The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  The problem with arguing about whether or not the Third Reich modernized German society, how far it wanted to change the social order and in what ways it succeeded in doing so, is that society was not really a priority of Nazi policy anyway. True, social divisions were to be, if not abolished altogether, then at least bridged over, social discord was to be replaced by social harmony, and status, though not class, was to be equalized as far as possible in new Reich. But much of this was to be achieved by symbols, rituals and rhetoric. Above all, what Hitler and the Nazis wanted was a change in people’s spirit, their way of thinking, and their way of behaving. They wanted a new man, and for that matter a new woman, to emerge out of the ashes of the Weimar Republic, re-creating the fighting unity and commitment of the front in the First World War. Their revolution was first and foremost cultural rather than social. Yet it was underpinned by something more concrete, that had real physical consequences for thousands, and in the end millions of Germans, Jews and others: the idea of racial engineering, of scientifically moulding the German people into a new breed of heroes, and its corollary, of eliminating the weak from the chain of heredity and taking those who were seen as the Germans’ enemies, real and potential, out of the reforged national community altogether. This meant a concerted attempt to improve the physical quality of the German race on the one hand: and a comprehensive drive to remove elements the Nazis considered undesirable, including above all the Jews, from German society on the other, as we shall now see.

  6

  TOWARDS THE RACIAL UTOPIA

  IN THE SPIRIT OF SCIENCE

  I

  Racial hygienists greeted the coming of the Third Reich with unalloyed anticipation. Since the 1890s they had been campaigning for social policies that put the improvement of the race at the centre of their concerns and targeted those whom they identified as weak, idle, criminal, degenerate and insane for elimination from the chain of heredity. At last, as Fritz Lenz, a long-time advocate of such measures, remarked, Germany had a government that was prepared to take such issues seriously and do something about them.1 His enthusiasm was not misplaced. From 1924 at the latest, when Hitler had read some racial-hygiene tracts during his period of enforced leisure in Landsberg prison, the future Leader considered that Germany and the Germans could only become strong again if the state applied to German society the basic principles of racial hygiene and racial engineering. The nation had become weak, corrupted by the infusion of degenerate elements into its bloodstream. These had to be removed as quickly as possible. The strong and the racially pure had to be encouraged to have more children, the weak and the racially impure had to be neutralized by one means or another.2

  Seeing that Hitler offered them a unique opportunity to put their ideas into practice, leading racial hygienists began to bring their doctrines into line with those of the Nazis in areas where they had so far failed to conform. A sizeable minority, to be sure, were too closely associated with political ideas and organizations on the left to survive as members of the Racial Hygiene Society, which was taken over by the Nazis and purged in 1933. Jewish doctors, of whom more than a few were enthusiastic racial hygienists, were similarly ousted. Even Lenz found that some of his ideas, such as, for example, the theory that illegitimate children were racially degenerate, ran into heavy criticism from Nazi ideologues like Heinrich Himmler. Very quickly, leading racial hygienists in the medical profession were outflanked by a younger generation, who led the key political institutions in the field, from the Racial-Political Office of the Nazi party, headed by Walter Gross (born 1904), the National Socialist Welfare organization, the Nazi Doctors’ League, and, increasingly, the SS, all of which had their own ideas about breeding and selection that rode roughshod over the scientific and medical niceties debated in the learned journals of the racial hygiene movement. Nevertheless, the leading figures in the movement were not disappointed by the new regime. Writing personally to Hitler in April 1933, Alfred Ploetz, the moving spirit of the eugenics movement for the past forty years, explained that since he was now in his seventies, he was too old to take a leading part in the practical implementation of the principles of racial hygiene in the new Reich, but he gave his backing to the Reich Chancellor’s policies all the same.3

  Practical policies were not long in coming. At the beginning of the Third Reich, Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick announced that the new regime was going to concentrate public spending on racially sound and healthy people. It was not only going to reduce expenditure on ‘inferior and asocial individuals, the sick, the mentally deficient, the insane, cripples and criminals’, it was also going to subject them to a ruthless policy of ‘eradication and selection’. On 14 July 1933, this policy took legislative form in the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.4 This prescribed compulsory sterilization for anyone who suffered from congenital feeble-mindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, hereditary epilepsy, Huntingdon’s chorea, hereditary deafness, blindness or severe physical deformity, or severe alcoholism. These conditions were subject to further definition by the large bureaucracy set up by the Reich Interior Ministry to administer the Law, while decisions on individual cases were taken by 181 specially established Hereditary Health Courts and appeal courts consisting of a lawyer and two doctors, acting on referrals from public health officers and the directors of institutions such as state nursing homes, clinics, old-age homes, special schools and the like, as well as social workers in the welfare system. This Law had long been an ambition of Germany’s influential racial hygiene movement, led by senior physicians such as Alfred Ploetz and Fritz Lenz, and had become a more insistent demand during the Depression. The enormous burden of welfare on the national finances had greatly increased the number and boldness of those in the welfare and medical professions who believed that many aspects of social deviance, poverty and destitution were the results of the hereditary degeneracy of those who suffered from them. Already in 1932 on the advice of the German Medical Association, a law had been proposed to allow voluntary sterilization. Now, suddenly, it was reality.5

