Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity | Germany

Nazism established itself in an extraordinarily short time as a major force in German politics and thereafter seized and consolidated its grip on power against all expectations. Humanity was to suffer appallingly as a consequence of the Nazis' success.

The Impact of World War I

Despite palpable tensions over the country's semi-absolutist constitution, early twentieth-century imperial Germany was among the more prosperous and dynamic of European societies. A vibrant literary and arts scene, a strengthening economy, and a relatively advanced welfare system gave grounds for influential citizens, such as the Jewish banker Max Warburg, to look to the future with optimism. States such as Prussia had sheltered and absorbed victims of foreign religious persecution for many generations and during its industrial revolution Germany attracted and successfully absorbed minorities from other parts of Europe. Jewish citizens had risen to prominence in the economy, among them Emil and Walther Rathenau of the electrical engineering giant AEG; Paul Silverberg, the coal mining magnate; and, not without controversy, the banker Gerson von Bleichröder, who had worked closely with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck during the 1870s and 1880s.

However, imperial Germany had its darker side. Pressure groups, such as the Pan-German League, demanded an adventurous, imperialistic foreign policy and laced their message with anti-Semitic and anti-Slavonic racism. Demands for an overseas empire were expressed more widely in German society as business circles sought assured markets and public opinion looked to the prestige that overseas territories would bring. In order to deflect attention from demands for constitutional reform at home, the German government played to this imperialist gallery and pursued an aggressive foreign policy. This fateful strategy contributed to the outbreak of what became World War I in July and August 1914 and then, ultimately, to Germany's defeat in the fall of 1918.

The war itself saw Germany suffer millions of casualties, in common with all the main belligerents, but it also triggered misery on the home front. The demands of total war against an expanding and increasingly powerful enemy coalition stretched the economy to breaking point. Juveniles, the elderly, and women labored under grueling conditions to maximize war production, yet at the same time an Allied blockade and official ineptitude at home combined to create near famine conditions in the towns and cities. Malnutrition-related deaths soared; townspeople took to scavenging the countryside for food, with official connivance: Occasionally, trains were run for this very purpose, for want of any better policy. After the guns finally fell silent, in November 1918, a global influenza pandemic reaped as grim a harvest of souls in Germany as had many a great battle. Life, it appeared, had become very cheap.

The Inter-War Period

Defeat brought a curious, even contradictory, combination of hope, demoralization, and anger in equal measure. There was a near consensus that the old empire had failed and that the kaiser, William II, should abdicate, but it was less clear what should follow. After a brief attempt during October 1918 to establish a constitutional monarchy, comparable perhaps to Britain's, open revolution broke out and led to the proclamation of a provisional republic on November 9 of that year. Friedrich Ebert of the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) formed a caretaker administration during the worst crisis to sweep Germany since the days of Napoleon. Most of the revolutionaries looked to the Marxist but staunchly parliamentarian SPD to establish a new social and political order. They also hoped to reach a tolerable peace with the victorious Allies. Public opinion generally anticipated a settlement on these lines. However, in the turmoil of defeat and revolution, the government had effectively lost control of day-today affairs, which made the fulfillment of these expectations unlikely.

Certainly, there were signs of hope. Industrialists and labor leaders reached a settlement of differences and, along with the civil service, collaborated in the successful demobilization of the war economy. Meanwhile, the army was extricated successfully from the former battle zones in France and Belgium, and, by January 1919, the process of constitutional reform was well on track. The resulting Weimar Republic saw the wholesale enfranchisement of women, a thoroughgoing commitment to social justice and welfare reform, and a significant democratization of the political process. As for the peace negotiations, an armistice came into effect on November 11, 1918, and the eventual Treaty of Versailles in June 1919 left the young German national state largely intact.

