Capitalism and Nazism

The next time someone tells you the Nazis were anti-capitalist, show them this.
by Corey Robin

From Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy.

Commenters on my blog claim the graph tells us nothing about the Nazis and capitalism; it only tells us that the economy improved under the Nazis. As it did in the United States under FDR. So maybe the graph plotting capital’s return under Nazism just shows general improvement in the economy in the 1930s, an improvement widely shared throughout the industrial world?

Luckily, Suresh Naidu, the kick-ass economist at Columbia, supplied me with the following graphs.

This first one, which comes from Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, compares the share of national income that went to capital in the US and in Germany between 1929 and 1938. Suresh tells me that the share roughly tracks capital’s rate of return.

Long story short: capital was doing better under the Nazis than under FDR. Not because of overall increases in economic performance in one country versus another, but because of the economic policies of the regime. Or so Suresh tells me. (Usually academics are supposed to acknowledge their debts to their friends and readers but own all errors as their own: in this case, I’m blaming everything on Suresh.)

The second graph — which comes from this fascinating article by Thomas Ferguson and Hans-Joachim Voth, “Betting on Hitler: The Value of Political Connections in Nazi Germany” — tracks the stock market’s performance in Britain, US, France, and Germany, from January 1930 to November 1933. As you can see, in the early months that Hitler came to power, Germany’s stock market performance was quite strong, outstripping all the others; it’s not until July that it even crosses paths with Britain’s, the second best performer.
voth-43-21

From Thomas Ferguson and Hans-Joachim Voth, “Betting on Hitler:
The Value of Political Connections in Nazi Germany”

On Twitter, Justin Paulson brought this fascinating article from theJournal of Economic Perspectives to my attention. It’s called “The Coining of ‘Privatization’ and Germany’s National Socialist Party.” Apparently, the first use of the word “privatization” (or “reprivatization”) in English occurred in the 1930s, in the context of explaining economic policy in the Third Reich. Indeed, the English word was formulated as a translation of the German word “Reprivatisierung,” which had itself been newly minted under the Third Reich.

After I sent him this article, Phil Mirowski also sent me this piece by Germà Bell, “Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in the 1930s,” from the Economic History Review. This article also has some fascinating findings. From the abstract:

In the mid-1930s, the Nazi regime transferred public ownership to the private sector. In doing so, they went against the mainstream trends in western capitalistic countries, none of which systematically reprivatized firms during the 1930s.

Source: Jacobin
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/04/capitalism-and-nazism/

Francis R. Nicosia. Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany (Book)

Francis R. Nicosia. Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xiv + 324 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-88392-4.

Grand Illusion? The Relationship between Zionism and Nazism in the 1930s

Forty years after the Second World War, a group of post-Zionist historians began to write a new vein of historiography sharply critical of the Yishuv in Palestine's instrumentalist view of European Jewry, its relationship with Nazism, and what they perceived as its failure to do more to rescue European Jewry during the Holocaust. Some reiterated 1930s' era critiques that accused Zionists of ideological identification with Nazism, working contacts with Nazis in defiance of the boycott, and a narrow focus on the needs of the Yishuv in building the "Jewish state" at the expense of a German Jewry suffering under Nazi rule.[1] Israeli scholars, like Tom Segev in The Seventh Million, have pointed to the Ha'avara (Transfer) agreement as a prime example of the Yishuv leadership sacrificing the interests of German and world Jewry for those of the Yishuv in seizing upon the "complementary interests of the German government and the Zionist movement."[2] Edwin Black, in The Transfer Agreement: The Untold Story of the Secret Pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine (1984), alleged that German Zionists were responsible for the survival of the Nazi regime because of their naïve and partisan cooperation with the Nazis in the Ha'avara agreement, in defiance of the international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany. Against the context of this debate over the relationship between Zionism and Nazism (one that of late has recently taken on even more sinister connotations in current anti-Zionist likening of Zionism to Nazism), Francis R. Nicosia's thorough examination of this relationship lays to rest such dubious charges of collaboration, while also uncovering new and unexamined areas of research that contribute greatly to our understandings of both Nazism and Zionism. Most fundamentally, Nicosia reminds us that there were limits on Jewish power before (and during) the war, and that the relationship between the Zionists and the Nazi movement was inherently unequal; in every single step along the way, the range of options for the German Zionists and the Yishuv leadership was limited by this great power imbalance.

Rather than focus generally on the relationship between Germany and its Jews (something that Nicosia suggests has already been covered extensively), Nicosia examines the relationship between a specific conception of German nationalism (a volkisch, anti-Semitic one) and Zionism (a volkisch, Jewish nationalist ideology). In so doing, he adds a significantly new approach to the study of the relationship between Germany and the Jews in general and to the history of Zionism and Nazism in particular. Through a focus on early ideology, Nicosia also points to an irony: whereas Theodor Herzl thought that Zionism would ultimately succeed in eliminating anti-Semitism, the Nazis believed that Zionism could be used in their effort to ultimately eliminate the Jews from German soil. From its inception, he notes, the Zionist movement was always concerned over how it would be received by the non-Jewish world, and, for Herzl, by anti-Semites especially, even at a time when support for Zionism, and by extension, the departure of Jews from Europe, could in fact be perceived as an anti-Semitic viewpoint. This ironic disconnect between the aims of the Zionists, the perceptions of the anti-Semites, and the elimination of Jews from European society pointed to the limits of this working relationship. Still, as Nicosia suggests, "in the end, the relationship between Zionism and anti-Semitism in Germany helped to define what each was and, perhaps more importantly, what each was not during the period of about half a century before the onset of the final solution" (p. 9).

Nazis and Zionists were in agreement that it was not possible for Jews to be both German and Jewish--the volkisch conception of national identity that both held to be at the core of their nationalisms made this impossible. By tracing the evolution of Nazi understandings of Zionism (from usefulness to irrelevance), Nicosia also provides crucial insight into the development of Nazi Jewish policy as well and refutes an intentionalist reading of such policy: "Thus, the policies of Hitler's regime toward Zionism and the Zionist movement in Germany before 1941, as examples of the implementation of its anti-Semitic ideology, only diminish the likelihood that the 'final solution' was part of an earlier plan or intention to ultimately mass murder the Jews of Europe" (pp. 10-11). When viewed in context, at the time of its implementation, the Ha'avara agreement must be understood as part of the regime's support for Jewish emigration, not as previewing in some way steps leading to the Final Solution. "Throughout the 1930s, as part of the regime's determination to force the Jews to leave Germany, there was almost unanimous support in German government and Nazi party circles for promoting Zionism among German Jews, and Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine" (p. 79). Still, by making use of the Zionist movement when it was convenient for Nazi policy, "the regime, perhaps unwittingly, permitted the Zionists a significant role in shaping some important components of Nazi policy prior to the genocide. These components, already important aspects of Zionist policy prior to the Nazi ascent to power in 1933, included the Ha'avara Transfer agreement, Zionist occupational retraining programs, large-scale community education programs, and the process of illegal immigration into Palestine. These were all Zionist initiatives that became elements of Nazi Jewish policy prior to the 'final solution'" (p. 284). The coalescing of Nazi and Zionist policy at key points around a shared goal of Jewish immigration from Germany gave preference to certain German Zionist objectives and, as Nicosia reminds us, regardless of whether such was the intent or not, by allowing thousands of Jews to reach Palestine in this way, saved their lives before WWII.

And while some German Zionists may have been cautiously optimistic that Nazi and Zionists goals might coalesce, Nicosia reminds us that in this uneven relationship, the Nazi regime did not afford German Zionists any special treatment as less Jewish than other German Jews, and continued to view Zionism as "an important instrument in addressing both parts of the process" of reversing Jewish emancipation and assimilation in Germany and ending Jewish life in the Reich through emigration (p. 105). This was never an even relationship; through a masterful use of sources representing both sides of this study--records of various Nazi and German state agencies from the period, as well as German and non-German Jewish and Zionist organizations--Nicosia demonstrates the manner in which Nazism and Zionism talked past, but not with, each other. Likewise, the structure of the book combines a focus on Nazi perceptions and manipulations of Zionism, with Zionist perceptions of Nazism and the possibilities for action within the framework. Importantly, Nicosia adds his chapter on Revisionist Zionism in Germany--an all too often overlooked element of this time period--and detail on the intriguing figure of Georg Kareski, president of the State Zionist Organization in Germany.

As Nicosia concludes, ultimately, there was absolutely no way in which they could actually "collaborate," for "in the end, the Nazis maintained a contempt for Zionism as for all things Jewish, as representative of what they considered to be some of the most dangerous and abhorrent characteristics of the Jews as a people" (p. 290). The Zionists, in reinforcing the drive to promote a Jewish consciousness and identity, were just as Jewish as the non-Zionists and anti-Zionists, and thus, "inseparable from the object of Nazi hatred and intent" (ibid.). While Herzl might have originally believed that "the initial movement [of Jews out of Europe] will put an end to anti-Semitism," little did he know that in under fifty years it would represent one step on the path to the almost complete victory of Germandom over Judaism.[3] In examining the inherently unequal relationship between these two nationalist movements, Nicosia has made an important contribution to both the history of Zionism and Nazism (and more broadly to the fields of German and Jewish history), while correcting misconceptions about the limits of actual Jewish and Zionist power.

Notes

[1]. See Hava Eshkoli-Wagman, "Yishuv Zionism: Its Attitude to Nazism and the Third Reich Reconsidered," Modern Judaism 19, no. 1 (1999): 21-40 for an overview.

[2]. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 20. The Ha'avara agreement, concluded in August 1933 between the German Zionist Organization and Third Reich officials, facilitated the passage of close to forty thousand German Jewish émigrés headed for Palestine by enabling them to retain sufficient assets to qualify for visas (most German Jewish émigrés surrendered nearly all their assets before departure from Germany), while leaving some assets for the Reichsvertretung (the Reich Representation of German Jews) to perform relief work with German Jews. The agreement also provided a market for German exports, which were purchased in Palestine with the proceeds used to pay costs for new emigrants.

[3]. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (Minneapolis: Filiquarian Publishing, 2006), 15.

Reviewed by Avinoam Patt (Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies)
Published on H-Judaic (April, 2010)
Commissioned by Jason Kalman

Source: H-Net
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23871

Prusia: el chivo expiatorio de Alemania

El historiador Christopher Clark desmonta en su nuevo ensayo la falacia sobre la que se cimentó la erradicación de Prusia del mapa y cómo su identificación con el nazismo se corresponde más con prejuicios que con hechos

ETIQUETAS
Alemania Historia Rusia

Moneda con la efigie de Juan Zápolya sentado en el trono de Hungría
Cultura La crueldad sin límites de Juan Zápolya

24 de octubre de 2016. 04:34h David Solar.

