The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (66 page)

When the Interior Ministry attempted to rule on the fate of non-Polish minorities, the confusion between cultural and biological definitions of race became painfully apparent:

The mixed population in the areas of Oppeln and Kattowitz, which has been for centuries greatly under German influence, is not to be regarded as Polish
… The same applies to a class of population living in the Reich province of Danzig-West Prussia, which is of predominantly Polish descent, but tends to German nationality owing to mixed marriages and cultural influence. The Kashubes, in spite of their Slavonic dialect, are never to be treated as Poles. This is still more the case with the Masurians. Anybody belonging to these nationalities is, however, to be treated as a Pole if he professes to be one, or has done so before the incorporation.

The journal
Ostland
went so far as to deny that the Polish nationality existed, asserting instead the existence of myriad petty ‘tribal types’: Mazovians, including Podlasians, Kurpians and Lowiczians, and Malopolanians, including Cracovians, Lachs, Lazowiaks, Sandomierzians and Lubliners. Moreover, as the Nazis looked further east, new dilemmas presented themselves. Alfred Rosenberg, the minister responsible for the occupied territories in Eastern Europe, argued that all the inhabitants of the Baltic States should be regarded aseligible for Germanization, but this position was initially rejected by those who regarded the ‘Finno-Ugric’ Estonians and the supposedly ‘Slavic’ Lithuanians as racially alien. Later, Rosenberg’s view prevailed; indeed, Hitler contemplated integrating the Baltic States into the Reich, though only after a gradual process of cultural Germanization. Ukrainians were also considered as potentially salvageable. Hitler argued that women aged between fifteen and thirty-five should be deported from the Ukraine to the Reich to work as housemaids. This, he argued, would retrieve German blood that had supposedly been lost when the ancient Gothic realm in the Ukraine had been conquered by the Huns in the fifth century.

Typical of the pseudo-scientific basis of all this was the report drawn up in April 1942 on ‘The Solution of the Polish Question’ by Dr Erhard Wetzel, lawyer and desk officer for racial matters in the Reich Ministry for Eastern Territories:

From a racial standpoint the Poles contain essentially almost the same racial strains as the Germans, although the proportions of the individual races are different. The nordic-phalian racial type is certainly fairly strongly present… That is the result of the strong strain of German blood which the Polish population of this area have received through the Polonization (
Verpolung
) of the Germans… On the other hand, the eastern Balt racial strain is present
in the Polish population to a far greater degree than in the German population. Moreover, in addition to dinaric,
westisch
and
ostisch
strains, there are also some fairly primitive
ostisch
types about whom one must have grave doubts as to whether they can be regarded as identical to
homo alpinus
… There is in my view some justification… to term these groups ‘Lapponoids’.

Equipped with such jargon, RuSHA experts known as ‘integration assessors’ (
Einigungsprüfer
) had to try to distinguish ‘pure or predominantly nordic and phalian types, who are first class in terms of their genetic health and social efficiency’ (Group I) from ‘balanced crosses with a significant proportion of nordic, phalian or dinaric race, with a small addition of other European races who are satisfactory in terms of their genetic health and social efficiency’ (Group II); ‘crosses in which
westisch, ostisch
or east Baltic racial strains are predominant, but in whom elements of the nordic, phalian or dinarian race are still clearly visible and who are therefore considered to be just adequate as a balanced cross’ (Group III+); ‘crosses in which
westisch, ostisch
or east Baltic racial strains are predominant, in which however nordic, phalian or dinarian race are still faintly discernible’ (Group III); ‘racially pure
ostisch
and east Baltic types, unbalanced crosses of the European races’ (Group IV); and finally ‘racial crosses with non-European races and alien races’. By the end of 1943 this bizarre but potentially lethal exercise in racial categorization had largely been completed. Of the 9.5 million people in the incorporated territories, 370,000 were already Reich Germans, a further 353,000 were acknowledged asfully fledged ethnic Germans, 1.7 million were Poles who had satisfied the criteria for inclusion in Groups I and II (and hence automatically became Reich citizens) and 1.6 million were Poles in Group III (who could become citizens only on a case-by-case basis and even then remained subject to discrimination). The rest were either in the fourth category or ‘asocial’. As ‘protected members of the German Reich’ they were likely to end up in concentration camps.

