The Nazi Holocaust: Part 2 The Origins of the Holocaust [Reprint 2011 ed.] 9783110970494, 9783598215520

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THE NAZI HOLOCAUST

THE NAZI HOLOCAUST Historical Articles on the Destruction of European Jews

Edited by Michael R. Marrus Series ISBN 0-88736-266-^1 1. Perspectives on the Holocaust ISBN 0-88736-252-4 2. The Origins of the Holocaust ISBN 0-88736-253-2 3. The "Final Solution": The Implementation of Mass Murder ISBN 0-88736-255-9 vol. 1 ISBN 0-88736-256-7 vol. 2 4. The "Final Solution" Outside Germany ISBN 0-88736-257-5 vol. 1 ISBN 0-88736-258-3 vol. 2 5. Public Opinion and Relations to the Jews in Nazi Europe ISBN 0-88736-259-1 vol. 1 ISBN 0-88736-254-0 vol. 2 6. The Victims of the Holocaust ISBN 0-88736-260-5 vol. 1 ISBN 0-88736-261-3 vol. 2 7. Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust ISBN 0-88736-262-1 8. Bystanders to the Holocaust ISBN 0-88736-263-X vol. 1 ISBN 0-88736-264-8 vol. 2 ISBN 0-88736-268-0 vol. 3 9. The End of the Holocaust ISBN 0-88736-265-6

THE NAZI HOLOCAUST Historical Articles on the Destruction of European Jews

2

The Origins

•

of the Holocaust Edited with an Introduction by

Michael R. Marrus University of Toronto

Meckler Westport · London

Publisher's Note The articles and chapters which comprise this collection originally appeared in a wide variety of publications and are reproduced here in facsimile from the highest quality offprints and photocopies available. The reader will notice some occasional marginal shading and text-curl common to photocopying from tightly bound volumes. Every attempt has been made to correct or minimize this effect. The publisher wishes to acknowledge all the individuals and institutions that provided permission to reprint from their publications. Special thanks are due to the Yad Vashem Institute, Jerusalem, the YTVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, and the Leo Baeck Institute, New York, for their untiring assistance in providing materials from their publications and collections for use in this series. Library of Congress Cataloging-ln-Publicatlon Data The Origins of the Holocaust / edited by Michael R. Marrus. p. cm. — (The Nazi Holocaust; v. 2) Includes index. ISBN 0-88736-253-2 (alk. paper) : $ 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) — Causes. 2. Antisemitism — Germany — History. 3. Germany — Ethnic relations. I. Marrus, Michael Robert. Π. Series. D804.3.N39 vol. 2 940.53Ί8 s—dc20 [940.53Ί8] 89-12252 CIP British Library Cataloging in Publication Data The origins of the Holocaust - (The Nazi Holocaust; v.2). 1. Jews, Genocide, 1939-1945 I. Marrus, Michael R. (Michael Robert) Π. Series 940.53Ί5Ό3924 ISBN 0-88736-253-2 ISBN 0-88736-266-4 set Copyright information for articles reproduced in this collection appears at the end of this volume. Introductions and selection copyright © 1989 Meckler Corporation. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form by any means without prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in review. Meckler Corporation, 11 Ferry Lane West, Westport, CT 06880. Meckler Ltd., Grosvenor Gardens House, Grosvenor Gardens, London SW1W 0BS, U.K. Printed on acid free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

Contents Series Preface Introduction

vii ix

Part One: Racism, the Occult, and Eugenics Social Darwinism in Germany, Seen as a Historical Problem HANS-GÜNTER ZMARZLIK The Mystical Origins of National Socialism G. L.MOSSE On Racism and Anti-Semitism in Occultism and Nazism JEFFREY A. GOLDSTEIN Hitler's Racial Ideology: Content and Occult Sources JACKSON SPIELVOGEL and DAVID REDLES Science and Values: The Eugenics Movement in Germany and Russia in the 1920s LOREN R. GRAHAM

3 43 59 79

99

Part Two: Antisemitic Background Prolegomena to Any Present Analysis of Hostility against the Jews GAVIN I. LANGMUIR The Theory and Practice of Anti-Semitism MICHAEL R. MARRUS European History—Seedbed of the Holocaust J. L. TALMON The Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism SHMUEL ETTINGER Comparative Perspectives on Modern Anti-Semitism in the West TODD M. ENDELMAN An Economic Interpretation of Antisemitism in Eastern Europe STANISLAV ANDRESKI German Antisemitism in the Light of Post-War Historiography ISMAR SCHORSCH Why Was There a Jewish Question in Imperial Germany? PETER PULZER Antisemitism as a Cultural Code: Reflections on the History and Historiography of Antisemitism in Imperial Germany SHULAMIT VOLKOV

133 172 185 208 245 265 278 293

307

Part Three: Hitler's Antisemitism: Politics and Psychohistory Hitler's Anti-Semitism: A Political Appraisal MARTIN NEEDLER Adolf Hitler's Anti-Semitism: A Study in History and Psychoanalysis ROBERT G. L. WAITE Hitler's Concept of Lebensraum: the Psychological Basis RUDOLPH BINION The Hitler Controversy GEOFFREY COCKS

331 336 375 414

Part Four: Nazi Persecution of the Jews, 1933-41 An Overall Plan for Anti-Jewish Legislation in the Third Reich? UWE D.ADAM Social Outcasts in the Third Reich JEREMY NOAKES The German Jews, 1933-1939 WERNER T. ANGRESS The Third Reich and the Transfer Agreement DAVID YISRAELI The Expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany October 1938 to July 1939: A Documentation SYBIL MILTON The Kristallnacht as Turning Point: Jewish Reactions to Nazi Policies YEHUDA Β AUER The Kristallnacht as a Public Degradation Ritual PETER LOEWENBERG The Strange Story of Herschel Grynszpan MICHAEL R. MARRUS Jews in Concentration Camps in Germany Prior to World War II LENIYAHIL National Socialist Vienna: Antisemitism as a Housing Policy GERHARD BOTZ The Ultimate Refuge: Suicide in the Jewish Community under the Nazis KONRAD KWIET The Jewish Badge and the Yellow Star in the Nazi Era PHILIP FRIEDMAN

431 454 484 498

518 553 582 597 608 640 658 691

Copyright Information

721

Index

725

Series Preface The Holocaust, the murder of close to six million Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War, stands as a dreadful monument to mankind's inhumanity to man. As such, it will continue to be pondered for as long as people care about the past and seek to use it as a guide to the present. In the last two decades, historical investigation of this massacre has been unusually productive, both in the sense of extending our understanding of what happened and in integrating the Holocaust into the general stream of historical consciousness. This series, a collection of English-language historical articles on the Holocaust reproduced in facsimile form, is intended to sample the rich variety of this literature, with particular emphasis on the most recent currents of historical scholarship. However assessed, historians acknowledge a special aura about the Nazis' massacre of European Jewry, that has generally come to be recognized as one of the watershed events of recorded history. What was singular about this catastrophe was not only the gigantic scale of the killing, but also the systematic, machine-like effort to murder an entire people — including every available Jew — simply for the crime of being Jewish. In theory, no one was to escape — neither the old, nor the infirm, nor even tiny infants. Nothing quite like this had happened before, at least in modem times. By any standard, therefore, the Holocaust stands out While Jews had known periodic violence in their past, it seems in retrospect that the rise of radical anti-Jewish ideology, centered on race, set the stage for eventual mass murder. As well, Europeans became inured to death on a mass scale during the colossal bloodletting of the First World War. That conflict provided cover for the slaughter of many hundreds of thousands of Armenians in Turkey, a massacre that Hitler himself seems to have thought a precursor of what he would do in the conquest of the German Lebensraum, or living space, in conquered Europe. Still, the extermination of every living person on the basis of who they were, was something new. For both perpetrators and victims, therefore, decisions taken for what the Nazis called the "Final Solution" began a voyage into the unknown. As the Israeli historian Jacob Katz puts it: "This was an absolute novum, unassimilable in any vocabulary at the disposal of the generation that experienced iL" For more than a decade after the war, writing on the Holocaust may be seen in general as part of the process of mourning for the victims — dominated by the urge to bear witness to what had occurred, to commemorate those who had been murdered, and to convey a warning to those who had escaped. Given the horror and the unprecedented character of these events, it is not surprising that it has taken writers some time to present a coherent, balanced assessment The early 1960s were a turning point The appearance of Raul Hilberg's monumental work, The Destruction of the European Jews, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 stimulated debate and investigation. From Israel, the important periodical published by the Yad Vashem Institute [Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority], Yad Vashem Studies, made serious research

available to scholars in English. German and American scholars set to work. Numerous academic conferences and publications in the following decade, sometimes utilizing evidence from trials of war criminals then underway, extended knowledge considerably. As a result, we now have an immense volume of historical writing, a significant sample of which is presented in this series. A glance at the topics covered underscores the vast scale of this history. Investigators have traced the Nazi persecution of the Jews before the implementation of the "Final Solution," showing links both to Nazi ideology and antisemitic tradition. They have indicated how the Germans coordinated their anti-Jewish activities on a European-wide scale in the wake of their territorial conquests, drawing upon their own bureaucracy and those of their allies, enlisting collaborators and various helpers in defeated countries. They have also devoted attention to the victims — whether in East European ghettos or forests, in Central or Western Europe, or in the various concentration and death camps run by the SS. Finally, they have also written extensively on the bystanders—the countries arrayed against the Hitlerian Reich, neutrals, various Christian denominations, and the Jews outside Nazi-dominated Europe. The volumes in this series permit the reader to sample the rich array of scholarship on the history of the Holocaust, and to assess some of the conflicting interpretations. They also testify to a deeper, more sophisticated, and more balanced appreciation than was possible in the immediate wake of these horrifying events. The literature offered here can be studied as historiography — scholars addressing problems of historical interpretation — or, on the deepest level, as a grappling with the most familiar but intractable of questions: How was such a thing possible? *

*

*

I want to express my warm appreciation to all those who helped me in the preparation of these volumes. My principal debt, of course, is to the scholars whose work is represented in these pages. To them, and to the publications in which their essays first appeared, I am grateful not only for permission to reproduce their articles but also for their forbearance in dealing with a necessarily remote editor. I appreciate as well the assistance of the following, who commented cm lists of articles that I assembled, helping to make this project an educational experience not only for my readers but also for myself: Yehuda Bauer, Rudolph Binion, Christopher Browning, Saul Friedländer, Henry Friedlander, Raul Hilberg, Jacques Komberg, Walter Laqueur, Franklin Littell, Hubert Locke, Zeev Mankowitz, Sybil Milton, George Mosse, and David Wyman. To be sure, I have sometimes been an obstreperous student, and I have not always accepted the advice that has been kindly proffered. I am alone responsible for the choices here, and for the lacunae that undoubtedly exist Special thanks go to Ralph Carlson, who persuaded me to undertake this project and who took charge of many technical aspects of iL Thanks also to Anthony Abbott of Meckler Corporation who saw the work through to completion. Finally, as so often in the past, I record my lasting debt to my wife, Carol Randi Marius, without whom I would have been engulfed by this and other projects. Toronto, July 1989

Michael R. Marrus

Introduction Historians have investigated several important roots to the Holocaust, seeking connections between developments in German and European society and the mass murder that was systematically organized on a continental scale in 1942. One of the most difficult problems concerns the long-term causes. Just how much significance should be accorded the ancient anti-Jewish traditions of European culture, and to what extent were these altered or transformed by more recent developments? Virtually all historians would acknowledge that modem antisemitism is in some sense, as the late Shmuel Etting«- put it, "a new version of an ancient hatred." No one would ignore the impact of Christian anti-Jewish teachings as part of the background of the events we are considering. But die issue most historians address is why mass murder should have been perpetrated by the Nazis during the Second World War. Historians have therefore tended to concentrate upon the more recent past, choosing a terrain in which they are able to show significant changes in the political, social, and intellectual climate that undoubtedly conditioned Nazi policy towards Jews. They have identified doctrines of race, the occult, and eugenics as essential elements in the Nazi and Hitlerian world view. They have measured and analyzed the specifically anti-Jewish currents in Europe and elsewhere, assessing their importance in particular countries, regions, and social groups. With this background, researchers have traced the evolution of the Nazis' persecution of the Jews after Hitler became German chancellor in 1933. This section sets the stage for the Holocaust by establishing the precedents — ideological, legal, administrative, social, and political — that facilitated the emergence of the "Final Solution" during the war.

Part One

Racism, the Occult, and Eugenics

RACISM, THE OCCULT, AND EUGENICS

Social Darwinism in Germany, Seen as a Historical Problem HANS-GÜNTER

ZMARZLIK

(For Gerhard Ritter on His Seventy-fifth Birthday)

Social Darwinism is one of the more recent "isms" in our field. Though used by biologists as early as 1906,1 the term did not gain general acceptance among historians until 1944, when Richard Hofstadter published his Social Darwinism in American Thought. In Germany since then the critical study of National Socialism has given additional weight to the term and the concept it stands for. Under the Third Reich millions have been systematically murdered in the name of the German people. A historian trying to account for this monstrous reality must take all manner of factors into consideration. Among the most important of these are certain ideological components: a biologistic dogma of racial inequality; a moral nihilism invoking the "struggle for existence" and the "survival of the fittest" as a universal law of nature; and—resulting from both of these—the conviction that radical extermination of the racially inferior elements and the selection of racially superior elements are justified by the fact that these policies are a vital necessity to a people that wishes to be strong. "Struggle for existence," "extermination," and "selection" are terms of Darwinist origin, and this is no accident; a glance at Hitler's Mein Kampf shows that a

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monism tinged with popular Darwinism figured prominently in the outlook of the National Socialist leadership. It was one of the few ideological elements that dominated Hitler's thinking throughout his political career and that he did not manipulate in accordance with tactical needs. Thus it becomes incumbent upon the history of ideas to investigate the origin and meaning of this Darwinism.2 But the question is not only where Hitler and his closer collaborators derived this ideology. It must also be asked whether this Darwinism is a primitive version of conceptions that can be found elsewhere, for example, in bourgeois rightist circles. For if this were true, we might perhaps more readily understand why the inhuman theory and practice of Hitler and his party did not in these circles arouse the opposition that their intellectual and ethical level might have led one to expect. And the scope of our inquiry must be broadened still further. For if we wish to appreciate the full historical importance of Social Darwinism, we cannot confine ourselves to the prehistory of the Third Reich, but must study the social consequences of the Darwinian theory from the very beginning. So broad an undertaking confronts us at the start with a confusing picture. For Darwinism has been invoked in support of very divergent interpretations of the social process. T h e proponents both of an altruistic ethic and of a brutal master-race morality take it as a foundation; it was invoked by liberal believers in progress, but also by the spokesmen of a crass historical fatalism, by the champions of egalitarian socialism but also by those who formulated doctrines of racial inequality. A closer look at the developments and their chronology enables us, however, to reduce the countless variants of Social Darwinism to two basic forms, the one determined primarily by the idea of evolution and the other by the principle of selection. What is meant by this will, it is to be hoped, be shown by the following remarks, in which I shall first at-

RACISM, THE OCCULT, AND EUGENICS Social Darwinism in Germany tempt to give a descriptive analysis of the principal varieties of Social Darwinist thinking, and then take up the question of their historical importance. T h e story begins in 1859 with the appearance of Darwin's chief work, On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. This book was eminently timely; within a few years it not only revolutionized the science of biology but aroused passionate interest far beyond the confines of biology. With the precision characteristic of Darwin, the title indicates the thesis at the core of his theory: it combines the idea of a cohesion in the developments of all living creatures—an idea repeatedly put forward since Buffon and Lamarck but never adequately explained—with a theory of selection, that is, the idea that the species had evolved through selection among varied offspring in the course of the struggle for life. T h e explosive force of this cool, scientific formulation becomes apparent when we consider the prevailing conceptions of the time. T o simplify, the biological thinking of the pre-Darwinian was based on two metaphysical assumptions: the notion of universal prototypes, which has its purest expression in Plato's theory of ideas, and that of individual final causes after the manner of the Aristotelian entelechies.3 In one form or another these conceptions presided over all attempts to interpret the wealth of data brought to light in the first half of the nineteenth century in the fields of zoology, botany, embryology, paleontology, and related sciences. Darwin now opposed a mechanical explanation, capable of dispensing with all extranatural and supernatural factors, to these idealistic principles, which imposed a pre-established intellectual form on the events of the natural process, so predicating the existence of a formative hand behind the phenomena, of a power which determined the direction of development in accordance with a preconceived plan, in short, of a higher unity amid empirical multiplicity. Up until then

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the awe-inspiring "fitness" of living creatures, their meaningful integration with their environments, had been regarded as the work of a superior guiding power, or in Christian terms, as the natural manifestation of God's creativeness. Now this fitness was no longer to be conceived as the product of causes operating in accordance with some higher purposes, but as the result of a vast number of possibilities of adaptation which served no transcendent aim but were selected or rejected on the basis of their aptitude for preserving and promoting the viability of individuals and groups from moment to moment. The developments of organisms could now be understood as a sum of improvisations unrelated to any ideal plan, and the natural cosmos as a product of chance. Thus Darwin took the magic and metaphysics out of the natural process by reducing it to interactions that could be understood in scientific terms: he naturalized biology and at the same time made it accessible to a historical method, that is, he immersed the species, which until then had been universally regarded as constant, in a stream of development descending from a past whose remoteness had never before been suspected and contended that all the innumerable species had risen gradually from the simplest forms. And far from being a mere hypothesis, Darwin's theory was supported by a wealth of convincing empirical evidence. Darwin's book gave the idea of evolution a hitherto undreamed-of force. It exerted a profound influence on all the sciences4 and indirectly on every sphere of social life. But here we shall not speak of these indirect emanations. The social dynamic of Darwin's doctrine expressed itself directly in the violent controversies that arose almost immediately between Darwinists and spokesmen for the churches. The stumbling block was the fact that the theory of evolution did not stop with animals but offered compelling proof that man was descended from the animal kingdom. Though Darwin had said nothing conclu-

