the german question
We approach the most notorious and best-evidenced case of genocide. My book Fascists shows that fascism was essentially a movement committed to extreme organic nationalism and statism, claiming to transcend social conflict, especially class conflict, by using paramilitary and state violence to
“knock both their heads together.” But there were two additionally danger- ous features of Nazism compared to other fascist movements: its conception of the nation was more racial than cultural, and it advocated an aggressive imperial revisionism to restore German’s former power. I will argue that when both were turned into eastward expansion in Europe, they brought about Nazi genocide, though only after a series of radicalizations of leaders and militants. This chapter deals with the radicalizations, the following two with genocide.
Why did Germany nourish racial sentiments that the Nazis then took to extremes? This is the German Question. But perhaps it is slightly mis- placed, for Germany was not alone. Northern Europe nourished racialism.
As we saw in Chapter4, Spaniards and Portuguese abroad were much read- ier to assimilate (and intermarry with) natives than were Northern European colonists. The late19th and early20th centuries also nourished racism. Social Darwinism now blended with biology, medicine, sociology, and psychology to generate racial-genetic notions of human progress. Many believed that the Germans or the British were genetically distinct from Slavs and Jews, that one race might be superior to another, and that social problems like crime or mental illness might be combated by eugenic, “race-purifying” policies.
The Nazi policy of murdering mentally retarded persons only took further the compulsory sterilization practiced by other Northern Europeans at the time. Third came the general rise of organic nationalism throughout much of Europe in the late19th century, discussed earlier.
But between these three broad encouragements and the commission of genocide lay a great gulf. Why did some Germans bridge it? Some seek an- swers mainly within German nationalism. It is conventional to identify two main types of nationalism, ethnic and civic, and to identify German na- tionalism as being decidedly ethnic and so more dangerous (e.g., Brubaker,
180
1992). Any long-term resident of French or Italian territory is considered a member of the French or Italian nation. This is a civic definition of cit- izenship allowing for assimilation of people of various ethnic origins. But in Germany, only ethnic Germans, wherever they live, have been securely considered full members of the German nation. This is held to be the root of the German problem because it is more exclusionary than is civic nationalism.
There is some truth in this. Yet, as I noted in Chapter1, ethnicity cannot be objectively measured. Germans still have to decide who is ethnically German.
German states have used two criteria: the ability to speak German as one’s na- tive tongue and blood descent. Language can be learned, but blood descent is given by heredity. So the precise mix of these two criteria would influence how exclusionary German nationalism would be. In the late19th century, Jews and Poles living in theKaiserreichwere partially assimilating into the German nation by speaking and culturally becoming German, though Poles were discriminated against and often regarded as second-class citizens. Jews and Slavs were being “cleansed” by the peaceful means of voluntary assimi- lation and institutional coercion. But German anti-Semitism was no greater than French anti-Semitism before World War I. Indeed, to explain why things got much worse, we must also look for causes lying outside of German na- tionalism itself.
But where exactly was Germany? It was more than the mere “geographical expression” of earlier centuries. But before1914two major German states remained, and millions of Germans lived in neither of them. Germany was incomplete. Thus any analysis of German nationalism must involve geopolit- ical relations (between states) and transnational relations (among Germans, and between Germans and others) that ran across state borders. This will be true at all stages of German radicalization. The transnational and geopoliti- cal embroilment of Germans in Eastern questions was to radicalize German nationalism and anti-Semitism.
German nationalists aimed to unite all ethnically defined Germans into one state. This was now tantalizingly close, for many German states had been consolidated into two great ones – Prussian Germany and Habsburg Austria.
But to include almost all Germans in any single state would require imperial expansion in regions dominated by other ethnic groups. The distinguishing feature of German nationalism in the late19th century was less that it was ethnic than that it implied imperialism – Germans conquering and ruling over others. Though imperial expansion was not unusual in Europe, German imperialism came late, and so would be more ethnic than had been the earlier English or French imperialism. By now the whole people should rule, not just the upper classes, so imperialism could mobilize the people into a more ethnonational imperialism. Under the influence of social Darwinism, wars might decide which nation was the fittest to survive. In Germany, race theorists said that the Danish and French minorities were of similar Aryan
stock, but not Slavs and Jews, who lived across the eastern borders of the two Germanies. Such eastern ethnicities might be considered alien to the German race.
