The Nazi Germany Sourcebook

An Anthology of Texts

Roderick Stackelberg, Sally A. Winkle, Roderick Stackelberg, Sally A. Winkle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134596928
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Nazi Germany Sourcebook is an exciting new collection of documents on the origins, rise, course and consequences of National Socialism, the Third Reich, the Second World War, and the Holocaust.

Packed full of both official and private papers from the perspectives of perpetrators and victims, these sources offer a revealing insight into why Nazism came into being, its extraordinary popularity in the 1930s, how it affected the lives of people, and what it means to us today.

This carefully edited series of 148 documents, drawn from 1850 to 2000, covers the pre-history and aftermath of Nazism:

* the ideological roots of Nazism, and the First World War
* the Weimar Republic
* the consolidation of Nazi power
* Hitler's motives, aims and preparation for war
* the Second World War
* the Holocaust
* the Cold War and recent historical debates.

The Nazi Germany Sourcebook focuses on key areas of study, helping students to understand and critically evaluate this extraordinary historical episode:

The German Empire and the First World War

The political and ideological roots of National Socialism can be traced back to the increasingly desperate rearguard campaign against the modernizing trends of the nineteenth century. These included the social and economic consequences of industrialization, democratization, liberalization, rationalization, urbanization, and secularization. Anti-Semitism, an indicator of anti-modernism, had a long tradition in the predominantly Christian culture of Europe. Christian anti-Semites associated Jews with self-seeking materialism and commercialism. Unencumbered by Christian self-restraint, Jews allegedly pursued worldly gain by practices Christians considered immoral.

Growing nationalism in the second half of the nineteenth century was the major source of modern anti-Semitism. The ethnic difference of Jews and their adamance in maintaining a separate Jewish identity offended nationalists who considered ethnic homogeneity the basic precondition for a strong nation. Nationalists resented the growing cultural and political influence of Jews after their emancipation in the course of the nineteenth century. Richard Wagner’s polemical essay, “Judaism in Music” (Doc. 1.1), provides an example of both traditional and modern nationalist prejudices.

The intensification of anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth century was also linked to the conservative backlash against middle-class liberalism and working-class Social Democracy. The Jewish community overwhelmingly supported the parties of the left, and Jews assumed leadership roles in both the Progressive and Social Democratic Parties. Pastor Adolf Stoecker attempted to wean workers from allegiance to the Social Democratic Party through a revival of Christianity and appeals to resentment against liberals and Jews (Doc. 1.2).

The tensions in German society provoked by the growth of the labor movement and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) were reflected in a surge of nationalism, militarism, and imperialism among the middle classes and government leaders under Kaiser Wilhelm II in the 1890s. The historian Heinrich von Treitschke was one of many publicists whose works idealized the nation and its heroic martial values (Doc. 1.3). Jewish “materialism” served as the foil to German “idealism” in Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s widely-read Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Doc. 1.4). Chamberlain, a trained botanist and self-proclaimed Christian, helped make racial anti-Semitism respectable among educated Germans. His influence even extended to the royal family, as his extensive correspondence with Wilhelm II attests (Doc. 1.5).

The movement of “national opposition” to the government’s allegedly too moderate domestic and foreign policies reached a preliminary climax after the SPD became the largest party represented in the Reichstag in the elections of 1912. The leader of the Pan German League, Heinrich Class, called for an expansionist foreign policy, suppression of the SPD, and reversal of Jewish emancipation (Doc. 1.6). His program reads like an early blueprint for Nazi policies. By putting a premium on national unity and making dissent equivalent to treason, an aggressive foreign policy was closely linked to defense of the authoritarian system at home. Military leaders and wide sectors of the elite came to believe not only that war against France and Russia was inevitable, but also that it would have a meliorative effect on Germany’s inner political dissension (Doc. 1.7). To weaken the left and pursue an aggressive foreign policy, however, seemed to require suppression of the liberalizing influence of the Jews (Doc. 1.8).

The excessive influence of military planners on German policy-making was revealed in the so-called Schlieffen Plan, put into effect upon the outbreak of war in 1914 (Doc. 1.9). The regime’s expansionist aims were revealed in Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg’s “September Program” (Doc. 1.10), which was not, however, made public at the time. The First World War further radicalized the ideology of Germanic supremacy, which contrasted creative German “culture” to commercial Western “civilization” and the heroic “ideas of 1914” to the materialistic “ideas of 1789” (Docs. 1.11, 1.12, and 1.13).

As the war dragged on without resolution and war weariness grew, liberal and Social Democratic pressures for a compromise peace and internal reforms reemerged in strength. The determination of the left was boosted as well by the Russian revolutions of 1917. In response to the challenge of the left, the German High Command, which remained committed to victory, supported the formation of the German Fatherland Party in 1917 (Doc. 1.14). This mobilization of the right in defense of German imperialist aims presaged the even greater mobilization of the right to reverse the political and military results of the war after German defeat and the fall of the Empire in November 1918.

