12. Kershaw, Hitler, p. 174.
13. Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p. 225.
14. Toland, Adolf Hitler, p. 199.
15. Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Hutchinson, 1969), p. 367.
16. Annegret Ehmann, ‘From Colonial Racism to Nazi Population Policy: The Role of the So-Called Mischlinge’, in Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (eds), The Holocaust and History: The Known, The Unknown, The Disputed and The Reexamined, p. 115.
17. Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p. 222.
18. Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows; London: Turnaround, 2004), p. 274.
19. Quoted in Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p. 223.
20. G. E. Schafft, Racism to Genocide (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), p. 62.
17
A People without Space
When the Nazis came to power in January 1933, they set out to rule Germany according to the twin principles at the heart of their revolution: the expansion of German living space and the creation of a pure Aryan ‘racial state’. Both of these projects would involve the revival of practices, concepts and theories that had been developed in Germany’s former African empire. Soldiers and scientists whose careers began on the pastoral deserts of South-West Africa or in the killing fields of East Africa, Togo and Cameroon were to play leading roles in the Nazi tragedy.
The other legacy of the Kaiser’s lost empire that was exploited by the Nazi regime was the powerful sense of nostalgia for the colonies that infused inter-war Germany. Much of this nostalgia was focused on the memory of German South-West Africa and the era of the ‘settler paradise’ between the Herero and Nama genocides and World War I. Alongside pro-colonialist tracts and pamphlets, a number of popular novels and memoirs were written between the wars by both former settlers and their ideological supporters. Many of these books glamorised the lives of the men and women who had made their homes amid the vast spaces of the south-west. This potent image became linked to a profound and widespread bitterness over the confiscation of Germany’s empire at Versailles. These sentiments were skilfully manipulated by Nazi propagandists to connect the memory of the lost colonies to the party’s incessant efforts to convince the German people of the Lebensraum theory and the need for German territorial expansion.
Although acquisition of Lebensraum was central to Hitler’s grand vision, it could be seized only through war, for which Germany was ill prepared until the late 1930s. By contrast, forging what Hitler described as a state that placed ‘race in the centre of all life’ was a task that could begin almost immediately.1 The party turned to a generation of German race scientists, eugenicists and anthropologists, many of whom had been trained in the colonial institutes or were veterans of field expeditions to the former colonies. Most, though not all, of these scientists embraced the Nazi revolution with palpable enthusiasm, as did their colleagues in medicine, engineering, geography and a host of other disciplines. The research these men and women had carried out on the peoples of Africa and Asia was used to lay the scientific foundations of the ‘racial state’. Those scientists whose work best supported the party’s central racial theories were rewarded with power and money. Their institutes and research programmes received lavish funding and party apparatchiks attended their lectures. The most prominent became wealthy, celebrated figures and were encouraged to apply their theories on race and purity in ever more radical ways. Ultimately they were given the power of life and death over their fellow citizens, and later over the peoples of Eastern Europe.
In an ‘Appeal to the German People’ issued on 31 January 1933, the day after the Nazis came to power, Hitler claimed that the Nazi state would ‘not recognise classes but only German people’. The new Führer demanded that his people enter into a pact of ‘mutual reconciliation’.2 Through such a process the old divisions of class and regional affiliation were, on the surface at least, to be expunged. The only social divisions that would remain in the new Germany were those of race and blood. These fissures were to be widened, made absolute and inviolable.
When designing the laws needed to create the ‘racial state’ and persecute those the regime defined as ‘non-Aryan’, the Nazis found a number of definitions and legal precedents, along with a whole lexicon of racial terminology, in legislation passed in Germany’s former colonies. Aspects of laws that had been designed to secure the racial privileges of white settlers in Africa were adapted by Nazi lawmakers and applied to the German nation itself.
