Black Earth(20)

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Hitler’s sixth political innovation was the globalization of German Jews. In reality, Jews were a very small part of the population of Germany, under one percent. Most Jews were assimilated to German society in language and culture; indeed, the German high culture of the early twentieth century, including much of the modernism that remains celebrated today, was in significant measure a creation of Jews. Most Germans did not see Jews in their daily life, and were not particularly good at distinguishing Jews from non-Jews. To make a new racial optic was to consolidate the German national community, the Volksgemeinschaft.

After Hitler’s takeover, membership in the German state followed the rules of membership in the Nazi party. In 1933, Jews were banned from public service and from serving as lawyers. By the terms of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, Jews became second-class citizens. For the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, these laws were part of a “constitution of liberty,” since they embodied the arbitrary distinction between friend and enemy that would make, in his view, normal politics possible. As of 1938, Jews could not exercise any commercial, medical, or juridical function in Germany. The steady disappearance of Jews from public life was meant to spur Jews to leave Germany and to revise the worldviews of Germans. In everyday life, measures directed against Jews forced Germans to think about Jews, to notice Jews, and to define themselves as “Aryans,” as members of a group that excluded the Jews with whom they shared the country.

At the same time, Nazi propaganda aggressively included German Jews in an imaginary group, the international Jewish conspiracy. Often Jews were described not as individuals, but as members of Weltjudentum, world Jewry. When books were burned, the message was global: In Heidelberg those of “Jewish, Marxist, and similar origins” were put to the torch; in G?ttingen books were set alight along with a sign bearing the name “Lenin,” the founder of the Soviet state. In this way the Jew became the Bolshevik, the union consummated by the very act of burning. Not so very much later it would be not books but Jews themselves who would be burned bearing such signs.

The globalization of the German Jew in the 1930s was an important but limited achievement. The Jew, as Hitler saw matters, remained inside the German. The extraction of the Jew from the German could be achieved only by removing Jews from the planet, something that could not yet be articulated in any precise way. Experience would later show that for Jews to be killed, they would first have to be physically removed from Germany. With a few hundred exceptions, Germans would not kill German Jews on the territory of their common prewar homeland. Germans beyond Germany, invading and occupying neighboring countries, and meeting Jews in places where political authority had been removed and the Jews had no protection, often described them in the impersonal way prescribed by propaganda. Jews beyond Germany were the overwhelming majority of the victims of the Holocaust. The globalization of racism succeeded when combined with world war.

Hitler’s final innovation was the redefinition of war. His version of militarism went beyond preparation for conventional wars, as in the Balkans. He intended not just to take territory that might be portrayed as ethnically contiguous, as in the Balkan Model, but to destroy entire states and master entire races. “Our border,” as the SS slogan went, “is blood.” In 1938, Hitler did away with the position of minister of war, and took personal command of the armed forces. Himmler, G?ring, Heydrich, and the other Nazi leaders planned a war of extermination, starvation, and colonization in eastern Europe.

Oddly, this planning was not directed against Germany’s actual eastern neighbor. Poland was unimportant in Hitler’s writings of the 1920s and visible only as a desired ally in his policies after the seizure of power in 1933. This seems stranger still in light of the fact that Poland is where the Jews of Europe chiefly lived. About ten times as many Jews were citizens of Poland as were citizens of Germany. There were about as many Jews in individual Polish cities such as Warsaw and ?ód? as there were Jewish citizens of Germany. And of course Poland was the country that lay between Germany and the Soviet Union, where Hitler’s true revolution was to be made.

A war was always the object of Hitler’s policy. The fact that one took place was above all a result of his designs and achievements within Germany. Yet Hitler made a mistake about Poland, imagining it only as an instrument in a larger German enterprise. Instead, Poland behaved as a political agent, a sovereign state.

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The German calamity of 1918 was a Polish miracle. Virtually everything about the outcome of the First World War that was threatening for Germans was exhilarating for Poles. The Treaty of Versailles of 1919, a symbol of injustice in Germany, was a pillar of the legal order in which an independent Poland could exist. When German troops withdrew from the East, a new Polish army could fill the power vacuum. Poles fought the Red Army for the lands that had been German client states. Poland won the Polish-Bolshevik War, and the Treaty of Riga of 1921 established Poland’s eastern border with the Soviet Union.