German Third Reich

Stefano Fait & Stefano Sosi German Third Reich (1933 AD -1945 AD) Introduction In order to understand the rise to power of Hitler, and the proclamation of the Third Reich – the third German Empire, after the Holy Roman Empire (843-1806) and the Wilhelmine Empire (1871-1918), one has first to consider the impact on Germany of the First World War. Defeated, and confronting a series of attempted communist uprisings, the political stability ensured by the creation, in November 1918, of the Republic of Weimar, after the name of the city where the national assembly was first convened to draft the new constitution, was fragile, premised on a short-lived agreement between the Social Democrats, the Catholics, and the Conservatives.

The newly formed state was studded with contradictions and inherent flaws. The 1919 Constitution contained a number of clauses that could occasion institutional instability like, for instance, a pure proportional electoral system which led to the proliferation of parties and, in turn, to increasing pressure on governing coalitions, together with the allocation of excessive power to the President, who was elected by popular vote and was entitled to appoint the chancellor, dissolve the Parliament and, during a national emergency, could legislate through executive orders and virtually wield absolute powers.

The young Republic was faced with the disastrous heritage of the war. Economic recovery was difficult and slow-paced, also due to excessive war reparations imposed by the peace treaty of Versailles, in 1919, and to the complexity of the reconversion from war production to peacetime production. Moreover, the new democratic leadership of Germany was discredited by their ready acceptance of humiliating peace terms, which required Germany toi accept full responsibility for the conflict. German reactionaries labeled them as the “November criminals”.

Consequently, the Catholic Centre, the nationalists and the Far Right, including the still minuscule National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) which, from the early 1920s was led by Adolf Hitler, gained an increasing influence on German political life. Even so, by about the middle of the Twenties, the Weimar Republic appeared to be set on the right track, as the economy was finally on upswing, and Germany was no longer subjected to international isolation (in 1926, Germany joined the League of Nations). Unfortunately, the Great Depression, leading to a worldwide recession, had devastating effects on German economy and society, for the recovery had been mostly financed by American capitals. Germany plunged into a seemingly irreversible crisis with massive unemployment, weak ruling majorities, and permanent social unrest. Moral panic ensued. Field marshal Paul von Hindenburg, formerly the most popular army commander of the Great war, seized the opportunity to appoint markedly reactionary minority governments, in order to neutralize democracy and pluralism and establish a social and political system that much resembled that of Imperial Germany.

One of the most detrimental consequences of this conservative offensive was that the NSDAP and other extremist parties gained legitimacy through the popular perception that they could solve the crisis without turning back history. As a result, the Nazi party rose from 2.6 percent of the vote in the national election of 1928se from 2.6 percent of the vote 30, and then to 37.2 percent in July 1932.

The conservatives agreed that the NSDAP could be a useful instrument in the struggle against Parliamentarism and Marxism, and saw that Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933. The Parliament was dissolved two days afterwards, and emergency decrees, like the Reichstag fire decree, which was issued by Hindenburg after a fire broke out in the Parliament, and which erased many of the key civil liberties of German citizens, sanctioning the

arbitrary imprisonment of political opponents and the suppression of publications which criticized the government.

Freedom of speech, press and association, together with the principle of the inviolability of property and property rights were all abolished.

New elections were called for and the campaign was characterized by intimidations, abuses, and massive pro-Nazi propaganda. This notwithstanding, a majority of German voters did not cast their ballot for the Nazis, who reached their maximum electoral success in a nominally free election, with 43.9 percent of votes. Now, because Communists elected candidates were banned from the Parliament, the Nazis secured an absolute majority in the German parliament and they immediately passed the “Enabling Act”, allowing the government to promulgate laws without legislative approval and in violation of the Weimar Constitution. On July 14, 1933, all other parties were outlawed and, subsequently, regional governments, local authorities, business and cultural associations were “aligned”, that is, nazified, while Jews were purged from most professions and public offices and forbidden to marry German citizens.

On June 30, 1934, Hitler ordered the killing of actual or potential dissidents within the party, during the Night of the Long Knives. Hundreds of top SA leaders were murdered and the SA were replaced by the SS, who swore loyalty to Hitler and to Himmler.

On August 2, 1934, the Reich President von Hindenburg died, and Hitler passed a decree according to which he could merge the offices of Head of State, Head of Government and Chairman of the Nazi party. Then Hitler devoted himself to the revision of the Treaty of Versailles and to the establishment of Germany as the hegemonic power of continental Europe.

In 1935, he ordered the military re-occupation of the Saar and, in 1936, of the Rhineland, which had been demilitarized under the Treaty of Versailles. In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria (Anschluss) and, in October of the same year, a part of Czechoslovakia (Sudetenland) with a majority of ethnic Germans was also absorbed into the Reich. Liberal-democratic powers did not react in any significant way, for they were too concerned about the prospect of another conflict. On the contrary, beginning from 1935, the fascist regimes of Italy, Germany, and then Japan, began to converge towards each other (Rome-Berlin Axis, Tripartite Pact), which increased Hitler’s confidence that he could proceed with his imperialistic plans. On September 1, 1939, one week after the signing of the secret MolotovRibbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and USSR, Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland.

Following this easy success, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Norway, France, Greece and Yugoslavia were all defeated and incorporated into the Nazi New European Order. Among the countries at war with Germany and Italy, only the United Kingdom, thanks to her insular position, managed to resist and to win the Battle of Britain against the German air offensive.

In June 1941, Germany launched “Operation Barbarossa” against Soviet Union, and by the end of the year the Wehrmacht had reached the outskirts of Leningrad and Moscow. However, this offensive was bogged down by the autumn rains and by the mud and, in December 1941, the Soviet counter-offensive pushed the Germans back and put an end to German Blitzkrieg. Afterwards, the US intervention tilted military balance in favor of the Allies and in the early months of 1943 an entire German army was besieged and destroyed in Stalingrad. By the middle of 1943 the allied invasion of Italy had knocked Mussolini out of the war. He spent the rest of his life governing a nazi-fascist puppet state in Northern Italy, until the German occupiers were driven out of Italy by the Allies and by the Italian partisans in the spring of 1945.

Meanwhile, in 1944, Soviet forces reached the eastern borders of the Third Reich and the Allies landed in France, opening up a second front in Western Europe. On April 30, 1945, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin, the capital of the Third Reich, which had been surrendered by the allied forces. Nine days later, Germany

surrendered. The Third Reich only survived twelve years, during which time it caused destructions and exterminations that are still unparalleled in human history.

Agriculture/Nomadic Lifestyle In advanced capitalist societies individual responsibility and free competition are paramount. In contrast, collectivist societies emphasize collective responsibility and purposes, as well as group cooperation. The independent, individualist, critical orientation is probably an adaptive response to the growth of large and anonymous urban centers.

The Nazis, who did not view the generative tension between the urban and the rural as a positive aspect of modernity and were possessed by a romantic idealization of rural life and the fatherland , did anything they could to overcome modernity. The Third Reich’s ethos was to be based on the values of rural life,

a segment of unbroken nature,

and of the Gemeinschaft, a hereditary, organic community to which one belonged by ascription, not by choice, the

fiction of a natural social order and policy in which tradition was sound and permanent.

