The Coming of the Third Reich (65 page)

Wisely, Hirschfeld did not return to Germany. While the Nazi press reported triumphantly on the ‘Energetic Action against a Poison Shop’ and announced that ‘German students fumigate the Sexual Science Institute’ run by ‘the Jew Magnus Hirschfeld’, the venerable sex reformer and champion of homosexual rights remained in France, where he died suddenly on his sixty-seventh birthday, on 14 May 1935.
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The destruction of his Institute was only one part, if the most spectacular, of a far more wide-ranging assault on what the Nazis portrayed as the Jewish movement to subvert the German family. Sex and procreation were to be indissolubly linked, at least for the racially approved. The Nazis moved with the approval of conservatives and Catholics alike to destroy every branch of Weimar Germany’s lively and intricately interconnected congeries of pressure-groups for sexual freedom, the reform of the abortion law, the decriminalization of homosexuality, the public dispensing of contraceptive advice and anything else that they thought was contributing to the continued decline of the German birth rate. Sex reformers like the Freudian Wilhelm Reich or the long-time campaigner for abortion reform Helene Stocker were forced into exile, their organizations and clinics closed down or taken over by the Nazis. The police, meanwhile, raided well-known homosexual meeting-places they had previously tacitly tolerated, while in Hamburg they arrested hundreds of female prostitutes in the harbour district, acting, somewhat bizarrely, on the basis of the Reichstag fire decree ‘for the protection of people and state’. If nothing else, the raids illustrated how the decree could be used as legitimation for almost any kind of repressive action by the authorities. The dubious legality of this action was resolved on 26 May 1933, when the cabinet amended the liberal Law against Sexually Transmitted Diseases passed in 1927. The amendments not only recriminalized prostitution, effectively legalized in 1927, but also reintroduced the legal ban on publicity and education relating to abortion and abortifacients.
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Within a short space of time, the Nazis had dismantled the entire sexual reform movement and extended legal restrictions on sexuality from the existing punitive laws against same-sex relations to many other kinds of sexual activity that were not directed towards the goal of increasing the birth rate.

The attack on sexual liberation had already been foreshadowed in the last years of the Weimar Republic. The years 1929-32 had seen a massive public controversy on abortion law reform, stirred up by the Communists, and reflecting the need of many couples to avoid having children in circumstances of dire poverty and unemployment. Huge demonstrations, rallies, petitions, films, newspaper campaigns and the like had all drawn attention to the issues of illegal abortion and ignorance about contraception, and the police had banned a number of meetings held by sex reformers. On 1 March 1933 a new decree on health insurance had legitimated the closure of state-funded health advice clinics across the land, enforced during the following weeks by gangs of brownshirts. Doctors and staff were thrown out onto the streets; many, particularly if they were Jewish, went into exile. The Nazis argued that the entire system of social medicine developed by the Weimar state was geared towards preventing the reproduction of the strong on the one hand, and shoring up the families of the weak on the other. Social hygiene was to be swept away; racial hygiene was to be introduced in its stead.
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That meant, as some eugenicists had been arguing since the end of the nineteenth century, drastically reducing the burden of the weak on society by introducing a programme of preventing them from having children.