What these policies meant in practice can be illustrated once again with the example of Zamość. In all, as many as 30,000 children were removed from the Zamość area, of whom 4,454 were deemed ‘racially valuable’ enough to be sent to Germany. The majority were sent
to concentration camps. On December 13 and December 16, 1942, transports containing 718 Poles from Zamość arrived at Auschwitz. All the children among them were killed by phenol injection as part of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele’s sadistic medical experiments. Two of his victims were the twin sisters Maria and Czeslawa Krajewski. They were just fifteen years old when they were murdered – for the ‘crime’ of being insufficiently Aryan.

The war not only created new opportunities for Nazi racial policy abroad. It also permitted a radicalization within Germany. From 1933 until 1939, for example, the Gestapo had harassed the 832 Jews still living in the Rhineland town of Krefeld with increasing zeal. Though they accounted for less than one per cent of the population, they provided the Gestapo with one in ten of their cases before 1936 and one in three thereafter. In over two-fifths of cases, the individuals concerned were taken into ‘protective custody’ – which put them beyond the reach of what remained of the established legal system – and sent to concentration camps. Nevertheless, it was only after the outbreak of war that Krefeld’s Jewish community could systematically be wiped out. By the summer of 1942, nearly all of them had been deported to their deaths, beginning with the first transport to the Łódź ghetto in October 1941. This escalation manifested itself throughout Germany, as anti-Jewish policy was increasingly implemented outside the regular judicial process. In November 1939, for example, a Jew accused of sexual offences against a German girl was simply shot by the police without reference to courts.

For Victor Klemperer, too, despite the partial protection of his mixed marriage, the coming of war meant an acceleration in the pace of his social exclusion. In 1940 he was forced to relinquish the home he had built in the village of Dölzchen and to move into a crowded ‘Jews’ House’ in Dresden. He was banned from public parks. The following year he was imprisoned for a week for failing to observe blackout regulations. He was taxed into penury. He was even banned from smoking. From September 1941 he was obliged to wear the
yellow star.
*
Each successive diminution in his rights as a citizen forced Klemperer to re-examine his attitude towards the country and culture he had once considered his own. As early as 1937 he had come to ‘believe ever more strongly that Hitler really does embody the soul of the German people, that he really stands for “Germany” and that he will consequently maintain himself and justifiably maintain himself’. Five years later that feeling of alienation had intensified. Discrimination by now was starting to undermine Klemperer’s health. While his wife trudged around in search of potatoes, he was forced despite his age and heart condition to clear snow from the streets and then to toil in a factory. His clothes and shoes were literally disintegrating. His living quarters had shrunk to little more than a cupboard. But these discomforts were as nothing compared with the fear – which constantly grew – of being searched, beaten, arrested, even murdered. ‘I can no longer believe in the completely un-German character of National Socialism,’ he reflected in June 1942, ‘it is home-grown, a malignant growth out of German flesh, a strain of cancer.’

True, not all Germans were afflicted by this disease. In June 1943 Klemperer remarked in his diaries on the ‘altogether comradely, easygoing, often really warm behaviour of the male and female workers towards the Jews… they are certainly not Jew-haters’. On several occasions he recorded how people (particularly middle-aged workers with Social Democrat or Communist backgrounds) signalled their sympathy, if only by shaking his hand and muttering encouragement. But such incidents were clearly outnumbered by occasions when perfect strangers abused him in the street. For example: ‘A group of boys on bicycles, 14 or 15 years of age… overtake me: “He’ll get shot in the back of the head… I’ll pull the trigger… He’ll be hanged on the gallows – stock exchange racketeer.”’ It is significant that the majority of these incidents involved young Germans – evidence, in Klemperer’s
eyes, of the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda in the schools and Hitler Youth. It is also evidence that ordinary Germans were well aware of the violence the regime was perpetrating against Jews, if not its precise nature.