The largest group whose bloodline the Nazis sought to extricate from that of the German Volk were the Jews. Since the late nineteenth century, various Völkisch movements had campaigned for a prohibition against mixed marriages between Jews and ‘Germans’, on the grounds that Jews were biologically separate and an ‘alien’ race. In May 1933, just three months into the Third Reich, Minister of Justice Franz Gürtner called for an initial investigation into how a law to ban mixed marriages might practicably work. It was not until September 1935, at the end of a summer during which Nazi street thugs had attacked Jews known to be married to Aryans, that the party finally acted.
The new laws were formally announced by Hitler at the 1935 party rally in Nuremberg. The Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour were known as the Nuremberg Laws. The former defined those of German blood as Reichsbürger (Reich citizens). The latter forbade Jews from marrying or having sexual relations with Reichsbürger. As the Nuremberg Laws also applied to the other racial groups caught in the dragnet of the racial state – ‘Negroes’ and Gypsies – the same terms, definitions and laws were also applied to them.
The earliest precedents the Nazi legal experts looked to when drafting the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour were the laws banning intermarriage passed in German South-West Africa in 1906. Similar sanctions had later been introduced in German East Africa in 1906 and German Togo in 1908.3
In drafting the supplementary decrees to the Nuremberg Laws, the party’s lawmakers also adopted a term first used in the colonies’ race laws – Mischlinge, of mixed race. The Mischlinge concept provided the lawyers and civil servants with both a conceptual framework and quasi-legal terminology, allowing them to formulate a system by which Germany’s ancient Jewish community, with its deep and complex roots, could be classified, isolated and ultimately extracted. Among the race scientists whose work was quoted by civil servants drafting the Nuremberg Laws were Eugen Fischer and his erstwhile co-author, Fritz Lens.4
Other terms that had first been applied in the drafting of colonial racial laws seeped into Nazi racial legislation and public discourse during the 1930s: the notion of Rassenschande (racial shame) and Bastardisation were both transmitted in this way. The censures imposed on German citizens who contravened the new race laws were very similar to those pioneered in Germany’s African colonies. In the same way that settlers who maintained relations with African women in South-West Africa had been disenfranchised and denied financial assistance, Germans whose spouses were of ‘lesser racial value’ – a term which included those with hereditary diseases – were denied certain tax benefits, child benefits and income tax relief by the Nazi state.5
In February 1941 Dr Oskar Hintrager, the former Deputy Governor of German South-West Africa, published a three-page article in the Illustrated Colonial and Foreign News in which he suggested that Germany’s colonies had allowed the Reich the opportunity to see the dangers of racial mixing at first hand. It had been ‘a good experience for the Volk to possess colonies’, Hintrager claimed. ‘Among colonial Germans the experience of living with other races underscored the importance of race itself; the most important lesson was that mixed marriages between white men and coloured women have appalling results and must, for many reasons, be utterly condemned.’6
The Nuremberg Laws, although regarded as race laws, in fact defined ‘Jewishness’ according to the r
eligious affiliation of the individual and their ancestors. A medical or biological test to determine Jewishness had yet to be developed. For the state to determine and record the racial status and genetic health of every individual, through medical, physiological examination, a considerable infrastructure of laws, training and institutions was required. Here again the Nazi regime drew on the expertise of the generation of race scientists, anthropologists and eugenicists, many of whom had learned their skills and acquired their knowledge in the lost colonial empire.
German race science had flourished in the years leading up to World War I. As military control over the various subject peoples of the empire had tightened, the colonies had been opened up to the scientists of Germany’s booming universities, institutes and museums. This was a process that had been energetically championed by Friedrich von Lindequist in his role as Secretary of the Colonial Department. In the first decades of the twentieth century, aspects of German racial science and aspects of the research carried out in the colonies became fused with ideas and principles taken from eugenics. In the 1920s and 1930s, German ‘race hygiene’ became increasingly influenced by the ideas and research of eugenicists in the United States, where eugenics laws had been passed in several states, a development that was praised by Hitler.
