Hitler's True Believers by Robert Gellately

Author:Robert Gellately
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

The Racist Ideology

Hitler’s racism was integral to his doctrine, and although over the years he modulated his public expressions of certain beliefs, antisemitism remained at the core of his Weltanschauung, of the National Socialist movement, and the new regime. Historians have focused attention on the evolution of official policies and propaganda, and yet a closer look shows that hostility to the Jews was brought home far more publicly and violently at the grassroots level than is often assumed. To be sure, racism both targeted and extended well beyond the Jews, and everything the regime touched was tinged with it—housing, sports, vacations, farming, culture, and above all private sexual relations. Whatever mixed signals German Socialism may have sent about improving the lives of ordinary people, that there would be no place for Jews was self-evident.

One form of public repression, straight out of the Middle Ages, that angry mobs inflicted on Jews in Hitler’s Germany was the Prangerumzug, literally the “pillory march.” Before the main event even began, victims’ heads could be shaved, and faces blackened in a ritualized casting of someone out of the Volksgemeinschaft. Even witnessing the event brought home the reality of National Socialist ideology. Germany’s relatively small population of 499,682 “believing Jews” was less than 1 percent of the 65.2 million people in the country, according to the June 16, 1933, census. Jews as a percentage of the total had been declining for years, and their number fell by an estimated 25,000 during Hitler’s first months in power.1 Even more vulnerable to attack were the 98,747 foreign Jews in the country, of whom around 80 percent were traditionally labeled as Ostjuden or Eastern Jews, namely those who had wandered from eastern Europe and had settled in Germany.2

Following on the heels of the March 5, 1933, Reichstag election, Nazi radicals began a nationwide campaign of violence aimed at the Jews, and onlookers were often unable to tell whether the unfortunates were German citizens or not. One of the first “shaming processions,” as recorded by Walter Gyssling, a former army officer and journalist, in his diary for March 9/10, spelled out the horror in Munich. Stormtropper (SA) rowdies staged the fake execution of a rabbi, and at midday, used whips to drive a Jewish lawyer down the street, without shoes or coat, and wearing only a shirt and torn underclothes. Around his neck was a sign: “I the Jew Siegel will never complain again about National Socialism.” This was the respected Dr. Michael Siegel, who had gone to the Police Presidency to plead on behalf of an arrested friend. After the SA beat him savagely, they paraded him around town for its demonstration effect.3 Word of Dr. Siegel’s tragic tale spread, and it horrified Jewish lawyers, such as Kurt F. Rosenberg in Hamburg, who mentioned the story in his diary. Exaggerations, gossip, and rumors stirred his insecurity. “From day to day, we ready ourselves to be thrown out of our profession. The antisemitic wave grows day in and out.”4

The SA

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.