Hitler

by Peter Longerich

  Although the equal status of Jews as citizens had been seriously undermined since 1933, the Reich citizenship law passed on 15 September 1935 finally put an end to it by introducing a distinction between ‘subjects of the state’ and ‘Reich citizens’. Being a ‘Reich citizen’, in other words possessing full citizenship rights, was open only to those ‘of German or ethnically related blood’ who proved ‘by their behaviour and attitude that they were willing and suitable to serve the German nation and Reich loyally’. ‘Reich citizenship’ was to be conferred in the form of a ‘Reich citizenship document’, although this never happened. The ‘Law to protect German blood and German honour’ banned marriages and extra-marital sexual relations between ‘Jews and citizens of German or ethnically related blood’. Jews were not allowed to employ Aryan women under 45 years of age as domestics and they were not permitted to hoist the Reich flag, a discriminatory provision that was designed once again to emphasize the Reich Flag Law that was being passed at the same time. The timing and method of announcing the anti-Jewish laws were surprising, but in content the so-called Nuremberg Laws were in line with what the rank and file of the Party had been demanding for months, as well as with the subsequent announcements that had come from the government. The exclusion of Jews from economic life, which the Party on the ground had also been demanding vigorously, was the only measure that as yet the government was not introducing.56

  At the special session of the Reichstag in Nuremberg on 15 September Hitler made a short speech about the new laws, which were then passed.57 In it he blamed ‘Jewish elements’ first and foremost for the ‘international agitation and unrest’ that Germany was being made to suffer. Incited by this international agitation, he said, the Jews in Germany had become involved in provocative acts, and he highlighted the incidents in Berlin after the screening of an anti-Semitic film. In order to prevent such occurrences turning into ‘very determined and individually unpredictable acts of self-defence on the part of the enraged population’, he had had no choice but to ‘deal with the problem through legislation’. Hitler then interpreted the discriminatory laws as an attempt ‘by means of one epoch-making solution perhaps to create the conditions that might enable the German nation to form a sustainable relationship with the Jewish people’. If the problem of German–Jewish coexistence could not be solved through legislation then the National Socialist Party would have to be ‘given legal responsibility for finding a final solution’.58

  The Party Rally then continued as planned. On 16 September Hitler made a speech to mark ‘Army Day’ and the following day closed proceedings with a long speech in which he rejected the frequent practice of critics of the regime of driving a wedge between the Party and the ‘Führer’; ‘The Führer is the Party and the Party is the Führer’ was his pithy formulation.59

  In the Hotel Deutscher Hof, at the end of the official programme, Hitler addressed Party leaders and once again expressly forbade any more ‘individual initiatives’ against Jews. Goebbels, significantly, doubted whether this instruction would be obeyed.60 With the Olympic Games scheduled for 1936, Hitler did in fact wish to avoid anything that might further damage his regime’s international reputation. For the same reason, after the Party Rally greater restraint was imposed on propaganda. For the time being the ‘Jewish question’ was not to be mentioned.61

  The passing of the Nuremberg Laws did not resolve the problem of how the Jewish population could be precisely defined.62 In particular there was disagreement between the Interior Ministry, which wanted ‘half Jews’ classified as Reich citizens, and the Office of the ‘Führer’s’ Deputy, in this instance Reich doctors’ leader Wagner, who wanted them generally to be classified as Jews. On 24 September, according to Goebbels’s notes, Hitler spoke at a conference of NSDAP leaders in Munich against creating a ‘hybrid race of non-Aryans’, a phrase by which he sidestepped the basic question of whether citizens with two Jewish grandparents were ‘Jews’ or ‘Aryans’.63 A few days later Goebbels records Hitler as still being ‘undecided’ over the ‘Jewish question’.64 By getting rid of the provision that the law should be limited to ‘full Jews’, as originally intended, Hitler had created a problem that he now consistently refused to resolve. For him what had been important was the big splash the Nuremberg Laws would make and their impact at home. He had not thought through how it would be possible to define the ‘Jewish race’. Given that propaganda made such an issue of ‘racial mixing’, this surprising fact once again demonstrates how nonsensical and misleading any attempt to differentiate the German population according to its ‘racial’ components was bound to be.

