Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (18 page)

Even before 1933, the German state displayed an ability to organize repressive social policies with unusual efficiency. Special police units targeted the gypsies (helped by the 1926 Bavarian Law for the Combating of Gypsies, Travellers and the Workshy), while unemployed men were labelled as “workshy antisocials” and dragooned into militarized “comrade groups” to keep them off the streets. But after 1933, such actions were centralized and intensified, backed by the findings of racial scientists such as Dr. Ernst Rüdin, whose “thirty
years of research in psychiatric genealogy” provided the scientific justification for the new sterilization laws. The state financed the country’s leading Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Heredity and Eugenics, to which a young wartime researcher on their staff called Josef Mengele would send eyes and internal human organs back from his laboratory in Auschwitz.

Demographers and statisticians helped organize enormous surveys of criminal and medical records, while doctors, medical researchers and psychologists sat on the Hereditary Health Courts which gave verdicts on cases of sterilization. Criminal biologists conducted investigations into “criminal types,” traced their genealogies and built up data banks. Far from being regarded as unscientific and barbaric, such research was modern enough to interest leading policemen and lawmakers of other countries. Only the outbreak of war in 1939 prevented Sir Norman Kendal, head of Britain’s Scotland Yard, from taking up a German invitation to tour the Dachau concentration camp in order to study contemporary policing methods, and to hear Arthur Nebe, head of the Criminal Police, lecturing on new techniques of crime control.

The racial nature of the Nazi welfare state targeted above all the country’s Jews. They were gradually but systematically excluded from the “national community”—first dismissed from public employment, then subjected to economic boycott and deprived of the protection of the law. In 1935, the Nuremberg laws for the first time offered a systematic definition of being Jewish and turned Jews into subjects, not citizens: the criminalization of interracial sexual relations and the prohibition of mixed marriages followed swiftly. The systematic Aryanization of Jewish properties—notably in Vienna after the
Anschluss
in 1938—could also be seen as part of this coercive and exclusionary racial welfare programme: more apartments were obtained by Nazi Aryanization policies in the Austrian capital in three years than had been built by the Social Democrats in the 1920s.

The exclusion, persecution and eventual extermination of the Jews was the culmination of a social philosophy which based itself upon the protection of the
Volksgemeinschaft
—a racially defined national community. “[Weimar governments] failed in the case of community aliens,” wrote a Munich law professor in 1944. “They did not make
knowledge of eugenics and criminal biology the basis of sound welfare and criminal policies. Liberalistic thinking saw only the ‘rights’ of the individual, and was more concerned with the protection of rights vis-à-vis the state than with the well-being of the community. In National Socialism, the individual does not count so far as society is concerned.”
³⁴

The emergence of the German racial welfare state—which was in so many ways the apotheosis of very widespread trends in European social thought—inevitably provoked an intense debate elsewhere. The exclusion of entire groups from the benefits enjoyed by the “national community,” the definition of that community in terms of racial biology, the recourse to police repression and medical violence highlighted all the ambiguities present in European thinking about race.

In an age of empire and social Darwinism, notions of racial hierarchy were ubiquitous, and few Europeans on Left or Right did not believe in ideas of racial superiority in one form or another, or accept their relevance to colonial policy. So-called “scientific racism” was taken seriously and influenced public attitudes. Sir Harry Johnston, for instance, a British colonial commentator, had defended the new science of anthropology to the public in 1908 on the grounds that it would help the rulers of empire decide whether races should be preserved, allowed to interbreed, or forced to die out. German anthropologists who shaped SS racial policy in eastern Europe during the Second World War had begun their careers with scholarly articles on “race mixing” in pre-1914 colonial Africa and Asia, where their concerns were shared by British and French colleagues.
³⁵

On the other hand, the application—and in such a radical form—of these ideas inside Europe was another matter entirely. In general, the concept of race had an exceptionally amorphous and indeterminate meaning, and varied widely from one country to another. Hitler’s policies made it harder to avoid confronting and working out these ambiguities, especially as they coincided with new discoveries in genetics, serology and the causation of mental illness which cast doubt on earlier assumptions about the scientific foundations of racial thought.

In few countries was biological racism as central to the definition of the nation as it became in inter-war Germany. References to
la stirpe
(race) in Italy, or to “the health of the race” in Britain were usually vague ways of talking about historical communities, with little impact on policy. Italian eugenicists were, after all, in favour of racial mixing, which they believed led to “hybrid vigour,” while the British were more concerned about differential birth rates between classes. In France, the nation was defined mainly in terms of language and culture, in the Balkans in terms of language and religion. Racial prejudice and anti-Semitism were omnipresent but not necessarily decisive in shaping policy. To be sure, the Third Reich spawned imitators, and hardline racialist movements flourished in Poland and Hungary. In General Metaxas’s Greece, Jews were not allowed to enter the regime’s youth movement. In Fascist Italy, the 1938 racial laws led to hundreds of dismissals from the universities and the civil service. Yet none of this—not even in Italy—could be compared in extent or intensity with what was happening in Nazi Germany.

