Nazi Ideology and Ethics

Nazi Ideology and Ethics
Nazi Ideology and Ethics
Edited by
Wolfgang Bialas and Lothar Fritze

Nazi Ideology and Ethics,
Edited by Wolfgang Bialas and Lothar Fritze
This book first published 2014
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright 2014 by Wolfgang Bialas, Lothar Fritze and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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ISBN (10): 1-4438-5422-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5422-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Wolfgang Bialas and Lothar Fritze.............................................................. 1
Ethical Conceptions
Nazi Ethics and Morality: Ideas, Problems and Unanswered Questions

Wolfgang Bialas ........................................................................................ 15
Did the National Socialists Have a Different Morality?

Lothar Fritze .............................................................................................. 57
Nazi Perpetrators
Hitlers Motive for the Holocaust

Gunnar Heinsohn ..................................................................................... 103
Nazis with a Clear Conscience? Civilian Functionaries and the Holocaust

Mary Fulbrook ......................................................................................... 127
A Question of Honor: Some Remarks on the Sexual Habits of German

Soldiers during World War II
Regina Mhlhuser .................................................................................. 149
Nazi Ideology and Propaganda
Nazi Military Ethics during Total Combat

Peter J. Haas ............................................................................................ 177
The Role of Evolutionary Ethics in Nazi Propaganda and Worldview

Training
Richard Weikart....................................................................................... 193
Nazi Ethics: The Medical Discourse
Turning Away From the Individual: Medicine and Morality

Under the Nazis
Florian Bruns ........................................................................................... 211
vi Table of Contents
Mercy Killing and Economism: On Ethical Patterns of Justification

for Nazi Euthanasia
Uwe Kaminsky ........................................................................................ 237
The National Socialist Patient Murders between Taboo and Argument:

Nazi Euthanasia and the Current Debate on Mercy Killing
Gerrit Hohendorf ..................................................................................... 275
The SS as a Moral Order
SS Ethics within Moral Philosophy

Andre Mineau .......................................................................................... 307
Das Schwarze Korps and the Validation of the SS Sippengemeinschaft

Amy Carney ............................................................................................ 323
The Moral Rigour of Immorality: The Special Criminal Courts of the SS

Christopher Theel .................................................................................... 343
Post-Holocaust Debates and Memory Politics
Universalism and Moral Relativism: On Some Aspects of the Modern

Debate on Ethics and Nazism
Wulf Kellerwessel ................................................................................... 367
National Socialism Bolshevism Universalism: Moral Transformations

in History as a Problem in Ethics
Rolf Zimmermann ................................................................................... 389
Ethics after the Holocaust: Jewish Responses

Isaac Hershkowitz ................................................................................... 421
On the Moral Profile of Public History: German Television, Nazi

Perpetrators, and the Evolution of Holocaust Memory
Stewart Anderson and Wulf Kansteiner .................................................. 439
Contributors ............................................................................................. 463

INTRODUCTION
WOLFGANG BIALAS AND LOTHAR FRITZE
Historiographic work on National Socialism has made much progress.

There may hardly be any period in the history of mankind which has been
researched in so much detail. This holds most of all for the historic events
and the National Socialist system of rule.
The description and analysis of systems of political rule form an essen-
tial part of the research on totalitarianism. However, the research of ideol-
ogy-guided dictatorships also called ideological dictatorships (Welt-
anschauungsdiktaturen) must necessarily include the analysis of the
ideology of the respective system. Among the essential elements of a sys-
tems ideology there count the moral convictions expressed by the major
ideologues and leaders. Who attempts to understand the rule of National
Socialism as well as the crimes for which it is responsible will thus have
do deal with the topic of Ideology and Morality in National Socialism.
In so far it is probably no coincidence that more recent research on Na-
tional Socialism apart from analyses of its system and practice of rule
increasingly deals with this topic and looks at the ethical aspects of the
National Socialist ideology as well as at the moral convictions of National
Socialist perpetrators. In this context, in recent years the debate has been
newly stimulated by keywords such as perpetrators with a good con-
science, the morality of immorality, morality of transformation or so
called morality in quotation marks.
Any discussion of the topic of National Socialist morality faces a se-
rious objection: Is it not that precisely National Socialism must be con-
sidered the epitome of immorality and inhumanity, so that speaking of
National Socialist morality and granting it any kind of morality is ruled
out right from beginning?
Indeed, it is not easy to escape intuitive defensiveness expressed by
this question and to critically question even this absolutely legitimate
preconception. For, we might ask, what kind of a morality is that supposed
to be, which justifies concentration and extermination camps, euthanasia
and the Holocaust, and by what kind of moral intuition are the perpetrators
in the camps and those responsible for establishing them supposed to have
2 Introduction
been guided? Was it not rather that the National Socialists were out for
doing evil deeds? Indeed, was it not that they themselves represented
the evil?
Nevertheless, in National Socialist texts of the various kinds again and
again we find that moral reasons are given: National Socialist ideologues
provided justifications for race policy. National Socialist authors worked
with moral categories such as decency and dignity, honour and duty. Both
National Socialist ideologues and perpetrators emphasized their belief to
have acted within the framework of their own moral order and, as they
understood it, to have behaved morally.
One open question is most of all the one about the motivations and rea-
sons of those who actively contributed to the crimes or who, by agreeing
with them or by expressing an indifferent attitude, made them possible at
all. What kind of self-understanding guided National Socialist perpetra-
tors? Were they really convinced that their actions could be morally justi-
fied? Or did they simply take over those reasons and explanations as pro-
vided by the National Socialist ideology?
The fact that some National Socialist perpetrators, as they often
claimed, indeed considered massive violations of the human rights and
even the destruction of European Jewry to have been morally correct and
necessary will probably always be difficult to understand. This refusal of
granting subjective moral motives even to National Socialist perpetrators
can only be countered by becoming aware of the fact that understanding
and comprehending human behaviour does not mean agreeing with it.
Only in exceptional cases National Socialist perpetrators may be sup-
posed to have been pathological criminals. Often they appear as average,
ordinary people who under different circumstances would never have felt
any inclination to contribute to crime and mass murder. Was it really that
the perpetratorss capability of judgement was so much restricted by ideo-
logical indoctrination that they must actually be considered to have been
criminally insane or that, at best, they could claim diminished responsi-
bilty?
Granted: This discrepancy is a theoretical challenge only if one be-
lieves the justification arguments to be credible and does not think that the
good conscience the perpetrators referred to was just a fake. However, the
attempt to distinguish the former from the latter reveals the limitations of
moral philosophy.
This question as well as a number of others were the topic of an inter-
national congress held at the Hannah-Arendt Institute for the Research on
Totalitarianism, Dresden (18-20 November 2010). Whereas research in the
German-speaking countries has produced a number of studies on the ide-
Wolfgang Bialas and Lothar Fritze 3
ology of National Socialism, studies on National Socialist morality are

only in their beginnings. The here presented volume documents primarily
the revised and extended contributions to the congress in Dresden. This
congress was meant as an encounter of moral-philosophical, historiograph-
ic and medicine-ethical research discourses on National Socialism. Some
contributions were included in addition.
In his opening contribution, the first editor of this volume, Wolfgang
Bialas, Hannah-Arendt-Institute for the Research on Totalitarianism,
claims the development of an independent moral order of National Social-
ism. He reconstructs how National Socialist ideology, philosophy and
medical ethics attempted to give reason to some race-ethical morality of
which the National Socialists claimed that, being a scientific morality, it
was in accordance with the laws of nature and life as well as of creation.
The moral conditioning of National Socialist perpetrators aimed at devel-
oping a kind of ethnic conscience which restricted moral obligations to
members of their own race community. Neither did they act without any
moral orientation nor in the awareness that what they were doing was
morally reprehensible. Among others, the following questions are dis-
cussed:
the conditioning of a new man as a race warrior or political

soldier whose actions, as he is free of religious and humanist re-
sentment, are guided by a race-ethical particular morality;
the mutual constitution of National Socialist ideology and morality
in a German society which was charged with moral significance;
the replacement of bourgeois-Christian morality by the species-
appropriate humanism of this new race-ethical morality, justifying
eugenics, euthanasia and race murder as being morally unobjec-
tionable and necessary for population politics;
the National Socialist threat of destruction to bourgeois society and
its humanist-Christian system of values of race-indifferent care and
charity, for which cultural degeneration in the course of history is
made responsible;
the entitlement to race-politically correct these developments,
which was supposed to enforce again the unrestricted right of those
being of high race, those being healthy and strong, in accordance
with the law of natural selection;
the phenomenon of National Socialist perpetrators with a good con-
science, which was emphasized by ideologically and politically
motivated criminals, both the masterminds behind the scenes and
4 Introduction
the opportunistic career offenders, so that, as they saw it, they

would be able to act free of selfish, abject or reprehensible motives;
finally the ambivalent discrimination against Jews as belonging to
an immoral race which was at the same time identified as the epit-
ome of a race-indifferent morality of reason which, from the point
of view of the Nazis, made them particularly dangerous.
The second editor of this volume, Lothar Fritze, Hannah-Arendt-

Institute for the Research on Totalitarianism, in his contribution pursues
the question if the leading National Socialists had a different morality. At
first the author states that also National Socialist perpetrators had accepted
a system of moral norms while at the same time feeling the obligation to
make their own behaviour subject to these norms. Among these norms
there counted a minimum of moral basic norms which was mostly in con-
gruence with that minimum which is also accepted by the citizens of dem-
ocratic constitutional states. Thus, there is no necessity to consider Nation-
al Socialist perpetrators immoral people, nor is it that they supported
different moral basic norms. Furthermore, it is possible that they did what
they did in the belief that they were acting in accordance with those norms
they themselves accepted. If nevertheless these perpetrators committed
crimes, this will be at least partially understandable, the author states, if
we assume that their non-moral convictions were different. By non-moral
convictions Fritze means convictions of a non-moral kind which, however,
are included as premises into morally relevant considerations or may play
a role with them. Non-moral convictions refer neither to a moral ought nor
do they imply value judgements in the moral sense. However, they essen-
tially decide about which scope rules, which reasons for justification and
which derived moral norms will be accepted when it comes to the practical
implementation of moral basic norms. This kind of interpretation does not
at all rule out that National Socialist perpetrators, apart from other, non-
moral convictions, had also different moral convictions which became
manifest by the practical implementation of moral basic norms. Finally
Fritze comes to the conclusion: The perpetrators, being convinced of the
moral justification of their actions, failed morally, insofar as they based
their actions on untenable non-moral convictions, whose untenability they
would have been able to see. Perpetrators with a good conscience violated
most of all cognitive duties.
Starting out from the frustration of widely accepted researchers of the
Holocaust when trying to explain Hitlers motivations for the destruction
of Jewry, Gunnar Heinsohn presents the following hypothesis: Soon after
World War I, Hitler identified Jewry as the originator of the ban on killing,
particularly the ban on infanticide and genocide as well as on the killing of

disabled people. With the development of the Jewish ethics of the sanctity
of life and the protection of the stranger, traditional rights to kill were
discredited and are now regarded a crime. According to Hitler, acceptance
of this Jewish ethics resulted in inacceptable consequences. Due to the
universal ban on killing, the fight of the peoples for territory is hindered
and the fighting spirit of the Nordic races is undermined by a bad con-
science. Based on this hypothesis Heinsohn, a sociologist, economist and
genocide researcher, draws several conclusions: Hitlers antisemitism, he
says, was not of a racist-biologic nature, rather the attempt at disposing of
the Jews must be understood to have been an attempt at extinguishing
Jewish ethics and at reestablishing the right to kill everybody weak as well
as all opponents in the racial war. Hitler, Heinsohn summarizes, had the
Jewish people be shattered as he believed them to be a source of infec-
tion for all non-Jews, in order to erase the Jewish programme of the sanc-
tity of life from the consciousness of the Germans. It was his goal to create
a historical turning point, in order to make the pre-Mosaic, archaic tribal
morality valid again.
By the example of the memoirs of Udo Klausa, Mary Fulbrook, Pro-
fessor of German History and Director of the Centre for European Studies
at University College, London, analyzes the self-exoneration strategies of
National Socialist perpetrators. From February, 1940, to early December,
1942, Klausa was the District Administrator of the District of Bedzin in
Upper Silesia, a district with three towns and 63 rural municipalities. At
that time the local population was expulsed to make room for German
resettlers, and tens of thousands of Jews were deported to Auschwitz.
After the war he kept hiding for a long time, to then by help of family
connections be listed under the coveted Denazification Group No. 5
exonerated. Fulbrook demonstrates how Klausa, by condemning the
practical implementation of National Socialist policy but not the basic
goals of this policy, was able to keep a good conscience after the war. By
always presenting other people as real Nazis, Klausa succeeded with
distancing himself from the events, which Fulbrook considers key-tactics
of self-exculpation. Furthermore, she also shows that these tactics only
work to a certain degree. For Klausas narration shows that at least at the
time when he was writing his memoirs he felt doubts and scruples con-
cerning the legality and moral innocuousness of his activities as a District
Administrator. That was why he found it impossible to admit that he con-
tributed to certain events or even knew of them. The subjective possibility
to ruthlessly participate in crimes is due, according to Fulbrook, to a kind
6 Introduction
of colonial racism which was rooted in the assumption that there existed
a hierarchy of peoples of higher and lower value.
Still during the war Himmler told his SS men that immoral behav-
iour would not be tolerated. In countless writings, NS propagandists had
emphasized that racial purity was a good deserving every possible pro-
tection, that it was indeed holy. From these ideologic premises there
resulted clear guidelines for the behaviour both of the High Command of
the Wehrmacht and the SS Leadership. Regina Mhlhuser, Hamburg
Institute for Social Research, in her contribution shows that and how under
the conditions of the war these restrictive orientations were partly given up
on in favour of a rather pragmatic way of proceeding: Indeed sexual en-
counters both rape and prostituion as well as consensual relationships
with native women were considered unwelcome, as they contradicted
NS ideas on race and endangered the military discipline, health and reputa-
tion of the troops. At the same time, however, virility was considered an
expression of strength, male honour and, after all, helpful with achieving
the goals of the war. The Hamburg historian makes clear that only seldom
military commanders really tried to enforce existing bans in this respect.
Instead, Wehrmacht and SS made much efforts to keep their men under
control by help of a voluminous disciplination apparatus. Whereas the
Wehrmacht, by referring to girl friends and wives at home, appealed to the
morality of their men, the catalogues of rules of the SS, says Mhlhuser,
read like pragmatic instructions to minimize the health hazards of sexual
intercourse.
Based on a study on the NS regimes military code, Peter J. Haas,
Professor of Jewish Studies and Director of the Samuel Rosenthal Center
for Judaic Studies at Case Western Reserve University, attempts to gain
general insights concerning the relation of military codes, that is those
expectations and instructions referring to the behaviour of professional
soldiers, and the ethical ideas of civilian society. According to Haas, the
NS military code as it developed over the time particularly for behaviour
at the Eastern Front showed that any attempt of formulating objective and
generally valid ethics of warfare is doomed to failure. At least in moderni-
ty warfare, he states, is outside the limits of ethical restrictions. At first
Haas makes clear that and how the Wehrmacht step by step adjusted to the
racist National Socialist ethics of warfare. The National Socialist military
code provided the individual soldier with a possibility to justify his
deeds. According to the authors conviction, it is impossible to develop
any set of rules which will reliably enforce humane warfare. The treat-
ment of Soviet prisoners of war, as it was codified and finally implementd
by the Commissar Order, does not only reflect the evil nature of war as
such but presents war as a rational system without any inner moral correc-
tives.
The National Socialists were supporters of Darwins evolution theory.
Hitler and other leading National Socialists assumed that man originated
from the animal world. Richard Weikart, History Professor at California
State University, Stanislaus, summarizes the evolution theory-based Na-
tional Socialist attitude towards ethics and morality by the term evolution
ethics a term which was in fact not used by the National Socialists.
National Socialist evolution ethics, Weikart states, were based on a racist
version of neo-Darwinism. By his contribution the author shows in which
ways moral obligations were based on reaching back to laws of biology
presented by curricula for the ideological education of SS and police. The
fight against the three main causes of the decline of any people was con-
sidered a moral obligation for any German citizen and anyway for any
member of the Nordic race: a declining birth rate, so called counter selec-
tion and the mixture of races. After all, says Weikart, the race policy of the
SS did not only aim at supporting the interests of the Nordic peoples but
according to the self-understanding of the SS was anyway meant to serve
for the further development of mankind. Thus, evolution ethics contradict-
ed democratic norms, humanitarian considerations and the idea of equal
rights.
Given the murder of mentally ill and disabled people called eutha-
nasia as well as the murderous experiments on humans at the concentra-
tion camps, there is the question of how such blatant violations of elemen-
tary rules of humanity and medical care were possible. Looking for
possible answers, Florian Bruns, a medical historian at the University of
Erlangen, reviews the ethical standards pursued by German physicians
between 1933 and 1945. Bruns asks about the moral convictions of Ger-
man physicians at that time as well as in how far they were influenced by
National Socialist ideology. Were there specifically National Socialist
medical ethics, and if yes, who communicated them to physicians and
students of medicine in Germany? The authors outlines the German ethics
discourses in the realm of medicine and presents the crucial protagonists
and institutions as well as their working in this context. Finally, Bruns
demonstrates how, by way of the National Socialist practice of enforced
sterilization, two constitutive principles of medical morality at the same
time were officially made invalid medical secrecy and the rule that a
physician must not do any harm to a patient; he discusses the postulate that
the individual had an obligation to be healthy and makes clear that obvi-
ously many physicians contributing to the euthanasia killings were con-
vinced of doing the morally right thing.
8 Introduction
The murder of psychically and mentally ill people during World War II
euphemistically summarized by the term euthanasia is also in the
focus of the study by Uwe Kaminsky. This medical and law historian
shows on the one hand that even under National Socialism such killings
needed justification, and on the other hand he shows how euphemistic
justifications (mercy killings, Freimachungsmanahmen (provisions to
make room) for purposes of air raid protection contributed to reducing
the inhibition threshold towards transgressing the ban on killing. Kamin-
sky makes clear that eugenic arguments, which were taken up again in the
period of National Socialism, did not automatically trigger off the de-
struction of life unworthy of life. According to Kaminsky, the thesis that
National Socialist euthanasia can be logically explained by racial hygiene
ignores both the National Socialist polycracy and the dynamics of events,
which is due to rule-immanent competition. Accordingly, in analogy to the
twisted road to the Holocaust the author speaks of the twisted road to
euthanasia. His contribution works out the justifications and reasons
given for the National Socialist acts of killing and makes obvious that in
the course of the war medical selection criteria retreated to the back in
favour of economic-utilitarian aspects. Then, it is stated, the euthanasia
killings were justified most of all by considerations of utility and by refer-
ring to emergency. In this context, Kaminsky says, Protestant theologists
indeed recognized in principle the possibility of an emergency indication,
however in contrast to the attitude of official representatives of the NS
regime they stated that actually such a situation was not given. Neverthe-
less, throughout the entire war the Churches rejected euthanasia.
Gerrit Hohendorf, psychiatrist, medical historian and medical ethicist
at the Technical University of Munich, asks if insights regarding the cur-
rent debate on euthanasia can be gained from the history of National So-
cialist euthanasia. At first sight, he says, the matter is clear: The killings
of ill people during National Socialism have nothing to do with euthanasia
as we understand it these days. The National Socialists misused the term
euthanasia to hide their true intentions. However, in the authors opinion
a detailed analysis of the genesis of the various forms of NS euthanasia
reveals the slippery slope on which the debate on the legal status of so
called life unworthy of life happened in Germany since the early 1920s
at the latest. The way in which the euthanasia actions happened would
have been impossible without the concept of medical relief. Hohendorf
reconstructs the current German euthanasia debate and in this context
points out to a problem which, in his opinion, is not appropriately reflected
on. That is: Who decides about what life means for those being incapable
of expressing their will? In case of patients who are incapable of making
an autonomous decision, as is Hohendorfs thought, it is still the physician

who must decide about certain degrees of suffering, according to the prin-
ciple of self-determination. An additional argument is that the legalization
of killing on request or medical assistance with suicide on the basis of the
principle of self-determination might result in severely disabled people
who are suffering very much might feeling an obligation to decide for
suicide, in order of not being a burden for society.
The SS committed evil deeds at a large scale. At the same time it
played an important role with conceptualizing National Socialist ethics.
But still, asks Andr Mineau, Professor of Ethics and History at the Uni-
versity of Quebec, Canada, can ethics of the evil be imagined at all, as
after all ethics are about the good? At first the author demonstrates that
and how SS ethics combined deontological, consequentialist and perfec-
tionist approaches, organized around moral concepts such as duty, the
good and virtuousness, while at the same time bereaving these concepts of
their universal nature. It replaced the universal validity of moral norms by
some biologic egotism which was oriented at the law of natural selection.
Accordingly, for SS ethics three dangers were relevant: The decline of the
birth rate, counter selection and the mixture of races. For the SS, moral
behaviour meant behaving in the interest of the German people, in the
context of which belonging to the German people was defined on the basis
of racial criteria, and the realization of the common good was understood
in the sense of preserving the racial substance of the people. According to
Mineau, this way of restricting the common good to one people legitimat-
ed every kind of violence, after all. By attributing value only to part of
humanity, SS ethics pursued excessive egotism, thus at the same time
showing a strong nihilistic component.
Amy Carney, a historian from Ohio University, discusses Himmlers
efforts to make the SS a kinship community to which not only his SS
men but also their wives and children as well as their descendants were
supposed to belong. The precondition for access to this community was
belonging to the Nordic race. On the basis of belonging to the common
Nordic blood, she states, one had intended to overcome every difference
religion, regional identities, class differences and to establish a race-
conscious biologic and cultural community which was supposed to be-
come the vanguard of the National Socialist race state. The author demon-
strates how in this context the SS weekly Das Schwarze Korps became
kind of an ideologic mouthpiece of the SS, focusing on topics such as
eugenics, the significance of marriage and family as well as on the Third
Reichs population policy. Das Schwarze Korps, Amy Carney makes
clear, was meant for spreading and explaining the biologic world view of
10 Introduction
the SS and after all served for the creation of a racist aristocracy in Na-
tional Socialist Germany.
The Dresden historian Christopher Theel in his contribution discusses
the jurisdiction of SS and police. First of all it was supposed to have the
function of a jurisdiction for the Waffen SS and thus be a tool of the polit-
ical and military leadership in the hands of the Reichsfhrer SS. Further-
more, according to Himmlers will it was supposed to develop into a new
kind of jurisdiction, free of Roman legal thought and based on a Germanic
sense of justice. Thus, it was supposed to develop a kind of jurisdiction
which was in accordance with the nature of National Socialism and the
tasks of the National Socialist state, claiming to finally become a model
for criminal justice in general. As Theel demonstrates, SS and police
courts were supposed to do the pioneering work. In this context the
author discusses efforts of liberating the judge from the inflexible
framework of the law and increasing his significance for the finding of
justice as well as the thus connected attempts to replace the traditional
offence-oriented penal law by an offender-oriented penal law consid-
ering the entire personality of the offender. Among others, the task of this
kind of jurisprudence was supposed to provide the German people with a
legal system which was grounded on a vlkisch sense of justice. At the
same time, however, one was aware of the fact that, for example concern-
ing the question of the killing of life unworthy of life, such a sense of
justice could not be assumed for the majority of the German people who
still had to be educated towards a sense of justice in the National Socialist
sense. By the example of the notorious verdict by the Supreme SS and
Police Court against Max Tubner in 1943 Theel demonstrates the attitude
of SS judges towards problems of legal practice resulting from the mur-
derous task of the SS.
In his contribution, the philosopher Wulf Kellerwessel from Mnster
points out to a grave difficulty of some contemporary moral concepts
resulting from the problem of rational criticism of National Socialist
norms of behaviour. He tries to prove that open or hidden relativism in
ethics makes a reason-guided criticism of National Socialist norms of
behaviour impossible. The author demonstrates this by the examples of the
positions of G. Harman, B. Williams and M. Walzer. Both Harmans and
Williamss meta-ethical convictions as well as Harmans internalism are
said to be problematic, and also Walzers reiterative universalism is said
to lack critical substance. Of course, Kellerwessel says, these moral phi-
losophers are not at all under the suspicion of sympathizing with an inhu-
man ideology such as National Socialism. Nevertheless their moral con-
cepts are said to be inappropriate for a convincing criticism of National
Socialism and its rules of conduct. A normative kind of universalism,

Kellerwessel states, has an appropriate potential for criticism. This is par-
ticularly true for discourse-analytical universalism.
The philosopher Rolf Zimmermann from Konstanz gives reasons to his
thesis that both National Socialism and Bolshevism represent historical
phenomena of being morally different and that their practice of mass de-
struction may be understood to have been racial or class murder out of
morality. This interpretation, says Zimermann, looks less paradox if speak-
ing about morality is not right from the beginning restricted to a certain
topical preliminary understanding or to apriori structures. The analysis of
both National Socialism and Bolshevism reveals their moral cores, social-
political structures of norms and violence structures as historical alterna-
tives to the egalitarian universalism of the western tradition. In the au-
thors opinion, the rupture of species that National Socialism and in
particular the Holocaust represented, indicates a transformation towards
being morally different, with corresponding sociocides on the side of
Bolshevism. Apart from important differences, the prospect of creating
new man with a new kind of morality was the overarching common
ground which, furthermore, resulted in an innerworldly redemption mo-
rality. According to Zimmermann, both moral-historical formations must
be understood to have been radically particularistic entities, in contrast to a
universalist kind of morality. Thus, in the course of a comparative consid-
eration of morality, also the particular suitability of egalitarian universal-
ism as a descriptive and normative guideline of alternative moralities be-
comes obvious. Zimmermann supports a concept of a meta-ethical
pluralism which puts any kind of monistic moral consideration into ques-
tion. Being a product of the historical development since the 18th century,
universalism must be seen in its contingency. Its moral guiding concept of
human equality is said to be not grounded in nature or reason but in the
will to make all humans equal, something which can be historically-
processually universalized but not conceptually guaranteed.
Isaac Hershkowitz, Professor of Philosophy at Bar-Ilan University, Is-
rael, provides a meta-ethical study on Jewish answers to the Holocaust.
Based on a phenomenological overview of the range of answers to the
question of which ethical conclusions must be drawn from the Holocaust,
the author develops a model of Jewish ethical answers. According to
Hershkowitz, at first two diverging approaches must be distinguished: the
particularistic and the universalistic approach. Particularistic answers
interpreting the Holocaust as the sound of Gods trumpet in reaction to a
concrete mistake in the life of the Jewish community are classified as
being ideologic. Moral enlightenment, Hershkowitz assumes, can be
12 Introduction
expected only from universalistic answers, they are the only ones to pro-
vide a message which can be accepted by all mankind. Although different
strands can be identified also within the universalistic approach, the vari-
ous thinkers are characterized by a certain moral restlessness as well as
by the opinion, on which they all agree, that they are facing the task of
fixing the world. These Jewish thinkers feel the urge to reestabish the
moral reputation of the world.
Stewart Anderson and Wulf Kansteiner, cultural-intellectual historians
at Binghamton University, claim that Holocaust studies lack a comprehen-
sive critical analysis of the history and structure of the moralistic world of
Holocaust remembrance. The authors differentiate between four types of
moral interventions, namely primarily ontologically, ethically, normatively
and applied-ethically oriented moral statements, distinctions that they
apply in their analysis of ZDF television programmes about the Holocaust
between the mid-1960s and the present. They consider the early 1980s
i.e. the period after the invention of the Holocaust paradigm and before the
commercialization of German television the most self-reflective and
self-critical era of German history TV. Anderson and Kansteiner exten-
sively discuss the so called Knopp TV of historical entertainment that has
successfully combined politically correct anti-Nazi messages with ambiva-
lent visual products celebrating Nazi power. Finally, they focus on the
broadcasting of violent Holocaust Memory that they explore as a combina-
tion of Holocaust curiosity, philosemitic values and the overcoming of
taboos and inhibitions.
ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS
NAZI ETHICS AND MORALITY:
IDEAS, PROBLEMS
AND UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
WOLFGANG BIALAS
National Socialism and the Holocaust were seen as the destruction of the
moral fabric of the Western world and as a possible relapse of mankind to
barbarism. In this context, the Holocaust was defined as a pathological
deviation from modernity. Being the incarnation of mans unnatural, al-
ways fragile domestication, morality was considered a kind of safeguard-
ing which had been imposed on man in contradiction to his inherent na-
ture. The Holocaust perpetrators were said to have revealed that, below the
surface of cultural domestication and moral safeguards, man had been
lying in wait for opportunities to become once more that beast he had
always been despite his guise as a civilized being. However, Auschwitz
was not only described as a break with European modernity but also as a
consequence of its ambivalences and potentials for destruction.1 Finally,
speaking of violation and failure as a species points to the destructive
rationality of Nazi ethnocentric morality having prevailed over a universal
morality of reason.2
Research on Nazi morality and ethics is still in its infancy in the re-
spective German-language literature,3 and the discussion here has only just
1
Cf. Michael Prinz and Rainer Zitelmann (eds.), Nationalsozialismus und
Modernisierung, 2nd edition (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1994).
2
Rolf Zimmermann, Philosophie nach Auschwitz. Eine Neubestimmung von Moral
in Politik und Gesellschaft (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2005).
3
Peter J. Haas, Morality after Auschwitz. The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic
for English-language literature (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988); Eve Garrard
and Geoffrey Scarre (eds.), Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust (Aldershot/ Bur-
lington: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003). For the German debate cf. Werner
Konitzer and Raphael Gross (eds.), Moralitt des Bsen. Ethik und
nationalsozialistische Verbrechen (Frankfurt a. M./New York: Campus, 2009); as
well as Raphael Gross, Anstndig geblieben. Nationalsozialistische Moral
(Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 2010).
16 Nazi Ethics and Morality
begun using buzzwords such as Nazi perpetrators with a good con-

science,4 the morality of immorality, nationalist transformational
morality, so-called Nazi morality, or morality in inverted commas.5
These concepts and metaphors as they are being utilized in the debate
indicate that research sees accepting any autonomous Nazi morality as
controversial. In the final analysis, what kind of morality could justify
concentration camps, extermination camps, euthanasia, and the Holocaust?
It is entirely appropriate to call Auschwitz the reality of the morally im-
possible,6 and there is no doubt that Nazism was the embodiment of im-
morality and inhumanity. The persecution, exclusion, and destruction of
European Jewry was not only a crime for which there is no precedent, it
was also deeply immoral. No further justification is needed for this state-
ment, even though it leaves a plethora of questions unanswered. For in-
stance, is it most crucially a question of comprehending why the Nazi
perpetrators committed their crimes? Or does the greater challenge lie in
understanding why they did not recognize what they were doing as crimi-
nal? Thus, assuming that they actually believed race ethics to be a justifi-
cation for the necessity of destroying the Jews, did they really think they
were morally justified?
I. The Nazi Value Revolution: Racial Ethics

and the Conditioning of the New Man
The Nazi value revolution aimed at reversing the bourgeois-Christian
system of values. Its successful and sustainable transformation allowed the
Nazi perpetrators to act on the belief that their behavior was morally unob-
jectionable or even imperative. Specific directives and behavioral expecta-
tions replaced traditional values. However, even when people start acting
unjustly and immorally, they still seek to justify their behavior that much
more so when they explicitly overstep a set of informal limits of a cultural-
ly established moral order, in other words, when they do things that are
criminal and immoral according to valid norms. Most people would recoil
in horror from acting in a fashion they themselves believed to be immoral.
4
Lothar Fritze, Tter mit gutem Gewissen. ber menschliches Versagen im
diktatorischen Sozialismusm (Cologne/Weimar: Bhlau, 1998).
5
Werner Konitzer, Moral oder Moral? Einige berlegungen zum Thema Moral
und Nationalsozialismus, in Werner Konitzer/Raphael Gross (eds.), Moralitt
des Bsen. Ethik und nationalsozialistische Verbrechen (Frankfurt a. M./New York:
Campus, 2009), pp. 97-115.
6
Hartmut Kuhlmann, Ohne Auschwitz, Internationale Zeitschrift fr
Philosophie, vol. 45 (1997) no. 1, pp. 101-110, here 107.
Wolfgang Bialas 17
Apparently, it is necessary to plausibly portray immorality as the morality

of a new order to make sure that people are willing to fall in line. It was
important for the Nazi perpetrators to appear to themselves as decent peo-
ple acting in a moral fashion.
There was a great likelihood that people who were not critical or skep-
tical of the Nazi system or who did not reject it outright would act as they
were expected to. Most of all, they did not want to act conspicuously,
which is why they preferred to live with as little disturbance as possible. In
general, they had no moral scruples. Instead, they implied that it was nei-
ther moral nor immoral but just reasonable to think of themselves and to
act in accordance with their own interests. The biological value revolution
of Nazism did not just give up on conventional morality but substituted it
with a new racial morality. It replaced universal values and thought pat-
terns of bourgeois morality that it considered incompatible with race ethics
while integrating others into its own value system. Among those taken on
and incorporated into the new moral order were the conscience as the inner
authority of moral self-questioning, ethically discriminating selfishness as
something immoral, allowing for the possibility of having misgivings as a
sign of moral seriousness, and overcoming the latter as a proof of moral
strength. Nazi ethics also renewed the validity of common sense moral
values and explicitly condemned lying, stealing, cheating, corruption,
cruelty, and murder as immoral and therefore unbefitting of a decent Ger-
man.
Racial biological naturalism and metaphysical politics declared that
humans were vehicles of higher principles. Their value was determined by
whether they helped engineer these principles through their actions, stood
in the way of those principles, or even promoted principles to the contrary.
Within the framework of race ethics, individuals were reduced to being
members of a race who jointly were either doomed to destruction if they
happened to be Jews or destined to rule the world if they were members of
the Nordic race such as the Germans. Their personal interests and inten-
tions only counted if they were in line with their racial affiliation. As indi-
viduals they were considered subordinates to history, the nation, the party,
and the Fuehrer whose goals they were supposed to support.7
7
Wolfgang Bialas, Der Nationalsozialismus und die Intellektuellen. Die Situation
der Philosophie, in Idem/Manfred Gangl (eds.), Intellektuelle im Nationalsozialismus
(Frankfurt a. M./Berlin/Bern/Bruxelles/New York/Oxford/Vienna: Peter Lang,
2000), pp. 13-50.
Nazism attempted to establish a scientific ethics by means of a biopo-

litical radicalization of Social Darwinism.8 Claiming morality to be in
conjunction with the laws of nature and life was to ensure its plausibility
in an era that believed in scientific and technical solutions to actual or
ideologically constructed social problems. The Nazi worldview was highly
compatible with the intuitive worldview of many people, whom it relieved
of the burden of making their own moral judgments and to whose value
system it gave systematic coherence and scientific plausibility.9 It also
suggested what they needed to do if they wanted to be in harmony with
this system of ethics. Many welcomed the fact that it relieved them of their
responsibility and the necessity of having to morally judge their behavior.
Nazi ideology and morality justified one another. The Nazi society was
burdened with moral meanings, and Nazi racial morality itself was an
ideological construct. The use of arguments concerning history, natural
laws, race, population policy, national hygiene, and biology was supposed
to provide the Nazi racial policy with a pseudoscientific framework of
reference. Moral concepts such as decency, honor, loyalty, and duty
played an important role in Nazi ideology. The Nazi movement tried to
give the impression that it was guided by moral principles and values and
that it also demanded its adherents to follow these principles.
The Nazi ideology agenda was to create a new morality that justified
itself on three levels: 1. by documenting a crisis of bourgeois morality, 2.
through the vision of a new morality, and 3. through the moral condition-
ing of the new man.10 Nazi morality perceived itself as being:
a higher morality geared towards absolute values and ideas in con-

trast to an intuitive common sense morality,
a German morality in contrast to a non-German morality,
8
On social Darwinism see Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary
Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004);
Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification
and Nazism, 1870-1945 (New York/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), pp. 11-60.
9
Peter J. Haas, Doing Ethics in an Age of Science, in Jack Bemporad/John T.
Pawlikowski/ Joseph Sievers (eds.), Good and Evil After Auschwitz. Ethical impli-
cations for today (Hoboken/NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 2000), pp. 109-118, here
110.
10
Cf. from the Nazi point of view Herbert Graf, Der neue Mensch im neuen Staat
(Berlin: P. Schmidt, 1934) and Erich Jaensch, Der Gegentypus. Psychologisch-
anthropologische Grundlagen deutscher Kulturphilosophie, ausgehend von dem,
was wir berwinden wollen (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1938).
Wolfgang Bialas 19
a racially conscious morality in contrast to a racially indifferent

morality,
a national morality in contrast to the internationalist class morality
which they claimed would split the nation and the people into hos-
tile social groups,
a master morality for asserting the rights of the stronger in contrast
to a morality of protecting the weak and needy from the encroach-
ments of the powerful,
a racial morality with a global reach in contrast to and competition
with bourgeois-Christian morality and Bolshevist atheism, and
an anti-Jewish morality.
The following theoretical justifications and thought patterns were sup-

posed to document the plausibility of Nazi morality:
the subordination of the individual to the functionality of a greater

whole or the assertion of higher ideas,
the acceptance of eternal laws of nature and life, and in particular
the law of natural selection, whose effectiveness was restricted by
Christian-Jewish morality of equality and humanity,
the substitution of universal values with ethnic values based on the
distinction between superior and inferior life,
the claim to intervene in the biological foundations and cultural
conditions of human life for the sake of racial perfection,11
the presumption of judging people according to their value and use-
fulness in the new racial order.
Nazi morality was conceived as a procedural virtue ethics. It combined

absolute virtues that demanded unconditional obedience with the attitude
of social engineering and replaced common sense intuitions with an ideo-
logical catalog of virtues and commands. The ideal of the new man was
the race-conscious and ideologically dedicated and knowledgeable
worldview warrior (Weltanschauungskrieger) the political soldier who
would be able to perform crimes for the sake of the Nordic race and Ger-
many with a clean conscience while at the same time perfectly convinced
11
Cf. Detlev J. K. Peukert, Volksgenossen und Gemeinschaftsfremde. Anpassung,
Ausmerze und Aufbegehren unter dem Nationalsozialismus (Cologne: Bund, 1982)
as well as Peukert, Die Genesis der Endlsung aus dem Geiste der Wissenschaft,
in Zerstrung des moralischen Selbstbewusstseins: Chance oder Gefhrdung?, ed.
by Forum fr Philosophie (Bad Homburg) (Frankfurt a. M. 1988), pp. 24-48.
of doing the right thing and acting morally.12 The trademark of this new
type of man was his capacity of moral judgment as defined by Nazism that
made him always act creatively on his own initiative and not just follow
orders blindly or mechanically.13 He was not presented as someone who
thoughtlessly took and obeyed orders without hesitation but as someone
who consciously took on responsibility. Being physically and spiritually
healthy and tough on himself, he always considered the consequences of
his actions. When he made a decision, he insisted on doing what he con-
sidered necessary, just, and moral. We want one thing above all- to be
honest to ourselves and know why we act one way and not another. We
want to be aware of the consequences of our actions [...] We want to live
in such a fashion that we can always be responsible for ourselves.14
Nazi ideology asked the German people to develop biological attitudes
and feelings as part of a racial character in order to form an ethnic con-
science15 that only recognized moral obligations towards members of its
own race. Attempts to create a racial conscience in contrast to racial indif-
ference emphasized personal responsibility.16 The moral core of man was
supposed to be his conscience, which was considered the symbol of his
life as a moral subject. Guided by his conscience, he would have to prove
that his actions would live up to his normative self-image.
Non-Aryans and parasites to the community were refused moral
care and charity. The new morality was only for the members of one's own
race who were not suffering from any inherited disease. Nazi racial poli-
tics tried to prevent foreign blood from coming into contact with the
community of Nordic Germans. In other words, in contrast to a supposedly
diffuse concept of Christian charity, moral empathy was restricted to
members of the Nazi racial peoples community whereas the racially infe-
rior and those of alien race were excluded from mutual moral obligations.
Altogether, the Germans were supposed to trust Nazi ideology and judg-
ments based on race ethics more than their intuitive moral judgment based
on their own experiences. Due to their racio-ethical indoctrination they
12
Gerhard Stoedtner, Soldaten des Alltags. Ein Beitrag zur berwindung des
brgerlichen Menschen (Leipzig: Armanen-Verlag, 1939) and Paula Diehl, Macht
Mythos Utopie. Die Krperbilder der SS-Mnner (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag,
2005).
13
Gtz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 2005), p. 22.
14
Moral kritisch betrachtet, Das Schwarze Korps, August 31, 1944, no. 35, p. 3.
15
Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge/MA/London: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 2003).
16
Martin Staemmler, Aufgaben und Ziele der Rassenpflege, Ziel und Weg, vol. 3
(1933) no. 14, pp. 415-422, here 41.
Wolfgang Bialas 21
were to be capable of participating in the persecution of the Jews without

any moral scruples. This was simultaneously portrayed as their racial and
ethical upgrading (moralische Aufartung) to the level of the new man
who supposedly needed the struggle for existence in order to stay healthy
and to protect himself against weakening.17
The ideology of racial biology implied that racial membership and the
corresponding affinity to a particular morality were generated by inher-
itance. The fact that the Germans belonged to the Nordic race placed a
particular moral obligation on them not to forfeit the possibility of being a
member of a superior race by racial misbehavior. The members of the
higher race were supposed to act in a racially conscious fashion in order to
prove that they were worthy of belonging. They were expected to demon-
strate through their commitment, struggle and personal dedication18 to
the cause of Nazism that they deserved to be counted among the racial
elite. They were called upon to form a racial value system that would
guide them not only in political clashes but also in their everyday lives. In
other words, by taking part in persecuting and stigmatizing the Jews the
Germans were supposed to demonstrate their assent to the new racial or-
der. Their sacrifice and dedication to the cause of Nazism was supposed to
demonstrate that they were personally ready to take advantage of the op-
portunities offered them by their racial membership.
Nazi racial ethics allowed the members of the Nordic race individual
space for development. The reason given was that if humans were already
predetermined by racial membership, the concepts of responsibility, guilt,
and failure would be inherently inapplicable. Any teachings that stated that
people were exclusively biological would leave no room for personal
success or failure but rather predisposed them to certain values, ideals, and
convictions due to their racial belonging. Therefore, ordinary Germans
were supposed to stress their predisposition to racial superiority through
developing the appropriate attitudes and behavior already ascribed to them
by their racial membership.
The moral discrimination of the Jews was justified by means of a se-
lective racial morality that replaced a universal morality of reason.
Through personally participating in persecuting the Jews the Germans
were expected to internalize the new morality of race-conscious toughness
and mercilessness towards racial enemies and inferiors. It was true that the
Jews were declared superfluous in a future society organized exclusively
17
Karl Ktschau, Zur nationalsozialistischen Revolution in der Medizin, Ziel
und Weg, vol. 4 (1934) no. 23, pp. 884-889, here pp. 884.
18
Kurt Leese, Rasse Religion Ethos. Drei Kapitel zur religisen Lage der
Gegenwart (Gotha: L. Klotz, 1934), p. 16.
according to racial criteria. Still, they were functional for bringing about
this order because they were needed to morally condition the new man to
become a racial warrior and biological soldier. Being aware of his re-
sponsibility toward his race and his people, the new man was supposed to
be capable of withstanding all foreign temptations not in harmony with
his race.19 Since humans cannot rely on their drives to intuitively act in
accordance with their kind in the way animals do, they would have to be
trained to think, feel, and act biologically. Conditioning Germans to rely
on their instincts to act morally was to make them act intuitively in har-
mony with race laws.
Animals were deemed superior to humans in that they behaved in con-
gruence with their own kind. Acting otherwise was practically impossible
for them as natural selection was seen to filter out those who differed from
their own and contradicted their nature. As Hitler put it in "Mein Kampf":
According to "the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life [...] the
stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his
own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel. [...]
The consequence of this racial purity universally valid in nature is not
only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races but their uniform
inherent character. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a
tiger, etc., and the difference can at best belie at most in the varying meas-
ure of force, strength, intelligence, dexterity, endurance etc., of the indi-
vidual specimens. But you will never find a fox who in his inner attitude
might, for example, show humanitarian tendencies toward geese, as simi-
larly there is no cat with a friendly inclination toward mice.20
The history of human civilization, on the other hand, was considered a
failed experiment in promoting variety, difference, and tolerance. Racial
indifference that deliberately ignored race as a core principle of nature,
life, and creation and also denied natural selection and racial coherence,
was blamed for the decay, confusion, and suppression of human nature.
More specifically, racial mixing and racially indifferent behavior were to
blame for the decline of mankind. Humanity would have to reconcile with
its biological nature, enabling it to resist the temptation to behave indiffer-
ently toward race and to cultivate the sovereignty of racial selfishness -
through a conscious attempt to thwart the cultural domestication ultimately
19
Franz Schattenfroh, Wille und Rasse (Berlin/Zrich/Vienna: Payer & Co., 1939),
p. 182.
20
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Translated by Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1971), p. 285.
Wolfgang Bialas 23
culpable for its estrangement. Conditioning people to act instinctively

immediately suggested that such behavior was moral.21
The bio-political restructuring of society along the category of race
perceived people as part of an anthropological experiment. In such an
experiment, the master race was supposed to be morally conditioned to
exterminate the racially inferior, those unworthy of life. The development
of the new man who could exterminate those unworthy of life with a clear
conscience propelled the new Nazi morality to supersede an allegedly
defunct one. The SS, as the racial elite, demonstrated that it was possible
to fabricate a race by annihilating other races.22 Their members saw
themselves as the prototypes of the new man. As the racial avant-garde of
Germanys societal transfiguration, the SS even perceived itself as a fertile
social and ethical microcosm within which they had already practiced the
future morality of strength and ruthlessness.
II. The New Morality: Superseding Bourgeois Racial

