Four

SS

During the 1930s, in Germany, there was some agreement on the fact that the German Volk was racially mixed, owing to the contribution of approximately six races, although no consensus existed over this issue, even within the SS. Many anthropologists saw the Nordic race as the superior one, the race that was ultimately behind all major achievements in human history. Many endorsed Hans Günther’s theory of the basic races that were represented in the German Volk: Nordic, Mediterranean, Dinaric, Alpine, East Baltic, and Phalian (Fälisch). These stems were subjected to the influence of Negro, Mongolian, Near Eastern, and Oriental races. The Jews did not constitute a race, strictly speaking, but they were seen as a “secondary racial grouping” (Hutton, 2005, pp. 35-49). As Christopher M. Hutton writes: Nordicism was suffused with nostalgia and racial pessimism, though there remained the hope that the Nordic race and the German Volk might yet be saved. By contrast, eugenic science, in its pure form, was technocratic and ‘progressive’, in that it argued for the engineering of a future bio-utopia. (Hutton, 2005, p. 113) But Himmler and the SS succeeded in combining these two aspects, by recycling völkisch nationalism and Nordic romanticism through a modern and bureaucratic machine devoted to the fabrication of biological utopias. 1. Race: The Basic Marker In SS thinking, race represented the basic anthropological marker and the ontological substrate of anthropological inequality. For example, the authors of the SS Handblätter für den weltanschaulichen Unterricht defined race as “a group of living beings with the same innate basic qualities”, while they made it clear that the differences among these qualities would materialize human inequality. As they wrote in substance: “Equality of all those who have a human face is contradicted by experience and observation (Nigger – White).” And since all values and cultural performances were linked to heredity, the doctrine of the equality of all human beings was opposed by the doctrine of race (BA NSD 41 / 75). Furthermore, given that races were different, unequal, therefore antagonistic, racial thinking complemented differential anthropology with war as the essence of politics: “the history of mankind was the history of race 42 SS THINKING AND THE HOLOCAUST struggles.” In fact, racial thinking said yes to natural life and covered all fields of life, as biological thinking created rational yardsticks for evaluating everything. It showed what “you could and should do”. In this perspective, ethics appeared as the logical continuation of biology (BA NSD 41 / 75). In a photo essay on blood purity, the authors presented some basic anthropological information to their readers. According to these authors, the races that made the German Volk were the following: Dinaric (Dinarisch), Phalian (Fälisch), Eastern (Ostisch), East Baltic (Ostbaltisch), Western (Westisch), and Nordic (Nordisch). These races were all naturally similar to each other, contrary to foreign racial components linked to Jewish blood, or to black, yellow, and red races. All German people carried some amount of Nordic blood, which was crucial to the Volk’s value, and, of course, only the bearers of German blood were Volk comrades (BA NSD 41 / 86, p. 11). Racial anthropology was to be the basis of political inclusion or exclusion. To these authors, science constituted the ultimate guarantee that legitimized and validated SS anthropology. As they said in their own words, science teaches us that blood is the bearer of good and bad characteristics. The external appearance of any human being is dependent on blood, just like the manner in which he or she gets involved with the things of the world. If we compare old fighters of with Bolshevik Untermenschentum, we can see the difference (BA NSD 41 / 86, p. 12). But if we want to fight to maintain our Volk’s particularity, as they wrote further, if we want to maintain our Nazi state, we must get involved in the struggle for maintaining our blood (BA NSD 41 / 86, p. 13). This struggle must mobilize all individuals, without exception, and it must take precedence over all details of public and private life. In all this, we know that human beings are not all equal and do not think in the same manner. 2. Race in Pictures In accordance with the Weltanschauung that emphasized feeling over reason, SS anthropology relied very much on external appearance as the expression of race and as the source of positive or negative impressions, whence the pedagogical use of photos aimed at illustrating human contrasts. Thus, the contrasted photos constituted a level of discourse in themselves, which skipped overly rational considerations and established a direct way of communication between images and feelings. And the contrasts were sufficient to make the point about human inequality. As the authors wrote, those who believe in the equality of all human beings only have to look at this picture to change their mind (the picture shows a female aboriginal from Australia, age 24, and a German young woman of the same age). Furthermore, we know that a wide spectrum of differences characterizes the inner dispositions of human beings toward things and questions of the world.