RACISM, THE OCCULT, AND EUGENICS Social Dartoinism in Germany sive about the origin or specific character of the qualities which gave man his special position as a thinking being, nevertheless, by effacing the dividing line between man and animal, his proof of the natural connection between them struck a violent blow at the traditional concept of man. T h e controversy began when a monism of Darwinist inspiration attacked the biblical doctrine of Creation and Christian dogma in general. T h e leader in this assault was Professor Ernst Haeckel of Jena, whose brilliance as a zoologist was matched by his naiveti as a natural philosopher. Haeckel did not content himself with the empirical and analytical methods to which nineteenth-century science owed its extraordinary progress. In Darwin's theory of descendance he saw a means of providing a unified interpretation of physical, biological, and psychological phenomena, of arriving at a synthesis of the specialized sciences and on this foundation of building a universal philosophy. This was a crude abuse of Darwin's theory and was condemned by the leading natural scientists of the day, Rudolf Virchow in the lead. But Haeckel was not to be discouraged. He became the prophet of a monist nature religion based on Darwinism—which disposed of the belief in a personal God and Creator as an old wives' tale. Despite his radical attack on the dogmas of the Christian churches, Haeckel did not criticize the ethical norms of Christian origin by which Western man had hitherto oriented his social conduct. T o be sure, side by side with the need to love one's neighbor he stressed the duty of selfpreservation and self-assertion in accordance with the natural law of the struggle for life. But he did not reject altruistic, humanitarian attitudes. On the contrary: only when a balance between struggle and harmonious order such as that revealed in nature had been recognized as the universal law of life and embodied in the will of the individual would mankind come of age and thus become cap-

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able of fulfilling the maxim: "Let man be noble, helpful, and good." Thus Haeckel amalgamated the naturalistic determinism of his mechanical concept of development with the ideas of a pre-established harmony between individual strivings and general development and of progress toward ever higher ethical perfection. At the same time attempts were made to include sociology in a monist synthesis based on Darwinism. These "bioorganic" social theories, by far the most significant of which was developed by Herbert Spencer, rested on the assumption that society was a special kind of organism, similar to a biological organism in constitution and function and hence subject to the same laws. Society was regarded as an aggregate whose nature results from the nature of its units, that is, human individuals. T h e physiologically demonstrable tendency of organisms to develop into more highly differentiated and integrated species was interpreted as a trend toward perfection and explained in man by gradual adaptation to an increasingly complex social environment. Thus a virtually automatic progressive evolution was regarded as the fundamental law governing the natural and the social process alike, so that the competitive struggle between individuals became a guarantee of continuous progress in ethics and civilization. Seen as the power behind human progress, struggle lost its sting and became an impersonal natural force. T h e evolutionary optimism that characterized the first phase in the application of Darwinist principles to natural philosophy, social theory, and ethics was far more an expression of the liberal, rationalist doctrines of the time than of Darwin's theory. For the core of the Darwinian theory is a process of selection in which value judgments play no part. Although in the "improvement of most organisms in respect of their aptitude for life" 5 Darwin saw a certain trend of the evolutionary process toward higher and more efficient types, he avoided deriving criteria of value from this view. As a keen-sighted and incorruptible

RACISM, THE OCCULT, AND EUGENICS Social Darwinism

in

Germany

observer he perceived that development in nature is not necessarily upward. Strictly speaking, his theory states merely that success in the struggle for existence signifies biological fitness for the living conditions prevailing at a particular time and place. Thus Social Darwinism in the more specific sense did not come into being until development ceased to be equated with progress and the theory of natural selection was taken as the principal model for social and political thinking. Only then did the special feature of Darwin's theory, the mechanical explanation of natural development by processes of selection and extermination in disregard of all teleology, achieve its full effect. A shift of accent in this direction took place when in a period characterized by the second industrial revolution, by imperialism and the national uprisings in eastern Central Europe, the doctrine of liberalism and with it men's confidence in the natural harmony and automatic upward trend of the social process ceased to be dominant. This change of climate which began in the seventies throughout the Western world and became more pronounced in the nineties was marked by a "naturalization" of political thinking and a brutalization of political methods. This is clearly shown in the writings of Social Darwinist authors. What only a short while before was interpreted as a free competition of individuals, with the prize going to the ablest and ethically best, was now looked upon literally as "struggle for existence"—a permanent struggle for selfassertion through increased power—and not primarily between individuals but between collectivities: social interest groups, nations, and races. Thus the theory of natural selection assumed central importance in Social Darwinist thinking; the struggle for existence was taken as a fundamental law and from it was derived a system of Darwinist social ethics in which the accent was put on the instincts of self-preservation and seif-assertion. T h e proponents of this ethic postulated the

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right of the stronger and thus sanctioned the egoistic power drive of the group, nation, or race to which they belonged. From here it was only a step to the condemnation of Christian ethics and the humanitarianism based on natural law that was the heritage of the Enlightenment. Certain authors spoke openly of a "morality of pity" or "humanitarian babbling," out of keeping with the new, harder era. T h e nineteenth century had owed the greater part of its scientific achievement to the "naturalistic revolution against metaphysical tradition," 6 a revolution in which Darwin, Comte, and Marx had played leading roles. But now the extreme radicalization of Darwinist principles 7 gives us an intimation of the threat to social praxis inherent in this same revolution. Of this the Social Darwinists were scarcely aware; in any case it meant little to them compared with the proud certainty of having at last fathomed the realities of the politicosocial process. In this second stage of Social Darwinist thinking a new school made its appearance. At the turn of the twentieth century the new school broke with the crude naturalistic monism of the older school characterized above, which held that supposedly all-embracing natural laws were at work in human society and that all social phenomena derived from the operation of these laws. This view had been rendered obsolete by the neo-Kantian theory of knowledge and untenable by the progress in biology. T h e younger Social Darwinists inquired into the relations between social processes and the biological development of man. Essentially this offered a promising field for research. But unfortunately, the younger Social Darwinists, instead of contenting themselves with analyzing and interpreting empirical phenomena, derived from their analyses prescriptions for a new social order and felt called upon to pave the way for such an order. This was typical of the activism that became widespread at the end of the nineteenth century. In at-

RACISM, THE OCCULT, AND EUGENICS Social Darwinism in Germany tempting to give an "Over-all Picture of the Cultural Development" shortly before the First World War, a contemporary wrote as follows: The gigantic development of technology and industry has . . . not only basically changed the externals of the world but also produced a new type of man who is keenly aware that, as Marx . . . put it, the essential is not to give a different interpretaton of the world, but to change it. In other words: the rise of technology and industry has created a new relationship between theory and practice. And between the past and future as well. Formerly men of the past, we have become men of the future. Comte's maxim: Savoir c'est voir pour prevoir has become the watchword of our day.8 This attitude did not spring only from the sense of power inspired by the enormously increased scientific and technical tools now at man's disposal, but also from a critique of the times, that is to say, a will to assume responsibility for the future because men had lost confidence in a self-evident and automatic progress. T h e Marxists had still concerned themselves primarily with a critique of false consciousness, an attempt to correct the conciousness of the masses and so give increased impetus to a trend that was already inherent in the historical process. T h e young Social Darwinists formulated the problem more radically. They started from the assumption that modern civilization involved mortal dangers to human society because it vitiated man's biological substance—a diagnosis based on the conviction that the achievement of individuals and social groups hinged essentially on their inherited racial constitution. Hitherto, they held, natural selection had seen to it that by and large the biologically superior individuals should occupy the leading positions in society. But now this regulator had been dangerously impaired. Consequently it was necessary to complement natural selection by a socially guided selection, for otherwise a general "vulgarization," that is, qualitative deteri-

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oration, of the human substance was inevitable, with disastrous consequences for the group's cultural creativity and capacity for political self-assertion. Thus the Social Darwinists held that it was the responsibility of the collectivity to control spheres of individual life which in the era of the liberal constitutional state had been excluded from the public jurisdiction. Certain consequences of the industrial revolution had, it is true, long since made it necessary to "organize a fight for public health." 9 Thanks to progress in science and medicine this fight had been largely successful. But this was merely a matter of combating visible evils by preventive measures of social hygiene, so providing humanly acceptable living conditions in the present. The younger Social Darwinists, however, considered it vitally important to put through the systematic application of sociobiological practices whose benefits would be reaped only by future generations and whose urgency most contemporaries found it hard to understand. Their program implied an extremely far-reaching departure from the conceptions regarding the relations between the state and individual that the nineteenth century had imprinted on the public mind. This becomes still more evident when we consider the two main and distinct Social Darwinist orientations: racial anthropology and racial hygiene. The racial anthropologists took the difference between races as their point of departure. They tried to provide the speculative racial theories of the nineteenth century, in particular that of Gobineau, with a scientific foundation, and to develop them further. With the help of skull and body measurements and pigment specifications, in other words, with the methods of so-called physical anthropology, 10 they determined and described certain racial types. Behind the divergent physical characteristics they sought, and believed they found, divergent intellectual and psychological qualities. T h e highest rank and hence the right to social leadership were attributed to the North

RACISM, THE OCCULT, AND EUGENICS Social Darwinism in Germany

Germanic race. Thus the biological care of this race, the preservation of its purity, seemed the most urgent task, and the most vital politicosocial goal was held to be a social organism in which the bearers of the most valuable racial heritage formed the ruling class. Thus these Social Darwinists invoked the highest authority of the late nineteenth century, namely science, as a justification for deriving from the empirically demonstrable diversity of human groups a strict dogma of inequality and for denying the claim of all individuals to equal social and political opportunities. Opposing modern industrial society with its tendency toward mobility and democratization, they embarked on a socialreactionary course which inevitably led them to regard the implementation of racial-biological demands at the expense of individual liberties as at least a necessary evil. It is perfectly obvious that the claim of the racial anthropologists to have found a scientific foundation for their theses rested on a massive self-delusion. For—quite aside from the fact that they vastly underestimated the role of environment—the concept of race with which they operated obliged them to oversimplify the complex relations between phenotype and genotype so as to make it appear as though certain outward characteristics were invariably associated with certain intellectual and psychological characteristics.,Looking as they did upon the races as distinct, self-enclosed units and accordingly "explaining the warlike and cultural achievements of the various states by their physiological characters and the inequality of their social substances," 11 they were obliged to misinterpret biological and social reality and force it into a bed of Procrustes.12 And indeed the proponents of racial anthropology were dilettantish free-lance scholars with inadequate scientific training. Not so the racial hygienists. Here the tone was set by university men who, in studying social processes from a sociological point of view, made a serious effort to confine

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themselves to demonstrable facts. They were concerned mainly with the problems of racial degeneration which, they held, entailed a qualitative population policy. While the racial anthropologists put the accent on "Nordification," the racial hygienists, for the most part, stressed the need of improving the race. The science of genetics had made enormous progress thanks to Weismann's germplasm theory, the rediscovery of the Mendel ian laws of heredity, de Vries' investigations of mutations, etc. But this progress had brought with it a decision of fundamental importance, which had the effect of radicalizing Darwin's principle of selection. Hitherto biologists had assumed with Lamarck that acquired characteristics could be inherited, and Darwin himself had accepted this thesis. Now it came to be generally recognized that hereditary characters were passed down from generation to generation substantially unaffected by external influences and underwent change only through mutations, that is, abrupt modification of the germ plasm. The racial hygienists inferred that if individually acquired characteristics could not be transmitted, then the qualities that individuals acquired by training and social influence would die with them unless the hereditary substance could be preserved from harm. Thus, to their minds, the progress of civilization, in which their contemporaries took such pride, was a series of Pyrrhic victories, because the joint effects of modern civilization and of Christian humanitarian ethics were harmful from the standpoint of racial biology. Constitutionally feeble persons and sufferers from hereditary ailments, who in former times would not even have attained the age of reproduction, were now able to bring forth numerous offspring, while the most gifted, socially superior classes tended to limit the size of their families. Both social institutions and public opinion, the racial hygienists held, were dominated by extreme individualist conceptions. Thus the duty to preserve the species, that is, the individ-

RACISM, THE OCCULT, AND EUGENICS Social Darwinism in Germany ual's biological obligation to the people as a whole, had been criminally neglected. Reflections of this kind were at that time current in all industrial countries and led scientists to concern themselves increasingly with biosocial problems. The racial hygienists made valuable contributions to this body of thought. Unfortunately their scientific discipline did not preserve them from the fundamental error of the other Social Darwinist schools, namely, drawing inferences about the nature of man as such from scientifically verifiable data concerning partial aspects of man. Though they tried to avoid unwarranted generalizations and were well aware that standards of social conduct cannot be derived from the scientific observation of natural processes, their belief that the quality and viability of human society depended essentially on the hereditary, biological factor led them to regard racial hygiene as a matter of life and death, far more important than all other existing problems. Thus, for example, Fritz Lenz, professor of racial hygiene at the University of Munich and one of the most strictly scientific proponents of the racial hygiene school, wrote: " T h e question of the genetic quality of the coming generations is a hundred times more important than the conflict between capitalism and socialism and a thousand times more important than the struggle between blackwhite-red and black-red-gold." * 18 Countless such statements might be cited. They all call for a new philosophy of life hinging on considerations of racial hygiene. The consequence of this orientation was that among the racial hygienists we find the same critique of civilization as among the racial anthropologists, though on an intellectually far higher level. Condemning modern in• Black, white, and red had been the colors of the Bismarck Empire; black, red, and gold, of the student movement and the liberal democratic revolution of 1848. The Weimar Republic adopted the latter for its national flag but the former for its commercial flag, and thereby practically institutionalized the national divisions and the bitter conflicts which the colors symbolized.

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dustrial society and disparaging democracy, its political correlate, as a leveler, they idealized rural life and a social structure based on strictly defined classes. Some of them even held that the Nordic-Germanic race is the most valuable factor in the European cultural sphere. T h e y criticized individual racial anthropologists for their lack of scientific method, but regarded their work as a whole as deserving and worth encouraging. Under these circumstances the unquestionable idealism of the younger Social Darwinists can only be called misguided. T h e y

desired a better

future for their

own

people, and indeed for all mankind, and wished to observe humanitarian principles in putting through their aims. T h e y earnestly and with subjective sincerity wished to save the health of the nation from the harmful influence of modern life. But in actual fact they favored the emergence of dangers far worse than those they wished to prevent. T h i s last statement, to be sure, anticipates our findings. T h u s far we have merely shown that a certain group of ideas can be singled out from the realm of ideas in general and described with the help of the concept of Social Darwinism. T h i s demonstrates the historical existence of our subject. But what of its historical significance? A n answer must be based on two criteria: (1) What has been the historical influence of Social Darwinism? (2) What light does it throw, as a pars pro toto, on the general history of the era? T h e question of how and to what extent ideas exert a historical influence soon leads from the realm of demonstrable fact to that of conjecture and opinion. T h i s is especially true in the case of Social Darwinism. For here we are not dealing—as in Marxism, for example—with a logically self-contained ideology that interprets every sphere of life from a unified point of view and through constant exegetic reflection on the work of a thinker of high intellectual standing repeatedly and publicly renews and dem-

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Germany

onstrates its inner unity. Here, on the contrary, we have to do with a large number of small minds who at first sight seem very different and whose inner cohesion and common trend are fully apparent only to a historian. T h e emanations of Social Darwinist thought are obscure and diffuse. Under such circumstances it is not profitable to ask "Who took what from whom?" and try to demonstrate dependencies and connections on the basis of direct borrowings and influences. It will be best to start by estimating the potential field of influence of Social Darwinism. One might begin with an inquiry into the number, social position, and organization of its exponents, and above all into the extent of their audience. This last might be estimated by the distribution of figures for Social Darwinist books and their reception by the press, the circulation figures of periodicals carrying this material, and the distribution of articles by Social Darwinist authors published elsewhere. First one should explore these sectors of political publishing in which one might expect to find a special affinity to Social Darwinist ideas. Then the positive findings should be tested for their relation to the ideological context of the time, and on this basis it should be determined to what extent they influenced men's actions and attitudes. Independently of this, it should be determined, on the basis of the speeches and writings of leading party politicians or statesmen, whether and to what extent Social Darwinist conceptions have entered into the horizon of persons in responsible positions. Unfortunately the tools for such an undertaking are lacking. For example, little biographical material on the bourgeois "rightist opposition"—the gathering place for nationalistic activists under the empire and the sphere which is of chief interest to us here—has thus far become available. This applies still more to the authors and groups whose dissatisfaction with the heritage of the nineteenth century found expression in criticism of civiliza-

THE ORIGINS OF THE HOLOCAUST Hans-Günter Zmarzlik tion and reform movements of all sorts. Along with investigations of this kind, a chronological table of the sales figures for publications which either ran into large editions or otherwise attracted attention would be helpful, as would a lexicographical work giving the circulation figures, editorial board, distribution area, type of readers, special aims, etc. of the more important periodicals (and, if possible, newspapers as well). In a word, any attempt to explore the phenomenon of Social Darwinism points up the necessity of expanding the traditional history of ideas into a social history of ideas.14 T h e urgency of this need is not confined to our special problem; it concerns problems confronting historical research in general, at least in the period extending from the late nineteenth century to the present day. For, to cite Meinecke's image, the history of ideas is like the ascension of a peak in "an ideal mountain range." In striving to show how "the essence of events is reflected" in leading minds, 15 it leaves concrete history far behind. Nevertheless it has made a significant contribution to the elucidation of concrete history because in the modern era down to the middle of the nineteenth century the social structure and the workings of tradition were such that inferences of general historical relevance can be made from the works of the great political thinkers and interpreters of history from Machiavelli to Hegel, and even up to Ranke and Treitschke. This has been less true since the old European social forms and mechanisms of domination were broken down by the dynamic of technological, industrial, and social change. Since then the historical process has undergone a transformation—deplored by Huizinga—that obliges the historian to deal more than before with collective phenomena and statistics.16 T h e traditional dividing line between a relatively small group of recognized cultural and political protagonists and the great masses of the population who undergo history has been blurred, and this in

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turn has changed the relationships between ideas and actions, spirit and politics. It is becoming less and less possible to interpret history on the strength of a few unifying categories. Instead we encounter an inflation of competing outlooks which relativize one another. As the number of those who contribute to the formation of the political will increases, their intellectual level drops and with it their ability to make productive use of ideas. Specialized education and semi-education become dominant; appeals to the emotions and passions, the suggestive force of the demagogic will and of irrational mythical images crowd out rational arguments and form the integrating nuclei of conglomerates of ideas which invoke cultural traditions with which they often have little more in common than borrowed catchwords. Thus the factor of transformation is favored over against the factor of continuity, while ideal values and aims become far more than before a manipul a t e raw material in the hands of mere technicians of demagogy. But even under these circumstances a relation still subsists between political behavior and the way in which each historic situation is interpreted. A situation is never a sum of facts; it is a horizon seen in contours imprinted by the prevailing culture. T o this extent the behavior of the most pragmatic politician or the most primitive demagogue, and of their blindest supporters as well, is indirectly culture-determined and can consequently be elucidated on the basis of cultural forms. But the operation is more difficult than it was before. Our selection of phenomena to investigate must be determined not by intellectual rank but by demonstrable effect; since we shall be dealing with phenomena of low intellectual density and rationality, we must avoid overly literal definitions and interpretations of positions and attitudes if connections are to be made visible between a multiplicity of coexisting and overlapping trends. In other words: Anyone inquiring into the influence of ideas on actions in this