Federico Guillermo Víctor, Augusto Ernesto, último príncipe de Reino Unido de Prusia y Alemania

Voltaire, amigo de Federico el Grande, escribía a mediados del siglo XVIII: «Sería útil explicar cómo Brandemburgo, un país arenoso, ha acumulado tanto poder que contra él se han levantado fuerzas más poderosas que las coaligadas contra Luis XIV». A la sazón, Federico II de Prusia combatía contra la coalición de Rusia, Francia, Austria y Suecia en la Guerra de los Siete años (1756-63). Se comprende el asombro de Voltaire: viajeros posteriores se referían a Prusia como «zona arenosa, llana, cenagosa, baldía» o «vasta región de arena desnuda y abrasadora; aldeas, pocas y alejadas entre sí y bosques de abetos raquíticos...». Partiendo de bases tan pobres, los Hohenzollern crearon allí un poderoso reino que se enfrentó a grandes alianzas impotentes para cortar las alas al águila prusiana.

La clave, según sus defensores, fue el trabajo, la administración austera, honesta y eficaz, la educación nacional avanzada (el país más alfabetizado del mundo en el siglo XIX), un código civil moderno y progresista, los políticos desinteresados, la tolerancia religiosa e ideológica, un ejército nacional disciplinado y bien adiestrado, una moderna escuela de guerra... Con esos mimbres Federico II y sus sucesores convirtieron Prusia en el reino germano más poderoso, cosecharon victorias militares asombrosas y unificaron Alemania.

Sus detractores sólo ven autoritarismo, servilismo, militarismo, «pestilencia recurrente» (Chur-chill), caldo de cultivo para la muerte de la democracia y el triunfo del nazismo. Tal opinión, dominante entre los vencedores de la II Guerra Mundial, provocó la Ley nº 46 del Consejo de Control Aliado (25/2/ 1947) por la que «El estado prusiano, junto con su Gobierno central y todos sus organismos, queda abolido». En adelante, Prusia sólo perviviría en la Historia, como Cartago o Esparta.

Prusia: el chivo expiatorio de Alemania

Convirtieron a Prusia en un chivo expiatorio apropiado para explicar la I y II Guerras Mundiales. En 1947 era cómodo decir: «Prusia fue la perdición de la Alemania Moderna y de la Historia Europea» porque buena parte de su territorio ya formaba parte de Polonia; su núcleo original –Brandemburgo– y territorios limítrofes constituían la Alemania del Este, bajo ocupación soviética, y en los territorios del Oeste, administrados por EE UU, Gran Bretaña y Francia, nadie se erigiría en defensor del cadáver e, incluso, a la mayoría de los alemanes les interesaba, sacudiéndose así las responsabilidades nazis que pudieran corresponderles.

Barrer de un plumazo

Siete décadas después, Chris Topher Clark, un historiador australiano profesor en Cambridge, ha publicado «El reino de hierro. Auge y caída de Prusia. 1600-1747» (La Esfera de los libros, Madrid, 2016), un libro tan bien documentado como valiente, que desmonta la falacia sobre la que se basó la erradicación de Prusia del mapa de las naciones. Uno de los caballos de batalla de Clark en esta obra es que «Prusia era un estado europeo mucho antes de que se convirtiera en un estado alemán. Alemania no fue una realización de Prusia, sino su ruina».

En el ocaso medieval, Brandemburgo era una región inhóspita, cuyas tierras apenas producían una cosecha cada cinco años, carecía de fronteras naturales, de materias primas explotables, de acceso al mar..., pero contaba con algo que la hacía codiciable: su señor era uno de los siete electores del emperador del Sacro Imperio romano germánico. En 1417, el Emperador Segismundo se lo vendió a Federico Hohenzollern, señor de Núremberg, agradeciéndole los servicios prestados en sus guerras contra los turcos y en su consagración imperial.

Durante los dos siglos siguientes, los margraves (marqueses) de Brandemburgo acrecentaron sus posesiones con matrimonios y alianzas, gobernándolas desde Berlín, una pequeña ciudad con apenas diez mil habitantes, pronto sustituida por Königsberg, histórica ciudad báltica que fue capital entre 1525 y 1701.

Enfermeras ayudando a soldados germanos en Allenstein

Personaje determinante entre los Hohenzollern fue Federico Guillermo (1620-1688), al que su bisnieto, Federico El Grande, atribuía las «sólidas bases del reinado»: sometió a los estados, que se consideraban súbditos del elector pero sin vínculos entre ellos, generalizó los impuestos, pacificó a los bandos religiosos y fundó de un ejército permanente, eliminando las milicias. En su lecho de muerte decía: «Todos conocen el desorden del país cuando comencé mi reinado. Lo he mejorado con la ayuda de Dios. Hoy soy respetado por mis amigos y temido por mis enemigos».

Su hijo Federico III (1657-1688) aprovechó la situación internacional y su madurez administrativa y para pasar de margrave (1688-1701) a rey de Prusia (1701-1713), con el nombre de Federico I, reconociéndole el emperador del Sacro Imperio Romano Germánico y de Austria a cambio de su apoyo militar en la guerra de Sucesión de España, en favor de las pretensiones del archiduque Carlos y en contra de los intereses de Felipe V. La Historia le recuerda por la conversión del margravato en reino por el nombre de Prusia, originario de una nación báltica, vecina a Lituania y ya desaparecida; por el establecimiento de Berlín como capital y por el boato de su corte, lo que contribuyó a su prestigio internacional.

«El rey sargento»

Su heredero, Federico Guillermo I (1688-1740), fue todo lo contrario: en vez de afable, brusco y desabrido; en vez de generoso, avaro; en vez de derrochador, administrador estricto; en vez de disfrutar con artes y letras, sólo era feliz con el ejército, al que llevó de 40.000 a 80.000 hombres, procedentes de reclutamiento obligatorio. Le llamaron «El rey sargento», y le ha sobrevivido su fama de violento y melancólico, pero fue, también, el artífice de la reforma agraria y del saneamiento de 65.000 hectáreas de marismas, de la supresión de los privilegios fiscales nobiliarios, de una administración eficaz y honesta. Se le recuerda por su ejército, tan desproporcionado como bien adiestrado y mandado, pero se olvida que durante su reinado Prusia no acometió aventuras exteriores y que se dedicó a crear las estructuras sobre las que se desarrollaría el país.

Uno de los «culebrones» en la joven Prusia fueron las relaciones entre el rey y su heredero, el príncipe Federico (1712-1786). Al rey Sargento le enfurecía que su hijo se cayera continuamente del caballo o temblara ante el fuego de la mosquetería y que sólo le interesara la poesía, la literatura francesa y la música; que en vez de cultivar la esgrima dedicara horas a tocar la flauta o que le atrajeran más los guapos oficiales de la guardia que las muchachas de palacio. Combatió tales inclinaciones a bofetadas y, ante un intento de abandonar clandestinamente Prusia, le metió en la cárcel y le obligó a contemplar la decapitación de su cómplice.

Soldados tomando café en Lotzen (al este de Prusia)

No podía imaginar que aquella calamidad de hijo fuera a convertirse en el Marte del siglo XVIII, vencedor en las dos guerras de Silesia y artífice de un milagroso acuerdo en la Guerra de los Siete Años; sus victorias admiraron al propio Napoleón, aunque a él le complaciera más el sobrenombre de rey Filósofo y la lisonja que le dedicó el gran filósofo Immanuel Kant, su compatriota y contemporáneo: «La era de la ilustración» es sinónimo de «la era de Federico». Pero la Historia le recuerda como el caudillo del gran ejército de la época con el que duplicó la extensión de Prusia convirtiéndola en el primero de los estados alemanes. Y sería su victoria en Silesia el gran argumento para calificar Prusia de estado agresor, olvidando interesadamente que ése era el signo de los tiempos: como Austria en los Balcanes, Inglaterra en Gibraltar, Francia en Bélgica, las potencias coloniales en la destrucción de reinos africanos y asiáticos para apoderarse de sus territorios y recursos, Rusia en Polonia, Estados Unidos en México y en los territorios de los pieles rojas. Tras las guerras napoleónicas se encerró a Bonaparte en Santa Helena, pero no se produjo el disparate de abolir Francia, como se hizo con Prusia en 1947.
El taconeo de los oficiales dandies

La identificación de Prusia y nazismo se corresponde más con los prejuicios que con los hechos. El premier británico, Churchill, hablaba del «terrible ataque de la máquina de guerra nazi con sus oficiales prusianos, esos dandies con sus sonidos metálicos y su taconeo»; su segundo, Atlee, opinaba que «el verdadero elemento agresivo de la sociedad alemana eran los junkers prusianos». Pero Prusia tenía el más democrático de los «landtag» (parlamento), pero fue disuelto por los nazis con el apoyo conservador. La cúpula dirigente nazi no era prusiana. Tampoco lo eran los militares. Hitler odiaba a los junkers (nobleza terrateniente prusiana) y a sus generales. Y si se unieron al nazismo esperando la recuperación alemana y la revancha de 1918, también fueron los más comprometidos en el atentado de Von Stauffenberg (1944), eliminado en las represalias consiguientes, lo mismo que los generales Witzleben, Olbricht, Fromm, Fellgiebel y muchos otros prusianos, encabezados por medio centenar de junkers.

Source: La Razon (España)
http://www.larazon.es/cultura/prusia-el-chivo-expiatorio-de-alemania-HN13787264#.Ttt1NDybPZDCSEa

Muere, a los 93 años, el polémico historiador alemán Ernst Nolte

El intelectual avivó con su obra el debate sobre los crímenes del nazismo al tratar de justificarlos. Hoy su obra es fundamental para el ideario de los grupos ultraderechistas que toman fuerza en Alemania.

El historiador Ernst Nolte - AFP

ABC - ABC_Cultura Berlín18/08/2016 18:33h - Actualizado: 19/08/2016 00:43h.
Guardado en: Cultura - Temas: Holocausto , Berlin , Crímenes de guerra , Fascismo

El historiador Ernst Nolte, uno de los principales intelectuales revisionistas de Alemania, ha fallecido en Berlín a los 93 años, según han informado fuentes de su familia. A lo largo de su carrera publicó obras de gran relevancia como «La guerra civil europea», «El fascismo en su época» o «La crisis del sistema liberal y los movimientos fascistas», algunas de ellas muy polémicas. Gran parte de su fama como historiador se debe a su papel en la llamada «Historikerstreit» (disputa de los historiadores) que se desató con su ensayo publicado en el diario «Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung» el 6 de junio de 1986, titulado «El pasado que no quiere pasar».

Nolte defendió en su obra que el nazismo fue la respuesta lógica al bolchevismo

Una de las principales tesis de la obra de Nolte es que el fascismo surgió en Europa como oposición a la modernidad. Además adoptó muchas posturas polémicas con la intención de justificar de algún modo los crímenes del nazismo. En el artículo del «Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung» Nolte relativizaba los crímenes del nacionalsocialismo y los veía como una reacción a los crímenes del estalinismo. «¿No fue el Gulag anterior a Auschwitz? ¿No fue el asesinato de clase de los bolcheviques el antecedente lógico y fáctico del genocidio de los nazis?», se preguntaba Nolte en el ensayo. El historiador concluía que la política de los nazis había sido a la postre una respuesta a la «amenaza existencial» que representaba el bolchevismo.

