State Violence in Nazi Germany by Emanuel Marx

Author:Emanuel Marx [Marx, Emanuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Germany, Modern, 20th Century, Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781000735437
Google: _E3ADwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-11-26T04:59:25+00:00

The first policy

The Jews of Germany occupied a special place in Nazi racial ranking. They were the opposite of the peoples whom the early German anthropologists had considered “nature’s peoples” (Naturvölker), colonized peoples lacking advanced technologies such as automatic weapons, that were destined to “succumb to a quick physical decline and die out” (Zimmerman 2003: 161, quoting the ethnologist Bastian). While the Jews had fully absorbed the German language and civilization, and were patriotic citizens, they were, as far as the Nazis were concerned, too diversified, individuated and socially mobile to fit into their utopian racial and martial hierarchy. In consequence the Nazis considered the Jews a “mongrel race, … a race of parasites that could only live by subverting other peoples, above all … the Aryans” (Evans 2004: 174). The Nazis did not wish their subjects to advance to such a state of modernity and spiritual freedom. To prevent this, they set up the Jews, and only the Jews, as warning examples to the Aryan population. The Jews were to be excluded from decent society, demonized, derided and rejected, all in full public view. Faced with such frightening sights and sounds, even a liberal-minded German would think twice before exposing himself to similar treatment.

The SS leaders, in particular, believed themselves to be the official arbiters of racial purity, and continually sought to extend the margins of pollution caused by the presence of Jews. The more people they defined as Jews the more powerful they would become. To this end they categorized persons with ever smaller doses of Jewish blood as Jews of mixed descent (Mischlinge), to the point where a mere drop of inherited or sexually transmitted Jewish substance could pollute the bloodstream of the national body (see Burleigh 2002: 165). They applied similar attitudes and rules to those married to Jewish or mixed-descent spouses. Himmler himself ardently believed, already in the 1930s, that a candidate for the SS who had even a single Jewish ancestor eight generations removed was unfit to join the organization (Heinemann 2003: 553). This concern with racial purity put many a German at risk of being suddenly exposed. To make matters worse, Hitler refused for several years to draw the line, while insisting that only he was entitled to do so (Gerlach 1998: 114). In this manner he caused baptized Germans with Jewish ancestors or Jewish Germans married to “Aryan” spouses, of whom there were 110,000 in the 1939 census, to fear continually for their safety (Zimmermann 2008: 130, Matthäus and Roseman 2010: xxix). On 8 April 1940 the definition was made more inclusive, when the army was instructed to release half-Jews and “men who were married to Mischlinge who were half Jewish or to Jewish women” (Gruner 2008: 85). Finally, on 21 August 1941, just before the major deportations of German Jews to the East began, Hitler came down on the extreme position and decided that half-Jews were to be treated as full Jews (Zimmermann 2008: 132).

The Jewish Germans were mentally unprepared for Nazi rule.

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