Both German states were ruled by dynastic monarchs opposing rule by the people. Yet the two differed. Prussian expansion had been mainly among Germans, so this was an ethnic German state, akleindeutsch(small German) nation-state, but with only partial popular sovereignty and po- tential second-class citizenship and/or assimilation for non-Germans. By contrast, Austrian expansion was in the east and south, mainly over non- Germans, agrossdeutsch (great German) imperium but not an ethnic one.
It was an empire of diverse ethnicities ruled by a German dynasty. The Habsburgs could not be nationalists. They had to rule by combining as- similation (getting others to speak German and adopt German culture) and multicultural confederalism (allowing other ethnic elites to share in rule). The Austrian version of Germany wasgrossdeutschimperialism, but it was not organicist. As Chapter3showed, the struggle for rule by the people across Habsburg lands spread organic nationalism among subordinate ethnicities, and Germans and Magyars reacted to this by demanding more ethnic, not merely cultural, rule. Thus by1900Austrian Germans were mobilizing the largest organic German nationalist movement in reaction to attacks by sub- ordinate nationalists on them.
Two ethnic groups seemed especially threatening. Most Germanic expan- sion was eastward, which meant that Russia was seen as the most threaten- ing rival power – massive, primitive, and Slav. Germans began to see alien, primitive Slav hordes as threatening “higher” Germanic civilization. The second threat was posed by Jews, seen as old religious enemies and “pariah exploiters” throughout Europe. Yet Western European states were now sec- ularizing, and Jews seemed embarked on assimilation there – as in Prussian Germany itself. This was less so in countries farther east. But Jews were in a peculiar position in the Habsburg Empire. The dynasty disliked nationalists – including German nationalists – and encouraged religious toleration and cos- mopolitan groups like the Jews as counterweights. The state was assimilating Jews, but German nationalists and Jews were more on a collision course in the Habsburg than in the Prussian Empire. This conflict was reinforced by the flight into Habsburg lands of Orthodox Jews from the pogroms of the Russian Empire. Their strange language, garb, and ringlets seemed alien and primitive. German fear of eastern Slavs and Jews increased at the end of the 19th century.
Jointly, these tendencies increased aggressive elements in German national- ism, though more in Austria than in Germany. But then World War I brought two decisive changes. Austria and Germany suffered disastrous defeat. This finished off both dynasties and dashed both German imperial projects. The Habsburg Empire ceased to exist as Austria was reduced to the small re- public it is today. Its other domains were granted to states with a single
dominant ethnicity, mostly Slav, in which Germans now suffered discrim- ination as second-class citizens. Prussian Germany also became a republic but remained a Great Power, if reduced in territories and population and shorn of dynastic restraints on nationalism. The two republics were politi- cally polarized into a Marxian left and a nationalist right. German rightist discontent about the Versailles peace treaties now emerged as ethnic im- perial revisionism – revise the borders to incorporate the “lost territories”
and create an ethnic German Empire. With Austria dismembered, only the Prussian German state, now simply known as Germany, could do this. The Habsburg cultural grossdeutsch ideal was dead, the Prussian ethnic ideal transformed into a newgrossdeutschexpansionism. But, as Burleigh (2000) emphasizes, the aggression of the Third Reich derived from an acute sense of victimhood.
The second consequence of the war period was that the Bolshevik Revolu- tion created a specter across Europe of class revolution and chaos, viewed as distinctively Russian and also as Jewish, since so many prominent Bolsheviks were Jews. In1918–19Germany, Austria, and Hungary all had to repress Communist uprisings in which Jews were prominent. This seemed to further entwine the two eastern racial enemies, Slavs and Jews. Jews were also seen as capitalist and linked to enemy powers in the West, but the Soviet Union was the main enemy of German expansion, and a Judeo-Bolshevik enemy might threaten inside Germany. Ethnic and class enemies were seen as jointly conspiring to found their own state over Germans. Of course, Jews were not actually seeking their own rival state (at least not in Europe), but they were seen as inspiring Slavs and Communists who were.
