The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Characteristic of the disappointment of many such groups in the Third Reich was the experience of the pharmacists, a branch of retailing based overwhelmingly on small independent drug stores. Many pharmacists saw in the coming of the Third Reich the chance to realize their long-term ambition of having their profession formally put on a par with medicine, to push back the growing might of the big drug companies, and to restore the integrity of the apothecary as a skilled, trained expert - a professional, indeed - who produced most medicinal remedies and treatments himself and was guaranteed against competition from herbalists and other unqualified rivals by the establishment of a legal monopoly. But this vision quickly turned out to be a mirage. Although the training of pharmacists was reformed in 1934 and Aryanized, with few objections, in 1935, the apothecaries themselves could not agree on how best to assert their monopolistic claims, and their organizations were absorbed into the Labour Front in 1934. The regime’s priorities soon took over, and pharmacists found themselves involved in the search for home-grown drugs to render Germany independent of pharmaceutical imports, and helping to prepare the medicaments that would be needed when war came. In this game, the big drug companies were the major players, and military priorities soon rendered the pseudo-medieval idea of the independent, small-town apothecary producing his own drugs and approved remedies almost entirely obsolescent.49 The same tale could be told in many other parts of the independent business sector. In the veterinary profession, for example, the same processes of co-ordination took place, with existing organizations dissolving themselves, and 4,000 out of Germany’s 7,500 vets already members of the new Reich Association of German Veterinary Surgeons by January 1934. Here as elsewhere, the voluntary professional associations largely co-ordinated themselves, and their reward was their formal incorporation into a Reich Chamber of Veterinary Surgeons in 1936. But early attempts by one wing of the profession to impose a backward-looking corporate form on their national organization gave way very quickly to the standard institutional structures of the Third Reich, centralized, hierarchical, and easily subject to central government control, as in other areas of small business as well.50

  Social Democratic observers in Germany reported the dissatisfaction of artisans and small shopkeepers with their situation in the Third Reich. Already in May 1934, small businessmen and retailers were complaining that the economic situation had not improved enough for people to be spending more on the consumer goods and services they mainly produced and sold, while the Party was constantly badgering them for contributions of one kind and another which they had no choice but to pay. Among their many grievances was the fact that promises to curb consumer co-operatives, in many cases institutions formerly close to the Social Democratic labour movement, had not been kept. Co-ordinated into the Labour Front and used as a convenient means of rewarding ‘old fighters’ by putting them in executive positions, the co-ops lost little more than the subsidies and tax privileges they had been granted under the Weimar Republic. A law of May 1935 arranged for the winding-up of financially weak co-ops, but attempts to ban civil servants from membership were quashed by Hess in 1934; and while around a third of the country’s 12,500 co-op stores did close down by 1936, often under pressure from local Party groups, there were still some two million co-op members at the latter date, and small shopkeepers still felt cheated because they had not disappeared altogether.51 In Silesia, according to the report of a Social Democratic agent, there was great ‘bitterness’ in these circles:The ceaseless collections are leading people to grasp the beggar’s staff. Turnover has fallen rapidly. Because of poor wages, workers can only buy the cheapest articles, and of course they flock to the department stores and one-price shops. People are cursing like fishwives, and their disappointment has already made itself publicly apparent in meetings ... At a recent meeting in Görlitz a shopkeeper spoke up in the discussion and said: ‘What didn’t they promise us before?! - The department stores were going to be closed, the co-operative societies were going to be destroyed, the one-price shops were going to disappear. Nothing has happened! We’ve been lied to and betrayed!’ The next day the man was arrested. This caused a great deal of bitterness.52

  Not only was consumer demand slow to recover, but the regime had, in this sense, not been National Socialist enough.53

  In 1935, even some shopkeepers and artisans who had been zealous Nazis in previous times were reported to be voicing their disappointment that their situation had not improved. One master artisan from Aachen was heard to say that all his colleagues were opponents of Hitler, but only three out of fifty he knew would actually dare to open their mouths; the rest remained silent.54 One could not say that the Nazis had done nothing for them, a Social Democratic report noted later, but almost all the measures they had taken had been double-edged. Credit had become difficult to obtain, demand was slow to recover, price controls had a damaging effect on profits, guild contributions were burdensome, the guilds were badly run, and taxes were being ratcheted upwards and collected with far greater zeal than before.55 Yet in the end, even the Social Democrats were forced to conclude in 1939 that: ‘For the moment, the artisans’ discontent against their increasingly oppressive situation scarcely has a political point.’ They grumbled about shortages of raw materials, complained about the loss of their workers to the armed forces or the munitions industry, and cursed the requirement placed on them to keep elaborate business records, but none of this came together into any generalized criticism of the regime itself. The Social Democrats concluded that these were ‘social strata for whom political thinking has always been alien’. This was dubious. Disappointment created disillusion, even dissent; but as in other areas of society, there were good reasons why this did not spill over into outright opposition to the regime. Those artisans and small businessmen who did keep their heads above water - the great majority - found for all their troubles and travails that their economic situation was at least better than it had been in the Depression. The small-business sector remained deeply divided, between producers and retailers, services and manufactures, and in many other ways. Finally, of all the sectors of German society this had been the most favourable to right-wing nationalism, antisemitism, and anti-democratic sentiment since the late nineteenth century. It would take more than economic discontent to turn it against the regime altogether.56

