by Peter Watson
The climax of physics was achieved by these personalities in the run-up to and in the immediate wake of the outbreak of war. In Berlin, Otto Hahn found that if he bombarded uranium with neutrons he repeatedly got barium. In a letter he shared these bewildering results with Meitner, now in exile in Göteborg. As luck would have it, Meitner was visited that Christmas by her nephew Otto Frisch, also in exile, with Bohr in Copenhagen. The pair went cross-country skiing in the woods, which were covered in snow. Meitner told her nephew about Hahn’s letter, and they turned the barium problem over in their minds as they moved between the trees. Until then, physicists had considered that when the nucleus was bombarded, it was so stable that at most the odd particle could be chipped off. Now, huddled on a fallen tree in the Goteburg woods, Meitner and Frisch wondered whether, instead of being chipped away by neutrons, a nucleus could in certain circumstances be cleaved in two.
They had been in the cold woods for three hours. Nonetheless, they did the calculations before turning for home. What the arithmetic showed was that if the uranium atom did split, as they thought it might, it could produce barium (56 protons) and krypton (36)—56+36=92. As the news sank in around the world, people realized that, as the nucleus split apart, it released energy, as heat. If that energy was in the form of neutrons, and in sufficient quantity, then a chain reaction, and a bomb, might well be possible. But how much U235 was needed?49
The pitiful irony of this predicament was that it was still only early 1939. Hitler’s aggression was growing, but the world was, technically, still at peace. The Hahn/Meitner/Frisch results were published openly in Nature, and thus read by physicists in Nazi Germany, in Soviet Russia, and in Japan, as well as in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States. The problem that now faced the physicists was: how likely was a chain reaction? America, with the greatest resources, and now the home of so many of the exiles, was a nonbelligerent after war broke out in Europe. How could she be persuaded to act? It was only after Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, two German exiles now working at the University of Birmingham in England, and walking the blacked-out streets of the city at night, calculated (in a three-page paper), that about one kilogram of uranium was sufficient (as opposed to 13–40 tons, according to earlier calculations), that movement began.50 Mark Oliphant, Frisch and Peierls’s professor at Birmingham, traveled to America and persuaded the Americans to explore whether a bomb could be built. Without informing Congress, President Roosevelt, motivated by a letter from Einstein (drafted by Szilard) found the money “from a special source available for such an unusual purpose.” Thus German-Jewish physicists played a full role in bringing into existence the bomb that would end the war. 51
THE CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL
Carl Schmitt has been widely acclaimed as being “among the two or three most original political theorists of the twentieth century,” yet his public enthusiasm for the Nazis, his anti-Semitism, and his “obdurate refusal” to recant after 1945 has put him in the same doghouse as Martin Heidegger.
Born in 1888, in Plettenberg, Westphalia, the son of a small businessman, Schmitt, like Heidegger, grew up in a provincial Catholic home. As a student, he tried his hand at satire—he was famously set against all aspects of modern culture. By 1914 he was a civil servant and did not volunteer until 1915, securing a desk job, though he later reminisced about falling from his horse—an episode never corroborated. Despite his hatred of modern culture, Schmitt much enjoyed the artistic Schwabing area of Munich, mixing with Expressionist painters and Dada artists and corresponding with Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII. He trained in the law and attended Max Weber’s lectures, but when revolution broke out in Munich in the wake of World War I, he abandoned both the bohemian life and the church and turned to teaching.
He now began his more formal, more systematic criticisms of democracy. Human history, Schmitt insisted, originated with Cain and Abel, not with Adam and Eve. Politics, for Schmitt, is located in concrete power struggles rather than abstract ideas. He had a love of conflict, and in 1932, when there was a reactionary coup d’état in Prussia, Schmitt defended the coup as a counsel in court, attracting the admiration of Göring, who thereafter became his protector.52 Schmitt joined the Nazi Party as April turned into May 1933 and supported the notorious book burning of May 10. This support is generally taken as helping Hitler’s bid for respectability.
