11 - Race at Heart

Summary

Nazism is a form of racism. If one adopts this point of view, which is not always a matter of universal assent, talk of the “living space” to be conquered and the “social harmony” to be achieved by the “community of the Volk” are merely its corollaries. These are services due the Volk, the people-race of supreme essence. In the 1930s, colonial and social ambitions helped lure imperialist “nationalists” and “socialists” de ressentiment into the Nazi camp. But it was Race that supplied the foundation of the regime that came into being in 1933 and Race that offered the “Aryans” a path to such unprecedented promotion in the social and international order alike. This redemption by way of Race goes a long way to explaining the attraction of Nazism. This is not the place to seek out the reasons for the success of Nazi racism in Germany. By comparatively charting the development of eugenics in Europe and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, Isabel Heinemann has demonstrated the specificity of the German case. Nowhere else was such a diversified, brutal and ultimately murderous array of eugenicist practices so systematically implemented.¹ For Heinemann, this is proof of the “extremely racist” character of German society in this period. To assess and understand the various aspects of this specificity as well as their genesis, proliferation and ultimate disappearance, other comparative-historical studies would be useful. But the fact is that the racism of extermination for Jews and the racism of radical exclusion for blacks were both hugely popular in Nazi Germany. To promote lynching, propaganda deftly played upon these popular undercurrents.