Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Peter Longerich [essential books to read TXT] 📗
- Author: Peter Longerich
Book online «Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Peter Longerich [essential books to read TXT] 📗». Author Peter Longerich
second wave began in spring 1935 with renewed anti-Jewish attacks, which reached
their pinnacle in the summer of the same year. The regime responded by pro-
mulgating the Nuremberg Laws, which discriminated against the Jews by assign-
ing them a special status that was defined in increasingly narrow and restrictive
terms as time went on. Then, in 1938, after a relatively long preparatory phase that
seemed from the outside more like an easing of policy towards the Jews, there
followed the third wave of anti-Semitism. After the violent excesses of summer
and autumn 1938 had culminated in the November pogrom, the regime decreed
the complete disenfranchisement of the German Jews, statutory steps towards
their total economic depredation, and their enforced expulsion.
Each of these three waves is marked by a characteristic dialectic between
‘campaigns’ arising in the ‘grass roots’ of the Party and measures taken by the
Nazi leadership. The anti-Semitic rowdyism of the National Socialist mob was
always followed by decrees from the leadership, which in turn instituted a whole
series of legal and administrative measures aimed at persecuting the Jews and
30
Racial Persecution, 1933–1939
thereby initiated a new step in the persecution process. These three anti-Semitic
waves from the pre-war period must be seen in the context of the racism that was
at the heart of National Socialism.
At the heart of National Socialist political thinking was the idea that all the
most pressing problems besetting Germany could be solved with the introduc-
tion of a fully comprehensive ‘new racial order’. What was to be created was a
racially homogeneous ‘national community’ consisting of biologically superior
‘Aryan’ or ‘Germanic’ Übermenschen. But this racial utopia was based on their
absurd and inconsistent concept of race: it was simply not possible to use
inherited biological criteria to reduce the populations of Central Europe to
their ‘racial’ components and at the same time maintain the view that the
majority of these people represented something approximating to a homoge-
neous blood-related community. Tellingly, contemporary ‘experts’ on race
solved this problem by qualifying the majority of the population of Central
Europe as a racial ‘mixture’ or blend. This meant that any policy that attempted
to define members of the ‘Aryan’ race according to clearly distinguishable
criteria, and to make a positive selection of ‘racially valuable’ individuals, was
doomed to failure from the outset. If the Nazis had actually attempted to
implement such policies across the board, either the inhabitants of Central
Europe would have been subjected to a form of racial hierarchy defined by the
proportion of ‘Aryan’ blood in their veins, or the definition of ‘Aryanism’ would
have had to be so broad as to apply to a very large proportion of those living on
the continent of Europe. In either case, a policy of ‘positive’ racial discrimination
such as this was not workable, and would inevitably founder on its own abstruse
premises.
The only practical way to implement racial policy was therefore to use negative
criteria. National Socialist racial policy consisted above all in the exclusion of so-
called ‘alien races’ and in the ‘racially hygienic filtration’ of the weaker members of
the native ‘Germanic’ race. Nazi racial policy thus always consisted of the exclu-
sion or ‘eradication’ of minorities. For historical reasons, Judenpolitik was bound
to play a central role within racial policy that operated along ‘negative’ lines in this
manner. The Jewish minority was only superficially integrated into society. There
was a traditional image of the Jew as ‘enemy’, an age-old prejudice, and existing
anti-Semitic stereotypes assisted in constructing a scenario in which ‘the Jews’
represented a serious threat both as ‘enemies within’ and as the adherents of a
worldwide conspiracy. In addition, Entjudung or the removal of the Jews, offered
considerable advantages to those carrying out anti-Jewish policy since removing
the Jews from German society, which was crucial to the idea of racial ‘cleansing’,
was for the National Socialists precisely the same as achieving their goal of total
domination. ‘Anti-Jewish policy’, or ‘racial policy’ in its broadest sense, was
intimately bound up with plans of the NS leadership that reached far beyond
the immediate anti-Semitic or racist goals.
Displacement from Public Life, 1933–4
31
Racism and anti-Semitism were not only core components of the National
Socialists’ ideology but played a key role in the implementation and consolidation
of the NSDAP’s ambitions for power. By setting about translating their radical
aims into anti-Jewish and racial policies after 1933, the NSDAP was quickly
creating a new dimension to politics, and one that was wholly dominated by
them. At the centre was the intention to rid German society of all forms of ‘Jewish
influence’ and of everything that was in any sense ‘racially inferior’, and as part of
this comprehensive ‘cleansing’ process the sectors of German society that needed
‘cleansing’ were also to be subjugated as thoroughly as possible to National
Socialist hegemony. This new political dimension had top priority; it cut right
across the traditional political spheres such as foreign, economic, or social policy;
it dominated, saturated, and transformed them. Almost every conventional pol-
itical problem could be interpreted as a ‘racial problem’ or an aspect of the ‘Jewish
question’.
It was also true, of course, that the goals of foreign, economic, and social policy
had implications for the implementation of ‘racial’ or ‘anti-Jewish policy’. As in
every conventional sphere of politics, the practical implementation of racial or
anti-Semitic goals and the concomitant expansion of the National Socialists’
political power was a complicated process. Close attention had to be paid to
potentially competing aspirations, to overcoming opposition, making tactical
concessions, managing internal rivalries, and establishing a consensus on which
direction policy should take.
Within this complex process of implementing new racially dominated power
structures, four elements should be highlighted in order to demonstrate clearly
what far-reaching implications such a multi-layered transformation had for the
entire political system.
First, the ‘struggle against the Jews’, against racial ‘disintegration’ and ‘alien
races’ made an important contribution to integrating and mobilizing the National
Socialist movement. The Nazis’ programmatic approaches within the traditional
spheres of politics were contradictory and inadequately thought through, so
racism and anti-Semitism functioned as an indispensable surrogate for lack of
consistency in these areas.
Second, by implementing a racial model of argument, the means of steering
public opinion in the ‘Third Reich’ were restructured so as to permit the hegem-
ony of racism. What used to be defined as social, economic, domestic, or foreign
policy was now subsumed under an all-embracing ‘racial problem’ or ‘Jewish
question’. But implementing a racial discourse in a dictatorship
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