When the Nazis seized power, the most important institute dedicated to the racial sciences and eugenics in Germany was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics, situated in Dahlem, a leafy suburb of Berlin. The directors of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lens, who with Erwin Baur had co-authored Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene. The other director was Otmar von Verschuer, who specialised in the study of twins and with whom Fischer worked closely.
The Eugen Fischer of 1933 was a very different man from the ambitious field scientist in his mid-thirties who had travelled to Rehoboth in 1908. Now almost sixty, Professor Fischer was arguably the most respected racial anthropologist in Germany. His academic reputation, initially founded upon his supposedly groundbreaking study on the Basters of Rehoboth, was inter national, and his work had been published in both Britain and the United States. He enjoyed strong personal links with the key players in the powerful American eugenics movement and was able to attract funds from their wealthy supporters.
Even though Hitler had probably read Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene while writing Mein Kampf, Fischer had not been immediately embraced by the Nazis. Not only had he conspicuously failed to join the party, but his theories on race, and on the Jews in particular, were not fully in accordance with Nazi doctrine. Early in 1933 Fischer was called to a meeting at the SS Office of Population and Genetic Health, during which he seems to have been persuaded to support the party. Although he never fully jettisoned his ideas that clashed with Nazi ideology, Fischer became a fervent and vocal supporter of the new order and eventually a party member. His willingness to participate in the racial revolution was amply demonstrated in 1933 when Fischer wrote a paper stating that racial mixing between Jews and Germans was damaging the German race and suggesting that laws be devised to prevent it. On becoming Rector of the University of Berlin in July, he used his inaugural lecture to declare his support for the Nazis and oversaw the dismissal of all Jews from the university’s staff. In 1934 he began teaching anthropology to SS doctors at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
Fischer’s role, like that of many prominent racial anthropologists and experts in race hygiene, was not merely to support the racial revolution in their papers and at the lectern. He also played a practical role in the building of the ‘racial state’. Alongside Jews and Gypsies, another racial group whom the Nazis wanted removed from the German ‘community of blood’ were the ‘Rhineland Bastards’.
At the end of World War I, the French army that had occupied the western Rhinelands of Germany included several thousand troops of various races from across France’s colonies. When these units took up their duties within the army of occupation, an international campaign against them was launched. They were condemned as ‘Senegalese savages’; the occupation itself was attacked (by a British journalist) as ‘The Black Horror on the Rhine’. In Germany, the campaign spread lurid and unsubstantiated allegations that the black troops had embarked on a spree of rapes and attacks on German women. When the French withdrew in 1921, the focus of German outrage fell on around four hundred mixed-race children left behind. Although mere infants, they were seen as racial outsiders and living reminders of Germany’s humiliation and defeat. Reflecting Eugen Fischer’s now widely accepted terminology, they were named the ‘Rhineland Bastards’ and both they and their white mothers were subjected to years of abuse and discrimination.
Within just three months of coming to power the Nazis turned their attentions to the ‘Rhineland Bastards problem’. In April 1933 Hermann Göring ordered that the local authorities collect information on their numbers and whereabouts. Churches and schools cooperated, handing over information to the authorities. Even at this very early stage, one of the key institutions assisting in the persecution of the Rhineland children was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute under Eugen Fischer.
Dr Wolfgang Abel, one of the departmental heads at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, carried out a series of ‘racialbiological’ examinations on a small sample of Rhineland children. Abel, who had come to Eugene Fischer’s attention thanks to his work examining Nama and San-Bushmen skeletons in a Viennese collection, concluded that the mixed racial heritage of the Rhineland children had rendered them physically and mentally deformed, and their genetic inferiority was so pronounced that action needed to be taken to ‘prevent their reproduction’. That same year Walther Darre, the Nazi Minister of Agriculture and later one of the architects of German expansion into the USSR, wrote, ‘It is essential to exterminate the leftover from the Black Shame on the Rhine … as a Rhinelander I demand sterilisation of all mulattoes with whom we were saddled.’ Darre suggested that sterilisation take place within two years before the ‘Rhineland Bastards’ became sexually active. ‘Otherwise’, he warned, ‘it is too late, with the result that hundreds of years later this racial deterioration will still be felt.’7
In March 1935, a ‘committee of experts on population and race policy’ was assembled by the Reich Ministry of the Interior, to find a solution to problem of the ‘Rhineland Bastards’.8 One suggestion was that with the help of the church they might be deported to Africa. Yet as Germany no longer possessed any African colonies in which to dump the Rhineland children, it was feared this might lead to some sort of diplomatic incident. Two years later, with the oldest Rhineland children reaching puberty, the Nazi regime consulted Eugen Fischer, whose study of the Rehoboth Basters had been used to legitimise the Nazis’ stance against racial mixing.