The Great Depression added economic discontents, and the Nazis swept into power not mainly because of anti-Semitism, but because they presented a plausible program of restoring economic growth by transcending class conflict, wrapped in organic nationalist rhetoric. The elections of the period 1928–32first saw a decline of the centrist liberal and special interest parties, with most of their votes going to conservative nationalists. The Nazis at first picked up lesser numbers. Then the conservatives began to lose ground, and the Nazis were the main beneficiaries. Unlike conservative nationalism, the Nazi variety seemed classless, popular, and so genuinely organic. Hitler promised strong leadership to knock the heads of all the classes and interest groups together, unify the nation, and make Germany great again. Though the Nazis played down anti-Semitism at election times, few doubted they would put pressure on the Jews, and many approved. Though the Nazis did not urge war, since this would have been very unpopular, most Germans expected and wanted them to reassert German power and recover the lost territories. So the Nazis rose up in free elections to acquire over a third of the votes, with only the socialists and Communists remaining as a substantial opposition. Since the remaining conservative parties had also radicalized to compete with Hitler, the Nazis effectively had a Reichstag majority, which
they used to engineer a more or less legal coup. The Nazis came to power through a democracy turning organic (see Mann,2004: chap.4). Then they immediately terminated democracy. But only a minority of Germans had ex- pected this beforehand, and most of them had voted socialist or Communist.
And even they did not expect a world war or genocide.
In some ways these elections resembled those of Serbia in1990–1. People voted for Hitler or Milosevic to a similar extent and for similarly varied rea- sons. Both appeared to have strong economic policies, and both expressed popular organic nationalism. Imperial revisionism and the rechanneling of class sentiments amid destabilized geopolitics and an economic crisis had made German nationalism thoroughly organic. Liberal and socialist notions of rule by a diverse people were initially defeated by democratic means by notions of organic rule. Then the winners destroyed democracy by force, en- suring that ethnonationalism would be expressed by racial fascism. Germany and Austria had thoroughly entwined the two senses of rule by the people – demosandethnos. Then the party of theethnosmurdered thedemos. It was a party dictatorship that was to perpetrate genocide.
Enhanced anti-Slav and anti-Semitic sentiments were not original to German nationalism, but were unintended by-products of its encounter with eastern geopolitical and transnational realities. In the Final Solution, Jews were not exterminated merely as Jews, but also because they become entan- gled in German struggles against others. Only in this indirect sense did Nazi genocide embody my third thesis: murderous cleansing threatens where two rival ethnic movements claim states over the same territory, each believing in the legitimacy and practicality of its claim. This only applies from the per- spective of the Nazis themselves, since Jews were not in reality conspiring to found their own state in German lands. But the Nazis believed Jews were behind Slav/Communist expansion. For this reason also, the Nazi case fits (indirectly again) into the mixed version of my fourth ethnic thesis. Threat- ened by the thought of a Jewish-fomented conspiracy of powers, the Nazis launched what they believed to be a preemptive strike against a weak group, Jews, to prevent Judeo-Bolshevism growing stronger in the future.
the scale of nazi genocide
In the last4years of its 12-year life, the Nazi regime caused the murders of approximately20million unarmed persons.1 Though Jews became the main victims, they comprised under a third of the total and their genocide occurred only well into the killing sequence. First came the escalating street, police, and concentration camp violence of Germany in the1930s – killing only a few thousand, but important in inuring and training perpetrators
1 No one can give an exact tally of the dead, either in total or for any of the groups of victims.
Rummel (1992) reviews many estimates and suggests that we use the midpoint of the more plausible ones. This calculation yields21million.
and the general population. This first phase was focused less on Jews than on German political opponents, especially on the left. This was essential in removing moderates from politics – as also occurred in the other cases of murderous cleansing. Though this was a politically aimed selective repres- sion, the political enemies were also castigated with organic, ethnic epithets, as “alien,” “un-German,” and so on. In1938Kristallnachtand the Austrian Anschlussbriefly focused Nazi fury on Jews, but in the following year this was overshadowed by the start of the first systematic killing in the so-called euthanasia project, code-named T4(after the Berlin address of its headquar- ters,4Tiergartenstrasse).
T4killed mentally retarded and disturbed Germans so that they would not have children. In all, perhaps250,000of these particularly helpless victims may have been murdered, a large percentage of all the mentally disabled persons within reach (Burleigh, 1994; de Mildt, 1996; Klee, 1983). This was genocide under the UN definition, though it was not ethnic genocide.
Biological-racial reasoning also led the Nazis to order the killings of “aso- cials” (including repeat criminals), homosexuals, and those with grievous birth defects or unusual physiques, like dwarves, supposedly introducing bi- ological impurities into the Aryan breeding stock. Their killing was erratic, leaving too many alive to be genocidal, but small non-Aryan ethnic minori- ties like Kashubians and Sorbians in Germany and Krimtchaks in the Crimea did suffer genocide.