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sphere of history, or seeking a reflection if not the very essence of events in ideas, must come down from the high mountains,

forgo magnificent panoramas, and in the

manner indicated above investigate the plain where these small minds dwell. T h e n alone will it become possible to understand the "crude naturalism and biologism" whose significance for political thinking was pointed out by Treitschke and more recently by Meinecke. 17 This brings us back to the question of the influence that can be attributed to Social Darwinism. First it should be noted that the Social Darwinist authors of the second wave never received remotely as much public attention as those exponents of "philosophical" Darwinism who attacked the Christian doctrines of Creation and Incarnation. Many such attacks were made during the sixties and seventies in the Western cultural sphere.18 It was in Germany, however, that they assumed the most spectacular forms. Here, even before Darwin, Bible criticism and materialism had fostered skepticism toward Christian revelation. A t the time of the Kulturkampf

the arguments

provided by Darwin's theory were exploited all the more ruthlessly by vulgar liberalistic thinkers. It was thus that Ernst Haeckel became one of the best-known and most controversial figures of his day. His polemics and those of his companions in arms19 were held to be so dangerous that in the early eighties, for fear of the poison of Darwinist monism, the teaching of biology was forbidden in the upper classes of the secondary schools, first in Prussia and then in the rest of Germany—a prohibition which, with some exceptions, remained in force for three decades. Another striking indication of the importance of a Darwinism twisted into a philosophy is the enormous success of Haeckel's Welträtsel.20

Appearing in 1900 and soon trans-

lated into twenty languages, the book sold more than 300,000 copies in Germany alone by 1914 and 100,000 more in the next decade. These two examples indicate the two social spheres in

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in

Germany

which we shall have to investigate the influence of Social Darwinist thinking. Haeckel had at first attracted the attention of Kulturkampf liberals b e l o n g i n g to the upper bourgeoisie. B u t by the turn of the century the educated bourgeoisie had ceased to be greatly impressed either by the crude monistic materialism that now assumed a particularly crass form in his writing or by his bitter attacks on the clergy. Haeckel had m e a n w h i l e been outdistanced by the progress of science and his philosophy had reduced itself to the absurd. T o the intellectual w o r l d he was no more than a voice from the grave. B u t where ignorance of science, semi-education, and a tendency to criticize the established authorities c o i n c i d e d — i n sections of the w o r k i n g class, a m o n g the declassed petty bourgeoisie, and in the y o u n g of all classes—this half-baked book made a p r o f o u n d impression. T h i s is indicated by canvasses made at the time, by statements to be f o u n d in autobiographies, and by the more than ιο,οοο letters received by the author. W i t h this book Social Darwinist t h i n k i n g reached the social groups from which the radical elements of the nationalist m o v e m e n t w o u l d later issue, and the socialist workers as well. T h i s influence, to be sure, cannot be defined w i t h precision. Essentially Haeckel's following was an antimovement; that is, the readers of his book were attracted less by w h a t the book advocated (a nature religion on a pseudoDarwinist foundation) than by what it attacked and how. A n attempt in 1907 to enlist the like-minded in a monist association under Haeckel's patronage b r o u g h t meager results. A l l this indicates that philosophical D a r w i n i s m as such was not an independent basis for orientation, but merely one factor in a more comprehensive vulgar enlightenment whose adherents were c o m m i t t e d to a scientific interpretation of the world, the belief in progress and views r a n g i n g f r o m anticlerical to anti-Christian. It is even more difficult to define the specific influence of bio-organic social theories. It was in any event m u c h

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smaller in Germany than in England and particularly the United States, to which Social Darwinist conceptions had spread chiefly through the work of Herbert Spencer and where they were well received thanks to a climate of extreme political and economic laissez-faire liberalism. In Germany

Spencer's

positivist

evolutionism

appealed

chiefly to the Marxists, because it attached to a far greater extent than the Darwinian theory to the thesis that functionally acquired characteristics were hereditary and consequently laid special stress on the formative power of the social environment. Still, as "the most radical exponent of individualism" among the sociologists of his day, Spencer was only partially acceptable to the Marxists.21 He met with little response among the more stateminded members of the German liberal

bourgeoisie,

especially as his crude naturalism was rejected by the great majority. His chief importance in Germany was to have prepared the way for Darwin—after all, he had developed the basic principles of his evolutionist thinking before Darwin. He had been made known to a broad public chiefly by the works of Ludwig Büchner (1824-1899), who before Haeckel was the most widely read exponent of scientific materialism.22 But even in Büchner the influence of Darwin and Haeckel overshadowed that of Spencer from the sixties on. There was no lack of independent German attempts to construct sociological theories on the basis of Darwinist biology, but they were either ephemeral 23 or owed their influence to concepts deriving less from Social Darwinism than from the philosophical tradition of German idealism.24 Whereas the Social Darwinism of the first, evolutionist phase reached bourgeois and socialist circles alike, the second, selectionist phase was rejected by the Socialist camp. Its interpretation of the social process as an unrestricted struggle of forces fighting blindly for their right to live

RACISM, THE OCCULT, AND EUGENICS Social Darwinism in Germany ran counter to Marxist ideology, as did the rejection, by the racial anthropologists and racial hygienists alike, of the environment theory and of egalitarian principles. A t the same time the Social Darwinist audience within the bourgeois camp shifted to the extreme political right. But even here the most radical forms of the second phase of Social Darwinism, especially its consciously antihumanitarian and anti-Christian ethics, met with little response because they were too sharply opposed to the spirit of Wilhelminian Germany. 25 T h e y had few active proponents. W e need mention only two extremely active publicists, Friedrich von Hellwald (1842-1892), who in addition to numerous articles published a gloomily fatalistic Kulturgeschichte in ihrer natürlichen Entwicklung [Cultural History in its Natural Development] which ran into four editions from 1874 to 189ο,26 and Alexander Tille (1866-1912), who attracted attention in the nineties by his radical critique of Christian humanitarian ethics.27 T h e most essential contribution of Darwinism to the political thinking at the turn of the century has rightly been held to be the brutality emanating from the idea of the struggle for existence. Social Darwinist authors were among the most vociferous advocates of ruthlessly imperialist policies. These authors were more influential in the Anglo-Saxon countries 28 than in Germany, where only a few obscure writers based their arguments for imperialism directly on Social Darwinism. 29 In Germany, however, an extremely militant body of publicists proclaimed that the struggle for existence was both necessary and salutory in the lives of nations, and were still doing so at the turn of the century when in the Anglo-Saxon countries the tide of imperialist passion had ebbed and such voices had quickly died down. But these nationalist writers, among whom Theodor von Bernhardi was the best known, were not Social Darwinists. They borrowed more or less dis-

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connected catchwords from Social Darwinism, but did not consistently apply the Darwinian theory to the interpreta tion of the politicosocial process. Such political writers found it possible to conciliate the progressive naturalization of political concepts, which found its expression in a willingness to adopt certain Darwinisms, with a sense of pursuing high ethical aims. In retrospect, of course, it is only too obvious that this attitude was a fa9ade. Thus it seems reasonable to suppose that sections of the bourgeoisie gradually became blinded to the immoralizing effect of a brutal struggle-forexistence ideology such as that subsequently advocated by Hitler. Hitler's vulgar Darwinistic monism also indicates that radical Social Darwinist ideas must have been massively propagated on a socially lower level. T h e middle links are probably to be sought in Austria, where the seemingly unbridgeable antagonisms between nationalities and the bitter struggles for national liberation made the older Social Darwinism seem more plausible than in prewar Germany. Also the shock of the defeat of 1866, felt to be a triumph of brute force and unscrupulousness over justice, operated in the same direction. For it is men who feel that they have been unjustly defeated who become most keenly aware that political and social life are essentially a struggle. These motives were demonstrably determinant in Hellwald, a former Austrian officer; the same applies to the beginnings of sociology in Austria, which are associated with the names of Ludwig Gumplowicz (18381909) and Gustav Ratzenhofer (1842-1904).30 Here again the idea of struggle occupied a central position and Darwinism exerted a powerful influence. It also influenced certain political leaders, as can be seen from the memoirs of Conrad von Hötzendorf. Such examples permit us to infer that works such as Hellwald's and of even more popular purveyors of Social Darwinism gained

RACISM, THE OCCULT, AND EUGENICS Social Darwinism in Germany wider influence in Austria than in Germany. T h e matter has not yet been systematically investigated. 31 T h e younger Social Darwinism also found its first expressions outside of Germany. T h e most internationally known and at the same time the most radical exponent of the anthropological trend was the Frenchman Georges Vacher de Lapouge, whose chief works appeared in the nineties. 32 However, he remained an isolated case in his own country. T h e ideas of the racial hygiene school were first put forward by Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, who as early as the sixties stressed the hereditary character of intelligence, believed he had discovered that gifted persons tended to have fewer children than others, and from such observations developed a new branch of applied science which he later called eugenics.33 Its purpose was to develop means of improving the innate qualities of individuals for the greater good of the community, while respecting the values of the liberal social order. Most of his successors continued in this ethically inoffensive direction. Only a few English authors put forward more radical demands.34 T h e first German exponents of a scientifically grounded (at least in its own opinion) social biology also aimed to avoid conflict with the imperatives of humanitarianism. But gradually humanitarian considerations were crowded out by concern for the future of their own people—fostered at first by the nationalistic power politics of the early twentieth century and later, after the military and political catastrophe of the First World War, by a desire to help a defeated and weakened Germany to rise again. T h e German school took its orientation neither from Lapouge nor from Galton, but started out independently. It came in, as it were, with the new century: on January 1, 1900, the head of the firm of Krupp offered an unusually

THE ORIGINS OF THE HOLOCAUST Hans-Günter Zmarzlik high prize for the best essay on the question: "What does the theory of descendance teach us in regard to the internal political development and legislation of states?" The papers submitted showed a conspicuous sociological trend which, as the concluding r£sum£ declared, confronted the state with novel tasks. Ideas of this kind had been in the air for ten years but now the appearance of two new periodicals gave them shape and form. The racial anthropologists rallied round the Politisch-Anthropologische Revue, which was founded in 1902, 35 while from 1904 on the program of the racial hygienists was put forward in Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie.36 In the prewar period each of these publications had an average circulation of 1,200; then the former went quickly downhill, suspending publication in 1922, while the Archiv increased its circulation in the twenties and still more after 1933, and continued to appear until 1941. The racial anthropologists had no common program or organizational cohesion. Yet, though few in number, they were untiring publicists. On the whole their scientific qualifications were more than questionable, but a few of them enjoyed a certain reputation, as for example—to cite the most prominent—Otto Ammon (1842-1915), engineer, journalist, and anthropologist, who received the degree of doctor honoris causa from the University of Freiburg for his anthropological-statistical work on the population of Baden, and Ludwig Woltmann (18711907), physician, philosopher, and ethnologist, who gained a considerable reputation with his attempts to show by iconographical methods that the leading lights of European culture were of Germanic blood. T h e racial anthropologists found their main audience among the nationalist right-wing opposition, which began in the nineties to organize outside the political parties. Their arguments were welcomed by those who were trying to build up national consciousness on the basis of the

RACISM, THE OCCULT, AND EUGENICS Social Darwinism in Germany

racial idea. Characteristic of this trend was the founding of a Gobineau society in 1902. Its sponsors included the Pan-German League, the Deutschbund [German Federation], the Ostmarkverein [East March Association], the German School Association, the Association of German Students, the German-National Association of Commercial Employees, and a number of sectarian nationalist groups. This list indicates the principal area accessible to racial-anthropological ideas, but not their degree of influence. For though membership in organizations can mean a good deal, it usually means very little. For present purposes it is probably rather significant in the case of the Deutschbund and the Pan-German League, because their leaders made a serious effort to forge racial theory into a political weapon. After the First World War, when the publications of the racial anthropologists had become obsolete and their magazine failed, their efforts were continued in a rather less crude form and with far greater success by the racial writings of Hans F. K. Günther, whose Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes?"1 sold over 50,000 copies by 1932. The high esteem in which Günther was held even then by the National Socialists is shown by the fact that in 1930 Wilhelm Frick, then minister of the interior of Thuringia, obtained a chair for him at the University of Jena over the opposition of the faculty and Senate. In 1905 the racial hygienists provided themselves with an organizational base, the Society for Racial Hygiene,38 with a clearly formulated program. The society never attained a large membership, but included a relatively high percentage of academicians from whose influence and social prestige it benefitted. Before the war, however, racial hygiene had no very broad audience; only the Deutschbund, a highly active group but with no more than a few hundred members, featured the demands of the racial hygienists in its program. But after the war, which had so forcefully demonstrated the importance of "human mate-

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rial" and created in Germany a favorable climate for the idea of a biological renewal, public interest in questions of population policy and eugenics increased. Well-known periodicals such as Süddeutsche Monatshefte opened their pages to racial hygiene. An attempt was also made to attract the interest of educated nonspecialists: in addition to Archiv a new, less specialized periodical, Eugenics, was founded; 39 new local groups were formed,40 and lecturers became more active. Of course all this amounted to very little in the light of the keenly felt necessity of showing a nation of seventy millions new ways. Only on the extreme right wing of the political front, where racism and antiSemitism, hence the dogma of biological inequality, was a central ideological factor, were the demands of the racial hygienists taken up, though agitators made little use of them. Thus until 1932 racial hygiene played only a modest, marginal role. With the National Socialist seizure of power it suddenly gained in importance, and with it to an even greater degree, "racial science." 41 T h e younger Social Darwinism provided the vague "racial" and sociobiological ideas of the National Socialists with a supposedly scientific justification and a certain clarity of formulation indispensable for purposes of indoctrination. Moreover, Social Darwinism offered a theoretical basis for practical sociobiological measures. In this sense the spadework of the younger Social Darwinists helped to make possible the sociobiological practice of the Third Reich. It confirmed the National Socialists in their certainty that biologicoracial quality was the highest criterion for the worth and historical rank of individuals and nations and that by systematically employing scientific and technical methods they would be able to control and modify this quality. Thus the younger Social Darwinism exerted a historical influence less by its direct appeal to the masses than by its formulations of plans and methods for the reorganization of society on a biologistic foundation.

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T h e development is generally known: starting out with legal measures to prevent the transmission of hereditary ills, which, though the voluntary principle was already abandoned, were by and large confined to a limited number of scientifically definable pathological conditions, it led to the mass extermination of so-called "unworthy life" —and later to plans and experimental preparation for the sterilization of whole peoples, whose realization was prevented only by the collapse of the Third Reich. Even more sinister was the development leading from the theoretical postulate that the Jews were an alien body endangering the people to social discrimination against them and finally to their physical extermination. Nevertheless it would be a crude oversimplification to derive this descent into barbarism directly from Social Darwinist impulses. T o be sure, Social Darwinist elements played a significant role in Hitler's ideas. But the virulent form they ultimately assumed cannot be blamed entirely on Social Darwinist efforts. A number of internal and external factors were here at work, not the least important of which were certain very personal qualities of the dictator and the opportunity for unrestricted coercion offered during the Second World War. These factors explain in part why it was now possible to sweep aside the previously existing barriers to race hatred which had hitherto stood in the way of a crude biologistic "national health" program. But how such ideas of national health and racial valuation arose cannot be adequately understood unless Social Darwinism is taken into consideration. Though the acts of barbarism performed in the interest of national health cannot be termed the necessary consequences of Social Darwinism, it is fair to say that Social Darwinism provided the ideological and practical conditions without which such actions would not have been possible. This brings us to the question: T o what degree were the proponents of Socialist Darwinist thinking respon-

THE ORIGINS OF THE HOLOCAUST Hans-Günter Zmarzlik sible for the crimes committed in the Third Reich in the name of biologism and racism? Let us concede that they did not will these crimes. Nevertheless, we should be falling short of the truth were we to regard them as mere victims of a historical process for which they, with their ethical attitude and political aims, were to no significant degree responsible. In view of their aims as here set forth it cannot come as a surprise that the racial hygienists—not to mention the proponents of "racial science"—wished the National Socialists to take power. True, they criticized the crude radicalism of the National Socialists, but this meant little beside their feeling of fundamental agreement. T h e younger Social Darwinism and the folkish movement stemmed from very similar ideological positions. They were united in their rejection of industrial society and democracy and in their admiration for a social order based on a class elite; in their condemnation of mechanistic, materialistic civilization in favor of an "organic" culture; in their critique of liberal individualism, to which they opposed a sense of community rooted in a racial and national bond. In short: they concurred in their resentmentcharged protest against the processes of restratification that had been set in motion by the political and industrial revolutions of the modern era. They also shared the conviction that the future of the German people could be secured only on the basis of natural inequality, that is, in the last analysis, by a new social order hinging on sociobiological and racial criteria—and that such a social order could be brought about only by a resolute statesman wielding enormous power. Thus it is hardly to be wondered at that as early as 1931 the Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie declared Hitler to be the only political figure of any weight to have recognized the signs of the times. All misgivings (and these, it must be stressed, were by no means lacking) were

RACISM, THE OCCULT, AND EUGENICS Social Darwinism in Germany submerged by the hope of at last seeing racial hygiene applied on a large scale. Consequently Hitler's assurance that in questions decisive for the future being or nonbeing of the German people he would not be deterred by petty, typically bourgeois scruples, that he would not, for example, confine the sterilization of inferior persons to extreme cases, was taken as a promise rather than a warning. 42 Even after 1933 satisfaction at the desired turn of events was the dominant note in the utterances of the racial hygienists, which culminated in the following profession of faith: The significance of racial hygiene in Germany has for the first time been made evident to all enlightened Germans by the work of Adolf Hitler, and it is thanks to him that the dream we have cherished for more than thirty years of seeing racial hygiene converted into action has become reality.43 True, the racial hygienists expected Hitler to adhere to the advice of the recognized specialists, that is, themselves. And they personally were inclined to carry out their intentions by humane methods. But their attitude was also influenced by the maxim, rooted in their own special science, that a desirable end (namely, the success of social biology) justified even inhuman means. Thus they became after 1933 apologists for measures whose inhuman cruelty they privately deplored. Typical of this is the statement in which one of the leading figures of the German Society for Racial Hygiene, the respected anthropologist Eugen Fischer, commented in 1934 on measures of this sort taken by Hitler: Many highly estimable and valuable human beings who are quite willing to adjust themselves [to the new order] have been struck hard and cruelly. Is any sacrifice too great when a whole people is to be saved? Did the war not cost precisely this people infinitely more of its precious hereditary lines? Folk renewal, the conscious culti-