It was not only Jews who fell victim to what has been called the Third Reich’s ‘cumulative radicalization’. As we have seen, the murder of mentally ill Germans had begun even before the outbreak of war with the
Aktion T-4
(see
Chapter 7
). The process was accelerated under wartime conditions; significantly, Hitler’s personal order authorizing the ‘euthanasia’ policy was dated September 1, 1939. The case of the asylum in Hadamar, north-west of Frankfurt, makes it clear just how overtly the Nazi state was now capable of committing murder. Between January and August 1941 more than 10,000 people were put to death there in a specially constructed gas chamber in the cellar, most of them mental patients transported from other psychiatric hospitals. Although the policy was supposed to be secret, local people knew perfectly well what was being done. As the president of the higher state court in Frankfurt reported to the Reich Minister of Justice, ‘even children call out when such transport cars pass: “There are some more to be gassed.”’ The smoke from the crematorium chimney was clearly visible hanging over the town. The personnel from the asylum were shunned by the local populace when they came to drink in local pubs after work. The Bishop of Limburg, in whose diocese Hadamar lay, followed Bishop Galen’s lead in protesting at what was being done. He too noted the absence of secrecy. Local schoolchildren referred to the buses that brought patients to Hadamar as ‘murder-boxes’ and taunted one another by shouting: ‘You’re crazy; you’ll be sent to the baking oven in Hadamar.’ A particular source of local concern was that elderly people would be next: ‘After the feebleminded have been finished off,’ local people were heard to say, ‘the next useless eaters whose turn will come are the old people.’ These complaints led to a suspension of the killings and the decommissioning of the gas chambers, but this proved to be only a tactical pause. Later in the war Hadamar once again became a slaughterhouse, though this time the victims were around 500 Poles and Russians, allegedly sufferers from tuberculosis. Because the smoke from the crematorium was seen as having precipitated the earlier protest, these victims of
Nazism were given lethal injections, or orally administered drug overdoses, and buried in the asylum grounds.

When it became necessary to suspend the ‘euthanasia’ campaign, its perpetrators lost little time in applying their techniques elsewhere. Concentration camps like Buchenwald were preferable to mental hospitals because they were located further from centres of population. (Buchenwald, surrounded by trees as the name suggests, was in the Ettersburg forest outside Weimar; it was invisible even from the nearby Ettersburg Castle.) By 1941 doctors like Friedrich Mennecke were routinely selecting prisoners there and in other camps as ‘unworthy of life’ purely on the grounds of their racial origins or ‘asocial’ behaviour. One such victim was Charlotte Capell, a forty-seven-year-old nurse from Breslau, who was condemned to death for ‘persistent racial defilement’ and ‘hid[ing] her Jewish origin behind Catholicism [by hanging] a Christian cross around her neck’. Another was Christine Lehmann from Duisburg, who was sent to Auschwitz after being identified as a ‘half-gypsy’ (
Zigeunermischling
) and found guilty of ‘asocial’ and ‘community endangering’ behaviour, namely a ‘marriagelike relationship’ with a German man. Marlies Müller, an unmarried Jewish servant, was condemned to be gassed for ‘continual racial defilement with German soldiers’, compounded by her ‘insolence and laziness’ in the camp where she had been held after her arrest.

Such was the ethos of the new empire that was taking shape in Europe. It was based on an ideology not merely of racial hierarchy and segregation but of sweeping ethnic transformation, to be achieved by the systematic and unrestrained use of violence against civilians in conquered territory and at home. To be sure, all empires – and indeed most states of any size – involve some measure of violence and subjugation. To end the Iraqi insurgency of 1920, to take just one example, the British had relied on a combination of aerial bombardment and punitive village-burning expeditions. Indeed, they had contemplated using mustard gas too, though supplies had proved to be unavailable. Churchill, no faint heart in these matters, was shocked by the actions of some trigger-happy pilots and vengeful ground troops, just as he had been dismayed by the Amritsar Massacre in India the year before. As Churchill freely acknowledged, British rule in the Middle East and India rested ultimately on soldiers, guns and ‘the whole apparatus of
scientific war’. But he made it clear on numerous occasions that he regarded British power as being fundamentally constrained by the rule of law and the sovereignty of parliament. Mowing down civilians, as he put it, was ‘not the British way of doing business’. As Macaulay had put it a century before, ‘the most frightful of all spectacles [was] the strength of civilisation without its mercy’. In the face of the Quit India movement of 1942, to be sure, the British did not hesitate to use force, but this was in the face of a wave of riots, strikes, attacks on communications and other acts of sabotage.
*
The leaders of the nationalist Congress were jailed but they were not murdered, as they surely would have been had the Germans or the Japanese been running India. And it is worth noting that this took place after Sir Stafford Cripps
†
had explicitly proposed that after the war a self-governing India be set up within the British Commonwealth under an Indianized Executive Council acting as a British-style Cabinet, with an elected constituent assembly renegotiating the terms of the new Anglo-Indian relationship, up to and including the possibility of provincial non-accession to the Commonwealth (leaving the way open to independence for a Muslim Pakistan). The British aim, as Cripps said, was ‘to give India full self-government at the earliest possible moment’.