Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Peter Longerich [essential books to read TXT] 📗

and indeed of abolishing these altogether. By the time the Nuremberg

Laws had been introduced and ‘eugenic’ measures had been introduced for certain

sectors of the population such policies had become state-sanctioned. Suspending

the principle of political equality for all citizens and introducing the certification

of Aryan ancestry in various areas of public life makes it clear how far the social

status of every individual was affected by the influence of racial politics.

What I intend to explore here is the relationship between the exclusion of Jews

and other minorities and the implementation of National Socialist rule on the

basis of a number of examples: the transformation of ‘social politics’, which was

mutated into ‘National Socialist welfare provision’ via the exclusion of Jews and

others; the effects of removing Jews from German schools on education policy and

its National Socialist remodelling; the consequences of the dominance of racially

inspired approaches in the areas of science; and the National Socialists’ usurpation

of the cultural life of the country, including important areas of everyday culture.

The Exclusion of Jews in Need from Social Policy

and its Transformation into National Socialist

‘Welfare Provision’

Jewish community welfare services in National Socialist Germany were faced with

the problem of having to help an ever-increasing number of impoverished, ageing

people, who were progressively being neglected by the state’s social services

systems.

Interim Conclusions

73

In summer 1935, many local authorities were beginning to discriminate

against the members of the Jewish population who were in need of support

in favour of other clienteles. Jews were also excluded from the ‘Winter

Relief Organization of the German People’ that was essentially run on

voluntary lines. Here as in other areas of public life, however, the author-

ities could not proceed arbitrarily: even the Nuremberg Laws did not

fundamentally alter the claims of Jewish Germans for social contributions

from the state. 1

After the end of 1935 Jewish welfare agencies were compelled by numer-

ous municipalities to declare the sums they disbursed for support and the

public agencies began by deducting these from the state provision. From

the same period Jews were increasingly excluded from certain special

measures and donations that were not specifically stipulated by law.

After 1936 Jews were treated separately from others in need of welfare

support, with counters set aside for them in social security offices or

accommodation in segregated refuge homes. And social security support

was cut.

This all happened not because of any intensification in legal measures for

persecution but because the welfare agencies in the local authorities devoted

considerable imagination and energy to the development of ever newer and

different ways to discriminate against Jews in receipt of support. 2 The German Council of Municipalities (Deutscher Gemeindetag) played an

important role in this process of cumulative exclusion; it was used to control

and standardize community policies in the 64,000 German municipalities. At

a meeting of the Council of Municipalities in June 1937 there was general

agreement that such practices be brought into line across the country and,

according to one suggestion, Jews should be equated with foreigners when it

came to welfare provision. 3 During the following year cities and the Council of Municipalities would come up with a series of new measures for further

discriminating against Jews who were in need of support. 4 After the November 1938 pogrom these initiatives were to culminate in an order from the Reich

Ministry of the Interior that provided for the complete exclusion of Jews from

public welfare provision. 5

Discrimination against Jews in need, as well as similar measures against

Gypsies and ‘asocials’, 6 contributed significantly to changing the character of social policy as a whole. It was transformed into ‘National Socialist Welfare

Provision’. Here, unlike in traditional social policy, it was no longer a

question of meeting individual needs and supporting the socially disadvan-

taged; at the centre was the idea that the support of individuals would be

made dependent on the assessment of their value for the racially defined

‘national community’. The exclusion of the racially ‘inferior’ was a key

constitutive element of this policy. 7

74

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

The Exclusion of Jews from the German Health System

and the Implementation of the Racial Hygiene

Paradigm in Medicine

During the period of National Socialist dictatorship ‘racial hygiene’ conceptions

that had been represented by a minority of members of the medical professions

since the Imperial age became definitive. 8 In close collaboration with jurists, educationalists, social scientists, and members of the social security network,

doctors collaborated under the Nazis with population policies that were aimed

at preventing the bearers of ‘negative’ hereditary characteristics from reproducing.

This was initially achieved via counselling on hereditary health issues, bans on

certain marriages and enforced sterilization; during the war it was pursued via the

systematic murder of those defined as ‘racially inferior’. 9 The ‘elimination’ of these

‘negative’ elements within the German population was regarded as a major

contribution towards the convalescence of the ‘body of the nation’.

According to the view of racial hygienists, it was important to slow down the

‘degeneration’ of the population but not only by preventing certain groups from

reproducing. The key difference between this and traditional notions of eugenics

was that racial hygiene attempted to put an end to ‘racial miscegenation’, which

was seen as particularly damaging, a flashpoint of the first importance for the

health of the nation.

In this vein, in a speech to the Reich Party Conference of 1935 the head of the

Reich Doctors’ Association, Gerhard Wagner, emphasized how ‘increasing mis-

cegenation with Jewish blood that is entirely alien to us’ would not only have ‘the

direst consequences, because it . . . is against the natural order’, but this ‘bastard-

ization’ with the Jews, ‘a people who are already bastardized’, might lead to the

unhindered spread amongst the German population ‘of the hereditary diseases

and negative dispositions that are already widespread amongst Jews’. 10

Racial hygiene not only proclaimed the struggle against ‘racial miscegenation’

but saw as a significant goal the complete exclusion of Jews from the health

system; indeed this was a fundamental condition for the implementation of its

ideas. This was not merely a question of excluding Jewish doctors and other

medical professionals, 11 or the gradual exclusion12 of Jewish patients from public health organizations, but above all it was manifested in the battle against so-called

‘Jewish medicine’, which was a synonym for those tendencies in modern medicine

that resisted the triumphal progress of racial hygiene. Above all this meant

medicine that was ‘mechanical’ or ‘industrial’ or concerned with