  There was nothing voluntary about the Law of 1933. Doctors were required to register every case of hereditary illness known to them, except in women over forty-five, and could be fined for failing to do so; at the same time the arbitrary and vague criteria used to define these cases left them with a good deal of latitude. Some patients agreed to be sterilized, but most did not. In 1934, the first year of the Law’s operation, nearly 4,000 people appealed against the decisions of the sterilization authorities; 3,559 of the appeals failed. As these figures indicate, the scale on which sterilization was carried out was very considerable. In 1934 alone the courts received over 84,500 applications for sterilization, roughly half for men and half for women. Of these, nearly 64,500 received rulings the same year; over 56,000 were in favour of sterilization. Thus an application from a doctor, social worker or other legitimate source was over 90 per cent likely to be approved and extremely unlikely to be overturned on appeal. In each of the first four years of the Law’s operation, over 50,000 people were sterilized in this way; by the time the Third Reich was over, the total number sterilized had reached over 360,000, almost all of them treated before the outbreak of war in September 1939.6

  Three-quarters of the orders were made in respect of ‘congenital feeble-mindedness’, an extremely vague and elastic concept that placed great power in the hands of doctors and the courts: it became common, for example, to define many kinds of social deviance, such as prostitution, as forms of ‘moral feeble-mindedness’. The inclusion of alcoholism affected mainly members of the underclass. The techniques employed - vasectomy for men and tubal ligation for women - were often painful, and sometimes led to complications: the overall death-rate, overwhelmingly among women rather than men, ran at 0.5 per cent, or a total of about 2,000 people. Before long, the scale of the programme had transformed the medical profession, as all doctors had to undergo training in recognizing hereditary degeneracy (for example, thr
ough the shape of the patient’s earlobes, the patient’s gait, or the configuration of the half-moon at the base of the patient’s fingernails). University medical faculties spent much of their time writing expert reports for the courts and devised ‘practical intelligence tests’ to sort out the sheep from the goats (‘What form of state do we have now? Who were Bismarck and Luther? Why are houses higher in the city than in the countryside?’). These ran into trouble when tests in rural areas revealed an equal degree of ignorance amongst allegedly normal schoolchildren as amongst supposedly feeble-minded ones. The possibility that rank-and-file members of the brownshirts from country districts might fail the tests was enough in itself to discredit the whole process of testing in the eyes of some senior Party doctors.7

  Roughly two-thirds of those sterilized were the inmates of mental hospitals, many of whose directors zealously combed through their patient files for candidates for the courts. The proportion of alleged schizophrenics was higher here; in the asylum at Kaufbeuren-Irsee, indeed, some 82 per cent of the 1,409 patients were ruled to fall within the provisions of the Law, though elsewhere a proportion of about a third was more usual. Sterilization was attractive to asylum directors because it meant that the patients could in many cases be discharged into the community afterwards. This affected particularly the younger, less severely disturbed patients, so that the better their chances of recovery were thought to be, the more likely they were to be sterilized. At the Eglfing-Haar asylum, two-thirds of the patients sterilized in 1934 were released within a few months; at the Eichberg asylum, nearly 80 per cent of those sterilized in 1938 were also rapidly discharged. This reduced running costs at a time when asylums, like the rest of the welfare system, were under heavy pressure to cut expenditure. Indeed some young women were clearly sterilized mainly in order to prevent them bearing illegitimate children who would be a burden on the community.8

  The reasons given for sterilization were frequently concerned more with social deviance than with any demonstrably hereditary condition. As one doctor wrote in putting forward a candidate for the operation on the basis of ‘moral feeble-mindedness’: In his social worker’s files he is described as a beggar or vagrant who has come down in the world. He is in receipt of a fifty per cent war injury pension because of TB of the lungs and intestine. He spends his money very irresponsibly. Smokes a lot and sometimes gets drunk. He has repeatedly been an inmate at Farmsen. He usually leaves the institution to go tramping. He has previous convictions for resisting arrest, breach of the peace, public slander and grievous bodily harm. In his welfare files it is reported that he has often disturbed the operation of the service and physically attacked officials, so that he was banned from entering the welfare office. According to Dr [ . . . ], C. is ‘a mentally seriously inferior individual who is totally without value for the community’.9

  In cases such as this, sterilization appeared principally as a punishment or a measure of social control. The prospect of the man in question having children seemed to be remote indeed. Sterilizing the inmates of asylums and similar institutions was in many cases an excuse for discharging the public purse from the responsibility of maintaining them.

