Cruel World (5 page)

In 1927 a new consideration brought the Rhineland Bastard question to the fore.
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Though the oldest ones were only eight years old, it was thought that something should be done to prevent them from reproducing when they reached puberty. One official suggested sterilization via “painless intervention,” while another proposed forced deportation under the auspices of a missionary agency. But the time was not yet ripe. The Weimar Health Ministry rejected both proposals on legal and public relations grounds. Such a project would require special legislation of a type still out of the question in 1927.

It was not out of the question after 1933. But the census ordered by Göring found only 145 “bastards.” Feeling that this figure could not be right, after all the fuss, the authorities dispatched Dr. Wolfgang Abel, a
Berlin anthropologist, to do further study in Wiesbaden, where 89 of the children had previously been found. After due investigation, which included careful measurement of noses, lips, and head shapes, as well as skin, eye, and hair color, Dr. Abel could only find 33 absolute qualifiers aged five to eleven. Not only were they “black” and, in his opinion, unhealthy, but they also exhibited all sorts of hereditarily undesirable traits such as flat feet and early “psychopathic symptoms” such as crying and nail biting.
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This was awkward, as, according to the Nazis’ own law, they were too young to sterilize.

Once again the low number of “bastards” caused consternation in Berlin. Somewhat weakening its case, the Prussian Interior Ministry suggested that mothers must be hiding the origins of many of the children who could pass as “European” and calculated that there must really be 500 to 600 of them. More thorough physical exams were ordered for students in the Rhineland schools in the hope of finding more “bastards” who would also be hereditarily unfit. But with very few exceptions, the targeted children were not only healthy, but models of achievement at school.

Continued focus on the Rhineland issue eventually led to a number of anxious discussions between officials of the Interior Ministry, the Foreign Office, and Nazi racial officials. The Foreign Office had been besieged by protests from abroad about the radical racial laws being decreed by the new government and about the sometimes violently discriminatory acts being carried out in public against non-Aryans. Important trading partners such as Japan, India, Turkey, and Brazil were concerned about treatment of their citizens who lived and worked in Germany. The Foreign Office worried that retaliatory actions would be taken against Germans resident abroad and that trade would be affected. So far the diplomats had hedged when responding to foreign complaints, saying that the racial decrees were only “emergency acts” against Jews, or anti-miscegenation laws similar to those in many countries, and that non-Aryan foreign nationals were safe. In the opinion of the Foreign Office, a public sterilization campaign aimed at the black offspring of French colonial and possibly American troops would upset other nations even more. In discussions with the racial officials, the German diplomats plaintively wondered if the word “Jewish” could be substituted for “non-Aryan” (apparently feeling that this would not deeply offend any other country), which would relieve them of the difficulty of figuring out which nationalities were or were not “alien” (not acceptable) as opposed to “European-related” (acceptable). But the racial authorities were immovable. Though willing to make concessions for those who were not German citizens, whose problems could be handled
case by case, they insisted that no basic difference between Jews and members of other alien races existed, and that it was their objective to rid the German people of all alien blood types.

And so the relentless pursuit of the Rhineland Bastards continued, but in secret. It was clear that the negative public relations effect of a special sterilization law for children would also be too great in Germany itself. Religious leaders would undoubtedly object, and it was felt that the regular health authorities could not be trusted to perform the illegal sterilizations and remain silent. The only recourse was the creation of a special agency within the Nazi Party structure that would not be accountable to the established court system. The procedures would be performed by carefully selected doctors with the “permission” of the parents or guardians of the children. Final approval of the project would, according to the racial hygiene officials, be requested from the Führer.

Whether Hitler authorized this process is not clear. But it is known that, after some delay, the full force of Nazi police and health agencies was focused on the Rhineland Bastards. In the spring of 1937 an office was set up in Gestapo headquarters in Berlin to oversee the project. Three special commissions, much like the hereditary health courts, were appointed in the Rhineland to process cases. Each case was given a number and was reviewed by an anthropological expert. The children, long since registered, were relentlessly hunted down. One seventeen-year-old, newly employed as a cabin boy on a river barge, was pursued through three cities. He had first been examined and measured anthropologically two years previously. On June 16, 1937, he was called to another examination, but, as he was on board a moving barge, he did not appear. This triggered an all-out manhunt involving the Gestapo, various local police departments, and all three Rhineland commissions. Telegrams flew back and forth describing the boy as a possible enemy of the state. The official in charge left orders that he should be called as soon as the child was found, no matter what the hour. At 12:15 a.m. on June 29, commission members were informed that the Gestapo had found the boy near Mainz. Driving through the night, they delivered him to a hospital in Cologne. Here he immediately underwent another physical examination and a hearing before the sterilization panel. His mother and stepfather were not present. Much worse, from the point of view of the commission, sticklers for procedure, was the absence of their anthropologist. Nevertheless, they did have the opinion of another professor who had seen the child’s photograph the month before and determined that he was indeed of a “non-European” race and had “negroid” and
“malayan” features. The parents had also seemingly “agreed” to the sterilization on a form presented to them earlier. The documents thus being in order, the operation was performed the next day.

