HI136 The History of Germany Lecture 12

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HI136 The History of GermanyLecture 12

• National Socialist Racial Policy

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Eugenics

• Eugenics good birth widespread in western
  societies from late 19thC (i.e. not
  German-specific)
• Ideal racial stock often equated to
  middle-class
• Dangerous classes of lumpenproletariat
• Note cultural stereotypes rather than scientific
  criteria

Inferior Hereditary Material Penetrates a
Village lone mother, illegitimate children,
drinking fathers, mental illness prison
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Pronatalism

• NS settlement schemes demanded a high birth rate
• Depression discouraged large families cf
  pre-1914 statistics disappointing
• Positive eugenics incentive schemes such as
  marriage loans, mothers crosses
• Lebensborn (Well of Life) SS scheme to promote
  Aryan births out of wedlock
• Anti-natalism? (Gisela Bock) several hundred
  thousand women sterilised

Above Mothers Cross below The nations
military strength is safeguarded by hereditarily
healthy, child-rich families
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Homosexuals

• Especially male homosexuals targeted as failing
  their reproductive duties
• 1936 para. 175 of Penal Code outlaws
  homosexuality
• Homosexuals incarcerated in concentration camps
  with pink triangle

NS chart alleging that one homosexual man can
contaminate 28 others note the
pseudo-scientific diagram
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Asocials

• Racial theory of hereditary illnesses
  (criminality, alcoholism), rendering sufferers
  unfit for community
• Workshy prostitutes targeted from 1936 on,
  becoming significant proportion of concentration
  camp population

This is how it would end.
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Roma and Sinti gypsies

• Sinti Roma labelled workshy
• Ethnographic studies of gypsies as Indo-European
  migrants
• Proportionally as many gypsies died in Holocaust
  as Jews

Gypsies await their fate at Belzec camp
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Euthanasia

• Financial savings on mentally handicapped
• Killings in sanatoria
• T4 programme under Viktor Brack experiments
  with gas vans
• Bishop Galen of Münster leads Catholic opposition
  (euthanasia becomes clandestine from 1941)
• Key text Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance

Victor Brack, architect of the T4 euthanasia
programme
Bishop Galen of Muenster, outspoken critic of
euthanasia
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Antisemitism

• Religious antisemitism, dating back to medieval
  period
• Economic antisemitism emancipation of Jewish
  Germans post-1871 coincided with economic
  depression
• Biological antisemitism Social Darwinism
  organicist view of body politic Jews as
  parasites contaminating Aryan blood

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The Jewish World Conspiracy
Jewish capitalist oppressor
Jewish bolshevik commissar (PoW photo, 1941)
Bolshevism is Jewry
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Pogrom-style violence

• Canalisation of street violence
• 1 April Jewish shop boycott flopped
• Concern at overseas opinion

SA men boycott Jewish businesses in April 1933
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Nuremberg Race Laws

• Sept 1935 legal solution
• Forbids sexual relations between Jewish and
  gentile Germans
• Defines Jews as those whose grandparents attended
  synagogue (i.e. non-biological criterion)
• General public acceptance that a Jewish
  question existed

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Kristallnacht, 9 Nov. 1938

• Goebbels SA manufacture popular pogrom
  against Jews
• Synagogues burned
• Jewish businesses trashed later Aryanised or
  sold off
• 20,000 mainly male Jewish citizens put in
  protective custody in camps
• Jewish community forced to pay 1billion marks in
  atonement

Passers-by view the shattered glass of a
shopfront attacked on Kristallnacht
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The SS and Jewish Policy

• From 1939 SS tasked with Jewish policy
• Emigration schemes (Madagascar, Urals)
• Jew-free Reich leads to ghettoisation in
  General Government, but cumulative
  radicalisation (Mommsen) between competing
  agencies

Reinhard Heydrich, Security Service leader
Adolf Eichmann, head of Jewish desk at Reich
Security Head Office
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The decision for the Final Solution

• Autumn 1941 (Operation Barbarossa) elation of
  victory or realisation of defeat?
• First tests of gas chambers at Auschwitz on
  Soviet PoWs
• January 1942 conference at Wannsee (Berlin)
  decides on European-wide programme of mass
  murder, using mechanised techniques

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The Holocaust

• 55,000 Jews from the Lódz ghetto 5000 Gypsies
  gassed in mobile gas chambers in the winter of
  1941-42.
• 200,000 killed in death camps at Chelmno,
  Treblinka Belzec in August 1942.
• By Dec. 1942 500,000 had been gassed at Belzec
  alone.
• Jews Gypsies from all over Europe transported
  to Auschwitz from spring 1942 onwards.
• Estimated that around 1,600,000 murdered at
  Auschwitz alone, c.300,000 of which were not
  Jews.
• Medical experiments conducted on camp inmates.
• Around 6 million Jews perished in the Holocaust,
  plus hundreds of thousands of others Gypsies,
  homosexuals, the mentally ill etc.

Jewish deaths in the Holocaust, showing
percentage of the population killed in each
country Source H. Schulze, Germany A New
History (1998)
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Models of radicalisation

• Intentionalists top-down models based on a
  Fuehrer order (lack of written evidence?)
• Incremental, step-by-step radicalisation, war
  against the Jews (Lucy Dawidowicz)
• Functionalists polycratic, competing
  bureaucracies radicalise from below (Martin
  Broszat) working towards the Fuehrer (Ian
  Kershaw)

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Holocaust Height of Modernity?

• Pseudo-scientific justification derived from
  rational Enlightenment perfectibility of
  mankind
• Use of factories of death, but also
  compartmentalisation of killing process enabled
  distancing from murder
• Increasing economisation of the Holocaust to
  justify it in war effort (Aly Heim)
• Key commentators Zygmunt Bauman

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Holocaust height of barbarism?

• Daniel Goldhagen focus on the trigger pullers
• Need to explain sadistic nature of violence
• Eliminationist antisemitism too simplistic?
• Cf Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men, who cites
  peer pressure, careerism, but also psychological
  need to conform to authority

Police Reserve Battalion 101, stationed in
occupied Poland