Soldaten

While much of daily life remained the same in Nazi Germany and formed the surface upon which society functioned, there were also drastic political and social changes. The split of society the Nazis brought about in the twelve years from 1933 to 1945 between a majority of members and an excluded minority was not only a goal justified by the Nazis’ racist theory and desire for power. It was also a means to realize a particular form of social integration. A number of recent historical works have looked at the history of the Third Reich through the lens of social differentiation. Saul Friedländer has especially focused attention on anti-Jewish practice, repression, and elimination;³⁷ Michael Wildt has stressed the coercive force used in the early days of the Third Reich as a means of collectivization.³⁸ Longerich has shown that the social exclusion and then extermination of Jews was by no means an accidental, strangely senseless element of Nazi politics, but their very core. The “de-Jewification” of Germany and broad stretches of Europe was, in Longerich’s words, “the instrument for gradually penetrating the various realms of individual existence.”³⁹ This penetration allowed moral standards to be reformatted, bringing about an obvious change in what people considered normal and deviant, good and bad, appropriate and outrageous. Nazi society was by no means amoral. Even the many instances of mass murder cannot be reduced to a collective ethical dissipation. On the contrary, they were the result of the astonishingly quick and deep establishment of a “National Socialist morality” that made the biologically defined Volk and the community it entailed the sole criterion for moral behavior and promoted different values and norms than those obtained, for instance, in post–World War II Germany.⁴⁰ Included in the Nazi moral canon were the ideas that people were fundamentally unequal, that the worth of the Volk outweighed that of the individual, and that what counted was particular and not universal solidarity. To cite just one instance of Nazi morality: it was under Hitler that failure to offer assistance in an emergency became a punishable crime in Germany. Yet that dictate applied only to the Nazi Volk community and could not be extended to people’s refusal to help Jews.⁴¹ This sort of particular morality was characteristic of the Nazi project in toto. The new European order and, indeed, global domination of which the Nazis dreamed were conceived as a radically inequitable world, in which members of different races would be treated differently under the law.

Nazi social practice enacted the idea that people were radically and irreconcilably unequal. It made the public aware of the “Jewish question” as something negative and the “Volk community” as something positive. These topics were then made a permanent focus of action in anti-Jewish measures, regulations, and laws, in instances of disappropriation, deportation, and worse. As a formula for how Nazi society was formed, Friedländer came up with the phrase “repression and innovation.” But given that a lot of German society did not change, we need to remember that for most non-Jewish Germans Nazi innovation and repression was but a secondary part of their everyday lives. For them, Nazism was a mix of continuity, repression, and innovation.

As a whole, the Nazi project has to be seen as a highly integrative social process beginning in January 1933 and ending with Germany’s ultimate defeat in May 1945. “Destiny,” as historian Raul Hilberg once dryly remarked, is an “interaction between perpetrators and victims.” Psychologically speaking, it is no great wonder that the practical enactment of theories of the master race was a matter of such consensus. Once the theory was cast in laws and regulations, even the lowest unskilled laborer could feel superior to a Jewish writer, actor, or businessman, especially since the ongoing social transformation entailed Jews’ actual social and material decline. The resulting boost to the self-esteem of members of the Volk was reinforced by a reduced sense of social anxiety. It was a new and unfamiliar feeling to belong, inalienably and by law, to an exclusive racial elite, of which others, equally inalienably, could never become part.