How serious Nazi leaders were about their racial views is indicated by the many statements and actions taken to uphold them, sometimes at great cost. Horst von Maltitz wrote and cited the following in The Evolution of Hitler’s Germany.17
“We are a master race which must remember that the lowest German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here,” said Erich Koch, Reich-Commissioner for the Ukraine, in a speech in Kiev on March 5, 1943. (p. 53)
The policy of utter ruthlessness of the occupation regime naturally resulted in deep hostility, even on the part of those groups of the native population who might otherwise have had some inclination to cooperate or to acquiesce in it, at least for the duration of the war. No one is willing to be stamped subhuman under the terror regime of a self-proclaimed master race. The native hostility immeasurably increased the difficulties of the occupation regime. Moreover, the mistreatment of the Soviet prisoners of war, which soon became known in the Soviet Army, greatly increased the determination of its soldiers never to surrender under any circumstances. More farsighted National Socialists, such as Alfred Rosenberg and even Joseph Goebbels, recognized these disadvantages and dangers, but their objections were useless. To Hitler, Himmler, and countless other national socialist leaders, the importance of asserting themselves as the master race and other ideological racial considerations had unquestioned priority. It was one of many instances in national socialist rule in which ideology took precedence over political and military expediency, (p. 54)
“For reasons of racial hygiene, it is undesirable to use prisoners of war as blood donors for members of the German folk community, because we cannot be sure that no men of mixed Jewish blood among the prisoners would be used for blood donations.” (p. 56).
For the improvement of the race, Himmler wanted the SS men to be the breeding bulls: “It must be a matter of course that the most copious breeding should be by this [SS] Order, by this racial elite of the Germanic people. In 20 to 30 years we must really be able to furnish the whole of Europe with its leading class.” And Hitler said: “I am firmly determined to station racially valuable military units, such as formations of the Waffen-SS, in all areas where the present population is [racially] bad, so as to have them take care of a freshening-up of the blood (Auffrischung des Blutes).” (p. 57)
The killing of Jews and others was highly irrational from any societal perspective, except the ideological one. Even their lesser mistreatment in the 1930s resulted in great losses for Germany in mathematics, in science, and in other realms. The Germans knew this. Hitler said, “If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science then we shall do without science for a few years.”18
It is an irrelevant question whether Hitler intended to kill the Jews from the beginning. Certainly to get rid to them was an obsession with him. Once the Nazis came to power they considered resettlement; we do not know how seriously. Extermination – implied by the word Ausrottung used in Mein Kampf- may have been considered all along. In a 1922 conversation recorded in the archives of the Institute fur Zeitgeschichte, Munich, Hitler said, “As soon as I shall have power, I shall have gallows erected, for example in Munich – Jews will be hanged until the last Jew in Munich is exterminated.”19 Even if he did not seriously intend to do this in 1922, usually intentions do not fully develop without some possibility of their actualization.20 After Hitler came to power, both the psychological possibility and the machinery of destruction evolved with the progressively greater mistreatment of Jews.
What was the cause of Hitler’s personal, deep-seated hatred of Jews? Did it arise from the death of his mother while she was being treated by a Jewish doctor? Was it deep hostility and anger caused by his bad relationship to his father, which found an outlet in anti-Semitism? Was it the virulent anti-Semitism in Vienna while he lived there in his early adulthood?c Did anti-Semitism serve him by elevating his self-esteem and giving a feeling of wholeness to a damaged self? Many attempts at understanding the Holocaust have focused on Hitler’s childhood and personal pathology. The predisposition to fanaticism does have roots in childhood and personality, but once a person makes a fanatic commitment to an ideology, knowledge of the ideology, and not his childhood and personality, is the best guide to understanding his behavior. Moreover, as I noted in Part I, we are concerned less with Hitler himself than with the people who came to follow him.
There will always be wild ideas and extreme ideologies. For us the question is how the German people came to follow a leader and a party with such ideas, and how they came to participate in their fulfillment. To understand this, we must consider German culture and its influence during both phases of the genocide: the Nazi rise to power and the progressively greater mistreatment of Jews.
Reasons for Hitler’s appeal: a summary
Hitler’s ideology had three primary components: (1) racial purity and the racial superiority of Germans, with an especially heavy component of anti-Semitism (and the belief that Germans had to be defended against Jews, who were bent on their destruction); (2) nationalism, an extension of German power and influence, which also promised material well-being expressed in the concept of Lebensraum; and (3)