Indifference with Racially Appropriate Humanism
The racio-biological differentiation of humanity that distinguished inferior
and superior races stood in contrast to the value system of bourgeois socie-
ty. Nazi ethics claimed to radically break with obsolete traditional human-
istic ethics but also utilized traditional concepts of moral philosophy such
as the Categorical Imperative. It declared a moral state of emergency
which justified a political and holistic anthropological upheaval. An indi-
vidual-oriented bourgeois morality was replaced by a vlkisch morality of
race and community. Adopting Nietzsches critique of Christian morality
as a protection of the weak, needy, and inferior and those unworthy of life
from the grasp of the strong and powerful destined to be the masters,
bourgeois morality was criticized as a historically anachronistic slave
morality that had managed to implant a guilty conscience in the master
race.23 Nazi ideology and ethics countered this supposed universalization
of a morality of weakness with the vision of a master race acting with
moral superiority in good conscience. The new man was supposed to lib-
erate himself from the fetters of moral obligations to the weak and needy
and to subordinate his life to racial imperatives instead of following out-
dated precepts of unconditional humanity and charity.
21
Dem Leben verschworen, Das Schwarze Korps, May 20, 1943, no. 20, p. 4.
22
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace &
Company, 1976), p. 412.
23
Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Antichrist, in Idem, Werke in 6 Bnden, Bd. 4, ed. by
Karl Schlechta (Munich/Vienna: Hanser, 1980), pp. 1161-1235, here 1168.
During National Socialism, questions of ethics and morality were dis-

cussed not only in the social sciences and humanities24 or medicine25 but
also in ideological diatribes,26 journalistic essays, prose, and poetry.27 This
led to a varied array of conceptualizations of Nazi ethics:
As a eugenic ethics28 it was supposed to be grounded in racial

conscience.29
As a selective racial ethics directed against an unnatural morality
of racially indifferent humanity it was restricted to the members of
the German peoples community.30
As a natural ethics of life it was supposed to boost life that con-
formed to the laws of nature and life.31
As a soldierly ethics it saw struggle, strength of character, and will-
ingness to sacrifice as opposed to old bourgeois values of an over-
saturated society whose value system had not stood the test of time
and therefore was defeated by competing value systems.32
As a German ethics it was neither supposed to be a bureaucratic
ethics nor a legal ethics but rather a morality of action, a master
morality, a morality of the people, and a morality of struggle.33
24
Kurt Hildebrandt, Norm, Entartung, Verfall, Bezogen auf den Einzelnen, die
Rasse, den Staat (Berlin: W. Kohlhammer, 1934). Georg Usadel, Zucht und
Ordnung. Grundlagen einer nationalsozialistischen Ethik (Hamburg: Hanseatische
Verlagsanstalt, 1935) as well as Gerhard Hennemann, Grundzge einer deutschen
Ethik (Leipzig: A. Klein, 1938).
25
Ktschau, Zur nationalsozialistischen Revolution in der Medizin, pp. 884-889.
26
Arteigene Sittlichkeit, Das Schwarze Korps, May 6, 1937, no. 18, p. 6.
27
Cf. Kurt Eggers, Vom mutigen Leben und tapferen Sterben (Oldenburg i. O.:
Gerhard Stalling, 1935) as well as Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer, Zwei Reden: Das
Geistesleben in seiner volksbiologischen Bedeutung (Munich: Langen Mller,
1942).
28
F. C. S. Schiller, Die Eugenik als sittliches Ideal, Archiv fr Rassen- und
Gesellschaftsbiologie, vol. 24 (1930), pp. 342-347, here 342.
29
Edgar Weidner, Das neue rztliche Denken im nationalsozialistischen Staate,
Ziel und Weg, vol. 4 (1934) no. 13, pp. 486-490, continued and concluded in no.
14, pp. 524-527.
30
Friedbert Schulze, Das Sittengesetz des nordischen Menschen (Leipzig: A.
Klein, 1933), p. 27.
31
Ernst Krieck, Mythologie des brgerlichen Zeitalters (Leipzig: Armanen-Verlag,
1939), p. 86.
32
Das Gesetz zur Sicherung der Einheit von Partei und Staat (1933/1934),
Nationalsozialistisches Jahrbuch 1938, pp. 148-163, here 152-153.
33
Cf. Hennemann, Grundzge einer deutschen Ethik.
Wolfgang Bialas 25
As a biological ethics it aimed at bringing about a rebirth of the bi-

ological instinct for spiritual health and a racially appropriate mo-
rality that Christianitys love-thy-enemy philosophy had de-
stroyed.34
Nazi racial ethics was incompatible with the political humanism of

human and civil rights and the Christian welfare ethics of unconditional
charity. Racially conscious behavior was to become self-evident through
the development of biological moral attitudes and intuition:
A racial instinct was to be triggered in Germans that would condi-

tion them to intuitively act and morally judge in a race-conscious
manner and thereby assume the biological responsibility for the
peoples community.
While members of the racial peoples community shared a com-
mon good based on reciprocity,35 they were supposed to act ac-
cording to their racio-biological self-interest toward inferior non-
Aryans.
The new man of Nazism was supposed to be a political soldier and
racial warrior in the ultimate worldview struggle, in whom the un-
conditional trust in the moral strength of judgment of blood
(moralische Urteilskraft des Blutes) could be placed.
The inexorable bonds between the Nazi critique of bourgeois morality,

the attempt at justifying and enforcing an original Nazi morality, and the
moral conditioning of the new man was forged by challenging any univer-
sal morality encompassing all people.36 A racially indifferent morality
deemed responsible for the weakening of the national organism was to be
replaced by a racially appropriate biological humanism. Nazi ideology
claimed a radical break with bourgeois ethics whose universal humanism it
rejected as anachronistic and no longer up-to-date. At the same time it
tried to make some of these humanist values such as human dignity, chari-
ty, and the common good based on reciprocity part of its own racio-
biological ethical framework. Although they also used an aggressive and
34
Karl Pintschovius, Die Wiedergeburt des Instinktes, Das Reich, August 18,
1940, no. 13, pp. 17-18.
35
Das Schwarze Korps, November 28, 1940, no. 48, p. 12.
36
Ernst Tugendhat, Der moralische Universalismus in der Konfrontation mit der
Nazi-Ideologie, in Werner Konitzer and Raphael Gross (eds.), Moralitt des
Bsen. Ethik und nationalsozialistische Verbrechen (Frankfurt a. M./New York:
Campus, 2009), pp. 61-75.
anti-humanist rhetoric to criticize these and other fundamental values of

bourgeois-Christian ethics, the underlying thrust of Nazi racial ethics por-
trayed the Nordic race as the predestined fulfillment of humanism. The
development of racial attitudes and a reliable racial instinct were meant to
enable the Germans to liberate humanism from racially indifferent exag-
gerations and place it on a racio-ethical foundation.37
The following examples of Nazi rhetorical patterns illustrate this bal-
ancing act of criticizing humanist and Christian ethics while simultaneous-
ly appropriating ethnic versions of humanist values and thought figures:
The Germans were supposed to listen to their conscience and moral

intuition - guided by a racial instinct, and they were to judge and
act intuitively based on Nazi racial ideology.38
Nazi ideology appealed to the Germans' strength of judgment, their
readiness to take on responsibility, and their conscientiousness, to
the power of judgment of blood and their responsibility toward
their race and people.39
They were not supposed to be a faceless and characterless robotic
mass but personalities with their own individual profile, that of the
racially conscious ethnic comrade.40
Nazi ideology pledged to give human dignity its due scope by en-
hancing the status of the racio-biologically strong, who alone
would be granted a life of racial dignity .41
The Germans were supposed to act in accordance with the principle
of charity - once they had affirmed, informed by the racial laws of
nature and life, who deserved due care as a fellow man and to
whom, as an alien to the community for reasons of racial hygiene
and national health, this was to be denied.42
37
Alfred Bumler, Der Kampf um den Humanismus, in Idem, Politik und
Erziehung. Reden und Aufstze (Berlin: Junker & Dnnhaupt, 1937), pp. 57-66,
here 57-58.
38
Geist, Instinkt, Glaube, Das Schwarze Korps, November 5, 1942, no. 45, p. 4.
39
Walter Gross, Die ewige Stimme des Blutes im Strome deutscher Geschichte,
Ziel und Weg, vol. 10 (1933), pp. 257-260.
40
Das Ende des Lebens, Das Schwarze Korps, March 25, 1943, no. 12, p. 4.
41
Walther Brunk, Nationalsozialistische Erbpflege, Blutmaterialismus oder
gttliches Naturgesetz?, Der Schulungsbrief, vol. 6 (1939) no. 3, pp. 356-358 and
Walter Hebenbrock, Nationalsozialistische Wohlfahrtspflege ist
Gesundheitsdienst, Der Schulungsbrief, vol. 5 (1938) no. 12, pp. 440-446.
42
Walter Gross, Unsere Arbeit gilt der deutschen Familie, Nationalsozialistische
Monatshefte, vol. 9 (1939) no. 107, pp. 99-106.
Wolfgang Bialas 27
Nazi ideology placed man at the center of this Nazi value revolu-
tion - but only in his capacity of functioning as the temporary ves-
sel for the maintenance of the hereditary pool (Erbmasse).43
It expressly recognized humanism, human rights, the freedom of
belief, and the freedom of conscience as long as these did not
conflict with the racial laws, and their validity was restricted to bio-
logically superior human beings.44
Nazi ideology claimed to be committed to the holiness and inviola-
bility of human life even after approving the systematic destruction
of life unworthy of life; it took it for granted that its commitment
applied only to racio-biologically valuable life.45
These examples demonstrate the contradiction between universal ethi-

cal concepts and their reduction to values valid only for the members of
the Nordic race. The Nordic race claimed moral leadership in the name of
racial humanism. This indicates that Nazi ideology was at least rhetorical-
ly serious about keeping the value system of humanism, but only for the
racially superior.
Nazism threatened to destroy the very bourgeois society that had culti-
vated it. The bourgeois value system was accused of having allowed
Christian welfare ethics and culturally destructive fantasies of human and
civil rights to supplant natural selection. Bourgeois humanism had suppos-
edly destroyed the natural foundation of social development by undermin-
ing the struggle for existence in a pseudo-humanistic fashion. Nazi race
ethics countered with the promise to liberate human behavior from unnec-
essary moral inhibitions.
Nazism was not a socialism of equality but rather committed itself to
a natural and Godgiven inequality46 of people. According to the Nazi
worldview, there was no single humanity or human as such but rather only
people with certain racial characteristics and hybridizations.47 The idea of
the equality of all people pursued by Christian morality and bourgeois
human rights had subverted the natural spirit of struggle and racial instinct
43
H. Finck, Volksgesundheit und Liebesleben, Ziel und Weg, vol. 4 (1934) no. 8,
pp. 287-294, here 289.
44
Hildebrandt, Norm, Entartung, Verfall, p. 276.
45
Gerhard Wagner, Rasse und Volksgesundheit, Ziel und Weg, vol. 4 (1934) no.
18, pp. 675-685, here 683.
46
Idem, Gesundheitsfhrung im nationalsozialistischen Staat, Der
Schulungsbrief, vol. 6 (1939) no. 1, pp. 45-46, here 46.
47
Walter Gross, Rasse und Weltanschauung, Weltkampf, March 1938, no. 171,
pp. 97-108, here 105.
of the superior race which jeopardized its survival.48 Unconditional empa-

thy and humanity were discredited as the racially indifferent fraternization
of mankind and an anachronistic relic of a bourgeois age that Nazism had
outgrown. Nazi ethics rejected any universal value system that encom-
passed all peoples and races and, in particular, the idea of universal human
rights.49 Instead, it based its ultimate justification on the value of race.
People were neither equal nor of equal value but superior or inferior de-
pending upon their racial membership and value.50 Human inequality was
deemed a fact of nature whereas accepting equality supposedly stood in
contrast to biological thought.51 The Nazi concept of justice promised not
the same to everyone but to each his own.52
Membership in the racial peoples community was a prerequisite for
staking a claim to the communitys morality. As strangers to the communi-
ty (Gemeinschaftsfremde) were excluded from this community morality,
they were deemed immoral. Consequently, they were either exposed to the
caprices of the community or the precepts of a negative morality that
sought to discriminate and destroy them. In other words, the higher hu-
manity of the race was at odds with a thoughtless humanity53 that only
protected the inferior. Belonging to a particular race determined the moral
or immoral behavior of its members. Simultaneously, the members of the
superior race were called upon to demonstrate their individual eligibility
by forming the corresponding attitude. The racial order of values was
supposed to transform itself into racial instinct.
Nazism highlighted peoples natural bonds to their race and their ethi-
cal obligations to their people. As it was stated, the individual could only
develop his or her capabilities and individual characteristics within the
framework of his or her racial membership. Belonging to a certain race
determined who deserved moral care and who did not.54 The new morality
replaced Christian self-denial with the principle of self-assertion toward
48
Friedrich Wieneke, Charaktererziehung im Nationalsozialismus (Soldin: H.
Madrasch, 1936), pp. 17 and 19.
49
Hennemann, Grundzge einer deutschen Ethik, p. 5.
50
Was ist Sozialismus, SS-Leithefte (BA NS 31/421, p. 116).
51
Walter Gross, Der Rassegedanke des Nationalsozialismus, Der
Schulungsbrief, vol. 1 (1934) no. 2, pp. 6-20, here 14.
52
Ferdinand Roner, Die Biologie im Kampf mit lebensfeindlichen Mchten,
Weltkampf, January 1937, no. 157, pp. 1-7, here 5.
53
Ernst Gnther Grndel, Die Sendung der jungen Generation. Versuch einer
umfassenden revolutionren Sinndeutung der Krise (Munich: Beck'sche
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1932), pp. 316.
54
Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer, Der Einzelne und die Gemeinschaft (Munich:
Langen Mller, 1939), p. 27.
Wolfgang Bialas 29
the inferior. As morality had been designated as a testing ground of natural

selection, the strongest and most resilient also had to prove their moral
superiority in the struggle for existence. The upshot of this clash was de-
clared a moral ordeal, and whosoever emerged victorious in this struggle
also asserted him-/ herself, morally. Selection in the struggle for existence
was declared the most divine law of life, nature, and creation, which justi-
fied eradicating people incapable of or unfit for life as obstacles to the will
of the Creator.55 Enforcing this law confirmed the holiness of human life
and brought humankind closer to perfection and health whereas liberal-
istic humanity as the safeguard of the inferior, the lazy and criminal56 had
thwarted the will of the Creator. Out of humility and respect for creation,
man ought not, according to this ideology, question the moral ordeal car-
ried out by natural selection and the struggle for existence. Blasphemous
doubt in the normative validity of this judgment would be redeemed by
destroying life unworthy of life out of respect for creation. This only rea-
sonable response to the danger that threatened the health and existence of
the German people claimed to be in accordance with the valid racial and
community morality.
The people was introduced as a biological organism exposed to the
same dangers as every individual. After all, a people could be more or less
healthy, capable of acting, subjected to mood swings, and prone to tempta-
tions. Before racially conscious behavior could be taken for granted as
health-conscious behavior, a people might have to go through a crisis that
threatened its very existence, according to this ethics. Racial awareness
was to spring from confronting the potential downfall of the German peo-
ple. The hope was that once Germans became aware of the dangers of
racial indifference and the irresponsible neglect of the nations ethnic fiber
the necessary change in consciousness would take place and make clear to
them how their own lives and the state of the national organism were di-
rectly related.
The Germans were blamed for having neglected breeding and their
own race. Their indifference to the law of race had caused the decline of
the German people and the subversion of faith, character and morality
with the infiltration of blood foreign to the race.57 Intermarrying with
non-Aryans had sapped the life force of the Germans and caused inner
55
Wagner, Rasse und Volksgesundheit, p. 683.
56
Weltkampf, April 1936, no. 148, p. 183 (under the headline World Jewification
and Defense - Weltverjudung und Abwehr).
57
Walter Gross, Politik und Rassenfrage, Ziel und Weg, vol. 3 (1933) no. 14, pp.
409-415, here 412.
turmoil.58 Non-Aryans and those deemed inferior had to be excluded from

the community so that all Germans could identify them as racial vermin
and act accordingly. Their public and legally justified exclusion was ex-
pected to reduce the probability of racial intermarriage that subverted the
community. Racial mixing came to be identified as a crime against the
people.
III. Acting in Concert with the Laws of Life

and Nature: The Racio-Ethical Justification
for Eugenics and Euthanasia
Nazism regarded itself as a movement that would help the German people
recover by mobilizing their healthy life instincts.59 Caring for and breed-
ing the strong and healthy replaced caring for the weak and ill. Keeping
the inferior alive artificially was characterized as sentimentality alien to
the Nordic race. Nazi racial politics insisted that life unworthy of life had
to be eliminated, which would boost the peoples sense of together-
ness.60 Showing empathy toward those suffering from an inherited dis-
ease was not only a violation of the laws of nature and life but also against
the will of God and creation. Life does not concern itself with individuals
and their trivial fates. Everyone was supposedly but one link in the chain
of life and one drop in the great blood stream of history.61 The slogan the
common good over the welfare of the individual underscored the inten-
tion of bringing basic selfish instincts under the control of the national
community. From the Nazi point of view, everything revolved around the
duties to the peoples community and not the rights of the individual. An
individuals value was determined by the extent to which he or she was of
use to the community.62
The laws of life had to be brutal in order to ensure that the degenerate
would be destroyed before it could endanger the existence of the race.
Acting in conformity with the laws of life meant being hard and unsympa-
thetic toward those who had no chance at survival in the struggle for exist-
ence if left to their own devices. Forming such an attitude marked the
moral elite of the new man. If someones strength did not suffice in the
58
Gerhart Schinke, Woran sterben Vlker? Auslese und Gegenauslese, SS-
Leitheft, vol. 5 (1939) no. 3, pp. 15-19, here 15.
59
Jaensch, Der Gegentypus, p. XXXII.
60
Ibid., p. 210.
61
Gross, Politik und Rassenfrage, p. 413.
62
Schattenfroh, Wille und Rasse, p. 193.
Wolfgang Bialas 31
struggle for survival, one ought to be refused all support for racio-ethical
reasons. The Germans forged by the new racial morality were expected to
make their own contribution to creating a society free of life unworthy of
life and inferior races. Based on the merciless acceptance of natural selec-
tion and the destruction of inferior life, they were supposed to take it upon
themselves to kill what life had already sentenced to death.
As a result of the Nazis transvaluation of values, the terms weakness
and need as well as strength and perseverance took on new meanings. The
capacity for suffering, tolerance, and placidity no longer marked the mor-
ally chosen but rather indicated ones incapability to hold ones ground in
the struggle for existence. The dominant in the struggle for existence were
called upon not to bastardize it with supposedly false humanity and exag-
gerated pity for the inferior unfit for life. The concept of a universal hu-
manity indifferent to race was blamed for abasing race and hindering the
necessary eradication of the bad races while economically burdening the
superior races. Due to their excessive increase progressively more re-
sources had to be expended to keep alive the supposedly inferior and unfit
who would not have survived on their own. Instead of supporting the
healthy who were capable of working, inferiors were kept alive who bur-
dened both themselves and the community. Nature, which allegedly al-
ways promotes the strong and healthy, would have long since mercilessly
eradicated them.63 Human interference in natural selection had caused this
degeneration.
Nazi racial ideology argued that protecting those unworthy of life pre-
vented the natural selection of the superior and the inferior. In other words,
a morality of weakness had prevented the laws of life and nature from
properly asserting themselves in the natural struggle for existence. That
struggle was not to be restricted by any moral considerations as it suppos-
edly benefitted the strong, granting them their rightful leadership role in
society. Those of high racial quality were not supposed to feel remorse
about exercising their mastery over the inferior. They were, instead, to
develop a master morality that would justify their leadership position as
natural. The strong needed to be protected from the moral blackmail of the
weak. Cultural and religious resentments in the struggle for existence were
blamed for moral decay and the suppression of natural instincts.
Racio-biological ethics and euthanasia had been criticized even before
the Nazis seized power. The argument ran that those who were too weak to
stand up for, or to care for themselves needed special care and that dealing
with them evidenced the value of the principles of humanity. In 1929,
Emil Abderhalden, the editor of Ethik, replied to the customary euphe-
63
Gross, Die ewige Stimme des Blutes im Strome deutscher Geschichte, p. 259.
misms of public health care that justified killing the racially inferior as
being in their own interest as it relieved their pain and suffering and un-
burdened the community: With a pure biological ethics, we can absolute-
ly reconcile the destruction of weaklings. The idea of helping the weak
and giving them special care is something entirely new from a biological
standpoint. Caring for the mentally and chronically ill has increased so
dramatically and the costs for lodging them and caring for them are so
high that some think too little remains for the healthy. From a purely bio-
logical standpoint, it is ethically justifiable to kill the ill for the sake of the
healthy, but our entire inner being rebels against such an ethics.64 In-
stead of offering potential apologies and justifications for the killing of life
unworthy of life, Abderhalden insisted on underpinning a biological ethics
with the principle of unconditional humanity. After the Nazis seized pow-
er, he expressly committed himself to racial ethics, in which it was taken
for granted that the public interest took precedence over self-interest.65
Nazi ethics set the right of nature against natural law. In their natural-
ist fatalism, the Nazis believed that they were endorsed by nature itself to
assume eugenic control and racio-biological leadership. They perceived
themselves as acting in accordance with the laws of nature, life and, in
particular, natural selection.66 This law ensured that those fit for life pre-
vailed over the weak and needy. Those incapable of asserting themselves
in the struggle for existence were doomed to destruction. Only those who
could survive on their own were granted the right to live.
Racial hygiene was to cure the ills of society by counteracting the re-
striction of the supposedly cruel laws of life upon which humans had pre-
viously encroached. Eugenic encroachment in nature, which had been
degenerated by race indifferent charity and humanism, was justified with
the necessity of restoring an original state of nature untouched by ethical
considerations. People had supposedly become estranged from their inner
nature under the moral pressure of cultural norms. Instead of confidently
following their natural instincts and intuitions they had accepted their
having been culturally discredited with the consequence that they were no
longer able to behave in accordance with their biological nature.
64
Emil Abderhalden, Sind ethische Grundzge wandelbar?, Ethik, vol. 5 (1929),
May, pp. 410-421, here 413.
65
Emil Abderhalden, Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz, Ethik, vol. 12 (1935),
Sept./ Oct., pp. 1-12.
66
Wieneke, Charaktererziehung im Nationalsozialismus, p. 43.
Wolfgang Bialas 33
The medical discourse of racial hygiene and national health played a

pivotal role in the implementation of Nazi racial policy.67 The new ethics
of the doctors profession saw the German physician as a health leader
who was no longer concerned with caritative welfare for the needy but
with productive prophylaxis68 against life unworthy of life. While the
physician of previous times was motivated toward curing ill individuals,
the Nazi doctors were no longer physicians of the individual but phy-
sicians of the nation.69 Cold humanism was neither a contemporary char-
acteristic nor befitting of the new physicians standing. The incurably ill
and handicapped were denied medical care that only the racially superior
could expect to receive.70 In the future, those with untreatable handicaps
would not be born in the first place. The new physician was no longer
supposed to be hampered by pseudo-humanist empathy71 for the mentally
ill and mentally handicapped. Ethical and religious qualms about en-
croaching on the right to life of those suffering from an inherited disease
were dismissed as unfounded.72 Humans may have all been equal before
God but not before the German physician whose care was given only to
German racial comrades seeking help 73 and to those free of hereditary
illness. The German physician was supposed to be a biological soldier.74
Armed with his race hygiene conscience,75 he could efficiently combat
inherited diseases and those who supposedly bore them without any hin-
drance from confessional or obsolete professional resentments of a sick
zeitgeist. The systematic killing of racially inferior life was justified as the
correction of untenable states in the peoples health through social hy-
giene.
Euthanasia was introduced as a means of correcting a system of care
for those in need which had supposedly gotten out of control, as it no
67
Cf. Ziel und Weg: Zeitschrift des Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen
rztebundes, 1931-1939.
68
E. Hamann, rztliche Standesethik im Dritten Reich, Ziel und Weg, vol. 4
(1934) no. 17, pp. 641-645, here 645.
69
Th. Lang, Der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche rztebund, Nationalsozialistische
Monatshefte, vol. 1 (1930) no. 1, p. 38-39, here 39.
70
Wilhelm Pfannenstiel, Gedanken ber das Wertproblem in der Medizin, Ziel
und Weg, vol. 5 (1935) no. 5, pp. 122-128, here 127.
71
Cf. Edgar Weidner, Das neue rztliche Denken im nationalsozialistischen
Staate, Ziel und Weg, vol. 4 (1934) no. 13, pp. 486-490, here 489.
72
Wagner, Rasse und Volksgesundheit, p. 683.
73
Weidner, Das neue rztliche Denken, p. 524.
74
Ibid., pp. 489-490.
75
Roderich v. Ungern-Sternberg, Wie verhlt sich die Rassenhygiene zur
Sozialpolitik?, Ziel und Weg, vol. 4 (1934) no. 17, pp. 654-656, here 656.
longer corresponded to actual conditions. This unresolved ambivalence

between threatening to kill inferior life and promising to redeem it sparked
the German debate on euthanasia before the Nazis seized power. The
threat of systematically ending life that could only be maintained by ex-
ternal care highlighted the scarce resources of the social and the health
policy. The argument ran that resources were disproportionally spent on
caring for and keeping alive the incurably ill while the healthy and produc-
tive lacked basic health resources. In contrast, the promise to end a life
forever reduced to pain and suffering allegedly took on the implied per-
spective of the incurably ill and mentally handicapped. The counterargu-
ment to moral scruples regarding killing the racially inferior and those
suffering from inherited diseases was that ending their suffering was in the
best interest of the afflicted who were perceived to be unfit to live on their
own. Even if they realized that death was the only solution to their unbear-
able situation, it was assumed that they would be incapable of killing
themselves.
As they were too helpless to articulate their needs, they needed advo-
cates who could empathize with their situation and find the best solution
for both those affected and for society. It was assumed that, if these un-
happy creatures themselves were able to communicate and act, they would
most likely choose their own death as a relief from unbearable pain and
suffering. Therefore, the understanding of those in favor of euthanasia was
that it was about assisting those incapable of ending their own degrading,
unworthy life. This made them dependent upon the help of others who saw
their relief through euthanasia not only as a moral duty toward the com-
munity of the healthy but also toward those whose lives were reduced to
such an extent that living was no longer worthwhile.
Nazi racial ideology justified euthanasia and the Holocaust as means of
elimination that would restore the healthy body of the people and rid hu-
manity of racio-cultural diseases and its human pathogens. They regarded
their political program of racial hygiene and restoring the peoples health
as applied biology.76 Their ideological self-authorization to rectify faulty
historical developments sought liberation from unconditional moral obli-
gations among humans as members of the human species. Perfecting the
human species biologically was to be achieved by selecting superior hu-
mans and simultaneously eradicating inferior humans deemed worthless.
76
Cf. nne Bumer (ed.), NS-Biologie (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft,
1990). Peter Weingart/Jrgen Kroll/Kurt Bayertz, Rasse, Blut und Gene.
Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland (Frankfurt a. M.:
Suhrkamp, 1992).
Wolfgang Bialas 35
Euthanasia and the Holocaust can be seen as variations of the destruc-

tion of humans whose genetic material was deemed damaged beyond
repair. They were either considered incurably ill, or they were doomed to
be eradicated by virtue of their fateful membership in the Jewish race.
Though there was no direct path leading from euthanasia to Auschwitz,
continuities and parallels are visible, for instance, in the technology of
mass killing, the medical personnel involved in the campaigns of destruc-
tion, and the, albeit modified, racio-hygienically justified destruction of
allegedly inferior life.77
As practicing charity and caring for ones fellow men were decried as
the Christian humanistic self-denial of human nature regardless of racial
belonging or the quality of life, Germans were called upon to commit
themselves to their own nature and break the chains of moral blackmail
from an unnatural form of humanism. Nazi racial ideology stated that there
was no reason for having a bad conscience about the superiority derived
from belonging to the Nordic race while losing oneself to egalitarian fan-
tasies. It was taken as self-evident that natures way of selecting only the
best and fittest individuals in the struggle for survival was hard and cru-
el.78 Nazi racial ideologues claimed that the other extreme of caring for
and maintaining all weak and crippled people, who were neither produc-
tive nor able to enjoy their lives, had a similarly devastating impact on the
population.79
The Germans were considered members of the master race. Free from
ethical, religious, or any other considerations that might have stopped
them from acting out their racial superiority they were supposed to act in
accordance with the precepts of a new morality which brought the unre-
stricted natural rights of the stronger to the fore. The goal was to ensure
that history would also fall under the natural law of the struggle for exist-
ence according to the sole right of the stronger as it had once been. This
normative naturalism perceived itself in harmony with biological evolution
as nature knew neither sympathy nor morality but rather only the right of
the stronger. The stronger was to follow his natural instinct by seeking to
not merely defeat but to destroy the enemy. Morality was supposedly
unnecessary for him; he was able to assert his will on the weaker by virtue
77
Robert N. Proctor, Nazi Biomedical Policies, in Arthur L. Caplan (ed.), When
Medicine went Mad. Bioethics and the Holocaust (Totowa/New Jersey: Humana
Press, 1992), pp 23-42, quote from p. 37.
78
Alfred Mjen, Die biologische Lebensauffassung und Sippenpflege, in
Michael Hesch and Gnther Spannaus (eds.), Kultur und Rasse. Otto Reche zum
60. Geburtstag (Munich/Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1939), pp. 131-139, here 131.
79
Walter Gross, Rasse und Weltanschauung, pp. 103.
of his own strength. Limiting the rights of the stronger to protect the weak
and needy from their encroachments was decried as unnatural. In the drive
to live, the humanity of nature as the morality of strength allegedly pre-
vailed over an immoral humanity of weakness. Basing morality on the
individuals need for protection, on the other hand, supposedly placed
normative fetters on the community, the race, and the stronger individuals
while the racial policy supported the process of natural selection by de-
stroying the ill and weak. A stronger race will drive out the weak, for the
vital in its ultimate form will, time and again, burst all the absurd fetters of
the so-called humanity of individuals, in order to replace it by the humani-
ty of Nature which destroys the weak to give his place to the strong.80
Nazi racial ideology states that nature uses struggle as a means to keep
life strong and healthy because whatever cannot be victorious in struggle
has to perish.81 It was supposedly a law of life to destroy anything weak
and inferior and allow only the strong to procreate.82 Only the racially
superior and healthy were, therefore, granted the right to reproduce while
reproduction was deemed impossible where it would mean suffering, mis-
ery, and damage to the individual and the community.83 Racio-hygienic
precautions were supposed to ensure that the inferior and hereditarily ill
were not born in the first place. Instead of artificially extending their lives
with exaggerated care, they should be left to themselves, which usually
meant certain death, or they should be systematically eradicated.84 While
everything unhealthy and inferior in nature becomes extinct on its own, a
culturally degenerated society supposedly has to consciously counter the
decay with racial politics. The weak and needy were to be treated hard and
mercilessly, and without humane care. To ensure the triumph of the racial
laws of life, one had to be hard on oneself before one could be hard on
others.85
80
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translated by Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1971), p. 132.
81
Von SS-Hscha Dr. Schinke, Von den ewigen Gesetzen des Lebens, SS-
Leitheft, vol. 4 (1939) no. 8, pp. 27-29, here 29.
82
Der Reichsfhrer SS (ed.), SS-Mann und Blutsfrage: die biologischen
Grundlagen und ihre sinngemsse Anwendung fr die Erhaltung und Mehrung des
nordischen Blutes (Berlin: SS-Hauptamt-Schulungsamt, 1941), p. 5.
83
Walther Brunk, Nationalsozialistische Erbpflege, Blutmaterialismus oder
gttliches Naturgesetz?, p. 356.
84
Heinz Neu, Biologische Politik. Deutschland, das knftige Reich gesunder
Wohlfahrt, sozialer Gerechtigkeit und pflichtbewusster Freiheit, Weltkampf,
February 1933, no. 110, pp. 43-51, here 49.
85
Walter Gross, Volk und Rasse, Der Schulungsbrief, vol. 6 (1939) no. 4, pp.
143-148, here 147.
Wolfgang Bialas 37
People were to resist the temptation to improve upon life and the
world, i.e. the work of the Creator. They should instead allow nature and
natural selection to differentiate between humans according to their fitness
for life. Man ought not to meddle with or resist the will of nature but rather
marvel at creation whose part he was. Only misunderstanding what it
means to be human would lead him to support the weak and the unfit for
life. What appeared to be humanity supposedly undermined the natural
foundations of human existence. The laws of nature always ensure the
triumph of the stronger over the weaker in the struggle for existence. The
healthier and stronger a people was, the greater was the brutality needed
for securing its continued existence and future.86 A culture oriented toward
humanism and Christian charity obviously left nature few options for
eradicating the inferior. The unconditional protection of the weak and
valueless meant that the inferior would elude the fate of early destruction
they would have otherwise faced.87 This is why the Nazi racial policy had
to eradicate those unworthy of life.88 Racially conscious superior men
living according to the healthy race instinct lacked moral scruples when
killing those with inherited disease since they considered these killings
necessary to ensure the future of the German people.89
Nazi racial ideology distinguished between negative eugenics, which
focused on the eradication of inferior person, and positive eugenics, which
sought to improve the racial substance of Aryans. Using the metaphor of a
garden, people were called upon to eliminate the quickly multiplying
human weeds in culture to put a stop to the deterioration of the human
race.90 A positive eugenics would still be necessary, however, to enhance
the human species and human life that consciously promotes the best,
strongest, healthiest, and most capable. As expected, negative eugenics
met with vehement resistance as it indeed violated, in particular, humani-
tarian and Christian unconditional egalitarianism.91
In Nazism, the Germans obligation to their racial community and the
racial health of the German people replaced the common sense morality of
86
chtung der Entarteten, Das Schwarze Korps, 1 April 1937, no. 13, p.11.
87
Lebensgestaltung, wie wir sie wollen, Das Schwarze Korps, 27 March 1935,
no. 4, p. 10.
88
Karl Zimmermann, Biologie und Rasse, Weltkampf, April 1936, no. 148, pp.
145-159, here 150.
89
Karl Ktschau, Ein Beitrag zur nationalsozialistischen Revolution in der
Medizin, Ziel und Weg, vol. 4 (3rd part) (1934) no. 1, pp.11-16, here 11.
90
Schiller, Die Eugenik als sittliches Ideal, p. 342.
91
Brunk, Nationalsozialistische Erbpflege, Blutmaterialismus oder gttliches
Naturgesetz?, p. 356.
human reciprocity. The unconditional and general prohibition of homicide

fostered by universal humanism was supposed to be replaced by the com-
mandment to kill individuals and groups identified as an incurable threat
to the peoples health. The conditioned readiness to kill was contrasted
with the culturally induced intuitive inhibition to kill, which included
everyone, without exception. The killing of racial vermin and those
deemed incapable of living in the community (Gemeinschaftsunfhige)
was considered a moral imperative to the community, the German people,
and the Nordic race. Killing the racially inferior and incurably ill was
established as a racio-hygienic measure to restore health to the peoples
body and to deliver humanity from biological-cultural illnesses and the
human pathogens that caused them, thus: Thou shalt kill the parasite!92
A bourgeois-humanist ethics was blamed for shielding the weak and
inferior from the risks inherent in the struggle for existence. It enabled
them to survive natural selection even though they were no longer able to
successfully fight for themselves in the struggle for existence. Nature
clearly would have eradicated them because they were incapable of surviv-
ing on their own. Nazi ideology suggested that these people should be
handled much more brutally and plunged headlong into the struggle for
life. Of course, this implied that they would have no chance of survival
because they would be helplessly exposed to the consequences of their
handicap. In their case, natural selection would mean certain death.
Surprising at first glance, Nazism called on people to have humility, to
practice moderation in all things human, and to show reverence for life in
the form created by God. It claimed to be strongly opposed to mans pre-
sumptuousness when trying to impose his will on nature. Committing
themselves to the biological laws of life and nature, Nazi ideologues ar-
gued against artificially extending life for those unable to live on their
own. They insisted that people were not free in their actions but dependent
upon race and blood. The concept of free will was said to contradict the
laws of nature and life as well as being out of touch with racio-biological
reality.
IV. Ethical Discrimination of the Jews

The destruction of the Jews and their morality was justified as a means of
rectifying history, whose natural order had been disrupted by moral re-
strictions.93 This moral transgression would not have been possible with-
92
Eggers, Vom mutigen Leben und tapferen Sterben, p. 71.
93
Harold I. Kaplan, Conscience and Memory. Meditations in a Museum of the
Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 59.
Wolfgang Bialas 39
out a revaluation of all values. It did not suffice for the Nazis to merely
oversee the life and death of the members of inferior races at their mer-
cy. Dehumanizing those doomed to destruction through degrading living
conditions supposedly led to the loss of self-respect and dignity instilling
in them a sense of cultural, moral, and social death which preceded physi-
cal death that is if natural death from hunger or illness did not strike
first. Moral categories no longer applied to them before their biological
death.
Jews were no longer granted dignity, respect, or the status of moral
subjects. Their thoughts, feelings, and behavior became irrelevant to their
assessment. As they had been reduced to belonging to a morally inferior
race, the reference system of mutual moral obligations no longer applied
to them. Hence, they were exposed to practices of degradation and dehu-
manization to make them resemble the ideological caricature of racially
inferior subhuman creatures. Hannah Arendt succinctly captured this ele-
ment of total power: Once the movements have come to power, they
proceed to change reality in accordance with their ideological claims.94
As the Jews were defined by their racial belonging they had no way of
escaping stigmatization. After all, the Nazis rejected their conversion to
Christianity, cultural assimilation, or patriotism as a deliberate cunning
strategy to endanger the Nordic race.
It was repeatedly emphasized that the Jews were the antagonists and
deadly enemies of the highest values and most profound ideas of the Euro-
pean peoples.95 Their foreign nature had nothing to do with their faith,
morality, or education, which meant that it could not be changed by con-
verting, emancipation or assimilation96 because of their fixed hereditary
racial predispositions. Furthermore, driving the Jews out of Germany and
settling them elsewhere in Europe would not solve the Jewish question;
they would have to be driven out of Europe altogether. After the issue of
the Jews future in Europe had been decided - they had no future there, the
focus on the Jewish question shifted to determine which group of persons
was to be considered Jewish.97 Importance was placed solely on racial
considerations and not on religious affiliation, rootedness, or nationality.
No Jew could escape the stigma of moral inferiority ascribed to the
Jewish race. The anti-Semitic racial ideology did not merely characterize
Jewish morality as negative but insisted on giving a face to Jewish immo-
rality by enumerating morally reprehensible actions and attitudes of spe-
94
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 471.
95
Walter Gross, Zur Lsung der Judenfrage, p. 5.
96
Ibid.
97
Ibid.
cific Jewish criminals and perverts. The SA-weekly Der Strmer in

particular consistently utilized a stereotypical martial rhetoric to depict the
gruesome Jewish skull and Devils grimace behind whose mask of
innocence lurked all manner of vices. Depicted were Jews accused of
race defilement, whose faces spewed horror and evil.98 The racio-ethical
revaluation of values sought to replace independent sensory perceptions,
experiences, and judgments as the common ground of moral intuitions
with a framework of ideological stereotypes, images, and meanings.
Exaggerated caricatures and staged images, much in the style of the
primitive pornographic anti-Semitism of Der Strmer, attempted to
make the different but always prejudiced and stigmatizing views of the
Jews perceptible. This ideological material was supposed to encourage
Germans to use their imagination and make sense of anti-Semitic stereo-
types such as the cunning, perverted, conspiring, and deceiving Jew. Ac-
cording to the totalitarian view, this ideology was deemed necessary due to
a discrepancy between the deceptive surface of things and their actual
essence. In a totalitarian society, ideological thinking becomes emanci-
pated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on
a truer reality concealed behind all perceptible things, dominating them
from this place of concealment and requiring a sixth sense that enables us
to become aware of it. The sixth sense is provided by precisely the ideolo-
gy.99 The ideological conditioning of the five senses through the sixth
sense of ideology aimed to make racio-biological truths visible. It sought,
for instance, to make assimilated Jews who had covered up their Jewish-
ness and were no longer recognizable as such identifiable.
If the Nazis were to prove the inferiority of the Jewish sub-humans, the
hidden threat of racial contamination, and a global Jewish conspiracy,
mere abstract attributions would not suffice. Ideologically untrained, polit-
ically indifferent Germans in particular were provided with telling images,
convincing statistics, and the scientific cogency of unequivocal expertise
in the propaganda campaign against the Jewish danger that, as one of the
eternal problems and threats faced by mankind throughout history, needed
to be solved once and for all through the final solution of the Jewish ques-
tion, i.e. the extermination of the Jewish race.
The 1940 propaganda movie Der Ewige Jude was a cunning cine-
matic stigmatization of the eternal Jew. Surely a masterpiece of inhu-
mane propaganda, it served to ideologically prime the Germans for the
destruction of the Jewish race. A sophisticated combination of unforgetta-
ble images, catchphrases, and suggestive proof, it conjured a multi-faceted
98
Cf. Der Strmer, January 1938, special edition.
99
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 470.
Wolfgang Bialas 41
image of the Jewish danger that was composed of Jewish craftiness and
scrupulousness, big-city ghetto culture and a cosmopolitan appearance,
abysmal primitiveness and shiftiness, and limitless adaptability coupled
with ice-cold calculation. A Jewish world conspiracy was trumped up to
portray the shape-shifting Jew as unswervingly focused on the execution
of their ultimate goal: conquering the world through financial speculation
and political conspiracies by means of capitalism, communism, and the
racial contamination of their host people. Only one (ideo)logical conclu-
sion could be drawn: the Jewish race had to be remorselessly eradicated in
the interest of social hygiene, national health, self-preservation, and the
very survival of the German people.
Two examples in the movie point to the particular danger presented by
assimilated Jews no longer identifiable as such who could racially subvert
the German people, unbeknown. One scene depicts young men whose
traditional clothing and beards explicitly mark them as Jews. By overlay-
ing images of the same men, now clean-shaven with fresh haircuts and in
Western clothing, the director underscores the contrast between their as-
similated appearance and their former cultural markers. Finally, another
scene shows Berlin salon and coffeehouse Jews in order to demonstrate
that they had shamelessly adopted the milieu of modern urban culture so
that the ideologically untrained eye could no longer distinguish them from
ordinary Berliners. Precisely because many Jews were, to the casual ob-
server, indistinguishable from Germans, their innermost essence had to be
brought to the surface their vanity and religious intolerance, their ice-
cold rationality and ability to parasitically thrive, their greed, hypocrisy,
and untruthfulness as well as their craftiness and cowardice.100 The sup-
posed Jewish art of concealment served as a justification for the imple-
mentation of the Yellow Star: As he does in his lifestyle, the Jew embod-
ies a chameleon that circumstantially adopts the color of its surroundings.
[...] Implementing the Yellow Star was a means of control of spiritual
epidemics (Manahme der seelischen Seuchenbekmpfung) and a
means of protection against physically camouflaged Jews101 who could
now be identified under their masks, especially when they superficially
resembled Germans.
Without sufficient ideological sensitivity and training, the Germans
were supposedly at the mercy of the cunning deceptions of the Jews. Nazi
100
Cf. Werner Dittrich, Erziehung zum Judengegner. Hinweise zur Behandlung
der Judenfrage im rassenpolitischen Unterricht, (Munich: Deutscher Volksverlag,
1937), pp. 6-23.
101
Ahasver, Ein Blick in das Verbrecheralbum, Neues Volk, vol. 12 (1941) no. 9,
p. 6.
ideology provided vivid examples, images, and stories to illustrate the

alleged racially inferior but also dangerous existence of the Jews.102 One
decisive element of the anti-Semitic racial policy was translating ideologi-
cal stigma into physical patterns of perception. The Jews were no longer
portrayed as humans but as parasites, vermin, and subhuman creatures.
Nazi ideology insisted that they had to be combated rigorously while a
preemptive racial hygiene was to shield the German people. The Jew was,
after all, not a human but rather the embodiment of decay that had lodged
itself in the German people as a divisive bacterium (Spaltpilz).103 The
struggle against the Jews was justified with the need for socio-hygienic
prophylaxis, moral purification, and protection of the peoples community
against racial infiltration and racial intermarriage.
Supposedly differing from that of non-Jews, the Jews moral code ex-
plained why they could not expect to be treated in accordance with the
moral standards of the German people. Ridding all Europe of Jewry is not
a matter of morality, but rather a question of state security. The Jew will
always act in accordance with his nature and racial instinct. He cannot do
otherwise. Just as a potato beetle destroys potatoes, the Jew destroys na-
tions and peoples. There is only one solution: radical elimination of the
danger.104 While the Jews as the members of a purportedly inferior race
were instinctively compelled to act immorally, Germans had yet to culti-
vate a comparable intuition to better equip themselves to act in line with
Nazi morality. Their already-established racial instinct supposedly gave
the Jews a temporary superiority over the Germans, who were still in dis-
harmony with their own race because the racially indifferent ideas of char-
ity, universal equality, and dignity that also extended to Jews still shaped
their moral reasoning.
It was not even possible to reproach the Jews for their immoral behav-
ior as they were merely following their instincts which had conditioned
them to destroy states and peoples. At this point, radical and effectual
intervention free of moral resentment supposedly became necessary. Any
other attitude would be foolish and irresponsible in respect to the German
people and Europe as a whole. The magnitude of the danger demanded a
102
Cf. Julia Schfer, Vermessen gezeichnet verlacht. Judenbilder in populren
Zeitschriften 19181933 (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2005).
103
Walter Buch, Des nationalsozialistischen Menschen Ehre und Ehrenschutz
(Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1939), p. 15.
104
Joseph Goebbels, berwundene Winterkrise. Rede im Berliner Sportpalast,
in: Goebbels, Der steile Aufstieg, (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1944), p.
301.
Wolfgang Bialas 43
swift and thorough resolution. As racial vermin, the Jews could actually
be compared with a cancer, a rampant and destructive tumor.105
The weekly newspaper Der Strmer, edited by Julius Streicher, was
particularly prolific in conditioning correct racio-political behavior. In
practically every issue those who believed they could continue to act hu-
manely and impartially towards Jews as friends, colleagues, neighbors, or
customers were threatened with the publication of their names and ad-
dresses. They were given the chance to correct their supposedly politically
nave, simple-minded (or consciously provocative), and faulty racio-
political behavior. Compliance with this demand did not go unmentioned
but rather was showered with praise and held aloft as a shining example
worthy of emulation. In this fashion, Der Strmer repeatedly denounced
non-Jewish Germans who were on friendly terms with Jews, conducted
business with Jews, represented Jews in court, purchased Jewish commod-
ities, or employed Jewish agents. Germans who had been noticed in the
company of Jews at public venues - were treated by Jewish physicians, -
seen at Jewish funerals, and appeared publicly with Jews in other places as
well as those who protected Jews, borrowed money from Jews, lent a table
or silverware to Jews for family celebrations, not to mention those who
had the temerity to wish a Happy New Year to Jews, all of them were
named.106 Friendliness, neighborliness, or business encounters and rela-
tionships between Jews and non-Jews were to be prevented meaning that
the coexistence of German Jews and non-Jews could lead to probation on
racial grounds, during which Germans had to prove that they supported
Nazi race politics.107
Nazism politically criminalized and prosecuted moral attitudes and ac-
tions that stood in contrast to race morality. Jews were denied the status of
moral subjects, which absolved non-Jewish Germans from moral obliga-
tions toward them. Their discrimination and persecution as inferior sub-
human creatures or racial vermins (Volksschdlinge) were expressly
justified as a policy in conformity with the law in the interest of the Ger-
man people and declared morally necessary for the health of the people.
Many Germans were apparently grateful for the anti-Jewish laws that
legalized the exclusion of Jews from the scope of moral obligations. The
majority of apolitical Germans accepted the persecution of the Jews for
105
H.G., Der asoziale Mensch. Ein biologisches Gleichnis, Das Reich, 23
November 1941.
106
Der Strmer, 6 February 1938.
107
Cf. Saul Friedlnder, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden (Munich: Deutscher
Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008).
fear of being disadvantaged or themselves or of becoming targets of perse-

cution should they refuse to cooperate.
V. The Moral Attitude of the Perpetrators

Initially, perpetrators were branded as violent pathological criminals. To
this Hannah Arendt added the counter-argument of the inconspicuous
personality structure of banal perpetrators unaware of the monstrosity of
their crimes. Another approach insisted that the anonymization of the
perpetrators through their categorization as cogs in the well-oiled machin-
ery of the modern industrial society and bureaucracy absolved them of
responsibility for their crimes. Christopher Browning's formulation of
ordinary men or ordinary Germans highlighted that the perpetrators
commonly stemmed from the midst of German society. There were perpe-
trators driven by a supposedly scientific worldview whereas others acted
as desktop perpetrators (Schreibtischtter) who considered whatever
asked of them their unquestionable duty. There were also those who simp-
ly took the opportunities to advance their careers or to take advantage in
other respects, with no concern for ideology at all. And finally, there were
quite a few who were driven by their lower instincts while enjoying them-
selves as masters over life and death. However, Nazi perpetrators who
were pathological criminals able to hide their disturbed personality under
the screen of racio-political ideology were the exception. They often ap-
peared as average normal human beings who neither would have had the
opportunity nor would they have been tempted to take part in crimes and
mass murder had the circumstances differed. This also holds true for those
who did not actually participate in the crimes but tolerated them in silence
instead of preventing them. In hindsight, these bystanders frequently
blamed the zeitgeist or the ideologically charged atmosphere for their
refusal to aid those persecuted for racial or political reasons. Either they
claimed to have been intimidated by the Nazi system of terror or frankly
admitted their sense of relief that they themselves had not been the target
of discrimination and persecution. For this reason, they consciously avoid-
ed encounters with those who might have needed their help. In retrospect,
they insisted that they would have stood up for them or at least not refused
them empathy and respect had the circumstances been different.
Along this line of argumentation, circumstances become central to the
determination of a particular action as moral or immoral. Perpetrators
portrayed themselves as victims of circumstances with which they had
come to terms. They would have adapted to any circumstances simply
because they considered it reasonable not to question any actions that
Wolfgang Bialas 45
appeared to be covered by laws and generally approved values. This in no

way distinguished them from the majority of the Germans. Needless to
say, they embraced the benefits of their willing cooperation with the sys-
tem: recognition and professional advancement. For them, the advantages
of the Nazi system vastly outweighed its disadvantages. They claimed to
have had no interest in the ideological justifications of the Nazi policy.
They were spared having to make their own decisions and judgments, for
which they were grateful in retrospect as it left them unencumbered from
personal guilt. According to this perspective, one can be guilty only if one
breaks the law, violates moral standards, seeks personal profit at the ex-
pense of others, or deliberately causes others suffering. They insisted that
none of that applied to them and that they were not to blame for their
deeds as they had not initiated them.
The perpetrators asserted that the ideological indoctrination had limited
their moral culpability, which is why they lacked the freedom to make
decisions whereas others even agreed with the criminal quality and moral
reprehensibility of their deeds given they were granted extenuating cir-
cumstances that relativized their criminal responsibility as perpetrators. Or
they claimed that they had been indifferent to the political circumstances
and their ideological foundations so that they had not been aware of any
wrongdoing or immoral behavior. As far as they could see it, they had
acted lawfully and morally, i.e. in accordance with contemporary Nazi law
and racial morality, i.e. Nazi law and race ethics.
These arguments are well documented in recordings and interviews of
Nazi perpetrators.108 The circumstances under which these recordings were
made are crucial. Most were produced after the destruction of Nazism in
connection with impending trials in which moral considerations were
coupled with legal concerns. Even if it is patently clear that the perpetra-
tors were trying to avoid a potential death sentence for crimes against
humanity, these records are still valuable material promising to shed light
on the moral order of Nazism. Furthermore, the distortions of their mo-
tives and reasons give us an idea about the perpetrators moral attitudes.
These attitudes ranged from fanatical belief in the Nazi ideology right
down to professional distance and a dutiful bureaucratic mentality. It is
self-evident that we cannot simply accept their moral justifications alt-
hough it would be misguided to ignore these transparent attempts at self-
108
Cf. Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (New
York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011); Steven Paskuly (ed.), Death
Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Commandant at Auschwitz, Rudolph Hss (Buffa-
lo: Prometheus Books, 1992).
exoneration109 as irrelevant to explaining the behavior of Nazi perpetra-

tors.
As a rule, the Nazi perpetrators acted as members of military units or
other political organizations within the hierarchies of command and deci-
sion-making, meaning they did not act on their own initiative or responsi-
bility. Still, even though they were acting in accordance with the norms of
their units or organizations, they had the opportunity and were encouraged
to personally distinguish themselves. The Nazi racial worldview dictated
their moral considerations and decisions, which made some of them claim
in retrospect that their ideologically induced moral brutalization entitled
them to reduced criminal responsibility in a fashion that is comparable to
the emotional brutalization and psychological defects of sexual offenders.
Most Germans either were adherents of Nazism because they shared its
ideology or they supported Nazi policy by reliably carrying out supposedly
unproblematic and nonpolitical professional duties. Even if they had been
indifferent to the Nazi racial ideology and ethics, they were able to vigor-
ously support its agenda.110 They felt obliged to give their best in carrying
out their tasks, whose validity they did not challenge. From this it seems to
follow that humans can act immorally without developing a personal im-
moral attitude. This paradox resolves itself when moral indifference itself
is identified as an immoral attitude, as rejecting the moral assessment of a
particular situation and acting accordingly. German physicians, judges,
priests, teachers, commanders of concentration and extermination camps,
and even train workers were deemed to have carried out their work with
the kind of dedication, perseverance, and professionalism that seems to
allow only one conclusion: All of these people, who kept the Nazi killing
machinery operating for the Holocaust, and without whom it would not
have functioned so smoothly and efficiently, believed that what they were
doing was meaningful, useful, and morally unobjectionable. They did not
just fulfill their duty or provide their services dispassionately but instead
appreciated Nazism as the implementation of ideas to which they them-
selves were dedicated.111
It is a controversially discussed question whether classic ethical theo-
ries can at all be applied to extreme events such as the Holocaust, whose
109
Donald M. McKale, Nazis after Hitler: How Perpetrators of the Holocaust
Cheated Justice and Truth (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012).
110
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that
the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly
and terrifyingly normal. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the
Banality of Evil (New York: The Viking Press, 1964), p. 276.
111
Haas, Morality after Auschwitz, p. 1.
Wolfgang Bialas 47
possibility had not been foreseeable at the time these theories were formu-
lated and thus could not, as historical reference, be adopted for the system-
atic rationale of such theories and the discussion as morally or immorally
exposed practices. It is doubted that the norms judgments and justifica-
tions developed by classic ethics suffice to comprehend the Holocaust in
its moral- ethical dimension.112 The assumption that Nazism had its own
moral order can be seen as a reply to the historiographical and methodo-
logical skepticism with respect to understanding the Holocaust. In his
book "Morality after Auschwitz" Peter Haas developed the concept of a
unique Nazi ethics. It sparked an academic debate in the English-speaking
world but attracted hardly any interest in Germany at the time.113 The
debate centered on defining Nazi ethics and morality, the conditions under
which morality is plausible, and the criteria for comparing differing moral
systems. The main features of Peter Haas argumentation will be reviewed
and discussed below.
Haas defined ethics as an internally coherent system of convictions,
values, and ideas that provided a standard for unambiguously identifying
certain actions as moral or immoral. Ethical theories, according to Haas,
either claim validity based on the fundamental principle of universaliza-
tion or see their coherence in the plausibility of their judgments and valua-
tions in the context of their specific origins and moral practices. Moral
judgments are either justifiable as objective and scientific or they are con-
sidered plausible because of cultural specifics and the personal credibility
of those who draw these judgments from their experiences and attitudes.
Haas emphasized the cultural modes of thinking that a community of
values shared and generally accepted linguistic conventions as grounds for
the plausibility of a value system. While ethics enabled a systematic un-
derstanding of good and evil, morality designated the values of which
ethics should consist. In other words, ethics should satisfy certain formal
criteria and provide standards that enable people to describe specific goals
as good or bad and the corresponding actions as right or wrong, appropri-
112
Cf. Rolf Zimmermann, Moralischer Universalismus als geschichtliches Projekt
sowie die entsprechende Kritik und Replik, Erwgen, Wissen, Ethik, vol. 20
(2009) no. 3, pp. 415-496.
113
On the debate of Morality after Auschwitz cf. John K. Roth (ed.), Ethics after
the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses (St. Paul/MN: Paragon
House, 1999). Jack Bemporad/John T. Pawlikowski/Joseph Sievers (eds.), Good
and Evil After Auschwitz: Ethical Implications for Today (Hoboken/NJ: KTAV
Publishing House, 2000). Emil L. Fackenheim, Nazi Ethic, Nazi Weltanschauung
and the Holocaust, The Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 83 (1992) nos. 1-2, pp.
167-172.
ate or inappropriate. He considered the formal characteristics of ethics as

more important for its success than its particular content. To be successful,
ethics, according to Hass, must first be coherent and consistent, as well as
compatible with what people already deem ethically plausible and moral.
The key factor for a new worldview and moral paradigm to be accepted
would be its compatibility with already established worldviews. People
would be willing to accept an ethical system if it was consistent with their
own worldview and their intuitive definition of moral or immoral.114
In an age of moral uncertainty and deprivation, scientific justification,
above all, lends its plausibility to ethics and guarantees its approval. In-
deed, Nazi authors who wanted biological racial morality to triumph in-
sisted that such a morality was in harmony with the laws of nature and life
and the will of God and Creation, i.e. with established scientific and reli-
gious authorities. Haas assumed that in Nazism as in all other political
systems, internal criteria of validity decided which actions are to be con-
sidered morally imperative and which appear morally dubious or even
immoral. He stressed that people always make moral decisions within the
internal framework of ethics in which they themselves participate. Applied
to Nazism, individual perpetrators could not be made responsible for the
Holocaust. Instead, the ethical universe they belonged to would be crucial
for their moral attitudes. It would have to be accepted that the moral in-
sight of the Nazi perpetrators depended on the racio-ethical framework
that was coherent for them, and that the moral quality of their behavior
was decided by the norms which were valid and morally legitimate in their
community of values.
Scholarly literature often dismisses the pseudo-ethical justifications for
the Holocaust used by Nazi perpetrators to justify their behavior as a
transparent concealment of their true motives and feelings. Whoever seri-
ously analyzes these absurd pseudo-intellectual sophisms of mass destruc-
tion for higher purposes becomes suspicious of having fallen prey to Nazi
euphemisms while in the end conceding that the Holocaust might indeed
have appeared legitimate from the perpetrators standpoint. Peter Haas, in
contrast, accepted the perpetrators assertion that they were at peace with
themselves and that they considered their actions to be morally unobjec-
tionable. They claimed to have been conscious of the moral dimension of
their behavior and that a coherent Nazi ethics enabled them to do what was
right and morally demanded. Haas saw their belief that the persecution of
the Jews and the Holocaust were morally justified not as some empty
rhetorical phrase but as a methodological challenge to integrate their moral
reasoning in the attempts to understand their behavior.
114
Haas, Morality after Auschwitz, p. 38.
Wolfgang Bialas 49
The good conscience demonstrated by most Nazi perpetrators is dis-

