Racism and National Socialism: A Brief History Christian Geulen

The Nazi concentration camp system in the the racist mentality is evident not least of all “Third Reich” obeyed a racist logic. Yet however in the implicit or explicit summons to act, to do indisputable this observation is, it cannot claim something about the supposed threat to the to serve as a sufficient explanation. On the wellbeing of the insiders posed by the outsiders, contrary, it immediately poses two questions: to eliminate the supposedly “unnatural” hotch- what exactly is a racist logic, and what exactly is potch of people and cultures and ultimately to ? And how does the racist logic of National improve the world by combatting the others. This Socialism relate to the long and comprehensive is what distinguishes racism from the prejudices history of racism before 1933 and after 1945? A and assumptions of inequality that presumably plausible account of how Nazism continued the occur in every particular community from neigh- history of racism while also adding something bourhoods to nations and, in principle, recognize new to it can contribute to an understanding of difference precisely in its accentuation. The sim- what was unique about the annihilation policies ple assertion of this difference – “we’re different of the Nazi state. At the same time, it can help us from the others” – can hardly be conceived of as recognize the historical origin of its justifications, racism. Yet where this difference is perceived as which by no means fell into oblivion after 1945. 1 a danger to be eliminated, where it is considered unnatural or a threat to ‘the own’, prejudices and The above-outlined thought is already an initial assumptions about ‘the other’ can quickly turn important prerequisite for the following deliber- into the demand and the summons to get rid of it ations: modern racism is understood here as a to the benefit of all. practice that does not differ from other forms of violent ostracism and hostility in the magnitude This distinction is also important with a view or special form of its violence, but in how it is to the history of racism before 1933. That is justified. It is in precisely this sense that rac- because it marks the historical transforma- ism is an ideology based on hypothetical rules tion from pre-modern forms of racist-justified and laws of nature, history and existence that ostracism and oppression into modern racism are intended to serve as orientation for human as a praxis-oriented ideology of the reinforce- action. On the other hand, racism is never mere ment and rescue of ‘the own’ through hostility ideology. In contrast to the classical function of towards ‘the foreign’ in the manner typical modern ideologies to legitimize and consolidate of the period immediately preceding National the status quo, modern racism links its justi- Socialism. Certainly, the early modern forms of fication with a reality still to be created, with oppression, enslavement and long-term anni- a world that has strayed from the right path, hilation, especially of non-European peoples, from the original ideal, and has to be healed, were manifestations of modern European racism improved, or redesigned. This is precisely what and accordingly justified by pseudo-scientific links racist ideology with praxis: rather than theories of the superiority and inferiority of the justifying supposedly natural states, it points to different ethnic groups. Nevertheless, the idea supposedly natural states to justify its practical that those foreign peoples could pose a threat creation and thus its racist actions. In a nutshell: to “white” European superiority was just as racism “always starts with an appeal to com- foreign to the perpetrators and protagonists of plete the task”. 2 those times as the notion that their existence was something unnatural and to be eliminated This can still be recognized in present-day as a result. On the contrary, particularly eight- forms of racism. To be sure, since the historical eenth-century scholars outdid one another in experience of National Socialist extermination the Eurocentric distribution of superiority and politics hardly anyone has dared to propagate inferiority as a given and inalterable world order the “eradication” of a people openly. Even so, to be acknowledged by all.