These ideas had rapidly gained wider currency among doctors, social workers and welfare administrators during the Depression. Well before the end of the Weimar Republic, experts had seized the opportunity afforded by the financial crisis to argue that the best way to reduce the impossible burden of welfare on the economy was to prevent the underclass from reproducing, by subjecting them to forcible sterilization. Before many years had passed, there would thus be fewer indigent families to support. Before long, too, the numbers of alcoholics, ‘work-shy’, mentally handicapped, criminally inclined and physically disabled people in Germany would be drastically reduced - on the dubious assumption, of course, that all these conditions were overwhelmingly hereditary in nature - and the welfare state would be able to direct its dwindling resources on the deserving poor. Protestant charities, influenced by doctrines of predestination and original sin, broadly welcomed such ideas; the Catholics, bolstered by a stern warning from the Pope in a 1930 encyclical that marriage and sexual intercourse were solely for the purposes of procreation, and that all human beings were endowed with an immortal soul, were strongly against. The appeal of a eugenic approach, even for liberal-minded reformers, was increased by the fact that mental asylums began to fill up rapidly from 1930 as families could no longer afford to care for ill or disabled members, while at the same time mental asylum budgets were drastically cut by local and regional authorities. In 1932 the Prussian Health Council met to discuss a new law allowing voluntary eugenic sterilization. Drafted by the eugenicist Fritz Lenz, who had been contemplating such policies since well before the First World War, it placed the power of advice.and application on welfare and medical officials whose word the poor, the confined and the handicapped would have been hard put to gainsay.
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This was only part of a much wider crackdown on what the respectable saw as various forms of social deviance. At the height of the economic crisis, no fewer than 10 million people were in receipt of some form of public assistance. As the democratic parties were closed down, municipal and state legislatures taken over and turned into assemblies of cheer-leaders for the local Nazi bosses, and newspapers deprived of their ability to investigate freely matters of social and political concern, welfare agencies, like the police, were freed from any kind of public scrutiny or control. Social workers and welfare administrators had already long been prone to regard claimants as scroungers and layabouts. Now, encouraged by new senior officials put in place by Nazi local and regional administrations, they could give free rein to their prejudices. Regulations passed in 1924 had allowed authorities to make benefits dependent on the recipient agreeing to work ‘in suitable cases’ on communal job schemes. These had already been introduced on a limited scale before 1933. Three and a half thousand people were working on compulsory labour schemes in Duisburg in 1930, and Bremen had been making such employment a condition of benefit receipt since the previous year. But in the dire economic situation of the early 1930s only a small proportion of the unemployed were covered - 6,000 out of 200,000 people on benefit in Hamburg in 1932, for example. From the early months of 1933 onwards, however, the number rapidly increased. Such work was not employment in the full sense of the word: it did not involve health insurance or pension contributions, for example, indeed it was not even paid: all that those who were engaged in it got was their welfare support plus, sometimes, pocket-money for travel or a free lunch.
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The work was supposedly voluntary, and the schemes were run by the private initiative of charitable institutions such as the Church welfare associations, but the voluntary element became rapidly less visible after March 1933. The urgent problem of mass unemployment was being tackled in the first place by coercion. A typical scheme was the ‘Farm Aid’ programme of March 1933, which took up initiatives already launched under the Weimar Republic to help the rural economy by drafting in young unemployed people from the towns to work on the land for board and lodging and nominal pay. Again, this was not employment in the proper sense of the word, but by August 1933 it had taken 145,000 people off the unemployment register, 33,000 of them women. Local administrators responsible for the homeless in Hamburg had been claiming since 1931 that they were making life unpleasant for the destitute and forcing them to seek support elsewhere. Such attitudes rapidly became more widespread in 1933. The number of overnight stays in the Hamburg Police Shelter fell from 403,000 in 1930 to 299,000 in 1933, largely as a result of this policy of deterrence. Officials began to argue that vagrants and the ‘work-shy’ should be sent to concentration camps. On 1 June 1933 the Prussian Interior Ministry issued a decree for the suppression of public begging. Poverty and destitution, already stigmatized before 1933, were now beginning to be criminalized as well.
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The police themselves, freed from the constraints of democratic scrutiny, launched a series of large-scale raids on the clubs and meeting-places of Berlin’s ring associations, networks of organized crime, in May and June 1933, as part of a campaign against professional criminals. Precincts they regarded as the haunts of criminal gangs were also centres of support for the Communists and their supporters. Such a crackdown was only possible after the Red Front-Fighters’ League had been smashed; it also constituted a further intimidation of the local population. Since the Nazis regarded crime, and particularly organized crime, as heavily dominated by Jews, it was not surprising that the police also raided fifty premises in Berlin’s ‘Barn District’ (
Scheunenviertel
) on 9 June 1933, a quarter known not only for its poverty but also for its high Jewish population. Needless to say, the association existed almost wholly in the minds of the Nazis themselves.
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The ring associations were ruthlessly smashed, their members taken into preventive custody without trial, and their clubs and bars closed down.
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In the penal system, where many of these people would eventually end up, the rapidly growing problem of petty crime had already led to pressure for harsher, more deterrent policies in the state prisons. Administrators and penal experts had argued in the last years of the Weimar Republic for the indefinite imprisonment or security confinement of habitual criminals whose hereditary degeneracy, it was assumed, rendered them incapable of improvement. Security confinement was increasingly thought to be the long-term answer to the burden these offenders supposedly imposed on the community. According to which criminologist or prison governor was making the estimate, anything between one in thirteen and one in two of all state prison inmates fell into this category at the end of the 1920s. Security confinement was included in the final drafts of the proposed new Criminal Code under preparation in the second half of the 1920s. Although the draft Code fell foul of the interminable wrangling of Weimar’s political parties, these proposals had a wide measure of assent in the penal and judicial establishments and clearly were not going to go away.
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There was no lack of specialist opinion that thought that the sterilization of genetically defective people should be compulsory.
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The Weimar welfare state had begun to turn to authoritarian solutions to this crisis that contemplated a serious assault on the bodily rights and integrity of the citizen. These would soon be taken up by the Third Reich and applied with a draconian severity that few under Weimar had even dreamed of. More immediately, state financial cutbacks were in any case forcing penal and welfare administrators to make ever harsher distinctions between the deserving and the undeserving, as conditions in state institutions of one kind and another worsened to the point where it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep everybody in them healthy and alive.
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II

