The New Normal in Nazi Germany

The twentieth century was a time of great economic, social, and political upheaval across Europe. More technological advancements were made during this period than in any other period throughout the entire history of mankind. At the same time that these great advancements were made, however, millions of lives were lost to wars and revolution. People were displaced from their homes and even mass murdered in forced labor camps. These problems cannot be attributed to a single factor, such as a politician's ambition or a culture's racist beliefs. Instead, the problems of the twentieth century, and the Holocaust, in particular, were born in an environment in which economic hardship, political ambition, and xenophobia compounded with disastrous results.

Although the many economic pressures and cultural beliefs that eventually led to the holocaust can be traced to long before the start of the twentieth century, the period between the two World Wars can be identified as a point of particular tension in German history. After being forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War, Germany was saddled with massive debt, owed primarily to France. The Allied powers held Germany entirely responsible for the war and Germany was forced to sign the unfavorable treaty under threat of occupation. The debt had no fixed figure and was designed in part to financially cripple Germany so that Germany would not have the resources necessary in order to rebuild a massive military and start another war.

Germany had no way to pay this debt and was forced to borrow money from the United States because the debt could only be paid in hard currency. The German mark rapidly lost value as the Weimar Republic printed money seemingly at the speed of light in an effort to buy U.S. dollars with which Germany could pay back the debt. Printing more and more money made the paper money worth less and less. Land and real estate speculators who held hard currency or precious metal were able to amass property at very low prices as German landowners were forced to sell, and an ever-increasing number of Germans were forced to rent their homes or land rather than own.

The people of Germany resented the terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, and much of this resentment was directed towards foreign property speculators, and Jews in particular. Shortly after Germany was forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles, Adolf Hitler published his 25-Point Program for the Nazi party. This Program rejected the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and stripped rights from any person who was not "of German blood," specifically targeting Jewish people. According to this Program, the German state had the right to seize property from non-citizens without paying for it, expand as needed to meet the needs of German citizens, nationalize businesses and department stores, deport "non-Germans," and execute all criminals.

The 25-Point Program reflects the rabid anti-Semitism that festered in Europe throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to the Program, Jewish people were inherently materialistic and were the enemies of the German people. Only people with pure German blood, later called Aryans, could be citizens of Germany. Furthermore, only citizens were entitled to the rights and protections described by the Program. These rights included the right to a pension, a job, food, and education.

This Program stripped Jews and people of other ethnicities of their German citizenship. Jewish families who had lived in Germany for generations would no longer be considered Germans, and neither would German Jews who actually fought for Germany during the First World War. Some foreigners would be allowed to remain in Germany as guests, but these people would only have rights as aliens, not as German citizens. All foreign people who had arrived in Germany after August 2, 1914, would be deported.

Initially, the Program had few followers and Hitler was imprisoned for attempting to stage a coup in Munich in 1921. The tides began to turn for Hitler, however, at the onset of the Great Depression. In October of 1929, the stock market crashed in the United States. In turn, the U.S. demanded that Germany begin to repay its loans within ninety days. No other country was able to loan money to Germany and German companies began to go bankrupt. Unemployment shot from 650,000 in September of 1928 to over 6,100,000 in January of 1933. The German people became desperate.

Most of the newly unemployed Germans were family men. Faced with the prospect of being unable to provide for their families, these men flocked to extremist political parties like the Nazis. After all, Hitler's 25-Point Program promised all Germans an education, opportunities, food, and a job. The Program also required that everyone work, which appealed particularly to unemployed working-class men and forbade rent-slavery. All at once, the Program promised to relieve the suffering of the German people while it identified a clear enemy that needed to be defeated: the Jewish people. Never mind the fact that most German Jews were in the same financial position as the people who were flocking to Nazism, or the fact that many of the speculators were not Jewish.

By 1933, Nazism had a firm hold over Germany. No longer making payments on the loans secured for reparations, the Nazis concentrated their efforts on building their military. Germany needed more income, and Hitler turned his attention to the first of his 25-Points, which asserted the right to a "Greater Germany." To the Nazis, a "Greater Germany" included all German-speaking people. Under this pretense, Hitler invaded the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. The Sudetenland was the seat of Czechoslovakia's industry, and now this income belonged to the Third Reich. Czechoslovakia was left weak and vulnerable.

