THE THIRD REICH’S RACIAL POLICIES

 

THE THIRD REICH’S RACIAL POLICIES

 

Adoph Hilter was born in Branau am Inn in Austria, part of the Hapsburg Empire, in 1889.  Hitler’s views on race evolved during his young adulthood in Vienna where, having failed in his attempt to study art at the Vienna Academy, he lived in a men’s home and worked as a street artist.  In 1913 Hitler moved to Munich capital of Bavaria, to dodge his call up papers from the Austrian army.  By this time, he had come into his inheritance following his parents’ deaths some years before.

Hitler was resident in Vienna from 1909-1913.  At this time Vienna, capital of the Hapsburg Empire, was home to a mixture (mischung) of ethnicities, races, a polyglot mix of languages, dress, and customs.  The Hapsburg Empire consisted of a German minority ruling over Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs.  The Hapsburg Empire was declining, for instance, in 1867 the Hapsburgs were forced to share power with the Hungarians.  Many of the minorities were eager to assert their own claims to nationhood. 

In June 1914 the heir presumptive to the Hapsburg Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb nationalists, resulting in the outbreak of WW1.  Hitler was delighted and immediately joined the List regiment of the German army.  He served on the western front for four years, gaining the rank of corporal and winning the Iron Cross parts 1 & 2, the most distinguished service medal of the German army.  He was devastated by Germany’s defeat in November 1918 and blamed Communists, Socialists and Jews who, he believed, had stabbed the German army in the back by promoting pacificism and war apathy.  Hitler promoted this legend throughout the 1920s, the “November criminals” who were to blame for Germany’s defeat and the detested Treaty of Versailles.

After the war Hitler was not immediately de-mobilised but was sent on a series of ideological indoctrination courses by the army.  The army was seeking to use him in a political role, creating propaganda and mobilising people against Marxism which was spreading through the influence of Socialists and Communists.  Eventually he was sent to observe a small party called the German Workers Party (DAP) led by former locksmith Anton Drexler.  Hitler transformed the party into the NSDAP, becoming its leader, and gave speeches in beer halls in Munich and later, in Circus Krone, an all-purpose venue in Munich sometimes hired by religious organisations and political gatherings that seated around 7,000 people.  When he spoke to mass gatherings his main theme was anti-Semitism, the Treaty of Versailles, the “November criminals” and the stab in the back legend.  Hitler learnt to adapt his speech to his audience so when he travelled to Hamburg to speak to a middle-class audience of business leaders, army officers and landowners, his main theme was opposition to Marxism, realising that his middle-class audience were disinterested in anti-Semitism.  The program of the NSDAP was so broad that it could incorporate almost anything and was a major focus of dissent and protest from the Weimar Republic.

Many political opponents dismissed the NSDAP as ridiculous and unthreatening but when they came to power in 1933, they demonstrated the lethal nature of their project.  Jews suffered discrimination by way of the Aryan paragraph, a clause included in the statutes of a company or organisation excluding those of non-Aryan or Jewish descent.  An exception for war veterans was only made when President Hindenburg interceded.  The Aryan paragraph, in fact, pre-existed the Nazis was first proposed by anti-Semite Georg von Schoenerer in his anti-Semitic Linz Program of 1882.  Hitler derived the title Fuehrer and the salute from Schoenerer too.  Hitler’s plan was that Jews were to be excluded from the public sector, the civil service, medicine, teaching, and from university life.  The Aryanisation of the private sector took longer but Jews were gradually removed from the boards of directors and their businesses were taken over and then bought out on wholly advantageous terms to the Third Reich.

There was still no legal basis for state sponsored anti-Semitism, but this came in September 1935 as a response to grass roots anti-Semitic violence and boycotts of Jewish businesses.  The legislation was established at a special meeting of the Reichstag convened during the annual Nuremburg rally.  Two laws were enacted, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour which forbade marriages and sexual relations between Jews and Germans and the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households and the Reich Citizenship Law which declared that only those of German or related blood could be German citizens.  The laws were extended in November 1935 to include Romani and black people.