220 | 221 This claim endured in the many anthropologi- for the theory of evolution and what historicism cal and ethnographic characterizations of the had already long done for the concept of histo- world’s peoples and the “world races” until ry: it overcame the speculative assumptions of well into the nineteenth century. Yet with the a natural-historical development mechanism emergence of the industrial-capitalist economic with which the Enlightenment had ushered in system and the gradual shift from modern colo- the modern age but then forcibly committed it nialism to modern imperialism – but also against to “progress”. These assumptions were now the background of the Universalist notion of one replaced by the insight that development, the fu- humanity and the modern conception of history ture, and the possibility of progress were decid- as an ongoing process of historical transfor- ed daily – in other words that they would neither mation – the self-evidence, and ultimately the happen automatically nor were they logically plausibility, of the idea of a fixed “universal ra- deducible from the past, but that they depended cial order” dwindled. Both spatially and tempo- on present action. 4 rally, ‘the own’ and ‘the foreign’ began to merge, transcultural forms of life evolved increasingly, In the context of development and progress, the and there was even a growing awareness of central law of Darwinism – the occurrence of natural orders. natural selection on a daily basis – was equat- ed with “survival”, pure and simple. And in the One of the first racial theories to react to this late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, state of affairs was The Inequality of Human many regarded this law as a natural-scientific Races written by the French diplomat and hobby foundation of Gobineau’s popular theories of the anthropologist Arthur Gobineau in 1853. 3 He antagonism between and intermingling of the regarded world history as being determined not races and the preservation of their purity. There by eternal differences between races, but rather was a huge drawback, however, to this linking of by their eternal intermingling with and eternal the two theories: precisely because of the fact struggle against one another. In this dynam- that they saw a causal relationship between the ic of struggle and intermingling, the only race development of the species and races on the that would survive in the long run was the one one hand and daily behaviour on the other, both that defended itself against intermingling with Darwin and – to a certain extent – Gobineau other races, and its way of life against foreign had emphasized above all the coincidental and domination, with every means at its disposal. In incalculable aspect of this development. At the four thick volumes, Gobineau thus established end of the nineteenth century, when the tech- a notion of race no longer as a concept of order, nical successes of the natural sciences had but as an abstract principle of development and ousted historicism as the guiding principle of a law of the preservation of cultural purity. the bourgeoisie, supplanting it with claims to rationalization, and brought the idea of nature’s It was above all this break with the older tradi- technical back to the fore, people no tion of racial systematics that accounted for the longer contented themselves with such contin- astonishing success of his book in the decades gencies in racial theory. 5 that followed, despite the extreme confusion and contradiction that characterized it from begin- These contingencies were thus rapidly enhanced ning to end. This was because Gobineau did for with mechanisms and laws that served to endow racism what did soon thereafter the random nature of the daily struggle for re-

1 For general comparison, see Georg M. Fredrickson, Rassismus. Ein historischer Abriss (Hamburg, 2004); Christian Geulen, Geschichte des Rassismus , 2nd ed. (Munich, 2014). 2 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer used this phrase to describe the workings of modern racist anti-Semitism, but it can easily be applied to modern racism in general. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment [1947], trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, 2002), here p. 140. 3 Joseph A. Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races [1853–55], trans. Adrian Collins, reprint of the 1915 edition (New York, 1967). 4 For a general discussion of this subject, see Wolf Lepenies, Das Ende der Naturgeschichte: Verzeitlichung und Enthistorisierung in den Wissenschaften vom Leben im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1976); see Charles Darwin, by Means of Natural Selection (London, 1859). The responsibility ethic in Darwinism was already pointed out early on by the American philosopher John Dewey, “The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy” [1909], idem, The Collected Works , Part II: The Middle Works 1899–1924, vol. 4: 1907–1909, ed. by J. A. Boydston (London, 1977), pp. 3–14. 5 For a more detailed discussion of this subject, see Christian Geulen, Wahlverwandte. Rassendiskurs und Nationalismus im späten 19. Jahrhundert (Hamburg, 2004).