Su disputa con Habermas

Se trata de una obra que ha dado lugar a grandes polémicas y sobre la que se han fundado algunas ideas actualmente en boga como las de los radicales ultraderechista Alternativa por Alemania (AfD). El artículo de Nolte generó una respuesta del filósofo y sociólogo Jürgen Habermas, publicada en el semanario «Die Zeit. Habermas acusaba a Nolte de ponerse a la cabeza de un grupo de intelectuales neoconservadores que procuraba liberar a los alemanes de su responsabilidad histórica negando el carácter único y sin precedentes del Holocausto. Además, Habermas mencionaba a otros historiadores, como Klaus Hildebrandt y Andreas Hilgruber, a quienes veía cerca de la posición representada por Nolte.

Las ideas de Nolte son fundamentales para movimientos como Alternativa por Alemania

Cuando se cumplieron 30 años de la «Historikerstreit» el diario «Die Welt» le dedicó un artículo de Nolte en el que se afirmaba que él había formulado muchas posiciones que ahora representa la agrupación AfD. La carrera de Nolte como historiador se inició en 1963 con la publicación de su libro «El fascismo en su época» en el que hacía una aproximación comparativa del fascismo italiano, el nacionalsocialismo y la Acción Francesa. En 1994 Nolte aportó un artículo a un libro titulado «Die selbsbewuste Nation» (La nación segura de si misma) en el que se agruparon varias voces de la nueva derecha alemana, que trataba en ese momento de aprovechar el júbilo que había generado la reunificación cuatro años atrás.

Source: ABC (Spain)
http://www.abc.es/cultura/abci-fallece-93-anos-polemico-historiador-aleman-ernst-nolte-201608181833_noticia.html

The physiology of barbarism. "The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class" - Donny Gluckstein

Few historical events have been subject to the same degree of controversy, confusion and mystification as the Nazi rise to power and the tragedy which unfolded in its wake. Attempts to understand the phenomenon have focused on a variety of explanations, some stressing the psychology of individual Nazis, others, such as Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, arguing that the German population shared Hitler's pathological race hatred and that this mass psychosis made the Holocaust possible. Various studies have stressed the exceptional nature of the Nazi regime, and many have therefore tended to minimise the potential for such atrocities to happen again. Recent trends have seen earlier social explanations of Nazism challenged by studies which claim that the Third Reich was above all else a racial hierarchy.1 Another increasingly widespread view holds that the Nazi state pursued a programme not of reaction but of modernisation or revolution. Donny Gluckstein offers a powerful counter to such arguments, and in the process reaffirms the Marxist analysis of fascism with a clarity and an authority that make The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class essential reading.

The book begins with an outline of the development of modern Germany and takes up the argument that the conditions which gave rise to the Nazi regime are somehow linked to a unique path of historical development whereby the 'normal' process of capitalist development was bypassed, producing an exceptional semi-feudal state. The opening chapter succinctly describes the specific features of German capitalism and their consequences for the classes in that society. In most advanced industrial nations capitalism had emerged with national unification and the establishment of bourgeois democracy. In Germany national unification was brought about by the Kaiser without any real democracy. This did not mean that capitalism failed to develop in Germany--in fact it did so at a great rate. But Germany's status as a 'follower' nation, industrialising after Britain, meant that it emerged with certain distinctive features, notably a greater concentration of capital in certain sectors, since it started out with larger production units, greater collaboration between capital and the state and, as a latecomer to the battle for international markets, a more prominent role for the state. At the same time, a mass of smaller, artisanal units continued to prosper, ensuring the survival of a large middle class.

The development of Nazism was to be shaped by all these factors, but above all else it was a product of the imperialist stage of capitalism. The concentration and centralisation of production, the increasing importance of banks as investors of finance capital, and the intensification of competition in an expanding world market led to a greater role for the state as an actor in defending and promoting economic interests both domestically and abroad. The fusion of state and capital under Nazism was therefore characteristic of an era dominated by finance capital which 'makes the dictatorship of the capitalist lords of one country increasingly incompatible with the capitalist interests of other countries, and the internal domination of capital increasingly irreconcilable with the interests of the masses'.2 In order to resolve these conflicts Germany's ruling elite turned to Hitler in much the same way as the French bourgeoisie had turned to Bonapartism in 1851, giving up its crown 'in order to save its purse'. Except that, given Germany's status as an advanced industrialised nation, the Nazis were forced to mobilise the petty bourgeoisie to secure power, using it as a 'battering ram' against working class opposition.3

Rather than transforming existing social relations, Nazism reinforced them 'by the most brutal and systematic methods imaginable--counter-revolution at home and, later, world war abroad'.4 Hitler, then, 'did not fall from the sky or come up out of hell: he is nothing but the personification of all the destructive forces of imperialism'.5 In the sense that Nazism reflected the tendency, identified by Marx, for the relations of production to be constantly revolutionised under capitalism, it may be considered 'modern', but, as the author argues, a regime which bolsters a system that has 'outlived its usefulness' is not engaged in modernisation.6

The origins of Nazism are firmly rooted in the counter-revolutionary current which developed in Germany after the First World War as a reaction to the revolutionary surge of 1918-1923. During this period Hitler established himself as a force to be reckoned with and sealed links with industrialists prepared to consider radical means to block the left, like the steel magnate Thyssen, who stated, 'Democracy with us represents nothing'.7 But although the capitalist class had an interest in promoting Hitler as a means of eliminating obstacles to its domination both at home and abroad, funding of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) did not guarantee complete control over them: 'Connections existed between capitalism and the NSDAP; but this does not mean the Nazis were either robots programmed by the bosses, or free agents making up their own minds and acting as they pleased'.8 Having failed to win ruling class backing for an armed uprising in 1923, Hitler realised that mass support was necessary to make fascism a serious alternative to democratic forces. The creation of a mass party of a million members with a 400,000 strong armed wing gave the Nazis a degree of autonomy, but their capacity for brutality had to be balanced against the need to keep elite supporters on board by not upsetting ruling class sensibilities.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933 they did so not as the result of a popular uprising, or even an electoral majority, but because they had the backing of a section of the ruling class. How, then, the author asks, did a party acting in the interests of this tiny elite achieve such widespread support among ordinary Germans? The analysis of this question, presented in chapters on the 'Nazi machine' and the Holocaust, is one of the book's great strengths. Central to the explanation developed here is an understanding of the way in which capitalism's capacity to mask the exploitation at its core is refracted through the prism of class:

The daily experience of life under capitalism mediates the impact of capitalist ideology. It can reinforce it, contradict it, or still have more complex results, partially reinforcing some points of the ideology and negating others. The general pattern is that with capitalists their life experience serves to reinforce belief in the system; the life experience of workers tends to clash with the received ways of thinking and cause it to be questioned either partially or totally. The middle class has a life experience which leaves it vacillating between both these poles.9

Nazi ideology was less likely to exert an influence over workers living in large towns--whose livelihood was threatened by unemployment and whose experience of work was characterised by a sense of collective solidarity--than over those working in craft or service sectors, less affected by unemployment, or those living in isolated rural communities. Similarly, in terms of middle class support, those whose livelihoods were threatened by the loss of savings--the old middle class 'rentiers'--or whose careers were bound up with the survival of the capitalist state--the civil service bureaucrats--were more likely to identify with Nazism than white collar employees, who remained potential allies of the industrial working class. What determined both electoral support for the Nazis and membership of the party itself were the social relations of capitalism. The more isolated the individual, the more bound up their lives and careers were with the preservation of the status quo, the less resistant they were likely to be to fascism: 'What counts in resisting Nazism are the chances of collective organisation and consciousness, and freedom from the direct influence (and intimidation) of the employer'.10

This is not to say that workers were immune to the pull of Nazism, or that no workers joined Hitler's party, but in general it was anxiety about the effects of the crisis which drove people into his arms, rather than rejection of the capitalist system, or even direct experience of unemployment. At the core of the mass movement built by the Nazis was the frustrated petty bourgeoisie which, faced with the disintegration of society and fearful of the prospect of revolution, sought to break free from the domination of the monopolies and cartels. Fusing at the lower end of the social scale with the working class, and with the capitalist bourgeoisie at the other, it is 'no wonder', wrote Trotsky, 'that ideologically it scintillates with all the colours of the rainbow'.11

Fascism's capacity to combine counter-revolutionary aims with a mass movement was both its strength and its weakness, a factor identified very early on by Clara Zetkin:

We should not regard fascism as a homogenous entity, as a granite block from which all our exertions will simply rebound. Fascism is a disparate formation, comprising various contradictory elements, and hence liable to internal dissolution and disintegration... however tough an image fascism presents, it is in fact the result of the decay and disintegration of the capitalist economy and a symptom of the dissolution of the bourgeois state.12

Although the 'sheer weight of forces at its disposal'13 would permit a fascist regime to survive for some time, as a movement it was nevertheless vulnerable when confronted, and sections of its support could even be won to a different political project. In the absence of a credible revolutionary socialist alternative, however, the 'countless human beings whom finance capital has brought to desperation and frenzy'14 were pulled by fascism into a movement in which everything was 'as contradictory and chaotic as in a nightmare'.15

Was fascism a middle class movement? Nazi propaganda before 1933 was full of promises to its middle class followers: '100,000 independent cobblers', declared Gottfried Feder, 'are worth more to the economy of the people and the state than five giant shoe factories'.16 Despite such rhetoric, Nazi rule offered very little to the middle classes. Indeed, once the labour movement had been defeated, ruling class power was immeasurably reinforced, at the expense of all other classes.17

If the regime can be seen to have retained the basic features of capitalism in an extreme form, rather than representing a break with it, how can the importance of anti-Semitism to the Nazi project be explained? A common view holds that the Nazis attempted a racial revolution and that their supporters were motivated above all else by pathological anti-Semitism. Here, again, the book underlines the importance of class distinctions. As far as ordinary Germans were concerned, racist attitudes derived from the anxieties and frustrations of everyday existence and provided scapegoats for their various grievances. In contrast, ruling class racism is a means of shoring up existing social relations and forms part of a hierarchical conception of society whereby notions of superiority and inferiority are bolstered by, among other things, the use of racism to legitimise the targeting of certain groups and, by extension, the treatment meted out to all 'inferior' elements in the hierarchy.18 The reification of existence under capitalism, which turns human beings into objects to be bought and sold, found its most grotesque expression in the Holocaust, when assembly line techniques and a modern transport network were used to commit mass murder, leaving what remained--teeth, human hair, etc--to be treated as industrial 'byproducts'. The distinction between ruling class and popular racism is an important one, not least because it undermines Goldhagen's claim that the Holocaust was a product of a collective German mentality. The shock and repulsion felt by ordinary Germans at Nazi led pogroms such as Kristallnacht (night of broken glass) in 1938, and the revulsion felt even by rank and file Nazis at the euthanasia programme targeted at 'lives not worth living', are evidence of this distinction.19

