admonished the planners, ‘could ever make the same impression as when a foreigner arrived at the still-to-be-built southern railway station or at the airport Tempelhof’ and saw facilities which ‘silenced any criticism’ through their ‘beauty and size’.29 In other words, don’t tell, show. Positively or negatively, the United States remained a major point of reference in Hitler’s plans.
Another area in which Hitler sought to compete with Anglo-America was in the provision of wireless sets. In 1933, Germany had only 4.3 million licensed radio receivers out of a population of 66 million inhabitants,30 a much lower proportion than either the United States or Britain. In order to redress this imbalance, Goebbels corralled some twenty-eight different companies to mass-produce an affordable radio. The resulting ‘people’s receiver’ was presented to the German ‘Radio Fair’ in Berlin in August 1933; 100,000 sets were placed on the market for 76 Reichsmark each. The associated poster proclaimed that ‘all Germany hears the Führer’, but that was a wild exaggeration. In fact, no more about 25 per cent of Germans would have the necessary radio set to do so (assuming they wanted to). The ‘people’s receiver’ was not part of some closed totalitarian information circle. It had not one but many channels–that was the whole point–and foreign broadcasts could be heard without interference, at least until the outbreak of war.31 It was thus an instrument primarily not of propaganda, but of consumption.32 Of course, consumption was also propaganda, a much better advertisement for the Third Reich than speeches or declarations.
Nor did Hitler overlook the importance of leisure, the enjoyment of which he regarded as central to his ‘standard of living project’ and thus to Germany’s supposed ‘racial’ wellbeing. In the 1920s, he had praised the way in which North Americans communed with nature, driving out from the cities into the countryside. The Nazi ‘Strength through Joy’ movement was given the task of organizing leisure activities for the masses, and opening the mountains, lakes and beaches of Germany to a much broader range of social groups than previously; Jews, of course, were excluded. Here again, the United States was at least the implicit model.33 Hitler had himself photographed with three young children, of suitably ‘Nordic’ appearance, against a mountain holiday backdrop. Within a few years, the regime was offering package tours, mostly to enormous purpose-built resorts on the Baltic Sea, but also, for the lucky few, beyond the Reich to Norway and the Mediterranean. One of the purposes of the ‘Strength through Joy’ movement was specifically to offer an alternative to ‘American’ models of leisure.34
The role envisaged for women in this modernization programme was decidedly limited.35 ‘The words women’s emancipation,’ he told a meeting of the NS-Frauenschaft, were ‘only words invented by the Jewish intellect.’ Hitler contrasted the ‘world of the man’, which was
characterized by ‘the state’, ‘struggle’ and ‘commitment to the community’, with the ‘smaller world’ of the woman, made up of ‘husband, family, her children and her house’.36 Generally speaking, Hitler was opposed to working women, unless they were secretaries or domestics. He had a particular horror of women in politics, and paid little attention to the Reichsfrauenführerin Gertrud Scholz-Klink. He was not keen on women in the professions either.37 He made an exception for ‘creatives’, however. Gerdy Troost, the wife of the architect Paul Troost, was given numerous contracts to remodel Hitler’s personal spaces. He also sponsored the work of Leni Riefenstahl. Likewise Hitler accepted the role of women in the performing arts, be it the managerial role of Winifred Wagner at Bayreuth, or the actresses in the cinema or on stage.38 He was also an admirer of the Czech film star Anny Ondra, wife of the boxer Max Schmeling.
In Hitler’s world, the cooperation of women was essential for the running of the larger whole. His concern was mainly demographic. ‘Every child [the German woman] brings into the world,’ he announced, ‘is a battle which she endures’ for the survival of her people.39 Natalist policies were thus at the centre of Hitler’s ‘positive’ eugenics after 1933. Germans were encouraged to found families.40 The Reinhardt programmes offered loans to freshly married couples to pay for furniture and other household items. A quarter of the principal would be remitted at the birth of each child. These loans were only available to previously working women.41 The Nazis also considerably upgraded the importance of ‘Mother’s Day’ and introduced a decoration which was punched with Hitler’s signature and awarded to mothers at different levels depending on the number of children of ‘German blood’ they had borne.42 These policies were accompanied by coercive measures to promote more ‘healthy’ births.43 Abortion was banned. Divorce was made easier in order to encourage remarriage and more births. Homosexuality was already illegal, but the Nazis discouraged it still further by tightening the legal definition of homosexual acts. Tens of thousands of transgressors were sent to state prisons. Taken together, these measures had some effect. Within six years, the number of births had jumped back to the level of 1924, the vast majority of them in wedlock. This increase reflected not greater fecundity, but the younger age of marriage; few couples actually took advantage of the financial inducements to establish larger families.44
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