"Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich (136 page)

6.
Bracher,
Zeitgeschichtliche Kontroversen
(1976), 28.

7.
According to him, a person’s outward appearance, in terms of color and morphology, is also indicative of
value
differences. The Aryan was the most valuable, the only creative human being (Hitler,
Mein Kampf
[1939], 285), and therefore—as was appropriate to the relationship between the strong and clever and the weak and stupid—had greater rights vis-à-vis all other races and a higher duty of self-preservation; this consisted in the rejection of interbreeding with other races in the struggle for supremacy, that is, against all inferior beings (
Minderwertige
[the weaker]) for the purpose of higher breeding (
Höherzüchtung des Lebens
). This exemplified the “iron logic of nature” (281 f.). The close ties between the racial principle and the principle of the Movement (the Party) are evinced by the tenet that the rights of higher races can be won only through movement, through struggle; struggle was therefore not only a means but also an end, as well as the wellspring of the further development of the race. For a fuller account of Hitler’s racial ideas, see A. Bullock,
Hitler, Eine Studie über Tyrannei
(Düsseldorf, 1960), 35 ff.; Bracher, Sauer, and Schulz,
Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung
(1962), 274 ff.; Hill,
Artgleichheit und Gleichartigkeit
(1966); Phelps, “Hitlers ‘grundlegende’ Rede”; von zur Mühlen,
Rassenideologien
(1977), 237 ff.

8.
Von zur Mühlen,
Rassenideologien
(1977), 235 f.

9.
Hitler,
Mein Kampf
(1939), 373.

10.
An attempt was made to define race as “a community of common origin with common mental and physical characteristics” or as “hereditary equality” (
Erbgleichheit
), as “physical traits
and
mental characteristics,” a group that “perpetually generates its own kind” (F. K. Günther, quoted in Kluge and Krüger,
Verfassung und Verwaltung
[1941], 162); see also Nicolai, “Grundsätzliches über den Zusammenhang von Rasse und Recht” (1934), 76. But no concrete definition was arrived at because the racial mixture in Germany did not fit into the National Socialist concept of pure race; similarly, Hitler only
describes
races—he never defines them (
Mein Kampf
, 238 ff.).

11.
Cf. in particular Feder,
Das Programm der NSDAP
(1932); Rosenberg,
Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts
(1930); Rosenberg,
Die Protokolle der Weisen
(1923). Cf., for example, Hill,
Artgleichheit und Gleichartigkeit
(1966), 255 ff.; Saller,
Die Rassenlehre des Nationalsozialismus
(1961); T. Toblanski,
Die Entwicklung zum Menschen
(1948); Tenenbaum,
Race and Reich
(1956); Breitling,
Die nationalsozialistiche Rassenlehre
(1971).

12.
Hitler on the “day of culture” at the 1933 Party rally (quoted in Kluge and Krüger,
Verfassung und Verwaltung
, 161). Also, Hitler at the 1935 Reich Party rally in Nuremberg: The political idea is the National Socialist weltanschauung as the “recognition of racial and hereditary contingencies of the German people” (18).

13.
Nicolai, “Grundsätzliches über den Zusammenhang von Rasse und Recht,” 76; in this sense see also Nicolai,
Die Rassengesetzliche Rechtslehre
(1934); Nicolai,
Rasse und Recht
(1934); Meyer,
Rasse und Recht
(1937).

14.
For further details, see von zur Mühlen,
Rassenideologien
, 235 f.

15.
The determining factor for him was not race but “destiny,” with which he justified the legitimacy of his own claim to power. Already in a speech on May 1, 1937, he had said that, although the foundation of the national community (
Volksgemeinschaft
) was certainly “blood,” “language,” “history,” and “manners and customs,” there was “something else … something that not only leads but actually drives us to this community: it is our common destiny, this ineluctable common destiny that none of us can escape” (quoted in Koellreuter,
Deutsches Verfassungsrecht
[1938], 70 f.). Cf. also Hitler’s remarks at table on June 2, 1942: following a flight to Poltava (today part of the Ukraine), he had doubts about his own ideas on race, which had been “somewhat shaken” by the previous day’s trip. In Poltava he had seen “so many blue-eyed, blond women that—thinking of the photographs of Norwegian or even Dutch women submitted to me with applications for permission to marry—I would speak of the need to ‘
southify
’ (
Aufsüden
) rather than ‘
Nordicize
’ (
Aufnorden
—an official term of Nazi ideology) our northern European states” (Picker,
Hitlers Tischgespräche
[1968], 174).

