Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (6 page)

The German Minister of the Interior also issued regulations prohibiting Jews from “acquiring, possessing, and carrying firearms and ammunition,” as well as “stabbing weapons.” Those possessing such weapons and ammunition were required to turn them over to the local police authority. This law would prevent Jews from defending themselves when the holocaust formally began. The noose was rapidly tightening around Jews, thus leading toward their eventual systematic murder in the Holocaust.

During the night of November 9, 1938, the Nazis incited a pogrom (a mob attack directed against a minority group characterized by killings and destruction of their property) against Jews in both Austria and Germany. This pogrom is now termed, “
Kristallnacht
” or the “Night of Broken Glass” because the windows of many Jewish-owned businesses were broken, showering the streets with glass. This night of violence included the pillaging and burning of close to 300 synagogues and massive looting of an estimated 7,500 Jewish-owned stores and shops. Thousands of Jews were also physically attacked, almost 100 were murdered, and approximately 25,000 to 30,000 were arrested and sent to concentration camps, mostly to Buchenwald.

This event is often regarded as the actual beginning of the Holocaust. The unlikely excuse used for the pogrom was the fact that a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew named Herschel Grynszpan, then living with his uncle in Paris, had murdered a German official in Paris. The main reason for Herschel’s anger was the inhumane treatment his Jewish parents in Germany received from the Nazis.

Herschel’s father, Zindel, was born in western Poland and moved to Hanover, Germany, in 1911 to establish a small store. On the night of October 27, the Grynszpan family’s possessions were confiscated and they were forced to flee to Poland. When Herschel received news of his family’s expulsion, he went to the German embassy in Paris on November 7 intending to assassinate the German Ambassador to France. After learning that the Ambassador was not in the embassy, he shot Third Secretary Ernst vom Rath. Rath was critically wounded and died two days later.

The assassination provided Hitler’s Chief of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, with the excuse he needed to launch his pogrom against German Jews. Goebbels tried to spin Grynszpan’s attack as a conspiratorial action against the Reich by “International Jewry” and, symbolically, against the Führer himself. Goebbels claimed they had received orders from the Führer that the “Jewish question be now, once and for all, coordinated and solved one way or another.”
¹³

The monetary cost of
Kristallnacht
was another problem for Germany because German insurance companies were legally required to pay for the damages to Jewish business and merchandise. The Nazis rationalized that the Jewish property was stolen from the German people and “it’s insane to…burn a Jewish warehouse, then have a German insurance company make good [on] the loss.” It was decided that, “since Jews were to blame for these events,” they will “be held legally and financially responsible for the damages incurred by the pogrom. Accordingly, a “fine of 1 billion marks was levied for the slaying of vom Rath, and 6 million marks paid by insurance companies for broken windows was to be given to the state coffers.”
¹⁴

Consequently, the Jewish community was required to pay millions of Reichsmarks to Germany for the damage inflicted on them! After
Kristallnacht
, the persecution of Jews became more organized and far more widespread. This led to an exponential increase in the number of Jews sent to concentration camps.

By this time it was clear to Hitler and his top advisors that forced emigration of Jews was no longer a feasible option because almost no nation would accept them. Numerous concentration camps and forced labour camps were already in operation; therefore the Nazis decided to send them there. The “passivity of the German people in the face of the events of
Kristallnacht
made it clear that the Nazis would encounter little opposition—even from the German churches.”
¹⁵
Although historian and professor Ronald Rychlak concluded that “Pope Pius XII did all within his power to negotiate peace and to save as many Jewish people as he could,”
¹⁶
he did far too little too late.

After World War II began in 1939, the Nazis began ordering Jews to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing so that they could be easily recognized and targeted for persecution. The German government recognized that most Jews could go underground or effectively blend into society because most German Jews in the 1930s were fully assimilated Germans. They often did not identify themselves as Jews first, but rather as Germans. Furthermore, in spite of the racial scientists claims, most German Jews were physically indistinguishable from Aryans.

The Nazis planned their holocaust very carefully and meticulously documented their activities because they believed the world would eventually celebrate their achievement of producing a superior race. They also wanted to prove to the world that they achieved what they saw as glorious work—such as finally eliminating the inferior parasitic races such as Jews.

THE NEXT STEP: GHETTOS

After World War II began, the Nazis began ordering all Jews to live within very specific regions of select large cities—these areas were called ghettos. Jews were forced out of their homes and relocated into smaller apartments inside these ghettos, often sharing them with other families.

Some ghettos started out as “open,” meaning that the residents could leave the area during the daytime for work, but had to be back inside the ghetto before their curfew. Later on, all ghettos became “closed,” trapping Jews within the confines of the ghetto walls. The major ghettos were located in the European cities of Warsaw, Lodz, Minsk, Riga, Vilna, Bialystok and Kovno. The largest ghetto was in Warsaw, Poland—at its height, in March 1941, its population reached almost 500,000.