Blood kinship was the source of Gemeinschaft ties. Ideally, modern Germans, like the ancient Germanic people, would settle together and fight in battle together. They would share the same spirit of the tribesmen who managed a common house and farm, a field and a pasture, and who, according to Tacitus, “were not…created for the city, but needed nature, forest and sod.” By contrast, “nomadic” people like the Gypsies and the Jews were regarded as inassimilable liminals, living on the threshold of German society, in a state of ‘social suspension’ and indeterminacy, socially and structurally ambiguous. These itinerant, cosmopolitan, boundary-transgressing peoples violated the deeply entrenched taboos and imperatives of the Teutonic tradition – epitomised by the “blood and soil” mystique – and trespassed the line separating the pure from the polluted, the worthy from the unworthy, because of their innate tendency to restlessness (Wandertrieb). Their removal from German society could not be postponed.

Animals, wildlife, domestication The Nazi legislation for the protection of wildlife and endangered species was far-reaching, and the use of animals in medical experimentation was also strictly regulated. Heinrich Himmler went so far as to declare that “Germans, after all, are the only people in the world who know how to treat animals properly.” This environmentalist zeal originated from the refusal to accept a clear-cut distinction between the human and the natural. Hitler, who held that human beings were nothing more than “tiny bacteria or bacilli on this planet” was set on establishing an alternative moral order and preached a secular, pantheistic and vitalistic religion, which prescribed a complete subordination of human beings to the laws of nature. Nature would offer spiritual guidance and German society would develop into a biotic community (organische Lebensgemeinschaft). Martin Bormann summarized the Nazi credo when he argued that “...The power of nature’s law is what we call the omnipotent force or God. ...We National Socialists demand of ourselves that we live as naturally as possible, that is to say in accord with the laws of life. The more precisely we understand and observe the laws of nature and of life and the more we keep to them, the more we correspond to the will of this omnipotent force.” Because they believed they were fulfilling a cosmic duty that they had been assigned by nature, the Nazis had no qualms in eliminating Jews, Gypsies, Blacks, and Slavs, who constituted different species, while they protected millions of vegetable and animal lives in their attempt to regenerate the German landscape and race. Their faith in the superiority of the “natural man” may explain Hitler’s obsession with the disastrous effects of “human domestication.” Following Nietzsche, the Nazis held that the domestication of human beings had caused their

degeneration and that a return to nature would coincide with their final recovery from the “ills” of civilization. Even the world-renown zoologist Konrad Lorenz, then a Nazi-sympathizer, argued that the breakdown of instinctive behaviour was leading to the relaxation of natural selection and, ultimately, to racial decay.

Art, Architecture, Culture and Literature There is an evident ontological cleavage between the way the graphic portrayal of nature developed North and South of the Alps. A preference for realism, naturalism and landscape subjects in Northern Europe, which were instead exceedingly rare in Southern Europe, had already been noticed by Michelangelo. Social historians and art historians essentially agree on the proposition that ‘Latin’ cultures did not long for the close, almost symbiotic relationship with nature called Naturgefühl, Zurück zur Natur (return to nature) or, in its most sinister form, Blut und Boden (blood and soil). Germanic and Nordic cultures in general were instead caught in a struggle between pagan natural immanentism and Judeo-Christian transcendental and anthropocentric spirituality, which was rekindled by the dispute between Romanticism and Enlightenment.

This divide must not be eternalized and essentialized. We should rather look at it as a series of scripts that are being constantly revised, while preserving various distinctive features that receive greater emphasis under certain circumstances.

Starting from the late nineteenth century, the one script that most caught on among young artists and intellectuals in the German-speaking and Nordic Europe was the Wandervögel movement. Wandervögel literally means literally “birds of passage”. Its adherents were young hippie-like roamers who defied parental authority and escaped the iron cage of materialist bourgeois conventions by fleeing to the countryside, to the woods and the mountains, in the name of freedom, equality, and a passion for nature and a healthy lifestyle, which translated into frequent hiking, nudist sun-bathing, and experiments with alternative medical therapies. This form of protest which, originally, was mainly pacifist and left-wing, turned entirely upside down the spirituality of its middle class members, who felt with an overwhelming intensity the need to live life to the full, and according to values of their own choice. However, following the Great War, its lack of direction, moral relativism, and refusal to adopt rational standards of conduct, made the movement remarkably vulnerable to the seductive simplicity of National Socialism, which purported to be a middle way between socialism and conservatism, capable of ensuring the security that bourgeois society could not give them. One of the most brilliant and wicked achievements of the Nazi leadership, who clearly despised the Wandervögel, but could discern its intrinsic mobilizing potential, was the transformation of the initial commitment of most of its leaders to lifereform (Lebensreform), and to the promotion of campaigns against alcoholism and venereal diseases, and for the amelioration of the working class’s living standards, dietary reform, and environmental protection, into a devious völkish ideology stressing racial regeneration and militarism. The aspiration to a better life through the pursuit of liberty and happiness, the belief that the return to nature was a panacea for the ills of modern life, the first manifestation of a women’s emancipation movement, and the protest against the hypocrisy of previous generations, were channeled into nationalism and racial thought, which completely subverted the initial progressive and utopian enthusiasms.

Wilhelminian and Weimar utopian literature underwent a radical change, and its early emphasis on pseudo-anarchism, premised on the primacy of individual welfare and happiness, gave way to one on conformity with the iron laws of nature, an unabashed exaltation of warfare and social Darwinism, the cult of physical prowess as an instrument of aggressive social and biological selection, and the understanding of social problems as the result of a flawed conduct of life and the counter-selective effects of civilization and the welfare state (what has been called ‘reactionary modernism’). The technocratic character of much völkish literature, in which German engineers are confided the task of

redeeming the Fatherland, led to the triumph of a “mystique of the engineer”, namely, the identification of national prestige with technological innovation and productiveness. Technocratic scientism and populist romanticism, became inseparable and complementary.

This accounts for the relative readiness of so many German artists to conform to the Nazi blend of Romantic naturalism, Nordic mythology and the Hellenic interpretation of life which, for Hitler, was the quintessential model of life conduct to which the German youth should aspire. The Nazi establishment endeavored to instill the populace with a passion for Spartan militarism and eugenic practices, as well for Athenian aristocratic aesthetics and callous foreign policy. The closest convergence with Nazi ideology and its obsession with the Greek and Teutonic spiritual revival occurred in sculpture and architecture. Sculpture focused on athletic and martial images, producing an awkward and artistically valueless neo-classic hodgepodge of pseudo-Hellenism and Germanic Aryanism, which could only serve the aims of an imperialist and militarist regime. At the same time, there took place an important re-evaluation of folk and peasant art and oral folklore, which were thought to be the embodiment of the Teutonic blood and ancestral inheritance and the expression of the ancestors’ worldview.

In architecture and urban planning, two artistic fields that Hitler greatly prized, Nazi megalomania found expression in the work of Albert Speer (1905-1981), whose mentor, Heinrich Tessenow (1876-1950), held the transparently ethnocentric view that internationalism in art and culture conflicted with “our nature to love our native land... True culture comes only from the maternal womb of a nation.”

When Speer became Adolf Hitler's chief architect (1933–45), he pointed out that the imperial dome which was to be built in Berlin as a place of worship – Berlin was to become “the grandest and most beautiful city in the world” –, once the Third Reich would prevail over its internal and external enemies, would be so monumental, that visitors would shrink to nothing. While this was the intended purpose of a regime that despised individuals and schemed for their symbolic abolition while concentrating its efforts towards the enhancement of the Aryan race, the “miniaturization” of the Führer was obviously unthinkable: “the fatal flaw of architecture that has lost all sense of proportion was revealed.

Under that vast dome Hitler dwindled to an optical zero.”