16.
In this sense see also Rauschning,
Die Revolution des Nihilismus
(1938), 435; he saw the key element of National Socialism as its
dynamism
rather than as the Party program. Similarly in foreign policy, National Socialism was “in the middle of the second phase of the nihilist revolution, in which the
völkisch
element has already largely been cast aside.”

17.
Cf. Hitler’s remarks in Rauschning,
Gespräche mit Hitler
(1950): “But we … are burning with the desire for power and we are in no way shy of admitting it…. For us this is … nothing less than the meaning of life” (219, 255).

18.
Cf., for example, Hitler’s remarks in ibid.; for further details, see Hill,
Artgleichheit und Gleichartigkeit
, 244 ff., with examples.

19.
Rauschning,
Gespräche mit Hitler
, 216 ff.; cf. also Hitler’s speech to the 1935 Party rally in Nuremberg (quoted in Kluge and Krüger,
Verfassung und Verwaltung
, 16).

20.
Hitler,
Mein Kampf
(1939), 384; Nicolai, “Grundsätzliches über den Zusammenhang von Rasse und Recht”; for further details, see Bracher,
Zeitgeschichtliche Kontroversen
(1976), 89 f., 93 f.

21.
Hitler in speech on the first anniversary of the seizure of power on January 30, 1934: “The new state itself can acknowledge no other task than the creation of the conditions necessary for the preservation of the
Volk
” (quoted in Nicolai,
Der Neuaufbau des Reiches
[1934]). For greater detail, see also Hitler,
Mein Kampf
, 165, 291 ff., 389, 394.

22.
Hitler to the 1935 Party rally in Nuremberg (quoted in Kluge and Krüger,
Verfassung und Verwaltung
, 16): “The starting point for the National Socialist doctrine is not in the state but in the
Volk
,” which “teaches the primacy of the people instead of the primacy of individual freedom. The nation alone is an end in itself … the state is but an organization, though the highest of the life of the
Volk
.”

23.
Huber,
Vom Sinn der Verfassung
(1935), 10 f.

24.
Scheuner, “Der Gleichheitsgedanke,” 256 f.; in this sense see also Held,
Volk, Recht und Staat
(1935), 15; Frank, introduction to
Nationalsozialistisches Handbuch für Recht und Gesetzgebung
(1934), xvii.

25.
For further details, see Freisler, “Schutz von Rasse und Erbgut” (1936), 141 ff.; Stuckart,
Nationalsozialistische Rechtserziehung
(1935), 5: “Identity of race (
Artgleichheit
) is the biological basis for a ‘racially appropriate’ (
artgemäss
) German law”; Nicolai, “Grundsätzliches über den Zusammenhang von Rasse und Recht,” 76 n. 21; For example, the future penal code in its entirety was to be an expression of racial values and racial preservation; cf.
Preußische Denkschrift für ein neues Strafgesetzbuch
(Berlin, 1933).

26.
Nicolai, “Grundsätzliches über den Zusammenhang von Rasse und Recht,” 76.

27.
H. Frank, “Nationalsozialistische Rechtpolitik,”
DR
(1936): 389: “Power is the life of the law”; for further details, see Fraenkel,
Der Doppelstaat
, 136 ff., with examples.

28.
Cf. article entitled “Rechtsstaat” in
Handwörterbuch der Rechtswissenschaft
, ed. Erich Volkmar, Alexander Elster, and Günther Küchenhoff (Berlin, 1937), 8:567 ff., 572, which says: “For this task [safeguarding the rights of the people] there is only the concerted power of the people, just as a tank threatening the frontline can only be stopped by a concentrated explosive charge; this concerted deployment of a concentrated charge of popular power for the protection of national life is how we see the constitutional state.” Freisler had written the article for the
Völkischer Beobachter
of December 21, 1931 (for further details see Fraenkel,
Der Doppelstaat
, 231).

