Kaiser's Holocaust (45 page)

Of all the theories to come from the nineteenth-century world of Social Darwinism and scientific racism, the one Hitler accepted most unquestioningly was Friedrich Ratzel’s
Lebensraum
theory. Hitler was probably well versed in the principles of
Lebensraum
theory long before his incarceration but, as with a range of other ideas that became central to Nazi ideology, he was able to explore it further at Landsberg Castle. Before he had become embroiled in the Nazi party, Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess had been the protégé of the foremost living authority on
Lebensraum
theory and the work of Friedrich Ratzel: Professor Karl Haushoffer. Haushoffer lectured in geopolitics at the University of Munich, and at one point had appealed to Hess to abandon politics and return to his studies. The evidence suggests that, while in prison, Hitler read Haushoffer’s theories and discussed them with Hess. After the war Haushoffer claimed that Hitler had read Ratzel’s
Political Geography
while at Landsberg.
13

Professor Haushoffer is known to have visited his former pupil Hess and Hitler in Landsberg. Speaking years later, Haushoffer recalled discussing
Lebensraum
theory, claiming that ‘Hitler never understood these things and did not have the right outlook for understanding them.’ Haushoffer also stated that during his visits he had always made special efforts to avoid being left alone with Hitler. ‘I always had the feeling’, he told an interviewer, ‘that he felt the distrust of a semi-educated person towards a scientifically educated person.’
14

Whether or not Hitler was inspired by Haushoffer and Hess, or took his ideas directly from Ratzel, it is clear that the notion of
Lebensraum
, as outlined in
Mein Kampf
, was little different from that of the Pan-Germans or Second Reich colonialists like Paul Rohrbach. Like them, he believed that nations were
essentially organisms whose health was determined by their ability to expand. Borders, in Hitler’s view, were mere lines on maps. The limit of a people’s geographic spread was determined by their racial vitality.

In 1923 Hitler believed that Germany’s future
Lebensraum
lay in the East, the lands from which her armies had so recently been expelled. He regarded his crusade for
Lebensraum
as the continuation of a tradition of German conquest and colonisation of the East that had begun in the thirteenth century and been briefly revived during World War I. There was, however, one critical grain of originality in the way Hitler viewed the East and its people. In World War I, the most prominent supporters of Eastern colonisation, including General von Ludendorff, the Pan-Germanic League and the various nationalist movements, had envisioned an Eastern empire in which the Slavic and Jewish peoples would be rendered economically dependent and culturally subservient to Germany. Germany’s role in the East had been one of
Kulturträger
– the bringers of culture and civilisation. The introduction of German
Kultur
in the East would help raise the Poles, Ukrainians and Baltic peoples from their current state of backwardness and lethargy. Hitler’s vision was profoundly different. He cast people of the East into racial categories devised in the nineteenth century, giving them the status of ‘colonial peoples’ – a term Hitler used to describe the Ukrainians.

Before the German
Volk
could take on the great task of creating ‘living space’ in Russia and apply Hitler’s racial policy to the Slavs and Jews, they would need to undergo a process of racial purification. The degenerate, defective and alien elements that had, in Hitler’s view, contaminated the Aryan bloodline had to be weeded out. The Reich was to be purged of the weak, and foreign races would have to be driven out or prevented from breeding with Germans. The National Socialist state, Hitler declared in
Mein Kampf
, ‘must set race in the centre of all life’.
15

Like much of Hitler’s core ideology, his dream of a racial state was in large part unoriginal. The Pan-Germanic League and the Deutschbund, two of the most influential
Völkisch
societies of the Second Reich, had, in the late nineteenth century, declared their determination to keep ‘fighting intermarriage with non-Aryans’.
16
Hitler believed that medical and racial science had advanced to such a point that it was now possible in a practical sense to forge a state in which the racially undesirable and the weakest in society could be excluded from the German bloodline. In his quest for evidence to substantiate this vision and for inspiration as to how it might be realised, Hitler turned to the pseudo-science of race hygiene – the Germanic strain of Francis Galton’s science of eugenics. Hitler’s search for scientific legitimacy again brought him into contact with the men of the lost colonial empire and the ideas that had been partly developed in Africa.

German race hygiene was born in 1895 when Alfred Ploetz had published
The Foundations of Racial Hygiene
. In 1904, the year Germany had begun her war to annihilate the Herero people, Ploetz had helped launch the eugenics journal
The
Archives of Race Science and Social Biology
, a periodical which was published by Julius Lehman’s family company. In 1923, as Hitler began to draft
Mein Kampf
, Julius Lehman re-enters our story. Following his arrest as a member of the Kampfbund Thule in 1919, Lehman had been briefly imprisoned, and was incarcerated when a fellow Thule Society member, Anton Drexler, founded the German Workers’ party. On his release, Lehman quickly joined the party in 1920 and even published some of its early propaganda literature.
17
By 1923 he had become one of the wealthy patrons who helped bankroll the party. Lehman had also developed close personal links to Hitler himself. Unlike many of Hitler’s other influential backers, Lehman was willing to get his hands dirty and had even played a marginal role in the Beer Hall Putsch, allowing his villa to be used to hold hostage a group of Bavarian government officials whom Hitler needed out of the way for the duration.
18

The year Hitler was sent to Landsberg Castle, Lehman’s publishing house was busy producing the second edition of what fast became the most influential German book on race hygiene and biological racism.
Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene
was cowritten by Erwin Baur, Fritz Lens and Eugen Fischer. Fischer’s chapters were based on his research into the Rehoboth Basters in South-West Africa. The book had been warmly received and well reviewed in Germany, translated into English for wider publication and had helped advance the careers and reputations of all three of its authors. For Eugen Fischer,
Human Heredity and
Racial Hygiene
was the first step in his journey to becoming one of the most powerful figures in Nazi racial science.

Fischer’s contribution to the book set his study of the Rehoboth Basters within the context of a wider survey of the various racial types of humanity, as he categorised them. Fischer argued that for the highest races to mix with the lowest was a degenerative act, a pollutant that threatened the health of the higher race. To address this acute danger, Fischer and his coauthors suggested that a programme of positive selective breeding was needed. This would help purify the Aryan race and accentuate its inherently noble qualities and innate talents, creating a true and undiluted Master Race.

While he was in Landsberg, Hitler was given a copy of
Human
Heredity and Racial Hygiene
by Julius Lehman. Historians have long argued that
Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene
helped shape Hitler’s views of race and racial purity, and one of the authors, Fritz Lens, was himself utterly convinced that the book had been one of the key influences on Hitler as he wrote
Mein
Kampf
. In 1931 Lens claimed that ‘many passages in it [
Human
Heredity and Racial Hygiene
] are mirrored in Hitler’s expressions’.
19
Although there is much in the book that Hitler might have disagreed with, if he read his copy he would have surely taken from it, as always, only those passages that supported his own opinions.

Hitler’s personal copy of
Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene
survived the war. It is housed in the rare books division of the
US Library of Congress. The dedication to Hitler, written by Lehman on the frontispiece, reads: ‘To Adolf Hitler, the primary fighter for the meaningful recognition of the race question as the most important cornerstone in our deepening knowledge.’
20

When the Nazis came to power in January 1933, they set out to rule Germany according to the twin principles at the heart of their revolution: the expansion of German living space and the creation of a pure Aryan ‘racial state’. Both of these projects would involve the revival of practices, concepts and theories that had been developed in Germany’s former African empire. Soldiers and scientists whose careers began on the pastoral deserts of South-West Africa or in the killing fields of East Africa, Togo and Cameroon were to play leading roles in the Nazi tragedy.

The other legacy of the Kaiser’s lost empire that was exploited by the Nazi regime was the powerful sense of nostalgia for the colonies that infused inter-war Germany. Much of this nostalgia was focused on the memory of German South-West Africa and the era of the ‘settler paradise’ between the Herero and Nama genocides and World War I. Alongside pro-colonialist tracts and pamphlets, a number of popular novels and memoirs were written between the wars by both former settlers and their ideological supporters. Many of these books glamorised the lives of the men and women who had made their homes amid the vast spaces of the south-west. This potent image became linked to a profound and widespread bitterness over the confiscation of Germany’s empire at Versailles. These sentiments were skilfully manipulated by Nazi propagandists to connect the memory of the lost colonies to the party’s incessant efforts to convince the German people of the
Lebensraum
theory and the need for German territorial expansion.

Although acquisition of
Lebensraum
was central to Hitler’s grand vision, it could be seized only through war, for which
Germany was ill prepared until the late 1930s. By contrast, forging what Hitler described as a state that placed ‘race in the centre of all life’ was a task that could begin almost immediately.
1
The party turned to a generation of German race scientists, eugenicists and anthropologists, many of whom had been trained in the colonial institutes or were veterans of field expeditions to the former colonies. Most, though not all, of these scientists embraced the Nazi revolution with palpable enthusiasm, as did their colleagues in medicine, engineering, geography and a host of other disciplines. The research these men and women had carried out on the peoples of Africa and Asia was used to lay the scientific foundations of the ‘racial state’. Those scientists whose work best supported the party’s central racial theories were rewarded with power and money. Their institutes and research programmes received lavish funding and party apparatchiks attended their lectures. The most prominent became wealthy, celebrated figures and were encouraged to apply their theories on race and purity in ever more radical ways. Ultimately they were given the power of life and death over their fellow citizens, and later over the peoples of Eastern Europe.

In an ‘Appeal to the German People’ issued on 31 January 1933, the day after the Nazis came to power, Hitler claimed that the Nazi state would ‘not recognise classes but only German people’. The new Führer demanded that his people enter into a pact of ‘mutual reconciliation’.
2
Through such a process the old divisions of class and regional affiliation were, on the surface at least, to be expunged. The only social divisions that would remain in the new Germany were those of race and blood. These fissures were to be widened, made absolute and inviolable.

When designing the laws needed to create the ‘racial state’ and persecute those the regime defined as ‘non-Aryan’, the Nazis found a number of definitions and legal precedents, along with a whole lexicon of racial terminology, in legislation passed in
Germany’s former colonies. Aspects of laws that had been designed to secure the racial privileges of white settlers in Africa were adapted by Nazi lawmakers and applied to the German nation itself.

The largest group whose bloodline the Nazis sought to extricate from that of the German
Volk
were the Jews. Since the late nineteenth century, various
Völkisch
movements had campaigned for a prohibition against mixed marriages between Jews and ‘Germans’, on the grounds that Jews were biologically separate and an ‘alien’ race. In May 1933, just three months into the Third Reich, Minister of Justice Franz Gürtner called for an initial investigation into how a law to ban mixed marriages might practicably work. It was not until September 1935, at the end of a summer during which Nazi street thugs had attacked Jews known to be married to Aryans, that the party finally acted.

The new laws were formally announced by Hitler at the 1935 party rally in Nuremberg. The Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour were known as the Nuremberg Laws. The former defined those of German blood as
Reichsbürger
(Reich citizens). The latter forbade Jews from marrying or having sexual relations with
Reichsbürger
. As the Nuremberg Laws also applied to the other racial groups caught in the dragnet of the racial state – ‘Negroes’ and Gypsies – the same terms, definitions and laws were also applied to them.

The earliest precedents the Nazi legal experts looked to when drafting the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour were the laws banning intermarriage passed in German South-West Africa in 1906. Similar sanctions had later been introduced in German East Africa in 1906 and German Togo in 1908.
3

In drafting the supplementary decrees to the Nuremberg Laws, the party’s lawmakers also adopted a term first used in the colonies’ race laws –
Mischlinge
, of mixed race. The
Mischlinge
concept provided the lawyers and civil servants with both a conceptual framework and quasi-legal terminology, allowing them to
formulate a system by which Germany’s ancient Jewish community, with its deep and complex roots, could be classified, isolated and ultimately extracted. Among the race scientists whose work was quoted by civil servants drafting the Nuremberg Laws were Eugen Fischer and his erstwhile co-author, Fritz Lens.
4

Other terms that had first been applied in the drafting of colonial racial laws seeped into Nazi racial legislation and public discourse during the 1930s: the notion of
Rassenschande
(racial shame) and
Bastardisation
were both transmitted in this way. The censures imposed on German citizens who contravened the new race laws were very similar to those pioneered in Germany’s African colonies. In the same way that settlers who maintained relations with African women in South-West Africa had been disenfranchised and denied financial assistance, Germans whose spouses were of ‘lesser racial value’ – a term which included those with hereditary diseases – were denied certain tax benefits, child benefits and income tax relief by the Nazi state.
5

In February 1941 Dr Oskar Hintrager, the former Deputy Governor of German South-West Africa, published a three-page article in the
Illustrated Colonial and Foreign News
in which he suggested that Germany’s colonies had allowed the Reich the opportunity to see the dangers of racial mixing at first hand. It had been ‘a good experience for the Volk to possess colonies’, Hintrager claimed. ‘Among colonial Germans the experience of living with other races underscored the importance of race itself; the most important lesson was that mixed marriages between white men and coloured women have appalling results and must, for many reasons, be utterly condemned.’
6

The Nuremberg Laws, although regarded as race laws, in fact defined ‘Jewishness’ according to the religious affiliation of the individual and their ancestors. A medical or biological test to determine Jewishness had yet to be developed. For the state to determine and record the racial status and genetic health of every individual, through medical, physiological examination, a considerable infrastructure of laws, training and institutions was required. Here again the Nazi regime drew on the expertise of
the generation of race scientists, anthropologists and eugenicists, many of whom had learned their skills and acquired their knowledge in the lost colonial empire.

German race science had flourished in the years leading up to World War I. As military control over the various subject peoples of the empire had tightened, the colonies had been opened up to the scientists of Germany’s booming universities, institutes and museums. This was a process that had been energetically championed by Friedrich von Lindequist in his role as Secretary of the Colonial Department. In the first decades of the twentieth century, aspects of German racial science and aspects of the research carried out in the colonies became fused with ideas and principles taken from eugenics. In the 1920s and 1930s, German ‘race hygiene’ became increasingly influenced by the ideas and research of eugenicists in the United States, where eugenics laws had been passed in several states, a development that was praised by Hitler.

When the Nazis seized power, the most important institute dedicated to the racial sciences and eugenics in Germany was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics, situated in Dahlem, a leafy suburb of Berlin. The directors of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lens, who with Erwin Baur had co-authored
Human Heredity
and Racial Hygiene
. The other director was Otmar von Verschuer, who specialised in the study of twins and with whom Fischer worked closely.

The Eugen Fischer of 1933 was a very different man from the ambitious field scientist in his mid-thirties who had travelled to Rehoboth in 1908. Now almost sixty, Professor Fischer was arguably the most respected racial anthropologist in Germany. His academic reputation, initially founded upon his supposedly groundbreaking study on the Basters of Rehoboth, was inter national, and his work had been published in both Britain and
the United States. He enjoyed strong personal links with the key players in the powerful American eugenics movement and was able to attract funds from their wealthy supporters.

Even though Hitler had probably read
Human Heredity and
Racial Hygiene
while writing
Mein Kampf
, Fischer had not been immediately embraced by the Nazis. Not only had he conspicuously failed to join the party, but his theories on race, and on the Jews in particular, were not fully in accordance with Nazi doctrine. Early in 1933 Fischer was called to a meeting at the SS Office of Population and Genetic Health, during which he seems to have been persuaded to support the party. Although he never fully jettisoned his ideas that clashed with Nazi ideology, Fischer became a fervent and vocal supporter of the new order and eventually a party member. His willingness to participate in the racial revolution was amply demonstrated in 1933 when Fischer wrote a paper stating that racial mixing between Jews and Germans was damaging the German race and suggesting that laws be devised to prevent it. On becoming Rector of the University of Berlin in July, he used his inaugural lecture to declare his support for the Nazis and oversaw the dismissal of all Jews from the university’s staff. In 1934 he began teaching anthropology to SS doctors at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.