Hitler was concerned that this legislation would damage Germany’s international reputation, so it was delayed until after the 1936 summer Olympics, held that year in Berlin.  The effect of the legislation on German Jews was devastating.  Instead of proper work in the professions, many Jews now had to take menial work.  Emigration was made increasingly difficult, and Jews were made to remit up to 90% of their wealth as a tax when leaving the country.  Some exceptions were made for mischlinge, people of mixed race where a person with only one Jewish grandparent was not considered to be Jewish but a person with two only if he or she practised the faith.  The Nuremburg Laws were a working out of Hitler’s worldview (Weltanschauung) which opposed Marxism and other popular beliefs like Christianity.  Hitler opposed Marxism and thought society was the consequence of racial struggle, not class struggle.  Using a very simplified and distorted account of Darwinism known as “social Darwinism”, Hitler viewed life as the result of struggle and survival.  Hitler believed that the weak should not be tolerated or offered compassion and help, hence his T4 euthanasia program.  Tiny minorities of non-Germans such as Jews and Gypsies could not be tolerated, since they threatened to pollute the racial purity of Germans.  Their role, if they had one at all, was to be slave labour for the benefit of the Herrenvolk (master race).  Some of his ideas are present in the works of the philosopher Frederich Nietzsche who also opposed Christianity and its insistence on raising up the weak, for instance, Christ’s doctrine that ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’.  However, Nietzsche was not an anti-Semite, if anything, he was rather anti-German and he would have opposed the way in which the Nazis incorporated his ideas in their depiction of an Aryan “superman” (Uebermensch).

Revealingly, Hitler dismissed Einstein’s theories as “Jewish metaphysics” as opposed to practical German science when the German physics community led by Nobel prize winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, had to persuade him that Einstein’s equations might lead to the creation of a new superbomb.  Freud’s theories were also dismissed but by the height of WW2 a form of psychotherapy was brought back to treat sufferers from shell shock.  Marx’s theories were complete anathema to Hitler even though he claimed to be a “socialist”.  Hitler agreed with Marx on one point, however, that religion would wither away after the revolution was complete.

Rather than being a planned genocide the Holocaust evolved slowly.  In November 1938 the killing of a member of the German diplomatic corps at the German embassy in Paris called Ernst vom Rath by a Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, led to the Night of Breaking Glass (Reichskristallnacht).  Synagogues and Jewish businesses were ransacked and set on fire, Jews were beaten up, some were murdered.  The pogrom had been whipped up by Hitler and Goebbels and took place in many German towns and cities.  It marked an acceleration of anti-Semitism and racial hatred in Germany.  More than 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and placed in concentration camps.  Reichskristallnacht was a prelude to the Final Solution.

The Nazis speculated wildly about what to do with European Jews.  The Madagascar Plan was proposed as a possible solution, deporting European Jews to the large African island of Madagascar.  Franz Rademacher, Head of the Jewish Department of the Foreign Office, proposed the idea in June 1940 but it was regarded as impractical because of the possibility of a British naval blockade.  The plan was shelved when the Final Solution got underway. 

Poland had been carved up by Germany and the USSR after a four-week war in September-October 1939.  Initially, executions of Jews began in occupied Poland on an ad hoc basis.  Atrocities committed by local populations were reported by German officers to their superiors, but the army was advised not to intervene in such cases.  Special groups of SS paramilitaries known as Einsatzgruppen (Operational Groups) supported by local police, auxiliaries, and local militias committed massacres of Jews and Poles.  Victims were shot and their bodies thrown into mass graves.  Jewish properties and businesses would then be offered to German colonists in the occupied territories.  Eventually the psychological toll on the men involved began to tell.  Such methods of execution were also regarded as expensive, so a cheaper, more efficient form of killing had to be found.

