"Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich (44 page)

Conclusion

If we consider the practice of the principle of
völkisch
inequality on the basis of the normative and administrative regulations as a whole, we must conclude that the special treatment of Jews and other aliens by the administrative authorities and the Security Police represented a seemingly coherent system of coordinated measures; as soon as the general political line was established, the administration and police apparatus functioned smoothly to put the system together. The respective provisions were carefully elaborated and coordinated by the proper authorities in line with the political and economic priorities: as regards Jewish citizens, first “purification” of the public service, then the anti-Jewish measures in the economic sector and public life; as regards the alien workers, first (or simultaneously with other measures) segregation from the community, then abolition of freedom of movement and complete severance of communications, restrictions in the cultural sector, and so forth. The system of special law regulated everything: nothing was to be left to chance, as the examples given show. When it came to the procedures for the implementation of special law, the simple device of administrative provisions for foreign workers was quite sufficient in the eyes of the administration and police authorities; specific legislation was not necessary, since they regarded these people as in principle being outside the realm of the (binding) provisions of the law. With regard to Jews of German nationality, special law had to be imposed, however, by the usual legislative process peculiar to the National Socialist state (laws issued by the Reich government and decrees issued by the Reich ministers), because regular (general) law was still applicable to them. These provisions, issued through the legislative channels, although blatantly unlawful, nevertheless contained remnants of some sort of correct procedure and did not fail to work. On the strength of the prevailing theory that the formal legislative process of law was identical with the terms of substantive law in the sense of “justice” (
Recht
), staunchly defended against all evidence even in the National Socialist era, these provisions were accepted by the administration as lawful and just. Further, the apparent regularity of these provisions misled the administrative authorities, even those at the highest levels of the Reich who elaborated these instruments, to the false conclusion that they were definitive and would preclude future restrictions; this could not have been further from the truth.

The reasons why the elaboration of the anti-Jewish regulations was assigned to the legislative powers can be found in foreign and internal policy considerations, which the regime had to observe. These considerations required a formal organization of the special (anti-Jewish) law system because the collective deprivation of the rights of a large number of persons of German nationality was at stake—an unheard-of event before that time in the German Reich as well as in the history of common (general) law.

In the eyes of the National Socialist leaders, such considerations were not necessary in the annexed and occupied territories, and especially in the overrun countries of Eastern Europe. The policy of eradication of aliens in the Altreich thus served the National Socialist authorities in the occupied territories as a model only with regard to the special fields to be regulated (because every authority charged with elaborating new rules naturally looks to precedent rules of the same or a similar kind) but not with regard to method and procedure. The choice of methods and procedures was rather arbitrary (and not bound by the rules of general law). It depended on the political aims (of the administration) and on the conditions in the respective territories, which differed considerably from those in the Altreich. Only against the background of these conditions is it possible to understand the special law for aliens in the Occupied Eastern Territories and in the General Government: not as a succession of more or less incidental isolated actions, but as an integral part of the National Socialist policy of special law. This system was established first in the territory of the Reich but took on its full development in the occupied East European territories. Thus, before examining the individual fields of special law, we must explain the underlying policy of the administration in these territories.

Section Two

The Implementation of Völkisch Inequality in the Annexed Eastern Territories

INTRODUCTION

Fundamentals of National Socialist Administrative Policy: The Exploitation and Expulsion of “Non-Germans”

I. Objectives and Outlines of the Implementation of National Socialist Policy

Administrative policy outside the territory of the Altreich was the bureaucratic expression of the National Socialists’ basic notion of how to shape the Europe of the future and the foreign territories still to be conquered. These notions are best summarized under the term
National Socialist Grossraumpolitik
.
¹
The goal of this policy, often masked as the Lebensraum policy,
²
the acquisition of areas with raw materials, and so forth, was the creation of a Greater German Colonial Empire,
³
supposedly in imitation of the British. This concept, which permeates all the special-law measures of the Civil Service, was by no means the product of later years; it had been developed in its fundamentals even before the seizure of power and was later rigorously adhered to, even if its implementation in detail was ever oriented toward the politically expedient.
⁴

About the outlines of this concept all political forces were unanimous. The main protagonists—Hitler himself; the experts in agricultural and settlement policy from Agriculture Minister Richard Walther Darré’s staff; the SS and police leaders (Himmler, Heydrich); the Party leadership (the office of the deputy of the Führer, later the Party Chancellery); as well as the heads of the Civil Service in the conquered territories, above all those in the occupied East European regions—all started from the assumption that the issue at hand was the enduring subordination of Greater Europe to the exclusion of the “outside” powers, Great Britain and the USA. In
Mein Kampf
Hitler had already drawn a rough sketch of the future Europe: Fascist Italy as an ally to the south, to the west a France deprived of its power, Eastern Europe as Germany’s future Lebensraum, in
Mitteleuropa
a strong Empire of All the Germans (
Reich aller Deutschen
) going far beyond the borders of 1914.
⁵
In contrast to the structure of the British Empire,
⁶
the dominant force in the National Socialist
Grossreich
was to be not the Civil Service but, true to its role as the leading “movement,” the Party
⁷
—as was later actually the case in the Annexed Eastern Territories and the occupied Soviet regions.

