Anson Rabinbach - The Third Reich Sourcebook

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

THE THIRD

REICH

SOURCEBOOK

Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism

EDWARD DIMENDBERG, MARTIN JAY, AND ANTON KAES, GENERAL EDITORS

THE THIRD

REICH

SOURCEBOOK

Edited by

ANSON RABINBACH AND SANDER L. GILMAN

University of California Press

BerkeleyLos AngelesLondon

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

2013 by The Regents of the University of California

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

The Third Reich sourcebook / edited by Anson Rabinbach and Sander Gilman.

p.cm.(Weimar and now : German cultural criticism ; 47)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-20867-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-27683-3 (pbk : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-95514-1 (ebook)

1. National socialismGermanyHistorySources. 2. GermanyHistory19331945Sources. I. Rabinbach, Anson. II. Gilman, Sander L.

DD 256.5. T 52452013

943.086dc232012050019

Manufactured in the United States of America

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 39.481992 ( R 2002) ( Permanence of Paper ).

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

The Third Reich Sourcebook offers English-language readers a broad range of texts, written or published during the twelve years that the National Socialist (Nazi) regime held sway in Germany, from its rise after World War I to the time it took power on 30 January 1933. This book is a companion volume to The Weimar Republic Sourcebook edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg and published by the University of California Press in 1994. We have sought to provide a comprehensive collection of newly translated documents that offer insights into Nazi ideology, economics, politics, society, cultural policy, and influence in the fine arts and popular culture. Any responsible documentation of National Socialism must include explicit recognition that the German Renaissance promised by the Nazis culminated in unprecedented horrorWorld War II and the annihilation of European Jewry. This volume considers Nazi politics, ideology, and culture from that vantage point.

Like The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, this collection seeks to present English-speaking undergraduates, graduate students, and general readers with a wide selection of primary sources that reflect the complex and often contradictory nature of German politics, society, and culture during this period of history. While some of the documents in this volume are well known and often cited, many of the texts have been recently excavated by historians and are translated and published here for the first time. In addition, many of those already in translation have been revised for a contemporary audience. To avoid replicating what has become a canon of Nazi texts, we were compelled to rethink what pieces would be most useful to scholars and students in the twenty-first century. The result is an archaeology of National Socialism emphasizing many arenas of thought and action in Nazi Germany hitherto underexamined. This volume thus contains speeches and texts of political leaders such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler, as well as texts by lesser-known commentators who contributed to the admittedly limited public dialogue about pivotal historical figures, such as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the composer Richard Wagner, or who wrote about major issues of the time, such as the meaning of sex, the soul, social fitness, suicide, or modern art.

The Third Reich Sourcebook documents how the Nazi leadership used ideas of racial purity, the German peoplethe Volk and the nation to judge not only works of art but individual human beings, whose fate often depended on an intertwined political and aesthetic vision. National Socialism relied heavily on visual imagery for its success, and the Sourcebook attempts to demonstrate how the visual culture (film, photography, newsreels, posters, advertisements, commercial art, illustrated magazines) of National Socialism reinforced its ideological and racial assumptions.

Most difficult to understand in light of the ultimate crimes of the regime is the reality that Nazisms racial utopia was a plausible and compelling idea for a great many contemporaries. The embrace of Nazi ideology and practice for countless ordinary Germans did not result merely from political propaganda but also from the more subtle mixture of commercial entertainment and soft ideology purveyed by the propaganda machine created by Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels frequently noted that the most successful propaganda worked through stealth, concealing a subliminal message in the supposed normality and conventionality of the stereotypes and concepts promoted by the Nazis. Even commercial culture adopted the style of the regime by promoting tanning creams and blond hair dye for women, as well as politically correct fashions. In many respects, Nazi ideology was a mlange borrowed from a variety of sources. The much-displayed concept of degeneration, for example, did not originate with the Nazis but began in the mid-nineteenth century as a French medical term that equated hereditary mental illness with crime, madness, nervousness, and social decline. The history of this concept and others raises important questions that these documents aid in answering: How did political language create myths or concepts of normalcy that ultimately became their own reality? How did an aesthetic of purity and degeneration become acceptableindeed normalduring the first years after the Nazi seizure of power? How did National Socialism integrate concepts appropriated from the textbooks of biology and natural history into a politically motivated aesthetic doctrine and practice? How did the elaboration of a biosocial metaphor evolve from the natural to the normative to create a new kind of body politics? How did this metaphor of purity and degeneration not only become official policy but also take hold as a widely shared and acceptable ideal? The fact that these ideas belonged to the standard mental equipment of educated Europeans and Americans long after the end of the nineteenth century only increased their destructive potential.

Of course, no German Renaissance was possible under such cultural tyranny. In the end, the assault on culture merely anticipated the eventual criminal policies of a racial state. Nazism was responsible for the greatest cultural diaspora of modern times, sending artists and writers into exile around the globe. The cultural resistance of these exiles is therefore an integral part of the story of Nazi policy, so we have included some of their voices in this volume.

Our intent, like that of the editors of The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, is to allow a teacher or researcher to examine a slice of German cultural and political history using primary sources. We have not aimed for an exhaustive treatment of the period but have sought to offer an evocative mosaic of the German experience between 1933 and 1945. We have focused on the key personalities, debates, and events in Germany, an ever-changing geographic area at the time, but we have also looked at how German and non-German Jews were victimized and how the genocide unfolded as the total war of the German military machine took control of the occupied lands of Central Europe and Eastern Europe. Limited space is also given to the voices of the internal German opposition and of German exiles in various lands of refuge. This mosaic reveals how complex the experience of Nazi Germany was for the widest range of its inhabitants.