"Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich (26 page)

After passage of the law of July 14, 1933, however, the way was opened for
compulsory
sterilization, and not only upon application by the affected person’s relatives but also at the instigation of the authorities. Moreover, the interpretation of the law, as it was expressed in the decree circulated by the Reich Ministry of the Interior on February 27, 1934, permitted interference with the right of individual freedom of movement for an indefinite period, in that so-called hereditarily diseased persons in living institutions could be confined there indefinitely.
⁶

Responsible for decisions involving possible sterilization was the Hereditary Disease Court, which was attached to the respective municipal courts and consisted of a local judge (
Amtsrichter
) as presiding judge, a medical examiner, and another physician (sec. 6, par. 1).
⁷
The possibility of sterilization, for which the Reich Ministry of the Interior had vigorously campaigned,
⁸
was frequently used quite frivolously.
⁹
Nevertheless, because sterilization was applicable only to individual cases and required a formally regulated procedure, the race fanatics among the political leadership considered the eugenics law insufficient. If compulsory sterilization and forced indefinite confinement of “hereditarily diseased persons” in institutions was permissible, then, in the minds of the Nazi leaders, who were completely indifferent to moral and legal considerations, it was no great step to begin contemplating the deliberately planned obliteration of such persons. As early as 1929, Hitler had publicly toyed with the idea of killing all children with physical birth defects (he estimated their number at 700,000 to 800,000 annually).
¹⁰
For what was the point of keeping “diseased” people alive who were nothing but “useless” members of the
Volksgemeinschaft
? And whoever was “useless” was “by definition”—as shown by the treatment later meted out to the so-called asocials—not “worthy of life,” but “unworthy of living.” This planned “euthanasia,”
¹¹
to be sure, could not be implemented by means of normative regulations, since even by the standards of the positivist legal thinking that predominated in National Socialism, such ideas were seen as not yet capable of being legalized.
¹²
However, the law of July 14, 1933, must be viewed as the immediate forerunner of that campaign, since it sought to overcome the “inhibitions” on the part of the public against straightforward killing of so-called inferior persons, in particular by constantly widening (and frequently quite arbitrarily defining) the circle of candidates for sterilization.
¹³
Even in the academic literature there were frank discussions of the question of killing “inferior” persons on racial grounds. Although such discussions at first took place “merely” in the context of punishing dangerous sex offenders under criminal law by emasculation, it was already clearly aimed at the eradication of so-called inferior persons in general. Thus, for example, one reads in a dissertation published in Göttingen in 1937:

The value of the individual to the community is measured according to his racial makeup. Only a racially valuable person has the right to exist within the community. A person who, because of his inferiority, is useless, indeed harmful to the whole, on the other hand, must be eliminated. The specific way in which this is to be done is a question that depends on the climate of popular opinion. Whether or not the people can as yet find it within themselves to understand the elimination of the inferior individual by [legal] killing remains to be seen; but today, at least, they certainly welcome the eradication of the sex offender and thus the prevention of any asocial offspring….

The great task itself must not be inhibited nor its effectiveness impaired by any petty disputes over jurisdiction. It cannot be that the eugenic indication, and racial considerations as a whole, are left out of account in imposing the sentence of castration simply because in some circumstances the boundary between criminal and racial-hygienic measures might be become blurred as a result.
¹⁴

Despite all efforts to popularize such ideas, however, plans for euthanasia were carried out under clandestine instructions from the Führer behind the veil of strictest (though perhaps never entirely successful) secrecy in hospitals and sanatoriums; roughly 190,000 persons fell victim to the program.
¹⁵
As the first large-scale murder operation on the part of the Nazi regime, euthanasia was the logical forerunner to the eradication of racially undesirable “non-Germans” in the East (where German legal principles were not in force and unwelcome attention was less to be feared), especially as implemented against the Jews (the Final Solution). This logical continuity is shown by, among other things, the fact that some of the personnel engaged in the euthanasia operations later found employment in the extermination camps in Poland.
¹⁶
True, the euthanasia campaign had to be broken off in 1941, because the conspicuously high number of death notices at the registry offices resulted in more and more questions from family members, protests by representatives of the Catholic and Protestant churches, and internal memos by individual judicial agencies.
¹⁷
In any case, the murder campaign of euthanasia shows, in the present context, what boundless possibilities had been opened up to a regime that was determined to take to its logical conclusion the fundamental idea built into the forced sterilization of undesirable persons, namely, that the state was at liberty to dispose of the individual as it saw fit.

2. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, September 15, 1935

The prevention of the birth of racially undesirable (“hereditarily diseased”) children, however, was by itself not likely to bring about the desired triumph of the principle of “purity of German blood.” The problem of undesirable offspring was attacked first only because there were existing proposals to fall back on as well as a broadly held conviction that eugenic measures were permissible in individual cases. The next step was to indict any liaison between racially undesirable persons as being morally objectionable, as “race defilement.” Of course “mixed marriages” had already been subject to discrimination in the past; for example, beginning in 1933 the Reich Ministry of Finance had (without legal authority) excluded such marriages from marriage loans.
¹⁸
However, it now became a matter of preventing such liaisons altogether, especially those between Jews and “Germans.” The ground for this had been prepared not only by an unbridled popular anti-Semitic propaganda campaign but also in the political
¹⁹
and in specialized academic
²⁰
literature, as well as through the emphasis placed upon theoretical racial (“ethnological”) instruction in the schools, where Jews were characterized not only as foreigners but also as enemies.
²¹