However, many did not see the situation as hopeful. Radicals on the political left and right bitterly resented the outcome of the revolution, which amounted to a compromise between the old imperial order and supporters of reform. Compromise could not satisfy extremists of any sort, and a series of armed uprisings, industrial strikes, and terrorist outrages followed. Some of Germany's brightest prospects, including the Catholic politician Matthias Erzberger and the Jewish industrialist-turned-statesman Walther Rathenau, were murdered, to the horror of mainstream public opinion. This unrest never threatened to topple the Republic, but it did have a significant, destructive impact on domestic and foreign perceptions of the new Germany. Furthermore, the country remained impoverished by the recent war. The currency began to devalue alarmingly, to the consternation of monied society, and devastating food shortages left many poorer Germans malnourished and prey to chronic disease or even premature death. The government lacked the necessary foreign currency reserves to meet its obligations, and agonized debates ensued over whether to pay a particular installment of reparations or to use the money to import wheat and keep the bakeries busy. Under these circumstances, the postwar reparations burden imposed on Germany turned public opinion against the Versailles Treaty.

At the January 1919 elections to establish a constituent assembly, voters had turned overwhelmingly to the republican parties. However, in subsequent parliamentary elections they began to shift toward parties that lamented the fall of the old empire, a time when Germany had stood proud among the world's nations, when there had been food on the table, and when money was worth what it seemed. More worrying, however, was the emergence on the right of a new breed of political extremism that advocated a witches, brew of social reform, national solidarity, and a racist program of retribution against Germany's alleged foreign and domestic enemies. These far-right demagogues claimed that the Treaty of Versailles (which they termed a "dictated" peace because there had been no open negotiations in 1919) had enslaved Germany to foreign Jewish capitalists who were growing rich on the toil of its ordinary, decent citizens.

Anti-Semitism was present in most European societies at the time, and not surprisingly these German extremists also vilified their country's own small, indigenous Jewish minority. Germany's Jews, it was argued, were treasonous and, working hand-in-glove with their co-religionists abroad, had undermined the war effort. Thereafter, the extremists claimed, Germany's Jews had sought to exploit the peace terms to deliver the country into foreign hands, caring little for the well-being of their homeland. Indeed, the accusation ran, Jews did not really have a homeland at all. These radicals named themselves National Socialists (Nationalsozialisten, abbreviated as Nazis) and called their party the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsch Arbeiterpartei, or NDAP). They advocated the solidarity and common good of the ethnic nation above class or other sectional interests. National Socialist ideologues, such as Dietrich Eckart, claimed that the Jews' allegedly treasonous behavior derived from inbred, racial characteristics that made their presence in Germany, let alone in any position of power, highly undesirable.

Up to this point, Nazism was only a fringe affair, its influence largely confined to Bavaria and, more particularly, its capital city, Munich. More significant criticism of the Republic and its institutions initially came from monarchist circles, but during 1923 a devastating series of crises brought the Weimar order and even the German state close to breaking point. The year began with a collapse in Franco-German relations. The French premier, Raymond Poincaré, accused Germany of deliberately defaulting on reparations. French troops invaded the industrial Ruhr District to extract payments in kind, by force if necessary. German opinion had always believed the reparations to be unpayable and regarded the French invasion of 1923 as a thinlyveiled imperialist adventure, for which the defaulted payments merely served as a pretext.

The people of the occupied territories of western Germany refused to cooperate with the invaders in any way. Instead, they effectively shut down economic activity in Germany's industrial heartland. The government supported this campaign of resistance with massive subsidies, but this only served to bankrupt public finances and, finally, destroy the ailing currency. The mark effectively became worthless, stripping middle-class Germans of all their savings. Soon enough the wider economic crisis precipitated mass unemployment in the towns and cities of the Ruhr. The district was ravaged by starvation for the second time in a generation, and hundreds of thousands of severely malnourished children had to be evacuated by train to farms in the east where, at least, there was food to be had.

Not surprisingly, political tensions exploded, destroying many of the compromises that had informed the German revolutionary settlement, fostering separatism in Bavaria and the Rhineland, and giving enormous encouragement to extremist groups of every kind. Communist-led strikes and uprisings broke out in central and northern Germany, whereas, in the conservative state of Bavaria, the far right gathered its forces. In November, Adolf Hitler's Nazis tried to launch a military coup from their stronghold in Munich and, although this putsch failed utterly, the Bavarian authorities were lenient: They only imposed a modest prison sentence on the Nazi leader. Hitler learned from his own mistakes. He resolved to exploit the Weimar constitution to seize power rather than attack the Republic head-on. This meant, from here on, that he would concentrate on fighting and winning elections.