  As Hitler continued to delay any decision,65 the negotiating teams from Party and state eventually proposed a compromise, namely the definition of a Jew contained in the ‘First Decree implementing the Reich Citizenship Law’.66 A Jew was defined as someone who had ‘at least three fully Jewish grandparents according to race’ and was thus excluded from Reich citizenship. People were to ‘count as Jews’ (and thus be treated as Jews) if they were ‘Mischlinge’ [lit. ‘mongrels’] with two Jewish grandparents, and if they were also adherents of the Jewish religion, were married to a Jew or were the product of an extramarital relationship with a Jew entered into after the Nuremberg Laws came into force. The remaining ‘Jewish Mischlinge’ (those with one or two Jewish grandparents) were to be given ‘provisional Reich citizenship’. Thus the ‘hybrid race’ was created that Hitler had wanted to avoid. The classification and decision regarding the fate of ‘Jewish Mischlinge’ was from this point on to give the bureaucracy a huge amount of work. Although final regulations were discussed in 1936/37, they were never enacted.67

  In addition to the anti-Jewish legislation, the Nazi regime’s racism was expressed during the first years after 1933 primarily through the codification of ‘racial hygiene’. Hitler was important in shaping this also. As early as July 1933 he had pushed the sterilization law through cabinet in spite of Papen’s resistance. At the Party Rally in 1934 he authorized the Reich doctors’ leader, Wagner, to have abortions carried out on ‘eugenic’ grounds even without a legal basis; he, Hitler, would guarantee Wagner would not be punished. Wagner then gave instructions to the relevant offices in the health service.68 In July 1935 Hitler wanted an investigation to be carried out into whether sterilizations could be performed by radiation in order to reduce fatalities. After he had seen a report from an expert claiming that women could be sterilized through the use of x-rays, a change in the law in early 1936 made this possible.69 At the end of 1935 he explicitly ruled out extending the sterilization law to include ‘foreigners with inherited diseases’ living in Germany, as there was no reason to improve other races by applying eugenic measures.70 In the case of the compulsory sterilization in 1937 of the so-called Rhineland bastards, some 600 to 800 young people who were the product of liaisons between French colonial troops and German women, a ‘special order’ from Hitler provided for this measure to be carried out without a legal basis.71 These examples show that Hitler pursued the demands he himself had voiced in Mein Kampf for ‘racial hygiene’ with a positively obsessive attention to detail.

  * Translators’ note: These were a regime substitute for the ‘works’ councils’ dominated by the left-wing parties.

  20

  A Foreign Policy Coup

  At the beginning of October 1935, shortly after Hitler had made his annual Harvest Thanksgiving speech, Italy mounted its long anticipated invasion of Abyssinia [Ethiopia]. By imposing sanctions on Italy, the League of Nations then created the diplomatic situation for which Hitler had been hoping.1 Learning in August of the Italians’ imminent attack he had given Goebbels ‘an outline of his foreign policy plans’ that went far beyond a revision of the international order established by the Treaty of Versailles and the restoration of Germany’s position of power in Central Europe: ‘. . . a permanent alliance with England. Good relations with Poland. A limited number of colonies. On the other hand, expansion eastwards. The Baltic Sta
tes are ours. Control of the Baltic Sea. Conflicts between Italy and England over Abyssinia, then between Japan and Russia. That is, in a few years perhaps. Then our great historic moment will arrive.’2

  Now, in October, Hitler instructed Goebbels to gear the press to be more strongly pro-Italian.3 A few days later, after Hitler gave an address in the Reich Chancellery to a meeting of ministers and military leaders, Goebbels noted that Hitler had set out ‘the full seriousness’ of the situation: ‘Mussolini’s in a desperate situation. England will try to include us in a system of sanctions. Then the Führer will offer to mediate. Appeal to world opinion. All this is coming three years too soon for us. Führer sees things very clearly. Knows what he wants too. Apart from this, rearm and be prepared. Europe’s on the move again. If we play our cards right, we’ll come out on top.’4

  The international sanctions against Italy, which came into force in the middle of November,5 did not in fact have a serious impact on its ability to fight the war, and by May 1936 it had defeated Abyssinia. The war gave Hitler an opportunity, however, to exploit the quarrel between Italy and the western powers by continuing to rearm using the conflict as a cover.