The reconciliation of neo-classicism, modernist and minimalist abstraction, and the neo-Romantic, neo-pagan and baroque aesthetics of the new ruling class lay at the core of the Nazi imperial dream. Hitler was very fond of architecture not only on account of his previous, botched attempts to become a professional architect, but because he rightly saw it as a tremendous vehicle of propaganda and an instrument of eternalization of the Reich. Colossal proportions and absolute regularity were inevitable, for every dictatorship must impress its friends and frighten its foes into a submissive or at least conciliatory attitude, as well as demonstrate its capacity to mobilize human and material resources to preserve the order and enhance the prestige of the nation. It is no accident that linear and essential neoClassicism was simultaneously embraced by the Russian communist Social Realism, by Italian Fascism and by German National Socialism: these political ideologies cannot be extricated from their aesthetic visions.

On the other hand, the symbolic and semantic association between cleanliness, morality, sobriety, neatness, industriousness, conceptual clarity, and modernity was anything but peculiar to National Socialism. In point of fact, it was the staple of the civic aesthetics of modernist functionalism within architecture and design, as well as urban and social planning, which endeavored to transform domestic and public spaces into ordered utopias inhabited by reformed bodies and minds. Even in democratic societies like 1930s Sweden and Switzerland, ascetic functionalism became an instrument of domestication of the masses: citizens were driven into compliance with the imperatives of modernity, progress, and civilization, that is to say, perseverance, self-control, authenticity, and harmony. Dirtiness, negligence,

slackness and the accompanying alcoholism were instead the marks of vice, corruption, and degeneration: a clean body was the mirror of a clean soul.

This is what Susan Sontag insightfully pointed out in her New York Times’ review of the photography book The Last of the Nuba (1973), by Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003), formerly Hitler’s favorite movie director, when she noticed the aesthetic continuum of Riefenstahl post-war photographic portrayal of purity, beauty, and moral virtue among African tribes with her cinematic tributes to the greatness of the Aryan race and ideals commissioned by Hitler himself, such as Sieg des Glaubens, 1933 – Victory of the Faith, Triumph des Willens, 1935 – Triumph of the Will, generally regarded as the most effective propaganda film ever made, and Tag der Freiheit: unsere Wermacht, 1935.

Cities It was in the progressive metropolitan areas of Berlin, Hamburg and the Ruhr that opposition to the Nazis was at its strongest. Conversely, in Bavarian cities, and especially in post-WWI Munich, anti-Semitism, anti-bolshevism, militarism, reactionary völkish nationalism and biological deterministic explanations of human behaviour were rather popular, at least among the local intellectual elite. The university of Munich was a bastion of conservatism, and it was in Munich that the esoteric and racist Thule society was formed, to investigate the occult and to create and financially sustain the then minuscule Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, whose “member No. 7” was none other than Adolf Hitler. Hess and Rosenberg were also members of the same society.

Of the two main branches of the German eugenics movement, the moderate, progressive, and liberal one was based in Berlin, and the radical and racist one, promoting Aryan supremacy and the sterilization or elimination of the unfit had its focus in Munich. However, Rassenhygiene was not popular in Weimar Germany, and it was only taught at Munich University: we have every reason to believe that, without the Nazi take-over, which sanctioned the triumph of the Munich branch, the German eugenics movement would have never headed down the path towards mass-euthanasia and mass-extermination.

Class system/luxuries/status For all their mystical orientation, the Nazis exhibited a remarkable

discernment of the importance of

status-related consumption to maintain a positive self-concept and, consequently, boost the morale of the German population as a whole. The collapse of the domestic front, in 1918, lingered in their minds. Mass advertising of people’s products and household appliances (Volkswagen, Volksempfänger, Volkskühlschrank) served as a constant reminder of national identity and of the omnipresence of the party’s philosophy. This pairing of national/ethnic symbolism and products had the additional advantage of expanding the domestic market for German-made products and of concealing the existing classdivisions within German society underneath a veneer of prosperity and ethnic cohesiveness.

The

peculiar Nazi version of consumer society was predicated on the assumption

that by making the aesthetic dimension of human life more salient and providing a

meaningful sense of community, ethnic consumerism would become a surrogate for social integration. At the same time, however, because American individualism, hedonism, and soulless materialism were one of the main target of Nazi propaganda, the regime was seriously concerned that mass consumption, which was indispensable for economic recovery, might generate a privat e consumer culture, more interested in individual and family comfort than in the organic strength of the nation. And rightly so, since middle and upper class women refused to bow to the “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (children, kitchen, church) rhetoric disseminated by the Nazi-controlled mass media, German advertisers did not relinquish the portrayal of German women as sophisticated, cosmopolitan fashion consumers, and German consumers continued to purchase expensive, foreign-made, luxury items and resented government’s interference in their shopping lists.

Communication and Transportation A core aspect of the 20th century was the development of means of mass communication that could relay information to large segments of the population and influence the public’s consensus on a variety of issues and priorities. The Nazis successfully exploited the mass media and instituted the Reichministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (“Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda”) which, under the direction of Jospeh Goebbels, made a crucial contribution to their effort to impose their views and decisions on German public opinion by establishing a monopoly on information distribution. Goebbels himself warned that “listening to foreign stations is a crime against the national security of our people.”

Once in power, the Nazi establishment gave a powerful boost to infrastructure investment, particularly to the Autobahn network, which provided much-needed employment and was meant to dramatically improve military logistics. However, during the war, because of fuel shortage and due to the far greater efficiency of railway transportation, these motorways were only used as auxiliary airports Economy Nationalism, imperialism, militarism, social Darwinism, a centralized economy, and protectionism were central to the universal mission of fascism. They would defuse the threat of global market competition, Bolshevik class struggle and intra-national ethnic conflicts and provide individuals with organic identities, rooted in history and nature, and therefore far more solid (and less free) than the contingent and impalpable identities generated by the dialectics of democracy.

A comprehensive scheme of socio-demographic, economic and geo-political reconfiguration of the hegemonic powers, in open violation of international norms and treatises, was envisioned, which would bring about a hierarchical and standardized systematization of the relationships between peoples, countries, and territories on a relativistic, particularist, and parochial basis (Großraum, Herrenvolk).

National sovereignty and ethnic specificities would be a cover for all sorts of abuses. This program included autarchic neo-protectionism and corporative statism, involving the centralised control of the national economy, a meticulous division of labor, large industrial cartels, and the coordination of transnational economic blocks (Grossraumwirtschaften: dollar, yen, Mark, lira) under the leadership of the respective hegemonic powers.

The implementation of this plan took its inception with a series of measures aimed at the attainment of full employment, involving a large-scale public works strategy, especially through the development of logistic infrastructures such as motorways, and an extensive rearmament program. Already in 1935 investments in military production exceeded the total amount of investments in the remaining sectors. Yet, while full employment became a reality in 1936, national debt reached unprecedented peaks, also due to autarchic policies, which included the production of expensive chemical surrogates, and to the inefficiency of a wholly centralized national economy which mainly favored industrial cartels.

Only territorial annexations could redress the budget balance. This was precisely the nature of the National Socialist economic program, one that was geared towards the demands of a war economy and that brought with it the urgency for a permanent war of conquest. In other words, the Nazi economic and social “miracle” had war as its inevitable epilogue.