In the fall of 1923, the liberal statesman Gustav Stresemann had dared to hope that these terrible events marked nothing worse than the growing pains of the young Republic. Weimar survived 1923, reached a revised settlement with the Allies over reparations in 1924 (the Dawes Plan), and finally became part of a European system of mutual security guarantees in 1925 (the Locarno Agreement). The economy recovered after a fashion, a stable currency was established, and important new social legislation was approved by parliament. However, the crisis of German democracy was only in remission, it was by no means cured. Simmering tensions persisted just below the surface. German democracy was in no condition to confront, let alone survive, another great crisis.

Even during the so-called golden years of 1925 to 1929, there were ominous danger signs. In 1925, the Social Democratic president, Friedrich Ebert, died. Presidential elections followed. The eventual victor was Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who had served as commander in chief of the German armed forces during the latter part of the Great War. Despite his association with the former empire and with Germany's defeat in 1918, many voters saw in him a symbol of national unity, a man above the bickering of party politics, and a reminder of the country's former greatness. The Weimar constitution granted the president substantial powers, including the capacity under Article 48 to suspend parliament and sanction rule by decree. These powers were originally intended to permit a democratically minded president to ride out any future crisis, and they had been invoked during 1923 precisely for this reason, with the consent of the republican parties. Now, however, they were vested in a man who was prepared to uphold the law, but made no secret of his monarchist sympathies.

In addition, the 1924 parliamentary elections saw a remarkable growth in fringe parties that represented particular regions or particular interest groups, whether it be farming, small business, or people who had been cheated out of their savings. (This was even more marked during the 1928 elections.) Voters, it seemed, were losing faith in the larger parties, which invariably had to trade off one set of promises or commitments against another. Now, voters threw their support behind particular special-interest parties that would henceforward speak up directly and only for them. The Weimar constitution unintentionally encouraged such behavior, because the constitutional assembly had resolved in 1919 to let every vote count equally in elections. The objective had been fair representation for parties such as the Social Democrats, who had lost out in national elections during the imperial era through rigged constituency boundaries, and in many state elections through a property-based voter franchise.

Alongside the unanticipated plethora of fringe interests encamped in the Weimar parliament, deep political divisions now formed which ensured that no larger party had any hope of obtaining a majority on its own. A series of coalitions governed the country, not entirely without success, but the inevitable horse-trading and compromise that accompanies coalition government left the electorate cynical and dissatisfied. Industrial relations also became increasingly polarized, and in 1928 this situation culminated in a major crisis in the Ruhr District. Steel bosses refused to arbitrate during a fierce wages dispute and instead locked out their employees. It was clear that the Weimar Republic was no longer able to reconcile opposing social interests. As a result, powerful supporters of the old empire, who had been prepared in 1919 to tolerate the Republic, began to look toward a more authoritarian constitutional system, including, perhaps, a restoration of the monarchy.

In 1929 the German economy was already in decline, but in October the U.S. stock-market crash dealt it a hammer blow. Since 1924, Germany had been dependent on a generous flow of foreign credit, particularly from the United States, to pay reparations and even to fund domestic spending. Now, American loans dried up, and nervous overseas investors began to repatriate their capital. By 1931 the entire European banking and financial system had been compromised by the wider economic crisis. International trade had collapsed and domestic economies were sliding ever deeper into recession. Germany was particularly badly hit and by 1932 a third of the labor force had registered as unemployed; a further sixth had simply given up working. The dire poverty, hunger, and disease that had scourged Germany between 1915 and 1924 returned with a vengeance. Poverty-related crime soared, and in the towns and the countryside alike, there were noisy political demonstrations and even riots. Few had any real confidence that the Republic would, or could, address the crisis.