But if ordinary Germans did not share the same outlook as the Nazi leadership, why did so many participate in its crimes? Again, the horrors perpetrated under Nazi rule are best understood not as a reflection of some kind of primordial evil but in relation to the constraints which capitalism imposes on human activity. The dehumanising bureaucratisation of life under capitalism, which strives to subordinate individuals to an external authority, and to control behaviour patterns by imposing deference to a hierarchical social structure, was reinforced and accentuated under Nazism which, by treating genocide as an everyday productive task (to the extent that railway regulations set out a system of fares for those transported to the death camps), imbued it with an illusory normality which helps explain why so many participated in it.20 Likewise, when leading Nazis boasted of their intention to destroy the individual's private sphere (Robert Ley declared in 1938 that the private citizen had ceased to exist and that hitherto only sleep would remain an intimate affair), such ideas were an extension, rather than a negation, of monopoly capitalism, itself typified by 'the feeling of individual insignificance and powerlessness'21 as personal autonomy is suppressed by the imperatives of production and the domination of the market.22

None of this would have been carried out, however, were it not for the smashing of resistance. This needs to be stressed, because it is an aspect of the Nazi rise to power neglected by writers like Goldhagen who choose to ignore opposition to the Nazis before 1933.23 In the early 1920s Hitler's attempts to seize power came to nothing. By 1928 electoral support for the Nazis stood at only 2.8 percent. As the crisis deepened and the Weimar Republic became increasingly discredited, society polarised and support for the Nazis grew. Why did the left, the most powerful and organised in Western Europe, fail to eliminate their threat? 'We have been defeated,' wrote the Austrian Marxist Otto Bauer after the fascists took power, 'and each of us is turning over in his mind the question whether we brought the bloody disaster on ourselves by our own political mistakes'.24

The tragedy of German social democracy's attitude to fascism was that it repeated the errors made by Italian social democracy a decade earlier in pinning its hopes on legality and the constitution: 'Stay at home: do not respond to provocations,' union leader Matteotti urged Italian workers attacked by fascists, 'Even silence, even cowardice, are sometimes heroic'.25 The German socialist Hilferding proclaimed 'the downfall of fascism' in January 1933, the month Hitler became chancellor, arguing that 'legality will be his undoing'.26 This loyalty to the institutions of the German state had led the Social Democratic Party (the SPD) to use violence against Communist opposition and even its own members, sending in the Freikorps to crush the Spartakist revolt in 1919, murdering Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, granting emergency powers to General Seekt to smash the left wing provincial government in Saxony and shooting down 30 Communists taking part in the banned May Day parade of 1929. Instead of attempting to win rank and file socialists to the fight against fascism, the Communist Party simply issued sectarian declarations against the SPD, denouncing it as fascism's 'twin' and calling for a 'united front...against the Hitler party and the Social Democratic leadership' which, as Trotsky pointed out, amounted to nothing more than 'a united front with itself'27. Having failed to stop the Nazis before they took control of the state, the left was immediately targeted and crushed by the regime. No amount of heroic resistance, well documented here in a chapter on defiance against Nazi rule, could prevent the imposition of the Nazis' sick 'moral norms' once the labour movement had been wiped out.

In the 1930s Trotsky highlighted the way in which barbaric aspects of medieval society survived alongside the technological advances of modernity. People all over the world could listen to radio and hear the pope talk about water being transformed into wine. Pilots flew the most advanced aircraft that science could produce but wore lucky charms to protect themselves from danger. Fascism drew on this kind of superstition and backwardness. When the Nazis came to power, he described how fascism had 'opened up the depths of society for politics':

Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.28

Today such contradictions between society's modernity and the persistence of backwardness and superstition are even more marked. Before playing his part in one of the century's most dazzling feats of technology by walking on the moon, the US astronaut Buzz Aldrin sat in his spacecraft and took holy communion; during the 1980s Reagan and Mitterrand, the leaders of two of the world's most advanced industrialised nations, both felt the need to employ the services of astrologers; in the 1990s religious sects announce their suicide pacts over the internet.

In a year when New Labour ministers have used the rhetoric of anti-fascism to justify the imposition of NATO power in the Balkans, and compared those who oppose their warmongering to appeasers of Hitler, this book is a timely reminder of what fascism is and what it is not. Donny Gluckstein has provided us with an outstanding analysis of the Nazi phenomenon. In its discussion of the Nazi leadership and its anti-Semitism, its analysis of the relationship between the Nazi regime, capitalism and the ruling class, and in its assessment of the aims and actions of both supporters and opponents of Nazism, this book's sensitivity to the interplay between the motivations of individuals and the broader historical and social context sets it out as a model for a dialectical understanding of fascism.

A review of Donny Gluckstein, The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class (Bookmarks, 1999)
JIM WOLFREYS

Notes

1 M Burleigh and W Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge, 1991).
2 R Hilferding, Finance Capital, cited in D Gluckstein, The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class (London, 1999), p8.
3 In 1931 Trotsky warned that 'considering the far greater maturity and acuteness of the social contradictions in Germany, the hellish work of Italian fascism would probably appear as a pale and almost humane experiment in comparison with the work of the German National Socialists'. See 'Germany, the Key to the International Situation', in L Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York, 1971), p125.
4 D Gluckstein, op cit, p128.
5 L Trotsky, cited ibid, p182.
6 Ibid, pp190-191.
7 F Thyssen, cited in D Guerin, Fascism and Big Business (New York, 1973), p35.
8 D Gluckstein, op cit, p44.
9 Ibid, p69.
10 Ibid, p89.
11 L Trotsky, 'What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat', in L Trotsky, op cit, p212.
12 C Zetkin, 'The Struggle against Fascism', in D Beetham (ed), Marxists in Face of Fascism (Manchester, 1983), pp104, 109-110.
13 Ibid, p110.
14 L Trotsky, 'What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat', in L Trotsky, op cit, p155.
15 L Trotsky, 'The German Puzzle', in L Trotsky, op cit, p266.
16 G Feder, cited in D Guerin, op cit, p86.
17 D Gluckstein, op cit, p135.
18 Ibid, pp175-176.
19 Ibid, pp173-177.
20 Ibid, pp182-183.
21 E Fromm, Fear of Freedom (London, 1942), p188.
22 D Gluckstein, op cit, pp148-149.
23 For a critique of Goldhagen see H Maitles, 'Never Again!', International Socialism 77 (1997).
24 O Bauer, 'Austrian Democracy under Fire', in D Beetham (ed), op cit, p289.
25 G Matteotti, cited in D Guerin, op cit, p109.
26 R Hilferding, 'Between the Decisions', cited in D Beetham (ed), op cit, p261.
27 B Fowkes, Communism in Germany under the Weimar Republic (London, 1984), p163.
28 L Trotsky, 'What is National Socialism?', in L Trotsky, op cit, p405.

Source: Socialist Review Index (UK)
http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj83/wolfreys.htm

Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion

Cover of Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion: Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919–1939 by Michael Wildt

Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion: Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919–1939

“Wildt offers a deep impression of what it actually meant for Jews to live in a society defined as a Volksgemeinschaft at least by its leaders…[His] book offers readable and detailed insight into what it meant to produce Volksgemeinschaft. It is by now a standard work on the early years of National Socialist anti-Semitism and supplies an inspiring view on the transformation of German society between the years 1919 and 1939.” · H-Net

"Hitler's Volksgemeinschaft convincingly blends larger conceptual claims with detailed historical analysis of specific localities. One cannot walk away from the book still thinking that the German population in Hitler's Germany was oblivious to, or unwilling to endorse, years of violently exclusionary mechanisms set in motion against Jews - the prelude to their eventual extermination." · Holocaust and Genocide Studies

“[Wildt’s] interpretation contests some of the established assessments. Even though the role of the ‘Volksgemeinschaf’ in this process is debatable, the concept inspired a study worth reading…[It]is definitely a thought-provoking book.” · Journal of Contemporary European Studies

In the spring of 1933, German society was deeply divided – in the Reichstag elections on 5 March, only a small percentage voted for Hitler. Yet, once he seized power, his creation of a socially inclusive Volksgemeinschaft, promising equality, economic prosperity and the restoration of honor and pride after the humiliating ending of World War I persuaded many Germans to support him and to shut their eyes to dictatorial coercion, concentration camps, secret state police, and the exclusion of large sections of the population. The author argues however, that the everyday practice of exclusion changed German society itself: bureaucratic discrimination and violent anti-Jewish actions destroyed the civil and constitutional order and transformed the German nation into an aggressive and racist society. Based on rich source material, this book offers one of the most comprehensive accounts of this transformation as it traces continuities and discontinuities and the replacement of a legal order with a violent one, the extent of which may not have been intended by those involved.

Michael Wildt studied history, cultural studies, and theology at the University of Hamburg. From 1993 to 2009, he was a Research Fellow at the Research Centre for Contemporary History in Hamburg, the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, and The International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. He is Professor of Modern German History at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Published by: Berghahn Books

Source: Jewish Study Library
http://www.jewish.lib.uct.ac.za/news/hitler%E2%80%99s-volksgemeinschaft-dynamics-racial-exclusion

Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938-1945. Anton Weiss-Wendt and Rory Yeomans

Racial Science on the Frontiers of Hitler's Europe

Alongside the theme of modernity, the subject of racial exclusion rests at the center of the now voluminous scholarship dedicated to the Third Reich. In particular, hundreds, if not thousands, of studies have investigated the caustic forms of racial science, which undergirded Nazi ideology and provided the rationale for Adolf Hitler's regime's murderous and utopian efforts to restructure Europe demographically. Yet surprisingly little is known about the ways in which Nazi racial thinking interacted with local state and parastatal institutions in the German occupied territories, not to mention among the Reich's allies.

This collection of thirteen essays edited by Anton Weiss-Wendt and Rory Yeomans seeks to close this important historiographical gap. Originating in papers given at a conference on racial science held at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo, Norway, the work is consciously comparative in nature. Jettisoning the traditional narrative of a top-down imposition from Berlin, the anthology instead refreshingly seeks to problematize the relationship between Germany and its vassal and satellite states concerning racial policy. Spanning the breadth of Nazi Europe, from the Netherlands and Norway to Italy, Romania, and the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, the essays highlight the ways in which eugenicists and ethnographers not only adhered to the tenets of Nazi racial doctrine but also subverted or challenged them in order to pursue agendas aimed at strengthening the body politic in their own countries.

As several essays in the volume note, the often complicated wartime relationship between European racial scientists and their Nazi counterparts stemmed from the fact that throughout the interwar period Germany played a key role in the development of racial science. Having emerged as an academic discipline in the early 1900s, the field was well established in the country by the 1930s, and research institutions at universities, such as Munich and Giessen, attracted students from as far away as Italy, Romania, and the Baltics eager to learn about the benefits of racial hygiene from some of the most prestigious scholars in the field. Indeed, eugenicists in east central Europe's fledgling new republics were especially keen to promote practices advocated in Germany, such as birth control and sterilization, as they appeared to offer the best means of navigating the social and economic pitfalls of the unstable interwar period.