Still reeling from the costs of the First World War and not interested in entering a second, Britain and France came to an agreement with Hitler. This agreement, called The Munich Pact, stated that Hitler could keep the Sudetenland as long as he promised not to use his military in the future. Czechoslovakia was never consulted regarding this arrangement, and the Czech president resigned over the betrayal from Czechoslovakia's sworn protector, France. Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister who signed the agreement, was regarded as a hero for averting another war. Britain's priority at the time was to secure peace, and Chamberlain's strategy had been to appease Hitler. Unfortunately for Czechoslovakia, Britain, and France, Hitler was not satisfied. Within a few months, he had invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia.

Hitler's ambitions were not sated by his successful campaign in Czechoslovakia. On the contrary, he turned his sights to Poland and Hungary. In August of 1939, Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the U.S.S.R. Both countries agreed not to attack each other, and Poland was divided between the two of them. The German invasion of Poland provoked Britain and France to declare war.

Britain had previously sworn to protect Poland from invasion, and the British people were already disappointed with the results of Chamberlain's efforts at peace. Britain's new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, inspired the British people with his "Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat" speech. In this speech, his first major one as Prime Minister, he argues that Britain must wage war; in fact, Britain must attain "victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be..." This victory must be procured. Otherwise, there is "no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for." In hindsight, this victory was had at all costs to Britain. The Second World War cost Britain her status as a great power and, despite the hard-earned victory, the Empire collapsed.

Throughout all of these successful military campaigns, Hitler and the Nazis had not forgotten the other points in their Program. Pressure had gradually increased on the Jews and other foreigners who lived in areas controlled by the Nazis. Those who were able to left, but relocating was not necessarily easy, especially for German Jews who had nowhere to go. Jewish people lost their businesses, their property, their ability to move about freely, and eventually their homes and their lives. These changes did not all take place at once, but instead, Jews lost one right after another until eventually they were forced into ghettos, and then finally transported to concentration camps.

The people who were transported to the concentration camps were told that they would be relocated to work camps. In some cases, this was true. Healthy adults were forced to work without compensation until they were no longer physically able. In many cases, however, the people arriving at the camps were immediately murdered. Elderly people, sick people, and infants were all put on these transports, supposedly to work. This information begs the question, how did the German people allow this to happen? Surely, many of them realized that a great number of the people on the transports were incapable of working and that nobody ever returned from these work camps. In the words of one of the camps' victims, how did "a cultured people turn to genocide, and how (did) the rest of the world, also composed of cultured people, remain silent in the face of genocide" during this period? There is no simple answer to this question. It is important to remember, though, that by the time the Nazis were transporting masses of people to the camps, the German people had become accustomed to witnessing the immediate suppression of any voice, often with arrest or even execution.

By the time that people were being transported en masse to the camps, it is very likely that many German citizens realized that these people were going to die. At the same time, any Germans with misgivings about these transports may very well have been in fear for their own lives. In addition, anti-Semitism had been institutionalized by the Nazis via their 25-Point Program. Young Germans were taught in school that Jews were less than human, and older Germans may still have blamed the Jewish people for the economic hardships Germany underwent in the twenties and thirties.

Within the course of about a decade, the brutalities of the Nazi regime had become the new normal for the people of Germany. Writing about communism, Slavenka Drakulic argues, "Political power may change hands overnight, economic and social life may soon follow, but people's personalities, shaped by the communist regimes they lived under, are slower tochange. Their characters have so deeply incorporated a particular set of values, a way of thinking and of perceiving the world, that exorcising this way of being will take an unforeseeablelength of time."

This line of thinking can also be applied to the German citizens who watched their neighbors board cattle cars never to return. The 25-Point Program fostered a particular set of values and dependencies that reframed the way German citizens viewed the world around them.

The twentieth century's greatest shame, the holocaust, cannot be attributed to a single factor. Germany's economic collapse following the Second World War created an unstable environment in which anti-Semitism and xenophobia bred and multiplied. When Hitler promised every German food and a job with his 25-Points, desperate, unemployed, working-class men flocked to his cause. As the Nazis made good on their promises to stimulate the German economy, support for Hitler and his political ambitions grew to the point where he was able to begin invading neighboring countries. The Nazi party gained so much power that even Germans who did not support their policies were reluctant to speak out. Eventually these factors, in combination with the Nazi educational initiatives that taught young Germans that people of other races were less human, resulted in a new normal for Germany, one that would have been unthinkable just twenty years prior.

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