The Nazi Rise to Power

In early 1930, the last democratic coalition government collapsed, prompting the old elite to make its move. Military and business interests close to the president resorted to rule by decree (under Article 48) and resolved to hold early elections, in the expectation that voters were tiring of Weimar and would give the old guard another chance. Thereafter, they believed, the constitution could be looked at again, but the plotters got more than they bargained for. Hitler had been released from prison in 1924 and had reestablished the Nazi Party in the following spring. He made it plain to the paramilitary adventurers who had helped plan the November 1923 putsch that their violent days were over. Instead, he insisted that elections marked the surest way to power. The NSDAP had fared relatively poorly in the 1928 parliamentary elections, but in 1930 it achieved a breakthrough by winning almost a fifth of the votes cast. State and local elections across Germany gave similar results, confirming that the Nazis had become a major political force that no one could afford to ignore. During the spring of 1932, Hitler ran a close second to von Hindenburg in fresh presidential elections, and his party triumphed in a new round of state polls. Finally, the NSDAP saw its vote double in July to over 37 percent in the national Reichstag elections.

How had this breakthrough been achieved, and which groups in German society responded most strongly to the appeal of Nazism? Historians once believed that the Nazis appealed to the marginalized, dispossessed middle classes of Protestant, small-town, and rural Germany. These were precisely the people who had abandoned mainstream politics in droves during the 1920s, turning instead to the special-interest splinter parties. These parties, however, had been unable to operate effectively during the Great Depression, leaving the middle classes open to the Nazis' xenophobic nationalism and promises of justice at home for the farmers and small businessmen of Germany.

More recent research does not deny the Nazis' appeal to these middle-class groups, but scholars now suggest that Hitler's party cast its net much more widely than had originally been assumed. Instead, these scholars argue, Hitler and the NSDAP appealed to almost all elements of German society with a message that promised national solidarity, economic reconstruction, and a just reward for hard work. The Nazis claimed to be the party for everyone: the professionals, the people of countryside, the industrial workers. Their racialism and aggressive foreign policy platform were no secret, but leading propagandists, such as Joseph Goebbels, played down these core Nazi beliefs, knowing them to be vote-losers. Nazi parliamentarians, such as Gregor Strasser, instead addressed the issues of the day, proposed daring solutions to the great economic crisis, and did their utmost to keep the appeal of Nazism general. Theorists have postulated that the Nazis pioneered many of the propaganda techniques of the modern political party, with parades, pageantry, and music all playing a crucial role. The Nazis adopted a militarist flavor that played well to German public opinion, selected and trained their public speakers with great care, and used emerging media such as film with devastating effect. No other party in Germany displayed comparable energy or had such a broad reach.

Above all, the success of the Nazi movement lay in its ability to recruit and mobilize an extensive army of activists who were willing to knock on doors, raise funds, convert friends and neighbors, and operate rudimentary welfare schemes for the party faithful. Meanwhile, the party recruited a cadre of young paramilitary volunteers, largely from the swollen ranks of unemployed workers. These were called Stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung, or SA), and they both attacked and intimidated political rivals on the left, while providing a highly visible public manifestation of militant Nazism. The uniformed SA was the mainstay of many a Nazi rally and parade and provided a constant reminder that the NSDAP was not simply another parliamentary party.

This almost unique ability to reunite the fractured elements of German society by creating a non-Marxist and strongly nationalist mass movement was quickly noticed by the conservative elite. It was struggling to rule the crisis-wracked country by decree, but General Kurt von Schleicher, who stood close to the president, was convinced that the monarchist right could harness and exploit the Nazis' huge and growing constituency to underpin a more authoritarian order with popular support. Accordingly, complex and initially fruitless negotiations opened between the monarchists and the Nazis. These talks dragged on through 1932, but Hitler's insistence that he head any such government as chancellor was unacceptable to the monarchists. At the turn of the year, however, President von Hindenburg was persuaded by his advisers, against his own better judgement, that Germany's only hope for a stable government would be a coalition government with Nazi participation, and thus a government with Hitler in charge. The Nazi leader was granted his wish on January 30, 1933.

Leading conservative politicians secured the majority of posts in Hitler's first cabinet and dared to hope that his inexperience in high office would render him their puppet. However, the new chancellor exploited the possibilities offered by Weimar's constitution up to and beyond the legal limits, and rapidly outflanked his coalition partners. He persuaded President von Hindenburg that extraordinary emergency powers under Article 48 were indispensable in dealing with an alleged communist threat to stability. When a Dutch communist, acting alone, committed an entirely fortuitous arson attack on the Reichstag, Hitler suddenly had a pretext for suspending civil liberties. He declared that Germany was under threat from Jewish-inspired global terrorism, against which the authorities had to act with all the means at their disposal.