Despite their admiration for the central role that eugenics played inside Germany after 1933, the authors highlight the considerable and enduring differences between these racial scientists and their German colleagues. As Isabel Heinemann notes in her incisive essay on the activities of the Reich Settlement Main Office (RuSHA), "seduced by abundant research funding and the prospect of swift national revival," many German academics enthusiastically implemented the regime's increasingly exclusionary racial policies (p. 50). Using the case study of RuSHA's activities in occupied Poland as a backdrop, the essay reveals that these racial specialists not only helped draft legislation, but also proved willing to go abroad as Nazism's racial vanguard after the outbreak of war in 1939, overseeing the deportation and extermination of non-Germans. Drawing on the rich historiography of Täterforschung, Heinemann conclusively demonstrates that these "architects of extermination" formed a distinct type of perpetrator, who, much like the counterpart in the Reich Security Main Office, was equally comfortable taking part in operations in the field as managing violent population transfers from offices in Berlin (p. 48). While readers familiar with Heinemann's previous work ("Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut": Das Rasse-und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas [2003]) will not find much new in terms of content, the essay serves an important function by setting up the juxtaposition between these Nazi racial scientists unconditionally committed to the violent pursuit of a racially pure Volksgemeinschaft and their often much less radical European contemporaries featured in subsequent essays.

The Nazis' uncompromising dedication to exclusionary racial ideology is further driven home in the keen contribution of Amy Carney. Fully intending the SS to serve not only as the martial arm of the German nation but also as an eternal wellspring of racially pure Nazi acolytes, throughout the war years, Heinrich Himmler took great pains to balance the tension between the burdens of frontline service and the need to ensure a demographic future for Nazism's racial elite. Unable to forego the necessity of providing valuable Menschenmaterial for the battlefield, the SS chief sought to encourage procreation by offering material incentives, reducing the bureaucratic red tape related to marriage applications, and even providing brief conjugal vacations for SS men. However, as Carney points out, these programs ironically cut against the grain of Himmler's vision of an ideal SS code, as the Reichsführer was dismayed to discover that most SS officers failed to grasp the importance of their reproductive obligations, and often simply reveled in the brief respite from frontline service.

The twisted nature of Nazi ethics is further astutely elaborated on by Wolfgang Bialas. Echoing the recent work of Alon Confino (Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding [2011]) and Raphael Gross (Anständig geblieben: Nationalsozialistische Moral [2012]), Bialas emphasizes the regime's efforts to supplant the Judeo-Christian humanist tradition with a new set of values that reflected National Socialism's view of history as a merciless life or death struggle between competing races by creating rigid binaries of belonging and exclusion. Citing as evidence the lack of apparent remorse among Nazi perpetrators during the postwar period and the often heard refrain that one was simply "following orders," he finds that the regime was largely successful in its attempt to provide justification for mass murder, reducing heinous crimes to mundane concepts, such as "work" or "duty," clinical terminology that revealed the lack of empathy for Nazism's victims and allowed killers to consider themselves, as Himmler remarked in his infamous Posen speech of 1943, "decent" guardians of the German racial community.

When placed alongside Nazism's ideological warriors, other European racial thinkers pale in comparison. Indeed, most eschewed violent schemes of racial purification, and others continued to adhere to competing conceptions of race, offsetting the hegemony of Nazi doctrine. For example, in Italy, eugenicists influenced by Latin and Catholic culture were more apt to promote positive eugenic policies, such as good hygiene and better working conditions, rather than resort to birth control or sterilization. The majority also tended to shy away from discussions of racial purity, instead using the term stirpe, or stock, to describe a national fusion of peoples that created a distinct, if superior, Mediterranean people. Indeed, throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, racial anti-Semitism and notions of pure races along the lines of those advocated by German academics remained relegated to the shadowy margins of racial discourse. However, things began to change after the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, which proved to be a turning point in Fascist thinking regarding race. This quest for empire demanded that Benito Mussolini's regime take a more concrete approach to such questions, as reflected in the discriminatory laws passed in Italy that barred sexual relationships between Italians and Africans in 1936. Another sign of the growing shift in discourse came two years later in the form of Guido Landra's 1938 "Race Manifesto," which advocated biological forms of anti-Semitism, and demanded expulsion of Italian Jews as irredeemable ballast. However, many of the ideas espoused in this document remained contentious, and heated debates between the national and biological camps of Italian racial science continued to rage until roughly 1943, when the formation of the Salo Republic, and more direct forms of German influence, definitively shifted the discourse in favor of racial biology.

The field of eugenics followed similar trajectories in southeastern Europe, where national belonging continued to be defined in anthropological and cultural terms until the 1940s. It was during this period that states allied to Nazi Germany acquired new territories, forcing reconsiderations of race. As Marius Turda points out in his case study of Hungary, "during the Second World War racial science acquired renewed importance in the public imagination," highlighting the critical role that the conflict played in radicalizing perceptions of the nation (p. 238). Characterized by tension between competing cultural and biological conceptions, few Hungarian racialists argued for a homogenous race until roughly 1938, when these debates were used to pursue territorial claims in southern Slovakia and Transylvania. Much like their German counterparts, flush with state funding, Hungarian eugenicists proved exceptionally willing to turn their research toward political ends, crafting a "Magyar race," which evidenced common hereditary characteristics, with predictable repercussions for the country's ethnic minorities. In neighboring Romania, racial thinkers were deeply troubled by the alleged dilution of the middle strata of society by the influx of foreigners, particularly Jews, who arrived from regions annexed after World War I. Inspired by German racial science, they sought to recast ethnicity, or neam, in biological terms, while remaining true to the idea of a synthesis of peoples which dominated Romanian national mythology. While they acknowledged that neam was created by centuries of ethnic fusion and argued against the conceptions of racial purity that dominated German racial science, they also warned that the Romania nation was now characterized by its "blood relationship," in which all its members shared in a common ancestry and needed to guard against the corruption of outside forces, namely, Jews. Thus, by 1942, Romanian racial scientists had created a "biologically hardened ethnic nationalism" that encouraged violence against outsiders (p. 279).

As Yeomans demonstrates, the country that adopted a racial doctrine most in tandem with that of Nazi Germany was the Independent State of Croatia. However, despite consciously modeling their policies on those practiced in the Third Reich, Ustasha racism cut an erratic course contingent on both changing leadership and a host of other factors that justified both atrocity and softer forms of discrimination. These contradictions were best exposed by the discourse surrounding the initial main target of the Ustasha, the Serbs. In contrast to the Jews and Roma, who were classified as racial outsiders and sanctioned by legislation that prevented them from interacting with "Aryans," Serbs never became the target of racial laws, and although the media constantly trumpeted the need for Croats to protect their racial purity, marriage with Serbs was never banned. Instead they were targeted for a campaign of cultural destruction alongside the murder operations carried out by Ustasha death squads. In the face of widespread Serbian resistance and a changing of the guard to a more moderate Ustasha leadership, by 1942 the regime had largely begun to abandon mass violence in favor of temporary, forced assimilation. During this period, Croatian eugenicists backpedaled from their earlier project of providing justification for the murder of the Serbian population. However, they still played an influential role in shaping doctrine by arguing that the minority needed to be purged of its intelligentsia and clergy, as they constituted the core of the Serb nation. By September 1944, as a new, radical leadership took the helm, Croatian racial scientists again found themselves espousing racist rhetoric against the Serbs, as the regime undertook one last effort to wipe them out. By astutely charting the ebb and flow of mass violence, Yeoman's essay dovetails neatly with the assertions of Christian Gerlach (Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World [2010]) and Alexander Korb (Im Schatten des Weltkrieges: Massen Gewalt der Ustaša gegen Serben, Juden und Roma in Kroatien 1941-1945 ([2013]) by highlighting the often erratic and uncontrollable nature of atrocity. By doing so, Yeoman refreshingly departs from the well-established scholarly interpretations regarding the state's monopoly, or lack thereof, on the course and scope of ethnically motivated violence.

In other parts of Europe, racial scientists tried to align their field with Nazi doctrine in order to work through the occupation, toward the end of strengthening their own national composition. This was the case in Estonia, where Weiss-Wendt finds that the ethnographers who formed the backbone of the nationalist movement were eager to work with Nazi authorities. During the interwar period, Estonian eugenicists faced what they perceived to be a demographic crisis motivated by a growing Russian minority. They eagerly seized on the opportunity to work with Nazi security forces to remove this allegedly threatening demographic segment, and successfully lobbied for the repatriation of the Estonian minorities inside the occupied Soviet Union, mirroring the Nazis' own efforts to repatriate ethnic Germans. While Hitler's regime came to view Estonia as an advance base for a racially restructured new Europe, in a certain sense, Weiss-Wendt finds that the tail wagged the dog, as local eugenicists sought to consolidate and bolster the nation through collaboration, working through intellectual, material, and security resources offered by the Nazis.

The apparent benefits of siding with the Germans are also found in Geraldien von Frijtag Drabbe Künzel's piece on Dutch settlers in the Nazi East. Traditionally, Dutch eugenicists had looked to Netherlands' colonies in Southeast Asia as a pressure valve to release "surplus" segments of the population and prevent a drain of resources inside the metropole. With Indonesia and parts of New Guinea occupied by Japanese troops, Dutch eugenicists eagerly seized on the opportunities offered by the Germans to promote settlement in Belarus and Ukraine. Between 1941 and 1944, 5,216 Dutch "pioneers" trekked eastward to farm plots of fertile black soil promised to them by the Nazi regime. They soon found that life in the East was double edged--while they were given free rein to command and exploit the "racially inferior" Slavs, they also quickly discovered the startling absence of racial comradeship exhibited by the Germans. Disdained as black marketeers, crooks, and "white Jews" by the Germans, the Dutch discovered they fit uncomfortably low within the racial hierarchy of the East, a fact that cruelly debunked the myth of Germanic kinship touted by the Nazi and Dutch governments inside the metropole.

This comprehensive and diverse volume succeeds in its intention to fill an important historiographical gap and challenge the hegemony of Nazi racial thinking inside Hitler's Europe. The one glaring weakness is the absence of an essay on France. Given the country's contribution to the racial reordering of Western Europe, not to mention the still controversial subject of Vichy collaboration, such a contribution would have rounded out the anthology. Likewise, an effort to compare the eugenic and racial policies of Nazi Europe with those of the neutral states of Switzerland and Sweden might have added further weight to the overarching theme of the work.[1] Lastly, an essay that discussed the effects of these racial policies at ground level or from the perspective of their victims would also have been welcome. While engaging and important, the majority of the chapters, with the notable exception of Yeoman's piece on Croatia, fail to break out of the realm of intellectual history and consider how these ideas played out once they were put into action. Such an investigation would have added a further layer of problematization, demonstrating the contradictions between racial theory and practice that not only allowed for mass violence and discrimination but also showed how targeted groups were in some rare cases, even if only momentarily, spared the full brunt of eliminationist eugenic policies. Here the plight of half-Jewish Germans springs readily to mind, a case which demonstrates that even at the heart of Nazism, cracks and fissures in racial thinking remained, allowing space for survival.[2] These points aside, the anthology remains a refreshing, cohesive, and compelling contribution to the scholarship on racial policy inside Hitler's Europe.

