"Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich (19 page)

Analogously, no convincing race-theoretical explanation could be found to justify the discrimination against Poles. According to National Socialist racial doctrine, all European peoples belonged to the family of the Aryans and were thus fundamentally “racially equivalent,” that is, recognized as equal before the law.
²²⁹
Discrimination against Poles was justified, however, because, like all Slavs, they represented a major
völkisch
and racial threat to Germany. Yet here, too, such reasoning was merely pretext. In his early statements on the Slavs, Hitler did not even mention the Poles, because at that time Poland was signatory to the Non-Aggression Treaty of 1934, and its position in the National Socialist scheme of conquest was not yet settled. The “ethnic threat” posed by the Poles was not discovered until the invasion of Poland. The placement of the Poles under rule of special law was done from fundamentally political motives, which were considerably intensified by the antipathy toward the Poles that, for reasons both political (voting disputes [Abstimmungskampf] in East and West Prussia, fighting in West Prussia and Upper Silesia, and the activities of the
Freikorps
) and religious, had been present in the eastern part of Germany in a particularly intense form since 1918. The main reason, however, was that the Nazi leadership considered the Poles to be the most dangerous of all peoples in Eastern Europe on account of their staunch insistence upon their national rights and identity as a people.
²³⁰
The race-political grounds for hatred of the Poles were merely the ideological mask justifying the National Socialist policy of violent force.
²³¹

The political basis for the systematically fomented hatred of and malice against Poles reveals itself in the thesis, invented ex post facto, of their “threat to the community,” which then became the dominant argument in both theory and practice. According to this, the Poles had to be excluded from the European community of rights on account of their “Germanophobia” and their political incompetence and “lack of culture.”
²³²
In contrast with this political argument, neither the racial window dressing of Nazi propaganda that commenced in 1939, according to which the Poles were “racial foes”
²³³
with regard to whom legal restraints were not to be observed, nor the elaborate attempts of the Race Policy Office to set up a racial classification of the Poles achieved much of an echo.
²³⁴

Finally, the political basis for the unequal treatment of the peoples of Eastern Europe is seen in the about-face of the Nazi leadership when the fortunes of war were reversed and the labor of the “non-Germans” was required ever more urgently. On instructions from the Central Office of Propaganda of the NSDAP dated February 15, 1943, all chiefs of propaganda of the Reich
Gaue
were obliged, “within the framework of the war against Russia, for which the energies of all the peoples of Europe are required,” to cease insulting the “Eastern nations” either directly or indirectly, and no longer characterize them as “beasts,” “subhumans,” and so forth, in order to gain their aid “in the struggle against Bolshevism.”
²³⁵

dd. “Racially Undesirable” Liaisons

The range of application of the principle of
völkisch
inequality was, however, not limited to the “non-Germans” in the German sphere of hegemony. Since, according to the National Socialist racial doctrine, the essential attribute of race was the
racial mixture
, upon which depended the degree of desirability or undesirability of particular persons for the German
Volksgemeinschaft
, the way was open for the race fanatics in leadership and administration to declare at their discretion any racial mixture, even
within
the German people, to be undesirable and therefore liable in principle to being dealt with under special law.

Practical approaches along these lines were certainly available, although they were perhaps not realized in thoroughgoing fashion by the administrative authorities. Thus, according to the views of the race experts in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, not only liaisons between Jews and Germans were “alien to type” and thus subject to a virtual marriage prohibition (sec. 6 of the First Implementing Order to the Blood Protection Law of November 14, 1935)
²³⁶
but also those mixtures involving “physical and mental differences,” for instance, the liaison of a “tall and strong man” with a “woman of small and delicate race,” since the physical health of the resulting child would “doubtlessly” be “endangered.” The same could be expected in regard to “mental, psychological, and character difficulties for the child of such a marriage.” Therefore, not only marriages between Germans and “non-German” persons (particularly people of color, Jews, and Gypsies) could be considered “foreign to type” in the sense of the Nazi race laws but even marriages between two persons of German blood whose external characteristics were unsuited to one another. Thus the marriage prohibitions in effect for Jews, including the regulation governing
Mischlinge
, also covered those persons who, according to the aforenamed criteria, exhibited an “alien” or “foreign-race” strain of blood (hereditary strain).
²³⁷

A skeptic might well object that the exclusion of “alien” persons from the right of freely contracting marriage was merely an isolated phenomenon that says nothing much about the dismantling of the general legal status of “aliens.” To this it must be countered that where racial policy is concerned, there were no isolated acts; nothing was left to chance; and that such discrimination was only the beginning of a process of total dissolution and adulteration of the law affecting such persons and their offspring, one that was single-mindedly pursued by the administrative leadership. Thus, for example, the plans and proposals drafted by the Reich Ministry of the Interior called for the future exclusion of all children of German citizens of “alien” descent from the German community of rights; that is, they would
ipso jure
no longer be able to obtain German citizenship. According to these plans, which in the case of the Jews at least were actually put into practice, the group of persons affected was to include not only children of Jewish citizens and Jewish
Mischlinge
, but also children of persons of other “alien” bloodlines.
²³⁸
If, therefore, one no longer interprets the concept of “alien origin” in the sense of biological descent but views it in connection with the fact that, quite simply, any otherwise undesirable liaison (irrespective of its racial classification) could be deemed “alien,” the infinite expansibility of the National Socialist racial ideas emerges in all clarity.

