The totalitarian state

The main purpose and goal of the Nazi revolution was to establish a Volksgemeinschaft. Its creation required the purification and increase of the German “race” as well as its biological separation from the Jews, whose infusion of evil into the German bloodstream, the Nazis said, served to pollute and undermine Germany’s well-being. Nazi efforts to purify the German race gained an air of scientific respectability from the pseudoscience of eugenics, the racial hygiene movement that flourished widely in the early decades of the 20th century. Nazi leaders spoke of their efforts to “reconstruct the German race.” The Law for the Protection of Hereditary Health (July 14, 1933) allowed for the eventual sterilization of as many as two million people deemed unworthy of propagating. The Marriage Subsidy Law of July 1933 aimed to stimulate the birth rate by granting loans to newly married couples; these loans would be forgiven incrementally with the birth of each additional child. The Nazi idealization of mothers and the celebration of motherhood as a special service to the Reich had the same objective. Hitler spoke of an eventual doubling of the German population through these measures. The most notorious of the steps taken to purify the German race was also a milestone in the anti-Jewish legislation promulgated by the Nazis: the infamous Nürnberg Laws of September 1935, which forbade marriage or sexual relations between Jews and Germans and assigned to Jews a lower class of citizenship.

Nazi efforts to solve the “Jewish problem” were in fact products of a vicious anti-Semitism that propelled the Nazi regime toward increasingly extreme measures of persecution. SA terrorism, legislation expelling Jews from the civil service and universities, boycotts of Jewish businesses and professionals, and the eventual expropriation of Jewish-owned properties had by 1938 led to the emigration of roughly half of the 1933 Jewish population of 500,000 people. Until the massive campaign of violence against Jews and Jewish property known as Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”), during the night of November 9–10, 1938, it still seemed possible for some Jews to remain in Germany, albeit in severely circumscribed circumstances. With Kristallnacht the Nazis ushered in a new level of persecution. In its aftermath Hitler put Göring in charge of Jewish policy. Göring coordinated the numerous party and governmental agencies competing for control of—and profit from—the persecutions of the Jews.

For the Nazis, to exclude Jews from the Volksgemeinschaft was as important as attracting the German working classes to it, in order to undo the long-standing alienation of the largely socialist-minded German worker from the nationalist consensus. Any success in this effort depended heavily upon the Nazis’ ability to provide employment for the millions of jobless whom they inherited in 1933. Public spending on rearmament and on public works projects such as the superhighway, or autobahn, network helped create many of the jobs so desperately needed. By 1937 Germany was beginning to suffer from a labour shortage. It was equally important to inculcate workers with a sense of being an integral part of a racially based national community. For this the Nazis devised an elaborate program of subsidies for leisure-time activities for workers. Called “Strength through Joy,” the program subsidized workers’ vacations; it made possible excursions to mountain or seaside resorts and offered the possibility of cruises in the Mediterranean or the Baltic Sea. By providing leisure activities for workers until then reserved for their economic and social superiors, the government attempted to integrate them into the Volksgemeinschaft. A new, inexpensive automobile, the Volkswagen, was designed to give workers the opportunity to own a car, which had until then in Germany been a symbol of wealth and status largely reserved for the upper classes. Hitler once said that Henry Ford had done more than anyone else to obliterate class differences in America.