Nazi ideology

Nazi ideology. The outbreak and course of the war were profoundly influenced by the ideological outlook of the Nazi leadership. Nazi ideology aimed at the building of a new social order in Germany to prepare the German nation for fighting; it laid emphasis on the racial or biological character of politics; and it contained the view that only through conflict with other races and nations could Germany prove itself worthy to establish a new German empire.

The ideas produced by Nazism were not particularly novel. They were derived from vulgar ideas about race and empire common to the radical right throughout Europe. Nazi thinkers such as Rosenberg were influenced by contemporary views rejecting democracy and liberal values, and calling instead for rule by a new authoritarian élite of ‘supermen’. These ideas were shaped by a widespread cultural pessimism, the belief that bourgeois Europe was doomed and that a new age was beckoning. Nazis shared the view that the world was a Darwinian jungle in which the fittest culture or race survived only through ceaseless struggle against other cultures and races. They were attracted to the popular geopolitical idea that a successful race would only survive in this struggle if it acquired Lebensraum (living space). The conquest of additional land would produce a proper balance between population and territory, and halt internal decline. Hitler distilled all this in his book Mein Kampf. No other Nazi writer was as influential as Hitler in setting the ideological goals of the movement both inside Germany and for the plethora of small pro-Nazi groups that sprang up in Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, and the Americas (see British Union, German–American Bund, and Ossewabrandwag, for example).

The first of these goals was the establishment of a new political and social order in Germany, the so-called ‘Third Way’ between decaying bourgeois capitalism and the growing threat of radical socialism. Nazis called this new order the Volksgemeinschaft (national community). It was distinguished by an authoritarian political system based on the ‘leadership principle’, where authority flowed downwards from the nation's leader and responsibility upwards from the racial ‘followers’. Society was no longer to be a class society but a corporative one, organized in estates and corporations, which would bind people to the national community and create a true sense of Germanness. Everything was to serve the interests of the Volk rather than those of the individual. This applied equally to German capitalism: though Hitler respected private property, the economy was to be controlled to serve political ends. The ultimate purpose was to create a community of racially pure Germans, loyal to their leader, who would meet the challenges of Germany's destiny in the historic struggle with other races.

The idea of race was central to the Nazi world view (Weltanschauung). Hitler believed that history was a constant process of racial struggle, like the struggle in nature. The main racial enemy was the Jew, who was regarded as the enemy of all races, sapping the vitality of the host nation and producing chaos and misery. The Jew came to symbolize for the Nazis all that they disliked in the world about them, unbridled modernization, international finance capitalism, international communism. Hitler saw the final struggle between Jew and German as a contest of world-historical proportions, a final reckoning with those responsible for Germany's downfall in the First World War. He did not exclude struggle with other races too, the Slavs in particular, who were regarded as Untermenschen (subhumans), fit only to be ruled by the master race, the Herrenrasse. Racial ideology had a number of implications. It led to the euthanasia programme in Germany, and the pursuit of a violent biological politics, directed against racial ‘undesirables’, homosexuals, prostitutes, the disabled, the mentally ill. For German Jews it led to their gradual exclusion from public life and the loss of civil rights, and, during the war, to extermination (see Final Solution).

The racial view of the world necessarily implied the idea of international struggle as well as internal ‘purification’. Nazis hoped to create a new order in world affairs as well as the new order at home. They saw war as a test of racial virility, and conflict with other races as historically inevitable. ‘Mankind has grown great in eternal war,’ wrote Hitler, ‘it would decay in eternal peace.’ He believed it was Germany's destiny to transcend the limitations imposed on it by the vengeful Allies in the Versailles settlement, and to seize its destiny, become the dominant power in Europe, and thence to achieve world power. This ambition required the conquest of ‘living-space’ for the master race through war against the Slavs in the east, who were led, Hitler believed, by the bitterest enemies of Germandom, Jews and Marxists. ‘If we want to rule,’ he once said, ‘we must first conquer Russia.’ Hitler saw Germany as a new Roman empire, extending firm rule over the subject races of Europe and Asia. There would be a racial hierarchy within the empire, with Germany at the top. The new imperial cities planned in Berlin, Nuremberg, Linz, and Vienna would demonstrate the triumph of Germanic culture. With Europe conquered in 1941 German leaders began to implement the ‘New Order’ in Europe, reorganizing the economy to serve German interests, murdering the Jews, and planning the exploitation of living-space in the east (see Germany, 4).

Historians are divided on the significance of Nazi ideology. It can be seen as a mere propaganda gloss for a political strategy that was opportunistic or shaped by circumstance. There was always a gulf in practice between ideological aims and social or military reality. The drive to get women back into the home, for example, could not be reconciled with the labour demands of rearmament. By 1939 there were more women working than in 1929. Popular protest obstructed the euthanasia programme and Nazi paganism. The invasion of the USSR in June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA) had a powerful ideological drive behind it, but its timing was governed as much by changes in Soviet policy in eastern Europe, and the need to acquire additional resources to fight the war in the west.

Nevertheless, there is strong evidence that by 1938, once Hitler had come to dominate decision-making, ideology did come to shape German political and military choices directly. The war against the USSR was an ideological war to smash ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’; the extermination of the Jews fulfilled the ideological imperative; a new political order was imposed by force on Germany after 1933, and then on Europe after 1940. From the late 1930s the more radical racists in the Nazi Party gradually assumed a greater political prominence, anxious to put the Führer's wishes into literal effect. Ideological conformity was enforced on the population, and dissent from ideological goals was violently penalized. Ideology supplied a broad frame of reference for the formulation and implementation of Nazi policies; acceptance of ideology became a crude litmus test of loyalty to the regime and the Führer; finally, ideology was used to legitimize wars of conquest and genocide. See also fascism.

Richard Overy

Bibliography

Jäckel, E. , Hitler's Weltanschauung (Middletown, Conn., 1972).
Cecil, R. , The Myth of the Master Race (London, 1972).
Herf, J. , Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1986).
Herzstein, R. E. , When Nazi Dreams Come True (London, 1982).