Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis (11 page)

Beliefs of this kind are found in many Enlightenment thinkers. It is frequently argued on their behalf that they were creatures of their time, but it is hardly a compelling defence. These Enlightenment thinkers not only voiced the prejudices of their age – a failing for which they might be forgiven were it not for the fact that they so often claimed to be much wiser than their contemporaries – they also claimed the authority of reason for them. Before the Enlightenment, racist attitudes rarely aspired to the dignity of theory. Even Aristotle, who defended slavery and the subordination of women as part of the natural order, did not develop a theory that maintained that humanity was composed of distinct and unequal racial groups. Racial prejudice may be immemorial, but racism is a product of the Enlightenment.

Many of those who subscribed to a belief in racial inequality
believed that social reform could compensate for the innate disadvantages of inferior breeds. Ultimately all human beings could participate in the universal civilization of the future – but only by giving up their own ways of life and adopting European ways. This was ‘a form of liberal racism, making the best of European experience the model for everyone, and the eventual perfection of mankind consisting in everyone becoming creative Europeans’.
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Liberal racism left open the possibility of the forcible destruction of other cultures, and even – if all else failed – genocide. If any culture resisted it would be an obstacle to the coming universal civilization. In that case it would be an obstacle to progress and a candidate for elimination. When H. G. Wells asked himself what would be the fate in the World-State of the ‘swarms of black and yellow and brown people who do not come into the needs of efficiency’ he replied: ‘Well, the world is not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go. The whole tenor and meaning of the world, I take it, is that they have to go.’
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Among progressive thinkers at the time, such ideas were commonplace. The peculiar achievement of Enlightenment racism was to give genocide the blessing of science and civilization. Mass murder could be justified by faux-Darwinian ideas of survival of the fittest, and the destruction of entire peoples could be welcomed as a part of the advance of the species.

Nazi policies of extermination did not come from nowhere. They drew on powerful currents in the Enlightenment and used as models policies in operation in many countries, including the world’s leading liberal democracy. Programmes aiming to sterilize the unfit were underway the United States. Hitler admired these programmes and also admired America’s genocidal treatment of indigenous peoples: he ‘often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination – by starvation and uneven combat – of the “Red Savages” who could not be tamed by captivity’.
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The Nazi leader was not unusual in holding these views. Ideas of ‘racial hygiene’ were by no means confined to the far Right. A belief in positive eugenics as a means to progress was widely accepted. As Richard Evans has put it:

Seeing that Hitler offered them a unique opportunity to put their ideas into practice, leading racial hygienists began to bring their doctrines into line
with those of the Nazis in areas where they had so far failed to conform. A sizeable majority, to be sure, were too closely associated with political ideas and organizations on the left to survive as members of the Racial Hygiene Society … Writing personally to Hitler in April 1933, Alfred Ploetz, the moving spirit of the eugenics movement for the past forty years, explained that since he was now in his seventies, he was too old to take a leading part in the practical implementation of the principles of racial hygiene in the new Reich, but he gave his backing to the Reich Chancellor’s policies all the same.
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There were many who shared the Nazi belief in ‘racial science’. The Nazis were distinctive chiefly in the extremity of their ambitions. They wanted an overhaul of society in which traditional values were destroyed. Whatever the conservative groups that initially supported Hitler may have hoped, Nazism never aimed to restore a traditional social order. Defeatist European intellectuals who saw it as a revolutionary movement – such as Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, the French collaborator who praised the Nazis for what they had in common with the Jacobins
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– were nearer the mark. The Nazis wanted a permanent revolution in which different social groups and branches of government competed with one another in a parody of Darwinian natural selection. But – as with the Bolsheviks – Nazi goals went beyond any political transformation. They included the use of science to produce a mutation in the species.

