Read The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Online
Authors: Niall Ferguson
Tags: #History, #Modern, #20th Century, #World
The obverse of all this was the effort to encourage the right sort of Germans to breed in the right sort of way. For racial purification involved not only the exclusion of those deemed to be
Volksfremd
but also the multiplication of racially healthy
Volksgenossen
. The Reich Agriculture Minister, Walther Darré, made the parallel with stud farming explicit when he wrote: ‘Just as we breed our Hanoverian horses using a few pure stallions and mares, so we will once again breed pure Nordic Germans.’ The Nazi eugenicists had all manner of ingenious ideas to boost Aryan procreation. The Law for the Reduction of Unemployment (June 1933) introduced marriage loans for couples who did not both work; the debts, which were intended to finance the purchase of consumer durables, were cancelled if the wife produced four children. A special handbook was made available to nubile young couples. In among the handy housekeeping tips and recipes, it contained a useful list of ‘Ten Commandments for Choosing a Spouse’:
There was also the German Mothers’ medal, awarded to any woman who over-fulfilled her quota as a medium for the propagation of Aryan blood. In a kind of childbearing Olympics, mothers were rewarded with gold, silver or bronze medals depending on how many children they had. Jews and other ‘ethnic aliens’ were, needless to say, ineligible. In order to make sure that only the right sort performed these feats of procreation, couples intending to marry had to secure certificates of suitability. Here was another way in which the professionals extended their competence under the Third Reich. Doctors could determine who was fit to breed. Hereditary Health Courts could order the sterilization of those deemed unfit, a procedure which, quite apart from its intended result, was in itself both painful and dangerous. And officials like Karl Astel of the Thuringian Office for Racial Matters could compile information that would ultimately allow racial profiling of the entire population.
Yet, despite all these inducements, stud farming turned out to be harder with humans than with horses. It greatly worried Himmler that his own SS men were not naturally attracted to the right racial types:
I see in our marriage requests [he complained] that our men frequently marry in a complete misunderstanding of what marriage means. With the requests
I often ask myself, ‘My God, must that one of all people marry an SS man’ – this chit of misfortune and this twisted, in some cases impossible shape who might marry a small eastern Jew, a small Mongolian – for that such a girl would be good. In by far the greater number of instances, these concern radiant, good-looking men.
In order to rectify this, he began to intervene in SS officers’ matrimonial decision-making. Not only did new recruits have to trace their pure German ancestry back five generations; they were allowed to marry only partners approved as racially suitable by Himmler himself. And they were then exhorted to have at least four children, ‘the minimum necessary for a good and healthy marriage’. Children of the SS were supposed to undergo an alternative form of baptism with SS standard-bearers instead of clergy officiating, and a portrait of Hitler rather than a font as the focal point of the ceremony. The prize for producing a seventh child was to have the
Reichsführer
himself as its godfather. In a further departure from traditional social conventions, Himmler came to believe that Aryan types should also be encouraged to breed out of wedlock. It was he who inspired the
Lebensborn
(literally ‘source of life’) programme, which was designed to allow SS officers to sire children with selected concubines located in fifteen delivery suites-cum-kindergartens. Himmler was quite explicit about the objective of all this: ‘To establish the Nordic race again in and around Germany and… from this seed bed [to] produce a race of 200 million.’ ‘It must be a matter of course that we have children,’ he declared in 1943. ‘It must be a matter of course that the most copious breeding should be from this racial elite of the German people. In 20 or 30 years we must really be able to provide the whole of Europe with its ruling class.’
