The Third Reich by Thomas Childers

Author:Thomas Childers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2017-10-13T04:00:00+00:00

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A RACIAL REVOLUTION

The Nazis had unleashed a revolution in Germany, but not an economic one. Hitler was not interested in economics and certainly did not intend to turn the rabid social revolutionary rhetoric of the party into reality. For all the insistent talk about Volksgemeinschaft, his view of the economy was strictly instrumentalist: he needed a strong industrial base and a powerful army to realize his dreams of expansion, of Lebensraum in the East. The fate of the small shopkeeper, farmer, or artisan, stalwart elements of the party’s national support before 1933, held little interest for him. As if to drive that point home, the party leadership announced on July 7, 1933, that “active measures” to nationalize the department stores—one of the party’s most strident promises before 1933—“were not indicated for the present.” No action against the department stores was undertaken, then or later, and the big chains continued to operate as before, although under different—“Aryan”—management.

Property relations in the Third Reich remained largely untouched, except for the expropriation of Jewish property. Instead, the Nazis undertook a fundamental reordering of status, the most obvious expression of which was their effort to elevate the social standing of peasants and workers, two groups traditionally considered to inhabit the lower reaches of German society. National Socialism, Hitler and Goebbels were at pains to emphasize, was not defined by wealth or property, by possessions, bank accounts, stock portfolios, and income, mere material things. Nazi socialism was much deeper, more profound than Marxism, they claimed. It did not change the external order of things, but sought to fundamentally transform the relationship of man to the state. They were going to create a new man, a new people, strong and vigorous and untainted by the weaknesses of the past. The Nazis did not need to socialize the banks and factories; they were socializing the people.

Creating a united Germany liberated from the traditional divisions of class, religion, and region was merely one dimension of Hitler’s agenda to establish a fundamentally new German nation. The National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft was to be a society bound together by blood, a nation built on a utopian vision of racial purity, cleansed of hereditary weakness and freed from the taint of foreign, especially Jewish, blood. The Third Reich would build national, by which the Nazis meant racial, solidarity by expunging the biological contaminants infecting the German people. They would cultivate a healthy, vigorous, racial community that would unchain the vast energies of a proud, revivified people.

History, Hitler believed, was driven by remorseless struggle, nation against nation, culture against culture, and ultimately race against race. In his thinking, a hierarchy of races existed, and Aryans, which he never defined in any serious anthropological way, were the most valuable race. They alone possessed the capacity “for creating and building culture.” In fact, “all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan.” But if the Aryans bred with people of

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