THE ORIGINS OF THE HOLOCAUST Hans-Günter Zmarzlik vation of the race, is raising a people from the abyss to which the so-called culture of the past decades has brought it.44 In a word: the folkish idea grounded in racial biology proved stronger than humanitarian reservations or concern for individual human rights. Such attitudes prevailed far beyond the confines of the younger Social Darwinism. Thus we may say that Social Darwinism was indeed historically significant as a pars pro to to. When in the perspective of the history of ideas we look back over the early thirties, we cannot but be struck by the failure of those members of the educated bourgeoisie who opened the way to Hitler more by toleration than by activism to react more strongly against the crude biologism of National Socialist ideology. T h e elucidation of this complex is of greater historical relevance than the search for the men who provided Hitler with his ideas. For to the man of today Hitler remains an alien phenomenon, a singular caricature of human potentialities, in whom he is not likely to recognize himself. T h e same is not true of Hitler's contemporary, the estimable well-intentioned citizen who incurred grave historical responsibility by neglecting to do the right thing at the right time. T h a t is a situation with which every man can identify himself. T o confront it as a historical example is to learn for the future. In the present case, to be sure, this involves special difficulties. For the investigation of the state of consciousness and political ideas of the German bourgeoisie of the Wilhelminian and Weimar periods is barely in its beginnings and must moreover deal with extraordinary complexities. Many forces of diverse origin are at work. W e can determine certain central trends, but the relations between them are confusingly intricate. T h e contours are blurred, the phenomena merge. In this situation the younger Social Darwinism provides a valuable guiding thread precisely because we are

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able to isolate it. Its representatives can be followed continuously from the turn of the century on; and moreover they were obliged to concentrate and to formulate their ideas clearly because it was through scientific solutions that they hoped to bridge the gap between the social reality of their day and the social development to which they aspired. True, their "scientific solutions" do not hold water. But what they had to say is more clearly formulated and hence easier to understand than any other statements of comparable relevance. We may attribute such relevance to the younger Social Darwinism because behind its strictly sociobiological aims—but related to them—impulses are discernible which were at work in circles of the German bourgeoisie extending far beyond Social Darwinism. Though these circles may have looked on racial hygiene as something far removed from them and on racial science as the concern of others, they nevertheless shared with the racial hygientists and racial scientists the ideological positions which, as we have shown, led the younger Darwinists to look upon the rise of National Socialism as a promising development. How then could they have been expected to take up arms resolutely against the dogma of the natural inequality of men and races? Under these circumstances even those who did not hold the racist and antiSemitic ideas of the National Socialists and were personally opposed to all violation of human dignity were no longer able to take a reasoned stand against biologism or to realize that a decision in favor of the National Socialist state amounted to a vote against humanity. T h e younger Social Darwinism was symptomatic of the gradual growth of such blindness to values, and in Social Darwinism this process can be observed in its most central and fateful aspect: the effacing of those limits which respect for the personal dignity of the individual had hitherto imposed on the demands of the social organism. T h e younger Social Darwinism not only reflected

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but at the same time radicalized this trend; it was not only an expression of far-reaching currents, but also the motive force behind them, and this was also true of the older forms of Social Darwinism, first in the liberalistic, then in the imperialist era. If amid the situationconditioned transformations of Social Darwinist thinking we look for a constant that may enable us to view it as a whole and to determine its specific share in the overall development, we may say that Social Darwinism posits a causal or final relationship between the human individual and natural (or more precisely, scientifically interpreted) development. His personal worth is derived first from his biological origin and then from his biological efficiency. T h e inviolable and indivisible dignity of man is degraded to the level of a variable, measurable against the standard of what is desirable for the health of the people and subject to regulation by correction and planning. Thus almost imperceptibly the individual becomes human material, and the road is opened to state policies that ultimately equate the right to live with biological utility. Thus an analysis of Social Darwinism reveals a process of declining standards, accompanied by a tendency to sacrifice the individual to the species, to devaluate the humanitarian idea of equality from the standpoint of a "natural" inequality, to subordinate ethical norms to biological needs. T h e rise of the Darwinist social diagnosis and therapy goes hand in hand with the decline of the human rights that safeguard the domain of the individual against arbitrary encroachments. Undoubtedly this development was not in the intentions of most Social Darwinists. It nevertheless stands out clearly in retrospect. The study of Social Darwinism reveals a segment of a degenerative process that has become more and more pronounced in the last hundred years—the decline of ethics as a social determinant. This places our subject in a timely context. Here it

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touches on a problem that is not confined to the prehistory and history of the Third Reich. For there is evidence enough in every field of social life—from everyday occurrences to international affairs—that this process has gone still further. True, Social Darwinism no longer plays a part in it. Not only because it was discredited by Hitler's crimes, but also because the empirical and epistemological progress of biology have deprived the Social Darwinist conceptions of their last semblance of credibility. The more recent findings make it impossible to view biological development as progressive and unilinear; they oblige us to draw a fundamental distinction between biological and psychological evolution. Another of their consequences is that the principle of selection, important as it still is, has receded into more complex contexts and taken its place beside other such factors as mutation, inheritance, and the formation of distinctive species in determining the evolutionary process. Further, the enormous deepening of our knowledge of genetics over the last few decades has conclusively demonstrated the fallacy of regarding the inherited constitution of man as a socially decisive factor, let alone of explaining the rise and fall of nations on the basis of genetics. And finally, in view of the enormous complexity that the biological process has today assumed for the scientific observer, and of the correspondingly refined methods employed by biologists, including the mathematization of data, modern biology has ceased to offer concrete, visual models that can be adduced for the popular interpretation of the social process. Thus Social Darwinism is a historical phenomenon in the full sense of the word. But at the same time it provides an access to the enduring question of the relation of modern biology to society, social ethics, and humanity. What is meant by this can be shown by the example of the efforts of the racial hygienists. They took as their point of departure empirically demonstrable hereditary injuries

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which can arise under the conditions of modern civilization, thus accepting a challenge which scientists could not ignore once they had gained awareness of it. In practice, however, they tried to accomplish too much with too little knowledge, because they were misled by extrascientific motives and aims. In consequence they contributed to a triumph of inhumanity. Still, if we disregard the element of demonstrable scientific error and political blindness in their work, there still remains a problematical core, namely the question: How can insights and methods developed within a specialized discipline, which necessarily derives its orientation from natural science, be applied to social questions without producing dangerous effects? Of course society cannot dispense with biological health, but it is regulated by norms that cannot but be impaired by the systematic application of biological principles. For the norms which have thus far determined the self-understanding and social conduct of our cultural sphere are oriented by "superreal" values deriving from the tradition of two and a half millennia. They have been rendered questionable by the findings of an empirical biology which in the last hundred years, the age of Darwin, have penetrated so deep into the structural and functional principles of living nature as to provide hitherto undreamed-of possibilities of acting upon the human physis and psyche and hence of manipulating social life. This conflict is the lasting problematic core of the ephemeral, situation-conditioned errors of the Social Darwinists. In our own times it has further increased in importance. With every advance of knowledge man's power to intervene in social and biological processes in accordance with his plans and desires increases. Spurred on by the power conflicts between states, pressed by numerous problems in an age of headlong political, economic, and technological revolutions, but also needlessly seduced by the possibility of controlling individual destinies even

RACISM, THE OCCULT, AND EUGENICS Social Darwinism in Germany where it involves manipulation of the reproductive process, man is availing himself of the means that science offers. And with every step in this direction not only the functioning of the social mechanisms but man himself becomes more dependent on the achievements of science, so that he tends more and more to seek the solution of all problems in scientific, pragmatic calculation. T h e Darwinian theory was a revolutionary breakthrough in this direction. Like all progress in the natural and social sciences, it brought with it an enormous increase in man's knowledge of the material conditions of social life and hence in his freedom of action. But the use that the Social Darwinists made of this increased knowledge indicates its potential threat to a humane social order. This insight points the way to special tasks. Since the sciences cannot stop providing society with more and more far-reaching instruments of power, it becomes more than ever incumbent upon them to provide better conditions for the proper use of such power. History makes a contribution to this task when it systematically investigates the interdependences between scientific development and the politicosocial process of the nineteenth and twentieth century and studies the decline of the traditional "superreal" values in favor of pragmatic, positivist, or even naturalistic maxims of conduct. 46 By creating awareness of this process through descriptive analysis, it can reasonably hope not only to elucidate the past, but also to lay bare constitutive factors and latent possibilities of the present, contributing to a realistic (in the deepest sense of the word) and hence productive answer to the most urgent problems of our day.

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NOTES ι. T h e term first appears in German in an article by the sociologist S. R. Steinmetz in Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft, Vol. IX, 1906, pp. 483 ff. T h e first critical survey pointing out the possible dangerous consequences of Social Darwinist thinking to appear in Germany is provided by the sociologist O. Hertwig in his book, Zur Abwehr des ethischen, des sozialen, des politischen Darwinismus, igi8. 2. T h e most penetrating account to date is that of Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Utopien der Menschenzüchtung. Der Sozialdarwinismus und seine Folgen, 1955. Her theses are rejected by Fritz Lenz, "Die soziologische Bedeutung der Selektion," in G. Heberer and F. Schwanitz, eds., Hundert Jahre Evolutionsforschung. Das wissenschaftliche Vermächtnis Charles Darwins, i960, pp. 385 ff. Cf. also Georg Lukics, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, 1954, pp. 537 ff; Karl Salier, Die Rassenlehre des Nationalsozialismus in Wissenschaft und Propaganda, 1961. 3. Cf. Lenz, loc. cit., p. 369. 4. Cf. Sir William C. Dampier, Geschichte der Naturwissenschaft in ihrer Beziehung zu Philosophie und Weltanschauung, 1952; Stephen F. Mason, Geschichte der Naturwissenschaft in der Entwicklung ihrer Denkweisen. 5. Quoted from Julian Huxley, "Darwin und der Gedanke der Evolution," in Heberer and Schwanitz, op. cit., p. 3. 6. T h e German translation of "struggle for life" by Kampf ums Dasein, current from the very first, is an intensification of Darwin's meaning. Darwin's " 'struggle' means competitive rivalry and not Kampf [fight, war, battle]. He distinguishes sharply between 'struggle' and 'war' (or 'fight'), and employs the latter terms only once: in connection with sexual selection, when two males fight over a female." W. Ludwig, "Die Selektionstheorie," in Die Evolution der Organismen. Ergebnisse und Problems der Abstammunglehre, ed. G. Heberer, 2nd ed., 1959, Vol. II, p. 666. 7. Cf. F. Wieacker, "Rudolph von Ihering (1812-1892)," in Wieacker, Gründer und Bewahrer. Rechtslehrer der neueren deutschen Privatrechtsgeschichte, 1959, pp. 197 ff.; quotation, p. 207. 8. R. Goldscheid, in Das Jahr 1913. Das Gesamtbild der Kulturentwicklung, ed. D. Sarason, 1913, p. 425. 9. T h e words of Max von Gruber, the Munich hygienist, quoted in ibid., p. 367. 10. Cf. Ε. Mühlmann, Geschichte der Anthropologie, 1948, pp. 9« ff·

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u . This aim is stated by Ludwig Woltmann, a leading prewar proponent of the racial anthropology school, in his chief work, Politische Anthropologie. Eine Untersuchung über den Einfluss der Descendenztheorie auf die Lehre von der politischen Entwicklung der Völker, 1903, p. 1. i s . O n the potentialities and limits of scientific social anthropology, cf. Ilse Schwidetzky, Grundzüge der Völkerbiologie, 1950, and Das Menschenbild der Biologie. Ergebnisse und Probleme der naturwissenschaftlichen Anthropologie, 1959. 13. E. Baur, E. Fischer, F. Lenz, Grundriss der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene, 4th ed., 1932, Vol. II, p. 419. 14. Cf. also Alvar Ellegard, "Public Opinion and the Press: Reactions to Darwinism," Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 19, 1958. PP- 379 ff· 15. F. Meinecke, Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte, ed. and with an introduction by W. Hofer, 1957, p. 24. 16. Cf. W. Conze, Die Strukturgeschichte des technisch-industriellen Zeitalters als Aufgabe für Forschung und Unterricht, 1957. 17. Meinecke, op. cit., p. 480. 18. An instructive survey is provided by Η . Hermelink, Das Christentum in der Menschheitsgeschichte von der französischen Revolution bis zur Gegenwart, Vol. III, Nationalismus und Sozialismus, 1955' PP· *>5 ff-> 445 19. Among Haeckel's immediate disciples the most successful popularizer was Ernst Krause, editor in chief of Kosmos. Zeitschrift für einheitliche Weltanschauung auf Grund der Entwicklunglehre, a monthly founded in 1877, and also (under the pseudonym Carus Sterne) author of a Darwinist cosmology, Werden und Vergehen. Eine Entwicklungs-Geschichte des Naturganzen in gemeinverständlicher Fassung, 1876; 6th ed., 1905. Ludwig Büchner took a similar direction, though his work was begun before Darwin and he is more independent: Kraft und Stoff, 1955; 21st ed., 1904. Another highly influential work was David Friedrich Strauss, Der alte und der neue Glaube. Ein Bekenntnis, 1872; 11th ed., 1882, a disavowal of the Christian religion based on Darwin. 20. E. Haeckel, Die Welträtsel. Gemeinverständliche Studien über monistische Philosophie, Bonn, 1899. 21. Cf. L. von Wiese, Soziologie, Geschichte und Hauptprobleme, 4th ed., 1950, p. 62. 22. Cf. note 19 above. 23. E.g., by Paul von Lilienfeld (1829-1903), the most consistent advocate of a Darwinist theory of society. Principal work: Gedanken über die Sozialwissenschaft der Zukunft, Parts 1 - 5 , Mitau, 18731881. 24. E.g., Albert Schäffle (1831-1903), who made a significant contribution to the development of sociology in Germany. Principal work: Bau und Leben des Sozialen Körpers, 4 vols., T ü b i n g e n ,

THE ORIGINS OF THE HOLOCAUST Hans-Günter Zmarzlik 1875-1878, Schaffte was guided to a very considerable extent by bio-organic ideas, but basically, to cite L. von Wiese, he was "closer to Hegel and Schelling than to Darwin, Spencer, or Haeckel." 25. Nietzsche is a special case. He was often been regarded quite mistakenly as a Social Darwinist because of a superficial resemblance between his radical critique of the Christian humanitarian tradition and certain Social Darwinist theses. Nietzsche was of course influenced by the Darwinian theory, though he probably knew it only at second hand and in a strongly Lamarckian coloration, as has been demonstrated by Charles Andler in Nietzsche, sa vie et pensee, 5 vols., Paris, 1920-1930. T h e influence of Darwinism on Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole has never been seriously investigated. Only on the basis of such an investigation will it be possible to engage in a meaningful discussion of Nietzsche's Social Darwinism. 26. F. von Hellwald, Culturgeschichte in ihrer natürlichen Entwicklung von den ältesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart, 2 vols., 1874. 27. Cf. the anonymously published book, Volksdienst. Von einem Sozialaristokraten, Berlin and Leipzig, 1893, and especially, Α. Tille, Von Darwin bis Nietzsche, Ein Buch Entwicklungsethik, 1895. 28. In regard to England, cf. William L. Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism, ι8ρο-ιρο2, 2 vols., 1935, pp. 85 ff; to the United States, Richard Hofstadter, op. cit., 2nd ed., 1955, pp. 170 ff. On the relative significance of Social Darwinist elements in the European context of the late nineteenth century, cf. Carlton J . H. Hayes, A Generation of Materialism I8Ji-igoo, 1941, passim. 29. E.g., Claus Wagner, Der Krieg als schaffendes Weltprinzip, 1906, a book occasionally cited by Pan-German authors. 30. T h e most important works of these two authors in this connection: L. Gumplowicz, Rasse und Staat. Eine Untersuchung über das Gesetz der Staatenbildung, 1875, and Der Rassenkampf, 1883; G. Ratzenhofer, Wesen und Zweck der Politik also Theil der Soziologie und Grundlage der Staatswissenschaften, 3 vols., 1893. 3 1 . A beginning of such an investigation in Wilfried Daim, Der Mann, der Hitler die Ideen gab. Von den religiösen Verirrungen eines Sektierers zum Rassenwahn des Diktators, 1958. T h e writings of Lanz von Liebenfels, the Austrian racial fanatic and religious enthusiast, exploited by Daim, often came close to Social Darwinist ideas. Unfortunately this book is confined almost exclusively to the person of Lanz and does not fulfill the promise of its title. 32. Main works: Les Selections sociales, 1893; L'Aryen, son role social, 1899. 33. Principal works: Hereditary Genius. An Inquiry into Its Law and Consequences, 1869; Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, 1883. 34. As for example in J o h n B. Haycraft, Darwinism and Race Progress, 1895, 2nd ed., 1900; Charles H. Harvey, The Biology of British Politics, 1904.