turbing. Not only perpetrators who believed in the Nazi worldview but
also the desktop perpetrators and politically indifferent perpetrators insist-
ed that what they had done was correct, necessary, morally demanded, and
appropriate given the situation in which they had been. It was important to
those involved in the ideological justification, propagandistic populariza-
tion, political implementation, logistical support, and immediate execution
of the Nazi racial policy to appear free of selfish, base, and reprehensible
motives to themselves. They appreciated that Nazi ideology provided
noble and honorable reasons for supporting a racial politics that was
justified as a necessary means to averting dangers to the peoples commu-
nity by eradicating the Jewish parasites living off the German people. This
spared the perpetrators all moral misgivings and human empathy toward
their victims so that they did not have even the slightest doubts that the
racial policy was justified. In a society where opportunism and indiffer-
ence became the predominant behavioral pattern, it was possible to accept
the consequences of Nazi ideology without sharing its contents, justifica-
tions, or premises.
Even though the race-indifferent bourgeois-Christian system of values
was no longer valid, it still had an impact on many Germans whose com-
mon sense morality it had shaped. Therefore, it had to be replaced with
race ethics in order to guarantee that supporting the Nazi racial policy did
not cause any moral scruples but appeared rather unproblematic, morally.
Based on moral reasoning according to the value system of race ethics,
Nazi perpetrators did not consider their actions morally reprehensible.
Moral scruples only occur when people are expected to act in a way that is
justified as politically lawful and necessary, and therefore also moral but,
nevertheless, contradicts their still valid internal moral value system. The
acceptance and internalization of race ethics helped prevent such a conflict
of values. A new moral order hence made a behavior otherwise felt as
problematic not only appear lawful in respect to its consistency with valid
laws but also moral.
The moral constitution of the perpetrators was composed of many ele-
ments and influences. Their motives for acting were just as decisive as the
socio-cultural circumstances that they accepted unquestioningly and as-
sumed to be unproblematic. Within the framework of their own moral
order they had a clear conscience. They took it for granted that they were
acting morally because they had pursued the higher cause of the German
people unfettered by selfish motives. When justifying their crimes, they
referred to a mix of historical constellations and ideological motivations
and claimed that they had found the ethical justifications of the racial
policy to be plausible.
It is the entire range of attitudes and behaviors in Nazism that requires
explanation: ideological fanaticism, the ethos of duty, opportunism and the
indifference toward the victims of the Nazi racial policy, all these patterns
of behavior were justified with moral reasons. However, even their indif-
ference toward the ideological justifications of persecuting the Jews did
not stop ordinary Germans from being loyal to Nazi politics. Ideological
fanaticism did not necessarily contradict the principle of duty and bureau-
cratic virtues.
The power of moral judgment requires maintaining a reflective dis-
tance to the groups to which one belongs without having chosen them.
When people no longer trust their judgment, this certainly affects their
moral accountability as they are no longer able to intuitively distinguish
the moral from the immoral. This raises the question if someone who was
unaware of any guilt while acting immorally can be held accountable in
hindsight. Does their lack of awareness exonerate the perpetrators of per-
sonal responsibility for actions they believed lawful, moral, and in line
with valid norms? It is this discrepancy between doubtlessly immoral
criminal deeds and perpetrators who assert that they were unaware of any
guilt that constitutes a problem. It is this discrepancy between undoubtedly
immoral criminal actions and perpetrators who claim to not have been
aware of any transgression which poses a problem. Nevertheless, such a
discrepancy becomes a problem only when one assumes that the perpetra-
tors had not, from the first, construed a claim intended to exonerate them-
selves against their better knowledge. One may presume that most of the
individuals who attempted to exculpate themselves after the end of Nazism
were driven less by a bad conscience about the moral reprehensibility of
their actions than by the hope of getting off scot-free. Some pointed to the
times, the laws, and the moral norms valid at the time that made their
actions appear lawful and morally unobjectionable. Others claimed moral
purification and retrospectively expressed remorse and regret. It is difficult
to decide, which of these opposing attitudes were mere strategic considera-
tions and which were genuine expressions of coming to terms with their
Nazi past. It is questionable whether the testimonies they gave were at-
tempts to justify their actions or expressions of sadness, or even shame and
guilt that actually reflected the motives of these perpetrators.
Do those who act immorally from our point of view share our stand-
ards of moral behavior so that they, when acting immorally, do so con-
sciously? Or do they also act morally according to their self-conception
justified by a new moral order developed for this very purpose: to make
Wolfgang Bialas 51
their actions appear morally right? Was the perpetrators supposedly good
conscience only feigned, or was it the result of a revaluation of traditional
values that redefined the meaning of moral and immoral?
The reluctance to concede moral motives to Nazi perpetrators is under-
standable. It does seem absurd to believe that they themselves actually saw
the persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust as morally right and neces-
sary. This simultaneously touches upon the key issue of assessing the
effectiveness of racial ethics, i.e. the question of whether the perpetrators
indeed found the moral justification of the Nazi racial policy convincing
so that ethical considerations motivated their actions. This does not pre-
clude other considerations from having played a similar or even more
important role in their willingness to participate.
After the end of Nazism, Nazi perpetrators attempted to justify their
actions by pointing to the ideological indoctrination and hierarchies of
responsibility and decision-making. They likewise frequently pointed out
their political indifference and naivet that supposedly kept them from
recognizing the criminal character of the Nazi system. They regarded
themselves as unpolitical because their crucial virtues had been reliability,
hard work, and discipline. It is more likely, however, that they were aware
of the moral reprehensibility of their crimes.
Max Webers distinction between an ethics of conviction (Gesin-
nungsethik) and an ethics of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik) can
also be applied to understanding the moral orders of Nazism. On the one
hand, the person advocating an ethics of conviction does not feel responsi-
ble for the evil consequences of committing a crime based on pure convic-
tion. On the other hand, the person subscribing to an ethics of responsibil-
ity counts on the average failings of people who are neither perfect nor
acting based on pure conviction and who are therefore also responsible for
the consequences of their behavior.115 The Nazi perpetrators with a clean
conscience claimed to have selflessly placed themselves in the service of
higher values. Paradoxically, distancing themselves from their personal
inclinations and assuming that this turns them into moral humans makes
people most prone to following an ideological ethics. Race ethics insisted
that its value system had nothing to do with everyday life, which, for this
very reason, took on an extraordinary meaning itself.
The SS, as the vanguard organization of racial warriors, asked its
members to intuitively follow their racial instinct when judging and acting,
which would allow them to base their actions on the detached perspective
of racial ideology that was supposed to enable them to keep a distance to
115
Max Weber, Politik als Beruf, in Idem: Gesammelte Politische Schriften
(Tbingen: Mohr 1988), pp. 505-560, here pp. 551.
the targets of racial exterminatory politics. SS men were also asked to

commit themselves totally to the Nazi worldview and not just consider it a
value system that would not at all affect their daily lives.
The question remains if those who actively participated in the persecu-
tion and murder of the Jews had to repress or reinterpret their deeds or to
numb themselves with alcohol in order to reliably humiliate, torture, and
murder. Or did they actually feel that what they were doing was right and
necessary? Did they consider it an honor to be entrusted with the job of
transgressing moral boundaries that were believed to be culturally well
established? Were they proud and satisfied with their atrocious deeds?
Maybe they even derived pleasure from the fear of those unconditionally
at their mercy. Perhaps exercising power over the life and death of others
made them feel exceptionally good or even godlike.
Neither psychologizing nor sociologizing morality plausibly links so-
cial circumstances with the perpetrators motives. While psychologizing
ethics demonizes the perpetrators who presumably chose to act immorally,
sociologizing transforms them into victims of the system that conditioned
them to behave opportunistically. The inversion of civic humane morality
portrayed humane common sense morality as absurd and unreasonable
while committing crime was depicted as a patriotic duty.116 The Holocaust
is among the inexcusable and unforgivable crimes for which there is no
atonement. Even if the perpetrators felt remorse for their crimes later-on,
they could neither atone for them nor expect to be forgiven. To put it dif-
ferently, the Holocaust, as an expression of radical evil, can be defined as
a crime which men can neither punish nor forgive.117 Nazi perpetrators
remain responsible for their crimes even if historic constellations beyond
their control considerably added to turning them into perpetrators. After
all, making allowances for the circumstances under which people acted
immorally does not necessarily relieve them of moral responsibility.
After the collapse of Nazism the perpetrators distanced themselves
from the crimes that they had instigated, committed, or silently tolerated.
Many denied any personal responsibility. Some even replaced the question
of personal responsibility altogether by reinterpreting the historic events at
stake as a metaphysical tragedy. A case in point is Hans Frank, the former
Governor-General of the occupied Polish areas who, during the trial in
Nuremberg in November of 1945, developed an apocalyptic vision that
fused the extermination of the Jews and the destruction of Germany into
one mass of suffering humans: We sit opposite the court. And the train of
116
Hannah Arendt talks about conditions [] where the crime was legal and
every human action was illegal. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 311.
117
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 459.
Wolfgang Bialas 53
the dead goes endlessly by without ever getting interrupted. Pale and wan,
without sound, in the dim yellow-gray light of eternity, this stream of
misery flows on. All, all surge on without pause, enshrouded in dim mist,
whipped by the flames of mankinds agonyhitherthitherthitheron and
on, and no end is in sight The human beings torn from life in this war
are the most gruesome booty of Death, raging in hate and destruction
youth and age, growth and existence, pride and humility There they go
Poles, Jews, Germans, Russians, Americans, Italiansall nationalities,
bleeding and wasting away. And one voice cries: This war must come, for
only as long as I live can it come about! Ah what hast Thou suffered to
come to pass, Almighty God!118
Frank transforms the many-layered reality of war and mass murder of
the Jews into a metaphysical apocalypse of death, misery and war that
exceeds human dimension, human imagination, and responsibility. This
imaginary scenario does not distinguish between perpetrators and victims.
In the dream sequence, people are metamorphosed into anonymous figures
in an infernal play in which there exists no recognizable differentiation
between various religious, ethnic, and national groups. The perpetrators
and victims become one in the apocalyptic accord of death. Even the Jews,
who just had been condemned as an inferior race doomed to a pitiless
process of extermination, now appear as one nation among others. Death
driven by hatred and the lust for destruction engages with life itself in an
apocalyptic struggle. In this apocalyptic scenario, people are either torn
away from life or death is denied its spoils.
The message of this apocalyptic scenario is unmistakable: from the
perspectives of eternity and the immensity of human suffering, the catego-
ries for differentiating human worlds fall short. A so to speak fateful event
beyond comprehension or influence befalls humans. What they do to each
other becomes irrelevant in the face of an overwhelming fate. Historic
events are elevated to the timelessness of an appalling, depressing, and
incomprehensible event, making their historical specificity unrecogniza-
ble. Few signs indicate the historical point of departure in which world
history escalated from the bleeding to death of nations to the apocalypse.
After everything is over, there comes Judgment Day, in which history
itself, in the light of the procession of the death of the victims, declares
survival tantamount to guilt in the Last Judgment. The guilty are not pro-
claimed but rather the perpetrators are lined up in an event that knows
neither guilt nor innocence. If there is guilt, it is the common guilt of the
118
Gustave M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), p.
44. On Hans Frank cf. Joachim C. Fest, Gesichter des Dritten Reiches (Munich:
Piper, 2002), pp. 286-299.
living who survived such horror. In the trauma of survival, they are all
guilty in light of those who did not survive, regardless of whether they had
been involved in killing the victims or were victims who happened to
survive their prescribed destruction. In this rhetoric, it was not the Nazis
who raged but death, the eternal equalizer, who tore both the Jews and the
Germans away from life. The suffering of flesh and blood is deemed the
agony of humanity for which God alone, omnipotent and unfathomable, is
responsible.
Gilbert, who worked with Frank as a court psychologist at the Nurem-
berg Trial, has good arguments for casting doubt on the genuineness of his
supposed agony of conscience. Frank was a showman of the conscience
who put his shame on stage without any shame or sadness about his
crimes.119 Gilberts skepticism is confirmed by Frank himself who, after
having given the report of his dream sequence, made sure that his perfor-
mance had left the desired impression, namely that of an individual seri-
ously anxious to comprehend and overwhelmed by the extent of what had
happened, who had been drawn into the undertow of apocalyptic events,
guiltlessly.
VI. Conclusion: Moral and Immoral Behavior

There are many potential explanations for why people act immorally. The
assumption that people can intuitively choose between moral and immoral
behavior bestows them with the ability to independently distinguish be-
tween moral and immoral. Furthermore, they are granted the capability to
resist any attempts at ideological manipulation and the legal codification
of immorality. Within the framework of an internal system of justifying
morality as developed by Haas, this assumption appears illusory. Obvious-
ly, having been conscious of the moral reprehensibility of their actions did
not prevent the perpetrators from acting immorally. Whosoever acts im-
morally knows that he or she might face the rejection or even the contempt
of his or her fellow men. The only plausible rationale for accepting the
moral contempt of others seems to be the assumption that the benefits of
acting immorally at least compensate for the downsides.
How do we know whether a certain behavior is morally reprehensible
or imperative, whether it is problematic, unobjectionable, or even morally
irrelevant? Assigning importance to this issue implies that people are not
indifferent toward the moral assessment of their behavior. If acting in
harmony with the valid value system is deemed moral, then any depar-
119
Arno Gruen, Der Fremde in uns (Munich: Klett-Cotta, 2002), p. 112.
Wolfgang Bialas 55
ture from it is deemed illegal and immoral. This statement simultaneously

implies that those whose actions we judge as moral share our moral stand-
ards. If we accuse them of acting immorally, we intuitively assume that
they are aware of the moral reprehensibility of their behavior or that they
are at least capable of recognizing it. We take it for granted that there is a
consensus as to what kind of behavior should be considered moral contra-
ry to immoral behavior.
If we morally evaluate people and their actions based on their belong-
ing to a certain community, it is no longer a question of one's actions being
approved by everybody but only by the members of one's own community.
It is only their judgment that counts while the judgment of others is either
considered irrelevant, or they are denied the right to make a moral judg-
ment. People usually do not differentiate between the facticity and the
validity of ethical norms in everyday conversation. They assume that be-
havior which is classified as moral or immoral is indeed moral or immoral.
This intuitive equation does not allow them to identify politically and
culturally sanctioned immoral behavior as such, which makes the system-
atic discussion of the ethical justifications of morally legitimate behavior
all the more important. Accentuating an internal perspective of morality
explains the formation of morality through belonging to a community that
distinguishes itself from others by precisely this exclusive internal morali-
ty.
Emphasizing an internal justification of morality makes it impossible
to qualify specific actions or judgments as moral or immoral from an ex-
ternal perspective. Even conflicting systems of moral values and attitudes
would have to be accepted as moral provided they offered ethical orienta-
tion within their own cultural system of validity.
Whatever kind of behavior had been deemed moral or immoral could
no longer be assessed from a cross-cultural standpoint. Moreover, a uni-
versalistic morality based on the mutual obligation of shared values and
human rights would be pointless.
Accepting an internal justification for morality not only touches upon the
issue of its cultural plausibility but also raises the even more fundamental
question of how different ethics can be compared from a standpoint outside
of their value system. If the cultural power of ethical systems depends solely
on their internal structure, they can no longer be compared with one another
based on rational criteria. Moral attitudes would then obtain their plausibility
from belonging to a community defined by its exclusive internal morality
that also distinguishes it from other communities. If morality is defined as
acting in accordance with an internal system of validity of ethical values and
norms, then the reverse argument stating that those who do not belong to the
respective community of values are considered immoral for no other reason

than their lack of membership in the hegemonic community seems valid.
Accepting the internal plausibility of every consistent value system leads to
an ethical relativism or a positivism of morality. Whatever appears convinc-
ing, coherent, and intuitively right within the framework of a valid ethical
system is then deemed moral. This assumption indicates that ethical systems
and the values and practices they morally justify can neither be criticized
from the outside nor compared, rationally.
Thomas Nagel distinguished two potential perspectives in the analysis
of human behavior between which we must strike a coherent balance to do
justice to people and their actions. On the one hand, we grant people the
status of autonomous subjects responsible for their own behavior. On the
other, we know that their actions are the result of circumstances generally
beyond their control, for which they cannot be held responsible. Nagel
states that indeed everybody is morally subjected to fate, but this should
not prevent us from morally judging them according to their actual actions
or inactions without exonerating them ab ovo by asking how they would
have acted had circumstances been more favorable to moral behavior.120
The sociocultural framework in which humans live conditions them. How-
ever, their moral conditioning does not exonerate them from moral responsi-
bility. The moral tests we face are importantly determined by factors be-
yond our control. It may be true of someone that in a dangerous situation he
may behave in a cowardly or heroic fashion, but if the situation never arises,
he will never have the opportunity to distinguish or disgrace himself in this
way, and his moral record will be different . . . one is morally at the mercy
of fate. . . . We judge people for what they actually do, not just for what they
would have done if circumstances had been different.121
How can feelings of pride and honor or mercy and empathy in regard
to ones fellow human beings be turned upside down? What went wrong
with common sense morality? Are there limits to what human beings are
able to do to each other? What does it take to turn ordinary human beings,
who are neither pathological criminals nor perverted psychopaths, into
functioning, willing executioners of immoral deeds? What can we learn
from the Holocaust in this respect? These questions have been discussed
again and again through sophisticated scholarly approaches. Each genera-
tion must ensure that the inherent challenges of these highly sensitive
problems will still be alive and not be content with ultimate stereotypical
conclusions.
120
Thomas Nagel, Moral Luck, in Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1979), p. 37.
121
Ibid, pp. 33-34.
DID THE NATIONAL SOCIALISTS
HAVE A DIFFERENT MORALITY?
LOTHAR FRITZE
Given the quantity and quality of the National Socialist crimes, one cannot
help asking if National Socialists had a different morality, possibly a spe-
cifically National Socialist one. This question arises from the point of view
of the majority society of the western democratic constitutional states in
which universally valid human rights are recognized.
To say that the National Socialists subscribed to a different morality is
unproblematic and not at all uncommon in everyday language. Of course:
If someone believes himself to be entitled to kill Jews or Communists, he
has a different morality than those who believe otherwise.
If, nevertheless, in the following, a seemingly taken for granted opin-
ion, namely, that the National Socialists had a different morality, is to be
made the topic of discussion this will transpire with the intention of visual-
izing the leading National Socialist perpetrators way of thinking and,
furthermore, to make a contribution to the clarification of the inner logic
of moral thinking in general.
I. Moral Convictions
The term morality captures different aspects so that even moral philoso-
phy finds it difficult to say what the specifically moral is or rather which
aspects constitute the realm of morality. Given these difficulties, I am
not intending to ask what morality is or what we mean by morality
but, in accordance with the initial question, I would like to discuss what
we mean (at least also) when we say that someone has a morality.
Obviously, someone possessing morality has (also) moral convictions.
But what are moral convictions? What characterizes moral convictions, in
contrast to convictions we do not consider moral?
Convictions are characterized by the cognitive attitude of believing
something to be true or right. A convictions is a belief which refers to a
certain content and is difficult to shake. Not any conviction must be rea-
58 Did the National Socialists Have a Different Morality?
son-based. Convictions may also result from believing something to be

evident. By moral convictions I mean convictions which constitute a
certain kind of criteria for judging on human actions, that is, actions which
are relevant not only for the actor himself. These are criteria on whose
basis it is possible to decide whether an action is right or wrong and is,
accordingly, to be accepted or rejected. Moral convictions are suitable for
passing judgments about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of actions and ways
of behaving. From these judgments, then, it is possible to deduce general
demands made on actions. Thus, from the moral judgment killing is
wrong follows the demand Thou shalt not kill!
Such demands, which linguistically take the form of imperatives, ex-
press norms. Norms come in the form of a request; they are instruments of
action control. They may take on the form of a commandment as well as
that of a ban or permission. Norms as a rule determine what one is or is
not to do.
Yet, not only moral norms belong to the realm of morality. Additional-
ly, moral principles are supported, too. Moral principles are the final
criteria for giving reason to and judging subjective maxims for actions,
moral judgments, and also norms. Such moral principles are, for instance,
the Golden Rule, the Categorical Imperative, the principle of universaliza-
tion of discourse ethics, and the utilitarian principle.
Furthermore, normative premises can find their way into our moral
thinking. One may, for example, assume a fundamental equality and an
equal aptitude for all humans and demand equal treatment for them all, or
one may, however, postulate the dogma of fundamental inequality and
unequal value. There are also different opinions concerning what the mor-
al quality of an action depends on or rather to which characteristics ap-
proval or disapproval refer: to the actors motives, the action itself, or the
consequences of the action.
Finally, notions about which entities shall be attributed a moral status,
that is, which kinds of entities are considered worthy of protection and
which respective orders of priority are to be accepted, also belong to the
realm of morality. Moral ideas differ according to the ways in which moral
contents are acquired. For example, moral contents may be deduced from
non-moral factors such as the subjective interests of enlightened and dis-
criminating individuals or, as in National Socialist thought, from the re-
quirements of self-preservation and the empowerment of ones own peo-
ple; one may try to deduce them from holy scriptures or from reason, or
from the concept of action itself; one may ascribe them to the rights hu-
mans have or which are attributed to them; one may, from the outset, at-
Lothar Fritze 59
tach the concept of morality to certain topical demands such as, for in-
stance, those of equal consideration for everyones interests.
II. Different Moralities?

All these convictions are convictions that come under the realm of what is
commonly called morality. In general, it can be said: Moral convictions
have normative references. They imply judgments on the scale of what one
ought to do, and they contain the behavioral demands which are in accord-
ance with these judgments. However, it must be taken into consideration
that these convictions are found among the moral convictions of the popu-
lations of the West. This even holds, for example, for the utilitarian princi-
ple by which, in extreme situations, even the killing of innocent people can
be justified. For the National Socialists, victim calculations of precisely
the utilitarian kind were typical.
Now, if one were to say that humans who hold different opinions con-
cerning these questions also subscribe to a different morality, one would
have to admit that also in the democratic constitutional states of the West
rather different morality are advocated. However, I presume that it is not
this kind of differences that one has in mind when one asks whether the
National Socialists had another morality.
Asking whether National Socialists had a different morality, we are
asking if the morality of typical National Socialists differed from the mo-
ralities in the West beyond these differences. On the one hand, the concep-
tual background of this question consists of the many actions by National
Socialists that we consider crimes and, on the other hand, by the presump-
tion that it would not have been possible to consider these actions justified
on the foundation of a Western human rights morality. What unsettles us
and triggers this question are thus morally unacceptable actions in this
case actions by National Socialists, whereby we are primarily concerned
with comprehending the convictions whence these actions originated.
Thus, the following can be concluded: If one is interested to under-
stand what morality someone has, one must investigate all those moral
convictions decisively influencing that persons way of behaving, that is,
his way of behaving toward others. However, the norms which one accepts
oneself are decisive for what one does or does not do. The norms accepted
by a person work as reasons for why certain actions are carried out or
refrained from. Wanting to know which practically relevant morality
someone has, one must most of all identify which moral norms he accepts.
Thereby it is unessential for judging someones actions on which rationale
these norms or on which moral principles the choices of action are based.
III. What Does it Mean to Have Morality?

Having morality, it obviously does not suffice to simply be acquainted
with moral norms. Rather, what is required is that one also accepts norms.
One accepts a norm after one has internalized it and if one is at the same
time willing to systematically abide by it. The acceptance of a norm is
attached to such willingness. Thus, having morality must also be connect-
ed to a feeling of obligation in respect to abiding by certain moral norms.
Having morality means feeling an obligation to meet certain behav-
ioral requirements which, as a rule, are also postulated by other members
of the society. Such requirements in reference to carrying out and refrain-
ing from actions are called moral norms. An obligation to paying atten-
tion to moral norms is felt only in respect to those norms which one be-
lieves to be valid and thus accepts, whereby one declares a norm to be
valid if one considers it reasonable, that is: if one is convinced of having a
reason for obeying it. Thus, to possess morality means accepting moral
norms while at the same time feeling the sincere obligation to pay atten-
tion to these norms as regards ones own actions. One possesses morality
if one is disgusted with ones own moral behavior and develops respective
guilt feelings in the case of an avoidable and, due to it being obligatory, to
be avoided violation of a norm considered valid. In such a case, one
speaks of the respective individuals bad conscience being prompted. The
conscience may be described as an internal control authority that registers
a difference between the required and the actual behavior and signals this
to the individual concerned. Acting morally is acting according to norms
out of obligation, that is, on the basis of realizing that the norms are justi-
fied and the willingness to do justice by the thereby resulting obligations.
One has morality if one has moral convictions of the kind mentioned.
IV. Did the National Socialists Have Morality at all?

The question Did the National Socialists have a different morality as-
sumes at least the possibility that the National Socialists had some morali-
ty at all in this sense. This is not a generally accepted assumption.
Although the National Socialists themselves understood their fight as a
fight against evil, many interpreters of the National Socialist outrages as a
matter of course assumed that the perpetrators themselves had intended
the evil, and that, indeed, they must have been amoral, profoundly de-
generate people. This judgment does not appear real helpful for decipher-
ing the thinking of National Socialists. This manner of speaking may
Lothar Fritze 61
foremost be an expression of the feeling of bewilderment which befalls us

again and again in the face of National Socialist crimes.
Instead, I am claiming that at least the National Socialists in authority
actually had morality in the here addressed sense. National Socialists, too,
accepted a socially valid system of moral norms from which behavioral
requirements arose for everyone, and thus they felt the obligation to make
their own behavior subject to these norms and to support them to the out-
side, where applicable.
That also National Socialists were oriented to norms can be made plau-
sible by many statements. When, for example, Hitler, in his speech on the
occasion of the official opening of the International Exhibition of Auto-
mobiles and Motorbikes, explains: Who drives an automobile bears [...]
responsibility [...] for the lives of his fellow humans. But who deals with
this irresponsibly behaves in a criminal and unprincipled way,1 he postu-
lates the validity of a general norm that is the commandment to prevent
fellow humans from being harmed.2 Or: When Heinrich Himmler in one of
his speeches exclaims that conscience commanded to carry out this
harsh cleansing [that is the final solution of the Jewish problem, L. F.],3 it
becomes obvious that one cannot speak of the absence of any moral will.
Of course, it is an intellectual imposition to understand the final solution
of the Jewish problem as an expression of moral will. But referring to the
conscience which is said to command a certain behavior shows that both,
intellectually and semantically, Himmler moved within a moral discourse
and was bent on morally justifying his actions. When he explains that one
was not entitled to save for later anything grave and difficult which
could be done today, for one could not bear the responsibility to be so
indecent as to leave the unsolved Jewish problem to ones children,4 this
shows that even Himmler, at least in as far as we may believe these expla-
nations, made efforts to orient his actions to at moral norms. Yet, it is
precisely this willingness to obey valid moral norms which is commonly
understood as moral will.
1
Adolf Hitler, (Rede zur Erffnung der Internationalen Automobil- und
Motorradausstellung vom 17. Februar 1939), in Max Domarus, Hitler. Reden und
Proklamationen 1932-1945, Bd. II/1 (Wiesbaden: R. Lwit, 1973), p. 1083.
2
However, this does not tell anything about the reasons given for this norm. E.g.
Hitler calls those who are responsible for other humans being killed by road acci-
dents a pest of the people, ibid.
3
Heinrich Himmler, Geheimreden 1933 bis 1945 und andere Ansprachen, ed. by
Bradley F. Smith and Agnes F. Peterson (Frankfurt a. M./Berlin/Vienna:
Propylen, 1974), p. 204.
4
Ibid., pp. 202, 204.
It is thus wrong to flatly ascribe moral disinterest to National Social-

ists, or to assume that they had been amoral beings, or to attest them a lack
of general willingness to orient themselves to moral norms at all, or to
believe them to be incapable of recognizing moral obligations. Quite obvi-
ously, Hitler, too, had moral convictions, and, within the framework of his
own system of convictions, he reflected on how one might act morally. If
it is true, however, that National Socialists possessed morality in the here
addressed sense, there remains the question whether they had a different
morality. This, as a matter of fact, is taken for granted by many authors.
V. Did the National Socialists Accept Other Moral Norms?

Instead of asking whether the National Socialists had a different morality, I
would first like to discuss if they accepted other moral norms. Thereby, I
will initially address the question whether national Socialists accepted
other norms exclusively to moral basic norms.
1. Basic Norms
Usually, basic norms are formulated in an abstract and general way. Alt-
hough they stipulate certain ways of behaving, they do not cover every
situation. In particular, basic norms do not contain any definitions to
which kinds of entities they refer, by which characteristics these entities
are to be identified, and whether they are valid without restriction or only
under condition and, if only unconditionally, which restricting conditions
are recognized. Thus, for many concretely applicable cases, they do not
contain any behavioral instructions. When two people advocate linguisti-
cally identical demands, they advocate, so my definition, the same norm.
Here, basic norms means those norms occurring, in the most general
formulation, still compatible with the action directive as expressed by the
respective norm. The prohibition to kill, for example, is such a basic norm.
However, also the prohibitions to harm other people, to expulse them, to
deprive them of their freedom, to steal from them, and to lie to them are
basic norms. Furthermore, commandments such as the commandments to
care for ones children, to help people in need, or to keep treaties belong to
such basic norms. These basic norms may be found in all or almost all
societies and at all times; thus they have cross-cultural validity. In accord-
ance with this empirical conclusion, one can define: Basic norms have the
same form everywhere, and they are socially and culturally invariant.
A concentration on basic norms seems to be appropriate to me also be-
cause, among others, they correspond to the intentions of those authors
Lothar Fritze 63
who assume that National Socialists indeed possessed a different morality.

Apparently, such authors believe that the National Socialists did not accept
certain moral basic norms and thus felt entitled to systematically violate
these norms or they even believe that National Socialists assumed the
negation of these norms to be obligatory. Hannah Arendt seems to have
held such an extreme position. She claimed that Hitlers new law had
demanded that the voice of conscience was telling everybody Thou shalt
kill.5 If this interpretation by Arendt is true, it is not only that the Na-
tional Socialists did not only accept the prohibition to kill but instead
propagated the norm You may kill or even You shall kill!
2. Concurrent Moral Basic Norms

Of course, we know that National Socialists violated moral norms: They
harmed and killed people, they drove them from their homes and forcibly
resettled them, they deprived them of their freedom and enslaved them,
they stole from them, lied to them, and they broke treaties.
Yet, what must be concluded from this in respect to our initial ques-
tion? Does the fact that norms were deliberately and systematically violat-
ed allow for the conclusion that these norms were not believed to be valid,
or not accepted? This must be negated. The conclusion that the deliberate
violation of a norm intended with a clean conscience means that one does
not accept it is wrong within the here suggested terminological system.
Instead, I am claiming that it is imaginable that National Socialists be-
lieved all basic norms to be valid and that they accepted them in the ini-
tially stated sense, and, at least in this sense, did not have a different mo-
rality. By the way, this also pertains to a number of basic values such as
justice, freedom, security, and honor as well as to human virtues such as
justice, loyalty, comradeship, willingness to perform, decency, chivalry,
and willingness to make sacrifices which, in their abstract general form,
were, just the same, advocated or rather demanded by National Socialists.
To me, it seems to be virtually self-evident that National Socialists ac-
cepted basic norms. Accordingly, Hitler declared the Ten Commandments
to be absolutely laudable as regulating laws.6 That he generally be-
lieved the orientation to moral norms to be obligatory could be made plau-
sible by many statements. For example, in his already mentioned speech
5
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Ein Bericht von der Banalitt des Bsen
(Munich: Piper, 1995), pp. 188-189.
6
Adolf Hitler, Monologe im Fhrerhauptquartier 1941-1944. Aufgezeichnet von
Heinrich Heim, herausgegeben und kommentiert von Werner Jochmann (Munich:
Orbis, 2000), doc. 43, p. 104.
he went on to explain: Basically, however, it is generally un-National

Socialist to be inconsiderable towards ones fellow Germans.7 Not to be
inconsiderate toward ones fellow humans is a basic norm which we sup-
port, too, and which, in any case, may have cross-cultural validity. The
same applies to Himmler. Of course, it was not his opinion that one was
allowed to kill other humans without a justifiable reason. In May 1940,
still, in a memorandum on the Eastern Policy which Hitler had approved,
he had rejected out of my inner conviction the Bolshevist method of
physically extinction a people, as it is un-German and impossible.8 He
later changed his mind. Yet, not even then did Himmler believe that it was
permissible to kill Jews as one pleases. Even the killing of Jews had to be
substantiated and justified. Thus, he was not only well acquainted with the
prohibition to kill, but he also accepted it; at the same time, he believed to
be entitled to violate it in a certain respect or under certain conditions.
Thus, it can be confirmed: Even if one violates a norm, this does not
necessarily mean that one believes it to be invalid. The reason for this is
simple and known to everyone: It is imaginable that one violates norms
but believes this violation to be legitimate or even necessary. Such a kind
of permission is only needed because the norm is valid. Whoever, for
example, recognizes the legitimation of being permitted to resist an ag-
gressor even by lethal means, if necessary, may at the same time accept
the norm Thou shalt not kill! Would not any supporter of the death pen-
alty (rightfully so) defend himself against the accusation that he rejects the
prohibition to kill?
3. Perpetrators with a Clean Conscience

As regards the leading National Socialists we are up against perpetrators
who were convinced that their actions were morally justified. Leading
National Socialists, among them Hitler and Himmler, were perpetrators
with a clean conscience. They were convinced that they were acting in
conformity with their moral convictions, particularly with the moral norms
they accepted. Neither Hitler nor Himmler seemed to have seriously con-
sidered that they were committing crimes. What applies to most people
also applies to them: It is always the others who are the evil ones. They
believed their own actions to be justified. Neither were the conscious of
7
Hitler, (Rede zur Erffnung der Internationalen Automobil- und Motorradausstellung
vom 17. Februar 1939), p. 1083.
8
Heinrich Himmler, Einige Gedanken ber die Behandlung der Fremdvlkischen
im Osten, in Josef Ackermann, Heinrich Himmler als Ideologe (Gttingen/Z-
rich/Frankfurt: Musterschmidt, 1970), doc. 37, p. 299.
Lothar Fritze 65
the fact that they were doing something morally prohibited or evil nor did
they intend to do so. This is also the reason why it was impossible within
the framework of their thinking to develop a sense of guilt, which, howev-
er, does not rule out that they knew or presumed that others would view
their actions as criminal.
Wishing to comprehend the criminal nature of National Socialism, we
must most of all comprehend how it is possible that humans violate moral
basic norms while believing this violation to be legitimate or necessary.
Thus, the clean conscience of many perpetrators which could be proved by
many of their statements is the reason for the actual need for clarification.
It must be explained how it is possible for people to err in regard to the
moral illegitimacy of actions which quite obviously violate moral basic
norms.9 If it is generally successful to make plausible that it is possible for
other people to do things with a clean conscience which we, against the
background of a human rights morality, consider crimes, we need not
insist on the highly implausible assumption that the National Socialist
perpetrators frequently had been amoral or wicked people, hence, people
who were either not interested in norm-guided behavior or saw the goal
and the purpose of their actions in harming others thus so to speak giving
an example of a behavior that Kant called devilish.10
VI. The Specifics of Moral Norms

Moral norms are to be distinguished from the norms of convention, mores,
and etiquette. As a rule,11 we speak of a moral norm when it is of exis-
tential importance to the determination of its content, and if abiding or not
abiding by it results in significant consequences concerning the gratifica-
9
See Lothar Fritze, Tter mit gutem Gewissen. ber menschliches Versagen im
diktatorischen Sozialismus (Cologne/Weimar: Bhlau, 1998); as well as idem,
Tter und Gewissen. Zur Typologie des Tterverhaltens, Aufklrung und Kritik,
vol. 12 (2005) no. 1, pp. 82-94. From a legal point of view, recently Udo Ebert
draws quite similar conclusions: Udo Ebert, Die Banalitt des Bsen
Herausforderung fr das Strafrecht (Stuttgart/Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 2010), part. pp.
5-19. See also Jrg Arnold, Tter mit gutem Gewissen. Impulse einer
moralphilosophischen Untersuchung ber die DDR-Vergangenheit fr das
Strafrecht, in Matthias Mahlmann (ed.), Gesellschaft und Gerechtigkeit.
Festschrift fr Hubert Rottleuthner (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2011), pp. 439-457.
10
Immanuel Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloen Vernunft, in
Idem, Werke in zehn Bnden, Bd. 7, ed. by Wilhelm Weischedel (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), p. 35.
11
Here I am not taking into consideration opinions according to which we also
have moral obligations towards nature.
tion of basic needs, the mastery of existence, and the avoidance of suffer-
ing.
1. Validity and Approval

In the following, I will speak of a moral norm when an accepted norm
exhibits two (formal) characteristics.12 First: The norm is supported by
claiming its general validity. Second: The norm is supported by claiming
its general approval.
About the first characteristic: Moral requirements are directed toward
an addressee, and they refer to certain entities and cases of application.
The claim for general validity is met if the supporter of this norm directs
the requirement connected to a norm toward everyone in a similarly rele-
vant position and claims it to be valid for all entities of the same kind as
well as for any similarly relevant situation. For this purpose, the formula-
tion of the norm may only include terms which do not arbitrarily restrict it
to individual cases. In particular, the formulation of norms may not in-
clude any proper names or indexical expressions such as I, you, we,
there, here, now, my people, my religious community, and the
likes.13 Whoever makes the demand Thou shalt not kill! cannot only
address certain people; by the same token, he cannot only address separate
individuals or restrict them only to chosen locations or certain times. In
this respect applies: Moral norms are supported by the claim to general
validity.
However, from this, it does not follow that a norm is considered gener-
ally (universally) valid only if it is directed to all humans as addressees
and if the normed action simultaneously refers to all humans. The moral
norm Parents shall care for their children meets neither the first nor the
second condition. In this sense, also the demand to fight for the self-
preservation of ones own people would be a moral demand. It addresses
all the members of all peoples.
About the second characteristic: The claim for general approval is met
when the supporter of a norm feels that everyone (or almost everyone) has
a good reason for opting for the societal validation of this norm. On the
one hand, this does not mean that a norm is a moral norm only if it is fac-
tually accepted by everyone. Rather, it cannot be ruled out that a moral
norm is supported by just one person. On the other hand, this does not
12
See Norbert Hoerster, Was ist Moral? Eine philosophische Einfhrung
(Stuttgart: Reclam, 2008), p. 13.
13
See Dieter Birnbacher, Analytische Einfhrung in die Ethik (Berlin/New York:
de Gruyter, 2003), pp. 33.
Lothar Fritze 67
mean that, under rationality conditions, literally everyone else really has a
reason to agree with this norm. There may be exceptions. However, the
supporter of the norm must be convinced that all (or almost all) other fel-
low humans also have a sufficient, subjectively good reason to accept this
norm, and he must wish it to meet with general approval. In this respect
applies: Moral norms are considered to be generally consensual and are
supported by the claim to general approval.
2. Substantiation as a Condition for Application

A morality of fundamental human rights that accepts a number of basic
norms assigns to every human resistance or also entitlement rights, which
may not be restricted without recognized justification. Unjustified viola-
tions of these rights are considered illegitimate. Now, to understand that
even perpetrators who violate such rights may have oriented their actions
to moral basic norms such as, for instance, the prohibition to kill, one must
realize the need for the substantiation of moral norms.
First: The universal claim of the validity of a moral norm does not say
anything about its scope. The norm Thou shalt not kill! prohibits a cer-
tain action, that is, killing. So far, all that is clear is that it refers only to
dealing with entities that can be killed at all, thus to living beings. Beyond
this, however, it does not say anything about who or what may not be
killed. Ignoring Buddhist ideas, the norm is usually understood as prohib-
iting the killing of humans but not of animals. Many understand this norm
more in the sense of it meaning the prohibition of killing humans who
have already been born, and many others understand it in the sense of it
only prohibiting the killing of other humans, hence, not suicide. The norm
You shall not lie! is understood in a similar way. From the formulation
of the norm, it is to be concluded first of all only that it refers to dealing
with beings that can be lied to. However, it remains unclear whether only
humans or also other possibly existing rational beings may not be lied to.
From this arises: Only the respectively accepted definition of the scope of
a basic norm decides which concrete actions are legitimate or illegitimate.
Second: In situations of concrete actions, moral basic norms must al-
ways be obeyed. As basic norms, however, are formulated in an unspecific
way, they do not include any directions for what needs to be done under
concrete conditions, and what not. For instance, basic norms do not in-
clude any directions for how to act in cases of emergency or in dangerous
situations, for example, in cases when obeying them might be connected to
massive impairment to the actor himself or to others concerned. They do
not include any directions in case other people violate basic norms and
thus do not meet their obligations to non-action. Also, they do not contain
any regulation in case basic norms contradict each other. Thus, it shows:
Whoever knows a basic norm does not yet completely know which con-
crete actions it prohibits.
Third: Sometimes, basic norms are not directly abided by but trans-
formed into more concrete norms by taking concrete circumstances into
consideration. For example, the (concrete) norm demanding to fulfill a
dying persons desire to be relieved from pain is a substantiation of the
basic norm to help other people. By taking characteristics into considera-
tion which pertain to both the conditions for action and the actor himself,
concrete norms can be derived from basic norms.
3. Scope Rules Reasons for Justification, Derived Norms

From this results an essential consequence for the understanding of human
moral practice: In order to know what needs to be done and what needs
not to be done in a concrete action situation, it is sometimes not enough to
know the moral basic norms. Beyond this, morally relevant decisions are
determined by those scope rules and reasons for justification considered
valid as well as by the subjectively recognized derived norms. We will be
able to understand the behavior of perpetrators with a clean conscience to
a considerable degree although not completely if we assume that they
accepted different scope rules or other reasons for justification, or other
derived norms.
VII. Scope Rules

Basic norms determine only imprecisely what is or is not to be done. This
is why their realm of application must be determined by scope rules.
Scope rules determine to whom moral norms shall be applied. Some scope
rules determine who is to be a member of the moral community. Other
scope rules result from the function which certain members of the moral
community have or rather in which capacity they are acting.
1. General Considerations
The example of the prohibition to kill may have conveyed how vague
basic norms can be. Furthermore, one ought to be aware that also other
ways of understanding one and the same norm are possible, and one needs
to realize that even the definition that the prohibition to kill only refers to
(other) humans it is still imprecise: The prohibition to kill may not merely
Lothar Fritze 69
apply to humans who had already been born but to human individuals in
general. Likewise, the prohibition to kill may refer only to human individ-
uals with dreams of the future, or, generally, to beings who are capable of
suffering or just to animated beings, or even to rational beings on the
whole. Furthermore, the scope of the prohibition to kill may be restricted
according to ethnicity, race, or also in reference to other (e. g. medical)
criteria.
To be able to obey the norm You shall not kill any (other) humans!
one must know which forms of life represent human life and which forms
of human life are considered man and thus come under the scope of this
prohibition. However, even if the humanity of the being concerned is un-
disputed, the scope of this norm may be subject to further restrictions. For
example, there would be an ethnic restriction if the scope were to coincide
with the origin from a certain community or the membership in a commu-
nity. Such a restriction existed when the prohibition to kill of the Deca-
logue was restricted to the realm of the People of Israel and had not yet, as
in the post-exile period, step-by-step been extended from the traditional
legal subject, the Israelite citizen, to man as such.14
The definitions of the scope of a norm are based on considerations of
relevance. Whoever understands the norm Thou shalt not kill! as the
demand not to kill any other human thus expresses with this reading of the
norm that, to him, only the killing of other humans is morally relevant. At
the same time, he expresses that to him neither suicide nor the killing of
non-humans represent violations of the prohibition to kill. We may thus
state: No matter which criteria are brought into account for the definition
of the scope of a norm, they must be considered morally relevant within
the respective belief system.15 This means however: One must be able to
produce reasons why, under the point of view of their possible killing, the
not included beings are not considered to be similar in a relevant sense and
thus also not morally equal. Otherwise, the criteria brought into account
would collide with the claim to the universal validity of moral norms.
A number of consequences arise from these considerations. First: On-
ly by determining the scope of a norm and in connection with the wording
of this norm is the respective moral obligation defined. Insofar as defini-
tions of the scope of norms have normative consequences they, them-
14
See Frank-Lothar Hossfeld, Du sollst nicht tten! Das fnfte Dekaloggebot im
Kontext alttestamentlicher Ethik (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 2004), pp. 13, 68, as
well as Matthias Kckert, Die Zehn Gebote (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2007), pp. 21,
76.
15
Which criteria should be taken into consideration for this at all and which rea-
sons could be given for the acceptance of these criteria is not a topic here.
selves, are thus morally relevant. The morality a person has is essentially
dependent on the accepted scope rules. Second: Scope definitions which
meet the demands for formal consistency do not affect the universal validi-
ty of the norm. The various ways of understanding the norm Thou shalt
not kill! might all meet the universalization demand, however, they have
different scopes. Third: Depending on the accepted scope rules, one and
the same norm (formulation) of the norm Thou shalt not kill! may be
compatible with actions (the killing of animals capable of suffering, abor-
tion, infanticide, suicide, killing those not belonging to ones own tribe or
people, or killing the mentally disabled) which, from the perspective of
other scope rules are considered illegitimate.
2. National Socialist Scope Rules

Looking at the moral thinking of National Socialists, one finds that leading
National Socialist ideologues did indeed advocate the same moral basic
norms as we do, however with different scope rules. This thus raises the
question of how scope rules are determined or rather what it depends on
which scope rules we accept. The answer to this is: For the determination
of the scope of a moral norm, non-moral convictions or rather non-moral
assumptions play a crucial role. To illustrate this thesis I will present three
non-moral theorems which were important for the determination of the
scope of basic norms in the context of National Socialist thought.
First: By referring to the race-and-culture-theoretical assumptions, Na-
tional Socialists assumed a natural inequality and different value of peo-
ples and races. Accordingly, they rejected the postulate of a normative
equality of all humans. So, in Hitlers opinion the so-called Aryan was so
to speak the crowning glory of all of creation, the prototype of how the
word man was understood.16 Hitler believed the Aryans entitlement for
subjugating the members of inferior races to be justified due to the Ary-
ans natural-born though to be proved in battle superiority as well as due
to his cultural-creative competence and occupation. Hitler revered the
aristocratic pivotal idea of nature and believed to be entitled to demand
the submission of the inferior and weaker according to the eternal voli-
tion ruling this universe.17 This, however, means: Aryans and non-Aryans
do not have the same status in respect to the validity of moral basic norms.
Second: On the basis of evolution-theoretical and anthropological con-
siderations, not all National Socialists accepted that all humans belong to
16
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf. Zwei Bnde in einem Band, 504.-508. edition
(Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger 1940), p. 317.
17
Ibid., p. 421.
Lothar Fritze 71
one and the same human species. Some ideologues assumed that there
were graduations regarding the quality of being human. One surely ex-
treme example of this mindset was presented by Hermann Gauch. He
wrote:
Thus, non-Nordic man is something between Nordic man and animal,

most of all ape-man. Accordingly, he is not man in the proper sense, he is
not man at all if actually compared to animal, but just a transition, a transi-
18
tional stage.
With these theoretical assumptions, certain human beings (in this case
non-Nordic humans) did not come under the scope of validity of the ac-
cepted moral norms. Indeed, statements by National Socialist perpetrators
may here be quoted which give rise to the presumption that the members
of various groups of victims of the National Socialists were not, or at least
not in the full sense, considered human beings. The succinct statement by
a member of one of the police battalions involved in the shootings of Jews,
for example, goes in that direction: The Jew was not recognized by us as
a human being.19
In spite of this I do not believe convincing the interpretation that the
intellectually leading National Socialists, or those directly involved in
shootings, had accepted a racially-based scope rule according to which
Jews or also other victims were not classed among humans and thus no
longer belonged to the circle of beings to whom the basic norms applied.20
Even if it were wrong to take a coherent National Socialist morality for
granted, this interpretation is contradicted by the fact that also National
Socialists made efforts to justify their killings and did this not only to
impress third parties but also in order to be able to stand up to their own
conscience. Such efforts would hardly be explicable if not also National
Socialists had been convinced that, in the ordinary case, the killing of
Jews was illegitimate as it was a violation of any humans right to exist
and had thus to be justified. At least a curriculum published by the SS-
Hauptamt left no doubt that all humans, no matter if they are Whites,
18
Hermann Gauch, Neue Grundlagen der Rassenforschung (Leipzig 1933), p. 77.
19
Quoted after: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitlers willige Vollstrecker. Ganz
gewhnliche Deutsche und der Holocaust (Berlin: Siedler 1998), p. 331. Goldha-
gen (in contrast to Christopher R. Browning) the espouses the opinion that in the
thousands of pages of statements by members of Polizeibataillon (Police Battalion)
101 there is no hint that Germans accepted Jews as human, ibid. p. 641.
20
On this, see Lothar Fritze, Moralische Rechtfertigung und auermoralische
berzeugungen. Sind totalitre Verbrechen nur in einer skularen Welt
mglich?, Leviathan, vol. 37 (2009) no. 1, pp. 5-33, here 17-20.
Orientals or Blacks, show certain, typically human features and charac-

teristics apart from common reproduction capacities and that thus all
humans belong to one and the same species.21
Third: The political thesis of a universal struggle for survival of peo-
ples and races constitutes the core of Hitlers ideology. Independent of his
race-theoretical assumptions and actually (unaware of being) in agreement
with Thomas Hobbes, Hitler did not believe in the possibility of a long-
term, stable, and peace-keeping cooperation under the conditions of the
natural state, in this particular case under the conditions of a general com-
petition among peoples and states. Accordingly, Hitler assumed that the
struggle for scant lebensraum and resources prohibited making equal al-
lowances for the interests of the members of other peoples and other races.
Under such conditions, as Hitler was obviously convinced, every party
(every state and every people) has, in Hobbes terminology, the right to
everything.22 This way, the members of competing peoples and races did
no longer belong to the circle of those to whom the basic norms applied.
Thus, under the conditions of a morally and legally unsettled natural state,
all that remains in the struggle of competing survival units is the law of
the jungle.
In the outcome, most likely all the leading National Socialists accepted
scope rules which differed from those we accept in the framework of uni-
versalist human rights ethics, among them also some ethnically and racial-
ly justified ones. These differences are morally significant. They indicate
differences between the morality of the National Socialists and ours.
However, the question is: Why, for example, does someone assume that
non-Nordic humans represented underdeveloped forms of being human
and would therefore not need to be treated as actual humans? Is it because
he himself is a bad person, amoral, and unscrupulous? Or is it because he
has different notions concerning certain facts of the outer world because,
for instance, he supports a different or a wrong theory? The answer to this
question is to be found in the examples given. They show that what leads
to the specific morally relevant scope rules are, in the end, extra-moral
assumptions. In the examples given, these are considerations from the
21 SS-Hauptamt, Lehrplan fr die weltanschauliche Erziehung in der SS und

Polizei, in Hans-Adolf Jacobsen/Werner Jochmann (ed.), Ausgewhlte
Dokumente zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus 1933-1945 (Bielefeld: Verlag
Neue Gesellschaft, 1961), pp. 1-10, here 2. See also Martin Staemmler,
Rassenpflege im vlkischen Staat (Munich/Berlin: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1937),
pp. 14-15.
22
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Hamburg: Meiner, 1996), p. 108.
Lothar Fritze 73
realm of natural science or rather anthropology as well as from political

philosophy.
3. Universalist Scope Rules?