E S SAYS production with determinable direction and Be that as it may, from the end of the nineteenth form after all. The themes of racial intermingling century onward ever closer links were drawn and the struggle between the races were now between Lamarckist conceptions of the pass- joined by the idea of creating race by essentially ing on of acquired traits, Gobineauesque ideas technical means, in other words by deliberately about the consequences of racial intermingling, exploiting the laws of development known until Darwinist notions of selection and the strug- that time. As a result, certain much older ideas gle between the races, and ever more popular – for example the notion developed as far back phantasms of the artificial creation of race. Yet as the eighteenth century by the French biolo- this discourse is by no means to be conceived gist Jean Baptiste Lamarck, according to which of as a debate conducted exclusively between qualities acquired in the course of an individual experts in the field of racial biology. On the con- life could be passed on genetically to the next trary, particularly in Germany it was not least of generation – underwent an unexpected renais- all the product of the emergence of the popular sance. 6 This mechanism, which Darwin had also sciences as a literary genre in its own right on come up with to enhance his theory of selection, the one hand, and the rapidly developing pub- offered a means of giving evolution a certain lishing industry on the other. As a result, within a direction on precisely the same specific, daily very short time, versions of all racial-biological level on which – from the strictly Darwinist point hypotheses and theories circulated – already of view – the trial-and-error game of mutation, long severed from their roots in natural science and selection took place, blind to – in texts dealing with the social sciences, cul- the future. tural history, education and art theory, but also in the literature of the reform movements and The German biologist had in volkish-nationalist and anti-Semitic publica- already refuted Lamarckism with experimen- tions. 10 tal proof of the strict separation of germ cells and body cells in the 1880s. Nevertheless, not What is more, certain natural scientists such as least of all in the massive critique levelled at Rudolf Virchow or Ernst Haeckel also increas- Weismann’s work, Lamarckism attained new ingly took it upon themselves to communicate popularity that was to endure from the end of the laws, principles and theories of science in the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth terms of their fundamental relevance for soci- century. 7 This was because, to a far greater ety, culture and politics. 11 Without exception, the extent than Gobineau’s or Darwin’s theories, most successful of these works were those that Lamarckism provided evidence of the individ- no longer differentiated between these various ual’s responsibility for the development of the dimensions of reality and – on the premises of race as a whole. Among the more prominent every available evolution-theoretical logic and of its ideological blunders was, for example, hypothesis – described nature, history, economy, the racist myth of telegony, according to society, art and politics as being subject to what which women who had sexual contact with were allegedly the inalterable laws of race. One “foreign-raced” men “acquired” qualities that prominent example whose influence endured could still become manifest in the physical until well into the “Third Reich” was Houston appearance of progeny conceived years later Stewart Chamberlain’s book on the Foundations with a different, “same-raced” man. 8 From the of the Nineteenth Century .12 plantations of the American south to the racist purity laws of National Socialism, this “fact” Starting in around 1900, however, this discourse was conveyed to white and “Aryan” women, moreover condensed in an entirely new scientific respectively, as a warning. This circumstance discipline that had been developed by Francis shows that the reintroduction of an evolution- Galton in England in 1883. There it was called ary model based on “environmental influences” “eugenics”; in Germany the term “racial hygiene” as opposed to pure “inheritance” – of which the was preferred. 13 It was in this school of thought former is, even today, often considered the more that the idea of the controlled creation of race progressive of the two – implies an ethic of – at the time the most recent racial-theoret- responsibility that can result in a radicalization ical concept – came entirely into its own. The of racist thought and action. 9 fundamental principle of this new science, which

222 | 223 was hardly challenged and remained interna- Against this background it is perhaps possible tionally popular until well into the 1930s, was to explain, at least to a small degree, why the as simple as it was misanthropic: the biological German Jews, of all people, – an ethnically de- reproduction of the carriers of desirable traits fined community that in the nineteenth century of a given population was to be encouraged, and had been visibly present and for the most part the reproduction of the carriers of undesirable nationally integrated in Germany – became the traits to be prevented. Whereas until that time target of ever more aggressive racist antago- theories of race had been primarily descriptive nism in the first third of the twentieth century. in nature, in this concept they culminated in Historically and in the present, Judaism marked concrete instructions for political action which the possibility of the existence of an indepen- at the same time summed up the core bio-polit- dent ethnic sub-community within the national ical logic of modern racism: that to combat and community (today this would be referred to as eliminate the other race, and all the undesirable social-cultural diversity within the national qualities associated with it, meant to strength- whole). Yet precisely that existence fundamen- en one’s own race and its qualities, which were tally contradicted the racial-theoretical as- considered desirable. The formal division of this sumption that homogeneity and “purity” were school of thought into a “positive”, promotive essential to ensure the survival of a commu- brand of eugenics and a “negative”, suppressive nity. Especially proponents of the more radical one merely served to underscore the fundamen- anti-Semitic sentiment of the time accordingly tal connection between the two. This logic was pointed out again and again that, despite their plausible particularly in societies where the supposed assimilation, the Jews were actually attempt was no longer made to divide human the most successful preservers of “racial puri- beings into peoples, races and cultures. Instead, ty”, and the effort and ruthlessness required to mankind was now viewed in what was to a cer- combat them therefore had to be all the fiercer. 14 tain extent a fluid, bio-political aggregate state, This racial-theoretical “ideologic” was also i.e. as living populations reproducing themselves what nourished the well-known anti-Semitic by biological means. This approach no longer treason and conspiracy theories of the time, as proceeded on the assumption of a given, firmly expressed, for example, in the Jewish census established hierarchy between the races. On of 1916 or the conspiration theory around the the contrary, such a hierarchy was now thought Protocols of the Elders of Zion .15 of as something attainable solely by means of certain infallible and scientifically prescribed The eugenics of the Weimar era was anything political action: the controlled reproduction of but mainstream in the German scientific com- the population and the strengthening of the de- munity. Nevertheless, in the interwar period it sirable native-racial qualities through the elimi- was popular and influential enough to cause nation of the undesirable foreign-racial ones. even Jewish scientists to introduce a racial