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35. Full title: Politisch-Anthropologische Revue. Monatsschrift für das soziale und geistige Leben der Völker. Founder and editor (until 1907), Ludwig Woltmann. 36. Full title: Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie einschliesslich Rassen- und Gesellschafts-Hygiene. Zeitschrift für die Erforschung des wesens von Rasse und Gesellschaft und ihres gegenseitigen Verhältnis, für die biologischen Bedingungen ihrer Erhaltung und Entwicklung sowie für die grundlegenden Probleme der Entwicklungslehre. The founder and editor (until 1937) was Alfred Ploetz (1860-1940), who after practicing medicine for ten years devoted himself exclusively to racial hygiene. Ploetz coined the term Rassenhygiene [racial hygiene] and explained it in his book Die Tüchtigkeit unserer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen. Ein Versuch über Rassenhygiene und ihr Verhältnis zu den humanen Ideen, besonders zum Sozialismus, 1895. The more prominent of the contributors to Archiv included the following academic scientists, who were also for a time coeditors: the zoologist Ludwig Plate, the psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin, the racial hygienist Fritz Lenz. A special position is occupied by Wilhelm Schallmayer (1857-1919), who as early as 1891 had pointed to the "physical degeneration threatening civilized man" and in the prewar period had written the most complete work on questions of racial hygiene. Strongly opposed to the racism and nationalism of the sociobiological trends, he stood aloof from the main group of racial hygienists around Ploetz. 37. Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes, 1922; 14th ed., 1933; Kleine Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes, 1925; 3rd ed. 1933. 38. From 1911 on it bore the name of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene. In 1914 it had roughly 350 members with local groups in Berlin, Munich, Freiburg, and Stuttgart. 39. Eugenik, Erblehre, Erbpflege. In Verbindung mit E. Fischer, F. Lenz, H. Muckermann, E. Rüdin, O. von Verschuer, ed. A. Ostermann. Sales for 1933: 4,200 (figures unavailable for previous years). 40. From 1924 to '1930 twelve additional local groups were founded in Germany and four in Austria. The membership increased to roughly 1,300. Cf. E. Fischer, "Aus der Gesichte der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene," in AfRGB, Vol. 24, '93°» PP· ι ff· 41. The Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene numbered 68 local groups in 1936; its official organ Volk and Rasse had a circulation of 13,300 in 1939; in 1936 Ploetz obtained the title of professor; in 1938 Ernst Rüdin, who had been its director since 1933, was awarded the Goethe medal for art and science; in 1936 doctorates in racial hygiene were offered at all universities where the subject was taught (Berlin, Munich, Leipzig, Königsberg, Frankfurt a.M.). At the same time information on racial hygiene was intensively disseminated by government and party bureaus, through newspapers, periodicals, schools, and indoctrination courses. At the end of 1934 the Thuring-

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ian Bureau for Racial Matters alone had given two-week courses on racial hygiene, population policy, and the "breeding of families" [züchterische Familienkunde] to some 9,000 members of specified occupation groups (physicians, jurists, mayors, policemen, political leaders, etc). On the subject of racial science suffice it to note that H. F. K. Günther was called to the University of Berlin, that in 1935 he was awarded the newly established NSDAP Prize for Science, and that by 1945 the sales of his books totaled almost half a million. 42. Cf. F. Lenz, "Die Stellung des Nazionalsozialismus zur Rassenhygiene," in A f R G B , Vol. 25, 1931, pp. 300 ff. 43. E. Rüdin, "Aufgaben und Ziele der deutschen Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene," in A f R G B , Vol. »8, 1934, p. 228. 44. E. Fischer, "Erbe," in Mein Heimatland, Vol. 21, 1934, p. 150. 45. An impressive example of the fruitfulness of this undertaking Is provided by F. Wieacker, Privatrechsgeschichte der Neuzeit unter besonderer Berücksichtingung der deutschen Entwicklung, 1952.

RACISM, THE OCCULT, AND EUGENICS THE MYSTICAL ORIGINS OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM B r G. L. Mosen In spite of nearly thirty years of research the intellectiial origins of National Socialism are still shrouded in a darkness as impenetrable ns the mystical ideologies present at its beginnings. Though it is well known that Nietzsche and Wagner were among the predecessors of the movement, the intensity of German national feeling was held to be sufficient explanation for the rise of National Socialist ideology. Today we are forced to realize that a more complex cultural development gave its impress to that movement long before it crystallized into a political party. 1 At the very center of this development were ideas which were not so much of a national as of a rohiantio and mystical nature, part of the revolt against positivism which swept" Europe at the end of the XIXth century. In Germany this revolt took a special turn, perhaps because romanticism struck deeper roots there than elsewhere. This German reaction to positivism became intimately bound up with a belief in nature's cosmic life-force, a dark force whose mysteries could be understood, not through science, but through the occult. An ideology based upon such premises was fused with the glories of an Aryan past, and in turn, that past received a thoroughly romantic and mystical interpretation. This essay intends to throw light on this ideology and to show its connection with later German history. An obvious connection can be Been through some of the men who participated in this stream of thought, men who later became prominent in!the National Socialist movement. However, it seems more meaningful to see such ä connection in terms of an intellectual atmosphere rather than in terms of individuals. Moreover, with this in mind, the youth movement and the country boarding-school (Landerziehungsheime) provide striking examples of a continuity with the 1920's and '30's, though only a brief hint of this can be given within the framework of this essay. We are primarily concerned with the actual formation of this ideology from the 1890'e to the first decade of the XXth century. This is necessary because historians have ignored this stream of .thought as too outr6 to be taken seriously. Who indeed can take seriously an ideology which drew upon the occultiem of Madame Blavatski, rejected science in favor of " seeing with one's soul," and came dangerously close to sun worship? Yet such ideae made a deep impression upon a whole nation. Historians who have dismissed these aspects of romanticism and mysticism have failed to grasp an essential and important ingredient of modern German history. 1

Cf. Jonchim Besser, " Die Vorgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus im neuen Lieht," Die Pforte, II, 21/22 (Nov. 1950), 763-785. Cf. also Crane Brinton, " T h e Nalioiuil Socialists' Use of Nietzsche," this Journal (1940), 131-150.

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THE ORIGINS OF THE HOLOCAUST Like all ideologies, National Socialism was formulated by certain men whose thought appealed to a wide variety of minds. It is from these men that we have drawn our examples. The early formulators of this romantic and mystic world-view were men like Paul de La garde (1827-1891), Guido von List (1848-1919), Alfred Schüler (18G51923), and above all, Julius Langbelm (1S51-J007)* They were popularized by publishers like Eugen Diederichs (1807--JΠΓΪΠ) of .Icna, whose influence was manifest in the diverse branches of the movement. It was Langbehn who pithily summarized their common aim: " to transform Germans into artists." 3 By " artist" these men meant not a certain profession but a certain world-view opposed to that which they called the "man machine." This transformation, which they felt had been omitted when Germany became unified, would convert the materialism and science of contemporary Germany into an artistic outlook upon the world, an outlook which would result in an all-encompassing national renewal. Such a viewpoint was connected to their belief in the cosmic life-force which opposed all that was artificial and man-made. Langbehn in his Rembrandt αβ Educator (1890) supplied the key to this transformation: mysticism was the hidden engine which could transmute science into art.4 Nature-romanticism and the mystical provided the foundation for this ideology. It was no mere coincidence that Eugen Diederichs was the German publisher öf Henri Bergson. He saw in Bergson a mysticism, a " new irrationalistic philosophy," 5 and believed that the development pf Germany could only i progress in opposition to rationalism. The world picture, Diederichs maintained, must be grasped by an intuition which was close to nature. From this source man's spirit must flow and bring him into unity with the community of his people. Such true spirituality Diederichs saw 2

It is significant that one common tie among all those men was their frustration in being denied academic recognition. Schüler and List were kept at arm's length by the academic world whose company they sought, while Paul de Lagarde had to teach in a Gymnasium for twelve years before he finally obtained a chair Rt the University of Göttingen. Julius Langbehn failed to obtain an academic post despite repeated efforts. These experiences undoubtedly deepened their aversion to intellectualism and to what they called academic pedantry. Langbehn's Rembrandt as Educator is full of diatribes against the professors whose World outlook he opposed. Such men were part of what has'been called the "academic proletariat." Langbehn eventually converted to Catholicism (1900)> This is not mentioned in C. T. Carr, " Julius Langbehn—a forerunner of National Socialism/' German Life and Letten, III (1938-1939), 45-64. For Lagarde, see Jean-Jacques Anstett, "Faul de Lagarde," The Third Reich (London, 1955). There is no modern work on List or Schüler. 4 • Julius Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher'(Leipzig; 1900), 8. Ibid., 82. B Eugen Diederichs Leben und Werke; ed. Lulu von Strauss und Torney-Diederichs (Jena, 1936), 180.

RACISM, THE OCCULT, AND EUGENICS reflected in the German mystic Meister Eckhardt (12607-1327?) whose works he had edited; later Alfred Rosenberg returned to Meister Eckhardt for the same reasons. Just as the romantics at the beginning of the XlXth century had opposed the " cold rationality " of antiquity and had found their way back to a more genuine humanity, so Diederichs hailed this movement as a " new romanticism." β Thus, a search for this " genuine humanity " dominated the movement, based upon a closeness to nature for the landscape gave man a heightened feeling for life. When Diederichs organized the gathering of the Free German Youth on the Hohen Meissner mountain in. 1913, Ludwig Klages, the Munich philosopher, told them that modern civilization was "drowning" the soul of man. The only way out for man, who belonged to nature, was a return to mother earth.T Such ideas led naturally to a deepening of the cult of the peasant. Julius Langbehn summed this up: " The peasant who actually owns a piece of land has a direct relationship to the center of the earth. Through this he benoinos master of the universe." 8 In opposition to peasant life there was the city, the seat of cold rationalism. Indeed, this w a s nothing new or unique; Jacob Burckhardt had already written that in cities art became "nervous and unstable." 0 Throughout the XlXth century men had advocated a retreat into the unspoiled landscape away from a society rapidly becoming industrialized and urbanized. But for the " new romanticism " nature did not signify the sole source of human renewal and vitality. Mysticism played a central role in this movement, connected with the concern for man's soul as an embodiment of the cosmic life-force. .Julius Langbehn cited Schiller's phrase that " i t is the soul which builds the body " and added that the outward form of the body was a silhouette of its inner life.10 The portrait painter Burger-Villingen enlarged upon this when he criticized the phrenology of Francis Gall. Gall's measurements of the skull led to serious errors, he claimed, because they comprised only the external influences of man. The important thing was to grasp the nature of man's fate, which was dependent upon his soul.11 Thus Burger-Villingen measured the profiles of men's faces in order to comprehend the expression of their souls. Fg.' this purpose he invented a special apparatus (a plastometer) which was much discussed in the subsequent literature. Julius Lang« ibid., 62. Freideutsche Jugend: Zur Jahrhundertfeier auf dem Hohen Meissner (Jena, 1913), 98ff. 8 Langbehn, Rembrandt, 131. * The Life and Letters of Jacob Burckhardt, tr. Alexander Dru (London, 1955), 10 225. Langbehn, Rembrandt, 65. 11 R . Burger-Villingen, Geheimnis der Menschenform (Leipzig, 1Θ12), 23, 27. 7

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THE ORIGINS OF THE HOLOCAUST behn wrote that researches into man's facial characteristics were a part of historical research." This remark leads into the philosophy of history of these men which provided the explanation for the mystic development of the soul from its base in nature* through the cosmic life-force. History, Diederichs wrote, is never factual but merely a thickening of the life stream of events through which, at one point or place, the universally valid laws of life become visible in reality. History could only be seen with the soul since it was the progression out of nature of the inner life-substance. I t was at this point that the mystic and the occult came to the forefront. This belief in a life-force was a kind of cosmic religion to a man like Diederichs, who referred to Plato as one of his sources.18 Yet, in opposition to rationalism, this religion was grasped through the intuition of the soul feeling its closeness to nature. Ernest Daqu6, whose book on Urwelt (the primeval world) was used extensively by all these men, coined the phrase " nature somnambulism," an intuitive insight into those life-forces which determine the physical nature of man. As man got ever farther away from nature, what remained of this somnambulism was wrongly described as soothsaying or as psychological disabilities. Yet all things creative were a survival of this nature somnambulism. 14 Paul de Lagarde put the same idea somewhat differently. Germans, though reaching into the future, should return to the past—a past devoid of all else but the primeval voice of nature." Manifestly, only those people who were closest to nature could grasp through their souls the inner, cosmic life-force which constituted the eternal. In Vienna Guido von List set the tone for this kind of argument and fused it with the glories of an Aryan past. Nature the great Divine guide and from her flowed the life-force. Whatever was closest to nature would therefore be closest to the truth. 10 List believed that the Aryan past was the most " genuine " manifestation of this inner force. I t was closest to nature and therefore farthest removed from artificiality—from modern materialism and rationalism. Thus he set himself the task of recreating this past. Given the philosophy of history common to these men, they looked down upon any scholarly disciplines such as archeology: " W e must read with our souls the landscape which archeology reconquers with the spade." Again, List advised: " If you want to lift the veil of mystery [i.e., of the past] you must fly into the loneliness of nature." " List's ideas 12

13 Lnncbelin, Rembrandt, 315. Enqcn Dirrfrrichs, 7Ί, 4Γ>2. Quoted in the National Socialist articlc: Karl Piirrlrich Weiss, " Individualismus und Sozialismus," I, Der Weltkampf, IV (1927), Of,-70. 16 Paul de Lagarde, Lebensbild und Auswahl, ed. K . B'ie-ch (Augsburg, 1924), 52. " J o h a n n e s Baltzli, Guido von List (Vienna, 1917), 18, 23. " Ibid., 2 fi, 27. 14

RACISM, THE OCCULT, A N D EUGENICS wore brought to Germany largely through the efforts of Alfred Schüler of Munich. This remarkable man, who never published a line, attracted to his person men like Rilke and George. I i i s circle of admirers maintained that Schüler " s a w with his s o u l " and could reconstruct the past by simply using his inward eye. T o a small coterie of friends Schüler lectured on the nature of the city. Urbanism was condemned and equated with the intellectual's alleged materialism which supposedly perverted their thought. Against this equation were those adepts whose " idealism " could only stem from the m y sterious call of the blood, the true creative instinct. 18 For Schüler the inner life-force was equated with the strength of the blood, an equation common to other writers as well. H e fulminated against the shallowness of soulless men ignorant of nature and its life-forces, an ignorance epitomized, he thought, in the Jewish poet Karl Wolfskehl blaspheming: " P e o p l e are m y landscape," 19 Significantly, Schüler believed this life-force could be manipulated through spiritualism. H e tried to cure Nietzsche's madness through an ancient Roman spirit rite. Klages was to lure Stefan George to a seance where Schüler would take over George's soul, transmuting it into a living receptacle of cosmic fire. George, .stubbornly obdurate, was appalled by the proceedings, and after the seance demanded that Klnges accompany him to a cafe where settled bourgeois, ordinary people, drank beer and smoked their cigars. 20 In Klages' eyes he was henceforth condemned, though any historian analyzing the thoughts of these men might easily sympathize with George. Schüler and Klages were not alone in believing the inner lifeforce to be akin to spiritualism. Indeed, the mysticism which, as Langbehn put it, transformed science into art) was precisely this lifeforce defined in terms of the occult. T h e ideology of this movement had direct ties with'those occult and spiritualist movements which were in vogue toward the end .of the century. Such ties were especially fostered by Theosophy. T h e opposition to positivism in Germany fed upon movements which in the rest of Europe were regarded ae " fads " rather than as serious world views. In Germany the belief in the life-force or cosmic religion embodied in the blood, which all things Aryan truly represented, led to a world view which gave special status to those who were " initiates " of such mysteries. The similarity of these ideas to the occult was noted b y contemporaries. Franz Hartmann, himself a leading German-American Theosophist, remarked upon the similarity of List's ideas to those of Madame Blavatski, the foundress of Theosophy. This he did by com18

Alfred Schuler, Fragmente und Vortrage aus dem Nachlass, Ludwig Klages (Leipzig, 1940), 33, 159. 20 Claude David, Stefan George (Paria, 1952), 200.

Einführung von 19 Ibid., 51.

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THE ORIGINS OF THE HOLOCAUST paring List's Bilderschrift to Madame Blavatski's Isis Unveiled. For just as List attempted to tear the veil from the true wisdom of the ancient Germans, so Blavatski revealed the surviving traces of a " secret science " in ancient and medieval sources. Their principles, she maintained, had been lost from view and suppressed; in like manner List claimed that Christianity had tried to wipe out the language of the ancient Germans, thus destroying their true nature wisdom.21 List believed that this lost language could be found in the mystic writings of the Kabalah, mistakenly thought to be Jewish, but in reality a compilation of ancient German wisdom which had survived persecution. Madame Blavatski made identical use of the Kabalah; she, too, rejected its Jewish origins, considering it a survival of true and secret wisdom.22 Hartmann himself, attracted by such parallelisms, became one of List's leading supporters. But we can go further than this. Madame Blavatski's Isis Unveiled was concerned with a study of nature. She attempted to study nature as she thought the ancients had studied it, in relation not so much to its outward form but to its inward meaning. Thus she also saw nature as being eternally transmitted through a life force which she thought of as an omnipresent vital ether, electro-spiritual in composition.28 This vague idea directly influenced men of the 1920's like Herbert Eeichstein, who believed that the first Aryan was created by an electric shock directly out of this ether. They called their theory " theozoology." 21 Her approach was, in general, similar to those exponents of the life-force we have discussed; she, too, felt that seeing with one's soul was the reality and deplored scientific methods« There is, however, a still closer relationship of these two bodies of thought through their use of imagery. For Madame Blavatski, fire was the universal soul substance, and this led Franz Hartmann to etate that it was the sun which was the external manifestation of an invisible spiritual power.28 For the men we have discussed, the image of the Aryan coming out of the sun was common. The painter Fid us, so closely associated with the' German youth movement, used this motif constantly. This popular ^painter believed that it was not enough for the artist to faithfully reproduce nature. Painting, for Fidus, was a transmission from the. extrasensory world»'· His paint-* 81

Baltzli, Outdo von List, 45; Frans Hartmann (1838-1912); Helena Petrovna Blavatski (1831-1891); Alvin Boyd Kuhn, fheosophy (New York, 1930), 116-117. 23 28 Baltzli, Guido von List, 65n.; -Kuhn, Tkeosophy, 144. Ibid., 135, 133. 24 Besser, " Die Vorgeschichte . . ν , " loc. cit., 773. 28 Franz Hartmann, The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme (Boston, 1891), Ιβθη. 1. 28 Erste Gesamtausstellung der Werke von Fidus tu seinem 60. Geburtstage (Woltersdorf bei Erkner, 1928), 9, 11.