New parliamentary elections were held in early March 1933 under anything but ideal circumstances, with Nazi stormtroopers prowling the streets. Political rivals were arrested and detained without charge in makeshift concentration camps, with no prospect of a fair trial. The media were increasingly subject to interference and censorship. Unsurprisingly, all of this resulted in Nazi gains at the polls. The NSDAP and its conservative allies won an overall majority in parliament, which effectively surrendered political power to Hitler and his ministers through the Enabling Act of March 23, 1933. On August 2, 1934, President von Hindenburg died and Hitler swiftly proclaimed himself Head of State and Government, taking the title of Leader (Führer) and National Chancellor (Reichskanzler). Fragile reassurances were granted to the army chiefs that they would remain an independent pillar of the nation. In gratitude, they squandered this concession by swearing, along with their troops, a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler.

Hitler's Third Reich

Hitler's regime quickly tightened its grip on the country. A series of decrees were enacted, increasingly placing the Nazi regime above the law as it moved to persecute minorities, in particular the Jews, and to institutionalize the concentration camp system of which Dachau was the most notorious peacetime example. The regime incarcerated tens of thousands of individuals it deemed to be political, racial, or social enemies and, although most were eventually released, a significant minority were severely mistreated; some were even murdered. Soon enough, the courts were instructed to turn a blind eye to such outrages, and the way was opened potentially for a murderous eugenics program and, during the 1940s, genocide of an unprecedented ferocity.

The Nazis' racist ideals were now expounded overtly, and every means was mobilized to promote them throughout society. The educational system was nazified, and youth movements and organizations were dragooned or lured into the Hitler Youth and German Girls' League. The press quickly came to understand that self-censorship and the promotion of news and features friendly to the regime were the only practical way to ensure survival. Propaganda minister Goebbels masterfully exploited the radio and film industries, ensuring that the Nazi message was promoted through entertainment rather than blatant propaganda. Even news coverage of the early concentration camps was superficially reassuring. Newspaper features stressed that the dregs of humanity, hardened criminals, vagrants, and dangerous political radicals were being given a chance to redeem themselves through hard work in the outdoors and through firm but fair discipline. The most dangerous, irredeemable convicts, the public was reassured, were shot if they tried to escape.

Further aspects of the Nazis' early record proved relatively reassuring to the typical citizen. The blatant thuggery of the SA antagonized most Germans, but during June and July 1934, the stormtroopers were restrained and their leaders executed without trial on charges of homosexuality and corruption. Although illegal, these executions met with public approval, and even the establishment refrained from protest. The Nazis, it reasoned, were cleaning out their own stables. Meanwhile, the government moved boldly and decisively to revive the economy, launching a series of job creation and vocational training programs.

By 1936 unemployment was virtually a thing of the past. The increasing availability of overtime and expanding employment opportunities for women, despite the Nazis' avowedly pro-natalist and antifeminist policies, meant that household incomes rose appreciably. Bitter years of abject poverty and political chaos were set aside. In simple but very important ways, the profoundly abnormal and immoral Nazi regime had reinstated a normal day-to-day existence for most of its subjects. Indeed, popular support proved sufficiently strong to enable even the most repressive dimensions of the Third Reich to operate relatively smoothly during peacetime. The SA rowdies were replaced by the more bureaucratic and infinitely more deadly Schutzstaffel (SS), under the command of Heinrich Himmler, which soon enough established control of all German police forces. However, Himmler's much-feared Secret State Police, the Gestapo, was a relatively small organization that functioned largely through a flood of information, tip-offs, and outright denunciations that flowed in from the general public. The Nazi police state was a state in which the people policed themselves to a very significant degree.