Education It has been suggested that the Nazi worldview was a “juvenile apocalyptic vision” and that this facilitated its acceptance by hundreds of thousands of young Germans, who were taught that they should mostly concern themselves with their own vital urges and with the good of the country and of the German Volk. These vital urges, which ran against contemporary social conventions, were illustrated by countless course books, as well as by the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Haeckel, the Lebensphilosoph Rudolf Eucken, who had by then acquired a cult-like status amongst high school and university students, and of their disciples. Ernst Haeckel, a marine biologist, had founded a “scientific religion” that he christened Monismus and whose preachers gradually became ever more intolerant and elitist. Monists, some of which held chairs in the most prestigious German universities and were widely acknowledged as influential public intellectuals, advocated the reform of society on the basis of the laws of nature, the elimination of “lives unworthy of life” and the natural selection of the fittest. They also publicly endorsed state-corporatism of a fascist kind, maintained that racial and intellectual inferiority went hand in hand with inferior human worth, that free will was a delusion, that liberalism was unnatural and pernicious, that, in the words of Hackel himself, criminals will always repeat their crimes no matter how long they are held in prison. Haeckel’s thought greatly influenced the worldview of Hitler, who reportedly plagiarized much of the most questionable content of Haeckel’s

Natürliche

Schöpfungsgeschichte and the Welträthsel - “the World Riddle”- an international bestseller which sold half a million copies in Germany alone, and was translated into 25 languages,n con con con con con con con cony German students.

In “the World Riddle”, Haeckel set out to solve all the remaining scientific riddles and offered a modern religious faith to thousands of uncritical minds, especially medical students and graduates in biology and anthropology.

Many German intellectuals felt ashamed oflogy and anthropology. Many Germher Friedrich Paulsen dismissed the book by saying that he had read it with a keen feeling of shame about the status of education in Germany, adding that the very existence of such a publication in the land that had given birth to Kant, Goethe, and Schopenhauer was truly painful. On reading the book, German physicist O.D. Chwolson wondered whether he should feel contempt or bitterness, laugh or weep.

Nevertheless, these books became immensely popular and their authors held an enormous sway on young Germans. Their unstinting admiration is almost puzzling when one considers the complexity of the subjects and the brutal tones of some of the argumentations. Even so, like sectarian devotees, these young readers addressed their gurus emphatically: “I thank Darwin and Haeckel for emancipating my intellect, for my deliverance from the bonds of traditional slavery, to which a great part of mankind is bound for all their lives. They gave me a key towards an understanding of the great exalted secret of nature and cleared the fog from my eyes which had hindered a clear view of

the world”. Another student remarked that “at that moment I rediscovered my fatherland and my people, and with that I was relieved of all unclarity and anger... There arose the strong feeling of cheerfulness and happiness which ie arose the strong feeling of ch of itself. In this way Ernst Haeckel returned to me my faith in my people”.

This almost mystical rapture goes a long way to explain why so few academicians eventually stood up when it came to defend German education from the Nazi assault. The anti-reductionist and anti-mechanistic stance of so many young scientists and physicians drove many of them to endorse that extreme form of biological determinism that lay at the core of the NS ideology, which was described as angewandte Biologie, that is, applied biology, by Hans Schemm, a member of the Bavarian government from 1933 to 1937. Adolf Hitler himself stated that “our revolution is another step, or rather the final step towards the overcoming of historicism, and the acceptance of pure biological values”.

From the Nazi point of view, historicism and mechanistic/materialistic science were peculiarly “Jewish” and undermined the “healthy” organic conception of Germany as one Volk with one Führer, in which a prominent role would be assigned to biologists and geneticists, now entrusted with the task of teaching the fundamental laws of life which supposedly sustained the regime. The teaching of holism accelerated the drift towards the “Final Solution” by reinforcing the idea that the whole took precedence over its parts, and in so doing it frayed the web of collective solidarity towards the weak. The existence of disabled people, depending on an artificial environment, was unconceivable within this biocentric paradigm. Not being in the service of life, the disabled and feeble-minded – erblich belastet (genetic defectives) – were really useless machines. Nazi physician Karl Kötschau expressed the opinion of so many medical practitioners trained in 1930s Germany when he argued that “our time does not need externally controlled machine-people, but rather self-controlled people who have developed their own powers schooled in battles with a healthy Nature. Our time needs the heroic man, the man who is up to the challenges of the time, and who does not have to rely on the doubtful protection of an all too artificial environment.”

In German school books, the much-despised separation of man and nature was overcome by “life-sustaining myths”, ethics answered to the needs of natural selection, and therefore free will, human dignity, and individual autonomy were to be eagerly sacrificed to higher “moral” purposes and natural calls.

Family National Socialism was also a form of Romantic Nationalism, where the belief in evolutionary progress intersected a nostalgic, Arcadian outlook on a utopian, unspoiled natural state, in which class boundaries, class struggle, and social unrest were unknown. Hence the great praises lavished upon the freedom-loving, decent, law-abiding, tradition-bound, proud, stern peasantry, and on the harmony of village-life, where roles and hierarchies are established once and forever and changes occur slowly, if ever. In this sense, National Socialism was also a reaction to the insecurity, impermanence, hybridity, and rootlessness of modernity.

It comes as no surprise that the Nazi leadership took Southern German and Austrian peasant family life and structure as a model applicable to the family system that would have been imposed throughout the Reich. Hitler declared that peasants were the “foundation of the entire nation”, for they had managed to preserve the primeval virtues, the folk character, as well as the ancestral essence and customs of Germanic peoples, by rejecting the culture/nature juxtaposition.

The “racially and morally precious” alpine peasant families, descendants of the Nordic Wehrbauer (armed peasant), the personification of the undying loyalty which was so greatly values by the Nazis, would therefore be socially and economically assisted and turned into “warrior-peasants”, who would guard the frontiers of the Reich and block invasions of foreign races.

Two American anthropologists, John W. Cole and Eric R. Wolf, who did ethnographic fieldwork in Trentino – South Tyrol (TST), near the Austrian/Italian border, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, postulated that German Romanticism and nationalism, and especially the ruralist, anti-capitalist, and anti-cosmopolitan Blut und Boden ideology, which loathed the Jews because they incarnated the ills of modern urban life, drew heavily on the symbolic repertoire of peasants accustomed to a stem-family system. Conversely, Italian nationalism, which was promoted by urban elites to serve their economic and political interests, had developed according to “ever-widening circles of integration”. The analogies with French nationalism and cultural imperialism are obvious, as is the cleavage between the Urvolk bio-centric exclusivist expansionism of National Socialism and the culture-centred fascist imperialism.

Tyrolean stem-families are greatly concerned with the perpetuation of the lineage, family estates and properties, which must be passed intact to a single heir. They follow the Anerbenrecht, which prescribes that the older son (Wirth) inherits the estate (primogeniture) and the younger siblings must leave (weichen, give way, yield) and make their living somewhere else. Alternatively, some of them are allowed to remain at the farm, and become Knechte (“farmhands”, but also “slaves”). This aristocratic model, in which only one male family member for each generation succeeds his father as the Bauer (farmer) and lords over the rest of the family, may partly explain the popularity of the concept of Untermenschen in Nazi times, as well as the Nazi obsession for bloodlines and purity.

Food German chemist Otto Hahn once mockingly told a Canadian interviewer that Adolf Hitler was “almost a saint.

No alcohol, no tobacco, no meat, no girlfriends. In a word: Hitler is no doubt a Christ.” In point of fact, Hitler was a devoted follower of those social and life reformers (Lebensreformern) of the first half of the Twentieth century, who saw themselves as missionaries of “the good life”, of modernization and development, and pressured the government for improved housing conditions, diet, and child care. This obviously called for a shift towards a centralised and interventionist State: a solution which was especially appealing to a megalomaniac like Hitler. As a result, the Nazi struggle against alcoholism, tobacco – seen as “genetic poisons” – and chemical adulterations like food dyes, which were thought to be carcinogenic, was accompanied by one encouraging German citizens to change diet and lifestyle, and to consume more fruit, vegetables and wholemeal bread.