In France, bitterly polarized as few other countries were between Left and Right, the 1930s saw a strengthening of both racism and anti-racism. In the 1920s high levels of immigration—from Poland, Algeria and elsewhere—had been welcomed as one way of boosting the birth rate; but in the 1930s anti-immigrant sentiment grew and large crowds—among them the young François Mitterrand—demanded the deportation of the new arrivals. As in the USA and the UK earlier, racial issues were closely tied to calls for immigration controls against “aliens.” At the same time, tracts like René Martial’s 1934
La Race française
were countered by anti-racist journals like
Races et racisme
. It is, in fact, from this time that the concept of “racism” itself dates. Ludwig Hirszfeld, who together with his wife Hanna had pioneered research into blood types after the First World War, wrote to dissociate himself “from those who attach the blood groups to the mystique of race.”
³⁶

In Britain, the attack on scientific racism was still stronger, though it is not clear whether this was due to better public understanding of the scientific issues, to lower levels of inter-war immigration, a relatively weak and nebulous tradition of thinking about nationalism, or simply greater outright antipathy to trends in Nazi Germany. But
leading researchers into the causes of mental illness demolished the myth of the “social problem group,” and with it the mainstay of the hardline eugenicist case in Britain. At the same time, a group of left-wing scientists and intellectuals campaigned against scientific racism.
³⁷

Typical of the works produced in this spirit in the English-speaking world were Jacques Barzun’s
Race: A Study in Modern Superstition
and Ashley Montagu’s
Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race
. But the sharpest attack of all came in a book called
We Europeans: A Survey of “Racial” Problems
, which was a best-seller in 1936. Written by the biologist Julian Huxley with the elderly anthropologist A. C. Haddon,
We Europeans
was a ferocious assault on what its authors described as the “pseudo-science of ‘racial biology.’ ” Huxley himself was a confirmed believer in eugenics, who felt Nazi racism had done the movement much harm. He underlined the vagueness of the term “race” and cast doubt on the existence of such a thing as “racial group sentiment” (a concept beloved not only by the Nazis but by British racial anthropologists such as Sir Arthur Keith). Huxley observed sarcastically:

Our German neighbours have ascribed to themselves a teutonic type that is fair, long-headed, tall and virile. Let us make a composite picture of a typical Teuton from the most prominent exponents of this view. Let him be as blond as Hitler, as dolichocephalic as Rosenberg, as tall as Goebbels, as slender as Goering and as manly as Streicher. How much would this resemble the German ideal?
³⁸

In common with other British researchers of the time, Huxley and Haddon insisted that there were no “pure races” in the biological sense in Europe. Environment, they argued, was more important than heredity in shaping the sense of communal identity, and they recommended using the term “ethnic group” rather than “race,” as the former lacked the latter’s misleading biological associations. But their book ended with a sombre warning:

The violent racialism to be found in Europe today is a symptom of Europe’s exaggerated nationalism: it is an attempt to justify nationalism on a non-nationalist basis, to find a firm basis in objective science for ideas and policies which are generated internally by a particular economic and political system, and have real relevance only in reference to that system. The cure for the racial myth, with its accompanying self-exaltation and persecution of others, which now besets Europe, is a re-orientation of the nationalist ideal, and in the practical sphere, an abandonment of claims by nations to absolute sovereign rights. Meanwhile, however, science and the scientific spirit can do something by pointing out the biological realities of the ethnic situation, and by refusing to lend her sanction to the absurdities and horrors perpetrated in her name. Racialism is a myth and a dangerous myth at that.
³⁹

It was in the Second World War that Sir William Beveridge offered his “welfare state” as a contrast to the Nazi “warfare state.” But between the two world wars, welfare and warfare were intimately connected, and social policies to improve population numbers and health reflected the anxieties of nation-states keen to defend or reassert themselves in a world of enemies. The Second World War fostered a new international anti-racist consensus, which was bolstered by new discoveries in genetics, marshalled by politically committed scientists such as Huxley, and reinforced by the knowledge of what Nazi policies had ultimately led to. All of this helped discredit attitudes which had been commonplace in the inter-war era. In Europe, a belief in scientific racism only lingered on among some anthropologists and social scientists in central Europe, who continue to see “long-skulled” and “big-boned” racial types around them to this day. But this is a relatively peripheral group with little impact on social policy. In general, it is now hard for us—living in a more individualistic world—to appreciate how far many welfare policies of the post-war decades grew out of a very different set of concerns about the decline, degeneration and reinvigoration of the nation and the race.
⁴⁰

FOUR

The Crisis of Capitalism

Father used to joke a lot in those days. But after two years the picture changed. One day father came home looking downcast. Mother looked at him and knew what had happened. He had lost his job … Now my father has been unemployed for over three years. We used to believe he would get a job again one day, but now even we children have given up all hope
.

—HANNA S. (FOURTEEN YEARS OLD), DECEMBER 1932
¹

“This house sees more hope in Moscow than Detroit.”
—MOTION DEBATED AT THE CAMBRIDGE UNION, 1932

“It was as if someone had picked up the world and shaken it into utter confusion,” wrote the novelist Sholem Asch. “There were no permanent values. What were paper or diamonds, gold, houses or factories? A transient illusion, a fleeting gleam, a dissolving fantasy.”
²
After the Great War, Europe’s economic life was in chaos; in Poland, four currencies were in use simultaneously; “starving Vienna” had been turned into a “giant city” in a dwarf country and its streets were filled with refugees and hungry former imperial civil servants: by the summer of 1922 the Austrian crown stood at 83,600 to the dollar. Prices everywhere were hundreds or thousands of times higher than before the war. The Greek government pioneered a new approach to taxation by calling in all banknotes, cutting them in half and returning only half to their original owners. But matters were not much better in western Europe, where a brief post-war boom quickly petered out, leaving more than two million unemployed in Britain alone. In 1923 Weimar Germany was rocked by hyperinflation, the same year that
both Hitler and the communists tried to seize power by force: the prospects for reconstructing capitalism in Europe looked bleak.