Of course, not everyone in the Nazi regime subscribed to such notions. But that did not greatly matter. For there were other, more mercenary reasons for backing racial persecution. The German Jews were few, no doubt, but they were on average relatively well off. What simpler way to raise cash for rearmament – or simply to line the pockets of the Nazi leadership – than to steal it in the name of Aryanization? In the year from April 1938 the number of Jewish-owned
businesses in Germany declined from 40,000 to 15,000. The boardrooms of corporate Germany saw surreal meetings at which Jewish directors – who were the founders of a firm or the founder’s heirs – stepped down, bequeathing their seats and shares to Aryan colleagues who, if they privately pledged to act as no more than trustees, often found it convenient to forget those pledges. The events of November 1938 illustrated the developing nexus between hatred and cupidity. On November 9, 1938, at Hitler’s instigation, Nazi thugs vandalized, ransacked or burned down nearly two hundred synagogues and thousands of Jewish businesses in towns all over Germany. Jewish cemeteries were desecrated and individual Jews beaten up; around ninety were killed. Some 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to labour camps, though most were released later. The pretext for this massive pogrom was the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, an official at the German embassy in Paris, by a seventeen-year-old Jew named Herschel Grynszpan, whose Polish parents had been deported from Hanover by the Nazis. This was a pogrom worthy of Russia in 1905, though with far more overt state direction. To Göring, however, the violence was also a fiscal opportunity. In the aftermath, a heavy ‘collective fine’ of a billion marks was levied on the German Jewish community to pay for the damage done, as if the Jews themselves had perpetrated it. The November 9
Reichskristallnacht
– an allusion to the broken glass that littered the streets afterwards – was a significant moment, revealing not only the violent urge at the root of the regime’s policy towards the Jews, but also the complicity of those Germans who did not feel hatred towards the Jews, merely indifference.
Nazi anti-Semitism was ‘something new in the history of the world,’ wrote the perceptive liberal journalist Sebastian Haffner in 1940, ‘an attempt to deny humans the solidarity of every species that enables it to survive; to turn human predatory instincts, that are normally directed against animals, against members of their own species, and to make a whole nation into a pack of hunting hounds’:
It shows how ridiculous the attitude is… that the anti-Semitism of the Nazis is a small side issue, at worst a minor blemish on the movement, which one can regret or accept, according to one’s personal feelings for the Jews, and of
‘little significance compared to the great national issues’. In reality these ‘great national issues’ are unimportant day-to-day matters, the ephemeral business of a transitional period in European history – while the Nazis’ anti-Semitism is a fundamental danger and raises the spectre of the downfall of humanity.
With the benefit of hindsight, we are bound to ask ourselves why a man like Victor Klemperer failed to discern the approaching calamity. Why did the Jews of Germany, and indeed of Europe, not flee sooner to avoid the hellish fate that Hitler had in mind for them? In fact, a substantial proportion did precisely that. In 1933 around 38,000 left the country, followed by 22,000 in 1934 and 21,000 in 1935. Over 200 of the country’s 800 Jewish professors departed, of whom twenty were Nobel laureates. Albert Einstein had already left in 1932 in disgust at Nazi attacks on his ‘Jewish physics’. The exodus quickened after the ‘Night of Broken Glass’. In 1938 40,000 Jews left Germany; nearly twice that number left in 1939. By the time voluntary departures ceased to be possible, there were little more than 160,000 Jews left in Germany, less than 30 per cent of the pre-1933 figure. It is often forgotten how successful the Nazi policy of encouraging emigration was, though it would probably have achieved even more had it not been for the high taxes levied by Schacht on those leaving Germany.
As we have seen, Nazism was a political religion and Hitler delighted in playing the part of prophet. ‘If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe’, he declared in a speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, ‘should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of Europe, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!’ As its context makes clear, however, this was as much a threat designed to induce further emigration as a prophecy of a coming genocide.
Nevertheless, it is not hard to see why a man like Klemperer, who considered himself so emphatically a German, chose to stay. Even as late as 1939, it was by no means clear that the Nazis were the worst anti-Semites in continental Europe. Nor was their racial state at this stage unique in the world.