Anti-Semitism in Germany

Anti-Semitism has a 2,000-year history in Europe. The origins of the stereotype of Jews as immoral materialists can be traced to the unwillingness of Jews to give up their religion in favor of world-renouncing Christianity. That stereotype persisted throughout the Middle Ages and was by no means confined to Germany. Anti-Semitism took on particularly intolerant forms in countries in which Christianity formed the official state religion. Although Jews who converted to Christianity could frequently escape persecution, there was a racist dimension in the widespread assumption that Jews were inherently selfish and sinful. The growth of nationalism led to intensified anti-Semitism in nineteenth-century Europe, particularly in Germany, as the international Jewish diaspora increasingly served as the foil against which nationalists defined German identity. Anti-Semitic publicists contrasted Jewish materialism and commercialism to the creativity of German idealist culture.

The great composer Richard Wagner (1813–83) first published the essay below under the pseudonym R. Freigedank (“free thought”) in a music journal in 1850 and reissued it as a pamphlet under his own name in 1869, the year that Jews gained full civil rights in the North-German Confederation. Wagner also disseminated anti-Semitism in the journal that he founded for his circle of followers, the Bayreuther Blätter. Driven, it would appear, in part by envy of the success of his contemporary, Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864), Wagner was also reacting to the increasing commercialization of art in the era of free-market industrial capitalism. He attributed this commodification of cultural works to the influence of the Jews after their emancipation from the restrictions that had kept them from full participation in German culture and society in the past. Wagner claimed that the “Jewish” spirit of profit and sensuality was corrupting the arts and undermining the creativity of selfless German artists pursuing their ideal visions at the cost of personal comfort or gain. He called for a national regeneration by purging the arts and society of “Jewish” materialism. Convinced of the superiority of his own art, he saw no contradiction in demanding state support for a national theater to stage his grand operatic works.

Wagner was one of the more influential of the many German publicists whose anti-Semitism derived from and contributed to their opposition to liberalizing changes in the second half of the nineteenth century. This essay repeats the recurrent stereotypes of Jews as an alien, deracinated, money-oriented people without any roots in the soil or the culture of their host nation.

1.1 Richard Wagner, “Judaism in Music,” 1850

… According to the present state of world affairs the Jew is already far more than emancipated: he rules, and will rule as long as money remains the power as a result of which all our activities and doings lose their force. That the historical misery of the Jews and the rapacious coarseness of Christian Germanic rulers were themselves responsible for handing the sons of Israel this power need not be elaborated here. But we do need to examine more closely the causes for why it is impossible to further develop the natural, the necessary, and the truly beautiful on the foundation of the present state of the arts without a total transformation of this foundation; and why this has now also placed control of the public aesthetic taste of our times into the busy hands of the Jews …

It is not necessary to establish that modern art is judaized; it is immediately apparent and confirms itself to our senses all by itself. It would require a far too extensive treatment to try to explain this phenomenon from the character of the history of our art itself. If, however, we believe that emancipation from the spirit of Jewry is necessary, we must above all recognize the importance of examining what forces we can muster for this struggle of liberation. We cannot gain knowledge of these forces from an abstract definition of that phenomenon, but only by becoming familiar with the nature of our inherent, involuntary feeling, which expresses itself as an instinctive aversion to the Jewish character: this irrepressible feeling, if we are quite honest with ourselves, must make clear to us what it is that we hate in that character. What we know for certain we can confront. By merely exposing it we may hope to drive the demon from the field, on which it is able to hold its own only under the cloak of darkness that we good-natured humanists have ourselves thrown over it to make its sight less repugnant.

The Jew who, as we all know, has a God all to himself, sticks out in ordinary life first of all by his external appearance, which has something alien to whatever particular European nationality we may belong. Involuntarily, we wish to have nothing in common with a person of such an appearance. Up to now this no doubt redounded to his disadvantage, but in the modern age we cannot fail to recognize that he feels quite good with this disadvantage. In view of his successes, he may even regard his difference from us as a distinction. Ignoring the moral side of this disagreeable game of nature, we wish here only to point out that in respect to art, this exterior can never conceivably be an object of artistic representation. When the plastic arts wish to represent the Jew, they generally draw their model from the imagination, either discreetly ennobling or leaving out altogether those traits that characterize Jewish appearance in ordinary life. Never does the Jew stray on to the theatrical stage; exceptions to this are so rare in number and unusual in kind as to confirm the rule.

We cannot think of any ancient or modern character, whether hero or lover, as performed by a Jew without inevitably feeling the ludicrous inappropriateness of such a performance. This is very important: a person whose appearance we have to consider unqualified for artistic representation – not on account of his individual personality but on account of his type – must be considered unfit for any artistic expression whatsoever of pure human character.