This friend-foe theory of racial politics reached its zenith in the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor (the Blood Protection Law), which was promulgated at the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg on September 15, 1935.
²²
This law—which the commentaries put out by the Reich Ministry of the Interior celebrated, in all seriousness, as a “generous solution of the Jewish and
Mischling
problem”
²³
and which, for the first time, used the term
Jew
in place of the term
non-Aryan
and introduced the expression “German or racially related
blood
”
²⁴
—was worded in such a way that marriages between Jews
²⁵
and “citizens of German or racially related blood” as well as any “extramarital intercourse” between them was flatly prohibited (secs. 1 and 2). Violations were punishable by a term in the penitentiary (of at least one year) or by a jail sentence or imprisonment (sec. 5). Jews were further prohibited from employing citizens “of German or racially related blood under forty-five years of age in their households” (sec. 3). This was meant to prevent the danger of the “undesirable mixture of races.” They were also forbidden to “raise the Reich national flag or wear the Reich colors” (sec. 4),
²⁶
a prohibition that, given the numerous parades and marches of the time, where showing the flag was compulsory, also served to facilitate the singling out and isolation of Jews for all to see.

In the period that followed, the Blood Protection Law underwent further expansion. Thus, the second implementing regulation to the Blood Protection Law broadened its prohibitions to cover those former Polish citizens who had acquired German citizenship—which affected primarily the so-called ethnic Germans
²⁷
—whereas the prohibition against race mixing did not apply to the great mass of Poles (persons with so-called protected status, or politically reliable foreigners).
²⁸
However, the Blood Protection Law was not aimed solely at Jews but also at other “undesirable” “non-Germans.” Hence the call for racial purity, upon which the “inner unity” of a people was said to rest, targeted only superficially the neutralizing of the Jews; it actually took aim at “aliens” of all kinds.
²⁹
Thus the prohibition on marriage, as already noted in the introduction, applied not only to marriages contracted between Jews (including Jewish
Mischlinge
) and “persons of German blood” and between Jews and
Mischlinge
of the second degree
³⁰
but was also interpreted beyond the wording of the law as being a desideratum (de facto a requirement) for all marriages between “citizens of German or racially related blood” in cases in which “offspring that would endanger the preservation of the purity of German blood could be expected to result.”
³¹
Such a threat was assumed to be latent in all liaisons between Germans and “inferior” “non-Germans,” including Gypsies, blacks and their descendants, and later the peoples of Eastern Europe. In order to prove that this threat did not exist in liaisons between “partners of different races,” it was necessary to obtain a “certificate of fitness for marriage” from the Public Health Office.
³²
Poles, too, although in principle deemed to be among the Aryans, were included in the prohibition on race mixing. There was a de facto prohibition against marriage of (stateless) Poles and Germans as well as marriage of Poles who had acquired German citizenship and all other “non-Germans.” There was no law enunciating such a prohibition. However, it was put into practice all the same by the tried-and-true method of internal administrative guidelines, which dictated that registry office officials simply should not record such marriages, in order (and this was of particular significance in the Annexed Eastern Territories) “to achieve a complete separation … [of the German citizens] from their Polish surroundings.”
³³

Here, too, as usual under the Nazi system, actual practice far outstripped the legal mandates. Not until 1943 was this de facto marriage prohibition set forth in the form of a
universal
standard, in that the so-called Protected Status Order
³⁴
prohibited marriages between Poles with protected status and
all
other persons (that is, they could marry neither Germans nor Poles registered in the German National Register nor any other “non-Germans” whatsoever), so that Poles were in effect allowed to marry only among themselves. This not only fulfilled the
Reichsführer
-SS’s long-standing dream of total racial segregation
³⁵
but contributed at the same time to the isolation of the Poles from all “extra-Polish” influences. Plans for such isolation, as will be shown in detail, were just as far-reaching as those for cutting off contact between the Jews and the outside world.

3. The Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People (Marital Hygiene Law), October 18, 1935

The marriage prohibitions discussed above, however, were by no means restricted to persons “of foreign race.” Indeed, as demonstrated in the introduction, the principle of placing such people under special law extended far beyond the circle of “non-Germans.” Just one month after the promulgation of the Blood Protection Law as part of the new “
völkisch
legislation,” the general outline of the marriage prohibitions was broadened to include all racially undesirable persons without regard to ancestry. The Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People (Marital Hygiene Law) of October 18, 1935,
³⁶
whose aim was to prevent the birth of any undesirable offspring, abrogated one of the most important individual rights—that of the free choice of one’s mate—since, in a poorly defined multiplicity of cases, it made the contraction of marriage absolutely impossible. Marriage was prohibited, first of all, to any “person with hereditary disease” as defined under the Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases of July 14, 1933.
³⁷
But it went further than that: marriage might not be contracted in any case in which “one of the persons engaged to be married suffered from a disease associated with the danger of contagion” that gave cause “to fear considerable harm to the health of the other party or of their offspring”; in which one of the persons engaged to be married was legally incompetent or under temporary guardianship; or in which one of the persons engaged to be married suffered “from a mental disturbance” causing “the marriage to be deemed undesirable for the ethnic community” (sec. 1). Such blanket clauses were open not only to unlimited interpretation but also to the most blatant kind of arbitrary rulings. The authorities were not required to show proof of the alleged harm; rather, the individual was expected to prove that such harm was
not
to be feared.