  Yet this rearmament, which was boosted in 1935 and was cranked up even further at the turn of 1936, deepened Germany’s economic problems and could not be sustained at the desired pace, as became evident in the autumn of 1935 and during the following winter.6

  At the end of October Hitler took note of a memorandum from Goerdeler, written at the instigation of the Reich Chancellery. Goerdeler exploited his resignation as Prices Commissioner to make fundamental criticisms of the way the government was forcing the pace of rearmament and of autarky. The notorious shortage of butter, he said, would oblige the government, if it did not provide foreign exchange to import fats, to introduce ‘an orderly system of distribution from the producer to the consumer’. Goerdeler made no bones about his belief that such a step would be disastrous.7

  Yet in spite of the difficult foreign exchange situation, at a meeting of army chiefs on 18 October 1935, the Defence Minister, Blomberg, had suspended the limit on armaments expenditure set by Schacht and in force hitherto. The Reich Bank considered this increased demand by the army for raw materials would inevitably put an intolerable strain on the foreign exchange situation. At a meeting with Hitler on 26 November Schacht provided an overview of the likely development of the foreign exchange situation over the coming six months, stating that the foreign exchange requirements of industry, the food industry, and commerce would produce a deficit of 376 million Reich Marks.8 On 24 December 1935 Schacht wrote a letter to Blomberg setting out clearly that he was unable to satisfy the army’s requirements for foreign exchange to buy lead and copper.9

  These demands placed on Germany’s foreign currency reserves had a particularly destabilizing effect on the food situation. The diminishing productivity of German agriculture (while the population was growing) could only be compensated for by increasing imports of food and animal feed. Yet Schacht, who had sharply reduced agricultural imports since 1933, refused to make the necessary foreign exchange available in order to safeguard the rearmament programme. Thus a direct conflict was arising between the production of ‘guns or butter’, which for the German people meant that they were forced to continue coping with food shortages.10 Hitler, however, now intervened personally. Having already spoken at the Party Rally about problems surrounding the supply of food and rejected wage rises by arguing that they increased the risk of inflation, he now tackled critics of his food policies on 6 October at a mass rally of German farmers on the Bückeberg and then four days later, when opening the ‘Winter Aid’ programme, emphasizing the idea of ‘national solidarity’, which was bound to involve ‘sacrifices’ for the ‘national community’.11

  Following this lead, Goebbels mounted a vigorous campaign on this subject during the next few months. The Propaganda Minister told his audience in a speech at the beginning of October that the temporary shortage of butter had to be accepted so as to enable the import of raw materials as part of the battle for jobs and to prevent millions becoming unemployed.12 Propaganda insisted that rearmament must continue at all costs; ‘guns instead of butter’ was the slogan.13 The Winter Aid collections were boosted by propaganda throughout the cold season; from October 1935 to March 1936 the Party continuously organized meetings to ‘enlighten’ people about the food situation.14 As a result of this campaign any sort of criticism of food shortages was branded as sabotaging the rearmament effort, with the result that such complaints were rarely expressed openly and, officially at least, did not particularly depress the public ‘mood’.15 An additional factor was that around the New Year in 1936 the food situation eased slightly. Hitler had brought in Göring as mediator in the ongoing conflict between Schacht and the Minister of Agriculture, Darré, over the provision of foreign exchange for the food industry. Göring saw to it that during December and January at least there was foreign exchange for the purchase of oilseed.16 This did not, however, lead to a perceptible lightening of the ‘mood’. Among the working classes in particular low wages were continually being contrasted with the privileges of Party bigwigs and the rising incomes of more affluent classes and perceived as examples of a blatant lack of social justice. As a precaution Goebbels and Ley decided at the beginning of February 1936 during the campaign for the elections to the councils of trust not to ask Hitler to speak, as this would ‘be too much of a commitment and so be too great a risk’.17 In the end the elections were called off altogether.18