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included studies of astral symbolism, as well as designs for theotiopliiu temples. It was he who painted the official picture to symbolize the Hohen Meissner gathering. Best known, however, were his paintings, bordered by theosophic symbols, on themes such as the "wanderers into the sun "—girl and boy wandering hand in hand, surrounded by growing plants, their nude boyish bodies translucent before a blazing sun. Hilgen Diederichs was also deeply concerned with such symbolism, 1 le'founded, in 1910, the so-called Sera circle in Jena. Its symbol was a red and golden flag with the sun as centerpiece. The main activities of this circle centered in the youth movement: excursions, folk dances, and above all, the old Germanic festival of the "changing sun." aT Here Germanic custom and spiritualist symbolism were intertwined. For Diederichs also the sun was the creator of life, a reaffirmation of the prime importance of those cosmic forces which underlay all reality.-8 Langbehn himself maintained that " a theologian should always be fioinmvluit of a theosophist" to compensate for the formalism inherent in his profession. He saw a similar value in spiritualism in general. His criticism of contemporary occultism was not that it was wrong, but that it was misdirected, searching through professional mediums for spirits where there were none." Such a linkage between theosophy and the völkisch world view will remain throughout the movement's history. This can be conclusively demonstrated through Prana, which called itself a German monthly for applied spiritualism and which was published by the theosophical publishing house at Leipzig. The editor was Johannes Balzli, the secretary of the Guido von List society, founded to spread the " master's " teaching and to finance his publications. Franz Hartmann, himself an honorary member of that society, was one of Prana's most frequent contributors as was C. W, Leadbetter, the stormy Anglican curate whom Madame Blavatski had taken with her to India and who later became Annie Besant's Svengali. Guido von List himself contributed to its pages, while Fidue provided most of the illustrations. The word " Prana " was taken to mean the power of the sun, the visible symbol of God, and " all present." This in turn was to be the sign of the " new Germany." 80 In Prana'e pages we find ideas on food and medicine which were common to this movement. Medical science was universally deplored in favor of spiritual healing, and the. eating of meat was said to impede not only spiritual progress but the understanding of nature and 28 « Eugen Diederieh», 171, 220, 297, Ibid., 267. Langbehn, Rembrandt, 93, "With a dose of mysticism one can gild the life of a nation " (203), 80 Prana, Organ für angewandte Geisteswissenechaften, VI, 1-2 (1916), 4, ae

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the life-force. 81 Theosophists linked the flesh of animals to their undeveloped intelligence; eating meat would thus induce animal coarseness in humans. Prana's writers further elaborated this idea, adding that meat could not increase life for it was lifeless and thus led to death. 32 The medical and vegetarian vagaries of Adolf Hitler were intimately linked with the mystic, Aryan ideology found in the pages of Prana, though Prana was not the only journal that reflected this mixture of thought. T h a t such ideas marched into the 1920's with renewed vigor can; be seen in the case of Arthur Dinter,. who, rose to.prominence,as an early National Socialist in the '20!B* As A-National Socialist deputy he played a leading role in the: overthrow of the socialist government of Thuringia in 1924 and subsequently became the editor of the " National Socialist" published in;Weimar. His celebrated räcial novel " The Sin Against the Blood " attained a large circulation. Though his companion novel " T h e Sin Against the S p i r i t " never proved as popular, it combined the racial ideology of his first book with episodes which could have been taken directly from'Madame Blavatski< For him the racial ideas of a man like Houston Stewart Chamberlain made sense only when they were integrated with his own spiritualistic experiences. Dinter made liberal use of such theosophist concepts as the astral ether, the sun, and the idea of rebirth (Karma) i88 For Lanz von Liebenfels, another of Prana's favorites, the term " Ariosophy " meant a combination of such* ideas with a world view centered upon the Germanic past. 84 Small .wonder that the industrialist who was the principal financial contributor to Guido von List's society was also an ardent spiritualist. 88 This, then, was the mysticism which transformed science into art. When these men called upon Germans to be artists they wanted them to recognize that their true soul was an expression of the cosmic spirit of the world based upon nature; Possession of such a spirit meant recalling that which was truly genuine, the Germanic past, as opposed to modern and evil rationalism. Langbehn, so often cited by his successors, felt this to be the only true individualism in a world of mass man. This individualism would lead to the creation of an organic 81

Ibid., 348-349. Nourishment and the development of the soul go hand in hand. Anti-nlcoholism plays an important role here as well. At the Hohen Meissner gathering the Temperance League said that it too wanted to serve the race. Freideutsche Jugend, 16; see also Langbehn, Rembrandt, 295-297. 82 Kuhn, Theosophy, 297; Prana, 46-47. 88 Arthur Dinter, Die Suende wider den Geist (Leipzig, 1921), 236. 84 Besser, " Die Vorgeschichte . . . ," 773. 8n Baltzli, Guido von List, 185. His name was Friedrich Wannieck; lie contributed more to the List society than all other members put together (79). Wannieck and Franz Hartmann had at least one seance together (185).

RACISM, THE OCCULT, AND EUGENICS human being in contact with cosmic forces. These forces were conceived in spiritualist terms, though Langbehn's touchstone was not Madame Blavatski, but Swedenborg. To him this mystio was the ideal German type. 8 · In a similar manner Diederichs came to see the identical image reflected in Meister Eckhardt," Such a philosophy of life did not need spiritualistic mediums in order to penetrate the "secret mysteries," 1 Indeed, for List the past came alive in the very human shape of Tarnhari, who called himself the chief of the lost German tribe of the Volsungen. The tribal traditions, which he related from his fund of ancestral memories confirmed List's own researches. Tarnhari "promptly produced several works of his own in which he told " family stories going back to prehistoric times." The stone of wisdom had come alive. It is symptomatic that this impressed Ellegard Ellerbeck, later one of the chief ornaments of National Socialist literature. As he wrote to List, " reading yours and Tarnhari's works I realize again that Ar [Aryan] lives laughingly." " One idea implied in all of this must be stressed. Only he who had ties with the genuine past could have a true soul, could be an organic fuid not a materialistic human being. Such ties were conceived of as being inherited, The genuine spirit of the ancestors was cumulative in their progeny, For Guido von List as for his successors, only the Aryan could grasp the " mysteries " of life which governed the world. These ideas allowed Langbehn not only to stress once more the virtue of a settled and ancient Germanic peasantry, but of a hereditary monarchy as well. A hereditary monarch was not merely someone elevated from the masses like the president of a republic. In the government of the nation such a monarch would be aided by the " natural aristocracy." This aristocracy did not derive solely from an inheritance of status; every German could be a part of it if he threw off rationalism and became again an " artist"—the organic man.89 Such a man was Rembrandt, in Langbehn's opinion; writing his book Rembrandt as Educator (Erzieher), he hoped to influence Germans through a striking example. The end result was to be the creation of an organic state where there would be neither "bourgeois," nor " proletarians," nor " junkers," but only the " people " linked together in a common creativity (now become possible), and united in a bond of brolherhood. Classes would not be abolished; as Langbehn put it: " Equality is death. A corporate society is life." 40 "Langbehn, Rembrandt, Θ4-95. Blavatski and G. It. S. Meade believed that " of all mystics, Swedenborg has certainly influenced Theosophy most . . . t h o u g h his powers did not go beyond the plane of matter. H. P. Blavatski, The Theotophical Glossary (Hollywood, 1918), 293. " E u g e n Diederichs, 15. 48 Baltzli, Guido von List, 155, 199. 89

RACISM, THE OCCULT, AND EUGENICS Science and Values: The Eugenics Movement in oppositional terms to the Church and monarchy; intellectuals seized upon scientific explanations of man's origins as natural allies in their struggle against these authorities. In addition, the intelligentsia wanted to close the gap between the culture of Russia and that of Western Europe; in their effort to do so, they often embraced rather uncritically the latest scientific trends coming from the West. By the first decades of the twentieth century, however, biologists in Russia had moved far beyond merfc imitation of Western science and had formed a center of outstanding genetics research, entirely in step with the new trends and- in some'respects even leading the way. Around the figure of S. S. Chetverikov a school of population genetics was established which is not fully appreciated even yet by historians of biology, largely because it disappeared in later years when Lysenko took over Soviet genetics." In addition to Chetverikov, prominent early Soviet biologists included Ν. K . kol'tsov, A. S. Serebrovskii, Ν. I. Vavilov, and Iu. A . Filipchenko. Several of these distinguished scientists were also heavily involved in the eugenics movement. 5 0 O n e of the outstanding younger Russian biologists was Theodosius Dobzhansky, who later emigrated to the United States, where he became world-famous. Dobzhansky's career began with a position in the Bureau of Eugenics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. T h e Russian eugenics movement was limited almost entirely to the years 1921-30, and this period can itself be divided into two phases, with the division around 1925. In the first phase, Russian eugenics developed along lines quite similar to the movement in a number of other countries. The German example was probably the most significant, largely because of the number of G e r m a n monographs on the subject and the closeness of Russian and G e r m a n scientific relations. In the second phase, after 1925, Soviet eugenists made an effort to create a unique socialist eugenics of their own, an effort which met increasing opposition. Lysenko and the form of Stalinist genetics which later became notorious throughout the world were not involved in either of these phases (these developments came only in the late 1930s and 1940s); nonetheless, the

Uswershenstuovame ι vyrozhdente ehelooeeheskogo roda (St. P e t e r s b u r g , 1866). F o r a discussion of this b o o k b y a n early Soviet eugenist, see Μ . V . Volotskoi, " K istorii e v g e n i c h e s k o g o d v i z h e n i i a , " Russkii evgenicheskii thumal, 2 ( 1 9 3 4 ) : 5 0 - 5 5 . A l s o see G e o r g e K l i n e , " D a r w i n i s m a n d the R u s s i a n O r t h o d o x C h u r c h , " in Ernest J . S i m m o n s , e d . , Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought ( C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1955), 3 0 7 - 2 8 ; N . Danilevskii, Darvimtm, kriltcheskot issledovanie (St. P e t e r s b u r g , 1889); K . A . T i m i r i a z e v , Charit Darum 1 ego tchenie (3d e d . ; M o s c o w , 1894); a n d A l e x a n d e r V u c i n i c h , " R u s s i a : B i o l o g i c a l S c i e n c e s , " a n d J a m e s A l l e n Rogers, " R u s s i a : S o c i a l S c i e n c e s , " in The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, 227-68. S e e M a r k B . A d a m s , " T h e F o u n d i n g of P o p u l a t i o n G e n e t i c s : C o n t r i b u t i o n s of the C h e t v e r i k o v School, 1 9 2 4 - 1 9 3 4 , " Journal of the History of Biology, 1 (1968): 2 3 - 3 9 , a n d " T o w a r d s a S y n t h e s i s : P o p u l a t i o n Concepts in R u s s i a n Biological T h o u g h t , 1 9 2 5 - 1 9 3 5 , " Journal of the History of Biology, 3 ( 1 9 7 0 ) : 107-29. M Ν . K . K o l ' t s o v w a s president of t h e R u s s i a n E u g e n i c s S o c i e t y ; l u . A . F i l i p c h e n k o w a s the d i r e c t o r of the B u r e a u of E u g e n i c s of the A c a d e m y of S c i e n c e s ; a n d A . S . S e r e b r o v s k i i w a s a m e m b e r of the p e r m a n e n t bureau of the R u s s i a n E u g e n i c s S o c i e t y a n d a c o n t r i b u t o r to its j o u r n a l . F o r his g r e a t h o p e s for the e u g e n i c s movement, see A . S . S e r e b r o v s k i i , " O z a d a c h a k h i p u t i a k h a n t r o p o g e n e t i k i , " Russkii mgtmchesku thumal, 2 ( 1 9 1 3 ) : 1 0 7 - 1 6 , e s p . 1 1 2 . I r o n i c a l l y , Ν . I. V a v i l o v , w h o u l t i m a t e l y s u f f e r e d the most at the h a n d s of Soviet authorities, a p p a r e n t l y steered c l e a r of e u g e n i c s ; he b e c a m e a foe of L y s e n k o in the late 1930s a n d died in 1940 in S i b e r i a n exile.

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THE ORIGINS OF THE HOLOCAUST Loren R. Graham controversies over eugenics in the 1920s were important elements in the foundation of later Soviet attitudes toward genetics;* 1 T h e two most important organizations in the Soviet eugenics movement were the Russian Eugenics Society and the Bureau of Eugenics of the Academy of Sciences, both created in 1921»" Each of them published a journal, the first entitled the Russian Eugenics Journal, the second (in its initial form) the. Bulletin of the Bureau of Eugenics. T h e latter w a s more academic than the former and also proved to be considerably more sensitive to the political opposition that soon developed to the eugenics movement. T h e members of the Bureau of Eugenics were professional geneticistsi interested in studying human heredity from a scientific standpoint and anxious to protect this study from political considerations, while the members of the Russian Eugenics Society were a heterogeneous collection of scholars and lay people. T h e popular aspirations of the society were illustrated by its call at the end of its first year for cooperative work on eugenics by scientific and social workers in all specialties. A s an expression of the most vital cultural problems, as a question of the eventual fate of culture, the eugenic idea must sooner or later gather under its banner all intellectually aware h u m a n beings. W e must hurry, while there is still time, while it is still possible to ward off many of the misfortunes that are threatening cultured society, misfortunes that are the result of the one-sided development of modern civilization."

T h e historian who today leafs through the pages of the Russian Eugenics Journal, knowing well the class antagonisms and radical currents still waiting to be expressed in Soviet society, is struck by the naivet£ and blindness to political complications of the early leaders of the movement. O n e of the early concerns of the journal's authors in the years immediately after the Revolution was the genealogy of outstanding and aristocratic Russian families; investigations, complete with family tables, were made of princely families of exemplary achievements, as well as of all the members of the Academy of Sciences in the previous century. Several writers expressed dismay about the dysgenic effects of the Russian Revolution. T h e emigration of the nobility and of other upper-class families as a result of the Revolution was seen as a serious loss to the genetic reserves of Russia, requiring eugenic correction· More predictable, perhaps, was concern about the enormous Russian losses during World War 1, far heavier in absolute (though not relative) terms than those of any other nation." O n e Soviet eugenist, V . V. Bunak, summed up the ef* " For a good bibliography of R u s s i a n eugenics literature, see K . Gurvich, " U k a z a t e l ' literatury po voprosam evgeniki, nasledstvennosti i selektsii i soprcdcl'nykh oblastei, opublikovannoi na russkom iazikf d o I / i 1918 g . , " Russkii evgmichtskii thumal, 6 (1918): 111-43. For a discussion of the e u g e n i c · movement in Soviet R u s s i a , see David J o r a v s k y , Thi Lystnko Affair ( C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , ig7o), 356-66. · " For accounts of the founding a n d early activities of the R u s s i a n Eugenics Society, see " O deiatel'nostl R u s s k o g o Evgenicheskogo Obshchestva za 1911 g o d , " Russkii tvgemchtskti thumal, I (1931): 99-101, and similar descriptions in succeeding volumes of the s a m e publication. For an interesting but somewhat o n e sided recent Soviet interpretation οΓ these early eugenic interests, see N . P. Dubinin, Vtdmot dmtlumi (Moscow, 1973). * * " 0 deiatel'nosti R u s s k o g o Evgenicheskogo Obshchestva za 1911 g o d , " 101. w For e x a m p l e s of these types of literature, see A. S . Serebrovskii, " G e n e a l o g i i a roda Aksakovykh, Russkii ivgtiticheskii thumal, 1 (193a): 75-83; N . Chulkov, " R o d grafov T o l s t y k h , " Russkii ngtnichtskiirjiumali

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Science and Values: The Eugenics Movement fects of eight years of war, revolution, civil war, and famine in the statement that the total genetic impact "might exceed that of the W e s t " in the same period. T h u s , the deep eugenic gloom of postwar Germany was reflected among Russian eugenists, although there was some hope for backward Russia in that " t h e - m o r e cultured a country, the more the biological danger of war,"»» T h e favored word in Soviet Russia for the subject was "evgenika" (eugenics), although the term "rasovaia gigiena" (race hygiene) was also used and racial interests were widespread. T h e Russian Eugenics Society soon established a special comrpission for the study of the "Jewish R a c e , " following a major interest of the German m o v e m e n t . " In one study the commission concluded that J e w s were in no way inferior to other ethnic groups. Despite the conclusion, the Russian eugenics movement explicitly thought in terms of racial differences—psychological as well as physiological—and followed the Germans in accepting suchiterms as the biologically meaningless "Jewish race." T h e Russian Eugenics Journal frequently contained reviews of German books that were Establishing the guidelines of race hygiene in terms of a static or typological definition of race (such as the famous textbook on h u m a n heredity by Baur, Fischer, and Lenz), and the reviewers were usually impressed by the new doctrines." T h e first issue of the Russian journal contained reviews of fourteen German books on h u m a n heredity and eugenics and no others. Kol'tsov and Filipchenko also wrote several articles for the main German eugenics journal, using the terms "Die rassenhygienische Bewegung" and "Die rassenhygienische Literatur" to describe Russian trends." 3 (1933): Iu. A..Nelidov, " O potomstvc b a r o n e Petra Pavlovlcha Shafirova," Russkii evgenicheikii thumal, 3 (1993): 61-66; V. Zolotarev, "Rodoslovnye A. S. Pushkina, gr. L. N. Tolstogo, P. Ia. C h a a d a e v i , Iu. F. Samarlna, A.1 1. Gertsena, kn. P. A. Kropotkina, kn. S. N. T r u b e t s k o g o , " Russkii tvgmichtskii zhumal, 5 (1917); S. V. Liubimov, " P r e d k i grata S. Iu. V i n e , " Ruukti tvgmichtskii thurnal, 6 (1938): 103-13; ' u · A. Filipchenko, " N a s h i vydaiushchiesia u c h e n y e , " Itvesliia buropo evgtnike, no. 1 (1921); Τ . K. Lepin, la. la. Luis, and Iu. A. Filipchenko, "Deiavitel'nye chleny byvsh. imperat., nyne Rossiiskoi, Akademii za poslednle So 1. (1664-1934 g g . ) , " Uvtstiia buro po tvgmikt, 3 (1935); L. S. Berg, " B r a c h n o s t ' r o z h d a e m o s t ' i i m e r t n o s t ' ν Leningrade za poslednie g o d y , " Priroda, nos. 7-13 (1934); Α. V. Gorbunov, "Vliianie mirovoi volny na dvizhenie naselenlia E v r o p y , " Russkii evgenichtskii thurnal, 1 (1933): 40-64; and V. V. Bunak, "Novye dannye k voprosu ο voine, kak biologicheskom f a k t o r e , " Russkii tvgmichtskii thurnal, 3 (1933): 333-33. M Bunak, "Novye d a n n y e , " 331. " T h e c h a i r m a n of the " C o m m i s s i o n for the Study of the J e w i s h P e o p l e " was V. V. Bunak. "Evgenicheskie z a m e t k i , " Russkii tvgmichtskii thurnal, 1 (1934): 58. For examples of the commission's work, see S. S. Yermel', "Prestupnost* evreev," Russkti evgenicheskii thurnal, 3 (1934): 153-58; a n d V. V. Bunak, " M a t e r i a l y dlia sravnitel'noi kharakteristiki sanitarnoi konstitutsii evreev," Rutsku evgenicheskii thumal, 3 (1934): 143-53. " See, for example, Kol'tsov's generally positive review of E. Baur, E. Fisher, and F. Lenz, Grundriss der punschlicht Erblichktitslthn und Rasstnhygitnt, in Russkii togmichtskii thumal, 3 (1934); 179-80. Kol'tsov commented that Lenz't section of this textbook had been an important source for his own article, "Vliianie kul'tury na otbor ν chelovechestve," Russkii evgenichtskti thumal, 3 (1934): 3-19. Filipchenko chose as a part of the title of one of his articles a q u o t a t i o n from the s a m e book, Lenz's observation that " d e r Schutz der geistigen Arbeiter, u n d speziell der hochbegabten, ist eine H a u p t a u f g a b e der Rassenhygiene." Iu. A. Filipchenko, " N a s h i vydaiushchiesia u c h e n y e , " 33. See, for example, Kol'tsov's " D i e rassenhygienische Bewegung in R u s s l a n d , " Archivß>r Rassen- und Gtsillschaflsbiologit, 17 (1935): 96-99; a n d Filipchenko'» " D i e russische rassenhygienische Literatur, 1911*1935," Archivßr Rassen- und GtstUscha/lsbiologit, 3 (1935): 346-48. T h e G e r m a n race hygienists paid particular attention to research done by Soviet scholars in the Ukraine that purportedly indicated that the cranial measurements of intellectuals are greater than those of workers and peasants—this in a " w o r k e r s ' artd p e a s a n t s , ' " statel See " M a t e r i a l i e n zur Anthropologie der U k r a i n e , " Archiv fit Rassen- und Gesellfchafisbialvgit, 35 (1931): 340-43.

