Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying (6 page)
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Authors: Sonke Neitzel,Harald Welzer
The inertia of a society’s infrastructure, the way its daily life is experienced, comprises one major part of split
consciousness. Another part consists of what is changing and, in particular, of whatever modifies people’s frame of reference. That includes the actions of a government that operated with propaganda, restrictions, laws, arrests, violence, and terror as well as opportunities for entertainment and identification. In reaction to those changes, there were changes in the perception and behavior of a populace that, while by no means universally politically engaged, did participate in
social affairs and tried to make sense of what was happening. For example, anti-Jewish measures such as the state-encouraged
boycott of Jewish
businesses in late March and early April 1933 were perceived in
contradictory ways within the German populace, as were later anti-Semitic initiatives as well. As paradoxical as it may sound, the capacity for Nazism to engender contradictory responses was an integrating force. National Socialist society still retained enough discrete spaces and parts of the public sphere for people to debate the pros and cons of government measures and actions among like-minded peers.
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To believe that a modern dictatorship like National Socialism integrates a populace by homogenizing them is to mistake the way it functions socially. The reverse is the case. Integration proceeds by maintaining difference, so that even those who are against the regime—critics of the Nazis’ Jewish policies or committed
Social Democrats—have a social arena in which they can exchange their thoughts and find intellectual brethren. This mode of integration extended all the way down to the storm troops and reserve
police battalions, which by no means consisted solely of Nazified, unthinking executioners, but included rational people who reached agreement with one another about what they did and whether they did it for good or evil purposes.
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The mode of social integration in every government office, every company, and every university was difference, not homogeneity. In all those social realms, there were subgroups that differentiated themselves from the rest. This always destroys the cohesion of the social aggregate. Difference lays the foundation for the aggregate.
The Nazi regime ended freedom of the
press,
censored criticism, and
created a highly
conformist public sphere with the help of extremely modern, mass media
propaganda. This, of course, did not leave individual Germans untouched. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that differences of opinion and discussion were completely eradicated. To quote historian
Peter Longerich:
From more than two decades of research on the social history and changes in mentality of the Nazi dictatorship, we know the populace of the German Empire between 1933 and 1945 did not exist in a condition of totalitarian uniformity. On the contrary, there was a significant amount of dissatisfaction, non-conformist opinion and varied behavior. What is, however, especially characteristic of German society under Nazism was that expressions of such resistance took place above all in the private sphere and at most in a kind of semi-public sphere that included circles of friends and colleagues, people who regularly met in bars and immediate neighbors. Such encounters happened within existing structures in traditional social milieus that had been able to preserve themselves in the face of the Nazi racist community: in church parishes, the relations between neighbors in villages, elite conservative and bourgeois social circles, and those parts of the socialist community that had not been destroyed.
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While much of daily life remained the same in Nazi Germany and formed the surface upon which society functioned, there were also drastic political and social changes. The split of society the Nazis brought about in the twelve years from 1933 to 1945 between a majority of members and an excluded minority was not only a goal justified by the Nazis’ racist theory and desire for power. It was also a means to realize a particular form of social integration. A number of recent historical works have looked at the history of the Third Reich through the lens of
social differentiation.
Saul Friedländer has especially focused attention on
anti-Jewish practice, repression, and elimination;
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Michael Wildt has stressed the coercive force used in the early days of the Third Reich as a means of collectivization.
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Longerich has shown that the social exclusion and then extermination of Jews was by no means an accidental, strangely senseless element of Nazi politics, but their very core. The “de-Jewification” of Germany and broad stretches of Europe was, in Longerich’s words, “the instrument
for gradually penetrating the various realms of individual existence.”
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This penetration allowed moral standards to be reformatted, bringing about an obvious change in what people considered
normal and
deviant, good and bad, appropriate and outrageous.
Nazi society was by no means amoral. Even the many instances of
mass murder cannot be reduced to a collective ethical dissipation. On the contrary, they were the result of the astonishingly quick and deep establishment of a “National Socialist morality” that made the biologically defined
Volk
and the community it entailed the sole criterion for moral behavior and promoted different values and norms than those obtained, for instance, in post–World War II Germany.
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Included in the Nazi moral canon were the ideas that people were fundamentally unequal, that the worth of the
Volk
outweighed that of the individual, and that what counted was particular and not universal
solidarity. To cite just one instance of Nazi morality: it was under Hitler that
failure to offer
assistance in an emergency became a punishable crime in Germany. Yet that dictate applied only to the Nazi
Volk
community and could not be extended to people’s refusal to help Jews.
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This sort of particular morality was characteristic of the Nazi project in toto. The new European order and, indeed,
global domination of which the Nazis dreamed were conceived as a radically inequitable world, in which members of different races would be treated differently under the law.
Nazi social practice enacted the idea that people were radically and irreconcilably unequal. It made the public aware of the “
Jewish question” as something negative and the “
Volk
community” as something positive. These topics were then made a permanent focus of action in anti-Jewish measures, regulations, and laws, in instances of disappropriation, deportation, and worse. As a formula for how Nazi society was formed,
Friedländer came up with the phrase “repression and
innovation.” But given that a lot of German society did not change, we need to remember that for most non-Jewish Germans Nazi innovation and repression was but a secondary part of their everyday lives. For them, Nazism was a mix of
continuity,
repression, and innovation.