ee. “Undesirable” Persons or Groups: The Principle of Special Law as the Central Concept of National Socialism

The above-described ability of the term
alien
to be infinitely expanded, therefore, points far beyond the original racially oriented point of departure of the concept of
völkisch
inequality. Although the racial-biological element had largely disappeared from the concept of the alien, there was nothing to hinder this process of legal undermining from being carried still further and being completely divested of any racial or political content whatsoever. In this manner, the concept of the alien gradually begins to replace that of the “foreign-racial” or the “non-German,” becoming at last a blanket clause behind which both racial and political contents could be hidden. The concept of the alien now embodies everything that was deemed foreign, strange, harmful, or undesirable. The judgment that one was alien could be passed upon anyone who did not conform to the dominant type, that is, to the
Volksgemeinschaft
. Other terms used for this were
foreign to the community
or
harmful to the community
, which were nothing more than juristic expressions for the concept of the political foe.

This opened up the possibility, via “unlimited interpretation,” of declaring
all
undesirable or unpopular persons or groups to be alien or “foreign to the community” and placing them under special law, particularly since anything “foreign to the community” could be attacked from an exclusively political-criminal point of view. Thus, criminal offenses that bore absolutely no relationship to political activities
²³⁹
(for example, sexual offenses, crimes involving currency violations, and others) could arbitrarily be declared political offenses,
²⁴⁰
with the result that the accused could be remanded in custody indefinitely or handed over to the Gestapo. Almost no matter or case was immune from the intervention of special law practices, regardless of how trifling it may have been.

Thus, for example, the Bavarian Supreme Court in Munich remarked that the name of a member of the executive board of a taxi owners’ cooperative could lawfully be struck from the register of associations if the police requested it. Whether or not the man was “an enemy of the state or at least an enemy of the state in the broader sense, [was] immaterial.” “In the battle for self-assertion that the German people are now forced to fight, there can no longer be, as there once was, an area of life that is nonpolitical.”
²⁴¹
Significantly enough, the German Supreme Court, in searching for matters that were immune from the intervention of political power, was unable to name anything other than the traffic code.
²⁴²

It was therefore quite accurate when, in the language of administration and law, the concept of special law also came to be described with the official phrase “special treatment,”
²⁴³
which originated in the secret idiom of the SS and the police (and was a code word for the liquidation of police prisoners).
²⁴⁴
Much more precisely than the phrase
special law
, it fittingly described the disappearance of any legal considerations in the treatment of undesirable persons. Discriminatory measures or special treatment thus became the common method for the disposal of any and all unpopular persons or groups.

The range of application of the principle of
völkisch
inequality was thus expanded ad infinitum. Not only racial, political, and clerical opponents were in practice deemed alien and thus “foreign to the community”; according to the dictates of political expediency, any persons or groups held to be undesirable for
other
reasons, regardless of their ancestry and/or citizenship, were characterized as criminal (see, for instance, the criminalization of the Catholic priesthood, which originated with Hitler himself)
²⁴⁵
or as “foreign to the community” and therefore fundamentally outside the community of rights. It thus became increasingly possible to dispense with proof of open antagonism or hostility to the regime. Objective criteria were neither necessary nor desirable. A “political enemy” (and therefore a person devoid of rights) was anyone whom the political authorities declared to be a political enemy. Nevertheless, as illustrated by the following examples, the term
Communist
was in practice the preferred way of characterizing “enemies” or unpopular persons, in order to give the impression that opposition to the regime was an objectively ascertainable offense. It was clearly stated, however, that the fight against Communism was not the actual
reason
, but only the
occasion
for the abandonment of “senseless” constitutional restraints.
²⁴⁶

Just how limitless the group of potentially affected individuals could be is shown by the call, issued in the literature as early as 1933, for the expulsion from the community of rights not only of Communists but also of conscientious objectors, persons who made “Germanophobic statements” abroad, and “the politically heterodox.” To be sure, this absolute deprivation of rights was disguised by saying that “heretics” belonged in principle “existentially” to the
Volk
and that no state could sunder this “fateful connection,” that is, cast someone out of the “community.” The individual member alone could exclude himself and “turn apostate.” But then it became the duty of the state to exclude irrevocably such apostates from the
Volksgemeinschaft
, since with apostates, being different “always denotes enmity.”
²⁴⁷
The courts consistently denied legal protection to members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect, who pled the principle of religious freedom, on the grounds that they propagandized for conscientious objection.
²⁴⁸

The most important, if not clearly the only, means of discrimination against all undesirable persons was the Reich president’s Decree for the Protection of People and State dated February 28, 1933 (the so-called Reichstag Fire Decree),
²⁴⁹
which, in the words of the preamble, was promulgated to combat “Communist acts of violence.” Despite this reservation, it soon became the legal authority for the indiscriminate persecution of all persons or groups supposedly foreign to the community.

The literature made it plain that the authorities were now free of “liberal fetters,” and not only in the fight against Communism. Such restraints were “unreservedly set aside.”
²⁵⁰
The principle of limiting the role of the police to defending against threats to public security and order and the principle of proportionality (“senseless and state-threatening … restraints”)
²⁵¹
were thereby abandoned. An implementing order of the Prussian minister of the interior dated March 3, 1933, determined that within the framework of the decree of February 28, 1933, the police authorities could extend their activities beyond the limitations set forth in sections 14 and 41 of the Law of Police Administration.
²⁵²