McConnell on Weiss-Wendt and Yeomans, 'Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938-1945'
Author: Anton Weiss-Wendt, Rory Yeomans
Reviewer: Michael McConnell

Anton Weiss-Wendt, Rory Yeomans. Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938-1945. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. 416 pp. (paper), ISBN 978-0-8032-4507-5.

Reviewed by Michael McConnell (University of Tennessee-Knoxville)
Published on H-German (September, 2014)
Commissioned by Chad Ross

Notes

[1]. See Thomas Etzemüller, "Total aber nicht totalitär: Die schwedische Volksgemeinschaft," in Volksgemeinschaft: Neue Forschungen zur Gesellschaft des Nationalsozialismus, ed. Frank Bahjor and Michael Wildt (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2009).

[2]. James F. Tent, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Nazi Persecution of Jewish-Christian Germans (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003).

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=40388
Citation: Michael McConnell. Review of Weiss-Wendt, Anton; Yeomans, Rory, Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938-1945. H-German, H-Net Reviews. September, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=40388
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Source: H-Net
https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/46331/mcconnell-weiss-wendt-and-yeomans-racial-science-hitlers-new-europe

Adam TOOZE. Le Salaire de la destruction. Formation et ruine de l’économie nazie

Adam TOOZE. Le Salaire de la destruction. Formation et ruine de l’économie nazie
Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2012, 812 p.

dimanche 3 mars 2013, par Laurent Gayme

Diplômé de King’s College et de la London School of Economics, Adam Tooze enseigne l’histoire de l’Allemagne à l’Université de Yale. Il a déjà publié Statistics and the German State, 1900-1945 : The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Cet ouvrage est la traduction de son livre The Wages of Destruction : The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, London, Allen Lane, 2006, récompensé la même année par le Wolfson History Prize et en 2007 par le Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize.
Remettre l’histoire économique au centre

Il faut saluer cette traduction, que nous proposent Les Belles Lettres, d’un livre majeur. Le lecteur français a pu lire, ces dernières années, de nombreux ouvrages novateurs sur l’Allemagne nazie, qu’il s’agisse de ceux de Ian Kershaw, de Robert Gellatelly, de Mark Mazower, de Christian Ingrao ou de Johann Chapoutot (qui fait le point sur les dernières recherches sur le nazisme dans Le nazisme, une idéologie en actes, collection Documentation photographique n°8085, Paris, La Documentation française, 2012). Parmi toutes ces parutions, peu étaient consacrées aux questions économiques, sauf l’ouvrage de Götz Aly (Comment Hitler a acheté les Allemands, Paris, Flammarion, 2005). Adam Tooze le souligne d’ailleurs, notant que l’histoire économique du nazisme a peu progressé ces vingt dernières années, à la différence de celles des rouages du régime, de la société et des politiques raciales par exemple. C’est pourquoi il se donne pour ambition « d’amorcer un processus de rattrapage intellectuel qui n’a que trop tardé » (p. 19), en nous livrant, sous l’égide de Marx, une imposante histoire économique de l’Allemagne nazie : « Le premier objectif de ce livre est donc de remettre l’économie au centre de notre intelligence du régime hitlérien... » (p. 20). Il se propose de le faire en rompant avec un postulat du XXe siècle, celui d’une supériorité économique particulière de l’Allemagne (encore présent dans les esprits de nos jours...), mythe détruit par les derniers travaux d’historiens de l’économie pour qui le fait économique majeur du XXe siècle est l’éclipse de l’Europe par de nouvelles puissances économiques, surtout les États-Unis. Dans les années 1930, l’Allemagne de Krupp, Siemens et IG Farben a un revenu national par tête dans la moyenne européenne (c’est-à-dire comparable en termes actuels à ceux de l’Iran ou l’Afrique du Sud), un niveau de consommation plus modeste que celui de ses voisins occidentaux, et « une société partiellement modernisée où plus de quinze millions d’habitants vivaient de l’artisanat traditionnel ou de l’agriculture paysanne. » (p. 21).
L’ennemi américain

La thèse centrale d’Adam Tooze s’appuie moins sur l’antiblchévique Mein Kampf (1924) que sur un manuscrit de Hitler connu sous le nom de « Second Livre », achevé pendant l’été 1928 et reprenant des discours de la campagne des législatives en Bavière en mai 1928, où se présentait Gustav Stresemann, ministre des Affaires étrangères de la République de Weimar. Convaincu que les États-Unis allaient devenir la force dominante de l’économie mondiale et un contrepoids de la Grande-Bretagne et de la France, Stresemann avait choisi, après la défaite de 1918, l’alliance financière américaine et l’intégration économique dans l’Europe capitaliste (les choix d’Adenauer après 1945), afin de gagner un marché assez vaste pour égaler les États-Unis. Pour Hitler, le moteur est la lutte pour des moyens de subsistance limités, autrement dit la colonisation d’un « espace vital » à l’Est, pour concurrencer la puissance des États-Unis dont l’hégémonie menacerait la survie économique de l’Europe et la survie raciale de l’Allemagne, es Juifs régnant tout autant à Washington qu’à Londres et Moscou. Hitler refuse « l’américanisation », l’adoption des modes de vie et de production des États-Unis car, derrière le libéralisme, le capitalisme et la démocratie se cache la « juiverie mondiale ».
Construire un complexe militaro-industriel

En somme, Hitler répond à une situation du XXe siècle par une solution du XIXe siècle. L’impérialisme, conjugué avec son idéologie antisémite, doit faire de l’Allemagne une puissance continentale capable de rivaliser avec l’Empire britannique mais surtout avec l’immense territoire des États-Unis. Dans ce but, Hitler organise à partir de 1933 le plus extraordinaire effort de redistribution jamais réalisé par un État capitaliste, puisque la part du produit national destinée à l’armée passe de moins de 1% à près de 20% en 1938, en même temps que la production industrielle augmente fortement, tout comme la consommation et l’investissement civil (6 millions de chômeurs étant mis au travail). Tout est sacrifié au réarmement et à la constitution de ce complexe militaro-industriel, particulièrement les intérêts des industries de biens de consommation et des paysans, d’où des mesures de rationnement des matières premières essentielles à partir de 1935 et plus tard le pillage de l’Europe. Cet effort supposait une forte organisation interne du régime et une très forte intervention de l’État dans l’économie, qui est acceptée par le grand capital allemand, affaibli par la crise de 1929, parce qu’elle était sélective, exploitant souvent l’initiative privée, et assurait des profits importants tout en maintenant l’ordre social et en écrasant la gauche et les syndicats. Enfin la conquête d’un Lebensraum à l’Est (avec le Generalplan Ost de rationalisation et de réorganisation agraire et le Plan de la faim de 1941 qui prévoyait de piller les ressources alimentaires d’une dizaine de millions de Polonais, de Russes et d’Ukrainiens) et la politique génocidaire, nées de l’idéologie raciale et antisémite, trouvaient leur justification économique au service de la puissance.

L’économie nazie et la Seconde Guerre mondiale

Pourtant Adam Tooze montre bien que la diplomatie, la planification militaire et la mobilisation économique ne se conjuguèrent pas en un plan de guerre cohérent et préparé à long terme. En septembre 1939, l’Allemagne se lance dans la guerre sans une forte supériorité matérielle ou technique sur la France, la Grande-Bretagne ou, en 1941, sur l’URSS. Avec une économie contrainte par les problèmes de la balance des paiements (impossible d’emprunter à la Grande-Bretagne et aux États-Unis ni de commercer avec eux) et sous contrôle administratif permanent, Hitler joue sans cesse contre la montre. En 1939, l’Allemagne ne peut plus accélérer son effort d’armement, quand la Grande-Bretagne, la France et l’URSS accélèrent leur réarmement. En outre, si en 1936 Hitler insiste encore sur le complot judéo-bolchévique, à partir de 1938 l’antisémitisme nazi opère un tournant antioccidental et particulièrement antiaméricain qui permet de mieux comprendre le Pacte germano-soviétique, qui de plus protégeait l’Allemagne contre un second front et contre les pires effets du blocus anglo-français. Outre les considérations idéologiques, face à l’ampleur de l’effort de guerre anglo-américain dès l’été 1940, les ressources économiques (céréales, pétrole) de l’URSS devenaient vitales pour la survie de l’Allemagne. Mais il fallait en même temps préparer l’invasion de l’URSS et répondre à la course aux armements transatlantique, ce qui nécessitait une victoire rapide contre l’Armée rouge, tout en conduisant les programmes SS de nettoyage ethnique génocidaire dans le cadre du Generalplan Ost.

Début 1942, les forces économiques et militaires mobilisées contre le IIIe Reich sont écrasantes. Mais le cœur du pouvoir politique nazi (le Gauleiter Sauckel, Herbert Backe l’orchestrateur du Plan de la faim, Göring, Himmler et Albert Speer) se lance alors dans un immense effort de mobilisation de toutes les ressources humaines (y compris la main d’oeuvre juive des camps), alimentaires et économiques (en pillant toute l’Europe) au service de la guerre et du « miracle des armements » de Speer. S’il y eu bien en 1944 une dernière accélération de la production allemande d’armements, ce fut au prix de la destruction d’une grande partie de l’Europe et de ses populations, et de l’Allemagne. Ainsi, en 1946, le PIB allemand par tête dépasse juste 2 200 dollars (niveau plus vu depuis les années 1880) et, dans les villes rasées, les rations alimentaires sont souvent inférieures à 1 000 calories par jour.
Un ouvrage majeur

On l’aura compris, on ne peut rendre compte ici de toute la richesse de cette fresque passionnante et tout à fait lisible par des non spécialistes d’histoire économique. Adam Tooze remet en cause bien des idées reçues sur les succès industriels du IIIe Reich et sur les motivations et les décisions nazies pendant la guerre, sans jamais sous-estimer l’importance des présupposés idéologiques nazis. Il nous propose une relecture brillante de la première moitié du XXe siècle, à la lumière des choix économiques opérés pour répondre aux bouleversements des équilibres économiques mondiaux, et nous offre un captivant plaidoyer pour l’histoire économique. Inutile de dire que, pour les professeurs d’Histoire de collège comme de lycée, c’est une lecture indispensable et particulièrement enrichissante, notamment en lycée pour les chapitres sur la croissance économique et la mondialisation, les totalitarismes et la guerre totale.