The outbreak of WWII had enormous repercussions for asylum inmates all across Germany and occupied Europe, as the rationing of food went hand in hand with the killing of people judged to be incurable in order to free up hospital beds and create a larger food supply for the rest of the German population.

Government “The Party is the State”. This is the the key tenet of National Socialist political theory. According to leading political and legal theorists of Nazi Germany such as Carl Schmitt and Georg Dahm, the Führer is the ultimate lawmaker, because law can only originate from the source of cultural, ideological and political leadership. This is so because, according to the leader-principle (Führerprinzip), “political leadership is the responsible determination of a closed unity of life, growing directly out of the basic forces of the community and based on a symbiosis of authority and power.” It follows that National Socialism did not have to rely on the consensus iuris, namely, the fundamental agreement about the law, because the Volk and the Führer were the embodiment of Law itself.

The State apparatus would only concern itself with administrative issues, while all politically relevant questions were left to Hitler, his entourage and to the Party leadership. In reality, however, the Nazi State was locked in

ceaseless internecine disputes, controversies over jurisdiction, and power struggles. This has led some historians to subscribe to the view that Nazi Germany was ruled according to a system of “authoritarian anarchy”, in which the absolute, monocratic authority of the leader was compromised by the policratic fragmentation of the public administration, and by rivalries between parallel and competing institutions created to further the “divide and rule” strategy of the Nazis.

At the same time, ministries were stripped of their autonomy, and became mere executors of Hitler’s will, so that Hitler himself became the only true coordinating and driving force of the Third Reich and his associates, often appointed on an informal basis, grew increasingly reliant on his “intuitions” and quirks, while at the same time he was reluctant to give direct orders. As a result of the large degree of uncertainty, and of Hitler’s susceptibility to flattery and self-delusion, numerous intriguers and social climbers began surrounding him. In the words of Albert Speer: “the weaker and more frightened these intriguers were in Hitler’s presence, the more brutal and egocentric they were in their interpretation of the concept of “state authority” toward their subordinates. Subconsciously aware of their weakness, they deliberately collected subservient creatures around themselves, who were alike in their conception of law and morals, and with their mental outlook”. Unsurprisingly, chaos ensued in both the domestic and the military sphere, and the megalomania of Hitler only aggravated this state of affairs.

Labor/Slavery The Nazi attempt to consolidate the New European Order geared to German interests fell through during the war, when the planned centralized division of labor and the mutual cooperation of nations and peoples under a German leadership failed to materialize, as a consequence of the violent and exploitative Nazi occupation of Europe. The Germans were thus compelled to resort to overt subjugation by force and to the enslavement of foreign labor, which became inevitable owing to Nazi policies excluding women from factory work, when men were enlisted and sent to the front.

According to policies formulated by Fritz Sauckel and Albert Speer who, in 1942, had been appointed Reich Minister for Armaments, Munitions and war production under the Four-Year Plan, five million foreign civilians would be mass deported from occupied territories and enslaved. They would be forced to work in German war factories and in the construction of fortifications, together with thousands of prisoners of war serving under compulsion and concentration camps inmates who were underfed and virtually exterminated through work. This was deemed justifiable on account of the fact that the least efficient German worker was still, from a racial and biological perspective, immensely more valuable than non-Aryan foreign workers. Those who refused to work would be physically punished, tortured, and oftentimes killed. Those who could no longer work efficiently were starved as punishment for their inefficiency and then left to die.

Language There are no static languages. Languages are in constant flux and change by random variations, by borrowing terms from foreign languages, by adding neologisms, and by jettisoning outmoded words. Languages can also be manipulated by a country’s leadership. Through analogies, metaphors, acronyms, buzzwords, idioms, and euphemisms, the psychological and symbolic associations and resonances of common words may acquire new, politically expedient, dimensions.

There were numerous and significant differences between standard German and the German employed by the public authorities, the mass media, and, gradually, by a substantial share of the German population during the Third Reich. Like the Orwellian regime in 1984, the Nazis fashioned their own newspeak, a dehumanizing tool of oppression and disinformation born out of the destructuration of conventional German and based on the groundless assumption that languages anchor human thought, that is to say, that we observe and interpret the world through the eyes of our native language. Hence the widespread use of expressions such as “euthanasia” and “final solution” in lieu of “muss murder” and “genocide”, “special treatment” for “murder”, “fanatical” for “devout”. By the same token, lawyers became “keepers of the law”, school textbooks used a simplified vocabulary to limit critical reasoning, and extermination camps were places where work would set people free.

Law/Ethics/Human Rights The Nazi ideology was firmly anti-universalistic. For the Nazis, laws could not be devised but only revealed, for they were organic, natural laws, that is, evolutionary laws, rather than formal abstractions. Urrecht and Rassenrecht were the only viable legal framework for a Racial State (Rassenstaat, völkischer Führerstaaat). This was a major challenge to jus gentium, jus publicum; and classic jurisprudence as a whole.

The Nazi symbolic universe, with its longing for a return to the medieval fusion of genealogy and soil (Blut und Boden), was radically opposed to the “monistic” Enlightenment egalitarian and libertarian doctrines (“liberal constitutionalism” and classic criminal law), which tended to level ethnic identities and diversity (Volksgeist), and to ignore national demarcations, much in the same way ist), and to ignore national demveral centuries earlier. The Nazis loathed the trans-territorialism and cosmopolitism of the Jews and the Gypsies, that is to say, their alleged lack of loyalty (Treue) to the territory, their restlessness (restlos), and their liminality, that is, impurity (Rassenschande).

Within this ideological frame, eugenics was meant to operate a readjustment/synchronisation (Gleichschaltung) of society in harmony with nature’s dictates. This ideology also generated its own peculiar legal system which was meant to effect a radical metamorphosis of international law, and would prove enormously misanthropic. Unlike Italian and Japanese fascism, National Socialism did not develop a true philosophical anthropology, but rather a philosophy of biological life and death, within a peculiarly evolutionary cosmology.

Consequently, National socialists were certainly immoral, and yet neither a-moral, nor nihilistic. They actually cultivated a despicable ethics, with rigid and articulate metaphysical foundations. The Nazis took the logic of their evolutionary ethic to its ultimate and most ruthless conclusions. They did not see such conclusions as appalling, because the customary ethical yardsticks no longer applied: even medical ethics could be inverted – from healing to killing.

Many National socialist scientists and physicians considered themselves to be progressive. They followed an ethical code that most of us find dreadful, and which prescribed the moralization of natural selection and the naturalization of morals (naturalistic fallacy), that is, a shift from a purely descriptive understanding of nature to a prescriptive and normative understanding of society. Once a distorted, simplistic, but rather popular definition of the evolutionary process was adopted as the ethical guidance, as opposed to transcendental and negotiated sources of moral conduct, they confronted a decisive choice: they could either concede that nature works in mechanical but mysterious and unpredictable ways, and therefore embrace relativism and nihilism thereafter or, in alternative, – and that is precisely what they did – they could assume that scientific inquiry, and specifically evolutionary and inheritance studies, had already grasped the meaning of it all. They selected the principles that best served their aims (a teleological struggle for life), fashioned a new ethical system and worldview and, in so doing, justified their cosmic vision and historical mission. They announced that the gap between culture and nature had been finally bridged, that society should conform

to the iron laws of nature, that the “Judeo-Christian” tradition, because of its anthropocentrism and hostility to nature (the dualism of body and soul), was causing the degeneration of humankind, and that, because some races and some citizens were unfit for survival and polluted superior races and healthy citizens, they fell under a different rubric: the duty of the government was to help nature run its course.