  These were not, therefore, seriously ill people, still less those whose ailments condemned them to a life of perpetual institutionalization. Those who were too ill, too helpless or too dangerous to be let out into society were unlikely to have children and so did not require sterilization. In essence, therefore, the regime was using sterilization to crush those areas of society that did not conform to the Nazi ideal of the new man or the new woman: overwhelmingly, members of the underclass, beggars, prostitutes, vagrants, people who did not want to work, graduates of orphanages and reform schools, the slum and the street: people who could not be expected to join the Hitler Youth, give money to the Winter Aid, enlist in the armed forces, hang out flags on the Leader’s birthday or turn up at work every day on time. The new Law gave the regime the power to reach into the most intimate sphere of human existence, sexuality and reproduction, a power that it would subsequently extend to its dealings with the Jews and indeed, potentially at least, every adult German. To back up these measures, a regulation issued on 26 July 1933 blocked access to marriage loans for people who suffered from hereditary mental or physical ailments; another regulation issued a couple of months later extended this ban to child benefits. It was only a small step from here to ban racially undesirable marriages altogether.10

  Against the background of reasoning such as this, it was not surprising that ‘habitual criminals’ were also one of the groups whose enforced sterilization had long been thought desirable by psychiatrists and criminologists. Local health officers, most notoriously Gerhard Boeters, in Zwickau, were vigorous in campaigning for such a measure under the Weimar Republic. The prison doctor in Straubing, Theodor Viernstein, considered that ‘enemies of the race, enemies of society’ had to be removed from the chain of heredity as fast as possible.11 Even Social Democrats such as Wilhelm Hoegner urged at least the voluntary sterilization of persistent offenders, though the Communists and the Centre Party, for very different reasons, were strongly opposed.12 Hitler and leading Nazis such as the legal expert Hans Frank were strongly in favour of including ‘habitual criminals’ in the list of those to be sterilized. But Reich Justice Minister Franz Gürtner successfully blocked such a move, both in the Sterilization Law and in the Habitual Criminals Law. He continued to do so despite pressure from eugenicists such as Ernst Rüdin, partly because officials were not convinced that it would be possible to separate hereditarily determined criminality cleanly from environmentally conditioned deviance, but mainly because they considered it unnecessary anyway because ‘habitual criminals’ were now incarcerated for life under the new rules for ‘security confinement’ and therefore could not reproduce. Nevertheless, state prisoners could be sterilized if they fell under any of the other grounds specified in the law, and prison doctors were energetic in identifying them amongst the inmates. The criteria for sterilization were extremely elastic and included the ‘congenitally feeble-minded’ and ‘alcoholics’, amongst whom a large proportion of prison inmates could be counted by a determined prison doctor. Hans Trunk, Viernstein’s successor at Straubing, for instance, proposed to have up to a third of the prison’s inmates sterilized, a figure considered too high even by the local Hereditary Health Court. It was hardly surprising that prisoners were over-represented amongst the compulsorily sterilized, with nearly 5,400 subjected to this procedure by December 1939. It was equally unsurprising that the threat of a vasectomy or hysterectomy spread fear amongst prison inmates, who often told each other the correct answers to the intelligence tests administered by the doctors and learned them off by heart.13

  On the other hand, the physically handicapped were considerably less severely affected. True, one of the conditions laid down by the 1933 Law was ‘serious hereditary physical deformity’, which it declared included anyone who suffered from ‘deviations from the norm that more or less strongly prevent normal functioning’, so long as these could be demonstrated to be inherited. Whether or not they were also mentally handicapped was completely irrelevant from this point of view. State support for such people was to be effectively abolished since they were of no use to the community. Already in the Depression, Germany’s residential care facilities for the physically handicapped, which provided 11,000 beds in 1927, had been forced by financial constraints to accept only children, and even there only those whom they considered capable of recovery through treatment. Well before 1933, therefore, the distinction between the ‘valuable’ and the ‘inferior’, or people suffering from curable physical handicaps on the one hand, and severe or multiple disabilities on the other, had become commonplace in care institutions. In the light of the massive propaganda attacks launched by the Nazis against the physically handicapped in connection with the sterilization law in 1933, many families withdrew their handicapped children or relatives from these institutions, fearing the worst for them.14
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  But by the mid-1930s, the atmosphere was beginning to change. Doctors pointed out that at least three-quarters of physical handicaps developed after birth, and that the vast majority were in any case extremely unlikely to be passed on to the next generation. Conditions such as a dislocation of the hips were regarded as perfectly treatable. So too was club-foot, which must have come as a relief to the Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, Germany’s best-known sufferer from the condition. It was of course already too late to propose him for sterilization, and the futility of the idea that his disability was hereditary was amply demonstrated by the sound and healthy physical constitution of his own numerous offspring. Possibly the obvious embarrassment of dismissing the club-footed as a danger to the future of the race was a factor in bringing about a change of policy towards physical disabilities in the Third Reich. But the major factor was economic. Orthopaedic surgeons and physicians, fearful for their jobs should a policy of sterilization and effective abandonment of treatment be adopted, pointed out that so long as the physically handicapped were of sound mind, they could be employed in a whole variety of appropriate jobs, especially if their treatment had met with some success. They noted that successful therapy required early treatment, yet the attitude of the Nazis was causing mothers to conceal their children’s disabilities from the medical profession for fear of what would happen to them.