Hitler's Wehrmacht, 1935–1945 by Rolf-Dieter Müller & Janice W. Ancker

Author:Rolf-Dieter Müller & Janice W. Ancker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2016-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

The “Master Race” and “Slaves”: Social Rank and Racial Hierarchy

While anti-Bolshevism was the most popular weapon of Nazi propaganda, the vicious tirade of anti-Semitism constituted a propaganda instrument with particularly brutal consequences. It initially functioned as a means to explain the origin and expansion of the war. But later, the constant reiteration of the notion of a Jewish world conspiracy was used to account for the coming defeat. It was linked to the threat of revenge and annihilation, which was intended to convince the Germans to go along with the barbaric conduct of the war.

The war began with an intensified quarrel between political enemies on the domestic front. A wave of arrests rolled through the Reich. The stigmatizing of “social outsiders” far exceeded the usual paranoia that caused other Western societies to intern foreigners and citizens from enemy nations during the war. Thus, it was no accident that the date of Hitler’s euthanasia order was the day the war began. With this, those Germans who were most handicapped and in need of care, those who were considered “useless eaters” and an obstacle to the march to victory, were eradicated from the Volksgemeinschaft. An important role in this massacre was the argument that spaces in field hospitals had to be made available for the soldiers. The selection process definitely did not stop there. It also involved a great number of people who were supposedly “asocial” and who, along with other marginal groups, were considered unfit for battle and were locked up, sterilized, and employed as slave laborers.

Since the National Socialists saw the war as a selection process for creating a racial elite, they wanted to compensate for casualties among the purportedly “best” in combat. They tried to do this, on the one hand, through the eradication of inferior people and, on the other hand, by the targeted “nordifying” of the Germanic “master race.” Thus, from the start of the war, efforts were undertaken to foster the production and cultivation of “racially pure” children, to strengthen the function of mothers and families, and to enable the colonizing and training of future “soldier peasants.”

The war was an expediting and radicalizing factor in racial and social policy in general. The seizure and exploitation of foreign territories offered the chance to put National Socialist ideas into practice much more radically than in Germany. Annexed territories such as the Warthegau served as experimental fields for the creation of a new “order” that would later be conveyed to the “Old Reich.”3

No event in recent history affected and changed German society more than the Second World War. Yet the effects of the war itself, especially during its second half and in the period directly after the war, had greater influence than the targeted measures taken by the National Socialists. For the most part, the National Socialists only took up developing trends, reinforced them, and justified them through ideology. As a result of the war itself, the working class and middle class gained in status (through such means as relaxing salary and price freezes, encouraging the consumer goods industry, and halting war taxes).

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