Nazi race ideologues

ABSTRACT

Stone argues that we need to disaggregate Nazi race ideologues since they do not form one undifferentiated mass. Ultimately, all the Nazis were race ideologues and chief among them were Hitler, Himmler and the other leading figures. All of the leading Nazis, whether they dealt specifically with ‘racial policy’ or not, put forward a racialized ideology, but those who made a name for themselves specifically as race theorists did not therefore all share the same views, nor did they all contribute in equal measure to the regime's crimes. Nor did race science, however deeply it threw its lot in with Nazism, drive the regime as much as did a kind of racial mysticism, or ‘thinking with the blood’. Here Stone suggests how we might evaluate the relative contributions made to the development of the Third Reich and its crimes by race scientists of different stripes, on the one hand, and theorists of racial-political conspiracies on the other.

KEYWORDS:

• eugenics
• fascism
• historiography
• intellectuals
• Nazism
• race
• racial mysticism
• racial science

Notes

1 Harry Mulisch, Criminal Case 40/61, the Trial of Adolf Eichmann: An Eyewitness Account, trans. from the Dutch by Robert Naborn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2005), 99.

2 Quoted in Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2003), 117.

3 Nuremberg trial transcript, 9 August 1946 (IMT XX, 541), available on the Avalon Project website at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/08-09-46.asp (viewed 15 September 2016).

4 Transcripts (TWC II, 227 and TWC, II, 262–3), quoted in Kevin Jon Heller, The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011), 301. Sievers was convicted of war crimes (medical experimentation), crimes against humanity and membership of the SS, and sentenced to death.

5 Paul Weindling, ‘Victims, witnesses, and the ethical legacy of the Nuremberg Medical Trial’, in Kim C. Priemel and Alexa Stiller (eds), Reassessing the Nuremberg Military Tribunals: Transitional Justice, Trial Narratives, and Historiography (New York: Berghahn Books 2012), 74–103 (91). On the Ahnenerbe, see Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, trans. from the German by Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2012), 275–9.

6 Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2008), ch. 2.

7 See the essays in Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto (eds), Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2014).

8 See discussions in Geoff Eley, Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany 1930–1945 (London and New York: Routledge 2013); and Devin O. Pendas, Mark Roseman and Richard Wetzell (eds), Beyond the Racial State (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press forthcoming 2017).

9 See the discussion in A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone, ‘Eugenics and genocide’, in Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2010), 193–209.

10 See, for example, Ingo Haar and Michael Fahlbusch (eds), German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919–1945 (New York: Berghahn Books 2005); Michael Fahlbusch and Ingo Haar (eds), Völkische Wissenschaften und Politikberatung im 20. Jahrhundert: Expertise und ‘Neuordnung’ Europas (Paderborn: Schöningh 2010); and Margit Szöllösi-Janze (ed.), Science in the Third Reich (Oxford: Berg 2001).

11 See, for example, Michael Kater, Doctors under Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1989); and Eric Ehrenreich, ‘Otmar von Verschuer and the “scientific” legitimization of Nazi anti-Jewish policy’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, 2007, 55–72.

12 Robert Proctor, ‘From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde in the German anthropological tradition’, in George W. Stocking, Jr. (ed.), Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1988), 138–79 (166).

13 Edoardo Tortarolo, ‘Objectivity and opposition: some émigré historians in the 1930s and early 1940s', in Q. Edward Wang and Franz L. Fillafer (eds), The Many Faces of Clio: Cross-cultural Approaches to Historiography (New York: Berghahn Books 2007), 59–70 (65).

14 Oscar J. Hammen, ‘German historians and the advent of the National Socialist state’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 13, no. 2, 1941, 161–88 (188).

15 Tortarolo, ‘Objectivity and opposition’, 66.

16 On which, see my Responses to Nazism in Britain 1933–1939: Before War and Holocaust, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2012).

17 Christopher J. Probst, Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2012), 175.

18 Hans F. K. Günther, ‘Sören Kierkegaard, ein Prophet aus nordischem Blute’, Völkischer Beobachter, 23 December 1926, quoted in David B. Dennis, Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2012), 250.

19 Dennis, Inhumanities, 267.

20 Walter Gross, Heilig ist das Blut: Eine Rundfunkrede von Dr Gross (Berlin: Rassenpolitisches Amt der NSDAP 1935), available in an English translation on the Calvin College: German Propaganda Archive website at www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/gross3.htm (viewed 16 September 2016). This translation is by the author, as are all translations from the German unless otherwise stated.

21 Ibid.

22 Quoted in Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, 110.

23 Wolfgang Bialas, ‘The eternal voice of the blood: racial science and Nazi ethics', in Anton Weiss-Wendt and Rory Yeomans (eds), Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1938–1945 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press 2013), 347–71 (350).

24 Stark, quoted in Dirk Rupnow, Judenforschung im Dritten Reich: Wissenschaft zwischen Politik, Propaganda und Ideologie (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft 2011), 292.

25 Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, 106, 123.

26 Ibid., 112.

27 Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1995), 12.

28 Fritz Lenz, Die Rasse als Wertprinzip: zur Erneuerung der Ethik (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns 1933).

29 Ernst Krieck, ‘Die Intellektuellen und das Dritte Reich’, quoted (English translation) in Uriel Tal, Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Third Reich: Selected Essays (London and New York: Routledge 2004), 9.

30 Josef Goebbels, Der steile Aufstieg: Reden und Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1942/43 (Munich: Franz Eher 1944), 301, quoted (English translation) in Bialas, ‘The eternal voice of the blood’, 358.

31 Christian Ingrao, Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine, trans. from the French by Andrew Brown (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press 2013), 42.

32 Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, 105.

33 Morris Edward Opler, ‘The bio-social basis of thought in the Third Reich’, American Sociological Review, vol. 10, no. 6, 1945, 776–86 (783).

34 See, for example, Marc Buggeln, Das System der KZ-Außenlager: Krieg, Sklavenarbeit und Massengewalt (Bonn: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung 2012); and Marc Buggeln, ‘Building to death: prisoner forced labour in the German war economy. The Neuengamme subcamps, 1942–1945’, European History Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 4, 2009, 606–32.

35 For an example of one of these sub-camps, see my article ‘Christianstadt: slave labour and the Holocaust in the ITS collections’, Freilegungen: Jahrbuch des International Tracing Service, vol. 4, 2015, 78–91.

36 Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich, for example 37–8, 83; Thomas Kühne, Belonging and Genocide: Hitler's Community, 1918–1945 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press 2010). See, most recently, Christian Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2016), ch. 7.

37 For a similar argument on one of Nazi ideology's forebears, see John Nale, ‘Arthur de Gobineau on blood and race’, Critical Philosophy of Race, vol. 2, no. 1, 2014, 106–24.

38 Paul Weindling, ‘Genetics, eugenics, and the Holocaust’, in Denis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers (eds), Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2010), 192–214 (213). See also Robert J. Richards, ‘Was Hitler a Darwinian?’, in Robert J. Richards, Was Hitler a Darwinian? Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2013), 192–242.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dan Stone

Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author or editor of sixteen books including, most recently, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press 2010), The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (ed., Oxford University Press 2012), The Holocaust and Historical Methodology (ed., Berghahn 2012), The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory: Essays in the History of Ideas (Palgrave Macmillan 2013), Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945 (Oxford University Press 2014) and The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (Yale University Press 2015). His book The Concentration Camp (Oxford University Press) will appear in 2017 and later in paperback in OUP's ‘Very Short Introduction’ series. He is currently working on a Leverhulme Trust-funded project on the International Tracing Service. Email: [email protected]