As a whole, the Nazi project has to be seen as a highly integrative social process beginning in January 1933 and ending with Germany’s ultimate
defeat in May 1945. “
Destiny,” as historian
Raul Hilberg once dryly remarked, is an “interaction between perpetrators and victims.” Psychologically speaking, it is no great wonder that the practical enactment of theories of the master race was a matter of such
consensus. Once the theory was cast in laws and regulations, even the lowest
unskilled laborer could feel superior to a Jewish writer, actor, or businessman, especially since the ongoing social transformation entailed Jews’ actual social and material decline. The resulting boost to the self-esteem of members of the
Volk
was reinforced by a reduced sense of
social anxiety. It was a new and unfamiliar feeling to belong, inalienably and by law, to an exclusive racial
elite, of which others,
equally inalienably, could never become part.
As things got worse and worse for some, the others felt better and better. The National Socialist project did not just promise a gloriously envisioned future. It also offered concrete advantages in the present such as better
career opportunities in all areas, including the Wehrmacht. The elites at the head of the Nazi Party were extremely young, and a good many younger members of the
Volk
saw their own heady personal hopes as connected with the triumph of the “
Aryan race.”
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This backdrop helps us understand the enormous individual and collective energy that was released in Nazi society. “The National Socialist German Workers Party was
founded on a doctrine of in
equality between races, but it also promised Germans greater equality among themselves,” writes historian
Götz Aly.
Nazi
ideology conceived of racial conflict as an antidote to class conflict. By framing its program in this way, the party was propagating two age-old dreams of the German people: national and class unity. That was key to the Nazis’ popularity, from which they derived the power they needed to pursue their criminal aims.… In one of his central pronouncements, Hitler promised “the creation of a socially just state,” a model society that would “continue to eradicate all [social] barriers.”
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If Hitler’s ideology had been pure
propaganda, the Third Reich would never have undergone the extremely rapid social
change it did. The central characteristic of the National Socialist project consisted of the immediate practical realization of its ideological postulates. The world indeed changed. Propagandistic
newspaper articles notwithstanding, the feeling of better days dawning, of living in a “great age” and “permanently extraordinary situation” established a new frame of reference. Interviews with people who experienced the Third Reich reveal even today how psychologically attractive and emotionally
integrative the Nazi initiatives of exclusion and integration were. It is no accident that
Germans of that generation tend to describe the
Third Reich, up until Germany’s military defeat at Stalingrad, as a “
great time.”
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Such people were categorically incapable of experiencing the exclusion, persecution, and dispossession of others for what they were. By definition, the others no longer belonged to the community, and thus their inhumane treatment did not conflict with the ethics and
social values of the
Volk
community.
In terms of social psychology, the reasons behind support for and trust in the Nazi system are no great mystery. The economic upswing commencing in 1934 may have been financed by state debt and larceny, but as interviews with those who lived at the time reveal, it created a mood of optimism and
confidence.
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In addition, the period saw a number of social
innovations with profound implications for individuals’ happiness. In 1938, for instance, a third of all German workers enjoyed the benefits of the Nazis’ state-subsidized
“Strength Through Joy”
vacation program—and that at a time when traveling abroad was still considered an exclusive privilege of the wealthy. “It has long been overlooked,” writes
Hans-Dieter Schäfer, “that upward
social mobility during the Third Reich was by no means solely symbolic.… People were twice as likely to move up in society in the six peace-time years under Hitler as they had been in the final six years of the
Weimar Republic. Nazi state organizations and quasi-private associations absorbed one million people from the
working classes.”
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By 1938, Germany no longer suffered from the mass unemployment of the Depression. In 1939, 200,000
foreign workers had to be brought in to cover a
shortage of labor.
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In other words: things were palpably better for members of the
Volk
under National Socialism, and the Nazis’ demonstrable success in keeping their social promises engendered a deep faith in the system, especially as it came after the profound economic disappointments of the Weimar Republic.
The material, psychological, and social integration of the majority, together with the simultaneous deintegration of those excluded from the
Volk,
fundamentally changed social values. In 1933, the majority of German citizens would not have been able to conceive that a few years later, with greater or lesser participation by the majority,
German Jews would be stripped of their rights and worldly possessions, and then deported to extermination camps. We can sense the enormity of the change in social values, if we imagine what would have happened if
the
deportations had commenced in February 1933, immediately after Hitler assumed power. The deviation from the accepted norms of the majority would have been too severe to proceed smoothly. Indeed, Nazi
ideologues had yet to even formulate the sequence: exclusion—loss of rights—disappropriation—deportation—
extermination. In 1933, this sequence may well have been unthinkable. Yet eight years later, such inhuman treatment of others had become part of what ordinary Germans
expected, and thus few found it exceptional. People collectively—each in his own individual, more or less committed, skeptical, or disinterested way—produced a common social reality.
Changes in social practice were a major driving force. There were no public protests against the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies, nor was there significant popular complaint at the concrete
discrimination suffered by German Jews. This does not mean that most Germans approved of anti-Semitic repression, but Germans’ passivity, their toleration of repression, and their restriction of criticism to the private realm of their peers translated politically initiated discrimination into everyday social practice. It would overestimate ideology and play down the practical participation of ordinary community members if we were to reduce the changes in the mentality structure within Nazi society to the
propagandistic, legislative, and executive acts of the regime. The active interworking of political initiative, private adaptation, and practical realization was what allowed the National Socialist project to engender such surprisingly rapid consensus. The Third Reich could be called a
participatory dictatorship, in which members of the
Volk
community cheerfully did their bit, even if they weren’t committed Nazis.