29.
Forsthoff,
Der totale Staat
(1933), 13, 29 ff.

30.
Wolf, “Das Rechtsideal des nationalsozialistischen Staates” (1934–35), 352. For more on the concept of the National Socialist “constitutional state,” see R. Höhn,
Staat und Rechtsgemeinschaft
(1935), 676. Schmitt, “Nationalsozialismus und Rechsstaat” (1934) (“We do not define the constitutional state on the basis of outmoded concepts but on the basis of National Socialism”—i.e., the basis for a just state); for more details, see Scheuner, “Die nationale Revolution” (1933–34), 161 ff.; Koellreuter,
Volk und Staat
(1935), sees the legitimacy of every concept in the notion of the
Völkisch
; thus, the “Bolshevik state” is a “nonconstitutional state” because it is “a-
völkisch
” (23); Frank, introduction to
Nationalsozialistisches Handbuch für Recht und Gesetzgebung
, xii; Göring,
Die Rechtssicherheit als Grundlage der Volksgemeinschaft
(1935) (letters of the German Law Academy). Scholz, “Die Rechtssicherheit” (1944): “National Socialist law in its substance and drafting has opened the way to supreme justice” (32). (The author was
Senatspräsident
at the Administrative Court.)

31.
A. Rosenberg, “Lebensrecht, nicht Formelrecht,”
DR
(1934): 233 f.; for more details, see Rosenberg,
Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts
(1933), 571 f.

32.
For an account of the disintegration of judicial and legal norms under National Socialism, see Püschel,
Der Niedergang des Rechts im Dritten Reich
(1947); von Hippel,
Die Perversion von Rechtsordnungen
(1955), 52 ff.; von Hippel,
Die nationalsozialistische Herrschaftsordunung
(1947); Kirschenmann,
Gesetz im Staatsrecht
(1971).

33.
Schraut, “Blutgebundenes Recht” (1934).

34.
Wolf, “Das Rechtsideal des nationalsozialistischen Staates,” 352.

35.
Directive of the deputy Führer of December 11, 1937:

We have to hammer these fundamental principles into the German people, until the essence and thinking of our nation, for so long buried, are set free…. The party must keep these … principles pure and clear for centuries. That is its great task. Nothing would please our opponents more than if the Nazis were to be sidetracked from these core principles of National Socialism into the uncertain field of scientific side issues and controversies, which might be of significance in terms of the history of human thought but politically are bound to become a burden of intolerable proportions. Science is subordinate to ongoing developments and experience; it is constantly expanded and complemented by new insights and observations. The Nazis proclaim the eternal truths of our
völkisch
existence, which were as valid a thousand years ago as they will be in a thousand years’ time. (
Verfügungen
, 1:478 f., directive no. 152/37) See also a similar directive in ibid., 474 f., no. 7/409 of December 2, 1940.

36.
Examples: already in 1933 the Reich Ministry of the Interior had an Advisory Board on Population and Racial Affairs with the following departments: National Health (Volksgesundheit), headed by Gütt; Reich Health Board; Reich Committee for the National Health Service; and Reich Central Office for Health Management; from 1933 on, there was also an “Adviser on Racial Research”—Dr. Achim Gercke (Bracher, Sauer, and Schulz,
Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung
, 285 n. 119); the German Medical Association (Deutsche Ärzteschaft) had an Office for Population Policy and Racial Affairs; the Reich leadership of the NSDAP had a Department for National Welfare and Health (Abteilung für Volkswohlfahrt und Volksgesundheit), and even the district courts had so-called Hereditary Health Courts (Erbgesundheitsgerichte). In 1935 an Institute for the History of the New Germany (Reichsinstitut für die Geschichte des neuen Deutschland) was established—which from April 1936 had a research department for the “Jewish question” under the aegis of H. Frank, though this ranked far behind Rosenberg’s Institute for Research into the Jewish Question (Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage) in Frankfurt. The latter was to be the nucleus of a central Nazi university to be set up after the war in which it was intended to house the confiscated Jewish libraries and archives (Bracher, Sauer, and Schulz,
Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung
, 312 n. 244). For an overview of the institutions devoted to “Racial Affairs,” see Frick, “Die Rassenpolitik” (1936); Bracher, Sauer, and Schulz,
Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung
, 285.

37.
“[As a result] the German people lack a true herd instinct that resides in the homogeneity of the blood” (Hitler,
Mein Kampf
[1939], 387).