In Der Begriff des Politischen (The Concept of the Political), published in 1932, Schmitt provides an amalgam of Heidegger and Nietzsche and pits liberalism, on one side, against extreme right and left on the other. Schmitt’s essential point is that we achieve our political identity through conflict, intense conflict, even fatal conflict. The experiences of “we” and “our” (reminiscent of Spengler) are central to politics (a celebration of the “whole” again), and its clearest defining process is by struggle, by fighting for what “we” believe in. Liberalism and democracy can never do this because compromise is the defining factor of liberal democracies and their product is always shifting. Because of this, Schmitt thought that people in liberal democracies never know who they truly are and can never take full responsibility for their lives. Political resolution, he thought, cannot be brought about by reason, only by “blood and soil.” Furthermore, he thought it was dangerous to base political aims on some ideological abstraction with a claim to universal moral principles. That never works because it is always overtaken by events.
Schmitt was a controversial figure in the 1930s and is still so. He was captured by the Americans in 1945, interned for more than a year, and never had another university job. But he was visited by, and/or praised by such varied luminaries as Ernst Jünger, Alexandre Kojève, Walter Benjamin, and various members of the Frankfurt school. Leo Strauss, a fellow political theorist and, like Schmitt, a friend of Martin Heidegger, renewed the focus on Schmitt in postwar America, where he was an exile. We shall meet Strauss, who was Jewish, again in Chapter 39.53
“SCIENTIFIC” NOTIONS OF “GERMANNESS”
Götz Aly and Susanne Heim have identified what they claim is a new science, a new academic speciality, which emerged in Germany in the late 1930s, and all thanks to the Nazis: demographic economics. This was based, they say, on the development of a new concept among town planners, geographers, economists, and demographers and was applied particularly to areas of eastern and southeastern Europe. That concept was “rural overpopulation,” held to account for low productivity and a lack of purchasing power. It applied especially in Poland.54
The concept was developed, say Aly and Heim, primarily by the Reichskuratorium für Wirtschaftlichkeit or RKW (Reich Board for Industrial Rationalization), a large, thorough outfit that, as an example, commissioned no fewer than 1,600 secret reports from the Kiel Institute of World Economic Studies as an aid to planning the war. It was these regional planners, statisticians, and agronomists—many of whom were initially cool toward the new regime, but whose careers were rapidly advanced as a result of the many dismissals—who did so much to make respectable a policy that started out as mere prejudice on the part of Hitler, Himmler, and others.
Poland had been singled out as a “population problem” as early as 1935 in a study by Dr. Theodor Oberländer at the Institute of East European Economic Studies in Königsberg, who argued that its system of smallholdings was chronically inefficient and ripe for an agrarian revolution “on the Russian model.”* This analysis was later widened, in 1939, by the social historian Werner Conze, into a “demographic structural crisis in eastern Central Europe.”55 A corollary to the theory of overpopulation was the idea of “optimum population size,” the size that allowed the maximum possible return to be extracted from the economic resources of a region.56 Using such reasoning, the academics calculated that somewhere between 4.5 million and 5.83 million Poles, “every second person in Polish agriculture…represented nothing but dead ballast.” So began the idea that a reduction in population numbers would help improve the efficiency of those areas that eventually came under German influence and contro
l, together with the idea that enforced deportation would help ensure “social peace.”
A second concept was spearheaded by the Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums, or RKF, the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of German Nationhood. This decided which minority ethnic groups were capable of “Germanization” and which weren’t. Himmler decided that one-eighth of the Polish population could be “Germanized” (“There are still a few Goths left in the Caucasus and the Crimea,” he said in 1942) and the population divided into:
a. Full-fledged Germans;
b. Persons of German origin who must be taught to become full-fledged Germans again, who therefore possess German nationality but not, initially, the rights and status of full Reich citizenship; this category was to be deported to Germany for Germanization;
c. Valuable members of the dependent minority races, and German renegades who “possess German nationality subject to revocation”
d. Foreign nationals who do not possess German nationality. These comprised 8 million, out of which 1 million were chosen in advance (and arbitrarily) to be included in category C.