6 On Lamarck, see Pietro Corsi, Jean Gayon and Gabriel Gohau, eds., Lamarck, philosophe de la nature (Paris, 2006). 7 See August Weismann, The Germ-Plasm: A Theory of [1892], trans. W. Newton Parker, (New York, 1893); idem, Über Rückschritte in der Natur (Freiburg, 1886). 8 On the subject of telegony, see Franz K. Stanzel, Telegonie – Fernzeugung. Macht und Magie der Imagination (Vienna, 2008). 9 Today Lamarckism has returned in the guise of , which, based on recent research, proceeds on the assumption that, by the indirect route of influencing the biochemistry of moleculogenetic reproduction processes, the environment and experience are indeed important factors in reproduction and thus in evolution. In view of the ideological-historical contexts outlined here, however, it appears highly problematic to want to recognize in this theory the new royal road to the joint research of nature and culture. See for example Peter Spork, Der zweite Code. Epigenetik oder wie wir unser Erbgut steuern können (Reinbek, 2011). 10 For a more detailed discussion of this subject, see Geulen 2004 (see note 5). 11 See for example Rudolf Virchow, Glaubensbekenntniss eines modernen Naturforschers (Berlin, 1873); Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century [1899], trans. Joseph McCabe (New York and London, 1900). 12 Houston Stewart Chamberlain, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century [1899], 2 vols., (London, 1911). 13 On the history of eugenics, see Stefan Kühl, For the Betterment of the Race: The Rise and Fall of the International Movement for Eugenics and Racial Hygiene [1997], trans. Lawrence Schofer (New York, 2013). 14 Thus was the reasoning of, for example, Theodor Fritsch in his anti-Semitic Handbuch zur Judenfrage (Berlin, 1907). 15 For general discussions of this subject, see Shulamit Volkov, Antisemitismus als kultureller Code (Munich, 2000); Klaus Holz, Nationaler Antisemitismus (Hamburg, 2001).