From the point of view of those who do not share the fundamental extra-
moral assumptions of people with different views, the thus resulting scope
restrictions are an expression of a non-universalist morality. If, however,
one is interested to grasp the self-consciousness of the National Socialists,
one cannot describe these scope definitions as the relinquishment of the
universalist point of view. It is such a relinquishment only from the point
of view of those who do not accept the boundary drawn between superior
and inferior races and peoples or rather perfect and imperfect humans or,
however, Hitlers struggle for life theory, and thus consider the scope
criteria brought into account to be morally irrelevant. From a National
Socialist point of view, however, there was no doubt that the basic norms
it accepted could be supported while claiming their universal validity and
general approval. On the one hand, the validity of the norms was accepted
for all those who in a morally relevant sense were to be regarded as equal.
On the other hand, approval did not depend on those who in a morally
relevant sense were not regarded as equal. What is more, resulting from
the fact of the irrevocable fight for survival among peoples and races,
Hitler accorded every competitor the right to secure everything needed
for the purpose of ensuring ones own existence even by violent means, if
necessary. He believed all beings on this earth to be equal regarding
their right to live. All of them were entitled to fight for this right.23 At
least as far as that went, Hitler had supported a universalist point of view
in every respect (not only in the National Socialist one), a kind of univer-
salism referring to the right to self-preservation. Of course, when fighting
for ones own self-preservation, the opponents interests will not be taken
into account quite as much as ones own. Hitler believed precisely the
latter to be impossible given human experience. Every people so he was
convinced strives to improve its own situation, also at the expense of other
peoples; any people believes to be entitled to what it has, and none asks:
Let us consider if maybe, compared to the situation of other peoples, we
are living too good a life.24
23
Adolf Hitler, Was wir wollen. Rede auf NSDAP-Versammlung in Oldenburg
vom 18. Oktober 1928, in Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, Bd. III/1
(Munich: K. G. Saur, 1994), doc. 37, p. 168.
24
Adolf Hitler, Wir und die Reichswehr Unsere Antwort an Seeckt und
Geler. Rede auf NSDAP-Versammlung in Mnchen vom 15. Mrz 1929, in
However, this preference of ones own self-interest, which, for in-

stance, we acknowledge also in our private dealings with the right to self-
defense, is indeed accorded to everyone. Yet, this is precisely why every-
one who shares Hitlers relevant anthropological and political convictions
will be reasonable enough also to agree with his notion of the legitimacy
of the fight for lebensraum and scant resources. Insofar as Hitler conceptu-
ally moved within the lebensraum theory and avoided any confusion with
his racist convictions, he claimed for the German people only a right
which he conceded to all peoples. In one of his speeches he stated:
With the lives of the peoples, the free play of forces will go on. Finally, the
worlds most efficient people will rule. We do not know which people it will
be. But we would not like to exclude our own people from the competi-
tion.25
Whether the convictions underlying the respective justifications (such as

the conviction that cooperation cannot prevent an irrevocable struggle for
scarce vital resources) are to be accepted or not is not a moral question as it
is not a question which could be answered by moral philosophical reflection.
Convictions of this kind are extra-moral and not non-moral convictions.
At the same time, some National Socialists had expanded the common
scope of a universalist morality. Himmler, for example, viewed every kind
of hunting as the murder of innocent creatures.26 Hitler, on the one hand,
held the opinion that future humans also came under the scope of moral
norms. On the other hand, he considered abortion a form of (illegal) killing.
VIII. Reasons for Justification

Moral norms make a certain kind of behaviour or certain defaults obligato-
ry; however usually those obligations as can be derived from them this
we must understand are valid only under certain conditions, that is those
of the ordinary case. Insofar these obligations are conditional; they are not
unconditionally valid. In other words: The thus formulated obligations
must be met as long as there are no extraordinary circumstances, no excep-
tional conditions allowing for not meeting an obligation27 which is obliga-
Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, Bd. III/2 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1994), doc.
6, p. 49.
25
Hitler, Was wir wollen, pp. 168.
26
Josef Wulf, Heinrich Himmler. Eine biographische Studie (Berlin-Grunewald:
arani 1960), p. 9.
27
A not absolutely or not unconditionally valid obligation, that is under ordinary
conditions, is sometimes also called a prima facie obligation (see, for example,
Lothar Fritze 75
tory under ordinary conditions. Such permissions for violating a norm,

which themselves represent moral norms, are called reasons for justifica-
tion.
Reasons for justification refer to circumstances under which valid norms
may be violated. Such circumstances may be the permanently given prob-
lem of securing ones existence which unleash a struggle for scarce vital
resources (as in a war for food or water). Just the same, there may be situa-
tion-related exceptional conditions necessitating active defense (e. g. an
act of self-defense). Also, it may concern violations of valid norms sanc-
tioned by a higher authority (some form of punishment that restricts indi-
vidual rights or even, as in the case of the death penalty, completely elimi-
nates them). Furthermore, there may be collisions with obligations, thus
situations where the execution of an imperative act (such as coming to the
rescue of someone who is being threatened) at the same time means the
violation of another valid norm (such as lying to an illegal attacker). Final-
ly, there may be victim calculations of the utilitarian kind so that the pro-
tection of certain interests necessitates the sacrifice of other interests, even
the sacrifice of humans, if need be.
Justification reasons rule out that the violation of a norm is (morally)
illegal. If a moral justification reason exists, the usually forbidden viola-
tion of the moral norm is not illegal. Accordingly, it also cannot be sanc-
tioned legitimately. Justification reasons are instruments of conflict regula-
tion. They determine how action alternatives accompanying a violation of
individual interests are to be decided such as how conflicting interests
between two parties are to be handled in certain cases, or how a choice
must be made between two possible states of the world. Justification rea-
sons decide about the legitimacy of the violation of the interests of other
parties. The fact that the violation of a norm is considered legitimate only
if a valid justification reason exists, confirms the validity of the norm.
David Ross, Ein Katalog von Prima-facie-Pflichten, in Dieter Birnbacher/Norbert

Hoerster (edts.), Texte zur Ethik, p. 253-269). I have myself sometimes used this
terminology (see Fritze, Moralische Rechtfertigung und auermoralische
berzeugungen, pp. 5-33, as well as idem, Anatomie des totalitren Denkens.
Kommunistische und nationalsozialistische Weltanschauung im Vergleich
(Munich: Olzog, 2012), p. 373). However, it is rejected by other authors (see John
R. Searle, Wie wir die soziale Welt machen. Die Struktur der menschlichen
Zivilisation (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2012), pp. 329-331).
Whether justification reasons have moral validity within a community

depends on their societal recognition. For a practical judgment of actions it
is to be differentiated if the validity of a justification reason or the exist-
ence of a valid justification reason is being debated.
From these connections, the following consequence is derived: The mor-
al legitimacy or illegitimacy of an action is not recognized alone by its outer
form. An action such as, for example, A kills B, may violate a moral basic
norm (here: the prohibition to kill) while still being morally legitimate.
2. Active Defense and Self-Defense

Now, if one takes into account the National Socialist perpetrators, it is
obvious that, often, they justified their actions by referring to active de-
fense or rather to situations of self-defense or, when queried, had justified
them as such. Invoking these kinds of justifications explains their clean
conscience, but, of course, does not mean that they actually had been in
such situations and that, accordingly, their actions had been justified.
However, it must be noted that active defense and self-defense are recog-
nized justification reasons also according to our morality.
Hitlers Lebenskampf theory cannot only be used for fabricating spe-
cific scope rules, it is likewise also suitable for deriving justifications by
referring to justification reasons. After all, it does not matter for the most
part how the justification for the permission to violate a norm is fabricated
in the moral philosophical sense: either via a restriction of the scope or via
the fabrication of a situation of active defense or self-defense.
As already mentioned, Hitler accorded every people the natural right to
fight for its self-preservation. Thus, this right was conceived as a univer-
salist one. In the context of such a struggle for lebensraum and scarce
resources, a Hobbes kind of War of everyone against everyone, the
members of other peoples may be killed or enslaved if this is necessary
either to avert the dangers derived from a lack or an undersupply of vital
resources (water, fertile soil, raw materials etc.) or to resist attacks by
enemies or competitors. A majority of justifications invoked by Hitler and
other leading National Socialists were based on the justification reasons of
active defense or rather self-defense.
Hitler placed enormous importance on the active defense of the dan-
gers he believed to have identified both for the German people and the
Aryan race as well as for all of humankind. As such (alleged) dangers he
identified, for example: the undersupply of lebensraum and the threat of
overpopulation in Germany, a conglomeration of races and a worsening of
the genetic pool, the influence of greedy capital and international finan-
Lothar Fritze 77
cial capitalism, Bolshevism and the intentions for expansion by Slavdom,

the Jewish predominance in society, economics, and culture, and the thus
resulting general Judaization, liberal democracy, the pre-eminence of
materialism, and the cultural decline. From this risk analysis Hitler de-
rived maxims for action which also included violent intervention.
To really understand National Socialist thought it is indispensable to ana-
lyze the justification argumentations first of all independent of the question
whether perhaps some of the arguments had been presented to justify actions
which were to be executed based on entirely different deliberations. Only this
way will one understand that even the National Socialists moral thinking
showed the generally found internal structure of justifications. Of course,
rationalizations of the kind indicated are to be expected. They shall be
identified in another step. However, a perpetrator who does not believe in any
of his own justifications but presents them with the intent to deceive would
not any longer be considered a perpetrator with a clean conscience. The here
suggested analysis scheme could be applied to such perpetrators.
Hitler, however, and along with him other National Socialist ideo-
logues and pragmatists, took these threats seriously. Without a doubt,
Hitler felt obliged to secure the German peoples nutritional basis and to
avert the danger of a renewed blockade of Germany by establishing a
German predominance on the continent. He believed it to be impossible to
still feed 62 million Germans in the so-called peaceful economic way.
The German people, he said, lived in an impossible territory, was sur-
rounded by gigantic states and was, furthermore, infested with paci-
fism and poisoned by democracy.28 He was convinced that Germanys
small supply basis of energy and raw materials needed to be expanded in
the interest of national security.
Then, there were the interior enemies. Apart from the Communists,
Jewry was considered the main enemy appearing to Hitler as a devilish
`decomposition ferment.29 On the one hand, he claimed that a kind of
contagious threat emanated from Jewishness. Thus, as he explained to the
Hungarian governor, von Horthy, during a conversation on 17 April 1943,
the Jews needed to be treated like tuberculosis germs which might be
contagious for a healthy body.30 On the other hand, Hitler assumed that
28
Adolf Hitler, Geist und Doktor Stresemann? Rede auf NSDAP-Versammlung
in Mnchen vom 2. Mai 1928, in Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, Bd. II/2
(Munich: K. G. Saur, 1992), doc. 268, p. 814.
29
Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 498.
30
Andreas Hillgruber (ed.), Staatsmnner und Diplomaten bei Hitler. Zweiter Teil.
Vertrauliche Aufzeichnungen ber Unterredungen mit Vertretern des Auslandes
1942-1944 (Frankfurt a. M.: Bernard & Graefe, 1970), p. 257.
Jewry was conspiring to destroy the German people. According to this

suggestion it had brought the misfortune of the German acts of opposition
upon itself. When they decided about the plan to completely destroy the
German people, Goebbels was capable of stating, they signed their own
death sentence.31 Furthermore, major justifications for ones own actions
were derived from the (real or alleged) threat of Bolshevism. It was con-
sidered the actual contemporary challenge. Hitler believed in an imminent
war of annihilation which would be fought to the death and could not be
evaded. Being himself the leader of an ideological dictatorship, he was
convinced that, according to Marxist utopia, the Bolshevist leaders were
pursuing an international revolutionary strategy which would gradually
shake the whole world and make it collapse.32 He considered Bolshevism
a threat to the entire western world. He saw himself confronted with an
ideologically founded will to attack, with the military power of this
will to attack increasing rapidly every year. And he added: Considering
the necessity of preventing this danger, all other considerations must re-
treat to the back, as they are completely irrelevant!33
At the height of his power, during the German Wehrmachts summer
offensive in 1942, Hitler summarized the motive for active defense and the
transnational significance of the National Socialist revolution thus:
If in 1933 this victory of an ideology had not been achieved, if, in those
days, one had not succeeded with the restoration of the Reich, with com-
pletely securing the unity of the Reich and, most of all, with restoring the
German Wehrmacht, then in this or in some other year a completely un-
armed, defenceless German nation would have fallen victim to a giant once
again moving across Europe from Asia. [...] Who has seen the East knows
by what this Europe of today not to mention at all our own home country
34
would be replaced.
31
Joseph Goebbels, Der Krieg und die Juden, in Idem, Der steile Aufstieg.
Reden und Aufstze aus den Jahren 1942/43 (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP,
1944), pp. 263-270, here 270.
32
Adolf Hitler, (Rede vor dem Industrieklub in Dsseldorf vom 27. Januar
1932), in Domarus, Hitler, Bd. I/1, p. 77.
33
(Adolf Hitler), Denkschrift Hitlers ber die Aufgaben eines Vierjahresplans,
Vierteljahrshefte fr Zeitgeschichte, vol. 3 (1955) no. 2, pp. 204-210, here 204-205
(italics omitted).
34
Adolf Hitler, Geheimrede vom 30. Mai 1942 vor dem militrischen
Fhrernachwuchs, in Henry Picker, Hitlers Tischgesprche im Fhrerhauptquartier.
Entstehung, Struktur, Folgen des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Ullstein, 1997), pp.
707-723, here 712-713 (italics omitted). See also (Adolf Hitler), Hitlers politisches
Testament. Die Bormann Diktate vom Februar und April 1945. Mit einem Essay
Lothar Fritze 79
In all of his statements Hitler referred to the justification reason of self-

defense in a mode of preemptive self-defense which, at least in modern
international law, is hardly or not at all accepted, except for the strategy of
national security of the United States of America.35 As justification rea-
sons themselves represent moral rules, it becomes obvious that, at least in
this respect, namely in as far as they believed preemptive active defense to
be justified, the National Socialists morality deviated (in any case from
that of todays German majority society).
For comprehending National Socialisms moral thinking it is essential
to realize: National Socialists felt morally entitled to approach these and
other problems in offensively and to react preemptively to threats, even if,
this way, others interests were violated. Additionally, the Bolshevist
crimes had long since become known in Western Europe so that the Na-
tional Socialists, too, definitely had a correct view of Bolshevism, at least
concerning the fact of these crimes. Thus, Joseph Goebbels matter-of-
factly said that to help fight this infernal world plague of Bolshevism,
the most blatant blood and terror regime the world has ever seen, was
the duty of any responsible man.36
Situations of danger and self-defense were also fabricated in other re-
spects. In the National Socialist ideology, the Jews did not only appear as
the most dangerous enemies of the German people both in the form of a
so-called parasitic people within the German racial corpus as well as in
the form of Jewish dominance of (alleged) financial capitalism but, partic-
ularly, in the form of Jewish Bolshevism. At the same time, there was
the insinuation that they constituted an immediate threat (and be it only in
the form of Germans becoming infected with those ways of thinking and
behaving assumed to be typically Jewish) so that the German people, in-
deed civilization as a whole, was in a situation of self-defense.
This is also how the systematic murder of the Jewish population in the
East by SS brigades and police battalions was justified. Although the kill-
ing of the Jews is originally not at all connected [...] to anti-partisan ac-
tions37 but resulted from racist antisemitism as well as the fear of Jewish
von Hugh R. Trevor-Roper und einem Nachwort von Andr Franois-Poncet

(Hamburg: Albrecht Knaus, 1981), p. 79.
35
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September
2002, in www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf (on 5 August 2005).
36
Joseph Goebbels, Der Bolschewismus in Theorie und Praxis (Munich: Franz
Eher Nachfolger, 1936), pp. 8, 28.
37
Andreas Hillgruber, Der Ostkrieg und die Judenvernichtung, in Gerd R.
Ueberschr/Wolfram Wette (ed.), Der deutsche berfall auf die Sowjetunion.
Bolshevism, after the fight against partisans in the rear of the German
front had been started these actions could be passed off as preemptive anti-
partisan measures.38 The Jews were considered enemies at the rear of the
Wehrmacht, and fighting them was seen a necessity of war.39 Himmler
argued similarly when he justified the decision to make the Jewish people,
that is, also women and children, disappear from the earth. He justified
this by pointing out that he had not believed himself to be entitled just
to extinct the males while at the same time letting grow up the avengers
to our sons and grandsons in the shape of the children.40 However, giving
such a reason is only necessary if also he was convinced that the killing of
subjectively innocent humans would have been a moral wrong under ordi-
nary conditions, and, thus, needed to be justified, or if, at least, he was
convinced that his listeners held this conviction.
After all, the mass shootings behind the Eastern Front by the so-called
SS-Einsatzgruppen were primarily guided by the idea of a preemptive
fight against enemies.41 Even after the war, Otto Ohlendorf, by profession
a jurist, who had temporarily been the commander of one of the notorious
Einsatzgruppen, justified their actions including the shooting of children
as a definite necessity of war, identifying42 himself with the Fuehrers
order to even fighting even of a danger which might arouse in the fu-
ture.43
Similar justifications were brought forward for the curtailment of the
rights of the disabled or for the campaigns for the destruction of worthless
life. Here, too, it was about keeping fellow Germans and the German peo-
ple as such from harm. Hitler called it half-hearted to grant incurably ill
people the permanent possibility to infest the other, healthy ones. Alt-
Unternehmen Barbarossa1941, 2nd edition, (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer

Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011), pp. 185-205, here 196.
38
See Hans Mommsen, Auschwitz, 17. Juli 1942. Der Weg zur europischen
Endlsung der Judenfrage (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002), pp.
120, 123.
39
See Saul Friedlnder, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden. Zweiter Band: Die Jahre
der Vernichtung 1939-1945 (Bonn: Bundeszentrale fr politische Bildung, 2006),
pp. 236, 239.
40
(Heinrich Himmler), Rede bei der SS-Gruppenfhrertagung in Posen am 4.
Oktober 1943, in Der Prozess gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem
Internationalen Militrgerichtshof, Bd. 29 (Nrnberg 1948), pp. 110-173, here
146.
41
See Ernst Nolte, Der europische Brgerkrieg 1917-1945. Nationalsozialismus
und Bolschewismus (Munich: Herbig, 2000), p. 469.
42
See ibid., p. 541, FN 22.
43
Quoted after: ibid.
Lothar Fritze 81
hough the merciless separation of incurably ill people was a barbaric

measure for those being unfortunately concerned it was a blessing for
the contemporary and future world.44 All these defensive statements gen-
erate justifications which make a violation of the (under ordinary condi-
tions) valid basic norms look morally justified.
3. Conflicting Duties
If carrying out a morally imperative action is inevitably connected to the
violation of another moral norm, a regulation is needed to determine how
conflicts of interests or norms of this kind are to be resolved. In order to
resolve collisions with obligations, usually, the rule according to which the
fulfillment of superior duties allows the violation of inferior ones may be
applied. Such a rule, as it is based on decisions on the significance of val-
ues, is of a normative nature; however, accepting the hierarchy which
constitutes the basis may depend on extra-moral assumptions.
The leading National Socialists considered peoples the actual human
reality and as that kind of reality which cannot be derived further,
whose secret is to be received directly from the secret of life and becom-
ing. The people was considered a common existence,45 a transpersonal
and timeless common existence of one and the same blood and uniform
mental and spiritual nature, and the individuals were just considered
manifestations of their peoples.46 Starting from this ontological thus
extra-moral assumption, a normative precedence of the community, the
people, the race, and also the state over the individual, indeed also the sum
of individuals, was postulated. For Hitler, the state was an organization of
individuals of the same nature and essence to improve the possibilities
to reproduce their kind as well as to achieve the goal of its existence as it
had been predestined by fate.47 According to this organic view, the indi-
vidual appeared as a construction cell within the racial corpus and
thus could never be the end but just the means of political planning and
44
45
Reinhard Heydrich, Aufgaben und Aufbau der Sicherheitspolizei im Dritten
Reich, in Hans Pfundtner (ed.), Dr. Wilhelm Frick und sein Ministerium. Aus
Anla des 60. Geburtstages des Reichs- und preuischen Ministers des Innern Dr.
Wilhelm Frick am 12. 3. 193 (Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1937), pp. 149-153,
here 149.
46
Werner Best, Erneuerung des Polizeirechts, Kriminalistik, vol. 12 (1938) no.
2, pp. 26-29, here 27.
47
Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 164-166.
acting.48 Accordingly, Hitler viewed overall fate to be primary and

individual fate to be secondary.49 Insofar as Hitler was ready at all to
concede the individual human an intrinsic value, he believed to be able to
define the value of a human according to whether he could be taken
away without replacing him: If not, he is of value [...].50 An individual
is valuable insofar as he attends to a function within the greater whole.
That is why the individual happiness of the individual must take a
backseat because, as Himmler had it, the true meaning and the fulfill-
ment of individual existence is in the people and not in the self.51
By declaring the preservation and the development of the people as the
highest value, National Socialism had indeed established a new value
system, a reversed hierarchy of values. The vlkisch state was said to
be a state under the rule of law from top-down, i.e. state under the rule
of law for the sake of the whole.52 Whereas in the individualist sys-
tem53 which had been overcome no higher value existed to which one
was entitled to sacrifice man, the of the National Socialist states function
could not be to protect the individual and work for his benefit but solely
to secure the preservation and development of the people.54 From this,
Werner Best concluded: The individual is only a means to this end, which
must be used and sacrificed according to what the vital needs of the people
require.55 This way, however, a very momentous justification had been
accepted. From then on it had to be considered justified to indiscriminately
violate individual rights if this seemed necessary for the self-assertion and
development of the people. Therefore, it had to be permitted even to kill
innocent people, as applicable. Hitler reduced the problem of how norm
conflicts are to be resolved to a common denominator: The right to per-
48
Heinrich Himmler, Aufgaben und Aufbau der Polizei des Dritten Reiches, in
Hans Pfundtner (ed.), Dr. Wilhelm Frick und sein Ministerium. Aus Anla des 60.
Geburtstages des Reichs- und preuischen Ministers des Innern Dr. Wilhelm Frick
am 12. 3. 1937 (Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1937), pp. 125-130, here 127.
49
Adolf Hitler, Rede auf NSDAP-Versammlung in Plauen i. V. vom 5. Mai
1928, in Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, Bd. II/2 (Munich: K. G. Saur,
1992), doc. 269, p. 831 (italics omitted).
50
Adolf Hitler, Was ist Nationalsozialismus? Rede auf NSDAP-Versammlung
in Heidelberg vom 6. August 1927, in Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, Bd.
II/2 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1992), doc. 160, p. 460.
51
Himmler, Aufgaben und Aufbau der Polizei des Dritten Reiches, p. 127.
52
Best, Erneuerung des Polizeirechts, p. 27.
53
By referring to 1 of the Verordnung zum Schutze von Volk und Staat Febru-
ary 28th, 1933, the basic rights of the Weimar Constitution had been suspended.
54
Best, Erneuerung des Polizeirechts, p. 26.
55
Ibid., p. 27.
Lothar Fritze 83
sonal freedom retreats in favour of the obligation to preserve the race.56

Perhaps nowhere is the difference between an individualistic human rights
ethics and the moral convictions of the National Socialists expressed more
clearly than in the distinction of the people as the highest value.
4. Victim Calculations of the Utilitarian Kind

Argumentations justifying the approving acceptance of legal violations
through the thus warranted protection of legally protected interests present
quite a unique kind of justifications. A typical example is the killing of
innocent people for the purpose of saving other, preferably a multitude of
innocent people. As a rule, such calculations are based on a utilitarian
principle, that is, the moral demand to orientate the decisions for actions
the greatest happiness of the greatest number.57 In contrast to the univer-
salist principle of utilitarianism, however, the utilitarian considerations of
the National Socialists were ethnically limited.
Victim calculations of the utilitarian kind are orientated to the idea of
minimizing sacrifice or suffering. They aim at minimizing the damage or
rather maximizing the benefit. On the basis of such victim calculations,
there was the attempt to provide reasons for the moral entitlement to kill or
risk the lives of thousands and even millions of humans in order to save
the lives of others or even of those who have not yet been conceived. This
way, actions which in the light of everyday morality appear to be crimes
are to become morally legitimated. It was felt to be a moral necessity to
justify the impairment and the sacrifice of humans because one knew
about the societal validity of the thus violated basic norms and, so the
assumption, indeed accepted them oneself.
On the basis of victim calculations of the utilitarian kind the moral le-
gitimation, maybe even the necessity of a violation of individual rights,
can be justified. Whoever is convinced of the validity of such justifications
may under the given circumstances feel morally entitled to send humans to
their death or even to kill them himself if, this way, a greater number of
humans is saved or conditions emerge allowing more humans to live in
times to come.
We will understand the inner logic of a number of National Socialist
actions only if we realize that precisely such considerations played a cen-
tral role in Hitlers thinking. Accordingly, he is reported to have told the
56
Hitler, Mein Kampf, S. 279.
57
Sacrifice calculations of a certain kind may also be reasoned by treaty theory.
On this see Lothar Fritze, Die Ttung Unschuldiger. Ein Dogma auf dem Prfstand
(Berlin/New York : de Gruyter, 2004), ch. II/3.
League of Nations commissioner Carl J. Burckhardt that he was not able

to accept that his people were suffering from hunger to then ask the rhetor-
ical question: Under such circumstances, would it not be better to leave
two millions on the battlefield than to lose even more as a result of starva-
tion?58 This consideration demonstrates how Hitler would approach cer-
tain issues intellectually, and it also shows, most of all, his disregard for
individual rights. His thinking was orientated to a radical way of under-
standing the utilitarian idea of the exchangeability of individuals. Accord-
ing to the principle of the exchangeability of individuals, the loss of one
individuals life can be compensated by having enabled the continuation of
life or the thus realized birth of another individual. In this thinking, the
individual is replaceable. The actual individual is so to speak just a place
holder for a certain amount of life. Everyones life can be taken, even
deliberately, if this way the total amount of human life will increase. This
idea is incompatible with the granting of an unconditional right to life.
Even the innocent individual may be sacrificed under the condition of his
replacement.
Accordingly, Hitler was convinced that, lastly, for the assessment of a
statesman, the total balance of the gains and losses in human lives result-
ing for ones people, and to be answered for by the statesman, was the
decisive factor. Hence, Hitler had at his disposal a figure of thought which
seemed to be suitable for justifying victim calculations even on a grand
scale. If Germany had a million children a year, he stated in a speech in
August 1929, and 700,000-800,000 of the weakest were eliminated, in the
end the result would perhaps even be an increase of power.59 If one gets
involved in this kind of accounts of gains and losses, there are hardly any
limits to ones imagination. After all, according to Hitlers understanding,
it was possible to include both the non-conceptions of the past as well as
future births in the end accounts.
With the help of such accounts it was even possible to justify the polit-
ical decision to wage war. By also taking into consideration non-
conceptions, Hitler, in a speech in front of junior military leaders in May
1942, presented the following account of his political actions:
Since 1918 there had been continuous birth restriction. This has been in-
terrupted since 1933. [...] Compared to the situation of 1932 alone, the Na-
58
Quoted after: Carl J. Burckhardt, Meine Danziger Mission 1937-1939 (Munich:
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1962), p. 266.
59
Adolf Hitler, Appell an die deutsche Kraft. Rede auf NSDAP-Reichsparteitag
in Nrnberg vom 4. August 1929, in Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, Bd.
III/2 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1994), doc. 64, p. 348.
Lothar Fritze 85
tional Socialist revolution has succeeded with having 2 million addition-

al humans been born in just a few years. The current war has cost less than
10% of the thus created additional influx in human lives into the German
60
nation.
And elsewhere he added: [...] I hope that in ten years time there will be
at least ten to fifteen million Germans more; [...] I am creating the condi-
tions for their lives.61 There may be no doubt: Also this is a moral way of
argumenting, based on the validity (in the ordinary case) of the ban on
killing. Hitler did not simply justify the right to sacrifice fellow citizens in
order to achieve just any kind of goals (in this case: to conquer foreign
soil) but connected this justification to the replacement of sacrificed life.
5. Argumentations for Justification

Justification reasons describe conditions, situations, and prerequisites
under which the obligation to abide by moral norms is suspended while
simultaneously spelling out criteria to be met by the norm-violating ac-
tions.
Now, if one asks on the basis of which kind of considerations the ex-
istence of justifying conditions will be decided, here, too, the answer is:
Essentially, for the construction of these justifying conditions, extra-moral
considerations come into play. So, questions of the actual existence of
prerequisites for the application of moral principles cannot be discussed
sensibly without taking empirical facts (such as, for example, the devel-
opment of the weapons technology) into consideration or without an as-
sessment of the opponents nature (such as his religious or ideological
convictions). Just the same, an assessment of claimed victim end accounts
must reach back to empirical data or the nomological knowledge of the
real sciences. A discussion of the claimed priority of the people over the
individual is to evaluate the dignity or rather the plausibility of the as-
sumed ontology. Thus, even if we look at the argumentations for justifica-
tion under the reference to the reasons for justification, we come to the
same conclusions, that is, extra-moral convictions and assumptions may
play an important and, under certain circumstances, even a crucial role.
Furthermore, and this, too, should have become obvious, argumenta-
tions for justification are interwoven with moral convictions. Crucial to
whether an argumentation for justification referring to reasons for justifi-
60
Hitler, Geheimrede vom 30. Mai 1942 vor dem militrischen Fhrernachwuchs,
p. 715 (italics omitted).
61
Hitler, Monologe im Fhrerhauptquartier, doc. 17, p. 58.
cation may be seen as legitimate or rather meets with acceptance is the

fundamental acceptance of the reasons, the figures of thought, submitted
as a justification for a violation of norms as morally legitimate. The ques-
tion of the acceptability of justification reasons is a normative question.
Whether self-defense or also positive sacrifice accounts are accepted as
justification reasons depends on ones moral convictions; in the case of
victim calculations it depends on whether one accepts a utilitarian moral
principle. Even in the case of corresponding extra-moral convictions, the
acceptance or non-acceptance of sacrifice calculations of the utilitarian
kind may be crucial for considering an act morally legitimate or not. In
cases of this kind, moral convictions are indeed crucial for the respective
assessment. Thus, for example, if someone like Freiherr Axel von
Bussche, who after pertinent experiences declared his readiness to attempt
a suicide attack on Hitler, believes that the mass killing of innocent vic-
tims cannot be justified no matter what the reasons, had quite obviously a
morality different from that of the National Socialists who considered such
actions to be legitimate.
IX. Derived Norms

Human actions are concrete. They happen under certain existential condi-
tions and in certain situations. Humans who act have certain convictions,
and they pursue certain goals. In many cases, moral basic norms alone do
not tell one what or what not to do. To be able to obey them, they must be
transformed into maxims of concrete action. Only the concrete action
conditions in connection with the actors other non-moral convictions
determine which behavior (action, non-action) is demanded in order to
meet the basic norms. This way, based on moral basic norms, concrete
principles of behavior (rules, norms) are derived whose compliance may
violate basic norms.
Practical life provides situations in which compliance with moral basic
norms is precisely not in the interest of those concerned by action or non-
action. If, for example, a physician administers a life-saving transfusion to
an unconscious accident victim, he assumes to act in the interest of the
individual concerned; he assumes that if the individual concerned were
aware of his predicament, he would agree to the bodily injury connected to
it. The acting physician thus refers to putative consent.
Lothar Fritze 87
It may be a moral error to obey the wording of a moral basic norm. It

may be that by obeying a basic norm (You shall not injure anyones
body!) one violates another, more important basic norm in the respective
situation (You shall help a person in need!).
In contrast to an express and consciously given permission by a respec-
tive individual to the violation of his individual rights, the reference to
putative consent is based on an interpretation of the interest of the individ-
ual concerned. These interests may refer to both those he would articulate
if he had the possibility to express himself (e. g. if he had not lost con-
sciousness) and those which he would express in the interpreters opinion
if he were in an informed state and capable of judgment. The latter shall be
called objective interest.
In general, the following applies: If putative consent refers to objective
interest and if the persons or group of peoples objective interests have
been interpreted correctly, a violation of articulated subjective interests
may be legitimate or even imperative. However, this means that under
these conditions, just as in the case of the physician helping without ex-
press permission, even a violation of basic norms may be legitimate or
imperative.
The case is different if an actor and the people whom the action con-
cerns share extra-moral convictions which are not accepted by third parties
either because they are not aware of these convictions or because they
reject these convictions as unfounded or wrong.
By taking specific extra-moral convictions into consideration, concrete
norms (rules, principles of behavior) can be derived whose compliance
actually violates norms, yet, simultaneously, constitutes a manner of real-
izing the behavior generally demanded by (other or also the same) basic
norms.) This kind of moral practice differs from ours in the way in which
the basic norms-violating behavior is considered morally legitimate or
imperative for the realization of an interest protected by basic norms.
2. National Socialist Action Principles

When it came to essential questions, National Socialists justified their
actions by referring to putative consent. Although the figure of thought of
putative consent, in connection with the idea of objective interests, did not
have the same kind of fundamental importance in National Socialist think-
ing as that of active defense or self-defense, particularly in Hitlers think-
ing, though, it was always virulent and, in many cases, provided a clean
conscience which was maintained even while one suppressed others or
entire peoples, deprived them of their freedom, or set oneself up as superi-

or to them.
Hitler and other leading ideologues believed that whoever has the ap-
propriate insight has the right, indeed the obligation, to politically govern
and to introduce the measures necessary for the struggle for life as well as
for the transformation of life. Accordingly, the de facto abolition of par-
liamentarianism after Hitlers assumption of power did not appear as a
tyrants arbitrariness. According to National Socialist understanding, Hit-
ler acted in accordance with the putative consent by the German people
who had been exploited and humiliated since Versailles and who, now,
were beginning to resist the suppressions and threats in the interest of
every individual fellow citizen. If this requires the dictatorship of a rea-
sonable, active, and benevolent leader, the practice of such a rule satisfies
the objective needs of every individual as well as the people as a whole.
As is well known, for Hitler, the fight against Jewish Bolshevism
was imperative to the enforcement the progress of civilization. At the same
time he was convinced that Germany was not only morally entitled but
also politically obliged to lead the Germanic peoples in the inevitable
decisive struggle against the Bolshevist enemy. For Hitler, it was a ques-
tion of personal responsibility to devote his (alleged) insights on the natu-
ral laws of the struggle of peoples and races to the (objective) interests of
the German people and, generally, all Germanic peoples as well as the
Aryan race. He would have believed it to be immoral to make the recogni-
tion of this responsibility dependent on the people's communities them-
selves recognizing the vital necessity of conducting this fight offensively
and to consent to his leadership. His conviction of being able to derive the
appropriate policy from a correct insight into the conditions for the possi-
bility of coping with existence made him convinced of representing the
objective interests of the Germanic people and thus of acting by legiti-
mately referring to putative consent. Goebbels had similar ideas. From
Germanys superiority, he derived both a political obligation and a
moral right for the Germans to lead Europe.62
On the basis of such considerations it became possible to derive, for
example, the basic norm You shall (as a politician) act in the sense of
societal progress! which rendered it possible to derive the concrete norm
You shall, if demanded by the fight for progress, assume the initiative
and the leadership! Whoever follows the thus derived concrete principle
of behavior because he is convinced of being entitled to legitimately refer
to putative consent believes to be acting in the (objective) interest of those
62
(Joseph Goebbels), Die Tagebcher von Joseph Goebbels, Bd. II/2 (Munich:
1994), p. 223 (2 November 1941).
Lothar Fritze 89
concerned (that is of those who must submit to his leadership). That is

why for Hitler neither his dictatorship nor the enforcement of the German
claim to leadership toward those peoples who had also an interest in elimi-
nating Bolshevism were connected to any violation of rights or interests.
From the assumed putative consent followed the moral right to restrict the
right to self-determination of both the German people and also the other
Germanic peoples to the extent necessary. It was Hitlers opinion that this
was precisely how the basic norms were to be adhered to in order to keep
ones own people and ones own race from harm and to advance societal
progress.
3. Acting on Behalf of Those Concerned

In contrast to justifications reasons, at least according to the actors under-
standing, derived norms are obeyed in accordance with the interests of
those whose interests are considered worthy of protection.
In the case of the National Socialists claim to leadership, this con-
cerned only those opposite whom this claim was enforced and not those
who fought the National Socialists. Thus, the claim to act in the interest of
those concerned initially referred to the German people or the Germanic
peoples as a whole. Hitler, however, still exceeded this. Like Aristotle, for
whom the status of being slaves was useful and just for slaves due to
their nature,63 he, too, believed that the natives in the occupied territories
would, in the future, have a much better life than today.64 Enslavement,
Hitler said, is in the (objective) interest of the enslaved!65
From the analysis of derived concrete action principles ensues: Despite
consistent moral basic norms, what is morally demanded in different so-
cieties may be different. And vice versa: If in a society moral demands are
valid which contradict those of another society, it does not follow that
different moral basic norms are supported there. For, by referring to extra-
moral assumptions and convictions it is possible to derive concrete norms
or principles of behavior. If these non-moral assumptions or convictions
are different from each other, different derived norms will result from the
same basic norms.
63
Aristoteles, Politik, in Idem, Philosophische Schriften in sechs Bnden, Bd. 4,
translated by Eugen Rolfes (Hamburg: Meiner, 1995), 1255a.
64
65
See also Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 324.
X. How is it Conceivable to Do Evil with a Clean

Conscience?
If we speak about evil being done with a clean conscience, we mean a
situation in which the moral basic norms are consciously and deliberately
violated without any justification (from our point of view) while the actor
is, simultaneously, convinced of the moral legitimacy of his actions.
1. Arguments for Justification

Violating moral basic norms, it is possible to keep a clean conscience if
one has justifying argumentations at ones disposal. These argumentations
must either demonstrate that, due to the accepted scope definitions, the
basic norms in question do not include the entities harmed, or they must
provide accepted reasons or facts, that is, justification reasons, which justi-
fy these violations, or they must make plausible that there had not been
any violations of interests at all and that, instead of adhering to the con-
crete action principles, it had not been anything but a specific way of real-
izing principles which were protected by basic norms. In any case, the
following applies: Very often it is extra-moral assumptions and convic-
tions that decide which justifications are accepted for the violation of valid
basic norms. The difference between us and the National Socialist perpe-
trators (as far as they were perpetrators with a clean conscience) does not
exclusively, yet quite considerably, lie in the different extra-moral as-
sumptions and convictions.
2. Extra-Moral Assumptions and Convictions

By extra-moral assumptions or rather extra-moral convictions I mean
assumptions or convictions of a non-moral kind.
Among others, extra-moral convictions may consist of metaphysical or
ontological assumptions, assumptions about contingent facts or theories on
the nature and functioning of the natural and the social world, ideas con-
cerning the behavior of humans or peoples and hypotheses regarding caus-
al relationships as well as ideas about values and goals. Such non-moral
assumptions may play quite an essential role in moral reflections, reflec-
tions about what is to be done and what not, as prescriptive premises, or as
statements about facts, or also as non-moral value judgments. Non-moral
value judgments refer most of all to conditions or events of the subject-
Lothar Fritze 91
internal or of the exterior world and judge them from the point of view of
their desirability or preferability.66
However, also non-moral value judgments may gain moral relevance.
They gain moral relevance if in principle it is possible to bring about or
prevent the conditions and events judged by way of human actions and if
the respective actions are indeed carried out. For, in as far as the moral
quality of an action is judged also by those conditions or events, that is, by
which non-moral values it realizes or intends to realize, non-moral value
judgments prove to be relevant for moral action judgments.67 For an indi-
viduals morality, also his (morally relevant non-moral) value judgments
may be decisive.
3. Extra-Moral Convictions within National Socialist Ideology

Not all convictions relevant to the political actions of National Socialists
must necessarily have been genuine National Socialist convictions. Many,
indeed almost all of their ideas and theorems may have been taken from
traditional intellectual contexts. Which extra-moral convictions that we do
not accept did the leading National Socialists have? In the following, let
me list some of those which appear particularly important to me: Hitlers
opinion was that peoples (and states) exist in a morally and legally disor-
derly natural state which virtually cannot be left. This was true for him at
least also insofar as, in his opinion, international legal agreements cannot
be enforced given the lack of a state monopoly on the legitimate use of
force. Accordingly, he believed that, in the long run, a peaceful coexist-
ence of peoples free of domination was unrealistic; thus he proceeded
from the assumption of an eternal fight of the peoples for lebensraum. In
this context he assumed that the German people were suffering from a lack
of lebensraum and would be able to effectively overcome the dispropor-
tion of the lebensraum and the population figure only through an expan-
sion of its lebensraum.
National Socialists identified a number of alleged dangers, among
them a Jewish and a Jewish-Bolshevist danger threatening the German
people or rather its vital interests. National Socialists assumed the exist-
ence of differently gifted races and, on this basis, postulated a world-
historic mission of the Germanic race.
National Socialists did not accept the postulate of the basic equality
and the equal aptitude of all humans and did, at least, question the idea of
the generic unity of the human race.
66
See Birnbacher, Analytische Einfhrung in die Ethik, p. 47.
67
See ibid., p. 47.
National Socialists supported an organic idea of community, that is,

they viewed peoples and states as independently existing organisms, in-
deed as living beings. Furthermore, they attributed entities of this kind,
namely, the German people or the Aryan-Germanic race, an independent
value which had to be protected without fail. Corresponding to these onto-
logical and axiological ideas, there emerged not only individuals from
their notions of morality but also supra-individual beings, whose interests
needed to be taken into consideration.
National Socialists postulated an absolute priority of ones own people
over foreign peoples as well as a value-based priority of the collective over
the individual. Accordingly, Hitler declared a peoples right to fight for its
self-preservation by any means available and under any circumstances as
an all-time priority, regardless of what the results might be for other peo-
ples and their populations or even for the members of ones own people.
4. Moral Sense of Guilt

On the basis of these and other extra-moral convictions, National Social-
ists constructed argumentations which made the violation of moral basic
norms, including the prohibition to kill, appear legitimate. Such arguments
are the cognitive prerequisite for being able to keep a clean conscience
even in case of a violation of moral basic norms. This way, National So-
cialists were able to believe that even the deliberate killing of innocent
people or accepting the killing of both the members of other peoples and
the members of their own people was morally legitimate. With other ar-
guments one tried to allege that certain actions were not what they seemed,
that is, legal violations, but rather that they were connected to the adher-
ence to moral basic norms in a situation-related appropriate way. Still
using other argumentations, one attempted to explain that the alleged vio-
lation of interests was actually in the correctly understood interest of those
concerned. Even such argumentations ensure the perpetrators clean con-
science and prevent any sense of guilt from developing. So it becomes
evident: Actions which must be considered crimes, for instance, from the
point of view of universalist human rights ethics, may be considered legit-
imate in the context of a different moral practice.
The validity of justifications depends to a large degree on the accepta-
bility of the extra-moral convictions adopted into them, including non-
moral value judgments. A certain kind of extra-moral convictions can be
logically or empirically refuted. Another kind may be classified as non-
acceptable as a result of coherence checks or plausibility considerations.
Concerning yet another kind, one may ask if there are good reasons for
Lothar Fritze 93
accepting them. So, for example, it cannot be ruled out that the incorrect
identifications of danger or self-defense situations or incorrect interpreta-
tions of interests can be recognized; by the same token, it is possible to
refute theoretical assumptions or explanations. Over-hastily pointing to the
different morality of the perpetrators would prevent this cognitive pro-
cess. The situation becomes more difficult if the perpetrators base their
justifications on metaphysical premises not accepted by us, that is, on
those which cannot be rationally refuted. Moral convictions based on di-
verging metaphysical assumptions such as an ontology in which peoples
or states appear as independent entities may be incommensurable.
XI. Did the National Socialists Have Different

Moral Convictions?
We have already seen that the National Socialists followed a particular
kind of utilitarianism, that is, a utilitarianism referring to ones own people
or race. To Hitlers way of thinking, the idea of minimizing the number of
victims was of central importance. He was convinced that, due to his abil-
ity to analyze dangers, he was able to act morally responsible under the
utilitarian aspect of minimizing the number of victims. I only see he
explained his thinking and actions at the Fuehrer Headquarters, the vic-
tims demanded by the future if today there is no sacrifice.68 As demon-
strated by written and oral statements, considerations of this kind dominat-
ed his way of thinking. In this context, he presented extremely vague
calculations to justify concrete actions with huge numbers of victims.
Hitler did not hesitate to derive principles of political action from theoreti-
cally founded speculations and to morally justify them. He believed, for
instance, that lengthy peace times were connected to depravation phenom-
ena, to which, typically, also belonged a decline in birth rates. Even peace
had its price or rather its victims.69 However, thereby, the question of
the justifiability of a war arises against the background of entirely unprec-
edented numbers of victims. Based on these extra-moral assumptions,
calculations emerge, which must have consequences for the willingness to
wage war.
Yet, utilitarian considerations for the minimization of the number of
victims are not at all genuinely National Socialist. Basically, even the so-
called Luftsicherheitsgesetz, which was passed by the German Bundes-
68
69
See Hitler, Geheimrede vom 30. Mai 1942 vor dem militrischen Fhrernach-
wuchs, p. 715.
tag and has meanwhile been declared a violation of the constitution, was
based on the calculation of possible numbers of victims. Certainly typical
for totalitarian systems are calculations of the numbers of victims on a
grand scale; characteristic is also the willingness to sacrifice thousands,
tens of thousands, indeedhundreds of thousands of currently living humans
for the sake of the life and happiness of future generations.
In this context, one might also ask if the principle of conduct anchored
in the Organisationshandbuch der NSDAP is to be interpreted as a moral
principle. There, it says that a National Socialist will always act correctly
if he examines himself daily and asks if his work and his conduct stand up
to the Fuehrers expectations.70 Later, Hans Frank had altered this princi-
ple in a manner reminding of Kants Categorical Imperative and demand-
ed: Act in a way that the Fuehrer, if he knew about your actions, would
approve these actions.71 Here, the alleged will of the Fuehrer is made the
criterion for correct action. The individuals responsibility consists of
defining the correct way of conduct in a concrete situation from his
knowledge of the general will of the Fuehrer. On the one hand, this princi-
ple in its intended effect, much rather had the nature of a control-
technological disciplinary instrument. On the other hand, one may say that
the trick to this imperative consisted in reason having been thought to
embody the Fuehrers will and that, hence, the interpreter of the reasona-
bly bidden, namely the individual, appeared as a self-legislator quite in the
sense of Kant.
The principle according to which a marriage partner should strictly
and without exception be chosen from among the members of the Ger-
man people may be termed genuinely National Socialist. This loyalty to
the blood of ones own people was considered the highest duty which
could not be violated unpunished; at the same time, its fulfillment was the
greatest honour for any individual.72 This moral principle was seen as
the instrument for the prevention of endangerment to the German peoples
self-preservation ensuing from intermingling with inferior races.
To which extent the National Socialists championed different moral
principles and in how far these principles themselves were supported by
extra-moral ingredients of the National Socialist ideology may, ultimate-
70
Organisationsbuch der NSDAP, published by Reichsorganisationsleiter der
NSDAP, Zentralverlag der NSDAP (Munich: Franz Eher Nachf., 1936), p. 4
(italics erased).
71
Hans Frank, Technik des Staate, (Berlin/Leipzig/Vienna: Deutscher
Rechtsverlag, 1942), p. 15.
72
Walter Gross, Deine Ehre ist die Treue zum Blute deines Volkes (Berlin:
Elsnerdruck, 1943), p. 31 (italics erased).
Lothar Fritze 95
ly, be left open at this point. In any event, Hitlers anti-individualistic

point of view did not just make him give center-field to the concerns of the
community, de facto, he was seeking moral principles which assessed the
legitimacy of an individuals behavior under the aspect of the desirability
of the consequences which this behavior as a generalized one and designed
to last for centuries, will presumably have for a society. Therefore, he
assumed that although exercising certain rights is capable of satisfying an
individuals personal desires, generally granting these very rights may at
the same time, however, have catastrophic consequences for future genera-
tions. Based on this consideration, he justified a universal testing proce-
dure, that is, evaluating any action which looks doubtful from the higher
point of view: how would things be if that what currently we consider
legal would have been considered legal already by our ancestors and if
they had indeed behaved according to it.73 From this, Hitler derived the
principle of not tolerating any of the modes of behavior in contemporary
times on whose account one must say that it was good that our ancestors
had refrained from them or that it would have been better if they had de-
sisted. According to this universalization principle, individual rights can
only be granted if granting them generally does not only make the [pre-
sent] continuation of life possible but if they might also be fundamental
for life.74 It was never possible, he went on, to follow the principle: the
important thing is that we live but, after all, one had to follow the prin-
ciple: the important thing is that those coming after us will be able to
live.75
XII. Once More: Did the National Socialists

Have a Different Morality?
Responding to this question with a simple yes would not do justice to
the complexity of the problem. Precisely for the reason that the National
Socialist practices give rise to condemnations one should try to avoid
obvious but all too simplistic answers.
First: The National Socialists accepted a minimum of moral basic
norms similar to what we accept. In this sense, they did not have a differ-
ent morality.
73
Adolf Hitler, Ein Kampf um Deutschlands Zukunft. Rede auf NSDAP-
Versammlung in Dresden vom 18. September 1928, in Hitler, Reden, Schriften,
Anordnungen, Bd. III/1 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1994), doc. 26, p. 84.
74
Ibid., p. 83.
75
Ibid., p. 84.
Realizing this fact, the diagnosis that in the case of traditional western
moral thought and National Socialist thought we are confronted with two
mutually exclusive moralities, will prove to be unhelpful, yes, even dan-
gerous. For, this manner of speaking suggests that in order to avoid crimi-
nal actions we would just have to decide on the right morality. However,
things are somewhat more complicated.
In the course of human history, there have been indefinite numbers of
crimes committed by people who accepted the basic norms of traditional
morality. However, accepting these basic norms does not yet guarantee
acting morally. Conversely, it does also not follow from a violation of
moral norms that the action was morally wrong. Therein lies the problem!
There are violations of moral basic norms which are considered legitimate
and which we consider legitimate as well. This is the context on which,
consciously or unconsciously, the clean conscience of many perpetrators is
based. Any action violating basic norms is deemed legitimate if one suc-
ceeds in coming up with a plausible reason or with presenting a convinc-
ing argumentation on the strength of which a violation of norms is morally
legitimate under the given circumstances.
Whether we consider such a violation legitimate often depends on our
extra-moral convictions. Therefore, an argumentative discussion about
perpetrators with a clean conscience would, among others, need to start
from their extra-moral convictions which are different from ours, of
course.
The claim that the National Socialists had accepted a similar minimum
of moral basic norms which was similar to ours is not completely inde-
pendent of the suggested conceptualization. For example, it is definitely
possible, though uncommon and not really practicable, to include justifica-
tion reasons in the formulation of norms. Deciding on such a linguistic
regularization, diverse basic norms will be supported also in case differing
justification reasons are accepted.
Second: Crucial for understanding the moral thinking of National So-
cialists is the insight that besides other moral convictions (other moral
principles, other justification reasons, and other normative premises) they
also had other extra-moral convictions. This implies: National Socialists
accepted relevance criteria which we do not accept; they considered justi-
fications for violations of norms to be valid, which we do not consider
valid, and they obeyed norms we do not obey. To a considerable degree,
these differences can be traced back to the acceptance of different extra-
moral assumptions and convictions.
Undoubtedly, the National Socialists considered justifications valid
which we, from the point of view of a human rights universalism, do not
Lothar Fritze 97
accept. These justifications may rest upon moral rules or principles which
we accept (such as the principle of self-defense) or to those, which we do
not accept (such as the principle of the exchangeability of the individual).
The National Socialist system of notions was thus suitable for justifying
actions which we consider criminal. And, in this sense, they had a differ-
ent morality.
Third: National Socialists accepted different moral principles to some
extent. Hence, the idea of the exchangeability of the individual may be
seen as one of the main characteristics of the National Socialists moral
thinking. National Socialists believed that it was morally legitimate to kill
humans in order to preserve the lives of other humans or to make life pos-
sible for those as yet unborn. Actually, in extreme situations, it is possible
to fall back on utilitarian calculations also in the western constitutional
states; the excessive reference to this moral principle was, however, typi-
cal of National Socialist morality.
Fourth: In the final analysis, Hitlers thinking was concerned with cre-
ating the intellectual prerequisites necessary for enforcing the demands
and the predominance of his own people. To Hitler, it was the creation of
man which was predetermined but not moral norms. To him, the latter
were based on interests and of an instrumental nature. Moral norms
though, and that is the crucial difference to individualist ethics, moral
norms must stand the test in the peoples inevitable struggle for life, so
Hitlers notion. In Mein Kampf Hitler explained in a somewhat similar
fashion:
But if peoples fight for their lives on this planet, thus, are confronted with
the fundamental question of to be or not to be, all considerations of human-
ity or aesthetics collapse completely, for all these ideas do not hover in the
ether but come from mans imagination and are tied to him. [...] [new par-
agraph] Thus, for a peoples struggle for its existence in this world all these
concepts are only of minor significance, indeed they are completely ruled
out as determinants for the forms of this fight, as soon as they may under-
mine the power of self-preservation of a fighting people.76
Here, and in many other passages, Hitler reasons for an ontological and
value-related priority of the people over the individual. According to this
notion, the individual can never [be] the end but only the means of politi-
cal planning and acting.77 The National Socialists connected an ontologi-
cal predetermination, that is, seeing the individual as a part of the racial
corpus with the postulate of a normative collectivism, and declared the
76
77
Himmler, Aufgaben und Aufbau der Polizei des Dritten Reiches, p. 127.
preservation and the development of ones own respective people to be the

highest value. Accordingly, it is the task of politics to secure the preserva-
tion and the development of ones own people. Furthermore, as Hitlers
explanations exemplify, from this vlkisch basic understanding arise
normative consequences both for dealing with the individuals of ones
own people as well as for those of competing or rather enemy peoples.
Already the individual fellow citizen must subordinate himself to his peo-
ples vital necessities, indeed he may even be sacrificed for this purpose, if
necessary. This applies even more so to the individuals of other peoples
fighting for the same lebensraum and resources. In Hitlers estimation,
when it comes to the struggle for existence, no people can be morally
obliged to compromise its own chances for survival and development in
favor of other peoples and their members.
This is not to say that Hitler necessarily and in every respect had to
have denied the legitimacy or validity of moral commandments in dealing
with the members of other peoples. However, in his judgment, the obliga-
tion to be considerate expired the very moment such considerations un-
dermined the realization of ones own peoples existential interests, when,
so his example, the self-preserving vigor of a fighting people might be
undermined. From such conditions, so the resultant consequence, even
the directly premeditated, respectively deliberate killing of members of
other peoples is not to be objected to, morally.
XIII. A Relativization of the National Socialist Crimes?