Against this backdrop, anti-Jewish measures intensified only sporadically, and left even the Jews uncertain as to their future. Some hoped that the persecution would have its limits, even be quietly dropped once the government had finished playing to its anti-Semitic followers. However, careers in the public service were largely closed to Jews in 1933, and Jewish businesses were subjected to a boycott on April 1. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws banned future intermarriage between Jews and Christians, although current marriages were grudgingly tolerated and the resulting offspring granted a tenuous security in an effort to avoid inflaming public opinion. The authorities began confiscating Jewish-owned businesses in 1937, under the so-called Aryanization program. Matters subsequently came to a head on November 9 and 10, 1938, when Goebbels staged a violent anti-Jewish pogrom. Kristallnacht ("Crystal Night"), was unleashed across Germany in response to the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a Polish Jew. A growing number of Jews chose to emigrate and, by the time that war approached, in 1939, some 280,000 of the 500,000 Jews in inter-war Germany had left the country. By the time the notorious Wannsee Conference in January 1942 confirmed the primacy of the SS in administering the Jews' ultimate fate, 360,000 had managed to emigrate from the country.

Anti-Jewish measures assumed their truly murderous, genocidal dimension with the coming of war in 1939. Germany had begun covertly rearming shortly after the Nazi takeover, and in 1935 Hitler publicly renounced the Versailles Treaty by reintroducing general conscription. In 1936, Germany remilitarized the Rhineland in further defiance of the Versailles and Locarno treaties, before seizing the foreign German-speaking territories of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938. In early 1939 the Czech capital, Prague, was occupied and, finally, in September, demands on Poland for the return of former German territory escalated into a general European war.

Early on, Hitler had envisaged waging a war of conquest. Although some historians doubt the existence of any particular master plan or blueprint, it is widely recognized that the east, and particularly the Soviet Union, was perceived by the Nazis as ripe for conquest and colonization. Eastward expansion had informed German objectives even during World War I, but the Nazis linked it directly to their racialist agenda and vision of the world (Weltanschauung). The Bolshevik regime of the Soviet Union was regarded as a degenerate but deadly manifestation of the global Jewish conspiracy, and its destruction was considered vital for Germany's future security. Soviet functionaries and the Jews of Eastern Europe alike were therefore doomed to destruction as the Nazis sought both to conquer this alleged enemy and, simultaneously, to clear the territory for colonization. The destruction of Europe's Jews and the destruction of the Soviet Union came to be regarded by the Nazis as one and the same thing.

Poland's Jews had been subjected to a wave of atrocities beginning in September 1939. Now, in June 1941, persecution on a much greater scale ensued. East European Jews and other victims were rounded up and shot by special task forces (Einsatzgruppen) or by regular army units. The Babi Yar massacre outside Kiev saw the execution of almost 34,000 Jews and communist functionaries in just two days. Ghettos were established in Poland for the bulk of the remaining Jewish population, but scant rations were provided, and starvation and disease took their toll of the population. During late 1941, however, preparations began for the industrialized slaughter of Jews and other victims in newly built extermination camps, of which Auschwitz became the most notorious. Here alone, hundreds of thousands of Jews died in the gas chambers, on work details, or in a multitude of arbitrary, inhumane ways.

Germany's defeat in May 1945 came too late to prevent the slaughter. The survivors and their descendents have struggled ever since to come to terms with the enormity of these crimes, for which some of the surviving Nazi leaders were brought to account at the Nuremberg Trials. Germany, an erstwhile pillar and bedrock of occidental civilization, was devastated physically, emasculated politically, and so compromised morally that even during the later twentieth century, many of its citizens balked at taking any pride in German nationhood.

Germany's intellectuals have struggled to reconstruct a German identity and ethos that is not haunted and dominated by Hitler and the gas ovens of Auschwitz. Many have found their integration in the western Atlantic alliance and participation in the construction of a European Union in close partnership with their former enemy, France, a more ethically plausible way forward. This new Germany remains deeply allergic to war and foreign adventures, an attitude for which, ironically, it has recently been roundly criticized by its major postwar ally, the United States.

SEE ALSO Anti-Semitism; Auschwitz; Babi Yar; Concentration Camps; Einsatzgruppen; Extermination Centers; Gestapo; Ghetto; Goebbels, Joseph; Göring, Hermann; Heydrich, Reinhard; Himmler, Heinrich; Hitler, Adolf; Holocaust; Intent; Kristallnacht; Labor Camps, Nazi; Namibia (German South West Africa and South West Africa); Nuremberg Laws; Nuremberg Trials; SS; Streicher, Julius; Wannsee Conference

Conan Fischer