In the case of the ‘Rhineland Bastards’, like that of the Gypsies, the Nazi Hereditary Health Courts were bypassed. Instead, Special Commission No. 3 was formed by the Gestapo, who placed both Eugen Fischer and Dr Wolfgang Abel on its board. The commission’s task was to identify and then sterilise the Rhineland children, as efficiently and discreetly as possible. In the spring of 1937, the children were taken directly from their homes or classrooms by the police and subjected to an examination by a board of race scientists. After it had been medically confirmed that they were of mixed race, they were taken to a local hospital where the operation was performed. By 1937 almost four hundred, all in their teens, had been forcibly sterilised. In Mein Kampf Hitler had warned that under Nazi rule the Germans would ‘not allow ourselves to be turned into niggers as the French tried to do after 1918’.
Eugen Fischer was the most prominent race scientist with a colonial background promoted to a position of power within the Nazi state, but he was not alone. Although there were some German scientists who had carried out racial and anthropological work in the colonies but later rejected Nazism, most whole heartedly embraced the opportunities offered by the regime. One of the most prominent, at least in the early years of the regime, was
Dr Philalethes Kuhn, a Nazi eugenicist and co-author of the eugenics tract From German Ancestors to German Grandchildren. Kuhn was a former Schutztruppe who had fought against the Nama under Theodor Leutwein. During the Herero genocide he had been the military surgeon at the Karibib concentration camp. After leaving German South-West Africa he continued his research at the Institute of Tropical Disease in Berlin, before joining the Schutztruppe in Cameroon. A founding member of Alfred Ploetz’s Society for Racial Hygiene, Kuhn lectured in Rassenhygiene at the University of Giessen. He joined the Nazi party in 1923 but died in 1937, before the full scope of the Nazis’ eugenics programmes was realised.
Another scientist who transferred his skills from the Kaiser’s empire to the Nazi regime was Ernst Rodenwaldt. As a colonial doctor Rodenwaldt had served in Togo and, like Fischer, had made his name studying the effects of ‘bastardisation’. Along with Alfred Ploetz, to whom he was linked by marriage, he co-edited the race hygiene journal The Archives of Race Science and Social Biology. When the Nazis came to power, Rodenwaldt began to apply his ideas on bastardisation to the subject of Jewish Mischlinge, pre-empting certain aspects of the Nuremberg Laws.
The Nazi race scientist Otto Reche first came to prominence as a lecturer at the Hamburg Institute for Colonial Sciences, perhaps the most prestigious of the establishments set up during the Second Reich to advance the study of the colonies and their people. Reche was a physical anthropologist and a close affiliate of both Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lens. He had taken part in the Hamburg South Seas Expedition, a project yielding hundreds of skulls and skeletons that were later used for anthropological research at the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology. Reche became a committed Nazi and devoted himself to studying the distribution of blood types across the human races in the hope of discovering a means by which Germanic racial ancestry could be proved and racial impurities detected in the blood. Reche also drafted recommendations for settlement and population policy of Eastern Europe for the Race and Settlement Main Office of the SS. He warned that, like all colonial projects, the settlement of Poland posed a potential danger of ‘bastardisation of German immigrants’. These dangers could only be overcome, Reche prophesied, if the areas in which Germans were to be settled were ethnically cleansed.9
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