Gypsies were also murdered after a delay. They confronted Nazis with an ideological dilemma. By 1939some leading Nazis viewed them as subhu- man, as they did Jews and Poles. Their roaming and supposed petty thievery got them alternatively classified as antisocials. Yet Nazi theorists recognized gypsies as of Aryan descent. Himmler suggested preserving the “ancient pu- rity” of their “stock” by segregating the “purer tribes” in reservations – until Martin Bormann (speaking for Hitler) silenced him. From late1942, gyp- sies at Auschwitz were shot, starved, worked to death, or perished in Josef Mengele’s ghastly experiments. Their systemic gassing began in 1944.
Gypsies in Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, the Netherlands, and Lithuania were mostly wiped out, as were three-quarters of Austrian and German gypsies.
But others were adept at evasion. Estimates of their dead are generally around 200,000–260,000, about a quarter of Europe’s gypsies, though defining who is a gypsy is difficult (Crowe,1996; Hancock,1996; H ¨oss et al.,1978:62–8;
Kenrick & Puxon,1972:183–4; Pearson,1983:200). There is much dispute about how genocidal this was. The intent was there but thwarted by an elu- sive quarry, so this was attempted genocide. It would have been accomplished had the Nazis won the war.
More Slavs were killed than anyone else (Hunczak, 1990: 122–4;
Kumanev, 1990: 140). In the 1939 conquest of Poland, the Nazis went beyond the bounds of even the most callous warfareof European history, discussed in Chapter2. Major General Lahousen testified after the war that the fuhrer had decreed dual military/civil control of occupied Poland to
accomplish “the extermination of the people” and “political field-clearing”
(Nuremberg Tribunal, 1946: VIII:588). The Nazis did kill almost all the highly educated Poles they could lay their hands on. SS General Berger urged:
“Better shoot two Poles too many than two too few. A savage country cannot be governed in a decent manner.” Just under3million non-Jewish Poles were killed, perhaps the most thorough20th-century case of politicide, the wip- ing out of an enemy elite. As Poles watched the extermination of the Jews, many believed that after the war they would be next for genocide (Gordon, 1984:101; Gutman,1990). Actually, the Nazis planned a more mixed fate for them –politicidefor up to a third,segregationfor another third, andwild deportationsinto Russia of the rest. The intended outcome was not quite genocide.
With the invasion of the Soviet Union in mid-1941, killing centered on Soviet civilians and Jews, at first mainly byEinsatzgruppen(“special forces”) shooting squads, then by combined SS, police, and Wehrmacht forces and in death camps. The Nazis killed6–7million non-Jewish Soviet civilians (nearly 4million Ukrainians, nearly 2million Belarussians, and1.5 million in the Russian Republic) plus3.3million Soviet POWs,57percent of all their Soviet POWs – compared to less than4percent of British and American POWs who died in German captivity (they were viewed by the Nazis as Aryans). About one-third of these Soviet civilians and POWs were shot or gassed; the rest were wastage, worked to death or simply not fed enough to avoid disease and starvation (Streit,1978:10). “Only” about15percent of Ukrainian non- Jews died in these ways, about10percent of Poles, and about 10percent of Belarussians – whereas90percent of Polish Jews died. But the absolute numbers are horrific. This was not quite genocide since there were too many Soviet Slavs to contemplate killing them all. Instead, the Nazi aim was to eliminate those who might conceivably oppose them (politicide), push vast numbers of the rest into central Asia in wild deportations, and then rule over the30percent remaining as helots in slavelike segregation. Russians were intended to suffer the same fate as Poles, but they were better equipped to resist.
The Italian writer Malaparte, traveling with the German forces, provides a graphic eyewitness account of the policy. In a ruined Ukrainian village, 118captured Russian soldiers were asked to read aloud fromPravda. Those who read best, they were told, would be given clerical jobs in the POW administration, an easier job than the quarrying awaiting those who failed.
Thirty-one passed this literacy test and stood in a group, “laughing content- edly” at their good fortune. They were then lined up against the nearest wall and shot. The sergeant in charge told Malaparte:
Russia must be cleared of all this learned rabble. The peasants and workers who can read and write too well are dangerous. They are all communists. (Malaparte,1946:
213–15).