Himmler had another system, also dividing people into four classes, of which the most startling was Class 3, members of minority races who had married Germans and shown themselves prepared to “conform to German notions of orderliness” and to “show a willingness to better” themselves. This then was the German (or at least the SS) idea of Germanness.57
The classification systems were more than theoretical exercises: the long-term plan was to likewise classify Polish land so that only the “deserving classes” who wished to better themselves would be given the best soil, the plan being that the proportion of Germans working on the best agricultural land in the East would be raised from 11 to 50 percent.58 Their homesteads would be the first to receive electricity and they were to be organized as the demographers saw fit—villages of 400–500 were judged the most efficient and cohesive. This really was a re-creation of the Volk. The figures amassed were designed to help the Government General produce a Polish petit bourgeoisie in place of the Jews, whose businesses had been closed or ransacked, the aim being that Poland would become “a purely German country within the space of fifteen to twenty years.”59 To this end the ghettoes were as assiduously studied as other aspects of Polish society. The number of workers and the number of dependents were calculated, set against the minimal amount of nutritional requirements and the cost. Aly and Heim show that these calculations were made and remade until they showed a heavy loss, one that could in no way be recouped, and then the fate of the ghettoes was sealed, on economic if not on racial grounds. As one RKW report put it, “Conditions of undernourishment could be allowed to develop without regard for the consequences.” Much the same arguments were used in Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia.
The project of the economists and demographers that turned out to be the most ghoulish, and important in its wider significance, was that which showed the Nazi leadership that mass murder would not be “significantly detrimental” to public morale.60 This began, according to Aly and Heim, in a project by a Professor Karl Astel, head of the Thüringischen Landesamtes für Rassewesen (Thuringian Regional Office of Racial Affairs). As part of this project, an epidemiological study of the mentally ill was carried out, which came up with a figure of 65,000–70,000 mentally ill people who were to be eliminated on economic grounds. A list was drawn up and a program known as Aktion T4, after the address of its offices at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin, established. Aktion T4 calculations were designed to show how much money the Reich would save by not having to support mentally ill individuals. As part of this, in 1939 Hitler’s personal doctor, Theo Morell, prepared a document in which he quoted from a survey of parents of severely handicapped children, carried out in the 1920s, in which they had been asked “purely hypothetical” questions as to whether they would consent to a painless procedure to cut short the life of their handicapped offspring. The vast majority had answered “yes,” a minority adding that although they did not want to decide the fate of their own children, they would be quite prepared for the doctors to make the decision. Some had even suggested that the doctors do it and then tell the parents their child had died of an illness. On this basis, say Aly and Heim, the decision was made by the Nazi leadership to carry out the murder of German mental patients (and Hitler certainly knew about it).61 It was done in secret, but the secret was allowed to leak out to see what the reaction of the patients’ relatives would be. On April 23, 1941, an official report concluded that “in 80 percent of cases, relatives are in agreement, 10 percent speak out against, and 10 percent are indifferent.” Nor was there any opposition from within the bureaucracy. “This was a lesson of fundamental importance for the organizers of the ‘final solution of the Jewish question,’” say Aly and Heim. “It convinced them that cover names would not be questioned, but would on the contrary be gratefully accepted, indeed expected, as an invitation to denial and moral indifference.”
The eagerness with which so many scholars embraced National Socialism and their ideas is still shocking after all this time. It cannot be explained simply by the fact that so many junior figures were given early promotion after the Jewish seniors had been dismissed, exiled, or deported. Many senior colleagues—Martin Heidegger, Philipp Lenard, Ernst Krieck, Paul Schmitthenner—were equally enthusiastic supporters of the National Socialists. This amounts to yet another “Traihison des Clercs” but on a much bloodthirstier scale than ever before.