Then, by enforcing a communal sanction of this vision and of the ethical system that sustained it, that is, by vision and of the ethical systemuation of values, they produced a certainty of impunity: every action, provided that it was approved by the Nazis, and the Nazis stayed in power, would not only be legal, but also morally legitimate and commendable. This would assuage any lingering reservations. In so doing, the Nazis filled the ethical void left by the weakening of conventional morality and crushed all previous attempts to craft a secular, humanist and humanitarian ethics. National Socialists did not necessarily think that they were evil. They believed traditionalists to be on the wrong side, for they did not see that times had changed and called for new modes of thinking and new rules.

Many agreed with Nietzsche that the morality of slaves and of the weak, preaching pity, compassion, and altruism, was sick, as opposed to the healthy, narcissistic and exuberant morality of the masters. On March 8, 1937, the SS periodical Der Schwarze Korps explained that when the Gospel of Matthew (5: 3) recited Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, that meant that the feeble-minded had no mundane rights, whereas nobody would dispute their right to own the kingdom of heaven.

The National Socialist astonishing success in blending mystical and scientistic undercurrents with some of Weimar’s most progressive social policies was achieved by capitalizing on the sincere commitment of German lifescientists and biological anthropologists to the foundation of a genuinely German civic religion, one that would challenge both the Judaeo-Christian dogma of the discontinuity of “Ego” and “Cosmos” and the Enlightenment principles of equality and justice sanctioned by the American and French revolutions.

These were the cornerstones of the SS-doctrine, the most ambitious and deadly attempt to establish an alternative moral and legal order, and a radically new social religion across a unified Europe, by substituting an essentially misanthropic Romantic and neo-pagan biocentrism grounded in the notion of ancestral inheritance for the conceited anthropocentrism of Christianity, Renaissance humanism, and Enlightenment humanitarianism. The revolutionary character of this doctrine with respect to the solution of the social question is undeniable. Never before had a government so adamantly sought to transform into medical and biological issues problems that up until then had been imputed to social and historical circumstances. But then again, this is precisely the origin of its malign appeal.

Medicine and Disease The logo of the Third International Congress of Eugenics, held in New York in 1932, defined eugenics as ‘ the self direction of human evolution’. Negative eugenics was concerned with the elimination of inheritable diseases and malformations and involved birth control, sterilization, castration, immigration restriction and, in Germany, involuntary ‘euthanasia’. Positive eugenics encouraged the reproduction of desirable characteristics and comprised prenuptial certificates, tax incentives for ‘fit parents’, ‘fitter family’ competitions, assortative mating, and pediatric care.

Although already Plato, Renaissance utopians, and French and German Enlightenment reformers had conceived the idea of human selective breeding, the term ‘eugenics’ was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton (1822-1911), Charles Darwin’s cousin, after the Greek word εύγενής, meaning ‘wellborn’. It would designate the science studying ‘all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had’.

All Scandinavian, North American and Central European countries adopted laws authorizing the eugenic sterilizations of their citizens. As a rule, eugenics legislation targeted thousands of marginal people, particularly women, members of ethnic minorities and the physically and mentally impaired. Many were forced, blackmailed, or cajoled into accepting sterilization or castration on grounds which also included sensory impairments, alcoholism, criminal recidivism and sexual promiscuity. Hundreds, possibly thousands of sterilizations went unrecorded because official authorizations were deemed unnecessary.

In Nazi Germany, the ‘Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring’ (1933) authorized the forcible sterilization of hundreds of thousands of citizens, the ‘Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor’ (1935) forbade miscegenation, while the ‘Law for the Protection of Hereditary Health of the German People’ (1935) made marriage permits compulsory and, in 1939, a Führer’s decree legalized the ‘involuntary euthanasia’ of an estimated 200,000 people in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe. In 1936, the ‘Lebensborn e. V.’ (‘Spring of Life, registered association’) was launched, involving the selective breeding of ‘racially superior’ children and the kidnapping of ‘racially valuable’ children across occupied Europe.

Most formulations of eugenic social policy addressed the problem of the reform of “counter-selective” institutions such as social welfare and national health care, which were held responsible for “selection relaxation”. In other words, for the National Socialists, prevention by any means necessary was always better than medical therapy.

The medicalization of deviance was the result of the development of an ideology which conceived diversity as preventable biological unfitness, and sought to restrain it through self-discipline (synchronization of bodies and acts), techno-scientific expertise (scientism), and record keeping (commodification of healthcare).

Religion, Philosophy, and Intellectual Movements National Socialism was a populist ultra-nationalism that functioned as a secular religion that rejected liberal democratic modernization as decadent and unable to stir the souls of the masses and embraced a deeply pessimistic and at times nihilistic anthropology. It was an anti-materialistic, anti-positivistic, ruralist, and, in a way, post-modern, reaction to the Enlightenment tenets, to universalist and cosmopolitan trends, to bourgeois hedonism and its obsession with individual rights to the detriment of duties, common obligations, order and social harmony (an ethos of service), and to the ideology of progress and modernization that had accompanied the rise of capitalism.

Nazi theorists and sympathizers believed in the inequality of individuals, human groups, and nations and favored hierarchical societies. For them, cultural and natural differences were unbridgeable, and all attempts to identify a set of common standards and objectives for the whole of humankind was utterly futile.

They stigmatized the artificiality and abstractedness of French Enlightenment, the utilitarian market ethos, and the axioms of jus gentium. Because mass democracy could only survive if socio-cultural and biological homogeneity (Artgleichheit) was vigorously pursued, if necessary also by eliminating heterogeneity, they urged the creation of ethnocracies of Herrenvölker, with specific legal philosophies and national ideologies anchored to notions of purity (Sauberkeit), national character (Volksgeist), and the hygiene (Rassenhygiene) of the body social (Volkskörper).

While the reduction of political life (nurture) to bare life (nature) was summarily dismissed in other countries, the Third Reich especially prized the concept of biotic community (biocracy), in which the divide between animals and humans is effaced (zoological reductionism), and all living beings continue to exist as part of the germ plasm (the sea of life), unless they are defective (and therefore harmful), in which case the line drawn between the healthy and the sick (disabled, Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, Bolsheviks, and so forth) coincides with the one between life and death (rule of exception).

The belief in a biological/natural causation of history and society was indeed quite peculiar to National Socialism, the only antecedents being Sade and Nietzsche, whose struggle against the Enlightenment ideals – and especially Condorcet’s benevolent humanitarianism and Kant’s cosmopolitism – was inspired by strikingly similar philosophical edifices, predicated on amoral, egotist naturalism, reactionary radicalism, a deeply pessimistic anthropology, a callous and unforgiving contempt for the disempowered and “mediocre”, and cynical, elitist social Darwinism.

What was distinctive about the Nazi philosophy and cult, and what prevented its exportation abroad, was (a) its biocentrism: the notion of National Socialism as angewandte Biologie, a form of pantheist mysticism (Monismus) and a nature-oriented lifestyle (naturgemäße Lebensweise), as opposed to Italian and Japanese fascist anthropocentrism and cultural essentialism; (b) its combination of Eternal Recurrence – human beings as the expression of the immortal germplasm (Ahnenerbe) – and natural teleology of history – biology as destiny (Erbsünde), which was the result of an erroneous understanding of genealogies in terms of genetic continuity, as opposed to the fascist social reformism and social hygienism.