Source: La Cliothèque
http://clio-cr.clionautes.org/le-salaire-de-la-destruction-formation-et-ruine-de-l-economie-nazie.html

Le origini culturali del nazismo

L'intento del libro Genocidio di Georges Bensoussan, ora tradotto in italiano, è indagare quali sono le origini culturali del nazismo: si occupa cosí di un tema classico nella storia delle idee, in cui questa disciplina dispiega la sua grande importanza per comprendere la storia, ma anche tutti i suoi trabocchetti e i suoi terreni scivolosi, tutte le sue soluzioni facili e ingannevoli.

È possibile trattare delle origini culturali del Terzo Reich solo se si è convinti che il fenomeno nazionalsocialista non rappresenti una malattia repentina nella storia tedesca, ma sia stato preparato da autori, temi, discussioni, che in qualche modo lo hanno reso possibile.

È opportuno chiedersi subito se "origini" sia da intendere come "cause": ricostruire le correnti intellettuali che stanno a monte della nascita del regime hitleriano significa rintracciare il punto di partenza di atteggiamenti, stili di pensiero, convinzioni, che hanno avuto quel regime come effetto? Ovvero: la storia delle idee può essere illuminata a posteriori dall'esito al quale le idee individuate come origini hanno condotto? La forza della cultura uscirebbe molto rinvigorita da una simile convinzione, ma anche con una responsabilità che non sappiamo quanto sia lecito attribuirle.

Il termine "origini" non si impegna in una simile affermazione, ma suggerisce in realtà, anche quando non lo dice in modo esplicito, che le premesse culturali sono essenziali nella formazione e nell'affermazione di un simile regime. Preparano il terreno indispensabile mettendo in circolazione questioni e accenti che formano il contenuto ideologico del regime a venire, predispongono ad ascoltare con attenzione e con favore parole d'ordine altrimenti inaccettabili, insegnano a non reagire in modo decisamente negativo ai provvedimenti del governo che assume il potere. In definitiva, ogni ricerca che si incammini per questa strada tenta di rintracciare quali parti delle premesse intellettuali siano state messe in pratica dal regime che poi si è affermato. Una volta che le ha identificate, definisce quelle parti come le origini culturali di tale regime.

Bensoussan rintraccia le origini culturali del nazismo in cinque correnti, che colloca tutte tra la seconda metà dell'Ottocento e gli anni Venti del Novecento: l'antilluminismo, il biologismo applicato alla storia e alla cultura, il culto della violenza, l'antisemitismo, il pessimismo culturale. Definisce il nazismo esclusivamente in termini di sterminio degli ebrei. Collega in modo stretto le correnti culturali che ha individuato con il nazismo cosí concepito. In questo percorso, a prima vista lineare, si nascondono più interrogativi che risposte, più soluzioni apparenti che indagini circostanziate, e a ogni proposta di spiegazione si affiancano altrettanti dubbi.

Iniziamo dall'antilluminismo: con questo termine Bensoussan intende la ripresa, alla fine del XIX secolo, del pessimismo radicale sulla natura umana (che proprio per questo esige il controllo sui cittadini da parte di uno stato forte) che era stato tipico degli autori controrivoluzionari, dei quali viene preso a esempio e tipo ideale Joseph de Maistre. Essi, a loro volta, basavano le loro teorie su un cristianesimo controriformista che vedeva il mondo invaso dal diavolo, destinato a una catastrofe, bisognoso di salvezza. Da qui deriverebbe il pessimismo culturale fin-de-siècle che vedeva il mondo sotto il segno della decadenza.

Peccato che le correnti culturali siano meno univoche di quanto possano apparire a prima vista. Proprio di uno dei maggiori illuministi, Voltaire, era la convinzione dell'esistenza delle razze e della gerarchia fra di esse, mentre non tutto il pensiero critico della Rivoluzione francese si fa ridurre a

reazione. Esiste anche la posizione liberalconservatrice espressa da uno dei primi e maggiori autori che riflettono criticamente sul 1789, Edmund Burke. Lo stesso vale per il pessimismo culturale: questo non era solo di matrice cristiana, come nel testo si sostiene, ma anche neopagana, vagamente spiritualista, e nient'affatto caratterizzata in senso religioso.

Ancor più difficile è identificare un suo preciso esito politico. La salvezza dal declino del mondo moderno era osservata da parti diverse, opposte: il presente veniva criticato perché troppo democratico o perché lo era troppo poco, perché troppo astratto o troppo concreto, perché impotente o perché malato di efficientismo; la salvezza dal declino era pensata come ancien régime o come un mondo di uomini liberi e uguali che potessero coltivare la loro anima.

Si può essere pessimisti sulla natura umana senza per questo vedere con favore le camere a gas, si può leggere nel mondo moderno un declino inarrestabile senza per questo sposare le ragioni dell'Olocausto. Inoltre, l'odio per la democrazia, lo spirito borghese, il parlamentarismo, proveniva in quel periodo da destra e da sinistra: e anche se sommiamo la critica alla democrazia con l'idea che l'uomo non sia buono per natura, e perfino con l'idea che la civiltà sia in una fase declinante, ciò che ne risulta non è necessariamente una posizione fascista (come Bensoussan afferma), ma semplicemente antimodernista.

È arduo sostenere che l'antimodernismo coincida con il fascismo, dal momento che l'equazione non torna da nessuna delle due parti. Da un lato il fascismo, cosí come il nazismo, fu anche fede nello sviluppo, nella creazione di uno stato e di un uomo nuovi, nell'industria, nel futuro, nella modernità; dall'altro, l'antimodernismo non è necessariamente la premessa del totalitarismo, tanto è vero che esiste anche un antimodernismo di sinistra.

Anche per quel che concerne il biologismo e il razzismo, che per Bensoussan preparano lo sterminio, le domande sono numerose. È vero che la cancellazione dell'umanità dell'uomo effettuata dal nazismo prende avvio dallo studio scientifico dell'essere umano che lo considera come un animale tra gli altri animali? Tutto il darwinismo sociale può essere considerato alla luce della soppressione dei deboli, di coloro che risultano perdenti nella lotta per la sopravvivenza applicata alla società? In un infiacchimento degli esseri umani credeva, a esempio, un autore come George Orwell, a proposito del quale è difficile parlare di simpatie naziste. Dell'onnipresenza dell'idea di razza nel periodo esaminato il volume offre un quadro inquietante, ma dubitiamo che l'idea di razza implicasse per tutti coloro che la utilizzavano una gerarchia fra le razze, un miglioramento da apportare a esse, la soppressione di una parte della popolazione.

Scrive Bensoussan: «Nel momento in cui la classe porta allo scontro (ma, anche, al compromesso), la razza genera l'idea di sterminio». Occorre notare che vi sono stati stermini (come quello staliniano) che non muovevano dall'idea di razza; vi sono stati scontri generati dalla prospettiva di classe che si sono tradotti in genocidi (si veda la Cambogia), mentre la razza, nella quale crede, non conduce tutta la cultura scientista di fine Ottocento al razzismo, tanto che molti positivisti sono sostenitori di un riformismo socialista che del darwinismo riprende solo l'evoluzione intesa come un progresso lento e inevitabile che elimina la necessità della rivoluzione.

Nelle premesse culturali del nazismo a essere in questione è la modernità: «L'ossessione della razza … è da mettere in relazione con la perdita dei punti di riferimento in un mondo diventato inintelligibile, e segna quella linea di sicurezza in un momento in cui ogni limite sembra svanire». Quasi che la responsabilità della centralità della razza in quel periodo sia da attribuire a un mondo che perdeva radici, sicurezza, si modificava troppo velocemente per gli esseri umani, lasciando una terra sconvolta e un cielo vuoto.

Bensoussan legge il pessimismo culturale in senso antiebraico poiché a suo parere fa dell'ebreo il simbolo della modernità. Ma il pessimismo culturale è decisamente critico di una modernità urbana, sradicata, artificiale: non è necessariamente antiebraico, cosí come non lo è l'antimodernismo. Per Oswald Spengler (uno dei maggiori esponenti del pessimismo culturale di quegli anni), il nomade

abitatore delle megalopoli contemporanee, sradicato da ogni terra, era il prototipo dell'uomo moderno, non dell'ebreo. Il fatto che antisemiti e critici della modernità di fine Ottocento dirigano i loro strali verso le stesse caratteristiche – urbanesimo, industrialismo, freddezza, impersonalità, artificialità crescente della vita – non autorizza a identificare le due correnti. Scrive Bensoussan: «Sinonimo di eredità da trasmettere, la razza è ciò che resta di fronte all'angoscia per l'opera distruttrice del tempo, e a maggior ragione sotto un cielo vuoto». Ma l'antisemitismo non è affatto un esito scontato di quell'atteggiamento che vede nella modernità una caduta. Si legge: «L'ebreo è necessario al nostro mondo, poiché la sua presunta malvagità cristallizza l'inquietudine sorta da un universo nuovo e incomprensibile». Certo, è innegabile che l'ebreo abbia fatto da capro espiatorio: come tutti i capri espiatori, ha compattato chi lo condannava e lo uccideva. Ma è possibile ricondurre l'antisemitismo al disagio della modernità? Se cosí fosse, perché ogni paese moderno non ha avuto il suo antisemitismo?

La sostanza del nazismo consiste, a giudizio dell'autore, nello sterminio degli ebrei, cioè nel genocidio del titolo. Ovvio che il razzismo, l'antigiudaismo, l'ideologia guerresca, il machismo, il darwinismo sociale, siano riconosciuti quali sue premesse. L'antigiudaismo caratterizza l'Occidente dal Medioevo in poi: resta da spiegare perché proprio in quel momento divenne un'idea-forza capace di tradursi nella tragedia della Shoah. Se quelle premesse sono pressoché tautologiche, siamo certi che il pessimismo culturale rappresenti una premessa altrettanto ovvia, altrettanto indiscutibile del nazismo? Il pessimismo culturale esprime una ripulsa della modernità e la convinzione che un'epoca dalle caratteristiche cosí negative condurrà a una fine dei tempi, a una catastrofe certa. È importante il tentativo di prendere sul serio questa corrente: ma si tratta di una corrente culturale assai composita, che da questa indagine risulta invece appiattita: è difficile, poi, indicare quale sia la sua traduzione politica, arduo addirittura affermare se ne abbia una. Peraltro, il pessimismo culturale non coincide completamente con l'impostazione che il nazionalsocialismo dà alla sua visione della storia né alla sua considerazione del progresso materiale, del valore dell'industrialismo e della modernità.

Come regime reale, il nazismo non poteva essere troppo nostalgico, e doveva, accanto al vagheggiamento di epoche più organiche, più comunitarie, più solidali, più artigianali nella storia del mondo, promuovere la propria industria per competere ad armi pari con le altre nazioni. La stessa cosa accade nel fascismo italiano, dove la contrapposizione fra un'epoca di crisi storica e di declino (che coincideva con l'epoca liberale, e anche con l'urbanesimo, il macchinismo, l'egoismo individualista) e un'epoca alta che coincideva con il fascismo e si caratterizzava con un ritorno alla terra, all'artigianato, al lavoro delle mani, alla corporazione medievale, doveva comunque fare i conti con la promozione della grande industria, di quelle macchine che sciupano il mondo e che erano tanto deprecate.