Does attempting to explain even the National Socialist crimes in the same
fashion as any other crimes not mean the relativization of these crimes?
Yes and no!
Yes, it means a relativization in as far as, this way, it is claimed that
these crimes do not differ enough from other crimes to defy a uniform
explanation pattern or that they are completely incomprehensible.
No, it does not mean a relativization for the reason that these explana-
tions do nothing to change the fact of the moral condemnation of the
crimes to be explained.
The question which the perpetrators would have had to ask themselves
in as much as they actually believed to have been doing something permis-
sible is whether it was morally legitimate to base their actions on the re-
spective extra-moral convictions. As regards this, we are confronted with a
moral problem also in the case of the leading National Socialists. This
moral problem is, in part, however, located on another level than some-
times imagined.
Lothar Fritze 99
It is not located, or at least not only, in the realm of moral volition or

rather moral convictions but in the realm of judgments as well as of deci-
sion-making. It may also be due to which habits one has developed and
which attitudes one has cultivated. On the one side, the National Social-
ists failure, in as far as they were perpetrators with a clean conscience,
was a cognitive one; on the other side, it was a failure which can be traced
back to irresponsible decision-making as regards their actions.
On the one hand, it is true that every individual who wants to be ac-
cepted as a reasonable being is, by the same token, also responsible for his
judgment and the formation of his will. The perpetrators failed morally
because they based their actions on an untenable ideology, whose untena-
bility they could have recognized. The perpetrators with a clean con-
science violated cognitive duties. The fulfillment of cognitive duties in
respect to relevant questions is the precondition for the possibility of act-
ing rationally, thus responsibly. Insofar as these violations of duties were
avoidable, they count against the perpetrators as a morale failure.
On the other hand, not only is there a violation of cognitive duties to
be lamented. Likewise, the perpetrators failure is based on an irresponsi-
ble attitude toward their own convictions. The callous insolence of believ-
ing oneself entitled to violating human rights, yes, even to sacrificing
humans on a massive scale based on a vague assumption of something
being true is typical for perpetrators with a clean conscience. I consider
this to be an irresponsible attitude.
Looking at these reasons for the failure of the National Socialist perpe-
trators, the National Socialists indeed had a different morality. However, it
is a specifically National Socialist morality only to a lesser degree; most of
all, it is a morality whose structure we observe in all large-scale criminals
motivated by ideology or religion. Nevertheless, several of the extra-moral
assumptions are specifically National Socialist. Speaking of a specific
National Socialist morality may at best be harmless, yet contributes hardly
anything to a better understanding. To understand and explain the National
Socialists actions, it is indispensable to also identify their extra-moral
convictions.
Additionally, the attempt to explain the National Socialist crimes in the
same fashion as certain other crimes is preferable in the following sense:
The here presented explanation demonstrates what humans, who need not
at all be described as evil, are capable of if they succeed in legitimating
their actions to themselves, thus maintaining their personal integrity. To
trace the National Socialist crimes back to the perpetrators amorality or
wickedness from the outset would mean opting for the most convenient
interpretation. As we believe ourselves to be morally upright, the thought
that we might have become involved in crimes of this kind seems unimag-
inable. The difference between us who accept human rights ethics and the
National Socialist perpetrators with a clean conscience does however not
belong to the realm of moral volition but, at least frequently, to that of the
extra-moral convictions.
The here presented analysis has shown: Although perpetrators with a
clean conscience fail morally, what they must be taught first of all is not
morality but rational thinking, and a part of rational thinking is that one
establishes a reasonable, sufficiently skeptical relationship with ones own
extra-moral convictions.
NAZI PERPETRATORS
HITLERS MOTIVE FOR THE HOLOCAUST
GUNNAR HEINSOHN
I. The Frustration of the Researchers

Like nobody else, Lon Poliakov (1910-1997) dealt with the Holocaust as
well as with all other murders of Jews. In North America he is called Mr.
Anti-semitism, after his eight-volumed The History of Anti-semitism
(1977-1988). From La Condition des Juifs en France from 1946 until the
English reworking of the Aryan myth (The Aryan Myth) in 1996, it had
been book after book and essay after essay for half a century. Neverthe-
less, until shortly before his death Poliakovs helplessness toward Hitler
(1889-1945) and the destruction of the Jews would not end. Is it thus really
surprising that less experienced historians are despairing completely?
Being an early master of research on Hitler and also a decades-long
observer of the debate, Alan Bullock1 (1914-2004) also belongs to this
group: The more I learn about Hitler, the more difficult it is for me to find
an explanation.2 Also Ulrich Herbert (*1951), maybe Germanys most
renowned junior historian on the NS period3 and a Leibniz Award Winner
already in 1999, is not able to find a satisfactory approach to the matter:
As there is no theory on the Holocaust, [...] it is basically discussing the
event itself again and again which might lead our interest toward gaining
insight.4 Gtz Aly (*1947), one of the most studious authors on the topic,
is at best ready to rule out what cannot have played a crucial role: These
days, no serious historian will attribute [...] the main or even sole respon-
1
Cp. Alan Bullock, Hitler. A Study in Tyranny (London: Odhams Press, 1952).
Idem, Hitler. Eine Studie ber Tyrannei (Dusseldorf: Droste, 1953).
2
Ron Rosenbaum, Die Hitler-Debatte: Auf der Suche nach dem Ursprung des
Bsen (Munich/Vienna: Europa-Verlag, 1999), p. 7.
3
Cp. Ulrich Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien ber Radikalismus,
Weltanschauung und Vernunft 1903-1989 (Bonn: Dietz, 1996). Idem (ed.),
Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik 1939-1945: Neue Forschungen und
Kontroversen (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1998).
4
Herbert, Best, p. 66.
104 Hitlers Motive for the Holocaust
sibility for the murder of Europes Jews to Hitlers obsessions.5 But

even this minimal position meets resistance from his colleague Hanns C.
Lhr (*1961) who is fifteen years younger: There is no doubt about Hit-
lers responsibility for the destruction of Europes Jews during World War
II.6 Both scientists are trying to give their best, indeed they summarize
their lifes work writing on invitation by the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung on the occasion of the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz
(27 January 1945).
Even more attention than the above mentioned authors is attracted by
Ian Kershaw (*1953), currently the most extensive Hitler biographer.7 But
even he is unable to provide more than a historic report: In the worst
possible way, Hitler demonstrated what we are capable of. Auschwitz
comes to the limits of what can be explained: historians can describe how
it happened, but why it happened is a completely different question.8
Even after seven more years of consideration, he has not come any closer
to an explanation: [Hitler was] an authoritarian type obsessed with an
extraordinary and hardly explainable desire for destruction.9
Hardly different from Kershaw are the results by the award winner of
the Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels, Saul Friedlander (*1932).
With his thesis of a specifically German kind of redemption-antisemitism
he has produced one of the about fifty general Holocaust theories present-
ed since 1945.10 However, he was perceived to a lesser degree as, at the
time, everyone was still discussing Daniel Goldhagens (*1959) thesis of
an extremely eliminatory kind of German anti-Semitism.11 However,
Friedlander succeeded in being frustrated with the attempt of trying to
grasp Hitlers motivation even twenty years before Kershaw: We know
5
Gtz Aly, Die vielfachen Tatbeitrge zum Mord an den europischen Juden,
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 15, 2002, p. 49.
6
Hannes C. Lhr, Hitlers Befehl,Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 24,
2004, p. 33.
7
Cf. Ian Kershaw, Hitler. 1889-1936 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1998).
8
Idem, In gewisser Weise war er der Mann ohne Eigenschaften: Die Geschichte
Hitlers ist auch die Geschichte seiner Unterschtzung. An interview with Ian
Kershaw, the author of the new great Hitler biography, Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, October 1, 1988, pp. 4-5.
9
Idem, Was wre gewesen, wenn?, Interview by Frank Schirrmacher and Stefan
Aust with Ian Kershaw, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 19, 2005, p. 36.
10
Cf. Saul Friedlnder, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden, 2. Bde (Munich: C. H.
Beck, 1998).
11
Cf. Daniel N. Goldhagen, Hitlers willige Vollstrecker (Berlin: Siedler, 1996).
Gunnar Heinsohn 105
the details of what happened; we know the chronology of events, but the
underlying dynamics of the phenomenon evade our grasp.12
Also Israels leading Holocaust historian failed his readers: In princi-
ple, Hitler can be explained; but this does not mean that he has been ex-
plained.13 Is an excursion into philosophy more helpful? As a moral phi-
losopher, Hungarian author Agnes Heller (*1929) stands out in the
genre,14 for which, after seven earlier awards, she was awarded the Goethe
Medal in 2010: The Holocaust can neither be explained nor understood. It
did not serve any purpose; it was neither a kind of liberation nor an event
within a causal chain. [...] What is irrational and unreasonable per se can-
not be integrated.15 Let us turn to Polands Wladyslaw Bartoszewski
(*1922) who did not only himself suffer at Auschwitz but afterwards com-
pleted his education as a historian. He does not give us any hope either:
Today, the historic, political, theological, and philosophical literature on
Auschwitz encompasses some thousands of books and an even larger
number of smaller contributions, probably in all languages. The phenome-
non of Auschwitz is a topic not only for scientists but also for artists. Nev-
ertheless it remains incomprehensible, ungraspable, and most incredi-
ble.16
What do educated laypeople say? Who could represent them better
than Ernst Cramer (1913-2010)? He is one of the Jews who were saved in
1945, and in January 2006, on the occasion of Auschwitz Liberation Day
at the German Bundestag, he condensed the sixty years of considering the
question this way: This genocide was the biggest catastrophe which has
ever befallen the Jews, and at the same time [the] most ungraspable trage-
dy of German history.17
12
Saul Friedlnder, Vom Antisemitismus zur Judenvernichtung. Eine
historiographische Studie zur nationalsozialistischen Judenpolitik und Versuch
einer Interpretation, in Eberhard Jckel/Jrgen Rohwer (eds.), Der Mord an den
Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Entschlubildung und Verwirklichung (Stuttgart:
Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1985), pp. 18-60, here 49.
13
Rosenbaum, Die Hitler-Debatte, p. 7.
14
Cf. Agnes Heller, A Philosophy of Morals (Oxford/Boston: Basil Blackwell,
1990).
15
Idem, Schreiben nach Auschwitz? Schweigen ber Auschwitz? Philosophische
Betrachtungen eines Tabus. Die Weltzeituhr stand still, Die Zeit, May 7, 1993,
pp. 61.
16
Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Unfassbar, unbegreiflich, unglaublich: Die
Bauplne von Auschwitz, Die Welt, February 17, 2009, p. 7.
17
Ernst Cramer, In vielen Menschen hatte der Teufel ber Gott gesiegt, Die
Welt, January 28, 2006, p. 4.
If science and philosophy fail, it is time to ask the artists. Arguably,

nobody else has spent as much time on the destruction of the Jews as
Claude Lanzmann (*1925) who in 1985 presented the nine-hour- long film
Shoa: I claim that there are no [historic explanations]. It was my iron rule
not to be interested in understanding. To the question why, an SS man
answered to the prisoner Primo Levi: There is no why here. That is the
truth. Searching for why is absolutely obscene. Historians create their
causal chains: the Great Depression, unemployment, the defeat in World
War I, Bolshevism, the time of Hitlers youth, and so on. These may have
been some of the conditions which were necessary for the development of
murderous anti-Semitism, but they are not sufficient.18
Of course, there are also Holocaust researchers who, for reasons of
popular education, are not interested in looking for Hitlers motivation.
They are afraid of whitewashing his countless helpers if they only concen-
trated on the overlord. Indeed, such a danger cannot be ruled out. Howev-
er, once you have several hundred murders on your desk, it soon becomes
clear that there is never a lack of ready and willing henchmen but that, in
most cases, they do not occupy positions from which it is possible to give
orders.19 Thus, the fact that perpetrators can be found in almost every case
does not provide an explanation, for these people are available also before
and after the killings.
According to Lon Poliakov, the most experienced and medially multi-
talented of all researchers on Hitler was Joachim C. Fest (1926-2006). For
43 years he presented works on Hitlers Germany.20 Two years before his
death he seized the occasion to lament the futility of his work: I do not
comprehend it [the murder of the Jews G. H.], and nobody who has ever
dealt with it has even come close [...] to a convincing interpretation.21
How are parents, educators, teachers, pastors, journalists, politicians, and
professors to be able to explain it if their question Why Auschwitz can-
18
Claude Lanzmann, Der Tod ist ein Skandal. Der franzsische Shoah-
Verfilmer Claude Lanzmann ber sein Leben, seinen Memoirenband Der
patagonische Hase, die Erinnerung an die Judenvernichtung und die Gegenwart
der Vergangenheit, Der Spiegel, September 6, 2010.
19
Cf. Gunnar Heinsohn, Lexikon der Vlkermorde (Reinbek bei Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 1999).
20
Cf. Joachim Fest, Das Gesicht des Dritten Reiches. Profile einer totalitren
Herrschaft (Munich: Piper, 1963). Idem, Hitler. Eine Biographi (Frankfurt a. M.:
Propylen, 1973). Idem, Die unbeantwortbaren Fragen. Notizen ber Gesprche
mit Albert Speer zwischen Ende 1966 und 1981 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt
Taschenbuch, 2006).
21
Idem, Mitleidlosigkeit bis zum allerletzten Punkt, Die Welt, September 10,
2004, p. 3.
Gunnar Heinsohn 107
not even be answered by the best experts? Pupils despairing over their
elders cannot even find a solution in Wikipedia shortly before class starts:
Only by Hitlers permission and approval, and on his orders, as is the
general consensus among historians, were the subordinate groups of the
NS perpetrators able to systematically exterminate the Jews. Nevertheless,
it is still being debated which factors were crucial for the escalation.22
However, what is investigated is not Hitlers motivation behind his per-
mission. Only the controversies about the indeed not always easily com-
prehensible steps toward implementation are presented. For example, most
experts see the Holocaust start as early as autumn 1939.23 Others do not
deny the early killings in Poland but believe that things started as late as
December 1941 because that is when the USA joined the war.24 However,
the chronological distance between the shots he fires does not say anything
about a murderers motives. About this, the analysts stay tight-lipped.
However, the nestor among them all, i.e. Poliakov, does not look all
too pessimistic anymore at the end of his long way. In his last essay Les
vraies raisons des crimes hitlriens (The real reasons for Hitlers
crimes) - he quotes the following passage from his own French transla-
tion: Hitler does not leave any doubt about his knowledge that his geno-
cidal methods are in accordance with archaic law. That is precisely why
he wants to reestablish the pagan law of antiquity, which had had to give
way to the Jewish law. On 6 August 1942 he monologizes: I imagine that
these days the one or the other wonder: how can the Fuehrer destroy a city
like Petersburg (Leningrad)! When I recognize that the species is in dan-
ger, my emotions are replaced by ice-cold reason: all I see are the victims
of the future if something is not sacrificed today. / Petersburg must disap-
pear. Here, one must apply ancient principles, the city must be completely
razed to the ground. (Also) Moscow as the seat of the (Communist) doc-
trine will disappear from the earth. / I do not feel anything when razing
22
Wikipedia, Holocaustforschung, in http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust-
forschung, last access in November 2010.
23
Cf. Peter Longerich, Die Eskalation der NS-Judenverfolgung zur Endlsung:
Herbst 1939 bis Sommer 1942, in Symposium on the Origins of Nazi Policy,
(Gainesville/FL 1998).
24
Cf. Hans Safrian, Die Eichmann-Mnner (Vienna: Europa-Verlag, 1993).
Christian Gerlach, Die Wannseekonferenz, das Schicksal der deutschen Juden
und Hitlers Grundsatzentscheidung, alle Juden Europas zu ermorden,
WerkstattGeschichte, vol. 6 (1997) no. 18, pp. 7-44. Idem, Krieg, Ernhrung,
Vlkermord: Forschungen zur deutschen Vernichtungspolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg
(Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998).
Kiev, Moscow and Petersburg to the ground.25 / Conscience is a Jewish

invention Hitler espoused already at the beginning of the 1930s. By his
decision for the extinction of Jewry, this obstacle to genocide was to be
cleared out of the way.26
This passage comes from Why Auschwitz?, which the author, two years
after having presented a first version of the thesis in an essay27 published
in 1995.28 Soon, the psychoanalyst Bla Grunberger followed Poliakov.29
However, he was predominantly interested in the authors thesis of the
occidental hatred of Jewry as an expression of the conflict between the
God of Abraham who spared the son, and the Christian God who sacri-
ficed his son.30 In 1998, the Catholic intellectual Carl Amery (1922-2005)
based his Hitler as Predecessor on Why Auschwitz? However, it was to
take half a decade31 until with Dan Stone (University of London), a Holo-
caust researcher in the stricter sense, adopted the thesis of Why Ausch-
witz?.32 In 2005, Rolf Zimmermann followed with Philosophy after
Auschwitz. In 2001, Jonathan C. Friedman (University of Maryland, Col-
lege Park) adopted these ideas in The Routledge History of the Holo-
caust.33 Thus, the author did not have much to present which might con-
vince his colleagues.
But what are we talking about? Even for him in those days there was
no doubt that the murder of the Jews had been decided before the begin-
25
Albert Speer, Der Sklavenstaat. Meine Auseinandersetzung mit der SS (Stuttgart:
Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981), p. 422. Bibliographic information is not in Polia-
kovs translation of the original Heinsohn, 1995 (see below FN 28).
26
Lon Poliakov, Les vraies raisons des crimes hitlriens, LInfini. Littrature,
Philosophie, Art, Science, Politique, vol. 46 (1996), pp. 76-79, here 77.
27
Cf. Gunnar Heinsohn, Umweltapokalyptiker und kokrieger: Die Zukunft des
Vlkermords, in Joachim Wilke (ed.), Zum Naturbegriff der Gegenwart.
Kongressdokumentation zum Projekt Natur im Kopf, Stuttgart, 21 -26. Juni
1993, vol. 1: Problemata, published by Kulturamt des Landeshauptamtes Stuttgart
(Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1993), pp. 225-260.
28
Cf. Gunnar Heinsohn, Warum Auschwitz? Hitlers Plan und die Ratlosigkeit der
Nachwelt, (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1995), pp. 164.
29
Cf. Bla Grunberger/Pierre Dessuant, Narzissmus, Christentum, Antisemitismus:
Eine psychoanalytische Untersuchung (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2000).
30
At first Gunnar Heinsohn, Was ist Antisemitismus? - Der Ursprung von
Monotheismus und Judenha. (Frankfurt a. M.: Eichborn, 1988).
31
Cf. Dan Stone (ed.), Theoretical Interpretations of the Holocaust (Amster-
dam/Atlanta/GA: Editions Rodopi, 2001), pp. 94.
32
Cf. Gunnar Heinsohn, What Makes the Holocaust a Uniquely Unique Geno-
cide?, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 2 (2000) no. 2, pp. 411-430.
33
Cf. Jonathan C. Friedman (ed.), The Routledge History of the Holocaust (Lon-
don/New York Routledge, 2011), p. 509.
Gunnar Heinsohn 109
ning of the war when he points to Reinhard Heydrichs (1904-1942) secret

order issued three weeks after the beginning of the war (21 September
1939). As the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Heydrich was
Hitlers executor but not the one providing him with motivation. Raoul
Hilberg (1926-2007) said that not even Heydrich comprehended his Fueh-
rer: Heydrich told him [Adolf Eichmann, 1906-1962]: The Fuehrer has
now decided the physical extinction of the Jewish people. And even Hey-
drich seemed to have been disturbed. Even he was not able to really com-
prehend the extent of the consequences of these words.34 Nevertheless, he
issued the order for the extinction:
To the heads of all Einsatzgruppen of the Sicherheitspolizei

concerning: the Jewish problem in the occupied [Polish] territory.
I refer to todays meeting in Berlin and once again point out that the in-
tended overall measures (that is the final goal) must strictly be kept secret.
It must be distinguished between the final goal (which will require
longer periods of time)
1. The steps toward achieving the final goal (which will be carried out
in the near future)
The intended measures require the most thorough preparations both in
respect of technology and of economy. It is a matter of course that from
here the oncoming tasks cannot be determined in every detail. At the same
time the following instructions and guidelines are meant to instruct the
heads of the Einsatzgruppen to make practicable considerations.35
Thus, even the allegedly arbitrary acts by which SS leaders are said to
have changed the Holocaust into an independent process against Hitlers
wishes, or at least without his knowledge, are here directly ordered in the
form of demanding practicable considerations.
II. Hitlers Indisputable Motives for the Other

Large-Scale Killings
The first large group of victims of the more than 300.000 originally target-
ed by Hitler-Germany, more than 100,000 from September 1939 on, was
34
Raul Hilberg, Podiumsdiskussion. in Eberhard Jckel/Jrgen Rohwer (eds.),
Der Mord an den Juden im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Entschlubildung und
Verwirklichung (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1985), p. 187.
35
Schnellbrief Heydrichs an die Chefs der Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei
vom 21. September 1939, die Judenfrage in den besetzten Gebieten Polens
betreffend. in http://forum.ioh.pl/download.php?id=65003&sid=da446dc1a4f10
64e25c40689840351d4.
eliminated because they were considered a costly burden for the nation,
thus weakening it from the inside.36 Beginning in Poland, everywhere
within the borders of the intended great empire the mentally and physical-
ly handicapped were killed. However, the handicapped outside of the
demarcation lines were not targeted.
Another large group of victims that was eliminated were the Sinti and
the Roma: vasectomies were enforced from 1934 on, with deportations
starting in 1936 and ending with at least 200,000 dead by 1945 because
they were considered social parasites despite the fact that, doubtlessly,
they were Indo-Aryan. The Roma living outside the borders of the intend-
ed great empire were not killed. The same holds true also for select con-
tingencies within these borders although it is no over-interpretation to
understand Heinrich Himmlers so called Auschwitz edict of 16 December
1942 as the instruction for a final solution.37
Homosexuals were persecuted because they were under suspicion of
hardly, or not at all, reproducing themselves and of infecting others.
Being stigmatized by having to wear a pink triangle, 5,000 to 15,000 of
them were deported to concentration camps starting in 1935. Between 50
to 60 per cent of them died. Nevertheless, there were no intentions to mur-
der all the homosexuals within the Reich or outside its borders.38
The Slavs were by far the largest group of victims of Hitler-Germany.
The General Plan East39 targeted more than 150 million of them, 100
million from the USSR alone. About 11 million, not including the soldiers
killed in combat, died after September 1939. They had been living in the
territories which were meant to become the Lebensraum for 30 million
German settlers. Slavs living outside the borders of the intended great
36
Ernst Klee, Euthanasie im NS-Staat. Die Vernichtung lebensunwerten
Lebens (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1983).
37
Distributed as an express letter from the Reichskriminalpolizeiamt [Imperial
Criminal Police] of 29 January 1943. Michael Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und
Genozid. Die nationalsozialistische Lsung der Zigeunerfrage (Hamburg:
Wallstein, 1996), pp. 301.
38
Cf. Rdiger Lautmann/Winfried Grikschat/Egbert Schmidt, Der rosa Winkel in
den nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern, in Rdiger Lautmann (ed.),
Seminar Gesellschaft und Homosexualitt (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), pp.
325.
39
Cf. Czeslaw Madajczyk (ed.), Vom Generalplan Ost zum Generalsiedlungsplan.
Dokumente (Munich: Saur, 1994).
Gunnar Heinsohn 111
empire were not persecuted. This holds true also for Germanized Slavs
(Ruhr Poles etc.) who might even have become settlers themselves.40
Probably the smallest group of minorities persecuted was that of the
25,000 to 30,000 Jehovahs Witnesses who not even constituted 0.04 per
cent of the Reichs population. Their strict observance of the Jewish ban
on killing, which found its expression in conscientious objection, was
punished as their most severe crime. Almost one-half of all Jehovahs
Witnesses suffered persecution and imprisonment. 2,000 of them,
marked by a purple triangle, were taken to concentration camps. About
1,500 of them died, and 270 were executed for conscientious objection.41
As they also rejected anti-Semitism, the ideological attacks on the Jeho-
vahs Witnesses were most similar to those on the Jews.
The second-largest group of victims of Hitler-Germany persecuted
immediately after 1933, whose loss totaled five-and-a-half million people,
were killed Europe-wide. They were killed even in territories which were
not meant to become parts of the Reich (Hungary, France, and the Balkans
etc.). For the time being, there is no consensus at all in reference to Hit-
lers motives for these mass murders: One will have to turn toward Hitler
once again. [...] At the top, it was Hitler alone!42
III. Hitlers Personal Hatred of Jewry

From his time in Austria (1889-1913) we do not know of any anti-
Semitic remark by the young H.[itler]. / Thus, the crucial question of when
anti-Semitism became the pivotal element in Hitlers thinking cannot be
answered for his time in Linz and Vienna. Its development must be at-
tributed to later years. When, in 1919, Hitler appeared as a politician in
Munich, he was already using aggressive anti-Semitic slogans.43 Apart
from this, the question concerning the reason for Hitlers personal hatred
of the Jews must be considered unanswered and possibly unanswera-
40
Cf. Isabel Heinemann, Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut. Das Rasse- und
Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas
(Gttingen: Wallstein, 2003).
41
Cf. Gerald Hacke, Die Zeugen Jehovas im Dritten Reich und in der DDR.
Feindbild und Verfolgungspraxis (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011).
42
Eberhard Jckel, Der SS-Intellektuelle: Bedurfte es keiner Befehle Hitlers, um
die Vernichtungspolitik in die Welt zu setzen? (Review of Herbert, Best), Die
Zeit, March 29, 1996, p. 18.
43
Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers Wien. Lehrjahre eines Diktator (Munich: Piper, 1996),
pp. 498-502.
ble.44 Of course, it further contributes to our frustration that, in Austria,

the young Hitler had admired Jewish artists, defended Zionists against
anti-Semites, definitely not been cheated by Jewish merchants, therefore
leaving his small paintings only for them to sell, and also not been rejected
by the Jewish professors at the academy of arts. As late as 1939, after the
Anschluss of Austria in 1938, Hitler personally vouched for the safe
passage of his admired family doctor, Eduard Bloch (1872-1945), from
Linz to America.45
What then exactly did Hitler say against the Jews as early as 1920,
when he was not spitting with rage as according to the Gemlich letter of 16
September 1919 with a similar content?46
Do not think you will be able to fight a disease without killing the agent,
without destroying the germ, and do not think to be able to fight racial tu-
berculosis without taking care that the people will be free of the agent of
racial tuberculosis. The workings of Jewry will never stop as long as the
agent, the Jew, is not taken away from us.47
That this illness or racial tuberculosis was not referring to racist-

biologist anti-Semitism becomes obvious already by the fact that Hitler did
not hate Semites as such. Nevertheless, the Arabian-Semitic Palestinians
were offered participation in the extermination of the Jews, and their lead-
er, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini (1893-1974), became obsessed with it.48
It was Husseini who made Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946)
work on a ban on the term anti-Semitism:
The use of this term will again and again hit the Arabian world which, ac-
cording to statements by the Great Mufti, is in its overwhelming majority
friendly towards Germany. The enemy countries use the fact that we use
44
Joachim Fest, Der Auftrag kam von Hitler, Die Woche, November 29, 1996,
pp. 38-39, here 38.
45
Cf. Hamann, Hitlers Wien, pp. 56.
46
Cf. Eberhard Jckel/Axel Kuhn (eds.), Hitler. Smtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905-
1924 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), pp. 88.
47
Ibid., pp. 178.
48
Cf. Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten. Eine
politische Biographie Amin el-Husseinis, updated, fully revised edition
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007). David G. Dalin/John F.
Rothmann, Icon of Evil. Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (New York:
Random House, 2008).
Gunnar Heinsohn 113
the word anti-Semitism to insinuate that this is also meant to express that
we throw the Arabs into the same pot with the Jews.49
The expression racial tuberculosis must be understood as a spiritual and

not a biological reference emphasized by Hitler in one of his last state-
ments (on 3 February 1945). There, he also made clear that he did by no
means consider Aryans or Germans the peak of the human species,
which should permanently reproduce itself toward ever higher superiori-
ty:50
I never held the opinion that the Chinese or the Japanese, for example,
were racially inferior. [...] I admit that their tradition is superior to ours. /
Our Nordic racial consciousness is aggressive only towards the Jewish
race. However, we speak of a Jewish race only for reasons of linguistic
convenience, for [...] from the genetic point of view there is no Jewish race.
Circumstances make us label in this way a racially and spiritually coherent
group, membership of which is claimed by Jews all over the world, no
matter which individual citizenship is given by passports. This group of
people we call the Jewish race. [...] The Jewish race is most of all a spir-
itual community./ Spiritual race is tougher and more enduring than natural
race. The Jew, wherever he goes, stays to be a Jew [...] and to us he must
appear as a sad piece of evidence for the superiority of spirit over
flesh.51
Nevertheless, Hitler was not without racism. In its purest form it was di-
rected at Black Africans. About 2,000 of them who lived within his do-
main were taken to internment camps where many of them died as a result
of brutal living conditions. There were no mass shootings or gassings.52
Others survived the war in Berlin, for example as entertainers, appearing
in films on Africa. Until 1937, about 400 Afro-Germans were subjected to
enforced sterilization.53 An Apartheid system was intended for the German
49
Die Benutzung des Begriffs hat zu unterbleiben,
http://www.ns-archiv.de/verfolgung/antisemitismus/begriff_abschaffen.php.
50
Cf. Richard Weikart, Hitlers Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
51
Hugh Trevor-Roper/Andr Francois-Poncet (eds.), Hitlers Politisches Testa-
ment. Die Bormann Diktate vom Februar und April 1945 (Hamburg: Albrecht
Knaus 1981), pp. 66-69 (italic by G. H.).
52
Cf. Bettina Schfer, Nachwort zur deutschsprachigen Ausgabe, in Michle
Maillet, Schwarzer Stern (Berlin 1994), pp. 187-188, here 188.
53
Cf. May Opitz, Rassismus, Sexismus und vorkoloniales Afrikabild in
Deutschland, in Katharina Oguntoye/May Opitz/Dagmar Schultz (eds.), Farbe
bekennen. Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte, (Frankfurt a.
M.: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1992), pp. 17-64, here 58.
colonies in Africa, which were to be reconquered. However, there were no

intentions for a murderous final solution of the Negro problem.54
Hitler made unmistakably clear that his fight against Jewry served oth-
er purposes than his devaluation of Black Africans, when he discussed
both in the same passage:
From time to time magazines tell the German Philistines that here or there
for the first time a Negro has become a lawyer, teacher, or even a priest,
nay, a heroic tenor or something. While the stupid bourgeoisie marvels at
such a miraculous circus act, / the Jew is smart enough to use this as anoth-
er evidence for the correctness of his theory of the equality of man, which
he tries to ram down peoples throat. This completely rotten bourgeois
world will not understand that it is criminal madness to train a born semi-
ape man long enough to believe that he has been made a lawyer.55
If by Jewish racial tuberculosis Hitler did not refer to anything biologi-

cal but to a spiritual race which might decompose other mentalities,
what would be its most important feature? Current interpretations are
unable to imagine anything concrete, but they believe that Hitler consid-
ered Jews even to be biologically immoral and by their destruction tried
to rid the world of immorality.56 Others are convinced that in no way
does spiritual race refer to anything religious but rather that for the first
time it was not for their faith that the Jews were persecuted in Hitlers
day.57
What now is the moral foundation of Jewish religion? This is ex-
pressed briefly in Hosea 6:6: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Its most im-
pressive commandment is Thou shalt not kill (2 Moses 20:13 and 5
Moses 5:17). Its commandment for the protection of man is most difficult
to meet: If there is a foreigner living in your country, you shall not sup-
press him. He shall live with you like any native, and you shall love him
like yourself (3 Moses 19: 33-34). The creed on which all of Jewry agrees
is condensed in the so-called Golden Rule:
54
Cf. Clarence Lusane, Hitlers Black Victims: The Experiences of Afro-Germans,
Africans, Afro-Europeans and African Americans during the Nazi Era (New York:
Routledge, 2002).
55
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925/27), Volksausgabe in einem Band (Munich:
Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1930), pp. 478.
56
Weikart, Hitlers Ethic, p. 198.
57
Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945 (New
York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 5.
Gunnar Heinsohn 115
Lo, today I have presented to you life and the good thing. / Today Heaven
and Earth shall be my witnesses: I have presented to you life and death,
blessing and curse so that you will choose life (5 Moses 30. 15-19).
Already in antiquity other peoples were surprised at the principle of the

holiness of life. At about 300 BC, Hekataeus of Abdera contrasted the
Jewish ban on killing children with the Greek right of abandoning children
and of infanticide.58 In the first century AD, Tacitus wrote on the Jews: It
is a deadly sin to kill an unwanted child.59 Might it be that Hitler identi-
fied the Jewish spirit precisely in this commandment? At the Nuremberg
Party Conference in 1929 he spoke directly against the Jewish law, since
Constantine the Great also a Christian one, on the protection of life:
If in Germany one million children were born each year and 700,000 to
800,000 of the weakest ones would be disposed of, in the end the result
might even be an increase in power, after all. It is most dangerous that we
ourselves cut off the natural selection process (by caring for the disabled
and weak G. H.). The clearest racial state in history, Sparta, did systemat-
ically carry out these racial laws.60
Already in Mein Kampf Hitler had condemned the ethics of the holiness of
life:
Not coincidentally it is first of all always the Jew who tries to implant
such deadly and dangerous ideas (of birth control and keeping every new
born child alive; GH) into our people.61
The first large-scale killing, personally signed by Hitler, concerned full-

blooded Aryans who, having been disabled or severely mutilated during
the invasion of Poland (1 September 1939), lived in his domain. This eu-
thanasia was definitely met with resistance. For example, Eugen Sthle
(1890-1948), Hitlers commissary for the killing of disabled people at the
Grafeneck asylum in Wuerttemberg, defended himself against Senior
58
Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism. Vol. 1: From
Herodotus to Plutarch (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Huma-
nities, 1976), p. 29.
59
Idem, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism. Vol. 2: From Tacitus to
Simplicius (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1980), p.
26.
60
Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie. Von
der Verhtung zur Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens 1890-1945 (Gttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992), p. 152.
61
Church Council member Reinhold Sautter from Stuttgart (1888-1971).

During a private conversation this man with a basically national attitude
accused him of violating the Ten Commandments by killing life unwor-
thy of living. Sthle answered: The 5th Commandment, Thou shall not
kill is not at all a commandment by God but a Jewish invention.62
Now, one might object that Sthle was not Hitler. Also, this
Wuerttembergian principal is not known for having been dealing with the
history of the ban on killing. Yet, things were different under Hitler so that
it may definitely be possible that Sthle was acting as a mouthpiece for his
supreme commander. If this statement did not come from the latter, anoth-
er source must be identified. Nevertheless, one cannot claim that Hitler
knew the passage in Philo (about 15 BC-40 AD) on the Jewish ban on
infanticide:
Not allowed (for us Jews) is the abandonment of children a crime which

is common with many other peoples, due to their innate misanthropy. [...]
It would be stupidity to believe that those would be friendly to strangers
who have betrayed those who are related to them. However, those laying
their hands on them provide the clearest evidence that they themselves are
manslayers and child murderers.63
That already Philo no longer understood the ban on killing but idealizes it
is something which cannot be discussed any further, here. From this au-
thors point of view it results from the ban on child sacrifice, which was
perhaps circumvented by polytheistic Israelites who did not want to be-
come monotheistic Jews, but, under its guise, committed infanticide for
the purpose of birth control.64
If it was not Sthle but Hitler himself who attacked the ban on killing
as a Jewish invention, we must return to the President of the Danzig
Senate, Hermann Rauschning (1887-1992) who joined the NSDAP in
1932 but left it in 1934, yet in the in-between time met with Hitler up to
62
Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie, p. 321.
63
Philo, ber die Einzelgesetze, 3, XX: 110-119, in http://www.early-
jewishwritings.com/text/philo/book29.html.
64
Cp. Gunnar Heinsohn, Theorie des Ttungsverbotes und des Monotheismus bei
den Israeliten sowie der Genese, der Durchsetzung und der welthistorischen Rolle
der christlichen Familien- und Fortpflanzungsmoral, in Joachim Mller/Bettina
Wassmann (eds.), Linvitation au voyage zu Alfred Sohn-Rethel. Festschrift fr
Alfred Sohn-Rethel zum 80. Geburtstag (Bremen: Unibuchladen Wassmann 1979).
Gunnar Heinsohn, Die Erschaffung der Gtter: Das Opfer als Ursprung der
Religion (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Wassmann, 1997), pp. 147.
Gunnar Heinsohn 117
thirteen times.65 The authenticity of Hitlers statements in Rauschnings

Hitler Speaks is very much debated among scientists. Established histori-
ography defends the basic substance of his reports.66 Other authors, among
them some from the far right,67 completely reject him as a source.68 This is
why several of the authors do not quote Rauschning at all whereas others
use him cum grano salis. All the participants in the debate agree that
Rauschning does not present any records of his meetings with Hitler and
that his text includes his own interpretation. Here, I will follow neither the
mostly correct fraction nor the other extreme position of just a com-
plete invention. I will however make use of some similar passages which
are known from other sources. If we simply reject what Rauschning re-
ports on Hitlers ideas on the conscience having been developed by
Jewry, which are typically right-wing and Nietzsche-inspired, we must
declare Rauschning to have been the inventor of these ideas. At least, the
manuscript of Hitler Speaks (published in 1940) had already been com-
pleted by 1939, that is, before the large-scale killings began. Accordingly,
the ideas look much more harmless than what was about to happen.
Not the entire book deserves defamation. Parts of it, most of all the two
final chapters, are a mixture of literature and historic sources (maybe a
comparison to the works by Alexander Kluge would be helpful), unique al-
so because of the fact that they tell about events that took place in 1933/34
- and were written by a protagonist from an exposed territory. The books
bad reputation is partly a result of historians initially using it as a conven-
ient source of quotations. From sensational excitement to scandalous con-
demnation might be a slogan for the history of its reception. But it is a his-
65
Cp. Theodor Schieder, Herrmann Rauschnings Gesprche mit Hitler als
Geschichtsquelle (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1972).
66
Ibid. Martin Broszat, Enthllung? Die Rauschning-Kontroverse, in Idem;
Nach Hitler. Der schwierige Umgang mit unserer Vergangenheit (Munich:
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988).
67
Such as Wolfgang Hnel, Hermann Rauschnings Gesprche mit Hitler Eine
Geschichtsflschung (Ingolstadt: Verffentlichungen der Zeitgeschichtlichen
Forschungsstelle Ingolstadt, 1984).
68
See also Fritz Tobias, Auch Flschungen haben lange Beine. Des Se-
natsprsidenten Rauschnings Gesprche mit Hitler, in Karl Corino (ed.),
Geflscht! Betrug in Politik, Literatur, Wissenschaft, Kunst und Musik
(Nrdlingen: Greno, 1988), pp. 91-105.
torical source written by an intelligent observer who got to the heart of the
substance of the dictator and his work long before the latters end.69
From his meetings with Hitler Rauschning distills:
This devilish Thou shall, thou shall!And that stupid Thou shall not!
We must clean our blood from it, from this curse of Mount Sinai! [...] The
day will come when against these commandments I will erect the tables of
a new law. And history will recognize our movement as the great battle for
the liberation of mankind, liberation from the curse of Sinai. [...] That is it
what we are fighting: this masochistic attitude of self-torturing, this curse
of so called morality, which is made an idol to protect the weak from the
strong, given the eternal fight, the great law of Divine nature. It is the so
called Ten Commandments that we fight.70
The few grandees of the Reich opposing the dictator seemed to understand
him. And it is conspicuous that the Church representatives among them
did not first of all refer to their Christian attitude but to Jewish ethics,
which they felt obliged to as well. So, it was not a whimpering Jesus died
for my sins based on the New Testament but the thunderous voice of the
prophets of the Old Testament. Correspondingly, the Bishop of Muenster,
Clemens August von Galen (1878-1946) condemned Hitler for the murder
of disabled people during a public sermon on 3 August 1941:
Woe to mankind, woe to our German people, if Gods holy command-

ment Thou shall not kill, which with thunder and lightning the Lord an-
nounced on Mount Sinai, and which right from the beginning God the Cre-
ator has inscribed into mans conscience, is not only violated but if this
violation is even accepted and exercised without punishment.71
However, Hitler considered the ban on killing as well as the conscience

not only a restriction to his interior demographic policy against disabled
people but even more a restriction to his external plans for conquest and
extinction. Accordingly, he was convinced (11 November 1941) that
World War I had been lost most of all as a result of pious considerateness:
69
Bernd Lemke, Rauschning, Hermann: Gesprche mit Hitler. Mit einer
Einfhrung von Marcus Pyka, Zrich 2005 (Review), in H-Soz-u-Kult vom
02.08.2006, <http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen/2006-3-081>.
70
Hermann Rauschning, Gesprche mit Hitler (Vienna: Europa-Verlag 1988), p.
210.
71
Heinrich Portmann, Kardinal von Galen. Ein Gottesmann seiner Zeit. Mit einem
Anhang: Die drei weltberhmten Predigten [1948] (Muenster: Aschendorff, 1961),
p. 357.
Gunnar Heinsohn 119
During the World War we had this experience: the only religious state
was Germany; and precisely that state lost the war.72 Already before his
attack on Poland he boasted in the presence of the League of Nations
High Commissioner, Swiss Carl Jacob Burckhardt (1891-1974):
If I have to wage war, I would prefer waging war the sooner the better. I
would wage it differently from the Germany of William II. which constant-
ly had scruples about using its arms to the utmost. I will fight ruthlessly to
the last.73
During the mega-killings in the East aimed at tens of millions, Hitlers

thoughts circled around this gigantism, again and again:
The ridiculous number of one-hundred thousand Slavs will be absorbed or

pushed away [to Siberia]. If, in this context, someone speaks about caring,
he must immediately be sent to a concentration camp.74
He knew that for this purpose he had to revoke the regulations of interna-
tional law from the Jewish-Christian age:
We are obliged to depopulate, just as we are obliged to adequately care

for the German population. A technique of depopulation will have to be
developed. You will ask: What do you mean by depopulating? Do I want
to get rid of entire peoples? Yes indeed, it will be something like that. / It
will be one the most important tasks of German politics for all times to
prevent by all means the further growth of the Slav peoples. Natural in-
stinct tells every being that an enemy must not only be defeated but de-
stroyed. In ancient times it was the conquerors good right to extinguish
entire tribes, entire peoples. / Our revolution is not just a political and so-
cial one. It is only by our movement that the Middle Ages will come to an
end. Mankind has been on the wrong track. The tables from Mount Sinai
have lost their validity. The conscience is a Jewish invention.75
Hitler read Friedrich Nietzsches (1844-1900) original work on the con-

science, The Happy Science, in 1924 during his time at Landsberg prison:
72
Henry Picker, Hitlers Tischgesprche im Fhrerhauptquartier. Vollstndig
berarbeitete und erweiterte Neuausgabe mit bisher unbekannten Selbstzeugnissen
Adolf Hitlers, Abbildungen, Augenzeugenberichten und Erluterungen des Autors:
Hitler wie er wirklich war (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1976), p. 77.
73
Ernst Deuerlein, Hitler. Eine politische Biographie (Munich: List, 1969), p. 144.
74
August 6, 1942, Speer, Der Sklavenstaat, p. 422
75
Rauschning, Gesprche mit Hitler, pp. 129, 210.
The sin is a Jewish emotion and a Jewish invention, and considering this
background of all Christian morality indeed Christianity had the intention
76
to Judaize the whole world. In the same book, Nietzsche extends this
finding by an understanding of that what later psychoanalysis will call the
sublimation of drives, when calling the Jews the moral genius among the
peoples because they were more contemptuous of man inside than any
other people.77
Hitler researched history for patterns of mass killings of the likes which,
only now, in the Modern Age, are punished as crimes against humanity.
He wanted to go back to age earlier than that of Franciscus de Vittoria
(1486-1546), who had demanded:
As a first legal title, the natural community and the community of all men
may be referred to. / How may the innocent be treated during a just war?
Firstly: Though shall not kill the innocent and just [2. Moses 23:7 G.
H.] / In a state it is not legal to punish innocent people for the crimes of the
evildoers. Thus it is also illegal to kill the innocent among the enemies for
the crimes of evildoers. / Even if the Prince is powerful enough to wage
war, still he must not at first look for opportunities and reasons for war but
must if possible, live in peace with all men, as St. Paul commands [Ro-
mans 12:18 G. H.]. But also he shall consider again and again that the
others are our neighbors whom we shall love as ourselves [3. Moses
19:18/33 f. St. Mark 12:31 G. H.]. / Once war has started for just reasons,
it must not be waged to destroy the people against which it is waged.78
If Hitlers movement was to conclude the Middle Ages, he apparently

divided history into three ages, the final one being the one in which his
own law would be valid. The first age had lasted until Moses Law was
passed on Mount Sinai and had been determined by the common right to
extinguish peoples. The second age, from Moses Law to Hitler, had been
burdened by the blatant curtailment of the right to the extinction of peoples
as well as the right to the selection of newborn children within one people
in the Spartan way. The third age had begun with Hitlers assumption of
power which, for the Germans, meant that the rights to infanticide and
76
Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Frhliche Wissenschaft [1882], in Idem, Werke, 2.
Bd., ed. by Karl Schlechta (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966),
Aphorismos 135.
77
Ibid., Aphorismos 136.
78
Franciscus de Vittoria, De Indis recenter inventis et de jure belli Hispanorum in
Barbares [Vorlesungen ber die krzlich entdeckten Inder und das Recht der
Spanier zum Kriege gegen die Barbaren, 1539], ed. by Walter Schtzel, (Tbingen:
Mohr, 1952), p. 43.
Gunnar Heinsohn 121
genocide had been restored. For, as he announced as early as August 1930:

The Jew destroys the natural instinct of self-preservation within every
human.79
Therefore, Hitlers revolution of moral terms was directed against
the biblical division of history into three ages. There, the First Age is the
aera ante legem (the age before the law). It lasts from the beginning of
mankind until the Ten Commandments are passed on Mount Sinai. The
Second Age is the aera sub lege (the age under the rule of law). It lasts
from Moses to Jesus. The Third Age is the aera sub gratia (the age under
the grace of God). It lasts from the Incarnation (incarnatio) of Jesus until
the end of all days.
Thus, Hitler wanted to go back to pagan antiquity:
Already in antiquity whole peoples had been liquidated. Tribes had been
resettled in passing, and just recently the Soviet Union had set an example
of how things could be done.80
The decline of this age was blamed on Jewish ethics:
That same Jew who in those days smuggled Christianity into the world
and killed that wonderful thing, once again he has identified a weak spot:
the guilty conscience of our world. / Peace will only be by way of a natural
order. This order requires that the nations will be structured in a way that
those being capable will lead. This way the inferior will receive more than
he could achieve on his own. Judaism destroys this order.81
Still, in the midst of victories, Hitler was obsessed by the idea that just a
few Jews might undermine these successes. Accordingly, he adjured Croa-
tias Minister of War, Slavko Kvaternik (1878-1947), on 21 July 1941: If
only one state were to accept a Jewish family, no matter for which reasons,
it would become the germ centre for renewed decomposition.82
Education was supposed to prevent such susceptibility, at least for the
future. All men fit for military service would receive this in practical edu-
cation. Since the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the soldiers
were guaranteed not to be persecuted for war crimes; they could then act
like the death squads of the SS because now, new archaic laws had be-
79
Enrico Syring, Hitler. Seine politische Utopie (Berlin: Propylen, 1994), p. 42.
80
Hildegard von Kotze, Heeresadjutant bei Hitler 1938-1943. Aufzeichnungen des
Majors Engel (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1974), p. 71.
81
Picker, Hitlers Tischgesprche im Fhrerhauptquartier, p. 106.
82
Andreas Hillgruber (ed.), Staatsmnner und Diplomaten bei Hitler 1939-1942
(Frankfurt a. M.: Bernard & Graefe, 1967), p. 614.
come a valid once more. As early as 13 May 1941, the soldiers were given
a general license to kill:
Concerning acts committed by Wehrmacht members and those in their

wake against enemy civilians, there is no obligatory legal persecution, not
even if the deed is at the same time a military crime or offence.83
For the time being, the victims were still restricted to members of the
Communist Party (Order of 6 June 1941): Thus they [the commissars], if
encountered when fighting or committing acts of resistance, must general-
ly be finished immediately. / Commissars are not recognized as soldiers;
the protection provided by international law is not applied on them. After
separation they must be finished.84 Behind this order there is the confi-
dence that convictions can be eliminated by killing those being convinced.
At least Wilhelm Keitel (1882-1946) as the head of the Wehrmachts Su-
preme Command (23 September 1941) does not see any problems for such
a practice. For him, the killing of the commissars means the destruction
of an ideology with which he agrees and which he backs.85 Why should
the Nazi leadership believe that the appropriate elimination of Jewish
ethics would be less feasible than that of Leninism-Marxism?
Those being selected for the SS were free to kill immediately whereas
the Wehrmacht was still dominated by Judaized Christians: These tasks
[the killing of the commissars] were so difficult [Heydrich] that the army
could not be burdened with it.86 Hitler closely observed the slow pro-
gress in the killer morality complaining on 18 October 1942 that:
Indeed he was aware that the army had only reluctantly followed the or-
ders such as the Commissar Order. The Supreme Command was to blame,
which was trying to change the profession of the soldier into that of a pas-
tor. If it were not for his SS, what orders may not have been carried out!
83
Erla ber die Ausbung der Kriegsgerichtsbarkeit im Gebiet Barbarossa und
ber besondere Manahmen der Truppe vom 13. 5. 1941 (Kriegsgerichtsbar-
keitserla, Nuremberg-DocumentC-50), in
http://www.1000dokumente.de/index.html?c=dokument_de&dokument=0093_kgs
&object=translation&st=&l=de.
84
Hans Buchheim/Martin Broszat/Hans-Adolf Jacobsen/Helmut Krausnick,
Anatomie des SS-Staates (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1967), pp. 501-
502 [Bold Type by G. H.].
85
Andreas Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie: Politik und Kriegfhrung 1940-1941, 3rd
edition (Bonn: Bernard & Graefe, 1993), p. 530, FN 62.
86
Buchheim/Broszat/Jacobsen/Krausnick, Anatomie des SS-Staates, p. 452.
Gunnar Heinsohn 123
Jodl replies that even in war international agreements are valid also for the
sake of ones own troops.87
However, in the course of the genocide in the East, which was wrongly
labeled the Polish and Russian campaigns, an ever increasing number of
common soldiers participated in the killings. Nobody knows how many
people were killed, however, as many as 50% are considered possible.88
Dejudaization and the removal of the Jewish aspect of Christianity re-
mained the goal while changing the Wehrmacht into an SS, that is, in
transforming all German soldiers into killers. Thus, in September 1943,
Hitler declared that the SS was the best he could leave his successor and
that the build-up of the Wehrmacht in the Germanic countries had to hap-
pen under the supervision of the SS.89
Nevertheless, his decomposition worries would not dissipate, which
is why all German youths, long before they were fit for military service,
were sworn to a new catechism where Thou shall not kill of Mount Sinai
was replaced by an archaic commandment of the eternal fight:
Thou shall not spare your enemy but encounter him with grim defense,
for he wants to be slain by you.
His task is to goad you, your task is: to defeat him.
Do not worry that one day there will be no enemy left; there will always be
new ones. All vermin is overly fertile and hawkish; that is why we are
forced to fight it.90
For this education toward Dejudaization, nothing was left to chance. For
example, the young elite who succeeded in being sent to the SS
Wewelsburg ate at tables with skulls painted on them and assembled in
chapels whose benches were also decorated with skulls and bones.91 Never
again, these youths shall hear: I have presented to you life and death,
blessing and curse, so that you will choose life (5 Moses 30: 15/19). For
87
Kotze, Heeresadjutant bei Hitler 1938-1943, pp. 130.
88
Cp. Christian Hartmann, Krieg und Verbrechen Zur Struktur des deutschen
Ostheeres 1941-1944, in Horst Mller/Aleksandr O. Cubarjan (eds.),
Mitteilungen der Gemeinsamen Kommission fr die Erforschung der jngeren
Geschichte der deutsch-russischen Beziehungen, Bd. 2 (Munich: Oldenbourg,
2005), pp. 18-26, here 18.
89
Bernd Wegner, Hitlers politische Soldaten. Die Waffen-SS 1933-1945, 4th
revised and improved edition (Paderborn: Schningh, 1990), p. 314.
90
Theodor Fritsch, Der neue Glaube, 3rd edition (Leipzig: Hammer, 1936), p. 169.
91
Cf. Karl Hser, Wewelsburg 1933-1945. Kult- und Terrorsttte der SS
(Paderborn: Bonifatius, 1987), p. 217.
never before had Jews, who would have been able to tell them this, been
destroyed for their religion in such a terrible manner.
IV. What Was the Destruction of the Jews

