Hitler

by Volker Ullrich

  A satisfied Goebbels later noted: “Our action against hunger and cold has made a huge impression.”149 The first call for donations succeeded in raising 358 million reichsmarks—a figure that would be bettered year on year until it reached 680 million reichsmarks in 1939–40. In a speech about the Winter Relief in 1937, Hitler called it the “largest social welfare organisation of all time.”150 Members of almost all Nazi organisations worked as volunteers, collecting money street to street and door to door and selling badges and pins. On the first Sunday in December, the Day of National Solidarity, prominent representatives of the regime also took part. For Goebbels, who collected money in front of the luxury Hotel Adlon in Berlin, these occasions were “popular festivals.” “Unbelievable,” he wrote.

  Tens of thousands. A celebration and hullabaloo that was impossible to ignore. I was almost crushed to death. Twice I had to flee inside the hotel. The marvellous people of Berlin. They gave and gave. Most generously the poor. I got tears in my eyes…Reported to the Führer that evening…A huge triumph. I filled up 42 collection cans.151

  On every first Sunday between October and March, the regime appealed to Germans to eat only stew and donate the money they saved to the Winter Relief. Hitler used his entire repertoire to make this sacrifice seem palatable to his “ethnic comrades”:

  And even if others say: You know, I’d love to take part in Stew Sunday, but I have constant stomach trouble, and I don’t see the point, since I’ll donate ten pfennigs anyway. [We say:] no, my dear friend, we set it all up deliberately. On purpose. Especially for you who doesn’t see the point, it is useful for us to point you back at least once in the direction of your people, to the millions of your ethnic comrades, who would be happy to eat nothing all winter but the stew that you eat perhaps once a month.152

  Only stews were served at Sunday lunches in the Chancellery, and those at the table were called upon to donate money as well. “The number of guests shrank to two or three,” Albert Speer recalled, “which led Hitler to talk sarcastically about some of his associates’ willingness to make sacrifices.”153

  But the Winter Relief was a “voluntary” charity organisation in name only. Workers had to tolerate contributions—10 per cent of their income taxes from 1935—being directly deducted from their wages. Those who refused to donate could count on being sanctioned. In November 1935, a farmer in northern Bavaria who had declared that he had no extra money for the Winter Relief received a sharp rebuke from the local Nazi chapter, accusing him of being “unwilling to feel like a member of the German ethnic-popular community.” He was threatened, should he not change his behaviour, with being brought to “where enemies of the state and parasites on the people are usually taken.”154 In the long run, the public grew disgruntled with being constantly called upon to make sacrifices and approached by collectors. Charity drives in the streets and door to door, one SPD observer reported in December 1935, had taken on the character of “organised highway robbery.” By January 1938, another observer wrote, they had “practically become a levy that no one can avoid.”155 Rumours also began to circulate that donations were not truly going to the needy. People joked that the abbreviation for the Winter Relief, WHV (Winterhilfswerk) actually stood for Wir hungen weiter (we continue to starve) or Waffenhilfswerk (Weapons Assistance Fund).156 There was some justification for the idea that the Winter Relief helped finance Hitler’s plans for war. The putative charity helped the Nazi regime throttle its expenditures for social welfare programmes and invest the money saved in arms. The phrase “socialism in deeds,” which Hitler and his vassals used to describe the Winter Relief, could hardly be taken at face value.

  The same applied to Hitler’s promise that within the ethnic-popular community every German would enjoy the same chances to better himself, so that in the end the best and brightest would rise to positions of leadership. The central task of government leadership, Hitler declared in his closing address at the Nuremberg rally in 1934, had to be to create the conditions for the “most gifted minds to be deservedly advantaged regardless of origin, titles, class and wealth.”157 In an interview with Louis P. Lochner, he said that he agreed with the American idea of not “reducing everyone to the same level,” but rather maintaining the “ladder principle.” “Everyone must get the chance to climb the ladder,” he declared.158 In early 1937, during an afternoon walk with Goebbels on the Obersalzberg, Hitler elaborated on his vision of the Nazi society of the future. Afterwards Goebbels noted: “The way to rise up must be available for everyone. Not bound to exams, but performance…The misery of testing must be done away with everywhere. A hierarchy of performance has to be created. Strictly organised. Wealth to be concentrated there. True socialism means clearing the way for the capable.”159