In other words, National Socialism could only exist as a movement (Bewegung), a perpetual motion, although it reposed on a patently fixist definition of nature. In fact, it derived much of its appeal from its “ability” to reconcile the notion of a linear, evolutionary progress of the Aryan race, with the never-ending re-emerging of the pure, genuine Aryan anthropo-typology, ever identical to itself.

In sum, National Socialism can be best understood if we bear in mind the dualism of modern European secular narratives: the belief in the malleability of human nature and society, and the Romantic passion for ethnicity, localism, and authenticity. The emphasis on the technocratic and absolutistic undercurrents of the Enlightenment, must not obscure the fact that fascism, and even more so National Socialism, had very much in common with Romanticism: (a) the dovetailing of the exaltation of the past and the Messianic hopes of a radically new future society; (b) the desperate, pantheistic yearning for the experience of the Infinite and the Absolute – das Streben nach dem Unbedingt – beyond human transience and the individual/wholeness divide, and for a sort of “cosmic awareness” which could be attained by sensitive intuition alone. Conversely, it was also argued that recourse to logic and rationality turned human beings away from nature and instinct; (c) the titanic rebellion against mediocrity and treadmill routine, which really was contempt for everyday life, ordinary people, and the artificial, consensual, negotiable, unexciting and non-heroic character of democracy (Sturm und Drang); (d) the misanthropic cult of Ego and of reified supra-individual entities like the State, the Germ-Plasm (Blood), the Volk and its Spirit (Volksgeist), portrayed as the true agents of history; (e) the ultrarelativistic wholesale rejection of universal and comparative criteria of evaluation of the past and the present, of Kantian cosmopolitism and of a critical perspective on historical events and socio-cultural phenomena which undermined tradition and social stability (the so-called “Biedermeier mentality”).

Resistance And Dissent A widespread consensus had been built by the Nazis upon a desire for redemption and revenge against the old enemies, inside and outside of Germany, the commitment to lower unemployment rates, the popularization of ancient Germanic myths which struck a resonant chord amongst the German populace, the skillful use of the mass media for propaganda purposes, the parades and mass demonstrations. The National Socialists were particularly successful in injecting the proper amount of “magic”, “sublime” and “epic”, that is, of mythic and ritual consciousness, into a society awaiting its palingenetic regeneration. Indeed, as Hitler himself remarked to Hermann Rauschning, “those who see in

National Socialism nothing more than a political movement know scarcely anything of it. It is even more than a religion: it is the will to create mankind anew.”

An abiding fascination with the Nazi attempt to carry out an existential, political and aesthetic revolution of unrivaled proportions, together with the merciless efficiency of the Geheime Staats Polizei (Gestapo, the secret state police) and the SD – Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service), and the unwillingness of the Allies to give credit to the small, but resolute, clandestine groups that sought to challenge the dictatorship, prevented German anti-Nazi resistance to gain ground.

Their contribution to the defeat of the Third Reich remains symbolic, but they bear witness to the rectitude and selfsacrifice of hundreds, if not thousands of German civilians and soldiers, who withstood intimidations, threats, public vilification, but also the appeal of certain features of the Nazi ideology.

On the other hand, the story of Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl, and Christoph Probst, the leaders of the White Rose resistance organization, arrested, imprisoned, and sentenced to death for circulating leaflets in which they accused the Nazi regime of betraying Germany and causing the pointless death of thousands of German soldiers, civilians and Jews, is truly heartening. Yet, few take the trouble to mention the fact that, prior to their fateful decision to oppose the regime and its imperialistic ambitions, they had been enthusiastic supporters of Hitler, and had joined the Hitler Youth.

The same may be said of those notables who organized the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler and take over the government. Most of them were were fervent Catholic, dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, and aristocrats.

German-British sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, in his Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland, has defined them as the most obsolete and retrograde elements of German society. Indeed, it seems past doubt that they did not fight and risk their lives for a liberal and democratic society, but rather to restore those virtues and habits of the mind that the Nazis had pledged to safeguard, but were gradually discrediting and undermining.

Some felt that they had no choice, their world was crumbling and they had to take action. Emmi Bonhoeffer, one of the 20 July conspirators’ wives, commenting on her participation in the plot, pointed out that “many think resistance is a question of will, but often one cannot choose. Free will is quite a restrained thing”. Friedrich Olbricht, the chief of the logistic division of the Reserve Army, and one of the conspirators, reportedly declared that he was dying for the noblest cause: “I am not doing anything more than thousands of other officers…have already done in this war, I am dying for Germany”. Henning von Tresckow, one of the organizers of the opposition among staff officers on the Russian front, employed a mythological metaphor to emphasize their ennobling fate: “no one among us can complain about his death, for whoever joined our ranks put on the poisoned shirt of Nessus. A man’s character is proven only at the point where he is prepared to give his life for his convictions”.

What is remarkable about their assertions is that they belie a morality of shame, more typical of Asian cultures and aristocratic milieus, rather than the morality of guilt which is characteristic of Euro-American ordinary individuals.

These dissenters took honor very personally, and shame, more than guilt, sanctioned it because, among the members of the same caste, the disgrace of individuals is an embarrassment for all their peers.

Science and Technology At the end of the nineteenth century, physical anthropology and medical anthropology had emerged in response to the culturalist relativism of humanities and historical studies and had adopted a static perception of the Naturvölker, exotic peoples that had been excluded from history and techno-cultural progress, save for those “fortuitous” encounters with the Kulturkreisen, namely those dynamic civilizations that set the pace for human progress

and evolution. Some of these “living fossils”, representing a miraculously preserved pure human nature, would be paraded across German cities in the Völkerschauen, veritable human zoos.

German anthropologists had initially dismissed Darwinian evolutionism because they believed it would blur the line between humankind and primates, instead of stressing what these latter had in common with inferior races (natural savages) and the feeble-minded. Subsequently, the main purpose of researchers was to gather scientific evidence on primitive human typologies so as to better comprehend the sequence of evolutionary stages that the Kulturvölker, had to go through to become part of Western civilization.

Clear-cut demarcations of natural and cultural attributes, and arbitrarily selected and anthropometrically assessed parameters defining the naturality and authenticity of the primitives and deviants, shaped Europeans’ selfperception. These radical forms of empiricism and naturalism among German physical and medical anthropologists had a considerable anti-humanist potential, and even liberal and socialist scholars would occasionally support views of human variability not appreciably distinct from those expounded by white supremacists. The genocidal war waged by Imperial Germany against the Herero, which made the Holocaust and Total War conceivable, was legitimized by the arguments of social Darwinist anthropologists.

Furthermore, because the leadership of physical anthropology in Germany comprised so many bio-medical specialists, the dichotomy normal/pathological acquired strong ethical and political connotations, which eventually sanctioned the mass-murder of thousands of German citizens who had been judged unfit for life (lebensunwertes Leben, that is, “life unworthy of life.”

Like biology and anthropology, physics was also required to become “more Aryan”, because the stress on the national character of science was necessary to set different theoretical approaches and practices apart. Nobel-laureate physics such as Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark showed no compunction in dismissing Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s relativity and quantum theories as the result of Jewish relativism, and therefore devoid of any scientific value. However, Heisenberg’s liaisons with Himmler allowed him to repel the attacks and to continue to pursue his plan to develop nuclear fission, though it is still unclear whether he would have been prepared to provide the Nazis with an atomic weapon. What is fairly certain is that without the decisive contribution of émigré physicists like Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller, the Allies would not have been capable of developing the atomic bomb before the end of the war.