Supposed to Achieve?
Hitler wanted to revive the archaic tribal practices of infanticide and geno-
cide, and in order to do this, he intended to extinguish the people of the
Mount Sinai ban on killing.
Soon after World War I he identified Jewry as the cause for overcom-
ing the age-old custom of killing ones enemies. He blamed religious
principles for the defeat of the German Empire in the war of 1914-1918.
These had been kept solely by the German side as a result of which the
will to unconditional killing had been dissolved. Hitler made this analy-
sis expressly without any personal hatred of the Jews. He was free of hoo-
ligan anti-Semitism.
Hitler did not see himself as a particularly ruthless violator of the Jew-
ish ban on killing but as somebody who eliminated it unscrupulously.
From his studies of history he drew the conclusion that before the devel-
opment of the Jewish ethics of the holiness of life and the protection of
foreigners, completely different norms had been valid, which allowed a
people to become inwardly stronger by killing their disabled offspring as
well as invincible outwardly by extinguishing instead of simply defeating
the enemy. He wanted to make these traditional rights to killing valid once
more for the sake of a leading role for Germany globally, and the German-
ization of Europe all the way to the Ural Mountains. More than one hun-
dred million Slavs were supposed to be eliminated by immediate killing,
forced labor, repopulation, or deportation to Siberia. By the end of the
war, about 11 million will have died.
The elimination of the Jews in order to extinguish Jewish ethics was
meant as a measure to reestablish the right to kill all internal parasites
and decomposers as well as all territorial-political enemies, particularly
most of the Slavs. That was the reason why this happened parallel to the
conquest for lebensraum in the East. These were not regular wars such as
the campaigns against France, Denmark, or Norway but genocidal mega-
killings under the protection of the Wehrmacht. It was indeed this inten-
tion, enforced with an ideological iron fist against the generals attempting
to find alliance partners, which then strengthened the Slavs resistance.
Never again were the German soldiers during their bloody and never-
ending work and fight for nationhood to win and defend such gigantic
territories to be inhibited by a guilty conscience, which for Hitler had been
Gunnar Heinsohn 125
a Jewish invention. In the midst of their extinction work, no-one should

ever again be allowed to utter Thou shall not kill to them. And if anyone
still did this, it was not to arouse any mercy within them. This is also why
the SS, the Ost-Heer, and the Hitler Youth, who were doing the job of a
hundred years (Alfred Rosenberg), shall lead the Germans, also emo-
tionally, toward the code of killing again. In cold, modern language, one
might say that Hitler had the hardware, the Jewish people, smashed to
erase the software, the Jewish principle of the holiness of life, from the
German mind.
Also non-Jews, particularly Christians, were to be eliminated if they
actively supported their ethical Jewish heritage of the protection of life.
This included most of all the Jehovahs Witnesses as they proved to be
infected with Judaism. Thus, in the national socialist model country, the
Warthegau, which had been annexed from Poland, not only were the
Polish priests killed but the German Protestants were also made subject to
the control by the SS; the Concordat which, formally, had remained valid
in the Reich proper, became invalid. In the case of Christians, the ethics of
love and life were in principle considered to be a Jewish infection which
could be cured. After all, the belief in Christs sacrifice as an act of salva-
tion, that is, the non-Jewish aspect of Christianity, provided enough reli-
gious matter for redemption.
Jews, on the other hand, could not count on any mercy even if they for-
swore their religion. Since, after millennia of persecution, they were still
present, they were considered to be incurably infested with the holiness
of life and hence a dangerous germ center for all non-Jews.
To get rid of Jewry, Hitler activated all available anti-Semites, reli-
gious opponents, racists, anti- Zionists, Palestinians, and economic com-
petitors. So, Hitler was the culprit who gave all the other culprits their
chance.92
Nevertheless, Hitler did not establish an anti-Semitic alliance. If only
50% of the 11 million Slavs killed were anti-Semites, he had as many anti-
Semites killed as Jews, and they were not even saved by previously having
actively contributed to their extinction.
By employing slurs such as Jewish-plutocratic war-mongerers in ref-
erence to Churchill and Roosevelt or Jewish-Bolshevists against the
partisans behind the German front, additional pretexts were created to
convince also those Germans who were not yet ready to kill. However, it
was not the traditional kinds of anti-Semitism or the grasp on the Jews
92
Clive James, Blaming the Germans: The much Lauded Revisionist Study of the
Holocaust (by Goldhagen) goes too far, The New Yorker, April 22, 1996, pp. 44,
here 50.
made possible by the war which almost automatically so to speak resulted

in Auschwitz. Rather, more specifically, it was Hitlers specific motive for
eliminating all ethical restraints which then allowed all other anti-Jewish
intentions to come into effect.
This, at least, is the authors opinion. However, he is not claiming to
have the last word. If we take the year 1967 as the starting point for the
most impressive, best-funded, and most unbroken wave of Holocaust re-
search up to now, we may well assume, on the one hand, that the results
presented will be quite different. On the other hand, it may be that Isaac
Deutschers conclusions, which he had worked on intensively in 1967
until shortly before his death, will be supported:
For the historian trying to understand the mass destruction of the Jews,
the most difficult obstacle is the absolutely unique nature of this catastro-
phe. It is not only a question of time and historical perspective. I doubt that
in one thousand years one will be able to understand Hitler, Auschwitz,
Majdanek, and Treblinka any better than we do today. Will we then have a
more sufficient historical perspective? On the contrary, it might even be
that posterity will understand things even less than we do.93
93
Quoted from Friedlander, Vom Antisemitismus zur Judenvernichtung, p. 18.
NAZIS WITH A CLEAR CONSCIENCE?
CIVILIAN FUNCTIONARIES
AND THE HOLOCAUST
MARY FULBROOK
Arno Lustiger historian, Holocaust survivor, resident in Germany and

native of the small Polish town of Bdzin once quoted Stanisaw Jerzy
Lecs comment on Nazis who were not plagued by any sense of guilt:
Ihr Gewissen war rein; sie haben es nie benutzt; their conscience was
clean: they had never used it.1 An examination of the roles and self-
representations of Nazi functionaries involved in the expropriation, exploi-
tation, degradation and ghettoisation of the Jews of Lustigers hometown
of Bdzin and surrounding areas provides intriguing material for our un-
derstanding of Nazis with a clear conscience. Such analysis can provide
insights both into how the Holocaust was possible and into aspects of the
legacies among those who went on to post-war careers as though they had
never really been Nazis.
Arno Lustiger was one of the very few survivors of the once flourish-
ing Jewish community of Bdzin; tens of thousands who initially survived
the ghettoisation and forced labour policies of the early years of Nazi
occupation were eventually murdered in the extermination facilities of
Auschwitz, situated a mere 25 miles or so to the south. There were three
major waves of deportation: in May and August 1942, and then in the final
ghetto clearance in the summer of 1943. Through the linked ghettoes of
Sosnowiec and Bdzin perhaps 85,000 Jews in total were transported to
the gas chambers of Auschwitz. From the town of Bdzin itself a total of
some 25,000 former inhabitants were murdered (roughly half the citizens
of the town), along with another 10,000 Jews or so from surrounding
towns and villages within the Landkreis of Bdzin, a district with three
towns and 63 rural parishes in eastern Upper Silesia. A key precondition
for the final roundup was the prior concentration of Jews within ever-more
1
Quoted in Arno Lustiger, Sing mit Schmerz und Zorn: Ein Leben fr den
Widerstand (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2004), p. 300.
128 Nazis with a Clear Conscience?
enclosed spaces, under ever-closer control and terrorisation processes

under the oversight of the Landrat, the principal civilian administrator or
chief executive of the area.
Udo Klausa was the Landrat during this period. Klausa was personally
in charge of the area between his initial appointment in February 1940
until his final departure on military service at the beginning of December
1942 although he was physically absent on two shorter stints of military
service: first, from 1 July to mid-October 1940, and then again from the
spring to the late autumn of 1941. After the war, the former Landrat re-
mained under cover until Allied denazification procedures had passed into
German hands; then, through family connections, he succeeded in gain-
ing categorisation in the coveted denazification Group V of Exonerated
Persons, and went on to a successful career in the post-war West German
civil service. His post-war story is one that may be summarised as a com-
bination of innocence and ignorance: he claimed that he was physically
absent whenever anything unpleasant occurred, that he knew little or noth-
ing about what was going on in the area for which he was responsible, and
that, insofar as he was aware that crimes were afoot, he was neither in-
volved personally nor did he wish to stay on any longer and risk innocent-
ly becoming guilty (unschuldig schuldig zu werden). There are many
respects in which his post-war self-representations in both his memoirs
(completed in 1980) and his various statements in connection with legal
investigations coordinated by the Ludwigsburg Central Office for the
Investigation of Nazi Crimes (Zentralstelle) are at odds with the records
in the archives. But the tricks of memory and mis-dating, the stories wo-
ven around particular incidents and the omission of others, all provide key
clues as to how it was possible to have been an active Nazi and to have
subsequently become a committed democratic and upright citizen of the
post-war Federal Republic of Germany apparently untroubled by any
pangs of conscience. Moreover, Klausas experiences, outlook and later
stories are arguably typical of many others.
A comparison of the archival sources and the later self-representations
of the Landrat of Bdzin can reveal the ambiguities and ambivalence on
the part of those charged with carrying out Himmlers racial policies on
the ground. This analysis also suggests some of the strategies later de-
ployed by former Nazis to deal with any stirrings of conscience and to
dispose of any sense of personal guilt for their role in the unfolding perse-
cution of the Jews.2
2
This article is based on my forthcoming book, to be published by Oxford Univer-
sity Press, provisionally entitled Ordinary Nazis. Parts of this article are drawn
with only minor amendments from different sections of the book. I am very grate-
Mary Fulbrook 129
I. Colonial Racism and the Question of Empathy

Lecs comment, while characteristically pithy and pungent, and arguably
true in many cases, glosses over a wider truth about the ways in which the
mass murder of the Jews was effected in practice: many of those function-
aries who laid the groundwork for the eventual programme of extermina-
tion neither intended this outcome nor sought to justify it.
Historians remain deeply divided over the relative roles of perpetra-
tors intentions, motives, political ideologies and social contexts in ex-
plaining the actions of perpetrators.3 In contrast to some of those ordering
and carrying out the actual killing, many of whom may indeed have been
personally motivated by a combination of sadism and antisemitism, many
middle and lower level functionaries were often carried along more by the
demands of their official roles in the system than by any personal animosi-
ties or ideological views on the so-called Jewish question. Such func-
tionaries were often shocked at the ultimately murderous outcomes of
racial policies which they had themselves helped to implement and sus-
tain.
Racial policies in the newly annexed territories were implemented in
the context of what might be called an ideology of colonial racism, root-
ed in and accompanied by a willingness to rule by terror but not directly
motivated by any anticipatory exterminatory intent. One of the ways in
which local functionaries could later retain a clear conscience was by
evading the full realisation of their own roles in the run-up to the final
solution. The physical and psychological preconditions for eventual de-
portation were effected through the early war-time years. The facilitators
of these policies were the local functionaries: they did not design the poli-
cies which were transmitted down to them through the channels of the
administrative hierarchy nor were they at the front lines of violence in the
same way as members of the SS, the Gestapo, or the ordinary police. But
they played a key role in the implementation of racism on the ground
through what was known as Germanisation, an integral part of the un-
folding tragedy that culminated in mass extermination.
On his appointment as Landrat in 1940, Klausa was not new to the role
of administrator of Nazi racism in newly occupied and incorporated terri-
ful to the Leverhulme Trust for a Major Research Fellowship during which much
of the research on Bdzin was carried out; it is related to a wider research project
on generations, discussed in Fulbrook, Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence
through the German Dictatorships (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
3
See for example the differences between Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men,
and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitlers Willing Executioners.
tories. In the autumn of 1938 he had taken up a post in the Sudetenland,

following the German takeover of this border territory after the Munich
conference; he was then transferred to a role in the administration of Bo-
hemia and Moravia after the German invasion of what was left of Czecho-
slovakia in the spring of 1939. With the invasion of Poland in September
1939, Klausas services were transferred again as he became personal
assistant to August Jger who was deputy to the new head of the
Reichsgau Wartheland (often known as the Warthgau), Arthur Greiser. In
the winter of 1939-40 Klausa became on his own admission only too well
acquainted with the brutal character of the policies of Germanisation, as
hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews were ousted from their homes,
held in transit camps in appalling conditions, and transported over the new
border into the German-occupied area of Poland that had become the Gen-
eral Government under Hans Frank. Finally, in February 1940, Klausa
gained his career ambition, the much coveted post as Landrat in the district
of Bdzin in the narrow strip of land east of Kattowitz beyond the so-
called police border setting this region apart from the main territory of
the expanded German Reich.
The Germanisation of the area for which he was now responsible was
a task which, on Udo Klausas own admission, he was relatively happy to
cooperate on, at least in part. This part related to the treatment of the in-
coming Germans. As he puts it in his memoirs although he was unhappy
about the forcible expulsions deemed necessary to make way for the reset-
tlement of Germans, I pursued with more commitment the task of caring
for the German population that was streaming into the area.4 Here, he
seeks to gain the moral high ground by emphasising that he insisted on the
incoming Germans having the right to attend churches even though this
was not entirely in line with Nazi policies at the time. His insistence on
ensuring the possibility of religious observance was also helpful in gaining
positive testimonials on his behalf after the war. And there can be little
doubt from contemporary sources that Klausa was concerned to make the
resettlement of Germans into the Landkreis as smooth as possible for the
newcomers: he gave instructions that the administration should ensure all
possible ways of easing the situation for the incoming Germans, including
the preparation of new areas for living in, and giving them preferential
treatment in acquiring furniture from the Polish property which has been
4
Landesverband Rheinland (henceforth LVR), Klausa 400, Udo Klausa, Erlebt -
Davongekommen. Erinnerungen, Bd. I: Erlebt - berlebt, 1910 1948 (1980),
henceforth cited as Erlebt p. 144.
Mary Fulbrook 131
seized.5 There seems to be no hint of recognition in this contemporary

document that the seized goods and furniture should perhaps not have
been taken from their original owners and handed on to incoming Ger-
mans in this way. It is a simple expression of the mentality of conquest,
seeing forcible robbery as in some sense legitimate acquisition; and the
mentality of colonial racism, in which the needs of Germans are priori-
tised above the rights of other groups.
Such a mentality also allows separation of policies in principle from
responsibility for implementation in practice: it is the brutality of the im-
plementation in practice that is wrong, not the policy itself; hence it is only
those charged with acts entailing physical violence, and indeed only some
kinds of physical violence, who are seen as engaged in wrongdoing. This
then permits a separation between real Nazis and those who were, pre-
sumably, only nominal or in some sense coerced into being members of
the NSDAP. Treating Nazis as others and self-distancing is a key tactic
to preserve a sense of clear conscience. Despite having been a member of
the NSDAP from February 1933 reported in terms which make it look as if
he had little choice if he were to pursue his chosen career right through to
the collapse of the Third Reich. Klausa, in his memoirs, repeatedly dis-
tances himself from those he terms the Nazis. The Nazis are always
someone else: fanatics, brown-shirts, or SS members. Civilian administra-
tors are cast in the role they took on in fact only after the war: loyal serv-
ants of the state, in no sense political. This is a direct misrepresentation of
the highly politicised nature both in terms of personal commitment and in
terms of practical tasks and responsibilities of the civil service in the Third
Reich. But it reflects a very widespread willingness in post-war Germa-
ny to lay all the blame on a few people at the top in the Hitler and his
henchmen view of history - and on the front line of the Nazi physical
force, particularly the SS and the Gestapo - while retaining a claim to the
decency of the Army, a claim that was only truly undermined in the
public consciousness by the Wehrmacht Exhibition of the 1990s. Even
though completed as late as 1980, Klausas memoirs are written in very
much the 1950s mindset.
This in his memoirs to continue with the example of the Germanisa-
tion policies Klausa suggests that the reverse side of the resettlement
coin, that of moving people out in order to make way for those being
moved in, was something with which he would have nothing to do, hav-
ing, he claimed, had quite enough of this during his stint in Posen. He
5
Archivum Pastwowe w Katowicach, Starosta Powiatu Bedzinskiego, 771 / 69,
circular of 14 April 1942 to the Brgermeister and Amtskommissare signed by
Klausa, Fol. 10.
emphatically distances himself from the actual practices of removing peo-

ple from their homes and sending them into the General Government, in
order to make way for incoming German resettlers, and typically shifts
full responsibility onto the SS. With some self-contradiction, Klausa
claims that he both witnessed terrible scenes that were carried out by the
SS and, yet, was never actually present:
There was no need or opportunity for any participation. It was all done by
the SS, and at best one could stand by with tied hands and see what heart-
rending scenes were being played out. I was never there.6
Curiously, only a few pages later in his memoirs, Klausa concedes that the
gendarmerie, for whom he had responsibility, did in fact assist in the re-
settlements.
Klausa may not have felt any need to be physically present at forced
expulsions and heart-rending scenes Yet, officially, he held ultimate
responsibility for housing policies and forced population movements, with
the civilian administration working closely hand in hand with the police
authorities to ensure that German policies were imposed as smoothly as
possible. The records of the time indicate that the Landrat was deeply
involved in the expulsion of people from their own homes and forcible
resettlement against their will, both in terms of his official position in
principle and his actions in carrying out his duties in practice. But the
archival legacies give us little sense of what this meant for the people
involved, nor do Klausas memoirs.
In Klausas own self-representations, there is barely a hint of what
went on with respect to the tens of thousands of Jews in the Landkreis of
Bdzin; there is only a brief comment implying that some relocation had
already taken place before his time. Referring to the northern areas of his
district, Klausa comments:
There were no Jews in this part of the district, they were all concentrated
in the three towns, if there ever had been any Jews in other areas. During
my time no resettlement in this respect took place.7
This, like much else in Klausas representation of the experiences of Jews

in the Landkreis of Bdzin, would appear to be a revealing and, indeed, in
this case, a massive failure of memory. It is also a failure to register the
effects of German policies on those who were their objects and victims.
6
LVR, Klausa 400, Erlebt, p. 143.
7
Mary Fulbrook 133
During his time in Bdzin, Klausa was instrumental to Germanisation

policies in several ways. He agreed to and assisted in the implementation
of a whole range of policies that increasingly restricted where Jews could
live, how far and by what means they could travel, the hours during which
they were permitted to be outdoors, the quantity and character of food
available to them; he also oversaw the work of the gendarmerie in main-
taining law and order in the rural parts of his country, and supported the
imposition of sanctions for transgression of any of the myriad of rules and
regulations imposed by the Germans, including failure to display the stig-
matising Jewish star. A systematic analysis of archival sources document-
ing the process of expropriation of Jews from their own homes, their re-
striction to increasingly over-crowded and unsanitary accommodation in
poorer areas of town, and their eventual concentration in exclusively Jew-
ish ghetto areas shows the guiding hand of the Landrat throughout. So too
does an analysis of support for incidents of terrorisation through the impo-
sition of retributions in reprisal for any sign of disobedience on the part
of the subjugated population.
All of these activities, and the associated changes that took place in the
living and working conditions of the Jews over the period from 1940 to
1942, eventually proved seminal in the way it was possible for tens of
thousands of Jews to be deported to mass murder in the round-ups of May
and August 1942 and the eventual clearance of the linked ghettos of Sos-
nowiec and Bdzin in the summer of 1943. The process of ghettoisation
may not have initially been intended as a stage on the way to mass murder,
but, logistically, this was its eventual functional outcome. All the steps
taken along the way made it ultimately possible for those at the front line
of violence, the SS, the Gestapo and the ordinary police forces to put
into effect the selections, incarceration and deportation of some 85,000
Jews from this area to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Had they not been
terrorised, humiliated, degraded and forced to live in appalling conditions
on subsistence rations, physically constrained and constricted, the Jews
would have had a somewhat less difficult time in seeking to resist or es-
cape the fate which ultimately befell them.
There was clearly a conflict of moral codes by the time Klausa came to
write his memoirs. While in the archival documents he discusses quite
factually the logistic questions surrounding the relocation of Jews into ever
smaller areas of concentration, virtually none of this appears in Klausas
own memoirs. In the latter, he often professes a degree of sympathy with
the subjugated Jews of his area, commenting for example that they lived in
the most miserable circumstances in a particularly poor Jewish quarter
in town, and he suggests that experiencing acts of early terror must have
been frightful. But he denies either that there were any Jews ever living in
areas other than this particular place, or that, if they did indeed once live
somewhere else and were subsequently moved, he himself had nothing to
do with this. The systematic concentration of Jews within ever smaller
areas, cramped into ever worse housing conditions, which he as Landrat
oversaw and implemented, finds no place in his memories. He claims that
he finally left for military service in August 1942 before the final phase of
ghettoisation into an enclosed space, which, in the chilling minutes of the
meeting of the Bdzin municipal authorities with Dreier, the Gestapo offi-
cial in charge of the Jewish affairs at the Gestapo head office in Kattowitz
explicitly intended to make the final clearance of the ghetto and the
cleansing of Bdzin of its Jewish population so much easier.
Klausa appears to have had little empathy at the time with those groups
in the population who were the objects of Nazi discrimination and subor-
dination. There is a failure of empathy and of any degree of thought for the
impact of German policies on those who were being ousted from their
homes, whose possessions and livelihoods were being taken from them,
and who were being forced into living in unsanitary and often life-
threatening circumstances, falling prey to often fatal diseases exacerbated
by malnutrition and unhygienic conditions, or being incarcerated and taken
to slave labour, or put to death for failing to cooperate with their own
enforced repression.
II. The Limits of the Civilising Mission

Other functionaries, too, appear to have shared an unshakable faith in the
superiority of the Germans and the inferiority of the different populations
over which they had come to rule. The diary of one Alexander Hohen-
stein (pseudonym) provides some evidence of contemporary responses; in
particular, both his and Klausas growing disquiet indicate the limits of
what was seen as acceptable from the perspective of colonial racism. Alt-
hough their careers were dissimilar, with Hohenstein demonstrating mark-
edly less willingness to go along with the system than Klausa did, a brief
comparison is nevertheless revealing.
For a year and a half, in 1941/42, Hohenstein was a lower-level local
functionary (Amtskommissar) and mayor of the town of Poniatowec (also
anonymised) in the newly annexed Reichsgau of the Wartheland. Hohen-
stein was sent here, to the colonial borderland territory of the eastern prov-
inces of the expanded Greater German Reich as a form of punishment for
having got into some trouble with the Nazi authorities in his previous
position back in the old Reich. In the summer of 1942 Hohenstein was
Mary Fulbrook 135
subjected to disciplinary procedures as a result of which he had to resign

from his post, was expelled from the NSDAP, and returned to the old
Reich. Following a period working in industry, he was sent to the front;
he survived the war but after the war was never able to take up his former
career in the civil service again, having been discredited and tainted by a
group III evaluation as a lesser offender, later reduced to group IV, fel-
low traveller (Mitlufer) in the denazification procedures. Increasingly
bitter, he handed over his diaries to the Institute of Contemporary History
in Munich, who published an edited version in 1963.8
Klausa and Hohenstein were both members of the by now well-known
war-youth generation.9 Hohenstein was born in 1901, Klausa in 1910.
Educated professionals, they shared much of the latent racism of the day,
viewing German civilisation as inherently superior to the ways of the
Polish people they were charged with subjugating. They both to some
extent registered the suffering of the Jews in the areas for which they were
responsible. In different ways, their disquiet about the escalation of Nazi
policies into genocide is evident from their own self-representations, and
in Hohensteins case also confirmed by the records of his career.
While throwing himself with considerable energy and much by way of
ideological aspirations into the mission of civilising this borderland area,
Hohenstein became increasingly troubled by Nazi racism in practice. He
records with shock the conditions he witnessed in the overcrowded ghetto
of his town. On being asked to take in more Jews, expelled from a neigh-
bouring town, Hohenstein is pleased with the way he went to some per-
sonal lengths to ease their journey, organising some transport for posses-
sions and those less able to walk the several kilometres to their new
homes, and trying to institute some sort of system for the allocation of
cramped and scarce space in the already over-crowded Jewish quarter. A
sense of class affinities overcame racial differences when Hohenstein
invited the local leader of the Jewish Council and his highly educated and
also professionally active wife to his own home, the Landrats official
residence for an informal social evening in December 1941. It was on this
occasion that Hohenstein allegedly heard the first intimations of the poli-
cies of mass murder now unfolding in nearby Chemno, the first camp
used for killing by gassing, starting already in December 1941. Hohenstein
was also deeply shocked when asked to provide a sixth candidate for a
public hanging in March 1942, which he failed to do; he also failed to
8
Alexander Hohenstein, Warthelndisches Tagebuch (Munich: dtv 1963).
9
Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten Das Fhrungskorps des
Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002); Fulbrook,
Dissonant Lives.
engage with the appropriate enthusiasm in this ritual of humiliation, in-

stead signalling by his body language looking down at his boots his
disapproval of the spectacle. This public hanging presaged the incarcera-
tion of the entire Jewish population of the town within the church and their
subsequent deportation and murder, a sequence effected around one month
later. It was in part because of many minor incidents and small intimations
of discomfort on Hohensteins part with racial policy along the way, and
in part because of his lack of full support of the public execution, that he
was ultimately disciplined, stripped of his offices, and sent back to the
west For Hohenstein, the civilising mission of colonial racism went up to,
but did not encompass, the final stages of mass misery and murder.
Klausa too appears to have become increasingly uncomfortable with
the course of developments in the Landkreis of Bdzin for which he was
responsible although he never lost his position or jeopardised his career
within the Nazi state over this. As far as we know, he cooperated fully in
his far more significant position in the hierarchy of local government in a
similar public execution which took place in Bdzin in April 1942, again
just one month before the first major deportation of Jews from the town to
their deaths in the gas chambers, in this case at Auschwitz. He does not
mention this hanging in his memoirs, but, given Klausas official position
as Landrat, it seems highly likely that he would have had to play an offi-
cial role gracing and observing the spectacle. With the deportations to
death in May and August 1942, however, Klausa appears to have experi-
enced a great deal of unease, arguably receiving psychosomatic expression
in an indefinable sense of physical malaise and digestive difficulties
although these also perhaps resulted from the illness the previous summer
and autumn that had caused him to be invalided out of the Russian cam-
paign.10 Whatever the cause, the symptoms were not easily cured by phys-
ical means: his wife complains repeatedly in letters to her mother during
the early summer of 1942 of Klausas nerves. Although he returned from
a lengthy rest cure visibly sun-tanned, well-fed and physically fit, his
nerves remained terrible, such that the rest cure appeared to have been
totally wasted money. Yet after the major deportation of August 1942 had
been completed, he appeared again more relaxed and his mood notably
lifted.
It was at this stage that Klausa seems to have made moves to return to
the front. There are, as we shall see in a moment, difficulties with the story
10
This is the interpretative gloss provided by Ute Benz, who quotes under a pseu-
donym, Elisabeth Hagen, from the letters of Klausas wife Alexandra to her
mother during this time. See Ute Benz, Frauen im Nationalsozialismus:
Dokumente und Zeugnisse (Munich: Beck, 1993), p. 89.
Mary Fulbrook 137
he later told, which is factually untrue in many details. But it is possible to

see some underlying psychological logic to his tale of disliking what he
saw and offering himself up to risk his own life at the front rather than
remaining party to emerging crimes on an unprecedented scale in eastern
Upper Silesia. Unlike Hohenstein, Klausa did not step sufficiently out of
line to be disciplined; but it is quite possible that potential pangs of con-
science began to make themselves felt at this point.
Both Hohenstein and Klausa were, in different ways, constrained by
the system to act in certain ways although with greater or lesser degrees of
responsibility and constraint in each case. Hohenstein was indeed explicit-
ly aware of them and commented at the time on the constraints of the
system; Klausa, in his memoirs, only briefly raises the question of whether
it had been right to serve such a system, only to dismiss this question as
one too large to be addressed in that context. After the war, neither appears
to have felt any qualms about the ways in which they had chosen to act,
and both seem to have retained a sense of their own personal decency,
with nothing on their conscience. Hohenstein, even after he had been dis-
ciplined, had lost his post and his membership of the NSDAP, and was on
his way back to western Germany in some disgrace, bid farewell in his
diary to the area of the Warthegau that he was leaving with a paean of
praise to the superiority of the Germans and continuing support for the
German civilising mission with which his activities had been imbued
throughout. Klausa repeatedly asserted his innocence, refusing to make the
connections between what he had done and what was able to develop as a
result of his actions.
There were further mechanisms in play in Klausas case that allowed
such a sense of innocence to remain unchallenged for the records of the
time were not actually all that easy to square with a rather different post-
war sense of morality. Hence, stories, gaps and absences are required to
set the now increasingly unpalatable records of former times into a more
acceptable moral framework of interpretation.
III. The Distortions of Memory and the Function of Stories

The Jews were not only outside the bounds of the moral community with
whom Klausa could empathise at the time, they were also apparently be-
yond his capacity to remember, at least explicitly in the later self-
representations available in the archival or family records. Neither in his
memoirs nor his defence statements to the investigations coordinated by
the Ludwigsburg Central Office, does Klausa recall even having actually
witnessed any acts of brutality taking place in the county for which he was
responsible, with a couple of significant exceptions, on which more in a

moment.
Klausas archivally documented words of praise for the local gendar-
merie, when they undertook reprisal killings or when they shot Jews at-
tempting to escape using the infamous phrase, auf der Flucht
erschossen find no mention in his memoirs or defence statements. He
fails to remember in his memoirs the incident at the little hamlet of Celiny
in June 1940, when 32 innocent people were put to death by being shot
against the wall of a house in reprisal for the death of a German gen-
darme; his memory should have been jogged by the fact that this incident
was thoroughly investigated by the Ludwigsburg Central Office for the
Investigation of Nazi Crimes (Zentralstelle) in response to which he erro-
neously claimed that he was away fighting in France and not in charge of
the county at the time. In sworn statements to the legal authorities in the
post-war investigations, also Klausa wrongly asserts that he was again
away on military service in the autumn of 1942, when a gendarme by the
name of Paul Grytz shot dead a Jew by the name of Kupferberg and his
son after they had been arrested simply for being found at large, walking
across a field rather than remaining under Nazi control pending deporta-
tion to death. On both these occasions, Klausa demonstrably gives false
dates of absence on military service.
But it is difficult to explain away some events to which he clearly had
to be a witness; and it is also difficult to claim a limited degree of opposi-
tion or resistance if one also claims one is unaware of the criminal nature
of the regime. There are two key stories in Klausas self-representation
which illustrate his desire to relay his own turning point in realisation and
resistance without at the same time conceding more by way of knowledge
of, even participation in, what was going on than he really cared to admit.
When Klausa does admit to some limited awareness of or at least sus-
picion about the essentially criminal character of what was going on in
the area, he is able to represent himself as a sort of hero. He briefly con-
cedes that he only once witnessed a deportation: he claims both in his
memoirs and his defence statements that he saw, from a distance, a miser-
able procession of perhaps 1,000 Jews passing near his house one
lunchtime; flanked by their own Jewish militia and led by a mere two
German policemen, they were headed for the nearby railway station. This
story holds the status of key experience in Klausas memoirs: he alleged-
ly, on seeing this group, immediately telephoned the Sosnowiec Chief of
Police, Alexander von Woedtke, who supposedly provided him with a
reassuring story about their resettlement in Russia. Nevertheless, accord-
ing to Klausas account, he now felt that he should make an immediate
Mary Fulbrook 139
move to get out of the area and no longer be associated with any criminal
acts potentially underway there. He thus supposedly arranged an almost
immediate return to military service at the front, rather than remaining in
an indispensable (unabkmmlich, uk) position on the home front, and
further claims that he then left for the army within a matter of days. This
story is factually incorrect on several counts. In reality, Klausa had been in
Bdzin on a period of extended leave from active military service on med-
ical grounds; he had a scheduled medical examination that happened to
coincide with the first day of the August 1942 deportations, on which
occasion he was found fit to return to the army in a motorised capacity;
and he did not in fact return to the front until as late as 1 December 1942.
Moreover, in the course of the autumn he was in charge when the final
ghettoisation pending the ultimate deportation in order to cleanse Bdzin
of Jews was officially agreed. Yet, Klausa can use this coincidence of
dating to tell a somewhat more heroic tale, one which also conveniently
has him absent at key dates in the course of the autumn.
Another part of this story has Klausa allegedly attempting to save a
Jew from deportation: his own housekeeper, gardener, janitor and facto-
tum, one Laib Flojm, along with Flojms wife and two small children. The
stories are mutually inconsistent and seriously misrepresent the details of
the historical record. Piecing together what probably actually happened
although this is not completely possible it would seem that Klausa, in
order to save Flojm from deportation, in effect participated in the selection
process taking place in a large sports ground just across the road from his
own home, where some 24,000 Jews were held over a period of three days
during which more than 4,000 were selected for sending down the railway
tracks to Auschwitz. In the process, it would appear that Klausa persuaded
the SS officers undertaking the selection that his Jew, Laib Flojm, re-
mained an essential worker in the area, as did many other local employers
as well as the infamous SS Organisation Schmelt, an employer of tens of
thousands of Jewish slave labourers in Silesia.11 The subsequent story of
having hidden not only Flojm but also his wife and children until his own
return to the front, portraying himself as at the mercy of the Nazis almost
as much as were the Flojm family, and hence no longer able to help them
provides Klausas self-representation with a semblance of courage in the
face of all personal risks but is again not borne out by the facts of his own
far later departure than that portrayed.
Without going into further detail here, it is clear that Klausa construct-
ed stories which both appeared to fit the known facts of what went on in
11
See further Sybille Steinbacher, Musterstadt Auschwitz. Germanisierungs-
politik und Judenmord in Ostoberschlesien (Munich: Saur, 2000).
the area during the time in which he was nominally in charge, but which
also provided him with an alibi of absence or ignorance, or both. It is quite
possible that some of his own dating was hazy, and his memory less than
accurate in every detail. But it is also notable that the varying dates he
gives of his absences on military duties, when we know from the archival
record that he was actually present in the area at the time, often conven-
iently got him off the hook as far as further legal investigations were con-
cerned.
Yet, there is perhaps an underlying truth to these stories: they register a
feeling of unease about the ways in which colonial racism was being sub-
sumed within a policy of genocide. It thus reflects some inner sense, if not
the outer facts of the situation, and it allows Klausa at least partially to
reconcile the details of that time, before 1945 with the shift in moral
frameworks and self-interpretation that took place in the altered interpre-
tive context of the post-war period. The function of story-telling in this
way is evident throughout his memoirs: his stories, of which there are
many, both smaller and larger, portray him constantly in a good light;
perhaps this was in itself a defensive strategy to explain not merely to his
family, for whom the memoirs were primarily written, but also to himself
that he really need have nothing on his conscience.
IV. The Limits of All Evil: Behind the Gates of Auschwitz

A major ploy for all former Nazis is to restrict the location and character
of ultimate evil to Auschwitz. In a sense, for Klausa, too, Auschwitz
appeared as the final threshold, the ultimate crossing of the moral bound-
aries, with the infamous archway entrance of Birkenau marking the gates
to the real kingdom of evil. Here again, stories hold a key function in the
clarification of conscience.
Klausa claimed in his memoirs that he had only heard about Ausch-
witz, or perhaps about what was really going on in Auschwitz, relatively
late in the war, when by chance he met a former school comrade on a
train. The old schoolfriend was wearing an SS-uniform, allegedly shock-
ing Klausa (or so he represents it in his memoirs). On being asked by
Klausa what his job entailed, the friend reportedly whispered back that
Klausa should not ask, it was terrible. Klausa uses this story to demon-
strate, once again, his own innocence and supposed ignorance of the worst
depths of the Nazi regime. Such train stories are a relatively typical way
of conceding that one had in fact known something rather than nothing,
but only indirectly, at second hand, registering with a degree of shock and
self-distancing from responsibility.
Mary Fulbrook 141
Even if we try to take Klausas version of this story at face value, his
mode of expression is illuminating. As Klausa put it of his former school
friend:
I am sure he did nothing wrong. I assume he had to stand in a watchtower

and shoot if a prisoner escaped. He quite certainly had nothing to do with
the actual task of execution in Auschwitz.12
One does have to wonder what, in Klausas understanding, the actual task
of execution then really consisted in, if shooting at anyone trying to es-
cape this place of mass murder, this anus of the world, was not included.
And who, if participation in evil really were restricted purely to those
assisting in the functioning of the gas chambers and crematoria, would
then be held actually responsible? Perhaps only the members of the
Sonderkommandos who did the dirty work of physically assisting the
condemned into the shower blocks and then subsequently pulling out the
bodies and putting them into the furnaces but not the SS guards on the
watchtowers whose task it was to imprison also these, who would in turn
soon become victims of the same process?
In any event, it is remarkable that some forty years after the war, in re-
tirement in the affluent western Federal Republic of Germany, Klausa
could still be resorting to the essentially Nazi notion that it was in some
way intrinsically legitimate to shoot someone who was trying to escape,
echoing the old phrase, auf der Flucht erschossen used so many times
when innocent people were killed as they sought to escape Nazi brutality
or killed when they had been found after escape and brought back to
Auschwitz.
Klausas qualms and doubts had arguably already begun in the course
of 1942, when he had himself realised what Auschwitz meant, and not,
as he claimed in his memoirs, some two years later in a supposed chance
encounter on a train. As he put it in one of his defence statements made on
16 December 1975 although he allegedly did not at that time know where
the transports were being taken nor was he then aware of what he called
this function of Auschwitz, nevertheless it was clear to me that a crime
was in train here. And I wanted to have nothing to do with this crime.13
Wherever Klausa actually drew the line of where evil really began, of
significance here is the fact that he seems to have baulked at the final stage
of the persecution of the Jews: their extermination by gassing, if not by
shooting while trying to escape. This is very likely a quite typical syn-
12
13
Bundesarchiv (henceforth BArch) B 162/7723, fol. 212.
drome; and it is for this reason that an excessive concentration on the ulti-
mate terror of Auschwitz while entirely justified in itself can also
inadvertently aid in the post-war camouflage of those who facilitated the
Nazi system of racist persecution all the way up to, but not including, this
final threshold.
The story has a further odd twist: Klausa shores up his assertions about
his former schoolfriends alleged innocence by adding: Besides, I heard
after the war that he had after all succeeded in getting away from Ausch-
witz and getting to the front. Moreover, his former schoolfriend survived
and was probably also not pestered about his role before 1945.14 There
are striking echoes here of Klausas own story: that this friend succeeded
in getting away from the ultimate place of evil and going instead to the
front, and that he was never prosecuted after the war.
This story as a whole functions, then, as what literary scholars call a
mise-en-abme, a text within a text, a miniature story mirroring the story as
a whole: nearby, in some supposedly legitimate way assisting but not
actually a culpable participant in a site of evil; escaping from the site of
evil to the military front represented as entirely honourable; never being
prosecuted or found guilty after the war, all, in a concentrated form, sug-
gesting a pattern or composite package intended to convince others of
ones innocence.
The cynical view would say that this partial admission of knowledge
combined with a simultaneous self-distancing, this determination to pro-
fess a degree of fractured ignorance and yet proven innocence, was a post-
war self-representation with which Klausa - and innumerable other former
Nazis - could comfortably live. Not being brought to account by the Ger-
man courts, which were notoriously tardy and lenient in their investigation
and prosecution of those involved in the machinery of the Nazi state, was
held up as definitive proof of innocence. Of course, in the strictly legal
sense, all are innocent until proven guilty, but that of course depends on
individuals facing a fair trial rather than evading justice and misrepresent-
ing their past.
V. Absence and Amnesia

Klausa was also far from alone in his later patterns of post-war self-
representation. Many of Klausas colleagues in the Bdzin and Sosnowiec
area professed that they, too, had nothing to do with and had known little
or nothing of what was really going on in the area: the Ludwigsburg files
14
Mary Fulbrook 143
are full of similar kinds of testimony from members of the civilian admin-
istration and individuals involved in economic exploitation of Jewish la-
bour. People protested that they had never seen, heard or in any sense
participated in anything untoward going on around them.
None of the three key individuals who had worked closely together to
agree and implement policies of ghettoisation, Sosonowiec police chief
von Woedtke, Sosnowiec city mayor Franz-Josef Schnwlder, and
Bdzin Landrat Klausa seemed after the war to want to accept that they
bore any responsibility for the ghettoisation of the Jews or even knew
anything much about the bloody ending of the ghettoes they had created.
The former city mayor of Sosnowiec from 7 January 1940 to 26 Janu-
ary 1945, Franz-Josef Schnwlder, made a statement to the Ludwigsburg
investigation on 11 June 1960, at the age of 63, at which time he was a
practising architect in Wesel. He alleged he had been on holiday in the
summer of 1942 when on his account the one and only action against Jews
in his area might have taken place; and he claimed that, he therefore had
known nothing about and had nothing to do with any maltreatment of Jews
in his area:
Up until summer 1942 no deportations of Jews took place. In the summer

of 1942 I went on holiday. After my return I heard that I the meantime in
the space of three days all the Jews apart from a work troop of around
1,200 men and women had been deported, and as far as I knew taken to
Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. As a reason for the deportation was given
that the Jews if collected together in a larger camp could be more easily
taken to work. What happened to them I dont know.15
Conveniently forgetting his own role in the ghettoisation of the Jews and
indeed also the major ghetto clearance of the following summer, 1943,
Schnwlder went on to assert:
I knew nothing of any maltreatment of Jews in Sosnowitz. The Jews were

completely excluded from our communal administration. They were under
their own Jewish administration, which in turn received its direction from
the office for deploying Jewish labour under the leadership of the SS-
Oberfhrer Schmelt.16
Thus, any miseries of life in the ghetto were represented as, essentially, the
problems of the Jews own ghetto administration and of the SS.
15
BArch B 162/1608, fol. 19R.
16
BArch B 162/1608, fols 19R-20.
A similar pattern is evident in the statements made by the former Sos-

nowiec police chief, Alexander von Woedtke. In his testimony of 8 March
1960, when he was living in retirement in Gttingen, von Woedtke tries to
shift some of the responsibility onto Schnwlder while at the same time
partially exonerating him:
I would like to mention that Herr Schnwlder as the city mayor of Sos-
nowitz had to carry the major burden of this moving of Jews. This action
went without a hitch; it did not come to any excesses. I know that he
[Schnwlder] was in fact a National Socialist, but was not a persecutor of
Jews. Since Herr Schnwlder took his duties seriously, he was in part re-
sponsible for Jews.17
Von Woedtke also lays the blame for Jewish living conditions squarely on
the Jews themselves, omitting any mention of the ways in which the Ger-
man administration was actually responsible for their appalling situation:
I would like to mention that the Jews in Sosnowitz had their own admin-
istration and their own militia.18
Von Woedtke does concede the participation of police forces under his
command in what he suggests was a purely administrative role in clear-
ing the ghetto in the short time available, which occasioned some diffi-
culties: The clearance of the ghetto had to take place in such a short time
that I had difficulties with my police tasks of keeping order.19 But he
suggests that it was not his police forces, but rather those of the state po-
lice headquarters in Kattowitz, who were actually responsible for any
political aspects of this action:
I would like to emphasise that my office had only to fulfil police duties
with respect to order and administration, in contrast to the political tasks of
the State Police headquarters, which was subordinate to the Reich Security
Main Office.20
Curiously, however, even members of the state police headquarters in

Kattowitz professed to have known nothing about it, being away in other
locations for months (as Walter Baucke claimed) or claiming that (in the
words of Franz Gawlik):
17
BArch B 162/1608, fol. 127.
18
BArch B 162/1608, fol. 127.
19
BArch B 162/1608, fol. 129.
20
BArch B 162/1608, fol. 126.
Mary Fulbrook 145
I cannot say anything about the resettlement of the Jews, because I had
nothing to do with it Besides, there were no Jews any more in Kattowitz,
but only in Sosnowitz still, where there was a big ghetto.21
Others involved in various lower level capacities in the area had similar
gaps in memory and made similar attempts to shift responsibility onto
others. Rudolf Braune, a former Nazi businessman who had taken over
Jewish concerns that had been expropriated, was aged 52 and living in
Hamburg when in the summer and autumn of 1961 he gave intermittent
statements, repeatedly breaking off or postponing meetings with the legal
authorities. But he too claimed he knew nothing and witnessed little, even
though he had allegedly tried to protect his Jews from deportation.22
Johannes Karl Hhnel, a former postal services worker (Postbeamter) and
now a refugee from Upper Silesia (in post-war West German representa-
tions, then, one of the many German victims) living in the southern Ba-
varian resort of Lenggries in the foothills of the Alps, testified in 1960 that
he knew that around 6,000 Jews from Olkusz (Ilkenau) were deported to
Auschwitz. But according to his testimony, this had taken place at a time
when he himself happened to be absent on unspecified other duties, else-
where. He also claimed that on his return he did not actually register the
fact that the Jews were no longer there, because even before their deporta-
tion they had not been allowed out of their houses and ghetto area, any-
way, so their absence made little impact on him.23 Theodor Clausen, a
former senior municipal inspector and registrar in Sosnowiec, and living in
Munich at the time of his testimony, claimed that he had never seen any-
thing of actions against Jews or of their resettlement, nor had he ever
witnessed any deaths or maltreatment of Jews or Poles in the town because
his office lay on the other side of town, some three to four kilometres
away from the ghetto, and because he worked until late in the evening in
his office.24 Johan Weifloch, a former criminal investigator in Sosno-
wiec, had similarly neither seen nor heard of any actions against the Jew-
ish population, because his activities concentrated primarily on the in-
coming post and the news service.25
Even Heinrich Mentgen, Klausas much-praised former head of the
gendarmerie in the Landkreis of Bdzin, had seen nothing, knew nothing
and could remember nothing. He too had allegedly been away - attending
21
BArch B 162/19657, fols. 506, 517.
22
BArch B 162/1609.
23
BArch B 162/7711, fols. 126-8.
24
BArch B 162/7723, fol. 53.
25
BArch B 162/7723, fol. 45.
his sons wedding in either 1942 or 1943, he could not remember which
year - when, so his driver supposedly informed him on his return, all the
Jews of Bdzin had been deported. He was taken to see the still evident
bloodstains at the railway station, but had, he claimed, never witnessed
anything himself.26 He was never challenged on where he had been during
the other year when his son was not getting married but another major
deportation took place, nor on what he had been doing during all the
months in between.
In short, those who had been involved in running the German system
in a wide variety of capacities in the area later professed that they had seen
and heard nothing at all while an estimated 85,000 people were deported
out of the towns, villages and surrounding localities and through the ghet-
toes of Bdzin and Sosnowiec on their way to labour camps and the gas
chambers of Auschwitz. These Germans all claimed, however implausibly,
that they had been working late, were engaged in other duties, away on
holiday, attending a sons wedding or in Klausas case, had disap-
peared to the front at the time of any violent incident or deportation that
they might have been expected to have witnessed; and they had supposed-
ly only at a later date gleaned, at second hand by being told something of
what had allegedly taken place. For all the differences of detail, the gen-
eral pattern of these stories is remarkably similar: engagement in purely
routine and respectable duties; absence from the area when someone else
did something wrong; later partial insights gained through snippets and
clues.
Whatever the reason for these post-war cover-ups, people like von
Woedtke, Schnwlder and Klausa certainly had been more involved in
events in the area than they were willing to admit. The cynical view, then,
might see these apparent gaps and distortions in memory as in line with an
unofficial post-war consensus that the best defence strategy was simply a
blanket denial of any relevant knowledge. Whether this pattern of self-
representation was actively coordinated among former colleagues who
were still in personal contact with one another (as we know at least some
of them were), or by talking to people of similar experiences, views and
outlooks, or independently and almost subconsciously as part of a general
manner of talking and a climate of the times in post-war West Germany,
is not easy to judge.
A more charitable view might say that Udo Klausa, in particular, had
not been as proactive in pursuing antisemitic policies and taking the initia-
tive to quite the same extent as von Woedtke and Schnwlder, and had
genuinely been absent for longer periods although not quite as long as he
26
BArch B 162/7723, fols. 214-6.
Mary Fulbrook 147
later claimed. He had perhaps been internally more opposed to develop-

ments than these colleagues and had felt a greater degree of unease about
what it was he was inevitably being caught up in while remaining in his
role in the area. He therefore perhaps did not feel that he personally had
anything to cover up, and was not prepared to engage in a fuller discussion
of his role, finding it easier to claim absence from the scene by a some-
what elastic treatment of his dates of army service. Possibly he had, by this
time, even come to believe his own story, was by now genuinely confused
about dates, and had in any event barely registered the effects of Nazi
policies on the victims and the miseries all around him at the time, thus
quite easily failing to remember them later.
VI. Conclusions
This story of an ordinary Nazi thus has many ramifications for our un-
derstanding of how Auschwitz was possible both in terms of mentalities
and the consequences of behaviour.
Caught in the system himself although in a very privileged position,
with many options still open to him, unlike the victims of Nazism Klausa
was perhaps internally immobilised. He was, and had been since his youth,
committed to serving his state in civilian administration and fighting for
his fatherland in war-time. Once he did finally realise what the former
really meant in practice, which was a very long way down the road, but a
road along which he was accompanied by very many others, Klausa was
effectively trapped in an emotional and political impasse. He himself ad-
mitted that he dared not speak out, that one had to be terribly careful, as
he later put it in his memoirs, and he was clearly not willing to risk the
lives and well-being of himself and his family by any outward resistance,
however discomfited he may have been by belated but growing awareness
of the murderous character of the system which he served.
Suffering from nerves, Klausa was unable to articulate, either then or
later, any explicit opposition to what was going on, or even to
acknowledge quite what he knew; he perhaps even did not want to know
what he knew. His only resort seems to have been to ensure that, despite
continued and perhaps in part psychosomatic malaise, he managed to pass
a scheduled army medical examination, persuade the authorities that he
was fit for military service, and return to the army, pretending, arguably as
much for his own psychological health and career as for avoidance of
prosecution, that he really had known nothing about it.
Whatever Klausas private feelings and reactions at the time, it is also
undoubtedly the case that he did not baulk at any stage in terms of his own
actual behaviour and his faithful fulfilment of his official role along the way,
which ultimately made Auschwitz possible: he played his allotted part in the
system, throughout, and faithfully implemented the racial policies of stigma-
tisation, segregation, containment and ghettoisation. Colonial racism, which
is not the same thing as what Goldhagen calls exterminatory anti-
Semitism, was a key element in developing the preconditions for genocide.
Nor, as far as the sources of the time reveal, did Klausa at any stage
show any visible concern for the suffering caused to fellow human beings
by Nazi policies up to this point until, several decades after the events he
portrayed, he sought to evoke a sense of sympathy for the victims of Nazi
policies in his memoirs. A strict separation in his mind between groups
defined on racial terms and ordered into a hierarchy of superiority and
inferiority was a precondition for effecting the policies of colonial racism.
It also allowed a lack of empathy with the victims of these policies: a total
failure to imagine and sympathise with their experiences and conditions of
life and death.
It is in part because of the attitudes and actions of people like this high-
ly educated lawyer and professional civil servant - who appears only to
have become queasy about his own involvement in the system once he
realised what was to be the next destination in the chain, the eventual
outcome of segregation and ghettoisation - that it was ultimately possible
for those at the front line of violence to put the Holocaust into practice.
Klausas case is perhaps located at a particularly significant position in the
spectrum, having held a role of responsibility in civilian administration in
a district so close to the gas chambers of Auschwitz; but it is also a very
ordinary example in the sense that the same lack of empathy with the vic-
tims of racism at earlier stages and the later determination to have known
nothing about it were very widespread. This failure of empathy, this un-
willingness to see or register what was actually going on, was a precondi-
tion for the functioning of the system and hence, eventually, for the ma-
chinery of extermination.
For the facilitators of Nazi rule in this province, the denial of any
knowledge of Auschwitz, or rather of this function of Auschwitz as a
final threshold of evil, functioned as a convenient means of self-
exculpation. From the post-war perspective of these facilitators, all that
was needed were brief alibis and tales of absence at crucial times, some-
times combined with hints of fragmentary hearsay. The vast majority of
those questioned by the West German legal authorities and answering
along these lines were then able to live out their retirements in a degree of
peace and affluence, untroubled by uneasy memories or any sense of an
unclear conscience.
A QUESTION OF HONOR:
SOME REMARKS ON THE SEXUAL HABITS
OF GERMAN SOLDIERS DURING WORLD WAR II
REGINA MHLHUSER
On 15 March 1946, Hermann Wilhelm Gring, the former Supreme