L'esaltazione della violenza e della guerra che Bensoussan individua nella cultura europea tra 1880 e 1914 può essere ricondotta per intero a preparazione del sistematico stato di eccezione del nazismo e alle sue violenze? Può essere ritenuta «la matrice di una brutalizzazione della società» accentuata poi dalla Grande Guerra? In verità, nell'esaltazione della violenza tra la fine del XIX e gli inizi del XX secolo confluiscono elementi molto diversi: il marxismo ortodosso che rifiuta il compromesso revisionista con il parlamentarismo, la lotta alla società borghese di Georges Sorel, l'anarchismo e i primi movimenti nazionalisti di massa. Dalla critica a una società che elimina dalla vita degli uomini la competizione e il progresso riducendoli a meccanismi tutti uguali, dal richiamo alla necessità della lotta anche cruenta, possono essere tratte conseguenze diverse: da un vitalismo individuale alla definizione del conflitto e della competizione come molle dello sviluppo, dall'esaltazione della selezione a favore dei migliori in quella lotta che è la vita al richiamo a non abbandonarsi agli automatismi sociali.

Le origini culturali del nazismo
MICHELA NACCI

GEORGE BENSOUSSAN, Genocidio. Una passione europea, a cura di Frediano Sessi, trad. di Carlo Saletti e Lanfranco Di Genio, Venezia, Marsilio, pp. 396

MICHELA NACCI insegna Storia delle dottrine politiche all'Università dell'Aquila. La sua opera più recente è Storia culturale della Repubblica (Bruno Mondadori, 2009).

Source: La Rivista dei Libri
http://www.larivistadeilibri.it/2009/10/nacci.html

Hitler, Mein Kampf. A critical edition

From the satirical weekly Simplicissimus,
31st August 1925 (in Bavarian dialect):
"The booklet costs twelve Marks? A
little expensive, neighbour...You
don't have any matches by chance?"

On 31 December 2015, 70 years after Hitler’s death, the copyright will expire on his book Mein Kampf. Immediately after that expiration date, the Institute for Contemporary History intends to present to the public an annotated critical edition of this work.

Central in critical commentary are the deconstruction and contextualisation of Hitler’s book. How did his theses arise? What aims was he pursuing in writing Mein Kampf? What social support did Hitler’s assertions have among his contemporaries? What consequences did his claims and asseverations have after 1933? And in particular: given the present state of knowledge, what can we counterpose to Hitler’s innumerable assertions, lies and expressions of intent?

This is not only a task for historiography. In the view of the powerful symbolic value still attached to Hitler’s book, the task of demystifying Mein Kampf is also a contribution to historical information and political education.

What is Mein Kampf?

Mein Kampf is Hitler’s most important programmatic text. He composed it between 1924 and 1926 in two volumes. In a strongly stylized form, Volume 1 centres on Hitler’s biography and the early history of the Nazi party (NSDAP) and its predecessor organization, the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP). Volume 2 mainly deals with the political programme of the National Socialists. Large sections of Volume 1 were written during Hitler’s incarceration in Landsberg am Lech subsequent to his abortive coup attempt in November 1923. Its failure, his imprisonment and the prohibition of the NSDAP interrupted Hitler’s political career. He utilised this time in order to weld everything that he had previously experienced, read and thought into an ideology in written form, and to develop a new perspective and strategy for his now outlawed party. After his release from prison, Hitler wrote much of the second volume at his mountain retreat in Obersalzberg. Once Hitler was installed as Reich Chancellor in January 1933, sales of the book skyrocketed, and it became a bestseller. Down to 1945, it was translated into 18 languages and 12 million copies were sold.

After Hitler’s suicide and the collapse of the Nazi regime in 1945, the victorious Allied powers transferred the rights to Hitler’s book to the Free State of Bavaria. The Bavarian state government then repeatedly employed the copyright in its possession to prevent any new printing of the work. But with the expiration of the copyright 70 years after Hitler’s death, effective 1 January 2016, this legal instrument is no longer available.

Why a critical scholarly edition?

Mein Kampf is one of the central source documents of National Socialism. Writing in 1981, the historian Eberhard Jäckel stressed its importance and impact: ‘Perhaps never in history did a ruler write down before he came to power what he was to do afterwards as precisely as Adolf Hitler. For that reason alone, the document deserves attention. Otherwise the early notes and accounts, speeches and books that Hitler wrote would at best be solely of biographical interest. It is only their translation into reality that raises them to the level of a historical source’.

Hitler’s politics, the war and crimes he initiated, changed the world completely. It was for that reason that all extant texts he authored – his speeches, his early notes and observations, his conversations with diplomats, his ‘monologues’ in the Führer Headquarters, his instructions for the conduct of the war and finally likewise his last will and testament − were published long ago. By contrast, we still have no scholarly edited critical version of the most extensive of Hitler’s writings, and also to a certain extent his most personal. Since the war’s end, Mein Kampf has only been published in extracts in Germany – a gap that has long been considered a desideratum in research on National Socialism.

The aim of this edition is thus to present Mein Kampf as a salient source document for contemporary history, to describe the context of the genesis of Hitler’s worldview, to reveal his predecessors in thought and mentality as well to contrast his ideas and assertions with the findings of modern research.

In preparing scholarly editions of National Socialist texts, the Institute for Contemporary History can point to a varied and wide-ranging expertise: for example, the collection of Hitlers Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen 1925-1933 (Hitler’s Speeches, Writings and Directives, 1925-1933), published between 1991 and 1998/2003, encompasses 12 volumes. In 1961, the Institute for Contemporary History also published Hitler’s Zweites Buch (Second Book). In the 1990s the Institute brought out the diaries of Joseph Goebbels and recently published the diaries of the NSDAP ‘chief ideologue’, Alfred Rosenberg. For that reason, it is only consistent if now the Institute also takes up this challenge of a critical edition of Mein Kampf, dealing with a textual source that certainly does not present itself like other historical documents. Rather, what is necessary, along with sober and precise scholarly expertise, is a critical encounter with Hitler’s text, in sum: an edition with a point of view.

A contribution to political education

Preparing scientific commentary on Mein Kampf is not only a scholarly task. There is hardly any book that is more overladen with such a multitude of myths, that awakens such disgust and anxiety, that ignites curiosity and stirs speculation, while simultaneously exuding an aura of the mysterious and forbidden – a taboo that can prove for some commercially lucrative.

Consequently, this critical edition of Mein Kampf also views itself as a contribution to historical-political information and education. It seeks to thoroughly deconstruct Hitler's propaganda in a lasting manner and thus to undermine the still effective symbolic power of the book. In this way, it also makes it possible to counter an ideological-propagandistic and commercial misuse of Mein Kampf.

After all, despite all the debates about republication, Hitler’s book has long been accessible in a variety of ways: on the shelves of used book shops, in legally printed English translation or a mouse click away on the Internet – Mein Kampf is out there and every year manages to find new readers, agitators and commercial profiteers.

For that reason as well, the task of a annotated critical edition is to render the debate objective and to put forward a serious alternative, a counter-text to the uncritical and unfiltered dissemination of Hitler’s propaganda, lies, half-truths and vicious tirades. The scholarly edition prepared by the Institute for Contemporary History is oriented to political education, and thus consciously seeks in form and style to reach a broad readership. By means of a kind of ‘framing’ of the original text in the form of an introduction and detailed commentary, a subtext to Mein Kampf is constructed. Through these annotations, it quickly becomes clear how Hitler’s ideology arose, just how selective and distorted his perception of reality was, and and it becomes possible to show the link between its formulation in Mein Kampf and the political practice and its terrible consequences after 1933.

How do the editors work?

Nazi period advertisment: "The
Book of the Germans. Adolf Hitler:
Mein Kampf. Eher Verlag [Eher
Publishing]. Distribution 4 million"

Two historians, under the direction of Christian Hartmann, are currently at work in the Institute for Contemporary History on the critical edition of Mein Kampf. They are structuring the original text by providing explanatory introductions to each individual chapter; through more than 3,500 annotations, they address a broad spectrum of variegated tasks by providing:

1. Objective information on persons and events described
2. Clarification of central ideological concepts
3. Disclosure of the source materials Hitler utilised
4. Explanation of the roots of various concepts in the history of ideas
5. Contextualisation of aspects contemporaneous to the text
6. Correction of errors and one-sided accounts
7. Development of a perspective on the consequences of Hitler’s book
8. New contributions in relevant fundamental research

Unusually in the context of an edition of a book, the editorial team is also examining the period after 1933, thus comparing Hitler’s programmatic ideas with his political actions in the time period 1933-1945.

The core editorial team, which in the peak phase of its work on the edition consisted of five historians, is further supported by experts from a number of other scientific fields in order to better evaluate Hitler’s myriad assertions in the light of the findings of modern research. To that end, external interdisciplinary advisors have also been consulted from a range of scholarly disciplines, including German Studies, human genetics, Japanology, Jewish Studies, art history, the educational sciences and economic history.

The team at the Institute for Contemporary History also encompasses special editorial staff for copy-editing and manuscript preparation, indexing and the precise textual comparison of seven select printings of Mein Kampf, along with a number of student assistants. Besides, the team is additionally able to benefit significantly from the broad professional infrastructure of the entire Institute for Contemporary History, with its many staff members specialized in research on the period of National Socialism, and its wealth of relevant library and archival resources.

In order to retain all areas of copyright, and also to counter possible commercial utilisation of this sensitive topic, Hitler, Mein Kampf – eine kritische Edition is to be self-published directly by the Institute for Contemporary History. The scheduled date of publication will be immediately after expiration of the original copyright in January 2016.

Current information on the debate regarding the publication of Mein Kampf can be found here:

Mein Kampf in public discussion

Hitler, Mein Kampf. A Critical Edition - in German

Direct acquisition and pre-orders

BUGRIM Verlagsauslieferung
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Tel.: 0049-30-606 84 57
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Download an information leaflet on the edition (in German).

ed. on behalf of the Institute for Contemporary History
Munich – Berlin by Christian Hartmann, Thomas Vordermayer, Othmar Plöckinger, Roman Töppel
with contributions by Edith Raim, Pascal Trees, Angelika Reizle, Martina Seewald-Mooser

Munich 2016
ISBN 978-3-9814052-3-1

approx. 2000 pages, with coloured illustrations, bound, cloth, without dust jacket
59,- Euro (D)

Publication date:
Available in bookstores as of January 2016

Press enquiries:

Simone Paulmichl
Head of Press & Public Relations
paulmichl[at]ifz-muenchen.de

Source: Institut für Zeitgeschichte website
http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/?id=550