  In his monologues in his military headquarters during the Second World War, Hitler would repeatedly revisit the idea of “a clear path for the capable.” The decisive thing, he asserted, was to ensure “that the gates were open for all gifted people.” In order to do that, Hitler added, Germany would have to eradicate its overdependence on “evaluations and pieces of paper.” He went on: “In my movement, I myself have had great experiences in the highest positions. I have the highest civil servants who are agricultural workers and have continued to prove themselves.” Performance, Hitler said, should be the only qualification for military promotion. “If a person has the stuff to excel, I don’t look at whether he comes from a proletarian background,” Hitler explained, “nor do I prevent children of military families from proving their worth once more.”160

  But Hitler’s egalitarian rhetoric was one thing, and social reality in the Third Reich another. On the one hand, members of previously disadvantaged social classes had better chances to work their way up the social ladder. The NSDAP and its subordinate organisations in particular, with their gigantic apparatus and the rapidly expanding armed forces after the reintroduction of compulsory military service, offered a host of new, well-paid posts. The promise that performance would outweigh social background and class especially appealed to the younger generation, whose career prospects had looked so bleak prior to 1933. The chance for young university graduates to advance their careers quickly and even occupy leading positions stimulated their desire to achieve and unleashed considerable social energy. The opportunity for upward social mobility accounted for a large amount of the Nazi Party’s attractiveness as a “modernising” force.161

  Still, none of that altered the basic structure of German society. Hitler was by no means the social revolutionary, as the odd historian has claimed.162 Class hurdles and barriers were lowered, but they still existed, and by no means was there full equality of opportunity in the Third Reich. Nazi propaganda, however, was remarkably successful in communicating a “feeling of social equality,” and this alone reinforced Hitler’s perceived role as a messianic saviour and strengthened Germans’ emotional attachment to his regime.163

  Hitler’s “ethnic-popular community,” therefore, was not simply a chimera or a deceptive façade, but nor did it become social reality or challenge the status quo of wealth and property. In the words of two prominent German historians, its appeal was based on “the ideal it represented, not the recognition of social reality.”164 Moreover, the vision for the future it entailed was not that of a society where everyone was equal, but precisely the opposite: a society characterised by extreme inequalities resulting from the Nazis’ biological, racist policies. The integration of “ethnic comrades” went hand in hand with the exclusion of those deemed “alien to the community.”

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  The latter category included not only enemies of the regime and Jewish Germans, but in principle anyone who did not conform to racist Nazi standards, be they the physically and mentally disabled, “antisocials,” alcoholics, homosexuals or gypsies. In so far as they were not “improvable,” these groups were to be subjected to racial-hygienic “special treatment.” In the second volume of Mein Kampf, Hitler had already specified the maintenance of �
��racial purity” as one of the main tasks of the “ethnic state.” What he meant was that “only the healthy should bear children.” To this end, the state was to call upon “the most modern medical assistance” in order that “everyone who is demonstrably sick or genetically burdened…be declared unfit and made incapable of reproduction.” This was to be accompanied by the “systematic promotion of fertility among the healthiest bearers of our ethnic identity.”165 Hitler repeatedly returned to these demands in his speeches prior to 1933. At the 1929 Nuremberg rally, he cited the example of Sparta, the “clearest racial state in human history,” which had “systematically enacted racial laws.” He contrasted this with the “modern humanistic nonsense” of the health and social policies in the Weimar Republic, which “preserve weakness at the cost of those who are healthier.” Hitler declared: “Slowly but surely we are breeding the weak and killing off the strong…The remaking of the ethnic-popular body is the greatest mission of National Socialism.”166