Commander of the German Air Force during World War II, testified at the
International Military Court in Nuremberg on the grounds of conspiracy
(of launching a war of aggression), crimes against peace, crimes against
humanity, and war crimes. Gring himself claimed that his actions had not
transgressed beyond the realm of normality in times of war. When his
defense council, Dr. Otto Stahmer, questioned him about his attitude to-
ward the criminal acts committed by soldiers under his command in the
occupied territories, he stated that he had had all of the cases that were of
a serious nature submitted to him personally and that it had not been
unusual for him to suspend judgments already pronounced by the division
courts
because they were too mild, especially when it came to the defilement of
women (Schndung von Frauen). In such cases I always confirmed the
death penalty pronounced by the courts, except when the insulted party
submitted a plea for pardon. [...]
In addition, I presided as legal counsel and judge (Gerichtsherr) over
proceedings against some of the inhabitants from the occupied territories
who had been put on trial before an Air Force court, for instance in cases
where [...] the native civilian population helped enemy airmen on the run.
It is self-evident that the war situation generally made it necessary to react
vigorously. I would like to point out that it is also self-evident that, within
this framework, the courts imposed the prescribed death sentence on wom-
en, too. In all the cases, however, which involved women, I never con-
firmed a single death sentence, not a single case during all of the war years.
Instead, I pronounced a pardon in every case involving a woman, even in
the most serious cases when there had been physical attacks and the partic-
150 A Question of Honor
ipation therein against members of my Air Force, I never put my signature

for confirmation under a single verdict concerning a woman.1
The way Gring told it, he had personally seen to it that Air Force soldiers
who had committed serious crimes were punished, sometimes even by
death. His first example referred to soldiers who had come before Wehr-
macht courts for having been accused of Notzucht (contemporary term
for rape). The extent to which the Air Force actually imposed death sen-
tences on soldiers in cases of Notzucht in the occupied territories will
need further investigation. The research conducted by Birgit Beck, howev-
er, has already demonstrated that the Wehrmacht generally did not consid-
er cases of rape at the war front and in the occupied territories a primary
criminal offense. The majority of the acts of sexual violence were not
prosecuted from the onset. The few cases that eventually came to court
were, for the sake of military efficiency, treated as violations of discipline
and as danger to the reputation and cohesion of the troops. The final ver-
dicts varied according to the territory, the stage of the war, and the occupa-
tion. The death penalty, however, seems to have been an exception. Fur-
thermore, most of the men who were sentenced to comparably high prison
sentences did not have to serve them in full.2
The way Gring comes to talk about the allegedly strict punishment of
the perpetrators of sexual violence he was questioned about indicates that
he used this narrative to present himself as a shining example of the hon-
orable military commander who acted in accordance with moral principles
even in the extreme situation of a war. He did not, so the implied message,
violate the fundamental agreements of civilized nations at war in modern
times.
Gring was apparently not only concerned with legitimizing the war
Germany had waged; above that, he also wanted to portray himself as a
I would like to thank Carsten Gericke, Therese Roth, and the members of the
International Research Group Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (www. wa-
randgender.net) for their enlightening comments and remarks on the subject.
1
Cited from: The Nuremberg Trial against the main war criminals, dated 14 No-
vember 1945 to 1 October 1946 [hereinafter referred to as IMT], Nuremberg 1947,
volume 9, p. 404.
2
Birgit Beck, Wehrmacht und sexuelle Gewalt. Sexualverbrechen vor deutschen
Militrgerichten 19391945 (Paderborn: Schningh, 2004), pp. 427, 308-325.
Christian Thomas Huber, Die Rechtsprechung der deutschen Feldkriegsgerichte
bei Straftaten von Wehrmachtssoldaten gegen Angehrige der Zivilverwaltung in
den besetzten Gebieten (Marburg: Tectum-Verlag, 2007), p. 95. David Raub
Snyder, Sex Crimes under the Wehrmacht (Lincoln, NE/London: University of
Nebraska Press, 2007), pp. 137.
Regina Mhlhuser 151
man of moral integrity. When the presiding judge of the Nuremberg Court,
Robert H. Jackson, asked him a few days later whether it was correct that
he had protested against translating the word Schndung (defilement)
with the term rape, Gring reaffirmed that he was prepared to absolute-
ly and gladly accept responsibility for the most serious things that I have
done. However, I explicitly reject this term [the translation of Schn-
dung as rape; RM] since it contradicts my being.3 Obviously, Gring
regarded rape as an act of violence specifically directed at women as
women. Defilement, on the contrary, appeared to mean to him a viola-
tion of honor that caused the most serious suffering to the male relatives of
the victims (a fact that is also evidenced by Grings use of the phrase of
the insulted party). His decisive rejection was hence not a show of em-
pathy for any of the women affected but rather an affirmation of his own
ethical framework and thereby a justification for the soldiers actions.4
In the mid-20th century, Grings rationale corresponded to the system
of values and norms in Europe and the United States. It has only been
since the mid-1990s that the sexual violence women experienced during
wartime and what harm it did to the victims has been discussed by a wider
public and, also, that such acts have been brought before international and
internationalized courts as crimes against humanity, war crimes, or geno-
cidal acts.5 In 1946, the Allies did not consider sexual violence a crime but
rather a quasi natural side effect of war. They operated on the assumption
that sexual violence was, in Gaby Zipfels words, a natural although
forced sexual act between a man and a woman that was not really harmful
3
IMT, volume 9, p. 624.
4
Refer to Ruth Seifert, Krieg und Vergewaltigung. Anstze zu einer Analyse for
the topos of violating honor, in Massenvergewaltigung. Krieg gegen die Frauen,
Alexandra Stiglmayer (ed.) (Freiburg i. Br.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993),
pp. 85-108.
5
Ingwer Schwensen provides an overview of the literature on this topic, Sexuelle
Gewalt in kriegerischen Konflikten. Auswahlbibliographie fr die
Erscheinungsjahre 2002 bis 2008, Mittelweg 36, vol. 18 (2009) no. 1, pp. 67-90.
For current discussion, also refer to Kirsten Campbell, Transitional Justice und
die Kategorie Geschlecht. Sexuelle Gewalt in der Internationalen Strafgerichtsbarkeit,
Mittelweg 36, vol. 18 (2009) no. 1, pp. 26-52. Carsten Gericke/Regina Mhlhuser,
Vergebung und Ausshnung nach sexuellen Gewaltverbrechen in Kriegs- und
Konfliktregionen. Zur Funktion und Bedeutung internationaler Strafprozesse, in
Susan Buckley-Zistel/Thomas Kater (eds.), Nach Krieg, Gewalt und Repression.
Vom schwierigen Umgang mit der Vergangenheit (Baden-Baden: Nomos 2011),
pp. 91-111.
as long as no extreme violence was involved.6 Correspondingly, acts of

sexual violence were not indicted at the Nuremberg Trials. Particularly
brutal cases were mentioned during the hearings of the evidence but only
to illustrate the perversion and the lack of civilized behavior on the part
of the perpetrators.
The next step in Grings argumentation, where he described himself
as the rescuer of female enemy saboteurs and spies, referred to moral con-
cepts also virulent in the Allied Forces. While many forms of violence
were deemed necessary, even honorable, or at least acceptable in armed
conflict, some of them violated the male matrix of war as Lutz
Klinkhammer phrased it.7 One of the ways in which these boundaries were
exceeded was in killing women and children. A number of Wehrmacht
soldiers indeed experienced a sense of horror and shame at the killing of
women and children in the Soviet Union as Snke Neitzel and Harald
Welzer demonstrated. In particular, higher-ranking soldiers feared the
moral decay of young German men and, as a consequence, of the future
generations. Neither any feelings of guilt nor negative visions of the fu-
ture, however, prompted these men to oppose the killing campaigns or to
launch rescue operations.8 The verve with which Gring insisted that he
put in his best efforts in support of women threatened by the death penalty,
even if they had seriously injured the soldiers under his command, seems
thus all the more telling. Not only was he trying to portray himself as an
individual with a spotless reputation but, first and foremost, as an honora-
ble man.
It becomes apparent that the way in which the soldiers generally acted
toward women and the way they committed sexual violence might become
a symbol marking the thin line between male/military honor and dishonor.
While Gring used the example of death sentences for cases of rape to
emphasize his respectability and, accordingly, that of the Wehrmacht, he
implicitly branded the men who had committed sexual violence as devi-
6
Gaby Zipfel, Ausnahmezustand Krieg? Anmerkungen zu soldatischer
Mnnlichkeit, sexueller Gewalt und militrischer Einhegung, in Insa
Eschebach/Regina Mhlhuser (eds.), Krieg und Geschlecht. Sexuelle Gewalt im
Krieg und Sex-Zwangsarbeit in NS-Konzentrationslagern (Berlin: Metropol,
2008), pp. 55-74, here 73.
7
Lutz Klinkhammer, Der Partisanenkrieg der Wehrmacht 19411944, in Rolf-
Dieter Mller/Hans-Erich Volkmann (eds.), Die Wehrmacht. Mythos und Realitt
(Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999), pp. 815836, here 834.
8
Snke Neitzel/Harald Welzer, Soldaten. Protokolle vom Kmpfen, Tten und
Sterben (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 2011), p. 193.
Regina Mhlhuser 153
ant perpetrators lacking male self-restraint (Manneszucht) and moral

fiber, who had thereby disgraced the military.
The picture he conjured had precious little to do with the reality of the
war that had just come to an end. From a wide range of sources from all
stages and territories of the war, occupation, and the final solution, we
know today that acts of sexual violence were a virtually normal and ac-
cepted part of the war for many soldiers. Members of the Wehrmacht and
the SS forced women (and sometimes men) to disrobe, fingered their ori-
fices during body searches, photographed them naked, implemented sexual
torture, perpetrated rape (with the penis, other parts of their bodies, or
objects), and forced women into sexual enslavement.9 The sources indicate
that such crimes were committed even by men for whom this would have
been unimaginable before the war. Among the all-male troops of the
Wehrmacht/SS, acts of sexual violence provided proof of and became a
symbol for their victorious masculinity and, by extension, male honor,
during the war and the occupation.
In the following chapters I will take sexual violence as a symbol of
honor/dishonor as a starting point for an inquiry into the connection be-
tween sexuality, gender, and male concepts of honor and morality. If at all
able to speak of a National Socialist morality, it was definitely aimed at
the way the Volksgemeinschaft (German national community) was to
regard itself. Moral obligations existed towards those considered Volks-
genossen (national comrades). Social norms, including sexual norms,
were subject to change over the time, i.e. during the establishment of the
regime and in the course of the war. Nazi sexual politics as well as the
perpetration of the limits to violence were embedded in an ethical
framework of its own. Following Raphael Gross, I am not going to use the
term Nazi ethics as a normative but as a descriptive category: as a des-
ignation [] of the values created during a specific period.10
To describe which norms and values were induced during the war, I
will first investigate the various forms of sexuality practiced by the mem-
9
See the source material for example in Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen, Heroes, Survi-
vors. Sexual Violence on the Eastern Front during World War II, unpublished
doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota 2004. Doris L. Bergen, Sexual
Violence in the Holocaust. Unique or Typical?, in Dagmar Herzog (ed.), The
Holocaust in International Perspective, (Chicago: Northwestern Univ Press,
2006), pp. 179-200. Regina Mhlhuser, Eroberungen. Sexuelle Gewalttaten und
intime Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion 19411945 (Hamburg:
Hamburger Edition, 2010). Neitzel/Welzer, Soldaten, pp. 217228.
10
Raphael Gross, Anstndig geblieben. Nationalsozialistische Moral, (Frankfurt a.
M.: S. Fischer, 2010), p. 16.
bers of the Wehrmacht and the SS during the war in the Soviet Union.
How did the men deal with heterosexual encounters?11 In the second part I
will then discuss the military regulation measures. How did the Wehr-
macht and the SS leadership try to keep their men in line ? The third part
will pursue the connection between the situation at the front and in the
occupied territories and life at home, within the borders of the Reich. Were
other moral concepts at stake, in the one and in the other? To sum up, I
will combine the various individual, institutional, and social scenarios and
argue that there was a special code of morality among the German military
leveling off the often contradictory ideas concerning the sexual behavior
of Aryan men somewhere between racial awareness (Rassenbewusst-
sein), on the one hand, and the alleged normality of the conquest of ene-
my women, even if these were deemed racially undesirable, on the
other hand. Finally, I will return to post-war reinterpretations such as those
by Gring and ask about their lasting impact.
I. Sexual "Conquests
On 7 October 1941, General Major Jrgen W., an artillery officer with the
20th Infantry Division, wrote in his diary about a military success of his
unit in the Nawlya region of Russia:
The village was purged, the 6th cp [company; RM] proceeded in a dashing
attack la military training ground, obtaining 120 prisoners and rich booty.
They also captured a caravan full of ladies [Damens] for the brave
Russians, although those inside had been slightly injured by M.G. fire; but
why do they go to war. Delicious girls [leckere Mdchen], the pri-
vates commented upon their return.12
11
The history of homosexual encounters of German men in the Soviet Union has
remained largely unexplored to date. Refer to Geoffrey J. Giles, The Denial of
Homosexuality. Same Sex Incidents in Himmlers SS and Police for the way the
Wehrmacht and SS dealt with violations of Paragraph 175, Journal of the History
of Sexuality, vol. 11 (2002) nos. 1-2, pp. 256-290. Geoffrey J. Giles, A Gray Zone
Among the Field Gray Men. Confusion in the Discrimination Against Homosexu-
als in the Wehrmacht, in Jonathan Petropoulos/John K. Roth (eds.), Gray Zones.
Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2005), pp. 127-146. Monika Flaschka, Race, Rape and Gender in
Nazi Occupied Territories, dissertation, (Kent State University 2009), pp. 137-176.
12
Jrgen W., Tagebuch in Russland (Archiv des Hamburger Institut fr Sozialforschung
[HIS-Arch], NS-O 22, cardboard box 4).
Regina Mhlhuser 155
Ego documents such as this suggest that military actors did not necessarily
understand acts of sexual violence as violence. In numerous written docu-
ments soldiers describe the conquest of women in a humorous and
sometimes suggestive tone as something that seemed to have been beyond
the actual war. The idea that the soldiers deserved compensation for the
difficulties and deprivations they had to endure during war is all over W.s
diary. Week after week he wrote about tasty food and fine delicacies
resulting (from looting trips) and tried to explain why he and his men
deserved them. The language of the above cited diary-entry reveals that
women, in his opinion, fell into the same category.
The language in the ego documents of German soldiers generally indi-
cates that many of them, regardless of their political conviction, be-
lieved that they had total power over enemy women. A conversation
between the 23-years-old petty officer Helmut Hartelt and the 21-years-old
sailor Horst Minnieur illustrates how sexual violence was directly inter-
woven with other forms of violence. Detained at a POW camp in Great
Britain in 1943 and unaware of the fact that the British Forces had in-
stalled wiretaps to monitor the information they might be exchanging,
Minneur at one point recounted a killing operation that he had witnessed
as a worker for the Reich Labor Service in Lithuania. His narrative fo-
cused on a beautiful broad who, when he and his comrades had asked
where she was going, had replied to my execution. At first the men had
thought that she was joking; only later did they learn that she had indeed
been killed.
Hartelt: Those broads, they were also shot there?

Minnieur: Yeah.
Hartelt: Did you see it [the execution; RM] when that pretty Jewess was
there?
Minnieur: No, we werent there anymore. We only know that she was shot.
Hartelt: So did she say anything beforehand? Were you together with her
again?
Minnieur: Yeah, we were together the day before. The next day we won-
dered why she didnt come anymore. Then we drove away with the
machine (the motorcycle; RM).
Hartelt: Did she also work there?
Minnieur: She also worked there.
Hartelt: Building roads?
Minnieur: No, she cleaned our barracks. When we were there those eight
days we came into the barracks, and slept there so that we didnt have
to go outside
Hartelt: So she certainly let herself get banged [sich hacken lassen], didnt
she?
Minnieur: She let herself get banged, but you had to be careful not to get
caught. Thats not new, of course, they got laid, the Jewish broads, in a
way that wasnt nice anymore.
Hartelt: So, did she say that she -?
Minnieur: Nothing. Oh, we just chatted [] she had gone to the university
in Gttingen.
Hartelt: And she let them turn her into a whore!
Minnieur: Yeah. They didnt realize she was a Jewess, she was quite de-
cent, and so on. Just tough luck that she had to bite the dust! 75,000
Jews were shot there.13
These young submarine soldiers spoke in informal German, but, obvious-

ly, they did not know each other well. . . Nonetheless, they talked about
mass shootings and sexual violence, topics that were obviously neither
taboo nor unusual. Especially young men would interpret blunt talk about
violence as a demonstration of their rigor and an affirmation of their mas-
culinity.14 The expression sich hacken lassen reveals that the merging of
sexuality and violence appeared natural to them.
It was also not unusual that women were given the blame or at least a
part of the blame for their fate. In this case, it was Hartelt who insinuated
that the woman had already become a whore in Germany. In a way,
Hartelt even offered his interpretation as an explanation and a justification
for the womans murder. Minnieurs reaction reveals the ambivalence that
men felt at times in the face of situations such as this. Initially, he ex-
pressed his interest in the beautiful woman of whom he had learned
some personal details in their conversation such as the fact that she had
studied in Gttingen. At the same time, however, he agreed with Hartelts
objection insinuating that she had tricked the men in Germany by hiding
her Jewish origin. The conflict arising from the fact that his comrades had
killed a former student he had liked obviously affected him, but in the end
he resolved it with the succinct tough luck. She had been in the wrong
place at the wrong time. Ultimately, he did not question the executions as
such.
Furthermore, the conversation illustrates that the Nazi criminal offense
of race defilement (Rassenschande), according to which sexual inter-
course with Jews was strictly prohibited, had only a limited influence on
13
Cited from: Neitzel/Welzer, Soldaten, pp. 164.
14
Frank Werner, Soldatische Mnnlichkeit im Vernichtungskrieg. Geschlechtsspezifische
Dimensionen der Gewalt in Feldpostbriefen 19411944, in Veit Didczuneit/Jens
Ebert/Thomas Jander (eds.), Schreiben im Krieg. Schreiben vom Krieg. Feldpost
im Zeitalter der Weltkriege (Essen: Klartext-Verlagsgesellschaft, 2011), pp. 283-
294, here 286.
Regina Mhlhuser 157
the behavior of German men. As Minnieurs remark demonstrates, the

primary worry of the soldiers seemed to have been not to get caught. In-
deed, engaging in sexual activities despite the risk of punishment could be
interpreted as particularly bold and thus respected behavior. Moral reser-
vations, on the contrary, do not seem to have played a significant role,
even though Nazi ideology clearly marked these sexual contacts as dam-
age to the body of the nation (Schdigung des Volkskrpers) as according
to hereditary science (Erblehre), Jewish blood was inherited; im-
pregnation science (Imprgnationslehre), on the other hand, stated that
any form of contact with a person deemed Jewish, for instance even when
taking a swim in the same pool, would infect an Aryan with Jewish-
ness.15
Being tainted by Jewish blood could also induce specific forms of
sexual violence. In her memoir I Will Survive published in 1964, Sala
Pawlowicz, a Polish Jewish woman, recollected how an ethnic German
(volksdeutscher) policeman had forced her to undress and tortured her with
a whip while insulting her because he was not allowed to have her.16
In general, many men seemed to have assumed that rules would be
handled relatively liberally at the front in the Soviet Union. For example,
some SS men stationed in Minsk publicly declared at the beginning of
1943 that the laws against race defilement were only valid within the
borders of the Reich and not applicable to the East. Remarkably enough,
this incident did not have any consequences.17 In many cases, German
15
The impregnation science of Dinter and Streicher which is frequently termed
contagionistic anti-Semitism today and, according to which the body of the Ger-
man Volk (thought of as feminine) would insolubly be infected by the Jew/the
Jewish, was theoretically incompatible with contemporary inheritance biology. At
the same time, however, both of these concepts remained virulent in the everyday
Nazi imagination, for instance in court proceedings on race defilement (Cornelia
Essner, Die Nrnberger Gesetze oder Die Verwaltung des Rassenwahns 1933
1945 (Paderborn/Munich/Vienna/Zurich: Schningh, 2002)). Furthermore, in some
trials concerning race defilement within the borders of the Reich, the judges
issued prison sentences to the defendants although they assumed that no sexual
intercourse but only masturbation had been practiced. Here, we can see unequivo-
cally that the topos of race defilement was not only about reproduction but at
times also focused on the question of desire (Alexandra Przyrembel, Rassen-
schande. Reinheitsmythos und Vernichtungslegitimation im Nationalsozialismus
(Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003)).
16
Sala Pawlowicz in collaboration with Kevin Klose, I will survive (London 1964),
pp. 35-37.
17
Hans Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Einsatzgruppe A der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD
1941/1942 (Bern: Peter Lang, 1996), p. 479.
soldiers also did not hesitate to get rid of rape victims who, by extension,
had become witnesses to the soldiers violation of the Nazi racial laws. In
his study on Einsatzgruppe D (one of the mobile killing squads of the SS),
Andre Angrick reported that an especially insidious moment occurred
when SS men promised Jewish women to spare their lives if they suc-
cumbed to their sexual desires. As soon as they had enough of them, or
were in danger of getting caught, however, the women were killed.18
In the face of the catastrophic food shortage in many regions, members
of the Wehrmacht and the SS also took advantage of the situation by the
seeking sexual contacts in exchange for food or consumer goods. When
filmmaker Ruth Beckermann asked a former soldier of the Wehrmachts
medical corps in 1995 whether he had encountered violence against wom-
en, he replied:
I dont believe there was ever a case of rape where I was. It was not nec-
essary because the people were so hungry. Dont misunderstand me: If
women wanted to stay alive, they virtually had to prostitute themselves. I
experienced that on the Kertsh Peninsula on the Crimea. [...] Soldiers who
were a little sympathetic [...] let the children clean their mess tins. In any
event, thats what we made it look like so that the officers wouldnt notice
that we gave the children something to eat, because this was prohibited.
There was a really sweet girl whose mother I sometimes gave my pots to
for cleaning. I saw a soldier with her and asked her why she was doing
that i.e. why she was getting involved with a German soldier. She replied
that she did it because she was hungry. But you just got some bread, I
said. She showed me the bread: it was not edible because it consisted of
sawdust, only on the outside was there a little bit of flour.19
The description by this former soldier illustrates that the boundaries be-
tween sexual violence and the sexual trade were often blurred. His descrip-
tion distinctly portrays the predicament that local women sometimes found
themselves in and emphasizes the circumstantial factor due to which some
women felt compelled to engage in sexual bartering. The food situation on
the Crimean Peninsula (in the Ukraine) was indeed disastrous. In February
1942, 15 to 17 people died of malnutrition every day.20 The former Wehr-
18
Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord. Die Einsatzgruppe D in
der sdlichen Sowjetunion 19411943 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003), pp.
359.
19
Ruth Beckermann, Jenseits des Krieges. Ehemalige Wehrmachtssoldaten
erinnern sich (Vienna: Dcker, 1998), pp. 102.
20
Manfred Oldenburg, Ideologie und Militrisches Kalkl. Die Besatzungspolitik
der Wehrmacht in der Sowjetunion 1942 (Cologne/Weimar/Vienna: Bhlau, 2004),
pp. 68, 87.
Regina Mhlhuser 159
macht soldier showed empathy for the women in this situation. In spite of
his unusually open and critical perspective, however, he did not question
male behavior. The connection of prostitution to the military does not
always seem to be an entirely unpleasant one but rather a somehow natural
and human part of a soldiers life, even more so since it stands in contrast
to rape. The sexual drive, as the subtext goes, needs to be satisfied just like
hunger.
This former soldier was not alone in the way he saw things. Prostitu-
tion as an axiomatic side effect of the Prussian Army had had a long histo-
ry. For Wehrmacht soldiers and SS men a visit to professional prostitutes
also constituted a normal part of military life. The Soviet leadership, how-
ever, had officially prohibited prostitution as bourgeois degeneration
before the invasion of the Germans. Therefore, to enter into negotiations
with a Russian woman, a German soldier either had to frequent the local
brothel, enlist the help of third parties, or be directly addressed by a wom-
an. In this respect, the local markets were a comparably easy avenue open
to German soldiers on the lookout for sexual encounters.21
To keep the sexual activities of the soldiers under control, the Wehr-
macht eventually set up its own militarily controlled brothels in 1942. The
extent to which soldiers took advantage of this military offer has not been
researched yet. Wehrmacht files show that there existed some rivalry
among the customers, sometimes even ensuing in fist fights. In this, the
concepts of honor and masculinity played a central role as the former
Wehrmachtshelferin Ilse Schmidt (female auxiliary personnel of the
Wehrmacht) clearly depicted in her autobiography: A colonel asked his
men to join him for a visit to an only recently opened brothel, a demon-
stration of loyalty the individual man could not easily turn down.22
In the military rear, where the men were often stationed at the same lo-
cation for weeks or months, which allowed for flirtation, consensual sexu-
al affairs, or even lengthy relationships to develop. In his study on the
Wehrmachts occupation policy on the Crimea, Manfred Oldenburg quotes
from a letter Corporal Herbert K. of the 72nd Division wrote on 30 July
1942, when stationed near Sevastopol:
Lately, we have been stationed in the same location and have had enough
opportunities to chat with girls. Many of my comrades have taken ample
21
Frank Vossler, Propaganda in die eigene Truppe. Die Truppenbetreuung in der
Wehrmacht 1939-1945 (Paderborn/Munich/Vienna/Zurich Schningh, 2005), p.
353.
22
Ilse Schmidt, Die Mitluferin. Erinnerungen einer Wehrmachtsangehrigen
(Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1999), pp. 47.
advantage of this. But I have my principles, which I follow in this matter.

They are Russians, which means that they are our enemies. So keep your
distance. Some close comrades of mine died at their hands only a couple of
weeks ago. Especially in this area, many a private (lowest ranking soldier)
has fallen victim to the treacherous attacks of partisans.23
From Herbert Ks point of view, a soldier should never lose sight of the
war situation, on the one hand, for reasons of military security and, on the
other hand, to maintain the allegedly necessary distance to the enemy. The
emotional bond that some of the men developed to local women and led to
a substantial number of applications for a marriage license, which dis-
turbed military officers and administrative staff responsible the most.
Especially long-term relationships were an expression of the fact that the
regimes racial and ethnic aims (rassen- und volkstumspolitische Ziele)
were by no means congruent with the views and actions of individual men.
II. Military Regulations

The military leadership was confronted with a dilemma: On the one hand,
sexual activity was considered undesirable as it jeopardized military
discipline, the health and the reputation of the troops, and increased the
hazard of espionage, not to mention that it also violated the principles of
Nazi racial ideology. On the other hand, masculine virility was considered
an expression of male and national strength and ultimately beneficial to
the war effort. In addition, the conquest of enemy women symbolized
the victory over foreign territory. Accordingly, there were a number of
military regulations forbidding rape or making undesirable sexual in-
tercourse subject to punishment. These were, however, hardly ever put
into practice.
As early as 31 July 1940, one month after the German army had occu-
pied France, the Supreme Commander of the Army, Walther von
Brauchitsch, was grappling with the question of the sexual habits of the
soldier in the field [Geschlechtsleben des Soldaten im Felde]. On 6 Sep-
tember 1941 his rules of action entitled self-discipline were disseminat-
ed among the troop leaders on the Eastern Front:
Since the predispositions of men differ, it is [...] inevitable that tensions

and woes [Spannungen und Nte] in the sexual arena will arise here and
there which we cannot afford to close our eyes to. The issue (of soldiers
23
Unteroffizier Herbert K., 13.Kp./Inf.Rgt.105 (72 ID), letter of 30 July 1942
(Bibliothek fr Zeitgeschichte Stuttgart (BfZ), Sammlung Sterz), cited from:
Oldenburg, Ideologie und militrisches Kalkl, p. 118.
Regina Mhlhuser 161
sexual habits; RM) can by no means be resolved by a ban on sexual activi-

ty. Besides other negative consequences, a ban such as this would increase
the number of violent sexual crimes and the risk of offenses against article
24
175.
Von Brauchitsch feared that, depending on their individual disposition,

men would build up sexual tensions and woes which might threaten to
explode in violent sexual or homosexual activities if there were no oppor-
tunities for moderate heterosexual encounters available. Von Brauchitschs
view, according to which the soldiers were not autonomous individuals
who made their own decisions but much rather objects subjected to their
own biology, was widely accepted in the Wehrmacht. This is also apparent
from some of the court cases against Wehrmacht soldiers accused of
Notzucht (rape). In the judges opinion, a defendant was criminally
liable only to a limited extent if he had been diagnosed as having suffered
from sexual compulsion (sexueller Notstand) or the build-up of sexual
urges (Triebstau) at the time of the crime. However, not much weight
was attached to these circumstances if the judges suspected that the de-
fendant could well have chosen another option to reduce his sexual
woes, for instance, when he was stationed in a city where prostitution was
easily available.25 To his mind, commercial sex was a way of preventing
the soldiers potentially deviant sexual behavior, thereby guaranteeing
the stability of the occupation regime.
As a matter of fact, the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW), the Army
High Command (OKH), and the Personal Staff Reichsfhrer SS (RF-SS)
had already delved into the possibilities of controlling the sexual activities
of soldiers in France, Poland, and the other occupied territories.26 Since
sexual encounters were considered a normal and quasi unavoidable part of
war, they did not aim at a general ban of heterosexual activities. Hitler
expressed this conviction in April of 1942: If the German man as a sol-
dier is supposed to be ready to die unconditionally, he should have the
24
OKH, von Brauchitsch, Schreiben an den Generalquartiermeister, Betr.:
Selbstzucht, 31.7.1940 (Bundesarchiv-Militrarchiv Freiburg,BA-MA, RH 53-7/v.
233a/167).
25
Cf. Beck, Wehrmacht und sexuelle Gewalt for the term "sexual woes", pp. 272.
26
CF. Insa Meinen among others, Wehrmacht und Prostitution im besetzten
Frankreich. (Bremen: Edition Temmen, 2002. Max Plassmann, Wehrmachtsbordelle.
Anmerkungen zu einem Quellenfund im Universittsarchiv Dsseldorf,
Militrgeschichtliche Zeitschrift, vol. 62 (2003) no. 1, pp. 157-173. Vossler,
Propaganda in die eigene Truppe. Robert Sommer, Das KZ-Bordell. Sexuelle
Zwangsarbeit in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern (Paderborn/Munich/
Vienna/ Zurich: Schningh, 2009), pp. 34.
freedom to love unconditionally.27 He thereby referred to the common

idea that love and combat were the two most profound existential experi-
ences of human or, more precisely, male existence. In combat, love, i.e.
sexual and emotional satisfaction figured as a means of sublimating mens
fear of death.28 The combatant who is given the job respectively the per-
mission to kill, must be ready to do so (to exercise the power to inflict
harm), Gaby Zipfel writes, in this, he must also face the possibility of
being injured or killed himself.29 Sexual desire can thus be seen as a form
of trying to overcome ones fear of death, which is why sexual activities
are not officially legal but nevertheless tolerated, at least as long as they
stay within the prescribed framework. In which way the soldiers hetero-
sexual activities were ultimately assessed depended largely on the middle
level of the military hierarchy, namely the officers whose responsibility it
was to lead the units under their command as well as to plan, execute, and,
in particular, be in control of military operations.
In order to present the soldiers with opportunities to seek heterosexual
encounters while, at the same time, minimizing the risks, the OKW and
the OKH as well as the RF-SS pinned their activities to a graded system of
disciplinary measures: instruction, sanitation, treatment, interrogation, and
punishment.30 Normally, leaflets urging them to exercise sexual discipline
were handed out to Wehrmacht-soldiers already during basic training. The
most widely disseminated text entitled German Soldier! was issued by
the Reich Ministry of War as early as 6 February 1936. Later on, it was
distributed in slightly different versions to the soldiers stationed in France
and in the occupied Polish and Soviet territories. One version handed out
in the Ukraine in 1943 reads as follows:
German Soldier!
Beware of sexual excesses! They reduce your performance and are not
beneficial to your health.
A soldier with a venereal disease is unfit for service. Self-inflicted dis-
abilities are unworthy of a German soldier!
Venereal disease can make you unfit for marriage and incapable of
procreati Your fatherland does not only expect maximum soldierly perfor-
27
Henry Picker (ed.), Hitlers Tischgesprche im Fhrerhauptquartier. Entstehung,
Struktur, Folgen des Nationalsozialismus, 2nd edition (Berlin: Ullstein, 1997
[Original 1951]), p. 332.
28
Gaby Zipfel, Blood, Sperm, and Tears. Sexuelle Gewalt in Kriegen,
Mittelweg 36, vol. 10 (2001) no. 5, pp. 3-20.
29
Idem, Ausnahmezustand Krieg?, p. 58.
30
Mhlhuser, Eroberungen, pp. 175-239.
Regina Mhlhuser 163
mance from you, it also expects you to start a healthy German family and
to present healthy offspring [...].31
This leaflet called upon the military duty as well as the ethnic and nation-
al responsibility (volkstumspolitische Verantwortung) of the soldier. It
focused on the idea of male self-restraint, therefore calling the individu-
al man to moderation to ensure military power and national health.
Along with the military education about the risks of uncontrolled sexual
contacts, the distribution of condoms, and the publication of the up-to-date
locations of hygiene stations (Sanierstuben where soldiers were sup-
posed to go to disinfect their genitals after sexual intercourse), this leaflet
was seen as a measure to raise the soldiers awareness and to control their
behavior.
Some Wehrmacht officers criticized the establishment of sanitation
stations as well as the distribution of condoms. On 20 April 1943, the
commander of Military District VII responsible for recruiting and training
soldiers in Southern Bavaria warned that the Wehrmacht should not let
itself be deceived about the dangers, or take the problem of venereal dis-
ease too lightly due to prudery. At the same time, it was his duty to pre-
vent soldiers from seeing the sanitary protective measures as tacit ap-
proval or even a stimulus to participate in extramarital sexual intercourse.32
Especially young men seem to have believed that contracting a sexually
transmitted disease would serve as proof of their potency and sexual ad-
venturesomeness, virtually constituting a trophy. The Naval Office, in a
letter on military training dated 15 July 1942 finally warned that the
wide-spread attitude of believing that contracting a venereal disease was
not only honorable but even a sign of being especially masculine must be
[...] countered with vigor.33
If a man contracted a sexually transmitted disease, he was to have easy
access to medical treatment. Ultimately, military generals came to the
conclusion that disciplinary measures in the wake of sexual encounters
were counterproductive: a man who feared punishment would probably
not come forward to receive proper treatment. Consequently, heterosexual
31
OKH, Merkblatt Deutscher Soldat!, no date [1939] (National Archives and
Record Administration [NARA], RG-242 78/189, sheet pp. 654).
32
Stellvertretendes Generalkommando VII A.K., re: Bekmpfung der
Geschlechtskrankheiten, 20 April 1943 (NARA, RG-242 78/189, sheet 6130737 f.,
here 6130737).
33
Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine, Schulungsbrief, 15 July 1942, Anlage Sol-
dat und Frau, p. 8, cited in Franz W. Seidler, Prostitution, Homosexualitt,
Selbstverstmmelung. Probleme der deutschen Sanittsfhrung 19391945
(Neckargemnd: Vowinckel, 1977), p. 102.
encounters were often tolerated. Only in some cases did becoming infected
with a sexually transmitted disease result in disciplinary action by a com-
manding officer. Even if they were not punished, though, soldiers some-
times had to undergo an investigation by the Security Service (Sicher-
heitsdienst, SD) aimed at finding out about the source of infection.
An indictment of a soldier by a Wehrmacht court was usually derived
from a charge of Notzucht- issued for instance by a translator or a fellow
soldier, or sometimes also by a relative of the victim. In general, the pro-
ceedings centered on the fact that the defendants had violated military
discipline and harmed the reputation of the Wehrmacht. Racial or ethnic
considerations were usually ignored. To date, we have knowledge of only
four division court proceedings on the Eastern Front that explicitly dealt
with race defilement. In two cases, the defendants justified their actions
by arguing that they had not been aware of the fact that the woman in
question was Jewish. Regardless whether this excuse was true or untrue,
the court exempted them from punishment.34
The most radical measure by which the Wehrmacht tried to control its
men was the establishment of military brothels. The Wehrmacht hoped
this form of organized prostitution would ensure military discipline and, at
the same time, allow for the permanent medical monitoring of the prosti-
tutes. In addition, the military leadership intended to raise the soldiers
combat morale and sustainably bind them to the military system by
demonstrating an understanding attitude for the soldiers situation and
rewarding their willingness of going into combat.35
The SS leadership did not officially organize brothels, arguing that this
would harm the reputation of Germanys racial elite. As early as the end
of 1941, before the first official Wehrmacht brothels were set up in the
Soviet Union, the representative of the Higher SS and the Police Leader
explained that while the establishment of brothels might be expedient for
the Wehrmacht, the SS, and the members of the police, it would however
be out of the question due to our world view (still, this did not mean that
SS men did not take advantage of local Wehrmacht brothels).36 While the
Wehrmacht tried to sensitize the soldiers not only to their military goals
but also in terms of racial hygiene, the military and the racial agenda
had been inseparably linked as a part of the SS-program from the onset.
34
Snyder, Sex Crimes under the Wehrmacht, pp. 191-200. Beck, Wehrmacht und
sexuelle Gewalt, p. 278.
35
Meinen, Wehrmacht und Prostitution im besetzten Frankreich, p. 75.
36
RMbO, gez. Dr. Runte, Schreiben an den RKO, Betr.: den ausserehelichen
Verkehr zwischen Deutschen und Angehrigen eines fremden Volkstums, dated
November 24, 1941 (BArch, R 90/460, pp. 170-171, here 170).
Regina Mhlhuser 165
Reichsfhrer SS Heinrich Himmler saw the SS community of kinship

(Sippengemeinschaft) as the realization of a racial selection that was
supposed to be the foundation for improving the human breed, ultimately
cultivating the Aryan race. In respect to the idea of racial breeding all
SS men were supposed to discipline their sexual desire in accordance with
the aims of the German Volksgemeinschaft and particularly those of the
SS kinship.
In times of war, however, this idea of the self-controlled Aryan collid-
ed with the assumption that men had to act out their sexual drives in order
to unfold their physical and mental powers in combat. The SS leadership
was aware of this contradiction: in spite of reminding them to restrain
themselves, it was assumed that the men would engage in uncontrolled
sexual contacts. At the end of 1938, the following educational leaflet was
handed out to SS candidates:
Remember
1. Sexual abstinence does not damage your health.
2. All extramarital sexual intercourse can bring about venereal disease.
3. Excessive consumption of alcohol leads to sexual excess and this again
to numerous infections.
4. Never engage in extramarital sexual intercourse without protection.
The condom provides the best protection.
5. After sexual intercourse without protection, visit the medical ward.
Medical help can prevent gonorrhea even up to 12 hours following in-
tercourse.
6. The slightest change in your sexual organs (such as burning, discharge,
soreness, or an abscess) requires that you immediately report to the
medical officer. [...]37
The members of the SS medical corps rarely concerned themselves with

sexual contacts as such, instead, they concentrated on the potentially nega-
tive consequences as well as measures of prevention. The moral tone that
was dominant in the Wehrmacht at least until 1944 was absent, here. In
contrast to the above cited Wehrmacht publication German Soldier!, the
educational leaflet of the SS spoke neither of the mens duty, honor or
morality, nor did it appeal to their reason. Instead, this publication had the
character of an instruction manual. The potential side-effects of sexual
encounters and the directions for the identification and handling of poten-
tial problems were elucidated in a pragmatic tone.
37
Chef des SS-Hauptamtes, SS-Sanittsamt, Ausbildungsbrief Nr. 5, dated 15
November 1938 (BArch, NS 31/292, pp. 62-95, here 78).
Here, too, racial considerations seem to have played a comparably

minor role. It is a fact that Himmler advised the leaders of the SS and the
Military Police in the Ukraine in 1941 to explicitly teach their men that
they may only respond to a liaison that they can account for to Germany,
to their own blood, and to their future child. At the same time he conced-
ed that it was pure coincidence whether the girl a soldier gets attached to
is purebred or unfit.38 Indeed, the criteria for racial evaluation were
neither clear-cut nor fixed. They were based on physical features, medical
diagnoses, character assessments, and the biography of an individual and,
hence, actually ambiguous and subject to changes depending on the terri-
tory, the stage of the war, and the occupation.
III. Home Front Duties

In Norway, the Wehrmacht had to deal with a number of suicide cases of
soldiers who no longer felt capable of dealing with the situation of having
a wife or a fianc, and a family back home and a girl-friend in the occu-
pied territory.39 In the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, the Wehr-
macht leadership feared similar problems. In his Briefing on the Preven-
tion of Suicide dated 6 October 1942 the medical inspector of the Air
Force therefore instructed all the medical officers to give priority to the
psychological problems of married or engaged soldiers:
Liaisons of soldiers who are married or engaged should be taken very se-
riously, in particular when these relationships have consequences, for in-
stance when pregnancies occur or conflicts arise with the womens hus-
bands or the boyfriends. Cases where soldiers cannot figure out a way to
evade their problems are extraordinarily numerous so that highest vigilance
is called for. In 19.4% of the suicide cases in the Air Force processed by
AF Div. 14, romantic or marital conflicts turned out to have been the main
cause, []. Reasonable advice and male understanding and camaraderie as
38
RF-SS Himmler, Rede auf der SS- und Polizeifhrertagung in der
Feldkommandostelle Hegewald bei Shitomir, dated September 19, 1942
(Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde [BA], NS 19/4009, pp. 78-127).
39
Kare Olsen, Vater: Deutscher. Das Schicksal der norwegischen Lebensbornkinder
und ihrer Mtter von 1940 bis heute (Frankfurt a. M./New York: Campus, 2000),
pp. 25, 123.
Regina Mhlhuser 167
well as contact to the women back home [...] can prevent many an irration-
al act.40
The Wehrmacht considered even the most private areas of the soldiers
lives to be a military matter. The bond to their families and to their girl-
friends back home was an essential motivation for many soldiers forced to
continue fighting at the front. Therefore their lives were supposed to be
kept as untroubled as possible. The same applied to the soldiers often
long awaited leave (of absence) from the front which was supposed to
serve as a period of rest and regeneration while simultaneously reminding
the soldiers as to why and for whom they were fighting.41 Furthermore, it
was of importance to the regime that the soldiers engaged in procreation
during their home leave, i.e. with racially desirable women (in contrast
to the women in the occupied territories).42 Crises, arguments, and jeal-
ousy between couples threatened to undermine this agenda, which is why
the medical officers were called upon to defuse the situation tactfully and
empathetically.
Military and civilian authorities demanded that the women at the
home-front show understanding for their husbands, fiancs, or boy-
friends. Articles in womens magazines as well as public authorities and
welfare workers advised women that it was their duty to stand by their
men ready for self-sacrifice, even if their partners seemed increasingly
distant or reserved. In his Letters by a Judge of 7 June 1943, Reich Jus-
tice Minister Otto Thierack emphasized that it was a womans job to at-
tend to house and hearth, fulfilling her husbands tasks in his place and
to maintain his fighting strength through her loyalty. If women did not
defend or value their honor, they not only disappointed their husbands
expectations but, beyond that, the expectations of the community. They
40
Inspekteur des Sanittswesens der Luftwaffe, Anweisung fr Truppenrzte ber
Verhtung von Selbstmord, Berlin, dated 6 October 1942 (NARA, RG-242 78/192,
pp. 6135832-6135837, here 6135834).
41
In his study on the letters German soldiers sent home from the Eastern front,
Sven Oliver Mller demonstrated that many men wrote to their mothers, wives,
and girl-friends that they were fighting to ensure that German women were pro-
tected from the Bolshevist hordes (Sven Oliver Mller, Deutsche Soldaten und
ihre Feinde. Nationalismus an Front und Heimatfront im Zweiten Weltkrieg
(Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 2007), pp. 163).
42
Gabriele Czarnowski, Das kontrollierte Paar. Ehe- und Sexualpolitik im
Nationalsozialismus (Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag, 1991).
could therefore no longer expect protection.43 By ascribing the origin of

this female duty to loyalty to traditional Germanic mores, Thierack
revealed that he viewed this issue in terms of racial politics.
Innumerable letters bear witness to the fact of men as well as women
fearing that their partners would not be faithful.44 The fact that men were
often absent for years combined with the fact that the women back home
increasingly became independent caused considerable insecurity on both
parts. Husbands and wives bewailed their alienation, and the number of
divorces rose rapidly. On the one hand, of course, the Nazi authorities
actually promoted divorce on racial grounds and, on the other hand, they
were not very concerned about the break-up of only recently celebrated
war marriages. Still, they clearly considered the separation of Aryan
partners who had been married for a longer period of time a threat.45
A dominant idea was that it had to be accepted as normal when men,
who the war forced to be absent from home for long periods of time while
being stationed far away, sought sexual contacts elsewhere. Womens
extramarital activities, by contrast, were considered immoral and de-
nounced as a decline of moral standards. The Security Service Reichs-
fhrer SS (SD) warned in April 1944:
The effect that marital infidelity of soldiers wives has on the men at the
front must be looked upon as particularly serious. The men are very trou-
bled by the news they hear from neighbors about the moral conduct of their
wives. Often the state is held responsible for this although it is in no posi-
tion to keep a family in order while the men are at the frontline.46
The SDs reasoning also centered on the question of military efficiency.