In most ghettos, the Nazis ordered the Jews to establish a
Judenrat
(a Jewish council) to both administer Nazi demands and to regulate internal life in the ghetto. The organization allowed Nazis to effectively order deportations of large numbers of Jews from the ghettos to the concentration camps. When the “Final Solution” began, the larger ghettos loaded up to 1,000 people per day into cattle cars and sent them to either concentration or death camps.

To facilitate the Jews’ cooperation, the Nazis repeatedly lied to them, such as telling them that they were being transported from the ghettos to work sites for labour when, in fact, they were being sent to their deaths, although the young and healthy were often worked to death. The Nazis eventually decided to murder all of the Jews remaining in the ghettos, “liquidating” them by boarding every one onto trains to be sent to death camps.

When the Nazis attempted to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto on April 13, 1943, the remaining Jews fought back in what is now known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Jewish resistance fighters had only a few small weapons yet held out against the Nazi regime for 28 days—longer than some European countries had been able to withstand Nazi conquest.

CONCENTRATION AND EXTERMINATION CAMPS

Although all Nazi camps are often referred to as “concentration camps,” some camps were extermination camps, others labour camps, prisoner-of-war camps and transit camps. While concentration camps were designed to work and starve prisoners to death, extermination camps (also known as death camps) were built for the sole purpose of rapidly and efficiently killing large numbers of people. The six extermination camps were Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Majdanek. Auschwitz and Majdanek were both concentration and extermination camps. Auschwitz was the largest and most famous camp where an estimated 1.1 million people were systematically murdered.

One of the first concentration camps to be built was Dachau, in southern Germany, which opened on March 20, 1933. From 1933 until 1938, most of the inmates in this camp were political prisoners (i.e., people who spoke or acted in some way against Hitler or the Nazis, such as the communists and Jehovah’s Witnesses) and those people that the Nazis labelled asocial.
¹⁷

Life within Nazi concentration camps was often inhumane and cruel. Prisoners were given inadequate rations of food and other life necessities, yet were forced to do hard physical labour for up to 12 hours a day. Eventually most were worked to death. Prisoners often slept with three or more people on each crowded wooden bunk, lacking mattresses and pillows. Both torture and death were frequent. At several Nazi concentration camps, Nazi doctors conducted painful, often lethal, medical experiments on prisoners against their will. One of the most well-known examples was the race medical experiments carried out by Dr. Josef Mengele, the subject of chapter 7.

Prisoners transported to the extermination camps were told to undress under the pretense of taking a shower to delouse them. Rather than taking a shower, the prisoners were actually herded into gas chambers, the doors locked, and then the innocent victims were murdered by poisonous gas. The prisoners at Chelmno were herded into gas vans instead of gas chambers. The purpose of the camps was to achieve the goal of a superior race by “breeding,” a

term that originally referred only to the systematic increase and eventual improvement of animals and plants, but that Charles Darwin applied to humans. “With the exception of the human case, no breeder is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to reproduce.” In this sense, the term “breeding” was taken up by Houston Stewart Chamberlain and
völkisch
theorists such as Josef Lanz for their program of racial biology.
¹⁸

Although Darwin evidently did not foresee the particular application of his ideas that the Nazis would adopt (i.e., slaughtering people) it was a very logical application of the ideas in his writings, especially his 1871 book,
The Descent of Man
.

The National Socialists strove for the “rebirth” of the nation “through the conscious breeding of a new human…. Racial breeding and pure breeding will be and must be the sole religion and church of the future.”
¹⁹
The extent of the Nazi fanaticism was, according to Nazi ideologist Richard Walther Darré, Hitler’s Minister for Food and Agriculture, such that they believed “only a few noble sires” were required

to raise the whole level of breeding and transmit noble traits to the offspring.” Because mankind was also “naturally subject to the same laws of breeding,” National Socialist leaders wanted, alongside the “exclusion of the worst,” the artificial Selection of the “best Germans by dint of blood.” Himmler in particular attempted after 1932 to fill the SS with a “racial selection of men.”
²⁰

Hitler’s “biologistic assumptions are the most extreme [example of] Social Darwinism,” but his racial conceptions go back to at least as far as Count Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882)

as popularized in Germany primarily by Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Agreements are obvious between
Mein Kampf
and Theodor Fritsch’s
Handbuch der Judenfrage
(
Handbook of the Jewish Question
), which Dietrich Eckart called “our whole intellectual arsenal.” In 1920…during his years in Vienna, Hitler was influenced by the racial ideas of Josef Lanz, as published in his
Ostara
journal. At the center of Lanz’s ideas was the “blue-blond,” the “Aryan race” as the “masterpiece of God,” while the “dark races,” among which were the Jews, were the “botched job of the Demon.” Moreover [the Nazis believed], “everything hateful and evil [stemmed] from racial mixing.”
²¹

Hitler made his “Social Darwinist and racial-hygienic pronouncements” very clear and believed that they justified his brutal evolutionary “ideology of a struggle for existence.” In his confluence of social Darwinist, racist, anti-Semitic and racial-hygienic ideas, Hitler thought he possessed a worldview that was grounded in natural science.”
²²