Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

was that racial hygiene attempted to put an end to ‘racial miscegenation’, which

  was seen as particularly damaging, a flashpoint of the first importance for the

  health of the nation.

  In this vein, in a speech to the Reich Party Conference of 1935 the head of the

  Reich Doctors’ Association, Gerhard Wagner, emphasized how ‘increasing mis-

  cegenation with Jewish blood that is entirely alien to us’ would not only have ‘the

  direst consequences, because it . . . is against the natural order’, but this ‘bastard-

  ization’ with the Jews, ‘a people who are already bastardized’, might lead to the

  unhindered spread amongst the German population ‘of the hereditary diseases

  and negative dispositions that are already widespread amongst Jews’. 10

  Racial hygiene not only proclaimed the struggle against ‘racial miscegenation’

  but saw as a significant goal the complete exclusion of Jews from the health

  system; indeed this was a fundamental condition for the implementation of its

  ideas. This was not merely a question of excluding Jewish doctors and other

  medical professionals, 11 or the gradual exclusion12 of Jewish patients from public health organizations, but above all it was manifested in the battle against so-called

  ‘Jewish medicine’, which was a synonym for those tendencies in modern medicine

  that resisted the triumphal progress of racial hygiene. Above all this meant

  medicine that was ‘mechanical’ or ‘industrial’ or concerned with preventive

  welfare, allegedly of Jewish origin, and which was concerned with the improve-

  ment of the state of the nation’s health across the board, without respect to the

  racial categories of patients. The link between Entjudung and the implementation

  Interim Conclusions

  75

  of racial hygiene approaches was expressed programmatically in 1935 by a spokes-

  man for National Socialist medicine: ‘All forms of eugenics, every attempt to

  improve our race will be in vain if we cannot achieve the complete emancipation

  of questions of medical politics from the influence of Judaism and its spirit.’13

  Just how closely the demand for the complete Entjudung of the health system

  was linked to the idea of the wholesale improvement of the health of the German

  nation can be shown particularly clearly in one area of health provision, in natural

  medicine, which under the National Socialists improved its standing vis-à-vis

  traditional academic medicine under the banner of ‘New German Medicine’. 14 In a 1938 issue of the periodical Heilpraktiker we can read that ‘the exclusion of Jews

  from the medical professions’ would also ‘detoxify the relations between doctors

  and the practitioners of natural medicine’ because ‘the Jew . . . has always been the

  strongest opponent of natural medicine, which is down-to-earth and socially

  aware’. 15

  The double process of Entjudung and the transformation of medicine along

  racial hygiene lines was part and parcel of the total occupation of the medical

  professions and the health system by the National Socialists. Doctors were con-

  trolled by Nazi organizations, new institutions were designed along ‘popular

  health’ lines, institutes and professorial chairs dedicated to racial hygiene were

  founded: this all contributed to a fundamental alteration of the structures of the

  health system and the dominance of National Socialist medicine.

  The Anti-Jewish Bias of the German School

  System and its Nazification

  Since 1933, and even more so after the second wave of anti-Semitism in 1935,

  Jewish pupils at state schools had been exposed to growing discrimination: the

  goal of these measures was first the exclusion, and finally the expulsion of Jewish

  pupils from general schools. 16 This occurred in various ways: Jewish pupils were progressively excluded from particular school activities, such as swimming lessons, visits to rural school halls of residence, outings, school parties, and so on.

  The more everyday school life was made to express National Socialist ideology by

  rituals (such as the flag ceremony), by symbols (such as the communal Hitler

  salute at every lesson), and by festivities and memorials, the clearer it became that

  Jewish pupils could not belong to the ‘community’ that was to be strengthened by

  all these measures. On the other hand, they were denied certain benefits such as

  reductions in school fees17 or training grants. 18 The introduction of ‘Theory of Heredity and Racial Science’ as a compulsory, cross-disciplinary subject in all

  types of schools19 as early as 1933, the enforcement of political education as well as the increasing pervasion of the various subjects with National Socialist content,

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  Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

  particularly in the subjects of Biology, German, and History, but also in Geog-

  raphy, Art, and Music, 20 stamped the Jewish pupils as ‘inferior’ outsiders. As a rule, Jewish pupils were forbidden to make the transition to higher education; they

  could sit the school leaving certificate, but did not generally receive the higher

  education entrance qualification required for enrolment in university studies.

  To this was added the fact that the racist and anti-Semitic content was often

  represented by teachers who victimized and humiliated their Jewish pupils in

  class, reducing them to exhibits that could be used to ‘prove’ the correctness of the

  racial theory that was being taught.