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THE ORIGINS OF THE HOLOCAUST Loren R. Graham T h e leaders of the Russian eugenics movement were anxious for contacts with other national eugenics societies and, indeed, worked for full international recognition. T h e fact that Soviet Russia was a revolutionary state that attacked the practices and world-views of leading nations in most areas of international political and cultural relations seems not to have deterred the early activities of Soviet eugenists. T h e y established contacts with the Eugenic Education Society in England, the Eugenic Record Office in the United States, and the German Society for R a c e and Social Biology. In November 1921 the Russian Eugenics Society was recognized as a full member of the International Eugenics Union with headquarters in London. But in the international arena, Bolshevik R u s s i a — a s well as the former enemy nation G e r m a n y — w a s ostracized by the former Allies at many international scholarly congresses after World W a r I, and this policy extended to eugenics, despite the formal contacts. T h u s , neither Soviet Russia nor Germany was invited to the Second International Congress of Eugenics in New York in 1921, a slight that deeply rankled Russian eugenists." T h i s ostracism, however, had the effect of deepening scholarly connections between the two pariah nations. T h e president of the Russian Eugenics Society, the biologist Ν. K . Kol'tsoV, did manage to obtain an invitation to the T h i r d International Congress of Eugenics in Milan in 1924, where he lamented that the influence of the Catholic Church was so prevalent that the participants were one-sidedly cautious in their discussions of practical eugenic measures.'He also noted that, if the attitudes of Catholic Italians were one extreme, the Americans, with their system of sterilization laws, were another. No Americans or Germans were present at the Congress, and, according to Kol'tsov, not-one participant spoke in favor of the American system of sterilization. 40 T h e eagerness of Russian eugenists for international contacts and recognition was also evident in the pages of the Russian Eugenics Journal, which regularly printed news of the other societies as well as summaries of the publications of the other eugenics journals; the German Archive for Race and Social Biology received the greatest attention. 41 W h e n the G e r m a n Society for R a c e Hygiene passed a series of resolutions in 1922 calling for greater attend tion by legislators to eugenics, the Russian Eugenics Journal printed the resolu« tions in full without comment. 4 2 Similar attention was given to proposals of the English and Swedish eugenics societies. 4 * In 1924 the journal gave equal play to a German physician who appealed to all of his "colleague-physicians; both in the cities and in the countryside to search for defective persons,'taking " For his irritation, see Ν. K . Kol'tsov, " K r i t i k a i bibliografiia: T r u d y i - g o mezhdunarodnogo evgenl* cheskogo s " e z d a , " Russkii evgenlcheskii fhurnal, 7 (ig*^): 69. " Kol'tsov, "Evgenicheskie s"ezdy ν Milane ν Scntiabre 1934 g o d a , " Russkii tvgmichtskii fhumal, 3 (1915)

71-77· For a contemporary survey o i t h e international eugenics movement, describing the various legislative programs, see P. I. Liublinskii, "Sovremennoe sostoianie evgenicheskogo dvizheniia," Russkii tvgtnuktshl ihumal, 4 (1926): 53-75. 41 "Kukovodiashchie polozheniia nemetskogo obshchestva rasovoi gigieny," Russkii togeniefuskii tAunw/, 1 (1923): 364-66. " "Sovremennoe sostoianie voprosa'o sterilizatsii ν Shvetsii," Russkii togenicheskii thumal, 3 (1915):'78-60 and " P r o g r a m m e prakticheskoi evgenicheskoi politiki," Russkii tvgtnichiskii (humal, 5 (1917): 37-40.

RACISM, THE OCCULT, AND EUGENICS Science and Values: The Eugenics Movement a d v a n t a g e of the help of local authorities, teachers, philanthropic institutions, medical personnel, a n d , t o sterilize as m a n y of them as possible." 4 4 A l t h o u g h the Russian eugenists shared m a n y assumptions of the international eugenics movement in general and of the G e r m a n movement in particular, they should not be seen as p r o t o - N a t i o n a l Socialists; Substantive links between the Russian eugenics movement and incipient fascism were completely lacking. Similar eugenics organizations existed in most Western nations at that time and, in fact, were far stronger in England and the United States than they were in Russia. Several ,early Soviet eugenists showed awareness that their analysis and p r o g r a m were potentially inflammatory from a political standpoint. In the early spring of 1925 the Russian Eugenics Society debated eugenics proposals that had been advanced in other countries, and some Soviet participants objected to the " c o a r s e n e s s " and ill-defined quality of a n u m b e r of these proposals. T h e Leningrad b r a n c h of the society dissociated itself from plans to prohibit racially mixed marriages, and they voted in favor of sterilization " o n l y on the basis of a decision of a special council of competent individuals and with the permission of the individual or his legal representatives and only on eugenic, not social, g r o u n d s . " T h e y did, however, vote in favor of obligatory isolation from the opposite sex of " c e r t a i n categories of the mentally ill and habitual criminals w h o s e reproduction w o u l d be dangerous for society on social and eugenic grounds." 4 * But the real significance of the R u s s i a n eugenics movement lay not in its relationship to Western eugenic proposals, interesting as those connections were, but in its place in the debates over the hature of m a n that were beginning to take place in Soviet Russia itself. H o w was the eugenics movement perceived by Soviet intellectuals outside the c o m m u n i t y of eugenists? W h a t w a s the relation of the doctrines of eugenics to the ideas of Russian socialism and C o m m u n i s m ? T h e great debate over the issue was slow in developing. T h e c o m m i s s a r of public health, Nikolai Semashko, had given his approval to the eugenics movement; the C o m m i s s a r i a t of Internal Affairs (a police organization) formally accepted the charter of the Russian Eugenics Society; and the Russian Eugenics Society received a small state subsidy. 4 ' T h e s e first official acts of recognition were p r o b a b l y not too significant in themselves, since in the early years the concept of eugenics was so new to most people in Soviet Russia, the essential issues so unexplored, that a sophisticated understanding of the movement by* bureaucrats w a s hardly possible. T o the extent that eugenics *4 "Evgenlcheskaia sterilizatsila ν G e r m a n i i , " Russkii tvgtnicheikii thumal, 3 (1915): 81. u " O b e u z h d e n i e Norvezhskoi evgenicheskoi programmy na zasedaniiakh Leningradskoi Otdeleniia R. E. O . , ' ' Russkii tvgtnicheikii zhumal, 3 (1913): 139-43. T h e particular eugenic program at the basis of this discussion was that of the Norwegian J . A . MjOen. T h i s society's discussion is very interesting, for it encompassed consideration of both "positive and negative race hygiene p r o p o s a l s " by speakers with wide disagreements on issues such as racially mixed marriages and mandatory sterilization. Ιίι.Μ For approval by the Commissariats of Health and Education, as well as for announcement of the subsidy, see " I z otcheta ο deiatel'nosti Russkogo Evgenicheskogo Obshchestva za 1913 g . , " Russkii tvgenicluskii ihumat, t (1994): 4. For approval of the society's charter by the Commissariat of Internal Affairs, see "Evgenicheskle z a m e t k i , " Russkii tvgmichtskii zhunust, a (1934): 58.

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was understood, it was thought to be the science for the collective improvement of mankind, and as such it was an activity that the young Soviet government automatically found interesting. In 1925 the debate that had begun to simmer in lecture halls and in local publications spilled out into major Soviet intellectual journals. T h e activities of the Russian Eugenics Society and the Bureau of Eugenics—up to this time primarily the concerns of a rather small circle of geneticists, physicians, public health specialists, and university students studying the same fields—now became an object of public attention. In one of the first comprehensive and critical analyses of the eugenics movement, Vasilii Slepkov's article, " H u m a n Heredity and Selection: O n the Theoretical Premises of E u g e n i c s " (which appeared in April 1925 in the major Bolshevik journal of Marxist theory), pointed out that the eugenists were emphasizing biological determinants of human behavior to the total neglect of socioeconomic determinants. Since most eugenists were biologists with little knowledge of the social sciences and especially of M a r x i s m , they had "absolutized" the influence of heredity to the detriment of the influence of=the environment and thereby converted genetics into a "universalist"'-interpretation in which all of human history was merely a story of the replacement of one genotype by another. T h e y had accepted the views of exponents of the Nordic race, who explained European history in terms of the domination by superior genotypes who became the European nobility* This conviction necessarily led to cultural pessimism, since the eugenists believed that the nobility was no longer reproducing at a rate sufficient to insure its survival. According to Slepkov, this point of view totally ignored the principles of M a r x i s m , which demonstrated that social conditions determine consciousness. Slepkov quoted Friedrich Engels on the importance of labor in the evolution of primates, Georgii Flekhanov's point that conservative thinkers had always explained human behavior on the basis of innate qualities in order to avoid social analysis leading to revolutionary conclusions, and K a r l M a r x ' s concept that " p e o p l e are a product of conditions and education and, consequently, changing people are a product of changing circumstances and different education."" A thief is not a biological type, created by heredity, said Slepkov, but a "social m a n " created by his environment, poverty, and unemployment. By emphasizing the hereditary differences of individuals to the complete neglect of social influences, the eugenists were inexcusably distorting the general understanding of human nature. Slepkov did not deny, however, that individuals differ genetically. In order to explain those differences he resorted to a. position that was to have a long, and eventually tragic, influence on Soviet biology: the inheritance of acquired characteristics. H e believed that Pavlov's research had demonstrated the influence of the social environment on human behavior. A n d he pointed out that Pavlov believed that conditioned reflexes " Slepkov, " N a s l e d s t v e n n o s t ' i otbor u cheloveka (Po povodu teoreticheskikh predposylok evgeniki),|' Pod inamenem matksiima, 1 0 - 1 1 ( 1 9 1 5 ) : 7 9 - 1 1 4 .

RACISM, THE OCCULT, AND EUGENICS Science and Values: The Eugenics Movement acquired during the lifetime of an organism could become, in some cases, permanently hereditable. Slepkov also referred tp the research of K a m m e r e r on salamanders as additional evidence of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, ignoring the fact that Kammerer's work was rejected by the great majority of biologists. Kammerer's political radicalism, however, was well known; Slepkov was thus able to strengthen his pröposed fit of Lamarckism and political reformism. As a criticism of their naive and one-sided biologism, much of Slepkov's castigation of the eugenists was appropriate; but, by placing so much emphasis ion the inheritance of acquired characteristics, Slepkov praised antique biology in order to humanize modern biology. A more judicious criticism would have been to dissect the dubious assumptions of eugenists that society was threatened by a biological degeneration that demanded social and legislative solutions, For many years, however, the inheritance of acquired characteristics remained only as a remote candidate to replace classical genetics. The geneticists and eugenists still had very powerful arguments at their disposal. Even in terms of politics, in the Soviet Union during the mid-1920s few assumed that Marxist socialism and eugenics were incompatible or believed that M a r x i s m and Larmarckism were uniquely compatible. Not only the eugenists with their arrogant programs for the biological reform of society but also the more sober and scientific geneticists interested primarily in animal and plant heredity were beginning, nevertheless, to meet stiff opposition from radical students in Soviet universities. O n e biologist with a political commitment to the new regime, Β. M . Zavadovskii, wrote that each year, when he gave lectures at the Sverdlov Communist University, the radical students reacted with hostility to his discussion of heredity; they called genetics " a bourgeois science" which contained implications that were unacceptable to the proletariat. Voices in favor of Lamarckism were becoming "louder and stronger," he wrote in 1925, as was the belief that genetics contradicted M a r x i s m and the social policy of the Communist party. " T h i s point of view is receiving support in the psychology of the m a s s e s , " he commented, " w h o s e first reaction to genetics is negative." Zavadovskii recognized that among educated Marxist scientists and social theorists the attitude toward genetics was much more positive than among students and lay people, since serious Marxists were Anxious not to contradict the findings of science and many fully recognized the scientific baselessness of Lamarckism. Yet Lamarckism continued to grow, especially among pedagogues, who believed that education was much more important than heredity. Zavadovskii feared that, in dispensing with the erroneous views of the eugenists, Marxists might "throw out the baby with the bath w a t e r " and eliminate the science of genetics as well. Marxists, he said, have been " f r i g h t e n e d " by the conclusions of bourgeois eugenists. 4 ' By 1925, then, the first crisis in the debate, between Mendelian or classical " Z a v a d o v s k i i , "Darvinizm 1 lamarkizm i problema nasledovaniia priobrcttnnykh priznakov," Pod tnammm marksitma, Iο— 11 (1925): 79-114.

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genetics and Lamarckism was coming to a head in the Soviet Union, and the eugenists were in the middle of it. The eugenists began to defend both genetics and eugenics simultaneously, and they considered the Lamarckians to be one of the most important groups among their opponents. As early as 1924 the most prominent Russian eugenist, KoPtsov, had published an article—"New Attempts to Prove the Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics"—in which he had dismissed such efforts as "the replacement of science by faith." 4 * Several of the eugenists realized that the criticisms advanced against them were so serious that, unless some way could be found tö reconcile their understanding of human heredity with Marxist aspirations, not only was the eugenics movement in danger but genetics as well. Iurii Filipchenko, one of the brightest of the eugenists, found an argument in favor of genetics that carried great weight, and for a time some observers thought he had outmaneuvered the radical critics of genetics. Let us assume for a moment, said Filipchenko, that the Lamarckians are correct and the Mendelians incorrect, even though scientific evidence at the moment all points in favor of the classical Mendelian theory. What would be the result for the proletariat, for the lower classes in general, and for the cause of social revolution if acquired characteristics wert inherited? Most people seem to believe that such a theory points to rapid social reform, since by giving individuals a better environment, not only would those individuals benefit during their lifetimes, but supposedly the good effects of that better environment would be passed on to subsequent generations, holding out the possibility of rapid improvements built on a successively improving genetic base. The view of an unchangeable genotype contained in classical genetics, on the other hand, seems to set iron limits to such improvement and therefore seems inherently conservative in its social implications.* 0 This view was superficial and false, said Filipchenko, because it assumed that only " g o o d " environments have hereditable effects, while a consistent interpretation of the inheritance of acquired characteristics would show that " b a d " environments also have effects. Therefore, all socially or physically deprived groups, races, and classes of people—such as the proletariat and peasantry and the nonwhite races—would have inherited the debilitating effects of having lived for centuries under deprived conditions. Far from promising rapid social reform, the inheritance of acquired characteristics would mean that the upper classes are not only socially and economically advantaged, but genetically privileged as well, a result of centuries of living in a beneficial environment. Thus the proletariat in Soviet Russia would never be capable of running the state; it was genetically lamed by the inheritance o( the effects of its poverty. If the classical geneticists were correct, on the other hand, said Filipchenko, then combinations of genes were distributed through,«* out the lower classes that would give the individuals possessing them'all the " K o l ' t s o v , "Noveishie popytki dokazat' nasledstvennost' blagopriobrctcnnykh prizr\akovj" RiuMi'o gemcheikii thumal, ι (1914): 159-67· « p . 167. 10 For a discussion of the impact of Filipchenko's argument, »ee Ν. M . Volotskoi, "Spornyc voproiy evgeniki," Vtslnik kommumitichttkoi okadtmii, to (1917): » 4 - 9 5 .

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Science and Values: The Eugenics Movement possibilities for being great scientists, musicians, artists, or whatever they might wish to be, if only the exploitative, debilitating environment were eliminated. T h e logic of Filipchenko's argument seems to have caused critics of the geneticists to hesitate. Several radical journals ran articles which maintained that only the inheritance of acquired characteristics, not Mendelian genetics, was counterrevolutionary. O n e author stated that the international bourgeoisie constantly renewed efforts to establish the inheritance of acquired characteristics in order to show its own genetic superiority, but.the proletariat was learning that science spoke against them. Another author, writing in The Red Journal for All People, said that every social reformer should read Filipchenko's argument in order to be armed for the political struggle. 81 For several reasons, Filipchenko's argument was not persuasive enough, however, to stem the popular belief that the inheritance of acquired characteristics was more congenial to the idea of creating a new society and a new culture than was Mendelian genetics. First of all, the majority of radical reformers, in a time of social revolution, either never listened to or never understood Filipchenko's fairly sophisticated argument. Simple arguments won out over subtle ones. M a n y commentators agreed with Zavadovskii that the first reaction of young Soviet students, on hearing of the dispute between classical gerietics and Lamarckism, favored Lamarckism because of its apparent possibilities for the rapid transformation of man. In other countries as well the nature-nurture'argument has often been equated, quite exaggeratedly, with a political split between the right and the left. And even at the source there seemed to be some support for this view, for Lamarck had himself risen to high position after the French Revolution. Events in Germany in the late igjos seemed to confirm the reverse side of the historical analogy: conservative race hygienists followed strict Mendelian genetics. Reasons for hesitation in making this neat equation—that Lamarckism has many conflicting interpretations of which a number are not closely linked to reformism or materialism, that Filipchenko's argument was logically stronger than those of his critics, that the whole question of directly linking politics to biology is intellectually dubious—all of,these subtle points faded before that first and simple assumption of lay people that genetics seemed to set absolute limits to human improvement while the inheritance of acquired characteristics seemed to open limitless possibilities. Even those relatively few scientifically educated Soviet participants in the debate who listened to Filipchenko's view and understood it were not all convinced, some for fairly good reasons. After all, if Filipchenko were correct 3bout the debilitating effects of an assumed inheritance of acquired characterstics on the lower classes, a great deal would depend on how long it would take to erase those effects—many generations or one or two? Furthermore, the most that Filipchenko could promise on the basis of his classical genetics was that some members of the proletariat could excel because of their fortu" 'bid., «5.