… The Jew speaks the language of the nation in which he lives from generation to generation, but he speaks it only as a foreigner … In general, the fact that the Jew speaks the modern European languages only as acquired, not as native languages, excludes him from all capability of expressing himself in them independently and in accordance with his inner character. A language – its expression and development – is not the work of individuals, but of a historical community. Only he who has grown up without self-consciousness within that community takes part in its creations. The Jew, however, stood outside such a community, alone with his Jehovah in a dispersed and rootless tribe, with all development out of its own resources denied to it; even its peculiar (Hebrew) language has only remained as a dead language. To write genuine poetry in a foreign language has been impossible up to now, even for the greatest genius. But our entire European civilization and art has remained a foreign language to the Jews. For he has not taken part in the advancement of the latter nor in the development of the former; rather the unfortunate and homeless Jew has, at best, merely looked on coldly and with hostility. In such language or such art the Jew can only copy and imitate, but cannot write real poetry or create true art.

The purely sensual expression of Jewish language revolts us in particular … But, if the defects of language described above make the Jew quite incapable of all artistic expression of feeling through the medium of speech, it follows that he must be far less capable of such expression through the medium of song. Song is speech intensified by passion; music is the language of passion. If the Jew intensifies his language – in which he may demonstrate ridiculous emotionalism but never artistic passion – to the point of making music, he becomes entirely unbearable. Everything that irritated us in his speech or his outward appearance repels us entirely in his music, insofar as we are not spellbound by the utter ridiculousness of this experience. In song, the most vivid and irrefutably truest expression of personal feeling, we are naturally most aware of the revolting peculiarity of the Jewish nature; in whatever field of art we might consider the Jews as capable, it can never be in the field of music …

Source: Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. XII, ed. by Julius Kapp (Leipzig: Hesse & Becker Verlag, 1914), pp. 9–15.

Translated by Rod Stackelberg

The suppression of Social Democracy

German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s main domestic goal from the late 1870s to his dismissal by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1890 was to weaken liberalism and suppress the recently founded Social Democratic Party (SPD), the party that represented the working class in the German Empire. Bismarck’s anti-socialist law of 1878 restricted the right of the SPD to organize, publish, and meet. Socialists were still allowed to become candidates in parliamentary elections, however, and the percentage of SPD votes in Reichstag elections continued to increase despite the restrictions to which the party was subjected. In the 1880s Bismarck also attempted to gain worker allegiance through a state-sponsored pension plan and health insurance system. A variety of right-wing political activists sought to lure workers into the nationalist camp through religious, anti-liberal, and anti-Semitic appeals.

Adolf Stoecker (1835–1909), Chaplain to Kaiser Wilhelm’s Court, founded the Christian Social Workers’ Party in 1878 (renamed the Christian Social Party in 1881) for the purpose of weaning workers from their allegiance to socialism and converting them to monarchism through nationalist and religious appeals. The constituency he attracted, however, were mainly lower-middle-class artisans and tradesmen, hostile to both laissez-faire liberalism (because it favored big business) and the socialist labor movement. The following excerpt from a speech Stoecker delivered in Berlin in 1880 reflects the growing conservative concern about the “social question” (the disaffection of wage-earning workers), which threatened the stability of the imperial system. He denounced Social Democracy as the product of the excessive materialism and secularism of the modern age. His speech offers a typical example of how moralistic appeals could be used to serve conservative political ends. At the same time, however, he painted a surprisingly forthright picture of the misery that attracted so many workers to socialism. His indictment of liberalism and individualism enjoyed particular resonance in the years of economic recession following the financial crash of 1873. Stoecker called for a revival of Christianity to combat the liberal, democratic, and socialist threats. Although he did not mention Jews in this particular selection, Stoecker and many of his fellow conservatives blamed the corruption of traditional values and the growth of left-wing movements on the influence of the Jews. In 1892 he lent his considerable prestige to the successful campaign to introduce anti-Semitic planks in the Conservative Party platform. His movement was one of the first attempts to use nationalism and religion to combat socialism.

1.2 Adolf Stoecker, speech on the social question, 1880

Of the stirring questions that are currently of general concern the social question is certainly the most stirring … We in Germany have particular reason to pay attention to this movement and not to allow any of its phases to escape us. Nihilism in the east, the Commune in the west, the whole great revolutionary movement in Germany all show that we are in fact, as the phrase so often goes, on volcanic ground¹ …

With respect to Social Democracy two different kinds of erroneous conceptions are prevalent. One group of economists see Social Democracy as something quite harmless, as a system of social reforms aimed at achieving the welfare of one’s neighbors. They forget the immoral tendencies connected with it and the war against Christianity that is bound up with it, and – attracted by the intellectual energy of the Social Democratic Party, by its dedication, and by its willingness to make sacrifices – they have almost nothing but good things to say of the movement. This conception is certainly wrong. Social Democracy is not just a movement for social reforms; as it portrays itself in Germany and as it has portrayed itself for decades in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of documents
• Authors’ acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The German Empire and the First World War
• 2 The Weimar Republic, 1919–33
• 3 The Third Reich: The consolidation of Nazi rule, 1933–35
• 4 The Third Reich: The road to war, 1936–39
• 5 The Second World War, 1939–45
• 6 The Holocaust
• 7 The aftermath of Nazism and the Historians’ Debate
• Index