The crackdown did not just affect the politically suspect, the deviant and the marginal. It affected every part of German society. Driving the whole process forward was the massive outburst of violence unleashed by the stormtroopers, the SS and the police in the first half of 1933. Reports continually appeared in the press, in suitably bowdlerized form, of brutal beatings, torture and ritual humiliation of prisoners from all walks of life and all shades of political opinion apart from the Nazis. Far from being directed against particular, widely unpopular minorities, the terror was comprehensive in scope, affecting anyone who expressed dissent in public, from whatever direction, against deviants, vagrants, nonconformists of every kind.
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The widespread intimidation of the population provided the essential precondition for a process that was in train all over Germany in the period from February to July 1933: the process, as the Nazis called it, of ‘co-ordination’, or to use the more evocative German term,
Gleichschaltung,
a metaphor drawn from the world of electricity, meaning that all the switches were being put onto the same circuit, as it were, so that they could all be activated by throwing a single master switch at the centre. Almost every aspect of political, social and associational life was affected, at every level from the nation to the village.

The Nazi takeover of the federated states provided a key component in this process. Just as important was the ‘co-ordination’ of the civil service, whose implementation from February 1933 onwards had put such powerful pressure on the Centre Party to knuckle under. Within a couple of weeks of Hitler’s appointment, new State Secretaries - the top civil service post - had been appointed in a number of ministries, including Hans-Heinrich Lammers at the Reich Chancellery. In Prussia, adding to the effects of the previous purge carried out by Papen after July 1932, Hermann Goring replaced twelve Police Presidents by mid-February. From March onwards, the violence of the stormtroopers was rapidly forcing politically unacceptable city officials and local mayors out of office - 500 leading municipal civil servants and seventy Lord Mayors by the end of May. Laws eliminating the autonomy of the federated states and providing for each one to be run by a Reich Commissioner appointed in Berlin - all except one were Nazi Party Regional Leaders - meant that there were few obstacles left after the first week of April to the ‘co-ordination’, or, in other words, Nazification of the civil service at every level. At the same time as the state governments were being overthrown, local Nazis, backed by squads of armed stormtroopers and SS men, were occupying town halls, terrorizing mayors and councils into resigning, and replacing them with their own nominees. Health insurance offices, employment centres, village councils, hospitals, law courts and all other state and public institutions were treated in the same way. Officials were forced to resign their posts or to join the Nazi Party, and were beaten up and dragged off to prison if they refused.
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