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THE ORIGINS OF THE HOLOCAUST Loren R. Graham itous possession of the right genes. The eventual result would be a clasp society based on innate, unchangeable ability, a meritocracyi T h e inheritance of acquired characteristics held a more radical, democratic prospect:· all members of the lower classes and their progeny might advance equally because of their social environment, and, given sufficient time, there was no reason for the former lower class to be at any genetic disadvantage to the former upper class. Several Marxist scholars tried to develop sophisticated arguments to meet Filipchenko's intellectual challenge^ Volotskoi, who had abandoned his ear* tier commitment to eugenics based on classical genetics and moved toward.a Lamarckian eugenics, held that Filipchenko's mistake lay in believing that the genetic effects of an assumed inheritance of acquired characteristics would be unilaterally harmful to those who came from a background of exploitation and unilaterally useful to those who came from a privileged background) Marxists understood, said Volotskoi, that the division of labor that led to societies based on slaveowners and' slaves, lords and peasants, or capitalists and workers has harmful and beneficial effects for both groups. In a hostparasite relationship in botany or biology, the parasite often degenerates because it obtains so much of its subsistence from the host; and the slave· owners, nobles, and capitalists of history have similarly degenerated while benefitting from the lower classes. O n each side of exploitative relations, said Volotskoi, there is a balance sheet of plusses and minuses: the proletariat suffers from poverty, lack of culture, and unsanitary conditions, but it benefits from the physical labor and hard work necessary for survival; the capitalists benefit economically from their privileged position, but they do not have to labor and become slothful and corrupt. Therefore, Volotskoi continued, Filip· chenko was incorrect in believing that an assumed inheritance of acquired characteristics would work only to the benefit of the upper classes; its effect would be mixed. The solution, he maintained, was to abolish the division of labor and conditions of privilege and suffering, for then human beings could be perfected through better social environment." Yet, in trying to refute Filipchenko, Volotskoi enlarged an assumption that was increasingly criticized by Soviet Marxist theoreticians: the belief that biological laws could be easily extended to human beings. It would be better, the theoreticians maintained, to divide human and animal or plant heredity and to recognize the nonreductive and qualitatively distinct nature of man. In that way many difficult problems could be avoided. Furthermore, dialectical materialism, the Soviet Marxist philosophy of nature, incorporated this the· ory of nonreductive levels into its overall perspective. Volotskoi confirmed the suspicions of the Marxist theoreticians by marching right ahead With the idea of eugenics, much as he decried "bourgeois eugenists."" Indeed, in his " Ibid., 111-34. " For an example of the type of extrapolation from the animal and plant worlds to that of human society which increasingly attracted criticism, nbte Filipchenko's observation: "Every plant and animal breeder who graduates from an agronomy institute is familiar in detail with the genetics of domestic animals and.

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Science and Values: The Eugenics Movement promotion of a socialist eugenics based on Lamarckian biology, he went so far as to suggest mandatory sterilization and thus fell into the position of a small minority, These debates essentially resulted in a draw among scientists on the issue of whether or not the inheritance of acquired characteristics was theoretically more consonant with M a r x i s m than was classical genetics. O n a popular level, however, the belief among, lay people and students that genetics was a bourgeois science continued to be strong and even grew as social conflict increased at the end of the decade with the commencement of the five-year plans. T h e obvious losers in the debate were the Russian eugenists who defined their field in terms of the Western eugenics movement. T h e y were not only supporters of classical genetics, with all of the controversy that field attracted in the Soviet Union, but they went far beyond these theoretical principles to extrapolations of biology to socifcty. In these extrapolations they included a host of assumptions about the future of society, the nature of races and classes,,and the relative influence of nature and nurture that did, indeed, conflict with prevalent views among the politically active elements of Soviet society. A s a result of their possession of these distinct and controversial views and of their links to ideologically hostile foreign scholarship, the Russian eugenists became more and more easily defined as "bourgeois specialists," an appellation that increasingly became akin to a criminal charge. T h e eugenists recognized that they must either abandon their concerns or radically change their activities in order to demonstrate that they actually had the,interests of Soviet socialism, not Western capitalism, at heart. T h e scientists in the Bureau of Eugenics at the A c a d e m y of Sciences chose the prudent path of abandoning the field. Between 1925 and 1928 they shifted from a concern with human heredity to a concern with the genetics of plants and animals. T h e change of emphasis can easily be seen in the successive .titles of their leading journal: 1922-1925

Bulletin

of the Bureau

of

1925-1927

Bulletin

of the Bureau

of Genetics

Eugenics

1928-

Bulletin

of the Bureau

of

and

Eugenics

Genetics

T h e last articles predominantly concerned with human genetics appeared in this journal in 1925. Eugenists in the A c a d e m y of Sciences became plant and animal geneticists primarily interested in the most exciting experiments in the field of their time, the study of Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly. But their eugenics past was to be held against them in the troublesome 1930s. T h e Russian Eugenics Society chose a more heroic and foolhardy path. T h e editors of the journal decided to change their emphases, to show how eugenics could be fitted to the purposes of social revolution and Marxism. T u r n i n g away from their genealogical studies of the nobility, they began to make studplants; c a n w e really say that the latter are more valuable in these regards than man himself?" Filipchenko then went on to call Tor the inclusion of eugenics instruction in the standard education curriculum for Soviet ,youth, See his " E v g e n i k a ν shkole," Rutskii tvgmichtikii fhumal, 3 (192)): 33.

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THE ORIGINS OF THE HOLOCAUST Loren R. Graham ies of the reformers and revolutionaries of Russian history, beginning with the Decembrists of 1825 but continuing right up to contemporary Commiinist party leaders, whom they noted were not reproducing at an adequate rate.' 4 Kol'tsov did a study of the genetic sources of the talented young proletarians being promoted up through the ranks of the universities and institutions of the Soviet Union." Other eugenists began developing extended justifications for a unification of the goals of Soviet socialism and eugenics. But the whole effort became increasingly artificial and strained. 5 * T h e eugenists with their record of connections with the international movement'—including German race hygiene with its ever-clearer links to National Socialism—could never justify themselves by trying to be more radical than their critics—or even equally radical—much as they were by then attempting. A scholar like Filipchenko could win individual debates through the strength of his arguments about the social implications of an assumed inheritance of acquired characteristics, but by style and background he was always a middle-class intelligent to his critics. By 1930 the eugenics movement in the Soviet Union was finished. These were years in which political controls in the Soviet Union were imposed on many scholarly institutions, and collectivization was violently enforced in the countryside. The Russian Eugenics Society was closed and its publications suspended. By 1931, when the Large Soviet Encyclopedia published the volume of its first edition with an article on " E u g e n i c s , " the field was simply condemned as a "bourgeois doctrine."" All efforts to create a unique, socialist eugenics were ridiculed. By this moment in Soviet history the logical possibility of linking the Marxist desire to transform man with the eugenic desire to improve him had irretrievably disappeared. The end of eugenics meant the end of discussions of human heredity, but it did not mean immediate victory for the doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Debates on that issue had been indecisive, and the Communist philosophers and political leaders did not wish to fall unwittingly into contradiction with science. The terms of the de facto intellectual truce were pragmatic: let the partisans of classical genetics and of the inheritance of " K o l ' t s o v observed in a 1914 article, "If we calculate the average number of children in the family ot each member of the Russian Communist party, that number will no doubt be far from what Grubcr cite« II necessary for a population group to preserve itself in the overall population. What would we say about a stock-breeder who every year, castrated his most valuable producers, not permitting them to multiply? But in cultured society approximately the same thing is occurring before our e y e s ! " Kol'tsov, "Vliinnie kul'tufy na otbor ν chelovechestve," Russkii tvgtnichtskii zhumal, 1 (1954): 15. The reference is to Max.Gruber, Unecht und BekUmp/ung des Geburtenrückgänge im dtuischtn Reicht (Munich, 1914)· H Kol'tsov, "Rodoslovyne nashikh vydvizhentsev," Russkii tvgtnichtskii zhumal, 4 (1916): 103-43- For other examples of this type of article, see N. P. Chulkov, "Genealogiia dekabristov Murav'evykh," Russkii tvgenicheskii thumal, 5 (1957): 3-10; P. F. Rokitskii, " B a k u n i n y , " Russkii evgenichtskii thumal, 5 (1997)! i l - n i and V. Zolotarev, "Dekabristy," Russkii evgenieheskii thumal, 6 (igaS): 178—97. " T h e difficulty of the position of the academic eugenists was illustrated by A. S. Serebrovikii When. I * called for a Socialist eugenics and then observed, " E v e r y class must create its own eugenics. This slogan however, . . . must in no way be understood in the manner of several of our comrades, especially in MoscM who maintain that the whole base of Morganist-Mendelian theory is an invention of the Western bourgeoilit and that the proletariat, creating its own eugenics, must base itself on Lamarckism." Serebrovskii, "TeonU nasledstvennosti Morgana i Mendelia i marksisty," Pod tnammem marksitma, 3 (1936): 113. " " E v g e n i k a , " Bol'shaia Sevtiskaia Entsiklopediie, 33 (1931): cols. 8 0 - 1 9 .

RACISM, THE OCCULT, A N D EUGENICS Science and Values: The Eugenics Movement acquired characteristics resolve the issue in practice, in the applied science of agronomy—not in the dangerous field of human heredity where the Germans in the 1930s were winning such notoriety, but in agriculture where the Soviet Union needed help. This truce set the stage for the rise of a clever schemer who could capitalize on the inability of geneticists in the early 1930s to produce agronomic miracles because of the immaturity of their science (hybrid corn and similar genetic innovations were applications of the 1940s), while he, surrounded by political supporters, exposed the eugenic past of a number of the prominent geneticists who tried to show the fallacies of his own innovations. Political loyalties, historical associations, and dedication to practical support of Soviet agricultural policies became far more important in determining the results of the discussions than logical rigor or scientific validity.

BY THE EARLY 1930s the process of the gradual crystallization of value links to conflicting concepts of heredity—links that were at first by no means clear or inevitable—was far advanced in Germany and Russia. Eventually the two societies went in opposite directions in their interpretations of the naturenurture controversy. The genetic doctrines and practices of Nazi Germany postulated the existence of genetic differences between races and other categories of man that have much greater importance in determining the worth and performance of individual members of those groups than anything that man could do during his lifetime. Thus, according to this assumption, "nature" obviously far outweighs "nurture." In the same years in which these doctrines became widespread in Germany, an opposite—and equally unsubstantiated—theory of genetics gained support and, finally, official approval in the Soviet Union. Lysenko's theory of agronomy, based on the inheritance of acquired characteristics, assigned an overwhelming weight to the nurture side of the equation. His naively optimistic theory of inheritance granted a much greater degree of control than the results of research in biology had indicated was possible. These two chronologically simultaneous episodes with contrasting results are probably the best large-scale "test cases" for the question of whether or not different values are inherent in different theories of heredity that we are going to find in the flux of history. The known scientific facts of biology and the tested, verified theories of heredity were the same in both countries. Yet each; on the basis of different value systems, embraced different theories of heredity,'and each labored mightily in later years to show the harmony between its biological science and its social morality. What do these examples tell us about the relationship between science and sociopolitical values? Granted, these two episodes are not ultimately the ideal types for asking such a question, since the sets of variables in the two countries were—not surprisingly—different. For example, the official ideologies which later developed out of the controversies of the 1920s described here were not true

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opposites—that is, they were not mirror images of each other. For that to be the case, two different theories of human heredity would have had to be fitted to two different political ideologies. That logical circle was never quite closed, since Lysenko's theory of inheritance was never explicitly applied to man t only to plants and animals. T h e concept of a Soviet eugenics—of Mendelian, Lamarckian, or whatever kind—was condemned by Russian political leaders after the early 1930s. In a sense, however, that very condemnation is the exception that proves the importance of the interaction of scientific theories and political values. The Germans in the 1930s used eugenics in such a horrifying way that the entire concept of eugenics was discredited even in those countries where both the prevailing value goali and the particular theory of heredity contrasted sharply with the goals and theory of the Germans. The world thus never witnessed the ironic and bizarre scene of two different societies aiming toward two different sets of value goals by applying two different (both incorrect) theories of human heredity. But the potential for this scenario was present. From the perspective of the present, it may appear that there is a natural alliance between eugenics and conservative, even fascist, sentiments. That link was not logically preordained, however, and was not perceived in the early 1920s by large numbers of radical critics of society. Marxists and socialists of many types then supported eugenics, as did liberals, progressives* and conservatives. In the early 1920s scientists and publicists who were interested in eugenics covered a rather wide range of political sentiment in Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia. In these early years eugenics was a faddish doctrine that was often considered progressive, the latest application of science for the benefit of man. If sometimes supported by aristocratic devotees of genealogical tables or middle-class members of social clubs, it also on occasion had support from committed socialists who believed thßt cultivation of true talent, rather than mere economic privilege, would destroy class society as it had been known. Both Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia were revolutionary states that had replaced recent monarchies. In the 1920s both were experiencing eclectic periods when the full political implications of the latest scientific hypotheses had still not been formulated. Were the passing of this early heterodox period and the emergence of a high degree of consensus about the correlation between theories of heredity and political world-views phenomena that touched Science itself, or were they only, epiphenomena of social and political turmoil? Do different theories of hered·· ity intrinsically contain different value implications? T h e answers to these questions depend in part on what the main rival theories may be. If the contending theories are defined in terms of their post-1933 vulgarized and absolutized forms (that is, a National Socialist theory categorizing humansi according to their "overall" genetic value—with J e w s , gypsies, and certain types of "social misfits'' at the bottom of the heap—opposed to Soviet theory that dogmatically attributed genetic progress to improvements in man's sociai environment), then the scientific "theories" in themselves contained t)y definition

RACISM, THE OCCULT, AND EUGENICS Science and Values: The Eugenics Movement clear value components. Obviously these absolutized explanations, encased in official ideology and supported by the respective governments, can hardly be classified as "science." Yet this fact should not be used as a convenient exit from the dilemma of the relationship of science to values. This study has intentionally been restricted to the period before 1930, when professional geneticists and eugenists in both Germany and Russia usually defined the contrasting theories in more academic terms. They often saw the difference between vulgarized extrapolations and core theories. Even Fritz Lenz spoke out in the 1920s against National Socialist "excesses" which, he believed, harmed the eugenics movement." He accepted the separation of factual and value statements as an ideal, even though he clearly violated it. During the German Weimar and Soviet New Economic Policy ( N E P ) periods, the rival theories, stated in their scientific forms, did not explicitly contain value statements. T h e rival theories were those of Mendelian genetics and.Lamarckism, viewed as scientific alternatives. And to many people they seemed to contain strikingly different value implications. One reason for different value connotations stems from the state of genetics in the 1920s as a pure and an applied science. Whether or not science qua science contains values, most agree that technology does have value impacts. Therefore, the significance for values of a particular science will vary as the associated technology,for that science develops. One interesting aspect of the development of human genetics in the 1920s is that not only was human heredity understood in an exceedingly inexact fashion, allowing much room for speculation based on social and class motives, but there was no technology available for controlling the genetic constitution of organisms except by selection on the basis of phenotypes. Such selection was offensive to existing values when applied to people, and therefore humane individuals wished for an alternative even if they accepted the goal of more control over human genetics. T h e relatively few geneticists who did not fall prey to the political ideologies of the time were left with a very undramatic argument, which could not carry their audiences in times of great social stress when the politically active were striving for answers to societal problems. T h e rigorous geneticists were saying, in effect: Yes, the science of genetics is in principle applicable to man. Genetics is, however, so immature as a science that any effort to apply it to man now would have disastrous and unpredictable effects. Therefore, do not try. to apply human genetics as a science, although continue to believe us when we·tell you that science is ultimately the best hope for man. In revolutionary situations popular audiences are not likely to find such an argument persuasive. Both Germany and Russia were undergoing social and political upheavals, and the audiences turned toward more radical, although M For examples of Lenz's criticisms, see his reviews of L . Γ. C l a u s s , Die nordische Setlt, and of K u r t Gerlach, Femslentiete, in Archiv fir Rassen- und GeseUscha/tsbiologie,'6 (1913), 445-47 a n d 330. Also see his more reserved criticism of the notorious journalistic race anthropologist H. F. K . G ü n t h e r in " N o t i z e n : G ü n t h e r s Berufung nach J e n a , " Archivßr Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie, 1 3 ( 1 9 3 1 ) : 337-39. L e n z criticized in particular the effort of National Socialist race propagandists to make a mythic, irrational ideal of the Nordic spirit. Lenz believed that racial ideas should be based on science.

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quite different, answers t o the problem of heredity, answers that contained possibilities for application. The German academic eugenists (as opposed to the race hygiene anthropologists) like Fritz Lenz were closer to science (as it then existed) when they attacked Lamarckists for their sentimental biology than were the Soviet Marxists who rejected genetics along with eugenics The tragedy is that those scientists who—contrary to Lenz—remained loyal to genetics as a scientific theory, while rejecting the growing inhumane and antirational extrapolations of German race hygiene, were unable to find appreciative audiences in either Germany or Russia. The reason for their failure no doubt lies largely in the social, political, and economic strains both societies underwent. T o give the details of those strains would require a long digression into the social and political histories of Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia. But the existence of these strains was only a necessary, not sufficient, condition for the emergence of radically different attitudes toward heredity. Also involved was a science of heredity so immature that it allowed room for wide speculation while offering few applications that were b