HI136 The History of Germany Lecture 12

HI136 The History of GermanyLecture 12 National Socialist Racial Policy

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

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: Mother’s Cross; below: ‘The nation’s military strength is safeguarded by hereditarily healthy, child-rich families’

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

‘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.’

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

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

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

The Jewish ‘World Conspiracy’ Jewish ‘capitalist oppressor’ ‘Bolshevism is Jewry’ Jewish ‘bolshevik commissar’ (PoW photo, 1941)

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

NurembergRaceLaws • 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

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

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

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

The Holocaust • 55,000 Jews from the Łódz 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)

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)

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

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

HI136 The History of Germany Lecture 12