1. NS Racial Policy HI 136 History of Germany

2. Eugenics Eugenics = ‘good birth’; widespread in western societies from late 19thC (i.e. not German-specific) ‘Ideal’ racial stock often equated to middle-class ‘Dangerous’ classes of lumpenproletariat Note cultural stereotypes rather than scientific criteria ‘Inferior Hereditary Material Penetrates a Village’: lone mother, illegitimate children, drinking fathers, mental illness & prison

3. Pronatalism NS settlement schemes demanded a high birth rate Depression discouraged large families; cf pre-1914 statistics disappointing Positive eugenics: incentive schemes such as marriage loans, mothers’ crosses Lebensborn (Well of Life): SS scheme to promote Aryan births out of wedlock Anti-natalism? (Gisela Bock): several hundred thousand women sterilised Above: Mother’s Cross; below: ‘The nation’s military strength is safeguarded by hereditarily healthy, child-rich families’

4. Homosexuals Especially male homosexuals targeted as failing their reproductive duties 1936 para. 175 of Penal Code outlaws homosexuality Homosexuals incarcerated in concentration camps with pink triangle NS chart alleging that one homosexual man can ‘contaminate’ 28 others; note the pseudo-scientific diagram

5. ‘Asocials’ Racial theory of hereditary illnesses (criminality, alcoholism), rendering sufferers ‘unfit for community’ ‘Workshy’ & prostitutes targeted from 1936 on, becoming significant proportion of concentration camp population ‘This is how it would end.’

6. Roma and Sinti gypsies Sinti & Roma labelled workshy Ethnographic studies of gypsies as Indo-European migrants Proportionally as many gypsies died in Holocaust as Jews Gypsies await their fate at Belzec camp

7. Euthanasia Financial savings on mentally handicapped Killings in sanatoria ‘T4’ programme under Viktor Brack experiments with gas vans Bishop Galen of Muenster leads Catholic opposition (euthanasia becomes clandestine from 1941) Key text: Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance Victor Brack, architect of the ‘T4’ euthanasia programme Bishop Galen of Muenster, outspoken critic of euthanasia

8. Antisemitism Religious antisemitism, dating back to medieval period Economic antisemitism: emancipation of Jewish Germans post-1871 coincided with economic depression Biological antisemitism: Social Darwinism; organicist view of body politic; Jews as parasites ‘contaminating’ Aryan blood

9. The Jewish ‘World Conspiracy’ Jewish ‘capitalist oppressor’ Jewish ‘bolshevik commissar’ (PoW photo, 1941) ‘Bolshevism is Jewry’

10. Pogrom-style violence Canalisation of street violence 1 April Jewish shop boycott flopped Concern at overseas opinion SA men boycott Jewish businesses in April 1933

11. Nuremberg Race Laws Sept 1935 ‘legal’ solution Forbids sexual relations between Jewish and gentile Germans Defines Jews as those whose grandparents attended synagogue (i.e. non-biological criterion) General public acceptance that a ‘Jewish question’ existed

12. Kristallnacht, 9 Nov. 1938 Goebbels & SA manufacture ‘popular’ pogrom against Jews Synagogues burned Jewish businesses trashed & later ‘Aryanised’ or sold off 20,000 mainly male Jewish citizens put in ‘protective custody’ in camps Jewish community forced to pay 1billion marks in ‘atonement’ Passers-by view the shattered glass of a shopfront attacked on Kristallnacht

13. The SS and Jewish Policy From 1939 SS tasked with Jewish policy Emigration schemes (Madagascar, Urals) ‘Jew-free’ Reich leads to ghettoisation in General Government, but ‘cumulative radicalisation’ (Mommsen) between competing agencies Reinhard Heydrich, Security Service leader Adolf Eichmann, head of Jewish desk at Reich Security Head Office

14. Models of radicalisation Intentionalists: top-down models based on a Fuehrer order (lack of written evidence?) Incremental, step-by-step radicalisation, & ‘war against the Jews’ (Lucy Dawidowicz) Functionalists: polycratic, competing bureaucracies radicalise from below (Martin Broszat); ‘working towards the Fuehrer’ (Ian Kershaw)

15. The decision for the Final Solution Autumn 1941 (Operation Barbarossa): elation of victory or realisation of defeat? First tests of gas chambers at Auschwitz on Soviet PoWs January 1942: conference at Wannsee (Berlin) decides on European-wide programme of mass murder, using mechanised techniques

16. Holocaust: Height of Modernity? Pseudo-scientific justification derived from rational Enlightenment ‘perfectibility of mankind’ Use of ‘factories of death’, but also compartmentalisation of killing process enabled distancing from murder Increasing ‘economisation’ of the Holocaust to justify it in war effort (Aly & Heim) Key commentators: Zygmunt Bauman

17. Holocaust: height of barbarism? Daniel Goldhagen: focus on the ‘trigger pullers’ Need to explain sadistic nature of violence ‘Eliminationist antisemitism’ too simplistic? Cf Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men, who cites peer pressure, careerism, but also psychologicalneed to conform to authority Police Reserve Battalion 101, stationed in occupied Poland