  This racist programme was anything but original. Hitler was reviving ideas that had been disseminated internationally in the 1890s, as the concept of eugenics was growing in popularity.167 After the enormous bloodletting of the First World War, such notions had once again gained credence among some doctors, psychiatrists, scientists and politicians, including a few socialists. The idea that “the best” had fallen in the war while “the inferior” had survived and been fattened up by the social welfare state dominated the discussion of eugenics in the Weimar Republic. In 1920, the criminal law expert Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche had published a pamphlet polemically entitled “The Admission of the Destruction of Unfit Life,” that called upon Germans to follow the Spartan example and kill sickly infants and old people. “In matters of life and death, sympathy is the least appropriate emotion towards the dead in spirit,” the authors argued. “There is no sympathy without suffering.”168

  In July 1932, the Prussian Health Council debated a proposed law that would have cleared the way for the compulsory sterilisation of the so-called genetically ill. That same year, the organisation representing German doctors lobbied for the introduction of eugenic sterilisation to combat “the deterioration of German genetic material” and to “relieve pressure on public funds.”169 Once the Nazis were in power, the advocates of racist eugenics received a green light for their plans. On 14 July 1933, Hitler’s cabinet approved the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Ill Offspring, which for the first time legalised compulsory sterilisation on the grounds of so-called racial hygiene. When Papen argued against compulsory measures, saying that appeals could be made to those affected, he was coolly rebuked by Hitler. The operations foreseen by the law, Hitler argued, were “not only minor, but ethically unimpeachable if one considered that genetically ill people would continue to reproduce in considerable numbers while millions of healthy children remained unborn.”170 With an eye towards the ongoing negotiations over the concordat with the Catholic Church, the announcement of the law was postponed for eleven days; it took effect on 1 January 1934. In his address to the Reichstag on the first anniversary of the “seizure of power,” Hitler spoke of “truly revolutionary measures” that had been taken against the “army of those whose genetic proclivities meant that they had been born on the negative side of ethnic-popular life.”171

  The law decreed that people “whose offspring were, on the basis of medical experience, deemed extremely likely to suffer from serious genetic physical and mental deficiencies” could be made “infertile via surgical operation.” Genetic deficiencies in the sense of the law included imbecility, schizophrenia, manic-depressive conditions, falling sickness, Huntington’s chorea, congenital blindness and deafness, major physical deformities and even alcoholism. An application for sterilisation could be made either by the persons concerned or their legal representatives, or by public doctors and the directors of hospitals, clinics and convalescent homes. Cases were decided upon by newly established genetic health courts consisting of a judge and two doctors.172 The introduction of the law was accompanied by a nationwide publicity campaign promoting compulsory sterilisation as “an act of charity and caring.”173 The courts approved 90 per cent of the applications; 290,000–300,000 men and women were sterilised in this fashion before the start of the Second World War, roughly half on the basis of “congenital imbecility”—a very flexible concept.174 Compulsory sterilisation gave the regime an instrument for extending its policies of racial hygiene to all sorts of marginalised groups and to punish various forms of behaviour that deviated from the social norm. Hans-Ulrich Wehler had correctly called this process a “dry run for the euthanasia programme” after 1939, whose deadly “expunging” was the extreme extension of this sort of “ethnic corpus” therapy.175

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  Germany’s Jewish minority was the primary group excluded from the Nazi ethnic-popular community. Hitler set their legal and social marginalisation in motion with the nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses in late March 1933 and the discriminatory laws that followed one month later.176 After that, however, the Nazi regime held back somewhat. Hitler enumerated the reasons why at a conference of his Reich governors in late September 1933. A transcript of the speech read:

  He as Reich chancellor would have preferred a gradually stricter treatment of Jews in Germany by creating a new citizenship law and then increasingly cracking down on Jews. But the Jewish-organised international boycott demanded the most vigorous response possible. Abroad people complained that Jews were being treated legally as second-class citizens…Since Jews had considerable influence abroad, it was prudent not to give them any material they could use as propaganda against Germany.177