The eighty thousand inmates of mental hospitals who were killed by gassing were murdered in the name of science. The thousands of gay men who ended up in concentration camps (where around half of them perished
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) were classified as incorrigible degenerates. ‘Criminal biologists’ had long categorized the quarter of a million Gypsies who perished during the Nazi period as belonging to a dangerous racial type. The belief that Slavs also belonged to an inferior racial group allowed the Nazis to view with equanimity the vast loss of life they inflicted in Poland, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

Without doubt ‘racial science’ opened the way for the Nazis’ supreme crime. The theory that humanity was divided into distinct racial groups that ought not to intermarry gave the imprimatur of reason to fantasies of pollution. The idea that these groups were
innately unequal sanctioned the enslavement of those deemed to belong on the lower rungs of the hierarchy. Without the construction of race as a scientific category the project of annihilating European Jewry could scarcely have been formulated. Anti-Semitism is coeval with the appearance of Christianity as a distinct religion: Jews were persecuted from the time of Rome’s conversion from paganism and throughout the Christian Middle Ages, while medieval anti-Semitism was reproduced in the Reformation by Luther. However, while anti-Semitism has ancient Christian roots, the project of exterminating Jews is modern. If the Holocaust required modern technology and the modern state in order to be executed, it also required the modern idea of race to be conceived.

Hitler’s goal of exterminating the Jews could not have been formulated without using ideas derived from a modern pseudo-science. Even so, it is impossible to account for the Holocaust solely in terms of racist ideology. No other group was selected for complete extermination, and none was hunted down with such systematic intensity. Whether they were Yiddish poets or medical doctors, university professors or Hasidic teachers, scientists or artists, tradesmen and merchants, men, women or children, Jews were threatened and stigmatized, driven from civil life and their property stolen, beaten and murdered in state-inspired violence, consigned to concentration camps and finally singled out for a fate no other section of humanity has had to suffer.

If a historical comparison can be made, it is with the attribution of demonic power to Jews in medieval Europe. As Norman Cohn has put it, ‘the drive to exterminate the Jews sprang from a quasi-demonological superstition.’
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A belief in the diabolical powers of Jews was a major feature in the millenarian mass movements of the late Middle Ages. Jews were shown in pictures as devils with the horns of a goat, while attempts were made by the Church to force Jews to wear horns on their hats. Satan was given what were considered to be Jewish features and described as ‘the father of the Jews’. Synagogues were believed to be places where Satan was worshipped in the form of a cat or a toad. Jews were seen as agents of the Devil, whose goal was the destruction of Christendom, even of the world. Documents such as the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
– a hugely
influential forgery that probably emanated from the foreign branch of the Tsarist secret service – reproduced these fantasies and turned them into a paranoid vision of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

The singularity of the Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jews comes not only from the scale of the crime but also from the extremity of its goal. Jews were seen as the embodiment of evil and their extermination as a means of saving the world. Nazi anti-Semitism was a fusion of a modern racist ideology with a Christian tradition of demonology. Eschatological myth and perverted science came together to produce a crime without precedent in history.

Like the millenarian movements of medieval times, Nazism emerged against a background of social disruption. Mass unemployment, hyperinflation and the humiliating impact of the Great War produced a wrenching sense of insecurity and loss of identity among Germans. As Michael Burleigh has written, the 1914–18 conflict

… created the emotional effervescence which Emil Durkheim regarded as integral to religious experience. The Great War and its disturbed aftermath led to an intensified revival of this pseudo-religious strain in politics, which exerted its maximum appeal in times of extreme crisis, just as medieval millenarians, or the belief that the thousand-year interval before the Day of Judgement was at hand, had thrived before in times of sudden change and social dislocation.
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The similarities between Nazism and medieval millenarianism were recognized by a number of observers at the time. Eva Klemperer, the wife of the philologist and diarist Victor Klemperer, compared Hitler with John of Leyden, and so did Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, the aristocratic author of an anti-Nazi book entitled
History of a Mass Lunacy
, published in 1937.
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Around the same time the British foreign correspondent F. A. Voigt identified the central role of eschatology in Nazism:

Every transcendental eschatology proclaims the end of this world. But
secular
eschatology is always caught in its own contradiction. It projects into the
past
a vision of what
never was
, it conceives what
is
in terms of what
is not
, and the
future
in terms of what can
never be.
The remoter past
becomes a mystical or mythical Age of Innocence, a Golden or a Heroic Age, an Age of Primitive Communism or of resplendent manly Virtue. The Future is the Classless Society, Eternal Peace, or Salvation by Race – the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
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In a study that is too little known, James Rhodes has provided a systematic examination of Nazism as a modern millenarian movement. Like the Anabaptists and other medieval millenarians, the Nazis were possessed by a vision of disaster followed by a new world. Seeing themselves as victims of catastrophes, they experienced sudden revelations that explained their sufferings, which they believed were the work of evil forces. They believed they had been called to struggle against these forces, to defeat them and rid the world of them in short, titanic wars.
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This millenarian syndrome of impending catastrophe, the existential threat of evil, brief cataclysmic battles and an ensuing paradise can be seen in many modern political movements (including the Arma-geddonite wing of the American Right). It fits the Nazis closely and shows the poverty of any account of Hitler’s movement that sees it simply as a reaction to social conditions. Nazism was a modern political religion, and while it made use of pseudo-science it also drew heavily on myth. The
Volk
was not just the biological unit of racist ideology. It was a mystical entity, which could confer immortality on those who participated in it. Using the Kantian term ‘Ding-an-sich’, which means ultimate reality or the thing-in-itself, Goebbels declared that ‘Ding-an-sich is the
Volk’
, and produced a poem in which the semi-divine qualities ascribed to the
Volk
are clear:

Without the vengeful war reparations of the Versailles settlement and the chaos of the interwar German economy, the Nazis would most likely have remained a fringe movement. They remained popular for as long as they did because they delivered material benefits to
large sections of the German population. The efficiency of Hitler’s war machine may have been exaggerated, but Nazi economic policies were not dissimilar to those advocated by Keynes (as Keynes himself recognized) and delivered full employment in the run-up to the war. The popularity of the Nazis was sustained in the first years of the war by military success and the orgy of looting that it permitted in occupied Europe. Delivering these benefits to the German population was a major part of the Nazis’ strategy to gain and maintain power.

At the same time the Nazis mobilized a potent mix of beliefs. Nazi ideology differs from that of most other utopian and millenarian movements in that it was largely negative. Nazi eschatology was a debased imitation of pagan traditions that allowed the possibility of a final disaster without any prospect of future renewal. This negative eschatology was linked with a sort of negative utopianism, which focused on the obstacles to future paradise more than on its content. The Nazis’ eschatology may have been less important than their demonology, which came from Christian sources (not least the Lutheran tradition). The world was threatened by demonic forces, which were embodied in Jews. The present time and the recent past were evil beyond redemption. The one hope lay in catastrophe – only after an all-destroying event could the German
Volk
ascend to a condition of mystical harmony.

The name of the Nazi regime derived from Christian apocalyptic traditions. The ‘Third Reich’ comes from Joachim of Flora’s prophecy of a Third Age, passed on to modern times by Anabaptist Christians and popularized in interwar Germany by Moeller van den Bruck in his book
Das Dritte Reich (The Third Empire
, 1923). A ‘revolutionary conservative’ in the manner of Oswald Spengler (whose book
The Decline of the West
had a huge impact in the 1920s), van den Bruck believed that the problems of interwar Germany were not only political and economic but also cultural and spiritual. He had a strong interest in Dostoyevsky, co-editing a German translation of
The Brothers Karamazov
with the emigre Russian writer Dmitri Merezh-kovsky, himself the author of a book of apocalyptic speculation.
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Both writers were sympathetic to Dostoyevsky’s fantasy of Russia as a ‘third Rome’ that could produce spiritual renewal in Europe, and
van den Bruck visited Russia in 1912. With these beliefs one would expect him to be sympathetic to the emerging Nazi movement. Yet –perhaps because he seems not to have shared their anti-Semitism – he and the Nazis never joined forces. On meeting Hitler in 1922 van den Bruck was repelled by the Nazi leader’s ‘proletarian primitivity’. Later the Nazis repudiated van den Bruck’s ideas, but a signed copy of his book was found in Hitler’s bunker and for a time van den Bruck supplied a scheme of thought that matched the Nazis’ sense of apocalyptic crisis and historical destiny. If the Holy Roman Empire was the first Reich and the united German Empire ruled by the Hohenzollerns (1871–1918) the second, the third would be the Nazi state that would last for a thousand years.