36.
The Twilight of the Theologians
When he was a boy of six, Adolf Hitler was for a short time a choirboy at the Benedictine monastery at Lambach in Austria. What he loved most, he said later, was “the solemn splendour of church festivals.” By the time he reached Munich in 1919, as a thirty-year-old ex-soldier, such religious feelings as he still had were a long way from Catholicism. By now Hitler was caught up with a völkisch sentiment, shaped by such people as Paul de Lagarde, whose version of Christianity was described earlier, in Chapter 22, a bastardization of faith in which it was asserted that Catholicism and Protestantism were “distortions” of the Bible, brought about mainly by St. Paul, who, Lagarde insisted, had “Judaised” Christianity.1
Many crude books circulated in the Vienna of Hitler’s day, one with the title Forward to Christ! Away with Paul! German Religion! Here too the argument was that the “poisoner Paul and his Volk” were the “arch-enemies of Jesus” who “had to be removed from the entrance to the kingdom of God” before “a true German church can open its doors.” The difficulty of Jesus’ being Jewish was circumvented in various ways, either by making him “Aryan” or, in the case of Theodor Fritsch, by arguing that Galileans were in fact Gauls, who in turn were German. (He claimed to have demonstrated this philologically.) All this became a central element in Hitler’s own view of Christianity, but on top of that he claimed to see in Jesus a mirror image of himself, “a brave and persecuted struggler against the Jews.”
Despite all this, Hitler was not anxious for the fledgling Nazi movement to antagonize established religion. Dr. Artur Dinter, a former scientist and dramatist whose daughter died tragically in childhood, called for “a German national church” that would counter modernism, materialism, and the Jews, “much as Jesus had done” (his Richtrunen were intended to replace the Ten Commandments). Hitler dismissed him, writing to Dinter, who had joined the National Socialists before Hitler and held Party Card Number 5, that he would not waste time on a “religious reformation” he would steer clear of religious issues, “for all time to come.”2
THE THEOLOGICAL RENAISSANCE
As we shall see, he didn’t stick to his word. When the Nazis did achieve power, their relationship with religion would remain troublesome. In some ways their religious views were simplistic, in other ways cynical and manipulative. Hitler himself seems to have had a vague notion of a “sacred universe,” but above all, in purely intellectual terms, the Nazis largely ignored the
fact that, just then, Germany was undergoing a renaissance in religious thought.3 It is a fact largely overlooked that just as the Germans had produced a “golden generation” in physics, philosophy, history, and film as the 1920s turned into the 1930s, there was a similar cohort of very creative individuals in theology. According to Alistair McGrath, writing in 1986, modern German theology has an “inherent brilliance” but since World War I, “the equivalent of a theological iron curtain appears to have descended upon Europe, excluding ideas of German origin from the theological fora of the English-speaking world.”4
The renaissance in theological thought had been sparked by Ernst Troeltsch, and by Adolf von Harnack, professor of church history at Giessen, whose book Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity; 1900), tried to go beyond all the historical criticisms that had accreted during the nineteenth century.
Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) was probably the first sociologist of religion. His main work, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches), was an attempt to bring a sociological understanding to the phenomenon of religion and to Christianity in particular. Troeltsch was affected by the same cultural pessimism as Werner Sombart, and he thought that the main source of alienation was the strong central state, which, however necessary, had helped to define modern social relations in economic terms, and was not what many people wanted, interfering as it did with their fulfillment and satisfaction. He hoped that a sociological understanding of religion might help form a state–church harmony through which many people could adjust their lives in the modern world.
His main point, after a historical survey, espoused both Dilthey and Simmel, arguing that Christianity cannot be looked at only from the vantage point of the committed Christian, that there are other ways of looking at the church and that these other ways have to be considered, and argued with, if religion is to survive.