  II

  Artisans and shopkeepers were not the only social group who hoped for an improvement in status with the coming of the Third Reich. White-collar workers and salaried employees of private businesses had long looked enviously at the superior pay, status and privileges of civil servants. Known popularly as the ‘new Mittelstand’, they were, however, deeply divided politically, with liberal and Social Democratic organizations rivalling those of the far right, and their votes for the Nazi Party in the Weimar years had not been above the average for the country as a whole. Many hoped that the Third Reich would once more set up the barriers of status between white-collar workers and manual labourers that the previous years had torn down. Fear of ‘proletarianization’ had been a major driving force in the white-collar unions, whether on the left, the centre or the right. But they were bitterly disappointed when Hitler came to power. The leaders of all three political wings of the white-collar unions were arrested and put into concentration camps, and the unions themselves, along with all other white-collar organizations, were amalgamated into the German Labour Front.57 Moreover, the fact that the workers and their organizations were formally integrated into the national community dismantled a further barrier. White-collar workers did not possess the close-knit traditions or distinctive culture that organized labour had enjoyed in the Social Democratic and to a lesser extent Communist movement, so they were more vulnerable to atomization and terrorization and less capable even of passive resistance. 58 It was not surprising, therefore, that a Social Democratic agent in a life insurance business in central Germany reported in 1936 that most were politically apathetic, apart from a few former supporters of t
he Steel Helmets and the Nationalists, who might not have been fanatical adherents of Hitler but were none the less pleased with the way in which he had crushed ‘Marxism’ in 1933. ‘The majority of the male employees are dully accepting of the political compulsion and all the various regulations, ’ he admitted. Most of them came from the lower middle class. They blamed problems on the ‘little Hitlers’ of the regime and continued to admire the Leader himself. The chances of any kind of critical thinking about the regime were fairly remote here.59

  More complicated was the position of university-trained professionals, of lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, university professors and the like. As we have seen, the Third Reich had a variable impact on the status of these groups, downgrading lawyers, civil servants, schoolteachers and professors on the one hand, and upgrading doctors in particular on the other. The Nazis’ anti-intellectualism and populism had an obviously damaging effect on the social prestige of such groups overall, and the changes that came about in university training reflected this, with the drastic fall in student numbers, the requirement to spend long periods of time in labour camps and the abolition of autonomous student institutions like the corporations. The rapidly growing power and prestige of the armed forces opened up new careers for bright and ambitious young men from the upper and middle classes in the officer corps, and made the professions seem dull and unrewarding in comparison. The oft-repeated and openly expressed Nazi contempt for the law made a career in it unappealing, and it is not surprising that by 1939 there were widespread complaints about the lack of suitable recruits for the judiciary and the legal profession. Even where a profession did relatively well out of the Third Reich, like the engineers, their situation did not improve that much. Rearmament, with its requirement for technical expertise in the design of tanks, ships, planes and weaponry; fortifications like the West Wall and public projects like the motorways; prestigious building projects in Berlin, Munich and elsewhere: these and other factors even led the Ministry of Labour to exempt engineers from labour mobility restrictions in 1937, especially if they changed jobs to further their professional training and development. None of this made much difference to their pay, however: in a company like Siemens, for example, the starting salary of a qualified engineer was still less than that of a first-year schoolteacher in 1936, while the engineers’ organization, led by Fritz Todt, was still complaining in 1939 that humanities graduates enjoyed greater social prestige than engineers. The award at the 1938 Nuremberg Party Rally of the second German Prize for Art and Science (the substitute for the now-banned Nobel Prizes) to Fritz Todt, the car designer Ferdinand Porsche and the aircraft engineers Wilhelm Messerschmidt and Ernst Heinkel in explicit and much-trumpeted recognition of the achievements of German technology did not seem to compensate much in the eyes of most engineers.60