  The Winter Olympics, which were held in February 1936 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, offered the regime a welcome opportunity to divert attention from the precarious food situation and the unenthusiastic mood at home and present itself to the international media as open-minded and peace-loving. Yet this scenario was suddenly threatened when on 4 February, two days before the opening of the Games, a Jewish student named David Frankfurter assassinated Wilhelm Gustloff, the leader of the NSDAP in Switzerland.19 No retaliatory action could be taken against German Jews at this moment. For weeks before the Olympic Games the German media had been primed to exercise restraint precisely with regard to the ‘Jewish question’. Their response to the assassination was therefore relatively moderate.20 Hitler opened the Games as planned. He waited until his address at Gustloff’s funeral in Schwerin on 12 February to direct his rage at the ‘hate-filled power of our Jewish enemy’.21

  As far as foreign policy was concerned, the deep divisions between Italy and the western powers caused by the Abyssinian conflict were, from Hitler’s perspective, producing their first positive results. On 6 January Ulrich von Hassell, the German ambassador in Rome, was able to report to Berlin that Mussolini had told him that it was possible ‘to make fundamental improvements in German–Italian relations’ and clear away the ‘only cause of disagreement, namely the Austrian problem’. As Hassell reported, Mussolini was offering Germany a treaty of friendship that would enable it to draw Austria ‘in Germany’s wake’ as far as foreign policy was concerned. If as a result Austria, although formally an independent state, became in effect a satellite of Germany, Mussolini would not object.22

  Until that point, however, several more months were to pass. In the meantime Hitler saw an opportunity to exploit Mussolini’s accommodating attitude in connection with a much more pressing problem. For at the start of 1936 the progress of German rearmament came up against a major obstacle that Hitler absolutely had to remove if he intended to realize his foreign policy goals, namely the demilitarization of the Rhineland as laid down in the Treaty of Versailles. This prevented Germany from protecting the heartland of German heavy industry, the Ruhr, against French intervention. However, by marching into the Rhineland Hitler would be violating not only the Treaty of Versailles but also the Locarno Pact and running the risk of reuniting its guarantors, Belgium, France, Britain, and Italy. Occupying the Rhineland was therefore not in the offing, as Hitler told Goebbels on 20 January 1936, so as to avoid ‘givi
ng the others the opportunity of turning their attention away from the conflict in Abyssinia’.23 This was a clear indication of the significance of the conflict in Africa for Hitler’s strategy. On 25 January, however, when Mussolini used an unattributed newspaper article to raise doubts about the continuation of the Locarno Pact because of talks between the British and French general staffs, Hitler began to revise his view of the Rhineland issue.24

  In addition, by the middle of February Hitler had come to the conclusion that the imminent ratification of the Franco–Soviet mutual assistance pact agreed in May 1935 might provide a suitable pretext for the occupation. Using this argument, he attempted to persuade Mussolini to adopt a neutral stance regarding this violation of the Locarno Pact. The moment seemed right because in February the war in Abyssinia turned in favour of the Italians. This was bringing the international crisis to its climax, thus minimizing the likelihood of the Locarno powers acting in concert in the event of Germany occupying the Rhineland.25

  Both Goebbels’s diaries and the notes kept by the German ambassador in Rome, whom Hitler summoned unexpectedly to Munich on 14 February and equally unexpectedly to Berlin on 19 February, furnish some revealing insights into the process leading Hitler finally to decide at the beginning of March to occupy the Rhineland. In Munich Hitler revealed to Hassell that from a military perspective the occupation of the Rhineland was ‘an absolute necessity’. Up to now, he said, he had planned it for the spring of 1937, as German rearmament would be more advanced by then. The right ‘psychological moment’ had arrived, however, because Britain and France were hardly in the mood to respond with military action. Hassell also gained the impression that domestic politics were an essential part of Hitler’s motivation.26 Neurath confirmed to Hassell that in view of the disaffected national mood Hitler was searching for ‘a national cause that would fire up the masses again’.27 The question of whether such domestic considerations were more important in determining Hitler’s actions in February/March 1936 than strategic foreign policy ones is, however, of secondary importance. For Hitler’s political style and strength lay precisely in his ability to combine such disparate motives and finally come up with a surprise move that took both domestic circumstances and the international situation into account. After a discussion between Hassell and Hitler over lunch on 19 February Goebbels noted: ‘The Führer is again ready to pounce. He ponders and broods and then suddenly he acts.’28