In neighbouring Poland, for example, there was no shortage of newspaper articles that could equally well have appeared in the Nazi
Völkische Beobachter
. As early as August 1934, an author writing underthe pseudonym ‘Swastika’ in the Catholic newspaper
Pro Christo
argued: ‘We should count as a Jew not only the follower of the Talmud… but every human being who has Jewish blood in his veins… Only a person who can prove that there were no ancestors of Jewish race in his family for at least five generations can be consideredto be genuinely Aryan.’ ‘Jews are so terribly alien to us, alien and unpleasant, that they are a race apart,’ a contributor to
Kultura
wrote in September 1936. ‘They irritate us and all their traits grate against our sensibilities. Their oriental impetuosity, argumentativeness, specific mode of thought, the set of their eyes, the shape of their ears, the winking of their eyelids, the line of their lips, everything. In families of mixed blood we detect the traces of these features to the third or forth generation and beyond.’ Some nationalists like Stefan Kosicki, editor of the
Gazeta Warszawaska
, began calling for the expulsion of the Jews. Others went further. Already in December 1938 the daily
Mały dziennik
was calling for ‘war’ on the Jews, before ‘the Jewish rope’ strangled Poland. The National Democrat (Endek) leader Roman Dmowski prophesied an ‘international pogrom of the Jews’ which would bring an ‘end to the Jewish chapter of history’. Nor was anti-Semitic violence purely verbal. There had already been pogroms in Wilno (Vilnius) in 1934, Grodno in 1935, Przytyk and Minsk in 1936 and Brzesc (Brest) in 1937. In 1936 Zygmunt Szymanowski, a professor of bacteriology at the University of Warsaw, was shocked by the conduct of Endek students in Warsaw and Lwów, who assaulted Jewish students between lectures. In the mid-thirties, between one and two thousand Jews suffered injuries in attacks; perhaps as many as thirty were killed.
Neither the Catholic Church nor the Polish government wholly condoned such violence, it is true. Yet Cardinal Hlond’s pastoral letter of February 1936 had scarcely been calculated to dampen down Polish anti-Semitism. ‘It is a fact’, he declared,
that Jews oppose the Catholic Church, are steeped in free-thinking, and represent the avant-garde of the atheist movement, the Bolshevik movement, and subversive action. The Jews have a disastrous effect on morality and their publishing-houses dispense pornography… Jews commit fraud, usury, and are involved in trade in human beings.
The temporal authorities were little better, despite the fact that the 1921 Constitution expressly ruled out discrimination on racial or religious grounds. In the 1920s Jews in the formerly Russian parts of the country had merely had to put up with the reluctance of the new regime to abolish what remained of the old Tsarist restrictions – many of which remained in force until as late as 1931 – and the inconvenience of the law banning work on Sundays. Worse was to come. The Camp of National Unity (OZN), founded in 1937 to mobilize popular support for Piłsudski’s successors, aimed to achieve the ‘Polonization’ of industry, commerce and the professions at the expense of Jews, who were declared to be ‘alien’ to Poland. There is no question that Jews were disproportionately successful, particularly in higher education and the professions. Though by 1931 fewer than 9 per cent of the Polish population were Jewish, the proportion rose above 20 per cent in Polish universities. Jews accounted for 56 per cent of all private doctors in Poland, 43 per cent of all private teachers, 34 per cent of lawyers and 22 per cent of journalists. Official boycotts of Jewish businesses led to dramatic declines in the number of Jewish-owned shops – in the Białystok region from 92 per cent of all shops in 1932 to just 50 per cent six years later. Jews were driven out of the meat trade by bans on ritual slaughter; Jewish students were segregated in university classrooms; they were excluded from the legal profession. By 1937–8 their share of university enrolments had fallen to 7.5 per cent. By the end of 1938 it was the government’s official policy to ‘solve the Jewish question’ by pressurizing Polish Jews into emigration. But that was scarcely an option for the many poor Jews in cities like Łódź, where over 70 per cent of Jewish families lived in
a single room, often an attic or a cellar, and around a quarter were in receipt of charitable assistance.
Anti-Semitism was also rife in Romania, thanks to the efforts of Alexandru Cuza and Octavian Goga’s National Christian Party and Corneliu Codreanu’s Legion of the Archangel Michael, with its green-shirted youth wing known as the Iron Guard. As capable as Hitler of equating Jews simultaneously with communism and capitalism, Codreanu had pledged to ‘destroy the Jews before they can destroy us’. He was not alone. In 1936 the president of the Totul pentru Tara Party, General Zizi Cantacuzino-Granicerul, had also called for the extermination of the Jews. To Goga, a poet by vocation, the Jews were like ‘leprosy’ or ‘eczema’. Even before 1937, Jews found themselves driven out of the Romanian legal profession, while Jewish students were subjected to harassment and intimidation. In 1934 Mihail Sebastian – born Iosif Hechter, but an apostate and a wholly assimilated Romanian – had written to Nae Ionescu, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bucharest, inviting him to write a preface to his new book. Ionescu’s preface contained the following dark admonition: