Nazism

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NAZISM.

NAZISM: A BELIEF-SYSTEM
NAZISM AS MILITANT ACTIVISM
NAZISM AS STATE-SPONSORED MURDER
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nazism constitutes one of the most studied phenomena of twentieth-century Europe. Philosophers, historians, and sociologists have all theorized on the causes of this multifaceted movement whose concrete dimensions unfolded on various planes. But trying to describe Nazism is like trying to fit the pieces together of a complex puzzle: How to account for a phenomenon whose nature concerned ideology, political militancy, and government practice all at the same time? How to encapsulate in these three poles its militant activism, the reactionary nature of German society, and the regime-driven policy choices that resulted in the Nazi rise to power in 1933? How, finally, to write the history of what began as a völkisch minor mass movement from Munich in the aftermath of World War I that would later grow to encompass all of Europe, from the Pyrenees to the Arctic Circle, from the Caucasus Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean?

Reconstructing the story in chronological order necessarily begins with an image of Nazism as a belief-system open to ever-increasing numbers of militants, who made it their own in extremely diverse ways. Next, attention would need to be drawn to understanding how the militant movements that drew on these ideas were regulated by a fundamentally racist ideology into an organization whose quest for power in Germany was launched in the late 1920s. Only then would an exploration begin of state-sponsored Nazism bent on European conquest, and whose main objective was to build a thousand-year reign out of iron, fire, conquest, domination, and extermination.

NAZISM: A BELIEF-SYSTEM

The root of Nazism as a belief-system was racial determinism. Nazi racism was determinist because it endowed the factor of biology with the power to create reality; racism served as a filter conditioning its entire outlook. Nazism was a biological grid for reading history, the world, and one's self.

The reference point for this Nazi reading of the world was furnished by the racial theories of Hans F. K. Günther (1891–1968), the Jena anthropologist whose system for describing European phenotypes was adopted by the Nazi Party in the early 1930s, after a series of debates whose intensity is worth noting. Güntherian analysis was made using racial types, which were identifiable based on groupings of both "intellectual and physical" characteristics shared by the individuals belonging to them. After having identified the concept, Günther immediately deduced that it was virtually impossible to pinpoint an actually existing "impervious human group" with a racially pure lineage: "All the peoples of the West," he wrote, "are composed of racially mixed populations in which all, or at least many, of the races of Europe are present in fixed proportions" (pp. 10–11). According to Günther, therefore, the difference between nations was grounded in the combinations that resulted from miscegenation, which produced a clear-cut hierarchical scale: each nation had its strengths and its weaknesses, each people a vocation. The world was thus an aggregate of races whose (conflictual) relations formed the stage of global history. In this sense Nazism would not rest content to merely read the world—it became its own historical tale to tell: a tale of racial conflict and the emergence thereby of the superior race.

Nazi racial fundamentalism produced a historical discourse whose importance has often been grossly underestimated. Indeed even though some historians seek the origins of Nazism in ancient history, the sharply honed analysis the Nazis themselves made of World War I and its consequences has been largely passed over in silence, despite the fact that it constitutes the heart of the Nazi belief-system itself. Nazi racial scientists viewed World War I as an unprecedented demographic catastrophe for Germany. The nation's Nordic racial core was slowly being endangered by neighboring races that comprised the world of enemies exposed by World War I. In this sense, Nazism fashioned itself into an apocalyptic discourse that fostered the spread of anxiety throughout German society about the threat posed by other, hostile races.

Nazism, however, was not destined to remain an anxiety-provoking discourse on history. Clearly its discourse explained Germany's World War I defeat in terms of racial hatred, but it also lent the movement a mission: to finally purge Germany of the scourge of encirclement, to reverse the world order laid out in the Treaty of Versailles (1919), and to forge a new society based on hope and racial fraternity out of the ruins of enemy states organized into a Europe-wide racial empire. Racial fundamentalism, the core of the Nazi belief-system, thus assumed a dual-role in the minds of its activists: on the one hand it mobilized and gave expression to a powerful political anxiety, but it also lent credence to a utopian vision by giving direction to history and making it possible to envision the future of the Thousand-Year Reich . Perhaps it was this transformation of an unspeakable anxiety into an ineffable utopia that explains the sheer force of the belief this ideology engendered in its activists' minds.

NAZISM AS MILITANT ACTIVISM

The structure of Nazi ideology may be viewed through lenses other than the work of philosophers and historians, although this approach already gave some indication of the extent to which its dogmas were refashioned in numerous and diverse ways by the activist individuals and groups who adhered to the Nazi system of thought. In fact as this dogma was progressively realized, it devolved into a series of diverse militant organizations that played a fundamental part in the evolution of the political role Nazism would eventually assume. Founded in the early 1920s, the National Socialist German Workers Party, or NSDAP, long remained a small movement among thousands of others, in a nebulous underground of völkische groups that testified to both an extreme vitality and a certain form of clandestine practice. Although the NSDAP's emergence as a mass movement drew initially from its reserves among the ethno-nationalist elites, it was nonetheless a watershed event in the evolution of the völkische forces, to which it lent a structure and strategy for the acquisition of power. The NSDAP brought these radical nationalist forces together under the same federal umbrella by driving them to internalize the different elements of the Nazi belief-system, and thereby structured the movement to be able in due course to encompass the whole of German society.

The NSDAP in the early years of its creation remained one small group among many, and the chaotic and futile challenge to power, known as the Munich putsch of 1923, could have spelled total disaster for it. But the method Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) developed, during his time in prison after the putsch, of seeking power through legal means, and the party's electoral successes during the years 1927–1931, rendered the Nazi strategy ever more attractive. Originally conceived as a mass movement, the NSDAP began to spawn local and national institutions headed by general and regional leadership committees, known as Reichsleitung and Gauleitungen respectively, which were run by the party's dignitaries. In Berlin for example, Josef Goebbels forged the party's regional direction and made it into one of the movement's power centers. However at the most local level, the NSDAP nourished a mass of activist functionaries whose recruitment and propaganda work became part and parcel of everyday social life in a host of towns and villages. From 1928 to 1933, Party membership went from 150,000 to 500,000 members. In 1935, the NSDAP numbered 2.5 million and had grown to 5.4 million on the eve of World War II. Although the party remained in certain respects an organ of militant activism in 1933, it soon became a tool for the supervision, management, and mobilization of German society. Before 1933 it had spearheaded the electoral campaigns that served as the Nazis' primary means for acquiring political power. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, the party was transformed into a simple conduit for the transmission of mass mobilization slogans issued by the propaganda ministry. This transformation was also true of the first Nazi paramilitary organization, the SA (Sturmabteilung). Despite the fact that it was the primary means for winning the battle with communists and others in working-class neighborhoods, the SA, which counted more than 500,000 members in 1933 and more than 3 million one year later, grew to a point that it was far too dangerous for the party to leave as it was. The outcome was the massacre of 30 June 1934, marked by the execution of virtually all the leaders of its paramilitary corps. Instead, the SA was transformed into an agency limited primarily to crowd control. Thus in the space of just a few short years during the period of the Nazi rise to power, the militant organizations whose effectiveness had been so legendary at silencing opponents and securing a stage for the party's expression—including through the use of violent combat in the streets—were changed into agencies of supervision, surveillance, and mobilization once that acquisition was complete.

The fact also remains that National Socialism styled itself as a reformist movement, with the goal of creating a racially purified Volksgemeinschaft (racial community) where the "class struggle" would be overcome, and whose core values of brotherhood and mutual aid would be the principles of social interaction. This plan was embodied in a second and relatively more widespread form of activism that went beyond formal membership in the NSDAP. Two groups, the National Socialist Volunteers (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, or NSV) and the National Socialist Winter Aid Society (Winter Hilfswerk, or WHW), along with a multitude of satellite organizations, produced the image of a society that cared for the poor, that came together in corporate entities and, in short, forged a set of social bonds. No doubt the drive toward supervision was a factor in the work of these Nazi organizations. However the fact remains that the large sums collected by NSV campaigns, and the sheer number of its members, demonstrate that this idea of mutual aid and solidarity (put into effect in a society in which racial purity had come to represent an obvious and indispensable prerequisite), went beyond the framework of political adherence, and constituted a locus of activism in its own right whose sources should not be underestimated. By 1939 some 16 million people had already participated in NSV campaigns redistributing nearly 2.5 billion reichsmarks.

Finally there was a third and lasting form of militant activism evident in the National Socialist movement. This form was represented by the SS (Schutzstaffel), founded in 1925. It was an organization that grew rapidly, particularly after the party assumed power in 1933. Nevertheless its leader Heinrich Himmler kept a strong hand on its growth, and issued recruitment guidelines that were both racial and social in nature. Although these criteria were not adhered to strictly, they did serve to preserve an image of the SS as the Third Reich's elite.

Whereas the NSDAP and the SA constituted working class–dominated mass movements, the SS was composed mainly of middle-class and upper-class men. In a way it was a cultural elite; in another respect, it was a body to represent German racial purity. The SS drew, throughout the Third Reich's history, on a reserve of young graduates from the bourgeoisie and middle classes, who were university educated and almost without exception won over by Nazi and völkische views.

Thus Nazi militant activism came to be embodied in a multitude of organizations that each enjoyed a measure of relative success, and that recruited from different elements of the German social body. The NSDAP, the SA, and the corporatist organizations attracted and funneled the working-class and rural masses, drawn to the Nazi discourse of fraternity and solidarity that animated its charity organizations. The incontestable success of these groups indicates the degree to which this version of Nazism reached an audience composed of a much larger fraction of the German population, stretching well beyond the conservative and völkische militant activists.

NAZISM AS STATE-SPONSORED MURDER

The NSDAP's formal rise to power on 30 January 1933 was not the result of a legislative victory, but of truly political calculations intended to allow career-members of the Weimar Republic's ministries to remain part of the new regime. The NSDAP had been the largest party in the Reichstag since 1931 in terms of numbers of representatives, and the Conservatives were attempting to limit its influence by associating it with a regime in which the Nazis were not in the majority. Hitler played the part of the inexperienced Führer, and the conservatives thought they had tricked him into playing into their hands. One year later however, anything Germany might have called a potential opposition force had been destroyed, and the NSDAP was the sole arbiter of the instruments of state. Historians of the functionalist school have carefully studied the dynamics of Nazi governmental policies, including the role of the dictator, the charismatic aspect of his domination, the phenomenon of anticipatory obedience it generated, the proliferation of extraordinary institutions, and the Nazi propensity to transform institutions from their traditional functions.

The result of these fundamental elements of Hitlerian state-sponsored governance when taken as a whole is what historians, following Hans Mommsen, have dubbed "cumulative radicalization"—a state practice founded on racial ideology, claiming for itself the mission of regenerating Germany and offering it the space it needed to forge an empire of a thousand years. To move these two axes of development forward however, the Nazis first needed to lift the fatal curse of World War I. Every policy of the new German regime was oriented toward this obsession and its prerequisites.

The first order of business therefore, once the assumption of power was assured and society had been effectively controlled by the militant organizations, was to undo the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles. This task was dependent on the foreign secretary, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and a diplomatic corps staffed by the traditional German elites, although they received almost all their direction from the impulses and opportunism of Hitler himself. From 1935 to 1939 the Nazis remilitarized the Rhineland; annexed Austria, the Sudetenland, and Czechoslovakia without firing a shot; and laid plans to recover the western provinces lost to a reconstituted Poland in 1918. As is well known it was this final episode, this last bluff, that led Britain and France to declare war against Germany. For the Nazis however this was a direct continuation of World War I, a war that drove the Nazi imaginary to its zenith—and the lay of the land in early 1941, after massive victories in the west, suggested indeed that the curse of 1918 had been lifted. Poland and France had been brought to their knees, Paris was occupied, Great Britain seemed to be in no condition to cause any serious harm. The hour appeared to have arrived for the realization of Germany's regeneration, for the utopia itself to be completed.

That meant occupying the eastern territories and invading the Soviet Union (USSR). In the eyes of the Nazi racist fundamentalists, the USSR was the place where the confrontation with the Reich's apocalyptic enemies would take place, because it was there that its racial and political enemies were the most completely fused. It was there as well that the vital space needed for the Nazi Empire's Thousand-Year Reich was to be conquered.

This conjunction of a racialized apocalyptic image of the enemy and utopian war objectives led the Nazi hierarchy to conceive the war with the Soviet Union from the outset as a war of annihilation. For the Nazis, whose occupation policies in the already acquired Polish territories aimed at Germanification, and whose murderous nature was being carried out on the ground every day, the Soviet population would henceforth have to be subjected to wholesale decimation. The demographic catastrophe would be so complete that the Soviet territories would be emptied and made available to Nordic colonization. According to the Wehrmacht's logistical calculations, which agreed with those made by SS demographers and the officers of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA), "dozens of millions of individuals" would have to be starved to death. Even in its early planning stages, Nazi policies envisaged extermination, and it was in the Soviet Union that the practices used to exhaustively eliminate Jewish populations were first put into effect. Shortly after the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen, or special killing groups, began massacring Russian Jewish women and children. By December 1941, a sizable portion of these communities had already disappeared behind enormous firing lines such as the one at Babi Yar on the outskirts of Kiev.

The cumulative radicalization of the Nazi regime was marked by the decision Hitler took in 1941, at a date historians still debate, to exterminate all of the Jews of Europe. Following an initial planning phase involving experimentation with different methods of extermination by gas, the Nazi genocidal machine went into full gear in early May 1942. The program culminated at its highest point with the killing of ten thousand Jews per day in the gas chambers of Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. All told, more than five million Jews fell victim to Nazi state-sponsored extermination.

However by the summer of 1944 the situation on the ground had also developed in a way the Nazis had always feared. They were now fighting a war on two fronts: on the west with the United States and Britain, who invaded in June, and on the east, the de facto main front, with the Soviet army, which had already decisively pierced through German lines and was inexorably headed toward its territory. From the Nazi standpoint the accomplishment of a utopia was no longer in question, but what was more likely was the physical disappearance of the Nordic race under the blows of the "Asiatic hordes." Immense waves of apocalyptic thinking and fear engulfed the final months of the Nazi state's existence, months during which the Wehrmacht raised an increasingly hopeless resistance against the advancing Red Army, which was little disposed to spare the German civilian populations it encountered, given the heavy losses it had suffered and the savagery of the Germans' own occupation policies in the East. Instead of the dream of colonizing the territories of the East, there unfolded the nightmare of an exodus of German populations whom the national sanctuary could no longer safeguard.

The nightmare ended on 8 May 1945, with the capitulation of the German armed forces. The Third Reich had been decimated, and its primary leaders were either dead, on the run, or in prison and awaiting trial. In these trials, the Allies judged an ideology of racial determinism, a militant activism with totalitarian aims, and state-sponsored policies of extermination that were without a doubt responsible for the deaths of more than twenty-five million civilians and soldiers, men, women, children, Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and Western Europeans, by war, famine, and genocide.