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

or collective classes for Jewish primary school pupils’. 28

Accordingly, in 1937 the number of Jewish pupils in general schools fell to about

15,000; the majority of Jewish children now attended Jewish schools or the

‘collective classes’ mentioned above. But it would not be until 1939 that Jewish

pupils were legally forbidden to attend general schools; the process of everyday

discrimination and repression continued until that point. 29

Liberation ‘from the Jewish Spirit’ and the

Construction of a ‘German’ Science

In almost all academic disciplines after 1933 there is a discernible tendency to give

a certain völkisch, a genuinely ‘German’ bias to each subject, by means of a

comprehensive expulsion of the ‘Jewish spirit’—beginning with the dismissal of

Jewish university teachers—and by means of a fundamental removal of the

remnants of a superseded ‘liberal Jewish era’. The various disciplines were in

varying degrees transformed and even partially redefined, in terms of both

content and structure. This will be examined rather more closely with reference

to a number of examples.

It was not until the era of National Socialism that psychology and psychother-

apy first won acceptance as academic disciplines in Germany. 30 The distinction from ‘Jewish’ psychoanalysis and its destruction as a discipline played an important part in this professionalization process. In psychology this dissociation was

attempted in part through the introduction of ‘Racial Psychology’ and ‘Racial

Typology’, 31 and in psychotherapy by the foundation of a New German Psychotherapy (Neue Deutsche Seelenheilkunde). 32 In both cases what was at stake was not only a theoretical dissociation from psychoanalysis, but a matter of working

out the fundamentally different mental make-ups of ‘Aryans’ and ‘Jews’.

The transformation of the discipline of Anthropology (Volkskunde) into ‘Ger-

man Anthropology’ (Deutsche Volkskunde), and its academic establishment on a

larger scale, which occurred only during the Nazi period, was linked primarily

with the idea of demonstrating the homogeneity and uniqueness of a German

national culture beyond all regional differences and European similarities. 33 But the precondition for this, as one of the leading anthropologists stressed, was to

make clear, ‘how the Jewish spirit deliberately turns against essential foundations

78

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

of German Anthropology. Jews above all are the first to turn away from the “Volk

as nation”. It is Jews who most strongly emphasize the differences between

individual classes and groups within the German Volk . . . The corroding effects

of the Jewish spirit in the German Anthropology of the past can only fully be

understood if one takes into account the Jewish influence coming from abroad.’34

This quotation already makes it clear how the accusation of ‘Verjudung’ (Juda-

ization) could be utilized in intradisciplinary disputes.

The advocates of a transformation of sociology into a ‘German theory of

society’ (deutsche Gesellschaftslehre) in turn assumed the task of fundamentally

renewing the ‘völkisches Selbstbewusstsein’—the ‘völkisch self-awareness’ of the

Germans. To this end they turned against a ‘Western’ sociology, meaning one that

concentrated on bourgeois, industrial society, and countered it with that of a

German Volkstum rooted in peasant society; this expressly German-völkisch new

science was supposed to connect with a traditional lineage represented by names

such as Jakob Herder, Ernst Moritz Arndt, and Wilhelm Riehl. Accordingly,

refoundation of the subject was concerned with fending off ‘volksfeindliche incur-

sions of Western thought’; particular importance was assigned to the battle against

‘Jewish thought, which has sought to talk the German people out of its völkisch

needs’. 35 ‘German sociology’ did manage to institutionalize itself in the universities in the mid-1930s, but without developing an ‘encompassing theoretical construct’. 36 The place of theory was occupied by practical social research, primarily concerned with ‘weeding out’ those who were ‘inferior’ and ‘of foreign race’ from

German society—a task that was to assume growing importance with the con-

quest of Eastern European territories.

In the discipline of history during the National Socialist era it is possible to

identify a powerful shift towards a Germanocentric folk history: along with the

Volkskunde researchers and social scientists mentioned above, and in cooperation

with geographers, archaeologists, and others, an attempt was made to create a new

interdisciplinary field of research: Volkstumsforschung or ethnicity research. 37

Volksgeschichte (ethnic history) and Volkstumsforschung primarily attempted

to record the history and culture of the German people through its differentiation

from foreign peoples; the actual roots of the German people could, the Volk-

stumsforscher were convinced, be revealed only when it was successfully freed

from being overgrown by alien cultures.

Here—despite the establishment of thematically relevant research institutes38—

anti-Semitism played a subordinate role. The chief intention was to re-establish

German borders in disputes with the country’s neighbours. Central to this was the

claim to demonstrate the superiority of the character of ethnic Germans in border

areas and abroad as against the national character (Volkstum) of foreigners, and

thus to establish the German claim to hegemony. The fact that Volkstums-

forschung sought to prove this claim to superiority primarily in a negative way,

through the demarcation/separation from ‘inferior’ peoples, was summed up by

Interim Conclusions

79

one of its leading representatives at the 1934 German Historians’ Congress, in a

formula that can hardly be beaten for concision: ‘Volksgeschichte is at its most

elementary level the history of border conflicts.’39

Ethnic research was by no means purely based on racial biology: the term

völkisch, which became its central concept, expressed the fusion of racist concepts

with cultural, historical, and spatial ones.

Ethnicity research (Volkstumsforschung) represented the striking attempt, by

overcoming the boundary between scholarship and politics, through close collab-

oration with political offices and through new institutional structures, to open up

career paths to a generation of academics close to the Party via the redefinition of

scholarly parameters.

Volkstumsforschung was to achieve practical significance during the war when,

as a result of policy advice, cartographic material, statistics, and ‘arguments’ were

made available to justify the displacement of Germany’s Eastern borders; within

this context it also achieved ‘scholarly’ preliminary work for the deportation of the

Eastern European Jews. Thus Volkstumsforschung, unable to demonstrate the

supposed superiority of the German people in a positive way, to a large extent

ended up providing anciliary work for genocide. In this way it provided a

particularly vivid example of the destructive momentum that lay within National

Socialist racial politics in almost all spheres of life.

A further example from the humanities might be mentioned here: the path

towards ‘völkisch legal renewal’ in jurisprudence led towards a consistent counter-

ing and denial of pre- and supra-state normative contexts. 40 The new version of the law was to be solely