  In turn, non-Jewish pupils increasingly kept their distance; the role played in

  this by the growing presence of the Hitler Youth in schools should not be

  underestimated. Jewish pupils were humiliated and tormented in a great variety

  of ways; assaults on Jewish fellow pupils were part of everyday school life, and for

  many Jewish pupils the daily journey to school became a torture. 21

  The stigmatization, ostracism, and expulsion of Jewish pupils, in spite of the

  small number of those affected—in 1933 the 45,000 Jewish pupils in public schools

  constituted less than 1 per cent of the whole pupil body22—formed a significant element in the Nazification process of the German school system, and were almost

  seen, from the NS point of view, as the precondition for it. 23

  From the viewpoint of the National Socialist regime Jewish pupils, as expressed

  in a statement by the Reich Education Minister published in the press in Septem-

  ber 1935, were a ‘major obstacle’ to the ‘united stance of the class community and

  the untrammelled implementation of the National Socialist education of the

  young’. 24 Consequently, as the Reich Education Minister announced in the relevant decree from the same month, ‘clear separation according to race’ was

  the precondition for the ‘creation of National Socialist class communities as the

  basis for youth education based on the idea of German nationhood’. 25

  A closer analysis of the new educational guidelines demonstrates above all the

  great difficulties involved in communicating the desired harmonious image of a

  homogeneous ‘Aryan’ race and culture in a convincing way. The constant refer-

  ence to the negative effect of the Jews, who were said to have done their best to

  prevent the emergence of the genuine German Volksgemeinschaft in the past,

  hence became part of the indispensable repertoire of education as practised on

  National Socialist term
s. National Socialist teachers went so far as to demand the

  exclusion of Jewish pupils from lessons, since their mere presence irritated them

  and represented an insuperable obstacle to the communication of National

  Socialist educational content. 26

  The efforts of the regime to create an entirely ‘German’ school system were thus

  essentially based on the propagation of anti-Semitic education content and an

  educational practice directed against Jewish pupils. The anti-Jewish orientation of

  school was thus an indispensable part of the implementation of National Social-

  ism in schools.

  Interim Conclusions

  77

  From the beginning of 1936 Reich Education Minister Rust expressly attempted

  legally to expel Jewish schoolchildren from general schools; at this time about half

  of the 45,000 or so Jewish pupils still living in Germany attended general schools.

  But Rust’s plan was initially thwarted by the veto of Hitler, who plainly did not

  wish to go ahead with this plan in the Olympic Year 1936. 27 In 1937 the Education Minister returned to the plan; once again, in 1937, he suggested the establishment

  of ‘special schools or collective classes for Jewish primary school pupils’. 28

  Accordingly, in 1937 the number of Jewish pupils in general schools fell to about

  15,000; the majority of Jewish children now attended Jewish schools or the

  ‘collective classes’ mentioned above. But it would not be until 1939 that Jewish

  pupils were legally forbidden to attend general schools; the process of everyday

  discrimination and repression continued until that point. 29

  Liberation ‘from the Jewish Spirit’ and the

  Construction of a ‘German’ Science

  In almost all academic disciplines after 1933 there is a discernible tendency to give

  a certain völkisch, a genuinely ‘German’ bias to each subject, by means of a

  comprehensive expulsion of the ‘Jewish spirit’—beginning with the dismissal of

  Jewish university teachers—and by means of a fundamental removal of the

  remnants of a superseded ‘liberal Jewish era’. The various disciplines were in

  varying degrees transformed and even partially redefined, in terms of both

  content and structure. This will be examined rather more closely with reference

  to a number of examples.

  It was not until the era of National Socialism that psychology and psychother-

  apy first won acceptance as academic disciplines in Germany. 30 The distinction from ‘Jewish’ psychoanalysis and its destruction as a discipline played an important part in this professionalization process. In psychology this dissociation was

  attempted in part through the introduction of ‘Racial Psychology’ and ‘Racial

  Typology’, 31 and in psychotherapy by the foundation of a New German Psychotherapy (Neue Deutsche Seelenheilkunde). 32 In both cases what was at stake was not only a theoretical dissociation from psychoanalysis, but a matter of working

  out the fundamentally different mental make-ups of ‘Aryans’ and ‘Jews’.

  The transformation of the discipline of Anthropology (Volkskunde) into ‘Ger-

  man Anthropology’ (Deutsche Volkskunde), and its academic establishment on a

  larger scale, which occurred only during the Nazi period, was linked primarily

  with the idea of demonstrating the homogeneity and uniqueness of a German

  national culture beyond all regional differences and European similarities. 33 But the precondition for this, as one of the leading anthropologists stressed, was to

  make clear, ‘how the Jewish spirit deliberately turns against essential foundations

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  Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

  of German Anthropology. Jews above all are the first to turn away from the “Volk

  as nation”. It is Jews who most strongly emphasize the differences between

  individual classes and groups within the German Volk . . . The corroding effects

  of the Jewish spirit in the German Anthropology of the past can only fully be

  understood if one takes into account the Jewish influence coming from abroad.’34

  This quotation already makes it clear how the accusation of ‘Verjudung’ (Juda-

  ization) could be utilized in intradisciplinary disputes.