  All professional groups, however, had lost substantially in autonomy through the process of co-ordination in the early months of the Third Reich, when their various professional associations were closed down, merged and brought under Nazi leadership. All had acquiesced in the process, as they had also in the purging of Social Democrats and Communists and the removal of Jewish members from the professional associations and in the end from the professions themselves. The dumbing-down of university education and professional training, with its emphasis on ideological indoctrination and military preparedness rather than on the traditional acquisition of knowledge and skills, added to this regimentation of professional activities to produce a palpable demoralization amongst many professionals. Even the doctors, probably the most favoured of the traditional professions under the Third Reich, lost some of their old privileges without gaining new ones. When in 1935 the government introduced a Reich Physicians’ Ordinance, for example, supplemented by a Professional Statute in November 1937, the doctors found themselves tightly bound by a set of rules imposed from above with penal sanctions threatened to anyone who infringed them. Disciplinary courts quickly became active in issuing warnings, meting out fines and even suspending doctors who transgressed. Not only did the doctors themselves now have to keep the Reich Physicians’ Chamber, founded in 1936, informed of any changes in their own circumstances, and submit to it any new contractual arrangements they entered into for approval; they also had to breach patient confidentiality by reporting serious cases of alcoholism, hereditary or congenital disabilities and sexually transmitted diseases to the authorities. Indeed the 1935 Ordinance, while affirming the principle of confidentiality in theory, explicitly said it could be overridden in practice if required by the ‘common sense of the people’, which of course, as ever, was defined by the regime and its servants. Doctors, no matter how senior they might be, were also required to undergo new training courses in racial hygiene and hereditarian biology. Five thousand physicians had to attend such courses in 1936 alone: many of them resented having to listen to interminable lectures by Nazi ideologues whose qualifications they frequently regarded as inferior to their own and whose ideas many of them treated with justified scepticism and suspicion.61

  An even worse blow to their collective pride was the regime’s failure to concede the medical profession’s long-held demand for the suppression of ‘quacks’, or non-university-trained healers, of whom there were at least 14,000 in Germany in 1935, or three for every ten qualified doctors. The National Socialist Physicians’ League, to which about a third of doctors belonged, lacked influence and prestige and was generally thought to be rather ineffective. The position of the Reich Physicians’ Chamber, to which all doctors had to belong, was stronger, but the basic problem was that leading Nazis, from Hitler downwards, were quite sympathetic to alternative medicine. The head of the Reich Physicians’ Chamber, Gerhard Wagner, as we have already seen, supported what he called the ‘New German Healing’ and tried to foist courses in it on university medical faculties.62 In the face of contradictory pressures from the doctors’ organization on the one hand and its own leaders on the other, the regime dithered for years until in February 1939 it finally announced that all lay healers had to be registered with the German Natural Healers’ Union, and that henceforth there were to be no new recruits into the occupation. Not only did this give the lay healers professional status, but from now on, those who could show the required degree of competence could get the title ‘physician of natural healing’, thus counting as doctors, while university-trained physicians could now be required to assist registered nature healers if the latter asked for their help. Particularly talented lay healers could even gain admittance to medical faculties in the universities without the usual qualifications. Finally, the whole set of rules and regulations was not backed up by any kind of sanctions against unregistered lay healers, who could continue to practise so long as they did not charge fees. Thus the German medical profession had to endure loss of professional status, increased government interference, and the erosion of traditional ethical positions.63

  Yet all this was more than balanced out by the enormous increase in the power doctors wielded over the individual in the Third Reich, bolstered by state policies such as sterilization and health screening for a whole variety of purposes, from military service to marriage. Health was central to a regime whose main priority was racial fitness, and the vast majority of doctors were more than willing to go along with the state’s new requirements in this respect; indeed, the idea of racial hygiene had been widely popular in the medical profession well before 1933. Doctors’ pay increased sharply after 1937, with average gross earnings rising from just over 9,000 Reichsmarks in 1933 to nearly 14,000 four years later; by 1939 it was said to be in the region of 20,000. The removal of so many Jewish physicians from the profession had led to a growth in the practices of those who remained, the economic recovery had increased people’s willingness to contribute to health insurance funds, and the funds themselves had been reformed so as to make it less expensive for patients to visit the surgery and less complicated for doctors to get the fees. This put doctors comfortably ahead of lawyers
in the earning stakes, and, incidentally, amounted to around twice the income of dentists, whose role in racial hygiene and its associated health policies was more or less minimal. Outside the surgery, the rapid growth in the armed forces opened up new opportunities to doctors to serve in the medical corps. Doctors were recruited to provide medical services for many branches of the Nazi Party and its affiliated organizations, from the brownshirts to the Hitler Youth. The most ambitious could join the SS, where they could obtain prestige and promotion more easily than in civilian life. Himmler set up an SS medical academy in Berlin to provide them with ideological training, and the doctors within the SS were headed by the grandly titled SS Reich Doctor, parallel to Himmler’s own title of SS Reich Leader. Altogether, it has been estimated that over two-thirds of physicians in Germany had a connection with the Nazi Party and its affiliates. The doctors’ key role in the imagined Nazi future was marked out by institutions such as the Leadership School of German Physicians, a training camp located in a picturesque part of rural Mecklenburg, where members of the Nazi Physicians’ League underwent a two-week training programme in Nazi ideology to prepare them for a political role in the Third Reich in years to come. Younger doctors thus found scope for their ambition in the highly ideologized area of racial hygiene, while older, established members of the profession were able to carry on their traditional work, and even be paid better than before for it, at the price of an unprecedentedly high level of interference in it from the state. It was an implicit bargain that most medical men were willing to accept.64