to control and subordinate economic development to the goal of preparation for war – Germany continued to be an industrializing society with certain endemic conflicts and strains. Historians have tended to agree that the ‘national community’ was created neither in reality nor in popular social perceptions, as far as the dominant ‘Aryan’ community was concerned, although there are lively controversies over the usefulness of the term in understanding the dynamics of Nazi society. What is more than clear, however, is that the ‘national community’ became very much a reality, in every respect, from the perspective of those who were excluded and persecuted.15
The Radicalization of the Regime
Hitler had two main aims, expressed in Mein Kampf and the later Second Book: to create a ‘pure’ racial community in Germany; and to expand Germany’s living space, dominating central Europe and, eventually, seeking world mastery. Hitler’s anti-Semitism, while finding resonance in the widespread prejudices against Jews, clearly went way beyond existing concepts of discrimination in its eventual practical implications. Hitler’s grandiose visions of the future of his Thousand Year Reich, while having much in common with conservative–nationalist desires for revision of the Treaty of Versailles, also went some considerable way beyond them in terms of global aspirations. While Hitler lost little time in jettisoning the political framework of the Weimar Republic, it took rather longer to transform the relationship of the Nazis to the old elites, whose miscalculated support had brought Hitler to power and who were essential for the effective use of that power. Moreover, Hitler had simultaneously to play to a number of galleries: to public opinion, dependent as his charisma was on repeated popular acclaim; to the Nazi Party activists, who were often frustrated at the apparent stalling of momentum and the incompleteness of the ‘national revolution’; and to the established economic and military elites whose cooperation was vital to the realization of Hitler’s ends. Added to these sometimes conflicting pressures was Hitler’s distinctive style of leadership, which allowed the duplication, indeed proliferation, of state and party offices and functions, and blurred the lines of leadership and responsibility. But on issues that mattered to Hitler he pursued his aims with ruthlessness and appropriate brutality. While Hitler’s intentions alone are not sufficient to explain the pattern of developments in the Third Reich – after all, Hitler had to attempt to realize his intentions under given circumstances and not always welcome conditions – the chronology of Nazi Germany reveals a progressive radicalization of the regime in line with Hitler’s pursuit of his overriding aims.
Anti-Semitic violence in peacetime was powered to a considerable degree by Nazi Party radicals, and Hitler sought to distance himself somewhat – at least as far as his public image was concerned – from the consequences of the more extreme or less successful of their actions, while at the same time continually pressing forwards with apparently more ‘legal’ forms of discrimination and persecution. The attempted boycott of Jewish shops on 1 April 1933 was rapidly called off, but systematic discrimination against Jews rapidly continued in a series of measures to remove Jews from professional and cultural life. In 1935 the so-called Nuremberg Laws – discussed well in advance, but announced in a last-minute way at the Nuremberg Party rally – sought to give legal validity to racial discrimination. Under the Reich Citizenship Law two categories of citizenship were introduced, with Jews given second-class citizenship, in that they could not become Reichsbürger with full political rights. Under the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, Jews were no longer permitted to marry those of ‘Aryan’ German or related extraction, nor – a deliberate affront in its moral implications – to employ ‘Aryan’ German women under the age of forty-five in their households. Consideration was given to the vexatious question of Mischlinge – those of mixed extraction who, in Nazi eyes, might be deemed to ‘pollute’ German blood. The milder view of excluding ‘half-’ and ‘quarter-Jews’ from the Nuremberg Laws was finally adopted (although with qualifications regarding half-Jews who professed the Jewish faith or were married to a Jew, and who were categorized as Geltungsjuden, or ‘counted as Jews’), while ‘three-quarter Jews’ were included as Jews. For many Germans, the Nuremberg Laws were welcomed as an apparent legalization of the rather ad hoc measures of discrimination against Jews. Yet what is particularly striking is the way in which Germans rapidly ‘learned’ to consider their fellow citizens in terms of the new racial categories: friendships were cut off, and German Jews not only lost status and livelihood but were also increasingly cut off from their former social circles and wider support networks. The ‘racialization’ of German society was extremely rapid, laying the groundwork for later, more radical measures.
Far from being the culmination of Nazi anti-Semitic measures, the Nuremberg Laws marked but a stage in the systematic exclusion of Jews from ‘normal’ life. With a brief, partial respite in deference to international opinion when Berlin hosted the Olympic Games in 1936, a series of supplementary decrees and regulations in the following years systematically continued to exclude Jews from their professions, from education, and from public and cultural life. From 1938 discrimination became more severe, with the ‘Aryanization’ or confiscation of Jewish property, and the effective removal of the means of material existence in a variety of ways. The effect, as a Nazi article of 24 November 1938 remarked with glee, would be to reduce the Jews to dependence on crime – which would ‘necessitate’ the appropriate measures on the part of a state committed to law and order, ending in the ‘complete extermination’ (restlose Vernichtung) of German Jewry.16
Commitment to law and order was scarcely evident in the actions against Jews on the Reichskristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) of 9 November 1938. Ostensibly precipitated by the murder of a member of the German Embassy in Paris by a young Jew, a supposedly ‘spontaneous uprising’ was incited by a speech by Goebbels on the occasion of the annual anniversary celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch. Party radicals burned synagogues, attacked Jewish homes and businesses, and looted Jewish property across Germany. Official party figures reported ninety-one deaths of Jews, and subsequently around thirty thousand Jews were arrested and detained in concentration camps for a period of time; the true number of deaths as a result of Nazi brutality, and individual suicides out of sheer desperation and despair, ran into far higher figures. Jews had to pay compensation for the destruction of property themselves, and hand over any payments from insurance policies to the state. Many non-Jewish Germans in fact joined in the public humiliation of Jews, or took the opportunity to benefit by looting property from Jewish stores. Innumerable others, far from having spontaneously perpetrated attacks – as the Nazi propaganda would have it – were actually appalled at the wanton destruction of property and evident lawlessness of the Reichskristallnacht. But while some offered sympathy, support and assistance at an individual level, they did little to protest openly against the attacks of November 1938; rumours of what happened to those who did raise their voices, and fear of the likely penalties, ensured widespread passivity and silence. Nor did people protest against the continuing series of measures discriminating against the Jews – the removal of their driving licences, the withdrawal of their passports (which were returned stamped with the initial ‘J’), the enforced adoption of the first names Israel or Sara, the ban on visiting museums, theatres, concerts, swimming pools, the forced surrender of gold and silver objects and all precious jewellery with the exception of wedding rings, the systematic reductions in status and livelihood. Most Germans simply acquiesced in the piecemeal process by which Jews were identified, defined, stigmatized, segregated and stripped of the status of fellow citizens and even human beings to become an oppressed minority in their own homeland. These peacetime measures of discrimination were a precondition for the subsequent preference of many Germans to ignore the later, more tragic fate of these people who had already been effectively removed from a normal status in civil society.
On the foreign policy front, desires for the revision of the Treaty of Versailles were, as indicated above, widespread among Germans. Already in the closing years of the Weimar Republic, after the death of Stresemann, less cautious, more strident tones had been evident in German foreign policy. These revisionist tendencies were unleashed with vigour by Hitler. In 1933 he made clear his preference for bilateral rather than collective security arrangements and soon withdrew from