  The advocates of a transformation of sociology into a ‘German theory of

  society’ (deutsche Gesellschaftslehre) in turn assumed the task of fundamentally

  renewing the ‘völkisches Selbstbewusstsein’—the ‘völkisch self-awareness’ of the

  Germans. To this end they turned against a ‘Western’ sociology, meaning one that

  concentrated on bourgeois, industrial society, and countered it with that of a

  German Volkstum rooted in peasant society; this expressly German-völkisch new

  science was supposed to connect with a traditional lineage represented by names

  such as Jakob Herder, Ernst Moritz Arndt, and Wilhelm Riehl. Accordingly,

  refoundation of the subject was concerned with fending off ‘volksfeindliche incur-

  sions of Western thought’; particular importance was assigned to the battle against

  ‘Jewish thought, which has sought to talk the German people out of its völkisch

  needs’. 35 ‘German sociology’ did manage to institutionalize itself in the universities in the mid-1930s, but without developing an ‘encompassing theoretical construct’. 36 The place of theory was occupied by practical social research, primarily concerned with ‘weeding out’ those who were ‘inferior’ and ‘of foreign race’ from

  German society—a task that was to assume growing importance with the con-

  quest of Eastern European territories.

  In the discipline of history during the National Socialist era it is possible to

  identify a powerful shift towards a Germanocentric folk history: along with the

  Volkskunde researchers and social scientists mentioned above, and in cooperation

  with geographers, archaeologists, and others, an attempt was made to create a new

  interdisciplinary field of research: Volkstumsforschung or ethnicity research. 37

  Volksgeschichte (ethnic history) and Volkstumsforschung primarily attempted

  to record the history and culture of the German people through its differentiation

  from foreign peoples; the actual roots of the German people could, the Volk-

  stumsforscher were convinced, be revealed only when it was successfully freed

  from being overgrown by alien cultures.

  Here—despite the establishment of thematically relevant research institutes38—

  anti-Semitism played a subordinate role. The chief intention was to re-establish

  German borders in disputes with the country’s neighbours. Central to this was the

  claim to demonstrate the superiority of the character of ethnic Germans in border

  areas and abroad as against the national character (Volkstum) of foreigners, and

  thus to establish the German claim to hegemony. The fact that Volkstums-

  forschung sought to prove this claim to superiority primarily in a negative way,

  through the demarcation/separation from ‘inferior’ peoples, was summed up by

  Interim Conclusions

  79

  one of its leading representatives at the 1934 German Historians’ Congress, in a

  formula that can hardly be beaten for concision: ‘Volksgeschichte is at its most

  elementary level the history of border conflicts.’39

  Ethnic research was by no means purely based on racial biology: the term

  völkisch, which became its central concept, expressed the fusion of racist c
oncepts

  with cultural, historical, and spatial ones.

  Ethnicity research (Volkstumsforschung) represented the striking attempt, by

  overcoming the boundary between scholarship and politics, through close collab-

  oration with political offices and through new institutional structures, to open up

  career paths to a generation of academics close to the Party via the redefinition of

  scholarly parameters.

  Volkstumsforschung was to achieve practical significance during the war when,

  as a result of policy advice, cartographic material, statistics, and ‘arguments’ were

  made available to justify the displacement of Germany’s Eastern borders; within

  this context it also achieved ‘scholarly’ preliminary work for the deportation of the

  Eastern European Jews. Thus Volkstumsforschung, unable to demonstrate the

  supposed superiority of the German people in a positive way, to a large extent

  ended up providing anciliary work for genocide. In this way it provided a

  particularly vivid example of the destructive momentum that lay within National

  Socialist racial politics in almost all spheres of life.

  A further example from the humanities might be mentioned here: the path

  towards ‘völkisch legal renewal’ in jurisprudence led towards a consistent counter-

  ing and denial of pre- and supra-state normative contexts. 40 The new version of the law was to be solely an expression of the ‘national community’, and that

  national community was, as one of the leading National Socialist jurists put it,

  defined by two factors: by ‘racial homogeneity’ (Artgleichheit) and by the ‘com-

  mon differentiation of friend from enemy’. 41 In fact the new völkisch law—

  adapted to the ‘essence’ of the German Volk—was to be reduced to an instrument

  in the hands of the National Socialist leadership; in this world of ideas there was

  no room for an autonomous sphere of law. Clearly this ‘essential core’ of völkisch

  law was not definable and—if the political leadership was not to be hampered in

  its actions—was not supposed to be defined more closely. On the other hand it is

  not difficult to discern, from the given definition, which ‘enemy’ the ‘racially