Regarding the status of the future colonies, however, the ideas of the political leadership and the Civil Service diverged. The Reich Ministry of Justice had since 1939–40 labored over numerous drafts for a “Reich colonial law” and on rules of jurisdiction in case of the reclamation of former colonies abroad,
⁸
such as Cameroon, German East Africa, German Southwest Africa, and New Guinea,
⁹
all of which planned a close emulation of the colonial law of the Kaiser era;
¹⁰
but, although great weight was given to considerations of detail such as the question of vacation for civil servants in the German colonies or a special colonial administrative career path for high-level officials,
¹¹
the men of the political leadership knew with certainly during the pre-1933 period where the first German colonies were to lie: in the East.

As early as the summer of 1932, there was talk within the National Socialist leadership about the substance of a future German eastern policy, which now made concrete the vague concept of domination over Europe developed by Hitler in the early period of National Socialism.
¹²
There was to be a “federation of States” in Central Europe, whose core was to be made up of Germany, Bohemia, Moravia, and Austria as constituent parts,
¹³
surrounded by a wreath of small and medium-sized, dependent “state structures.” Thus the Greater German
Grossreich
was to be built out of an encircling ring of satellite states, or structures half-colonial in status.

Seen as a natural precondition for this was the
dismemberment
of the Central European states, such as Czechoslovakia and “Jew-infested” Austria, which latter Hitler had included in his colonization plans from the very beginning.
¹⁴
As early as the fall of 1933 Hitler had laid out before his most intimate circle his concept of a future Europe from the Atlantic to the Caucasus:
¹⁵
Around Greater Germany (including Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, and western Poland), he envisioned not a federation of equal partners but a
Bund
of “auxiliary nations,” without economies and polities of their own. To the west this would take the form of a
Westbund
(France, Flanders, Holland), to the north a
Nordbund
(Denmark, Norway, Sweden), to the east an
Ostbund
(the Baltic states, Poland, the Balkan states, the Ukraine, Georgia, and the Volga area).
¹⁶

At stake here, therefore, was nothing more nor less than the
colonization
of the European nations, particularly those in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. Indeed, to the National Socialist leadership the colonial status seemed the only appropriate one for conquered territories.
¹⁷
In this respect, the concept of colonization was not confined to certain regions alone; rather, the goal was expansion on all sides, not only to the east,
¹⁸
even if talk of colonization went mostly in that direction. In reality Hitler was thinking of “colonizing” all of Europe—with the exception of Italy.
¹⁹
The supposed necessity of gaining “room in the East” was, as Hitler declared in private, put forward only because the political leadership required freedom of action for the means of colonization, that is, for the coming war.
²⁰

The idea of “Lebensraum in the East” was thus justified less from a standpoint of population policy than from one of power politics, as a “precondition for the realization of the utopia of the supremacy of the master race,” as the “temporally and spatially unlimited political freedom of action” of the Greater German Empire;
²¹
the arguments put forward for public consumption, for example the need for access to the sources of raw materials, for room for excess population, for economic autarky, albeit the expression of genuine interests that certainly played their part,
²²
represented merely short-term objectives. Behind them stood military-political and security interests.
²³
These latter were not nourished by rational calculation but rather had their roots in the (irrational)
²⁴
weltanschauung of those who held them and so, as has already been stated in the introduction to this volume, cannot be rationally explained. At stake was nothing less than power at any cost. This was the actual “long-term goal” of National Socialist thought, quite apart from all national, economic, and military factors,
²⁵
and it was much stronger than such considerations.

For in the struggle for power as such, a hunger for aggression and domination, for experience and action (“adventuresome colonial life”), which had long been building in Germany and was presently breaking loose under the National Socialist regime, now came to the fore.
²⁶
It was reinforced precisely because the desire for expansion was not restricted to specific regions, because the long-term goal of the National Socialist leadership itself remained indeterminate and not limited to Europe.
²⁷
The policy of “universal anxiety”
²⁸
on the part of the National Socialist leadership offered all true believers, fellow travelers, and other enthusiasts unlimited opportunities to help themselves, to enrich themselves, to experience adventure. Add to this, moreover, that the mysticism of the East as encouraged in Germany (Eastern colonization, the Teutonic Order, etc.) allowed the sole objective of the leadership, power for its own sake, to be kept well out of sight. It was precisely from this lack of rational considerations,
²⁹
then, that the National Socialist will to expand received its impetus, its fascination, and its irresistibility
³⁰
—a fact whose emotional center of gravity was much better appreciated by contemporaries of Hitler than by subsequent generations.
³¹

The addiction to power and domination at any price also helps to explain the ruthless colonization plans for and the treatment of even those nations who were “racially” related (such as the Austrians);
³²
for, at root, neither racial nor other reasons were decisive for the policy in the conquered regions, but rather, and exclusively, the idea of domination, of the “universal drive for approval,” the vague desire for a “new distribution of the earth,” which coincided with the will to destroy all existing orders and create anarchy.
³³
Of a federation of states dominated by Germany as talked about repeatedly within the National Socialist leadership, of a commonwealth after the British pattern, or of an extended area held together by alliances, there could be no question; according to the National Socialist leadership’s own ideas, the only remaining path to supremacy lay through occupation sustained by the rule of force. As for the administrative policy to be cultivated in the conquered regions, whose practitioners openly readopted colonial terms and customs from the years prior to 1914 in order to create the impression of tradition and continuity in German foreign policy,
³⁴
such irrational motives and goals among the leadership provided, however, no serviceable basis. For them the question was whether or not administratively defensible principles could be extrapolated from them, principles that would guide the Civil Service in the soon-to-be-conquered colonial territories.