E S SAYS biology of their own in defence against anti- Very many aspects of racial-political praxis in Semitism. By the early thirties, i.e. shortly before the Nazi camps after 1933 can thus be read as Hitler’s assumption of power, this led to what the radical realization of ideas and demands in retrospect seem to us very remarkable that had already been formulated with all ex- dialogues and discussions between a Jewish plicitness in the previous decades. It is impor- theory of race and an anti-Jewish one. 16 Natu- tant to emphasize that fact in order to arrive at rally, the events of 1933 brought these endeav- a historical understanding of what happened ours at scientific discussion to an abrupt and in the camps. But did Nazi racism amount to permanent halt. nothing more than finally putting racial policies into practice that had previously merely been Yet the eugenic racism of the early twenti- demanded by a few? Or did the seizure of power eth century was distinguished not only by the in 1933 bring about a further, structurally new special role Judaism played in it, but also by the stage of development in racism? fact that it shifted the focus from the theoretical characterization of races, racial types and glob- To answer this question, it is important to re- al race distribution to the practical-instrumental member how little the Nazi regime had bothered issue of how to preserve, improve, or even newly about the scientific – or even the popular-scien- create a race. Proceeding on the assumption of tific – theories, positions and approaches of ra- the population as the race in its raw state and cial theory before 1933. Whether in Hitler’s Mein the point of departure for all racial policy, now Kampf , Rosenberg’s Mythus des 20. Jahrhun- the attention was also directed towards groups derts , or Strasser’s Stürmer , the chief ideolo- that could hardly be described as races in the gists of the Reich drew entirely at random from strict sense: the mentally and physically handi- the authors of volkish, eugenic and population capped, the socially weak, the chronically ill, ho- theory, from Chamberlain, Gobineau and Dar- mosexuals, prison convicts, “born” criminals and win, from the turn-of-the-century anti-Semites all persons socially marginalized in other ways. and the national-culture theorists of Roman- One of the first internationally discussed – and ticism, but also from theories devised sponta- in part also implemented – eugenic population neously within their own ranks. In fact, “true” policies was the forced sterilization of the men- eugenicists in Germany and abroad regarded tally handicapped and criminals classified as the Nuremberg Race Laws passed in 1935 as a dangerous. These “negative” measures were to regression to a state of knowledge several de- go hand in hand with “positive” projects devoted cades behind modern race research. 18 (Naturally, to the exclusive breeding of racially high-quality in Germany this sentiment was expressed only elements of the population in special restricted on the quiet.) institutions in which even middle-class sexual norms were suspended in the service of higher National Socialism thus did not exhibit the objectives. Even if the implementation of such slightest effort to legitimize its racial policies on measures and projects were still the exception the basis of the then state of race theory. At the before 1933, the eugenic paradigm of racial same time, the Nazis never tired of claiming that improvement through the targeted manipula- every one of its political measures was a neces- tion of the population was an integral aspect sity dictated by the laws of nature. The regime of deliberations and discussions on health, did nothing at all to legitimize its politics scien- population, and cultural policies in the early tifically. In fact, it dissolved every link that had twentieth century – in Germany, but to no less existed between racial theory and racial-polit- a degree in other countries as well. It was not ical praxis (even though the former could have least of all the costs occasioned by the care of been cited as justification of the latter), and what were actually undesirable elements of the succeeded in creating a direct nexus between population – or, as the Nazis later expressed it, its own practices and the hypothetical natural those “unworthy of life” – that were cited as an laws of race development, in essence equating increasingly popular argument in the economic the two. It considered every measure an act in crisis situations of the interwar period. 17 the racial battle. The fighting of this battle – and not its causes, its consequences and certainly not its theoretical description – was the decisive

224 | 225 and only legitimate aim. And that is precisely what has justifiably been called the “self- empowerment through violence” in which framework active participation in the battle and the practice of terror against “strangers to the people” were the only means of guarantee- ing the right to belong to one’s own “people’s community”. 19 Hannah Arendt once referred to this rationale as a process logic of the “eman- cipation of thought from experience” and saw in it a core element of totalitarianism. Where experience and justification are eliminated, ter- ror becomes the only form of action that lends substance and validity to the assumptive natural law of racial conflict – through its simple imple- mentation: “Where wood is chopped, splinters must fall.” 20

Until and since that time, racism had and has never again been tantamount to terror as a law of nature . At the same time, however, the history of the development of racist thought from the nineteenth century to the early 1930s shows that this ideology – a modern school of thought with a claim to scientificity but always directed towards the practical shaping of the world – tended to turn justifications of “racial orders” into instructions for their practical creation. These days, racist assumptions and racial-the- oretical justifications (even if they are no longer referred to as such) are unmistakeably once again becoming socially and politically accept- able. All the more important is it to counter them critically from the start – and not to wait until worries about “foreign infiltration” turn into xenophobic action.

Christian Geulen Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and Its Didactics at the University of Koblenz-Landau

16 On this subject, see Veronika Lipphardt, Biologie der Juden. Jüdische Wissenschaftler über ‚Rasse‘ und Vererbung 1900–1935 (Göttingen, 2008). 17 See Kühl 2013 (see note 13). 18 For a more detailed discussion of this subject, see Christian Geulen, “Ideology's Logic: The Evolution of Racial Thought in Germany from the Volkish Movement to the Third Reich”, Mark Roseman et al., eds., Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany (Cambridge, 2016). 19 See Michael Wildt, Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion: Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919–1939 (New York, 2014). 20 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1955] (Cleveland and New York, 1962), p. 471.

E S SAYS