  But it was not just deference to foreign opinion that initially dissuaded Hitler from forcing through further anti-Jewish laws. Having announced the end of the revolutionary phase of his “seizure of power” in July 1933, he also wanted to rein in the violent excesses of the SA. The Third Reich’s first waves of anti-Semitism petered out in the second half of 1933.178

  Yet away from the public eye, Jews were still being forced out of German economic, social and cultural life. In the towns and villages of provincial Germany, the anti-Jewish boycott continued, and posters and signs reading “Jews unwelcome” or “No admissions for Jews” could be seen at taverns or at the entry to towns. Synagogues were attacked, Jewish graves were defaced, and the homes and businesses of Jews had their windows smashed on a daily basis. Jews were insulted, belittled and physically beaten on the streets. “All the Jewish residents who have not fled live in constant panic,” read a Nazi report from the northern Bavarian town of Gunzenhausen, which had seen the outbreak of a fully fledged pogrom in March 1934.179

  Such anti-Semitic violence offered radical party activists in provincial Germany an ideal environment to draw strict racial borders within local society, isolating their Jewish neighbours and stigmatising “ethnic comrades” who continued to frequent Jewish shops and maintain contact with Jews.180 Local police officers were caught between a rock and a hard place, having to assert the state’s monopoly on force on the one hand while risking unpopularity with the well-known leaders of anti-Semitic mobs on the other. If they intervened at all, it was mostly too late, and as a rule, they arrested the victims and not the perpetrators. “Fearful of the party, the local police authorities do not satisfactorily respond to attacks, which are especially prevalent before Christmas,” the state police office in the region of Kassel reported in December 1934.181

  In the spring of 1935, anti-Jewish agitation dramatically increased. Along with boycotts, local Nazi groups opened up a second battleground with a campaign against so-called “race defilers.” Jewish men and non-Jewish women suspected of carrying on affairs were driven through the streets and subjected to public humiliation in “pillory parades.”182 In every corner of the Third Reich, copies of the rabidly anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, with its lurid reports of “race defilement,” were publicly displayed in glass cases. Often they lis
ted the names and addresses of “ethnic comrades” who still patronised Jewish businesses. “There are always crowds around the Stürmer cases,” read a report from East Prussia to the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith. “The newspaper and its pictures have a powerful effect on the public, terrifying old customers so that they no longer dare to enter [Jewish] businesses.”183 The pressure to break off social and commercial relationships with Jews was constantly ratcheted up, and few Germans had the courage to resist. For their part, many Jews tried to make themselves inconspicuous and avoided appearing in public. “It is no fun going out any more,” the forcibly retired teacher Willy Cohn wrote from Breslau. “The repulsive articles in the Stürmer are everywhere. It is surprising that more doesn’t happen considering how incited the populace is.”184

  This second wave of anti-Semitism in Germany was not ordered from above, but there are indications that it was entirely welcome to the Nazi leadership, including Hitler. It was a pressure valve for dissatisfaction among the party grass roots, in particular SA men frustrated by the Night of the Long Knives. Moreover, after the success of the Saar referendum in January and the unproblematic reintroduction of compulsory military service in March, the need to defer to foreign opinion decreased. Significantly, that April, Hitler rejected an appeal to ban signs reading “Jews forbidden,” which were said to make a bad impression on foreign visitors. On the contrary, Hitler said that he had “nothing against such signs.”185 Not without reason, the most radical party activists believed that they were acting in Hitler’s interests, even if the regime did not officially endorse the anti-Semitic violence. The opinion that “the Führer had two faces,” wrote a Hessian senior official from Wiesbaden, was widespread within “low-ranking party offices.” He believed that: “Certain ordinances, especially in the area of the Jewish question, had to be issued because of foreign opinion. But the Führer’s true will was known to every genuine National Socialist from his world view, and the task was to carry out this will.”186 In May 1935, the Gestapo in the region of Münster reported that broad sections of the movement, especially the SA, thought that the time had come “to take care of the Jewish problem from the ground up” and that the government would “then follow.”187