Having said that, we should not make the common mistake of assuming tat the Nazis only focused their attention on military and war-related technology (like synthetic fuel refineries). Totalitarianism is above all concerned with the disciplining of human behavior and the efficient management of human resources. National Socialism was also a project of technocratic modernization of German society by scientific means, one engaging all disciplines that could further Nazi plans and, in the main, allowing scientists to preserve a rational and result-oriented attitude. Aside from its pursuit of military excellence, National Socialism produced cutting-edge scientific research on cancer prevention, promoted biodynamic farming, vegetarianism, antivivisectionism, regulated the use of pesticides, asbestos and food dyes, and launched anti-tobacco and anti-alcoholism campaigns. The rationale behind these seemingly progressive attitudes, the Nazi biotechnological advances, and their implementation of exterminatory programs was, most likely, a deep cognitive anxiety concerning health (hypochondria), bodily cleanliness, and purity.

Sports/Recreation National Socialism was the subversion of conventional anthropologies of the body and of the mind: hence, the emphasis on “moral” and physical education, and on social and racial hygiene. The principle that people do not own

their own bodies was perverted to reinforce the conception of individuals as mere corpuscles immersed in the eternal stream of history and of the germplasm (as heirs and progenitors of noble breeds), that is to say, units in the organic whole of the Volk. Bodies and minds belonged to the Nation and to the Führer. This atomization of citizens was made possible by the industrial killing of World War I and by the Great Depression, while humanities and biological sciences projected the past – the ancestral virtues and millenarian traditions of the Teutonic race – into the future, and vice versa.

To paraphrase Nietzsche, regenerated Nazi men would represent the antipode of democratic-liberal citizens, who were portrayed as fraught with skepticism and enfeebled by demagogy. Even their bodies would mark the increasing distance from the bourgeois ideal which, allegedly, was inimical to sport, naturally pacifist, compassionate, emotional, humanitarian, calculating, and sterile.

Declining birth-rates were indeed one of the chief preoccupations of the regime, which was by necessity pronatalist in view of its rearmament and expansionist plans, and urbanites were stigmatized for their hedonistic selfishness. Hitler’s entourage insisted on the devastating effects of industrial citizens on the health and vigor of the Germans and of their genetic pool (germ-plasm). Cities were said to be apt to destroy “human material” and extreme rationalization curbed fertility, because this latter was really the product of instinct, physical exercise, sport, and clean air. On top of that, healthy and sturdy men would also be morally sound and wise, unlike the weak, who tended to be treacherous and scheming.

Obviously, in everyday practice, “toughness” and self-mastery were antagonistic to the virtues of mercy and humility. The goal of Hitler was, in the first place, the creation of “a violently active, dominating, brutal youth,” a youth “indifferent to pain”. In furtherance of this objective, the nazification of German life was to be extended to sport as well, so that physical exercise in the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) really resembled soldier training, and could include throwing grenade-like objects, climbing walls, jumping into the sea, and crawling under barbed wire. As in Italy and Japan, sport really became a mere training ground for future recruits.

International sport events were also exploited by the regime as a display of its efficiency, prestige, and of the fitness of the Aryan race and the German Volk. The most well known example were the Summer Olympics held in Berlin in 1936, which last for two weeks, during which the dictatorship aptly dissimulated its racist and militaristic nature, although he refused to allow German Jews and Gypsies to take part in the athletic competition. The organization of the Olympic Games turned out to be one of the major successes of the Nazis: the national team won the most medals, and the world indeed praised German hospitality and efficiency. Still, the eighteen African-American athletes won 14 medals overall, while non-German Jewish athletes won 13 medals (nine of them gold).

Then, Hitler confided to Speer that “in 1940 the Olympic Games will take place in Tokyo. But thereafter they will take place in Germany for all time to come, in this stadium”.

War, Weapons, Military, and Diplomacy The ultimate objective of Hitler’s foreign policy, as he himself announced in his Mein Kampf, was an expansion of the German Reich towards the East by means of a series of imperialist and exterminationist wars. Drawing on social Darwinist, geo-political and racialist theories, Hitler argued that the security, perpetuation, and growth of the “ethnic substance of the Volk” – that is, the cultural and biological heritage of the German people – could only be ensured by extending its hegemony beyond Central Europe. However, instead of relying on the conventional, liberalcapitalist doctrine of colonialist exploitation, Hitler saw in the destruction of Soviet Union and in the enslavement and partial annihilation of Eastern European Slavs, the solution to German predicaments. Eventually, after a final

showdown with the United States, Germany would remain the world’s only super power. While the objectives were crystal clear, the means to carry out his plan were less so.

Initially, Hitler had to camouflage his real intentions, and pretended that he merely pursued the guidelines of Weimar foreign politics, namely the revision of the Treaty of Versailles. But because the United Kingdom refused to adopt an attitude of benevolent neutrality, Germany sought a rapprochment with fascist Italy – even though ideological incongruities and mutual distrust would advise against the formation of such an alliance – and, even more astonishingly, with the Soviet Union.

The reason for this seemingly absurd decision was conveyed to Carl J. Burckhardt, high commissioner of the League of Nations, by Hitler himself on August 11, 1939: “Everything I undertake is directed against Russia. If the West is too stupid and too blind to comprehend this, I will be forced to reach an understanding with the Russians, turn and strike the West, and then after their defeat turn back against the Soviet Union with my collected strength. I need the Ukraine and with that no one can starve us out as they did in the last war.” Hitler was so enamored with his master plan that even in 1945, when defeat was impending, he attempted to persuade the Western Allies to join forces with Germany against Soviet Union.

Hitler also believed that the offensive military doctrine of Blitzkrieg (lightning war) would allow the Third Reich to beat its enemies by avoiding trench warfare and a fight on two fronts, which was widely believed to have been the main cause of the defeat of Imperial Germany in World War I. Blitzkrieg involved rapid maneuvers, the concentration of armed forces (especially airplanes and tanks), the decentralization of the command structure, and superior military technology. However, contrary to what most people think, the Wehrmacht (German army) was not as efficient as it has been portrayed by Nazi propaganda. In fact, German soldiers were ill-equipped to cope with the Russian winter and the African desert, overall armament levels and means of transportation were far from impeccable, and new weapons, like V1, V2, jet fighters, and advanced submarines became available only in 1944, when the war was already virtually lost.

Paradoxically, despite their eagerness to fulfill “Germany’s destiny” by military means, the Nazis could not anticipate the magnitude of such a task.

Further Readings Evans, Richard John. The Third reich in power 1933-1939. London: Allen Lane, 2005 Etlin, Richard A. Art, culture and media under the Third Reich. Chicago, Ill.; London: University of Chicago press, 2002 Steinweis, Alan E. The impact of nazism: new perspectives on the third reich and its legacy. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska press, 2003 Mommsen Hans (ed.). The Third Reich between vision and reality: new perspectives on German history, 1918-1945.

Oxford; New York, N.Y.: Berg, 2001.

Szoelloesi-Janze, Margit (ed.). Science in the Third Reich. Oxford; New York, N.Y.: Berg, 2001 Herbert, Ulrich. Hitler's foreign workers : enforced foreign labor in Germany under the Third Reich. New York, N.Y.; Oakleigh, Melbourne: Cambridge University press, 1997 Bergen, Doris L. Twisted cross: the German christian movement in the Third Reich. Chapel Hill, N.C.; London: University of North Carolina press, 1996.

Dow, James R., Lixfeld Hannjost (eds.). The nazification of an academic discipline: folklore in the Third Reich.

Bloomington, Ind.; Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana University press, c1994

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