The terrible isolation of this boy calls to us across the years. One cannot be immune. No such scruples seem to have bothered the racial hygiene officials in charge of the sterilization program, which would also bring to the operating room a twelve-year-old girl (who at least was accompanied by her stepfather), numbers of fifteen-year-old boys, and at least one daughter of an American soldier, who was sterilized in the Women’s Clinic at the University of Bonn the day after the cabin boy. As was done in all these cases, the operation was described in detail in the child’s dossier by the surgeon:

But there often were problems, which the Nazi surgeons might not recognize as important, as the 1991 testimony of another sterilization victim shows:

The exact number of Rhineland Bastards sterilized by the commissions is not known, but it was probably far fewer than 300. The execution of this program is especially significant in its circumvention not only of traditional and humane laws, but even of the Nazis’ own laws. In the use of secret agencies folded into the police apparatus and the validation of the process by the hard-core eugenics scientists of the time, it provided the model for the vast and horrific programs to come.

By 1945, the total of recorded sterilizations within the Reich had risen to some 400,000, and was probably higher, a figure made especially surreal when one contemplates the extraordinary success, until that year, of the
swarthy, clubfooted Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, who, despite his hereditary deformity, produced six fine children for the Fatherland.

Dealing with the tiny number of representatives of the “Black Horror” inside Germany, all belonging to a single generation, was not very difficult. The “Gypsy Plague” would be a greater challenge, not on moral but on scientific grounds. For centuries, Gypsies had been regarded with fascination and suspicion in the Western world, and in most places still are. Descendents of nomadic tribes thought to have originated in the Indian subcontinent, their physical characteristics alone were enough to disqualify them from the Nordic pantheon. This was sometimes awkward for Nazi theorists, because, technically speaking, the Gypsies were “Aryans.” That unfortunate fact was more than balanced by their itinerant and, to the bourgeois European, unacceptably unsanitary lifestyle, not to mention their frequent lack of formal education, which made it easy to label them as “work-shy,” “asocial,” and “feebleminded” elements eligible for incarceration in concentration camps and for sterilization.

As was the case with the Rhineland Bastards, registration and classification of Gypsies was seen to be essential to control of the “plague.” In this case too, much of the work had long since been done. A Central Bureau for Gypsies had been established in Bavaria in 1899. Its director, Alfred Dillmann, had published a handy
Gypsy Book
for the authorities in 1905, which not only noted that Gypsies were generally criminal in nature, but listed some 3,000 of them by name, complete with genealogy and physical descriptions such as “real Gypsy type” and “apparently epileptic.” The most notorious, who had been detained for offenses such as begging, vagabondism, lack of trading licenses, and use of false names, were honored with a photograph.
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A law passed in Bavaria in 1926, To Combat Gypsies, Vagabonds, and the Work-Shy, which was adopted by the Weimar government in 1929, put in place numerous regulations. Some, dealing with the licensing of animals, control of camping sites, and regulating school attendance of Gypsy children (they could be exempted from attendance if it could be shown that they were receiving “proper instruction” at home) seem reasonable. Less so was mandatory registration with the local police, who could send Gypsies over sixteen to work camps and jail for not having permanent employment and a variety of other flimsy reasons. By this time, the terms “vagabond” and “work-shy” had seemingly become a little unclear, leading the Bavarian Interior Ministry to issue a
clarification: “The term Gypsy is well known and does not need further explanation. Racial science gives information as to who should be regarded as a Gypsy.” Vagabonds are then defined as persons who are not racial Gypsies, but who, according to their general behavior and conduct, their occupations and their nomadic habits, are comparable to Gypsies. Basic to the vagabond, the regulation continues, is that his occupation serves only as “cover for a dishonest, Gypsy-like lifestyle.”
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By 1933 there were some 150 Gypsy regulations on the books in Germany, including a Prussian law requiring all Gypsies over age six to be fingerprinted and carry a special ID card.

Existing legislation made it easy for Gypsies sent to concentration camps to be sterilized as criminals and asocials, but to the Nazis the “Gypsy Plague” was not a criminal problem; it was a racial one that would require their complete separation from the pure German nation-race, or “Volk.” In 1934, therefore, all Gypsies lacking German citizenship were deported. By 1935, more stringent controls on itinerant German Gypsies were in place. With the enthusiastic support of the locals in many municipalities, the traditional encampments of Gypsy caravans were limited to special enclosures, which often were surrounded by fences and put under police guard. In some localities, those in the enclosures were required to observe curfews and could leave only for work, school, or medical care. In order to rid Berlin of Gypsies during the 1936 Olympic Games, an enormous encampment of this type was hastily set up at Marzahn, a swampy area just outside the city next to a cemetery and a garbage dump.

More difficult was the problem of settled Gypsies, who were not covered by the vagabond laws, and who had often intermarried several generations back and could not always be visually distinguished from other Germans. Nazi race officials fretted over the fact that there were no specific laws limiting Gypsy participation in German society. To make do, elements of newly minted anti-Jewish laws were made applicable. While this classification opened the way for the persecution of Gypsies on purely racial grounds, it made life ever so much more complex for the various agencies already dealing with “racial health.” Here was another category requiring anthropologic definition and eugenic analysis.

Help was forthcoming in the person of Dr. Robert Ritter, a child psychiatrist trained in Germany, France, and Switzerland, whose specialty was “antisocial” youth and the genealogical tracing of vagabondism and other criminal traits.
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Ritter, who never joined the Nazi Party, was, despite that fact, a member of his local sterilization board and quite familiar with the racial requirements of the Volk. In 1936, he was offered the
directorship of a new branch of the Reich Health Department known as the Race Hygiene and Biological Population Office. Funding would be provided both by the Health Department and SS agencies. The main mission of Ritter’s new office was to register all the Gypsies in Germany. Ritter was, at first, reluctant to become involved with the Nazi bureaucracy, but seduced by the possibilities of furthering his life’s work, he took the job.