HI136 The History of Germany
Week 12 / Lecture 11

• How ‘modern’ was the Nazi state?
• How do categories of race and sex intersect when studying population policies enacted under the Third Reich?

• Eugenics = ‘good birth’; widespread in western societies from late 19thC (i.e. not German-specific)
• ‘Ideal’ racial stock often equated to middle-class
• ‘Dangerous’ classes of lumpenproletariat
• Note cultural stereotypes rather than scientific criteria
‘Inferior Hereditary Material Penetrates a
Village’: lone mother, illegitimate children, drinking fathers, mental illness & prison

Above: Mother’s Cross; below: ‘The nation’s military strength is safeguarded by hereditarily healthy, childrich families’
• NS settlement schemes demanded a high birth rate
• Depression discouraged large families; cf pre-1914 statistics disappointing
• Positive eugenics: incentive schemes such as marriage loans, mothers’ crosses
• Lebensborn (Well of Life):
SS scheme to promote
Aryan births out of wedlock
• Anti-natalism? (Gisela
Bock): several hundred thousand women sterilised

• Law for Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased
Offspring (July 1933): approx. 2 million people sterilized
• T-4 Program
• Sexual Deviancy

Victor Brack, architect of the ‘T4’ euthanasia programme
Bishop Galen of
Muenster, outspoken critic of euthanasia
• Financial savings on mentally handicapped
• Killings in sanatoria
• ‘T4’ programme under
Viktor Brack experiments with gas vans
• Bishop Galen of Münster leads Catholic opposition
(euthanasia becomes clandestine from 1941)
• Key text: Michael Burleigh,
Death and Deliverance

‘This is how it would end.’
• Racial theory of hereditary illnesses
(criminality, alcoholism), rendering sufferers
‘unfit for community’
• ‘Workshy’ & prostitutes targeted from 1936 on, becoming significant proportion of concentration camp population

Gypsies await their fate at Belzec camp
• Sinti & Roma labelled workshy
• Ethnographic studies of gypsies as Indo-
European migrants
• Proportionally as many gypsies died in
Holocaust as Jews

NS chart alleging that one homosexual man can ‘contaminate’
28 others; note the pseudo-scientific diagram
• Especially male homosexuals targeted as failing their reproductive duties
• 1936 para. 175 of
Penal Code outlaws homosexuality
• Homosexuals incarcerated in concentration camps with pink triangle

• Religious antisemitism, dating back to medieval period
• Economic antisemitism: emancipation of
Jewish Germans post-1871 coincided with economic depression
• Biological antisemitism: Social
Darwinism; organicist view of body politic; Jews as parasites
‘contaminating’ Aryan blood

1933 April Boycott of Jewish Businesses http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/boycott1933.html
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/boycott.htm

Nuremberg Race Laws

Jewish ‘capitalist oppressor’
‘Bolshevism is Jewry’ Jewish ‘bolshevik commissar’ (PoW photo, 1941)

Passers-by view the shattered glass of a shopfront attacked on Kristallnacht

Reinhard
Heydrich, Security
Service leader
Adolf Eichmann, head of Jewish desk at Reich
Security Head
Office
• From 1939 SS tasked with Jewish policy
• Emigration schemes
(Madagascar, Urals)
• ‘Jew-free’ Reich leads to ghettoisation in
General Government, but ‘cumulative radicalisation’
(Mommsen) between competing agencies

• Autumn 1941 (Operation Barbarossa): elation of victory or realisation of defeat?
• First tests of gas chambers at
Auschwitz on Soviet PoWs
• January 1942: conference at Wannsee
(Berlin) decides on European-wide programme of mass murder, using mechanised techniques

Jewish deaths in the Holocaust, showing percentage of the population killed in each country
Source: H. Schulze, Germany: A New History
(1998)
•
55,000 Jews from the
Łódz ghetto &
5000 Gypsies gassed in mobile gas chambers in the winter of 1941-42.
•
200,000 killed in death camps at
Chelmno, Treblinka & Belzec in
August 1942.
•
By Dec. 1942 500,000 had been gassed at Belzec alone.
• Jews & Gypsies from all over Europe transported to Auschwitz from spring
1942 onwards.
• Estimated that around 1,600,000 murdered at Auschwitz alone, c.300,000 of which were not Jews.
• ‘Medical’ experiments conducted on camp inmates.
• Around 6 million Jews perished in the
Holocaust, plus hundreds of thousands of others
– Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill etc.

• Intentionalists: top-down models based on a Fuehrer order (lack of written evidence?)
• Incremental, step-by-step radicalisation, &
‘war against the Jews’ (Lucy Dawidowicz)
• Functionalists: polycratic, competing bureaucracies radicalise from below
(Martin Broszat); ‘working towards the
Fuehrer’ (Ian Kershaw)

• Pseudo-scientific justification derived from rational Enlightenment ‘perfectibility of mankind’
• Use of ‘factories of death’, but also compartmentalisation of killing process enabled distancing from murder
• Increasing ‘economisation’ of the
Holocaust to justify it in war effort (Aly &
Heim)
• Key commentators: Zygmunt Bauman

Police Reserve Battalion 101, stationed in occupied Poland
• Daniel Goldhagen: focus on the ‘trigger pullers’
• Need to explain sadistic nature of violence
• ‘Eliminationist antisemitism’ too simplistic?
• Cf Christopher
Browning, Ordinary
Men , who cites peer pressure, careerism, but also psychological need to conform to authority