Hitler initiated a euthanasia program known as T4 aimed at eliminating the mentally ill, mentally handicapped, and physically handicapped who Hitler regarded as burdens on the German people.  Although the program was halted on the intervention of Bishop Galen of Munster, the Nazis discovered a new form of mass killing by attaching rubber tubes to the exhaust of a lorry and pumping carbon monoxide fumes into a gas chamber.  Later a chemical disinfectant known as Zyklon B was found to be even more efficient.  Pellets of the substance were dropped into a shower system and the body heat of the victims allowed the substance to do its work.

In January 1942 practical details of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question (Endloesung der Juden Frage) were worked out at Wannsee near Berlin.  The Wannsee Conference was set up by Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office.  Other attendees included Heinrich Mueller, Head of the Gestapo, and Adolph Eichmann, SS officer and organiser of logistics of mass deportation of victims to ghettos and death camps.

Nazi death camps were established in eastern Poland, far away from the territory of the Old Reich.  Most of them were established in a territory known as the Central Government established when Poland fell to the Nazis and Soviets in September-October 1939.  Their names Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, and Majdanek are synonymous with terror and murder.  Two other death camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Chelmno were built in a territory known to Germans as east Prussia (Ostpreussen).  At these places murder was organised in a cold-hearted, efficient, rational manner and on a factory scale.  SS units guarded the camps, but the day-to-day work of clearing the bodies from the gas chambers and disposing of them in the immense ovens provided by Topf, a company based in Erfurt, Thuringia, was done by the Sondernkommando (Special Commando), groups of inmates who worked in return for a few more months or weeks of life.  Hitler practised a divide and rule tactic in the camps which had lethal outcomes for those concerned.  The largest and best known of the camps was Auschwitz-Birkenau (Birkenau, a POW camp for Soviet troops, was added later).  The camp commandant was Rudolf Hoess.  More than 1.1 million people were murdered here but not all of them were Jews.  74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Romani, and 15,000 Soviet prisoners died here too.  Auschwitz had many sub-camps and even industrial facilities owned by I.G.Farben, a German chemical conglomerate who realised the possibility of exploiting the masses of slave labour provided by the facility.  The careful planning, logical construction, and efficient, scientific rationalisation of genocide marked it out from previous genocides like that of the Armenians in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire.  Hitler himself remarked, “who remembers the Armenian genocide?”

As the Soviet and western Allied forces began to push back the German army from east to west, the Nazi regime began to implode.  The inmates of concentration camps were forced to participate in futile death marches across Germany.  Many more prisoners died in these pointless vindictive actions.

Today its thought that 6 million people died in the Holocaust.  The figure was thought to be 5.5 million until the release of formerly classified Soviet archives in 1990 altered the received number, pushing it upwards.  At his trial in Tel Aviv in 1962, Adolph Eichmann also gave the number as 6 million.  The Holocaust is the most serious crime in human history, not least because it is comprehensively documented and relatively recent.  Its author, Adolph Hitler, committed suicide in the Bunker in Berlin in April 1945 and never had to face a court and explain his actions although some of his henchmen like Goering, Speer, Rosenberg, and Streicher were tried at the Nuremburg war crimes tribunals in 1947.  It is remarkable that an unknown person from Austria was able to take over an advanced state, along with his party, which had a sophisticated legislature and governmental processes and submit it to his will.

There are now many books, articles, theses on the Third Reich and the leading members of the NSDAP who, along with Hitler, drove the policies of the regime.  Professor Richard Evans 3 volume history of the Third Reich from 1918-45 and Professor Ian Kershaw’s 2 volume biography of Hitler are among the best work on the period.  These are more recent and better researched than earlier works like Alan Bullock Hitler: A Study in Tyranny which came out immediately after the war.  That work is still worth reading.  Recent films like Oppenheimer by director Christopher Nolan explain the scientific background to the construction of the atom bomb dropped on Japan which effectively brought WW2 to an end.  Another film The Zone of Interest directed by Jonathan Glazer, is a study of the life of Rudolf Hoess and the lives of his wife and family who lived on the edge of Auschwitz and how Hoess tried to shield his family from the actual work of the camp.  Such interest demonstrates the continuing relevance of WW2 to our post-Holocaust world.

Paul Murphy