Their primary interest was not to upset the soldiers and the SS men. Tradi-
tional beliefs about sexual morality such as marital fidelity, however,
43
Verfgungen, Band IV, V.I. 28/348, dated June 7, 1943, also cited in: Birthe
Kundrus, Kriegerfrauen. Familienpolitik und Geschlechterverhltnisse im Ersten
und Zweiten Weltkrieg (Hamburg: Christians, 1995), p. 375.
44
Inge Marszolek, Ich mchte Dich zu gerne mal in Uniform sehen.
Geschlechterkonstruktionen in Feldpostbriefen, WerkstattGeschichte, vol. 22
(1999) no 1, pp. 41-59. Ulrike Jureit, Zwischen Ehe und Mnnerbund. Emotionale
und sexuelle Beziehungsmuster im Zweiten Weltkrieg, WerkstattGeschichte, vol.
22 (1999) no 1, pp. 61-73. Christa Hmmerle, Entzweite Beziehungen? Zur
Feldpost der beiden Weltkriege aus frauen- und geschlechtergeschichtlicher
Perspektive, in Veit Didczuneit/Jens Ebert/Thomas Jander (eds.), Schreiben im
Krieg. Schreiben vom Krieg. Feldpost im Zeitalter der Weltkriege (Essen: Klartext-
Verlagsgesellschaft, 2011), pp. 241-252.
45
Kundrus, Kriegerfrauen, pp. 369-373.
46
Meldungen vom 13.4.44, p. 6483.
Regina Mhlhuser 169
ultimately became a hindrance to Nazi aims. Nazi ideologists such as

Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg rejected the Christian values while, at the
same time, attempting to build upon familiar turf and re-appropriate tradi-
tional elements of faith, for instance by speaking about guilt and sin
against the race or the volk.47 In an order proclaimed by Reichsfhrer SS
Heinrich Himmler as early as 28 October 1939, the main duty of German
women and girls of good blood was to become the mothers of the chil-
dren of the soldiers going to war and to do this in the most profound moral
seriousness (in tiefstem sittlichen Ernst), even outside of marriage. This,
so the message, would be the only way to prevent the birth rate from drop-
ping.48 Himmlers proclamation was contested as it stood in crass contrast
to traditional values and moral ideas.49 The historian Annette Timm as-
sumes that this, among others, also led to the long-standing myth that the
Nazi organization Lebensborn e.V. had been founded by Himmler in order
to establish breeding facilities to bring SS men and Aryan women
together for procreation.50 Ultimately, the Reichsfhrer SS stopped ad-
vancing these political visions publicly. He did however devise a long-
term plan for the modification of traditional values: for instance by en-
lightening married women, many of whom have become fanatics in regard
to moral respectability after getting married or by transforming the lan-
guage: The term illegitimate must be eliminated entirely.51
Himmler and others understood the liberation from the traditional
boundaries of sexual morality in terms of a Germanic project. However
this vision, too, was not free of sexual restrictions and values. Male self-
restraint (Manneszucht), for instance, was seen as an Aryan character-
ristic that constituted an expression of noble character and racial superior-
ity. In contrast, sexual excess was denounced as deviant and associ-
ated with Jewry or the Marxism of the Weimar Period. On the whole,
however, many people resisted the redefinition of sexual values demanded
47
Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism. Memory and Morality in Twentieth Century
Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 10.
48
Geheimerlass des Reichsfhrer-SS fr die gesamte SS und Polizei (dated
October 28, 1939), printed in: Norbert Westenrieder (ed.), Deutsche Frauen und
Mdchen. Vom Alltagsleben 1933-1945 (Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1984), p. 42.
49
George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality. Middle-Class Morality and Sexual
Norms in Modern Europe (New York: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp.
166-169.
50
Annette F. Timm, The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
51
See Martin Bormann, ... ber das Problem unserer volklichen Zukunft ...,
dated January 29, 1944, printed in Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Der Weg zur Teilung der
Welt (Koblenz/Bonn: Wehr und Wissen, 1977), p. 274.
by Himmler and others. Numerous writings of different origins published

until the end of the war explained that the Nazi aims of racial purity and
the national recovery depended on premarital chastity, a monogamous
and prolifically procreative marriage, and wholesome family life.52 Espe-
cially Christian supporters of Nazism wanted to promote the traditional
conservative values.
To sum up, there was neither a consistent position on sexual morality
nor a straight forward general directive on how to implement Nazi sexual
policies. Still, as Dagmar Herzog argued in her book Sex after Fascism,
overtime, an unmistakable trend against traditional morality as it had been
handed down for generations appeared. The new morality was mainly
directed toward the question of who was permitted to have sex with who,
and this was discussed in terms of racial politics.53 Institutions deemed
Aryan such as the HJ (Hitler Youth Organization) and the BDM
(League of German Girls) promoted premarital sex within their institutions
while at the same time sexual encounters between Germans and non-
Germans were subject to surveillance, regulation, and in certain cases to
bans and severe punishment. The abuse and murder of those deemed
unworthy of reproduction and life due to their purported hereditary or
racial characteristics, Dagmar Herzog concludes, constituted the back-
ground against which those classed as superior were enjoined to enjoy
their entitlements. The legitimation of terror and the invitation to pleasure
operated in tandem.54
IV. Conclusion
Official Nazi sexual politics regarded sexual morality first and foremost as
an issue of racial and ethnic politics (Rasse- und Volkstumspolitik). Over
the years, who had sex with who and what was deemed necessary, permit-
ted, tolerated, outlawed, or prohibited was increasingly geared to the ques-
tion of whether it served the purposes of keeping the race pure and stabi-
lizing the Volksgemeinschaft. This was by no means merely about
reproduction, i.e., the birth of racially desirable offspring and the birth
rate. In addition, the individual sexual interests of German men and wom-
en were supposed to obey racial and ethnic criteria, an aim that the re-
gime hoped to achieve by way of national education. Various activities
52
Herzog, Sex after Fascism, p. 17.
53
Ibid., chapter 1.
54
Ibid., p. 18. Cf. also Elizabeth D. Heineman, Sexuality and Nazism. The Dou-
bly Unspeakable?, Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 11 (2002) nos. 1-2, pp.
22-66.
Regina Mhlhuser 171
called upon the individual to behave responsibly, respect public policy and
thus support the Volksgemeinschaft. Sexual self-control was seen as an
agenda for and an expression of a higher morality as well as a source of
(morally superior) Germandom.
A whole series of activities, ranging from the work of the medical
corps of the Wehrmacht in the occupied territories to the welfare workers
in the Reich, were geared to influencing an individuals behavior. For
example, tuberculosis, sexually transmitted diseases, and having sexual
relations under the influence of alcohol were seen as chronic national
diseases (chronische Volkskrankheiten) which needed to be treated not
only medically but also socially and in terms of the social welfare policy.
The crucial point in racial thinking was inclusion, which was supposed to
foster a feeling of belonging in Germans and boost their sense of commu-
nity. Numerous measures such as financial aid or awards such as the
Mother Cross were supposed to support this basic conception.55
However, what often appeared ambiguous already on the ideological
institutional level turned out to be multifaceted and often contradictory in
everyday practice. On the one hand, racial gray zones did exist. In many
cases, the question of what was deemed racially desirable, undesira-
ble, or alien could not be answered easily. The criteria for racial and
ethnic evaluation were in fact not clear-cut and fixed but much rather
subject to change over time during the different stages of the Nazi regime
and the war. It was one thing that Jews were excluded as the other, as
elements subverting the Volksgemeinschaft a priori, but the question of
who was to be defined as a Jew as well as the criteria for racial and ethnic
evaluation were transitional and constantly disputed. For instance, initial-
ly, relationships of German women and Polish forced laborers were pun-
ished severely within the borders of the Reich; toward the end of the war,
however, when the birth rate had dropped and the fear of defeat was
becoming more intense, such relationships were frequently tolerated;
sometimes children resulting from these relationships were even regarded
as desirable.56 In addition, the respective territory had a substantial im-
55
On the development of the Volksgemeinschaft see Michael Wildt,
Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermchtigung. Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen
Provinz 19191939 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2007).
56
Gabriele Czarnowski, Zwischen Germanisierung und Vernichtung. Verbotene
polnisch-deutsche Liebesbeziehungen und die Re-Konstruktion des Volkskrpers
im Zweiten Weltkrieg, in Helgard Kramer (ed.), Die Gegenwart der NS-
Vergangenheit (Berlin/Vienna: Philo, 2000), pp. 295-303. Birthe Kundrus, For-
bidden Company: Romantic Relationships between Germans and Foreigners,
pact on the interpretation of sexual measures and regulations, which, for

example, showed itself by the fact that the Nazi criminal offense of race
defilement hardly ever applied to the occupied Eastern territories.
For the soldiers and SS men who went to war for the German Volks-
gemeinschaft specific sexual norms and morals applied, which were not
completely detached from those within the borders of the Reich, however,
they still differed considerably. As Ulrich Brckling argues, the transfor-
mation of men destined for deployment to combat zones included unleash-
ing their individual potential for violence, but at the same time this very
potential needed to be kept under control by disciplinary measures.57 In
order to compensate the men for the extreme demands made upon them
during wartime and for the subjugation they were expected to endure, the
military, as Jan Philip Reemtsma has observed, made special conces-
sions.58 During the National Socialist war of annihilation, heterosexual
activities, including sexual violence, were a part of these concessions,
concessions that were not always legal but, generally, tolerated. It has been
confirmed that strict bans on undesirable or prohibited sexual inter-
course existed. Yet only in the rarest of cases did military commanders put
these bans into effect. As a result, military authorities created spaces of
opportunity (Gelegenheitsrume) for German men to engage in hetero-
sexual activities, which they utilized or not according to the individual
norms and habitual practices within their military units.
Ultimately, however, neither the Wehrmacht High Command and the
Army High Command nor the Reichsfhrer-SS limited themselves to
passive sexual politics by generally refraining from intervention. By
educating their men about the symptoms and risks of sexually transmitted
disease, by passing out condoms, and by establishing hygiene stations and
military-controlled brothels they actively created opportunities for their
men to seek comparatively uncomplicated and inexpensive heterosexual
contacts bearing only limited risk. Since male virility was considered to be
an expression of strength, and as the conquest of enemy women sym-
bolized the victory over foreign territory, heterosexual activities were
ultimately deemed beneficial to the war effort. They were thus not only
19391945, Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 11 (2002) nos. 1-2, pp. 201-
222.
57
Ulrich Brckling, Disziplin. Soziologie und Geschichte militrischer
Gehorsamsproduktion (Munich: Fink, 1997), p. 10.
58
Jan-Philipp Reemtsma, Die Wiederkehr der Hobbesschen Frage. Dialektik der
Zivilisation, Mittelweg 36, vol. 3 (1995) no. 6, pp. 47-56, here 51.
Regina Mhlhuser 173
tolerated but seen as a positive factor and the underlying fuel for the
military machine, as Annette Timm puts it.59
To which extent Wehrmacht and SS commanders systematically pro-
moted the sexual activities of their soldiers, tolerated them willingly or
with dismay, or disciplined their soldiers depended on the military and
political situation as well as the norms and perspectives of the men in-
volved. On the whole, men who voiced moral reservations, for instance by
considering setting up brothels as counterproductive and damaging to the
morality of an entire generation of young German men, were in the minor-
ity.
Ego documents from soldiers and SS men demonstrate that many men
felt that they had complete power over the women of the enemy. In the
male-dominated front society, specific moral standards were created for
the soldiers, discrediting frailty and doubt as feminine and emphasizing
the ability to overcome scruples and doubts as masculine strength. Soft
skills such as being able to cook or speak with sensitivity were respected,
but only as long as a mans rigor was beyond a doubt.60 In this situation,
the men often acted in a manner which would have been unthinkable for
them before the war. Breaking the rules of traditional morality in fact, was
an experience that frequently created a strong bond among the men, thus
strengthening and securing the ties within a military unit. Violence, or the
failure to act, did not have to be deemed morally offensive if it could be
thought of as acceptable in terms of masculinity.61 Sexual potency also,
or maybe particularly when it erupted in sexual violence, could become
a proof of honor, a demonstration of strength and alleged invincibility, at
least as long as they were deemed combat-effective and did not run
counter to the military agenda. Acts of sexual violence were only rarely
considered crimes, except for when they were deemed to be counterpro-
ductive in terms of military goals.62
The intertwinedness of sexuality, masculine ideals, and the use of force
was systematically suppressed and denied after the end of the war. Similar
59
Annette F. Timm, Sex with a Purpose. Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and
Militarized Masculinity in the Third Reich, Journal of the History of Sexuality,
vol. 11 (2002) nos. 1-2, pp. 223-255, here 254.
60
Thomas Khne, Kameradschaft. Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen
Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006).
61
Werner, Soldatische Mnnlichkeit im Vernichtungskrieg, p. 289.
62
Louise Du Toit discusses the fact that there is still no societal agreement whether
the acts of v sexual violence should be considered a crime (Louise Du Toit, A
Philosophical Investigation of Rape. The Making and Unmaking of the Feminine
Self, Routledge. New York: Chapman & Hall, 2009).
to what Hermann Gring had stated in his testimony at the beginning of

this article, the former Supreme Commander of the Army, Erich von Man-
stein, while testifying at the Nuremberg Tribunal, referred to the death
sentences of two soldiers from his corps who had been accused of rape in
63
Russia. Without particularly being questioned about this, both former
military commanders volunteered reports on incidences of rape and the
alleged strict military handling thereof in order to prove that the German
army as well as they themselves had not violated the basic agreements of
the modern day civilization. During the war, the perpetration of sexual
violence was often perceived as an expression of masculine strength and,
by extension, of male honor (individually, and in relation to the respective
military unit). The collective experience of the intertwinedness of violence
and sexual arousal might indeed have been a factor that strengthened the
male bond which was ultimately regarded as morally sovereign.64 In con-
trast, the post-war narratives by Gring and von Manstein presented sol-
diers who had committed rape as individual offenders, thus dishonoring
the military. This shows that sexual violence was considered a symbol of
both male honor and dishonor, military respectability and disrespectability,
and national civility and barbarianism.
This post-war reinterpretation is extremely effective, particularly as the
intertwinedness of sexual desire and extreme violence is an emotionally
explosive and morally highly sensitive topic. Although the war of annihi-
lation as well as the crimes committed by German soldiers have become
extensively researched and debated topics since the beginning of the
1990s, the question of sexuality, and specifically of sexual violence, had
remained a largely obstructed topic until several years ago.
63
IMT, volume 20, p. 665. Also see Erich von Manstein, Verlorene Siege (Bonn:
Athenum-Verlag, 1955), pp. 176-177. Oliver von Wrochem shows the efforts
made by von Manstein in the post-war era to rehabilitate the Wehrmacht (Oliver
von Wrochem, Erich von Manstein. Vernichtungskrieg und Geschichtspolitik
(Paderborn/Munich/Vienna/Zurich: Schningh, 2006), p. 109).
64
On the moral sovereignty of comradeship see Thomas Khne, Belonging and
Genocide. Hitlers Community 1918-1945 (New Haven/London: Yale University
Press, 2010).
NAZI IDEOLOGY AND PROPAGANDA
MILITARY ETHICS DURING TOTAL COMBAT
PETER J. HAAS
In the following I propose to examine the Nazi Warrior Code as this was
formed, articulated, and finally made fully operative during the unfolding
of Operation Barbarossa in 1942. By using the term Warrior Code, I
mean to refer to the general expectations, norms, and rules that define the
behavior expected of the warrior class or, in todays context, the profes-
sional military. Such a code covers the conduct of the members of the
military during wartime (ius in bello) but often defines the good man-
ners (chivalry, gentlemanliness) expected of soldiers in peacetime con-
texts as well. In modern times, such codes have often been written down
and have become encoded in doctrine through honor codes, codes of
conduct, field manuals, military justice systems, command letters, and the
like. In this case study, I will look at command directives from the Nazi
high military command instructing subordinates on how to deal with ene-
my troops and prisoners-of-war, in particular. As we shall see, the Nazi
regime over time produced an explicit code of military conduct on the
Eastern Front that stood in direct contrast to what we would normally
define as moral behavior. That such a warrior code could be articulated
and implemented in a modern military suggests that while such codes are
important, and even necessary, their content is not fixed. In fact, I would
like to argue that the case of the Nazi warrior code, among others, im-
plies that any attempts to find objective and universally true ethics for
warfare are futile, in the end. In other words, in the following I will argue
that warfare, at least in the modern world, is ultimately and by its very
nature outside the boundaries of ethical constraints. This is not to say that
attempts to draw up and enforce viable warrior codes are useless; in fact,
quite to the contrary, such codes are crucial for allowing soldiers to retain
a sense of self-worth even while engaging in the gruesomeness of combat
operations.1 On the other hand, however, it is also the case that, inherently,
such codes are of limited use and ultimately are destined to fail in the face
1
See Shannon French, Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and
Present (Lanham/MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
178 Military Ethics during Total Combat
of actual and sustained combat. I submit that what we witness in the Nazi
warrior code is in fact the failure of the traditional norms of combat and
that a kind of inverted warrior code was institutionalized in their place,
which not only recognized the gruesomeness of war but in fact encoded it.
In any case, when it comes to ethics, the military offers an odd frame-
work. After all, it is the militarys job to kill the enemy, whoever that
happens to be, and virtually by any means. It is what soldiers are trained to
do. Maybe this is why the military has often felt the need for a code of
conduct, a set of expectations including a sense of duty, honor, profession-
al pride, and something we might even call chivalry. Thus, the profession-
al military has often seen, and still sees itself not only as moral but as
reflecting the highest moral standards of the state or nation it represents
and defends; it claims to be, and is often seen as consisting of model citi-
zens. My premise is that the Nazi military did indeed have a type of warri-
or code which established a high moral idea but at the same time allowed
for the grossest maltreatment of enemy soldiers (especially that of the
Soviet POWs). From this examination I hope to learn something more
general about the relationship of warrior codes, on the one hand, and
ethics as normally understood in civilian society, on the other.
I wish to begin my investigation with a different war, that is, with a
story from the American Civil War. On 2 September 1864, the Northern
general William Tecumseh Sherman entered the Southern city of Atlanta,
Georgia. The city was a key railway link and an important population and
industry center of the Southern Confederacy. It was being defended by the
Confederate General John Bell Hood and had by then been under siege for
several weeks. Finally, Hood decided to salvage what was left of his army
and to abandon the city, on his way out burning what military stores and
depots he could. Union General Sherman entered the city the next day and
ordered all civilians to leave the city within the week. Later, he ordered
that all military and government buildings be burned but, whether by in-
tention or not, many of the civilian parts of the city went up in flames as
well. The burning of Atlanta was the beginning of a deliberate rampage
and the destruction of the city pursued by General Sherman. In the weeks
that followed, Sherman marched his army though southern Georgia on the
way to the port city of Savannah. This so-called March to the Sea rav-
aged the area to such an extent that it is still largely unpopulated, today.
The resentment over Shermans scorched earth policy has lived on in the
minds of many Southerners as an act akin to genocide to this very day.
The rationale for this policy lay in Northern politics. Shermans March
was meant to convey the impression to the North that the South was on the
edge of defeat. The Civil War had already dragged on for some four years
Peter J. Haas 179
and the North was war-weary. 1864 was an election year and the Demo-
cratic candidate, former Union general George McClellan, was running on
a peace ticket. He promised to sign a truce and pull the Union forces out of
the South. His opponent Abraham Lincoln, the war president, seemed
likely to lose. General Sherman knew this, and his aim was to achieve a
stunning victory so that Northern voters would vote Lincoln into office
and allow the Union to push the war to a successful conclusion. His plan
worked. The South was reeling from the shock of the destruction of Atlan-
ta, the Confederate Army was on the run, the North saw victory just on the
horizon, and shortly thereafter Abraham Lincoln won reelection. Not even
two months after Lincolns election victory, Sherman wrote to Lincoln
that he was giving him the port city of Savannah as a Christmas present.
Sherman then turned north, accepted the surrender of Joe Johnsons Army,
combined forces with Ulysses S. Grant, and, within months, the Union
forced the surrender of the last substantial Confederate Army, Robert E.
Lees Army of Northern Virginia. With this, the Civil War was over.
Shermans scorched earth tactics may have been brutal and deeply im-
moral, especially in the framework of a Civil War fought for the Union of
the North and the South, but it won the war.
I have taken this as an opening example because William Tecumseh
Sherman is famous for another reason. There are varying accounts, but it
seems that one of his most famous quotes comes from a speech he gave to
the graduating class of the Michigan Military Academy on 19 June 1879.
There are different accounts, but here is what seems to be a fairly reasona-
ble version:
Ive been where you are now, Sherman said to the cadets, and I know
just how you feel. Its entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of
every one of you a hope and desire that someday you can use the skill you
have acquired here. Suppress it! You dont know the horrible aspects of
war. Ive been through two wars and I know. Ive seen cities and homes in
ashes. Ive seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces
looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is Hell!
War is Hell! There are of course many ways to understand this quotation
and the sentiment behind it. Sherman may well have meant it as a descrip-
tion of the horrible mixture of deprivation, starvation, pain, suffering, fire,
and death. This would fit in with what he said in his order evicting civil-
ians from Atlanta, You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will.
War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into
our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.
Yet, others have suggested another meaning. The one I wish to focus on is
found in Chapter Two of Michael Walzers 1997 book, Just and Unjust
Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations.2 There, Walzer
argues that war is hell in the sense that wars (and especially modern wars)
have no known bottom limits as to what can be inflicted on an enemy.
However just a war may be in the beginning, each side triggers a recipro-
cal reaction on the other side, and the feedback loop spirals downward
interminably to greater and greater cruelty. In this context, Walzer cites
General Dwight Eisenhower, When you resorted to force you didn't know
where you were going [...]. When you got deeper and deeper, there were
just no limits except [...] the limitations of force themselves.3 For Eisen-
hower as well as Walzer war is hell as at last there are no innate limits to
the cruelty and suffering it brings. It is open-ended, uncontrollable chaos.
War, especially modern warfare, insofar as it inevitably goes beyond order
and meaning, really is a kind of hell.
This brings me back to the concept of a warrior code. The idea of
war as hell as I have just articulated it runs precisely counter to this and to
the long philosophical tradition in the West which has tried to enforce
limits on warfare to define what is called a just war both in the sense of
ius ad bellum (justly entering a war) and the sense of ius in bello (fighting
a war justly). This has taken various forms. The Roman thinker Cicero
already gave us the basic theory of bellum iustum. This tradition was most
notably taken up in the early Church by Augustine of Hippo, refined by
Thomas Aquinas, and has persisted through the ages to our own day. It has
made itself felt in a variety of modern, secular forms: various treaties, the
diverse Geneva Conventions, rules found in the military doctrines of vari-
ous countries such as the Israeli Tohar HaNeshek (Purity of Arms)
and the Bundeswehrs concept of innere Fhrung. In the United States,
military ethics is taught at all of the military academies, and military chap-
lains are charged with advising commanders on matters of morals and
ethics, among others.
Of course, actual war can never live up to the ethical standards posited
in the classroom and taught in officer training sessions. Nonetheless, the
ideal persists that a just war fought justly is not only possible but in
some way actually justifies any military action underway. That is, mod-
ern states want to be able to claim that deploying their armed forces is not
only morally justified but that such use is in accord with moral norms.
Every society wants to claim that it is on morally high ground, and it is the
enemy who has shown himself to be undeserving of the support of moral
2
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illus-
trations (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 21-33.
3
Ibid., p. 23.
Peter J. Haas 181
individuals. This claim to morally high ground explains why we are

shocked and scandalized when incidents of abuse occur such as the mal-
treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq or the targeted killing of in-
nocent civilians just for fun in Afghanistan. In part, this is because the
members of a democratic society perceive the military as an extension of
their own culture; after all, the soldiers engaged in fighting are its sons and
daughters, friends and neighbors. Their actions reflect the nation whose
uniforms they are wearing, and when soldiers burn down a village, torture
and humiliate prisoners, or kill random civilians, not only outsiders, but
also the people in their home country understand this to mean that the
soldiers themselves are somehow at least partially to blame. This subse-
quent existential fear runs counter to what most citizens in a modern de-
mocracy deeply want to believe, namely that it is the other side, the ene-
mies who behave like barbarians, who do not place sufficient value on
human life, and who fight unfairly. Not only we as civilians retain a strong
sense of ius in bello, of fighting wars in a just and righteous way, but
often even soldiers themselves come away feeling dirtied by such activi-
ties. Perpetrator soldiers themselves also adopt these perhaps unrealistic
standards and spend years, even the rest of their lives, having to deal with
guilt and the various forms of the post- traumatic stress syndrome.
For the reasons stated above, we can see that the military has an active
interest in promoting a sense of military ethics even beyond the politics of
governmental or popular support. The military wants to preserve the moral
character of its soldiers as a simple matter of troop morale if nothing else.
After all, soldiers need to feel proud of what they are doing, need to feel
motivated, and need to be willing to maintain a solid sense of self-worth
while continuing to perform their duty whatever this may entail. The re-
sulting warrior code, of course, includes such military virtues as obedi-
ence, loyalty, and courage, but there is also a sense of chivalry and of
honor, and of serving a higher calling. A major pragmatic function often
cited by authors writing on the Warrior Code is that such a code helps
preserve the psychological wellbeing of the soldiers.4 Soldiers are not just
rampaging killers or murderers, yet, soldiers do kill, but for the most part
reluctantly so in the line of duty and out of a perceived need to defend
their family, country, way of life, or even democracy itself. Furthermore,
soldiers must persist and be successful in battle and then come home to
lead normal civilian lives. We all certainly know that many soldiers return
home from combat suffering from depression and other psychological
conditions, very often also having been seriously wounded. The warrior
4
See for example French, Code of the Warrior.
code is one way to try to limit at least the psychological damage and to
deal with the aftermath.
The question is whether or not the notion of a warrior code is in fact
realistic. If, as Sherman announced and as Walzer understood it, war is
hell in the sense of it being beyond the reach of ethics; hence, the attempt
to hide this fact with high-sounding warrior codes is ultimately useless and
may even be harmful insofar as it denies the truth. This now brings me to
the situation of the Nazi soldiers and the role of the military, both the nor-
mal Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. Was there a warrior code in opera-
tion that allowed these soldiers to commit what, in retrospect, are clearly
understood as acts of gratuitous brutality and genocide and to do this while
maintaining a sense of self-worth?5 The answer I would like to suggest is
that such a code did exist for the Nazi soldiers, offering them a way to feel
justified or to justify their participation in the acts that were committed. To
be sure, just like any code, it never was 100 percent effective. However, it
seems to have been widely effective, considering the soldiers in the SS
and, eventually, those in the Wehrmacht as well. The information is thus
instructive as it sheds light on the extent to which such codes are able to
fulfill their intended function more or less independent of their actual
moral content.6
In the following, I will now look at the Wehrmacht, in particular. I will
do this for two reasons. First, due to the fact that the Wehrmacht was a
modern military organization with an already established history reaching
back to the Reichswehr and its predecessors in ascribing to a code of chiv-
alrous military conduct. It is thus historically and structurally different
from the military formations of the SS, which were direct outgrowths of
the Nazi Party and reflected Nazi ideology from its very foundation. In
other words, the Wehrmacht was a Western military institution in the
traditional sense, with roots outside the Nazi regime. Second, the imple-
mentation of the Nazi warrior code in the Wehrmacht offers a study in
5
By setting behavioural standards for themselves, accepting certain restraints, and
even honouring their enemies, warriors can create a lifeline that will allow them
to pull themselves out of the hell of war and to reintegrate themselves into their
society, French, Code of the Warrior, p. 7.
6
Gray notes that the ugliness of a war against an enemy conceived to be subhu-
man can hardly be exaggerated. There is an unredeemed quality to battle experi-
enced under these conditions []. Traditional appeals of war are corroded by the
demands of a war of extermination, where conventional rules no longer apply,
Jesse Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (Lincoln/NE: Uni-
versity of Nebraska Press, 1998), pp. 152.
Peter J. Haas 183
how radically a warrior code can change in content and still be coherent
and operative for a modern military.
Before turning to my specific examples, it has to be pointed out that
the established German military elite, essentially the officer corps of the
Wehrmacht, found itself involved in an intricate political situation as re-
gards the Nazi Party. On the one hand, the official policy of Nazi Germany
for rebuilding the German military via the reconstruction of military indus-
tries, rearmament, and more aggressive political initiatives to regain con-
trol of strategically important territory was fully supported by the military
establishment. The military elite certainly was anxious to move beyond the
constraints imposed by the Versailles Treaty. From the very beginning, the
Reichswehr (its name changed to Wehrmacht in 1935) cooperated with the
newly emerging National Socialist state.7 But a series of factors seemed to
threaten the status of the Wehrmacht in respect to seeing itself as the coun-
trys one and only true military and the way the Nazi government saw it.8
One such factor was the emergence of the Partys own military structure,
the SA, and then that of the SS with its later military component, the
Waffen-SS. The rise of the SS, and particularly the Waffen-SS divisions,
posed a threat to the Wehrmachts status as the only military institution of
the Nazi government, and by the outbreak of war in 1939, the leadership
cadre of the Wehrmacht was facing the possibility of being sidelined by
the SS. This threat was exacerbated by a second factor, namely, the grow-
ing threat of war. By the late 1930s, the military high command felt grow-
ing concern about Hitlers aggressive foreign policy, noting correctly that
Hitlers military strategy was overtaking the actual preparedness and ca-
pabilities of the Wehrmacht. This led to further disagreements over battle
plans and deployments, although the rapid succession of victories in the
West seemed to have sidelined most of these concerns. The concerns re-
turned with renewed force, however, with Hitlers decision to invade the
Soviet Union. In the spring of 1941, as preparations for Operation Barba-
rossa were well underway, the Wehrmacht generals faced what seemed to
7
See Manfred Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat: Zeit der
Indoktrination (Hamburg: R. v. Dreckers Verlag, 1969), pp. 38. This does not
mean that all officers immediately or fully adopted Nazi ideology, however. Ibid.,
pp. 58-62.
8
See Jrg Echternkamp, At War, Abroad and at Home. The Essential Features of
German Society in the Second World War, in Ralf Blank/Jrg Echternkamp/
Karola Fings/Jrgen Frster/Winfried Heinemann/Tobias Jersak/Armin
Nolzen/Christoph Rass (eds.), Germany and the Second World War, vol. IX/I:
German Wartime Society 1939-1945: Politicization, Disintegration, and the Strug-
gle for Survival (Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 49.
be an actualization of their fears of being overtaken by the Party, when

they were briefed (or instructed) about the ideological and racial war that
was about to begin, being forewarned that this would be conducted in a
way different from what had been the case on the Western front. There is
some dispute as to how the generals reacted and whether or not there may
have been some opposition expressed at the time on the grounds of mili-
tary honor and the morale of the troops. In fact, at least some of the mili-
tary reservations about the direction of the policy seem to have come out
in the open as indicated by a Fuehrer Directive of 21August 1941, in
which Hitler stated outright, the proposals by the OKH for the continua-
tion of the operations in the East dated 18 August do not conform with my
intentions.9
Thus, the leadership of the Wehrmacht found itself in the difficult posi-
tion of having to reconcile its evaluation of the situation with its own ca-
pabilities, absorbing the strategy imposed by Hitler, and coping with the
rise of a competitive parallel military structure, all in the context of war
looming overhead and then real war. In this politically charged context the
Wehrmacht found itself maneuvered into a position in which it needed to
bring itself into closer congruity with the extensive Nazi program for re-
shaping Germany, as indicated below.10 This is not to say that the
Reichswehr (and later Wehrmacht) leadership gave up on the traditional
code of military honor easily, or overnight, but it must be said that over
time it came a long way in this process. Overall, it can be safely concluded
that by the time of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, the Wehr-
macht had been largely aligned with Nazi ideology and policy. This was
true not only for the upper echelons of the officer corps but also for the
rank and file of the military, which was increasingly made up of conscripts
who had grown up in Nazi Germany and often been part of the Hitler
Youth, thus taking the need for a racial war of extermination more or
less for granted. For all these reasons, the end result was that the Wehr-
macht as an organization gradually fell into line with Nazi policy.11 Hav-
9
Cited in: James Steiner, Hitlers Wehrmacht: German Armed Forces in Support
of the Fhrer (Jefferson/NC/London: McFarland and Co., 2008), p. 92.
10
Jrgen Frster, Ideological Warfare in Germany, 1919 to 1945, in Blank/
Echternkamp/Fings/Frster/ Heinemann/Jersak/ Nolzen/Rass (eds.), Germany and
the Second World War, pp. 501. In this process, 1935 seems to have been an im-
portant turning point. See Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat, pp. 79-
105.
11
See the discussion in Wolfram Wette, The Wehrmacht: History, Myth Reality
(Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 90-98 and 195. On the
other hand, it must be noted that this alignment with Nazi racial war ethics was
never accomplished.
Peter J. Haas 185
ing said all this, it also has to be noted that the alignment of the Wehr-
macht with Nazi racial warfare ethics was never fully achieved.12
The notion of the soldiers being the representatives of the German
people as a whole (a kind of fighting extension of the Volksgemeinschaft)
was not without precedent, and had already been articulated in the early
days following World War I.13 The Nazi ideal of rearming the military
both materially and mentally was therefore not, in and of itself, out of
the ordinary. What was different, of course, was the content; when the
Nazi Party took hold of the state apparatus, the war that was being pre-
pared was less about purely military gains but instead more about race and
ideology. To be sure, the Wehrmacht continued its struggle to retain con-
trol over its own officer and enlisted training and indoctrination, but it
appears that it was steadily being taken over by the Nazi leadership. This
seems to have been especially true when the disaster of Stalingrad began
to unfold in the winter of 1942/43. The concern was that a signal defeat
would not only stall the military drive of knocking the Soviet Union out of
the war but would also have a negative impact on troop morale, overall.
This may also have been a response to the already declining physical and
mental condition of the military forces in the East due to both the devastat-
ing losses among the combat units and the increasingly primitive condi-
tions in which Wehrmacht soldiers found themselves.14 To deal with these
developments, the Nazi leadership began to implement more rigorous
ideological training and more severe disciplinary action. The establish-
ment of Nationalsozialistische Fhrungsoffiziere in December and January
1942 reflects the first of these responses while the changes in military
justice reflect the second approach.15 Bartov in fact has argued that by the
last year of the war, or so, the remarkable resistance put up by German
soldiers in the face of the advancing Red Army was a function not so
much of group cohesion, which had been largely compromised by the high
turnover in officers, non-commissioned officers (NCOs), and regular
troops nor by the fear of disciplinary punishment, although this was a
growing factor, but by ideological indoctrination. As Bartov puts it when
12
See for example, Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat, pp. 355-356.
13
See Echternkamp, At War, Abroad and at Home, p. 51.
14
Omer Bartov, refers to these as the destruction of the primary group, which
gave the Army its overall cohesion, and the demodernization of the front. See
Omer Bartov, Hitlers Army: Soldiers, Nazis and Ware in the Third Reich (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. p. 28.
15
See Echternkamp, At War, Abroad and at Home, pp. 52-56. On the later, see
also Manfred Messerschmidt/Fritz Wuellner, Die Wehrmachtjustiz 1933-1945, 2nd
edition. (Paderborn: Schningh, 2005).
talking about the outbreak of panic, desertion, and mutiny, the Wehr-
macht protected itself from most breakouts by harsh discipline but com-
pletely inoculated its troops against a panic epidemic by huge counter-
injections of terror from the enemy.16 It was these ideological injections
Bartov goes on to argue, which allowed the Wehrmacht soldiers to come
to terms with their own brutality.17 They were, after all, being told by the
experts that they were fighting a barbarian army that would do the same to
them and their families if given a chance. This indoctrination of the
Wehrmacht soldiers brought them close to the Waffen-SS in their thinking
and, in essence, supplanted the SS warrior code to the Wehrmacht.18
Another factor in all this, of course, was the fuzzy boundary between
what constituted a military defense of the German homeland and the war
of racial extermination, which was part of government policy. From the
point of view of the German soldiers, especially as the Eastern front dete-
riorated and the Red Army began to advance toward Germany, these two
components of the war merged into one bloody struggle. Particularly in the
East the war descended into the kind of hellish moral wasteland of which
Sherman (and Walzers interpretation of Shermans statement) had spo-
ken.19
In the remainder of this paper I want to look at two examples of how
this new, more radical warrior code was instantiated in the Wehrmacht.
The first example of how a warrior code can be supportive even of geno-
cide is provided by the so-called Kommissarbefehl (Commissars Or-
der) which set forth the overarching doctrine governing the actions of the
Nazi Wehrmacht in the East. The Befehl describes the militarys role in
eliminating the ideological leadership of the Red Army (the Commis-
sars) during the invasion and the anticipated conquest of the Soviet Un-
16
Bartov, Hitlers Army, p. 104.
17
See ibid., pp. 106.
18
See George Stein, The Waffen SS: Hitlers Elite Guard at War (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1966), pp. 119-136. Also Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmacht im NS-
Staat, pp. 354-355.
19
See for example, Peter Steinbachs discussion in his essay, Krieg, Verbrechen
Widerstand: Die Deutsche Wehrmacht im NS-Staat zwischen Kooperation und
Konfrontation, in Karl Heinrich Pohl (ed.), Wehrmacht und Vernichtungspolitik
(Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), esp. pp. 11-19. Karl Heinrich Pohl,
in his essay in the same collection, Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehr-
macht 1941-1944 notes that The leadership of the Wehrmacht, as regards the
realization of the plans for a war of extermination, had not merely remained pas-
sive but had participated actively, agreeing, preparing, and executing [my transla-
tion], p. 143.
Peter J. Haas 187
ion. In the version of 23 May 1941, while the final planning for Operation
Barbarossa was underway, the directive stated,
In the fight against Bolshevism there is to be no expectation that the be-

havior of the enemy will be in accordance with the principles of humanity
or international law. In particular, we can expect from the political com-
missars of all kinds, as the real bearers of resistance, the hateful, cruel, and
inhuman treatment of our prisoners.20
Building on this assertion, the Befehl goes on to say that therefore it is

necessary to eliminate Soviet military and civilian commissars preemp-
tively as soon as they are encountered, that is, even before any of them
arrive at POW-camps. In effect, commissars, even civilian ones, are to be
executed summarily.21 The reason given for this was that the German
soldiers could expect the same from them, a rationale I will return to in a
moment.
The rhetoric and language of the Befehl is crucial for adducing its eth-
ics. It begins by positing that the enemy will not act in accordance with
the principles of humanity or international law. There are two points
being made, here. The first one is that the enemy will not act in accordance
with international law. The implication is that the Soviets have already
rejected the applicability of international law in their fight against the
Germans and so, in theory, the German warriors themselves have been
given license to feel that they are not bound by international law in this
case, either. An important foundation is being laid here: German warriors
can engage in what in another frame of reference might appear to be a
summary execution of civilian commissars. Here, however, the target
population has already suspended the applicability of the normal moral
and legal frame of reference and has indeed already condemned itself to
live and die by the law of the jungle, as it were. The commissars thus de-
serve to be executed and the soldiers who carry out such executions are
not morally culpable.
The second element in the opening lines of the Befehl is that the ene-
my will not in any case act in a human way. Now, on the one hand, this
can be seen as little more than an extension of the racial ideology of the
Nazis. In comparison to Aryans, Russians as well as Jewish-Asiatic Bol-
sheviks were seen as sub-human. Yet, on a deeper level, this claim also
justifies the inhuman, even unhuman behavior soon to be expected and
20
Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen
Kriegsgefangenen 1941-1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), p. 48.
21
See ibid., pp. 44.
even demanded of Nazi soldiers. Again, what appears to be the execution

of civilians is really something else, entirely. Not only was it the killing of
already self-declared criminals but of criminals who were not even fully
human. Here, then, we see that the military had already allowed itself to be
drawn into a special kind of moral warrior code.
But let me move on to my second example. This general directive was
subsequently given its operational form by the OKW (Oberkommando der
Wehrmacht; Supreme Command of the Armed Forces). There is a strik-
ing letter written by General Hermann Reinecke, at the time a lieutenant
general and the head of the General Office of the Armed Forces at the
OKW. Under his aegis came also the office dealing with POWs. In Sep-
tember 1941, a few months after the invasion of the Soviet Union,
Reinecke issued instructions as to the expected treatment newly arriving
Soviet POWs at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Western Ger-
many. His command letter is important as it explicitly puts into operational
terms what was already the de facto policy in regard to the treatment of
Soviet prisoners-of-war, as we have seen in the Kommissarbefehl.
Reinecke begins by noting that
The war between Germany and Russia is not a war between two states or
two armies but between two ideologies, namely, National Socialism and
Bolshevism. The Red Army soldier must be looked upon not as a soldier in
the sense of the word applying to our western opponents but as an ideolog-
ical enemy. He must be regarded as the archenemy of National Socialism
and must be treated accordingly []. The fight against National Socialism
is carried over into his flesh and blood. He conducts himself with every
means available to him: sabotage, subversive propaganda, arson, murder.
Thus the Bolshevik soldier lost every right to claim treatment as an honor-
able soldier or according to the Geneva Convention.22
It should be noted that the enemy soldiers are not even called enemy sol-
diers instead they are cast as ideological combatants, which is why they
are neither to be regarded as fellow soldiers-at-arms nor to be treated as
such. This is based on a statement by General Alfred Jodl (Chief of Opera-
tion Staff, OKW):
In the war against Bolshevism, the conduct of the enemy according to the
principles of humanness and of international law is not to be taken into ac-
count. In particular, one is to expect from the political commissars of all
kinds a hate-filled, cruel, and inhumane treatment of our prisoners. Retalia-
tion must therefore be implemented immediately and in full measure
22
Ibid., p. 46.
Peter J. Haas 189
against those persons, who are known as the carriers and originators of
those well-known Asiatic, Barbarian methods.23
Reineckes own letter goes further in specifying the implications of this

view:
The Bolshevik soldier has therefore lost all claims to treatment as an hon-
orable opponent in accordance with the Geneva Convention []. The or-
der for ruthlessness and energetic action must be given at the slightest indi-
cation of insubordination, especially in the case of Bolshevist fanatics.
Insubordination as well as active or passive resistance must be broken im-
mediately by force of arms (bayonets, rifle butts, and firearms) []. Any-
one carrying out this order who does not use his weapon or does so with
insufficient energy is punishable.24
There are a number of elements in this part of the letter which call for
further consideration. Most striking is the call for ruthlessness and ener-
getic action to be taken at the slightest perceived resistance. In practical
terms, this means that even what appears to be passive resistance, say, a
sick soldier being slow to follow an order barked in a foreign language is
to be met with immediate and maximum force. Furthermore, any soldiers
who do not do this, in particular those who do not use their weapon, are
liable to punishment. In short, German guards and soldiers are expected,
and even commanded as part of their warrior code, to treat the enemy
without humane regard, and so to mete out punishment, including death,
without hesitation or forethought. The soldiers who do this are not only
23
Im Kampf gegen den Bolschewismus ist mit einem Verhalten des Feindes nach
den Grundstzen der Menschlichkeit und des Vlkerrechtes nicht zu rechnen.
Insbesondere ist von den politischen Kommissaren aller Art eine hasserfuellte,
grausame u. unmenschliche Behandlung unserer Gefangenen zu erwarten. Die
Vergeltung muss daher sofort u. in vollem Umgange gegen diejenigen
Persnlichkeiten einsetzen, die also Trger u. Urheber jener bekannten asiatisch-
barbarischen Methoden bekannt sind., ibid., p. 46.
24
Der bolschewistische Soldat [hat] jeden Anspruch auf Behandlung also
ehrenhafter Soldat und nach dem Genfer Abkommen verloren. Es entspricht daher
dem Ansehen und der Wrde der deutschen Wehrmacht, dass jeder deutsche
Soldat dem sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen gegenber schrfsten Abstand hlt.
Behandlung muss khl, doch korrekt, sein. Jede Nachsicht und sogar Anbiederung
ist strengstens so ahnden. [] Rcksichtsloses und energisches Durchgreifen bei
den geringsten Anzeichen von Widersetzlichkeit, insbesondere gegenber
bolschewistischen Hetzern, ist daher zu befehlen. Widersetzlichkeit, aktiver oder
passive Widerstand muss sofort mit der Waffe (Bajonett, Kolben und Schusswaffe)
restlos beseitigt werden., ibid., p. 181.
seen as dutiful and thus as good Germans but may even be commended or
rewarded. According to signs posted at a concentration camp memorial
site in the Netherlands, the guards there had been ordered to shoot any
prisoner (and these had been civilians) approaching the outer fence. Those
who performed this task diligently were rewarded with a multi-day pass.25
Conformity with this warrior code was thus not only expected but reward-
ed. As any warrior code, this would certainly help the soldiers maintain
their psychological balance during the otherwise ghastly jobs they found
themselves doing.
This order in and of itself is remarkable in its virtually open-ended jus-
tification for the use of maximum violence against a particularly vulnera-
ble population, namely disarmed prisoners-of-war, or even civilians. From
the point of view of the ordinary soldier, there is little room or in fact need
for moral hesitation. Any action against a Soviet prisoner is fully warrant-
ed as they (the victims) had already removed themselves from any rules of
law. In addition, they were not even fully human. On the other hand, fail-
ure to act on even the flimsiest of excuses could bring an official repri-
mand and a sense of personal failure or weakness. Any soldier in this
situation could be counted on to play it safe rather than to be indecisive or
cautious and so end up in trouble. The warrior code implicit in Reineckes
order ensured that the soldiers would act in a certain way and would feel
self-satisfied, indeed morally justified, by doing so. The military, the
whole country, and even the German Volk would see them as such.26
What I have just discussed was, of course, based on one particular set
of documents from one camp, within one small time frame, and against
one particular group. But I believe that what happened in Bergen-Belsen is
representative of the larger attitude that the highest level of command had
25
There are many examples of this. See for example, Michael Englishman,
163256: A Memoir of Resistance (Waterloo/ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press,
2007), p. 29.
26
This argument was actually based on academic work done on the concept of
military ethics in the 1930s. See for example, Max Simoneit, Wehr-Ethik: Ein
Abriss ihrer Probleme und Grundstze (Berlin: Bernard & Graefe, 1936), p. 134:
In addition, the honor of the individual due to his membership in the national
community also depends on the honor of the community, for the nation doesnt
feel anything, but rather the individual. In such a situation, it is in no way possible
fto give to the nation any other honor-norms than those the individual possesses.
(Original: Zunchst ist die Ehre des einzelnen durch seine Gliedschaft in der
nationalen Gemeinschaft auch von der Ehre der Gemeinschaft abhngig, die
Nation empfindet ja nicht, sondern der einzelne. Bei dieser Sachlage ist es auf
keinen Fall mglich, der Nation andere Ehr-Normen geben zu wollen, als sie der
einzelne besitzt.).
Peter J. Haas 191
created and so of the larger process of making the Nazi warrior code
operational in the Wehrmacht. This was a warrior code which, of course,
would not only apply to the Wehrmacht, but to all the institutions across
Nazi Germany in general. However, its establishment in the military has
been my focus here as it articulates the basis for a code of behavior which
is ultimately tied to the higher concepts of loyalty, Germaneness, and
Good and Evil. It thus constitutes, as I have argued elsewhere, one type of
ethics, a good example of how a warrior code can be framed irrespective
of its content.
To be sure, the nature of the Nazis warrior code and the extent to
which the Wehrmacht conformed to it, or resisted it, became a matter of
considerable reflection during the post-war formation of the Bundeswehr
in 1955. What was the relationship of the Bundeswehr to be with its pre-
decessor? What elements of the military traditions of the Wehrmacht (and
the Reichswehr before it) were worthy of preservation and emulation, and
what parts were to be rejected? To a large degree, of course, the answer
depended on what memories of the Wehrmacht were going to be carried
forward. This debate has a long and complex history and is associated with
the larger issues concerning post-war Germanys relationship to its own
past and its perceptions of the role and use of its military both at home and
abroad. While the picture which emerges is not a simple one it seems clear
that, to some extent, the complicity of the Wehrmacht in the genocidal war
of the Nazis was given a lower profile in favor of emphasizing the mo-
ments of reservation and resistance.27 In any case, it seems abundantly
clear that the Bundeswehr profoundly pondered the Wehrmachts World
War II experience and its implications of what happened at the time of
formulating its own warrior code, including the doctrine of the Innere
Fhrung.
Nonetheless, regardless of the complexity of its content, the instantia-
tion of the Nazi warrior code in the Wehrmacht stands as an example of
the elasticity of the notion warrior code.
This brings me back to my starting point with General Sherman and
the notion of war as hell. The implication Walzer drew from this was, as
noted, that anything goes in war because war is intrinsically by nature
without any innate and externally objective moral rules. The Nazi warrior
code as exemplified in the Wehrmacht by Reinecke and others seems to
substantiate the argument that any set of rules can coalesce into a service-
able warrior code during a war, and so war is in fact a kind of hell insofar
as it constitutes a chaotic situation in which anything and everything is
27
For a lengthier discussion of this part of history, see Wette, The Wehrmacht, pp.
251-291.
permissible in the end, even an inverse moral code. In this sense, the
treatment of Soviet POWs as codified in the Kommisarbefehl and in-
stantiated by Reinecke and others was not a reflection of the evilness of
war per se but, on the contrary, a reflection of the ultimate coherence of
war as a rational system which has no built-in moral content outside of its
own framework. The Nazis viewed the struggle in which they were en-
gaged as a war of existential proportions, a war of Aryans against Asiatic
Bolsheviks, of human against subhuman beings, of survival against extinc-
tion, of reason against mindless nature, perhaps even as a part of a kind of
Manichean cosmic battle between Good and Evil.28 In this scenario, the
Kommisarbefehl and Reineckes letter make perfect sense and constitute a
warrior code appropriate for that kind of racial war. They preserve the
honor of the soldier in the midst of violence, blood, gore, and death. War
may be hell, but the soldier need not be a devil; as expressed in his warri-
or code, he simply operates within a particular moral order.
The logic here is the logic once articulated by the one-time U.S. presi-
dential candidate Barry Goldwater who is cited as saying, Extremism in
the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is
no virtue. If in such a Manichean worldview, you are fighting the ulti-
mate Evil, then moderation is a vice, even a sin, and extremism is in fact
the ultimate virtue. Reinecke in his own mind was not calling on the Ger-
man guards to be violent, cruel, or inhumane; he was calling them to a
higher standard of moral virtue. Just as Sherman on the way to Savannah,
the Nazi-soldiers were slashing and burning in the service of what they
were told was a higher, maybe the highest Good.
28
[...] indem statt vom Zweck von der Lebensfunktion im Sinne der
Lebensnotwendigkeit gesprochen werden msste, die infolge ihres gttlichen
Ursprungs auch heiligende Wirkung auszustrahlen vermag. (Translation: [...] so
that instead of having had to speak of the purpose of the life-function in the
sense of the necessity for life, which as a result of its divine origin is also capable
of emanating a sacred effect.), Simoneit, Wehr-Ethik, p. 65.
THE ROLE OF EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS IN NAZI
PROPAGANDA AND WORLDVIEW TRAINING
RICHARD WEIKART
Even though Nazi propaganda never used the term evolutionary ethics to
describe its position on ethics and morality, Nazis nevertheless often em-
braced the concept of evolutionary ethics as a core element of the Nazi
worldview. By evolutionary ethics I mean a view of ethics that embraces
two interrelated but distinct concepts: (1) the idea that morality is largely
based on biological traits which arose from evolutionary processes and (2)
the notion that moral goodness is defined by the evolutionary process,
especially by what promotes the evolutionary progress. Many leading
Nazis embraced both of these ideas, though the latter was more prominent
and had a greater impact on Nazi policies. The evolutionary origin of mo-
rality was not a major theme in Nazi propaganda, though Hitler and other
Nazis espoused it at times. However, Nazi propaganda continually stressed
the biological determinism of the moral character as allegedly differing
from one race to another.
In my earlier work, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eu-
genics, and Racism in Germany (2004), I examined the role of evolution-
ary ethics in the thought of a multitude of German scientists, physicians,
philosophers, and social thinkers of the pre-World War I period. These
advocates of evolutionary ethics had a profound impact on the develop-
ment of the Nazi worldview. In Hitlers Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolu-
tionary Progress (2009), I explained the significance of evolutionary eth-
ics for Hitlers worldview. In this essay, I would like to examine the way
in which the Nazi regime used evolutionary ethics in its propaganda, espe-
cially in publications and courses designed to inculcate the Nazi
worldview. Obviously, one of the most important publications promoting
the Nazi worldview was Hitlers Mein Kampf, which clearly promoted
evolutionary ethics. Another propaganda piece personally endorsed by
Hitler was Wofr kmpfen wir? (What Are We Fighting For? 1944), a
pamphlet explaining the essentials of the Nazi worldview and included
large doses of evolutionary ethics. Two SS manuals aimed at promoting
194 The Role of Evolutionary Ethics in Nazi Propaganda
their worldview: Lehrplan fr die weltanschauliche Erziehung in der SS

und Polizei (Worldview Training Curriculum for the SS and Police) and
Rassenpolitik (Racial Policy) likewise gave a prominent role to evolution-
ary ethics. Finally, several popular scientific writings by the medical pro-
fessor Martin Staemmler, which carried official Nazi imprimatur, promot-
ed evolutionary ethics.
Before proceeding to explain the importance of evolutionary ethics to
Nazi propaganda, I must explode the misconception that a few scholars
and even more websites have propagated and are propagating; this con-
cerns the false claim that Hitler and the Nazis rejected biological evolu-
tion, especially the evolution of humans from other animals.1 In my book,
Hitlers Ethics: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress I have already
proved that Hitler believed in the evolution of humans from primates, but
there are also many other lines of evidence proving the Nazis devotion to
biological evolution. First, the official Nazi biology curriculum included
large segments on biological evolution and specifically taught the evolu-
tion of humans from primates and the evolution of the human races from
more primitive progenitors.2 Second, the Nazi regime appointed German
anthropologists who embraced evolution, including the most prominent
evolutionary anthropologists in Germany some of whom were SS officers
to professorships and honored them in many other ways. Racial scientists
during the Nazi period, including many who joined the SS, were uniformly
1
Some examples of scholars denying that the Nazis believed in human evolution:
George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third
Reich (New York: Dunlop & Grossett, 1964), p. 103. Anne Harrington,
Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 262, FN 2. Robert J. Richards,
That Darwin and Haeckel Were Complicit in Nazi Biology, in Ronald Numbers
(ed.), Galileo Goes to Trial and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Cam-
bridge/MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 177. Peter Bowler, Darwins
Originality, Science, vol. 323 (2009) no. 5911, p. 226. Michael Ruse, Interview,
The Stanford Review Online Edition,
www.stanfordreview.org/Archive/Volume_XL/Issue_7/ Features/features2.shtml,
accessed May 7, 2008.
2
See Reichs- und Preuisches Ministerium, Erziehung und Unterricht in der
Hheren Schule: Amtliche Ausgabe des Reichs- und Preussische Ministeriums fr
Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung (Berlin: Weidmannsche
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1938, pp. 140-164. H. Linder & R. Lotze, Lehrplanentwurf
fr den biologischen Unterricht an den hheren Knabenschulen. Bearbeitet im
Auftrag des NSLB. Reichsfachgebiet Biologie, Der Biologe, this appeared as a
separate supplement without page numbering in vol. 6 (1937) (in the copy I saw,
this appeared immediately after Heft 1).
Richard Weikart 195
committed to biological evolution. Third, many Nazi periodicals, such as

Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, Neues Volk, Volk und Rasse, and Der
Biologe published articles and recommended books that taught biological
evolution.3 They even published articles bashing creationism such as the
infamous one by Konrad Lorenz which advocated the teaching of evolu-
tion as an antidote to racial egalitarianism.4 Finally, the publications which
I am going to analyze in the remainder of this essay and which were some
of the most official statements of Nazi ideology ever issued during the
Nazi period, clearly taught biological evolution, including the evolution of
humans and races.
The form of evolutionary theory underlying Nazi evolutionary ethics
was a racist version of neo-Darwinism. The fundamental idea was that
population pressure forced organisms to compete for sustenance. The
ensuing struggle for existence among the organisms would result in the
survival and reproduction of those of the most favorable variations (the
fittest) while others (the unfit) would perish leaving no progeny. Darwin
called this process natural selection, which many German biologists and
eugenicists often abbreviated as merely selection (Auslese). This competi-
tion was to occur among the individuals within a society, but the Nazis
emphasized even more the competition among different races.
Nazi racial theorists rejected Lamarckian evolutionary theory, uphold-
ing instead August Weismanns theory of hard heredity as did most Ger-
man biologists by the 1930s. Nazis often stressed the impossibility of
changing biological traits by altering the environment. They minimized the
influence of the environment on human behavior, embracing instead bio-
logical determinism. They argued that human intellectual and moral traits
were determined primarily by heredity. The Nazi belief that heredity was
basically fixed and not subject to environmental influences was not anti-
evolutionary, however. On the contrary, it mirrored Weismanns evolu-
3
Some examples are: Heinz Brcher, Ernst Haeckel, ein Wegbereiter
biologischen Staatsdenkens, Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, vol. 6 (1935) no.
69, pp. 1088-96. Heinz Brcher, Rassen- und Artbildung durch Erbnderung,
Auslese und Zchtung, Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, vol. 12 (1941), pp.
667-76. Gerhard Heberer, Abstammungslehre und moderne Biologie,
Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, vol. 7 (1936) no. 79, pp. 874-90. Gerhard
Heberer, Die genetischen Grundlagen der Artbildung, Volk und Rasse, vol. 15
(1940), pp. 136-37. Eugen Fischer, Die Entstehung der Menschenrassen, Volk
und Rasse, vol. 13 (1938), pp. 229-36. Christian von Krogh, Schausammlung fr
Abstammungs- und Rassenkunde des Menschen in Mnchen, Volk und Rasse,
vol. 13 (1938), pp. 193-94, etc.
4
See Konrad Lorenz, Nochmals: Systematik und Entwicklungsgedanke im
Unterricht, Der Biologe, vol. 9 (1940), pp. 24-36.
tionary theory and was completely consistent with the views of leading
German biologists and eugenicists who were committed to Darwinian
theory. Sometimes, Nazi theorists stressed the constancy of heredity over
thousands of years and thus the futility of trying to induce change by alter-
ing the environment. However, none that I am aware of would have insist-
ed that heredity remained constant over millions of years.
In evaluating the relationship between evolutionary ethics and Nazi
ideology, we must keep two points in mind. First, as important as evolu-
tionary ethics was to the Nazi worldview, many elements of Nazi ideology
were derived from other sources: Prussian militarism, nationalism, Chris-
tian anti-Semitism, authoritarianism, and others. Second, evolutionary
ethics was a contested position among biologists and other scholars. Many
Darwinian biologists, anthropologists, and physicians embraced and pro-
moted it whole-heartedly while others, especially philosophers and sociol-
ogists, but also some scientists, warned against any attempts to apply
Darwinism to ethics. The Nazis understanding of the evolutionary theory
was in most respects in harmony with the best science of the day: they
rejected Lamarckism and supported natural selection through the struggle
for existence. However, the Nazis also adopted a racialized form of evolu-
tionary ethics which, though widespread among scientists especially in
Germany, was more controversial.5
Hitler almost never discussed what had influenced his thinking, so it is
difficult and often impossible to pinpoint the sources that shaped his
worldview. Probably, his views about evolutionary theory and evolution-
ary ethics came from a variety of sources.6 Hitler claimed that he had
learned Darwinism in school, which is highly likely since Darwinism was
widely accepted in German scholarly circles by the first decade of the
twentieth century. The geneticist Fritz Lenz reported that Hitler had read
his co-authored book on human genetics and eugenics while at Landsberg
prison at about the time he was composing Mein Kampf. This is likely
since Lenzs publisher, Julius F. Lehmann, was a friend of Hitlers who
sent him copies dedicated to him of many of the books Lenz had published
on racism and eugenics. If Lenzs book was not one of Hitlers sources,
others of Lehmanns many publications may have introduced Hitler to
similar ideas. One of the more likely candidates was Lehmanns periodical
5
For an example of a British scientist opposing the Nazi view of evolutionary
ethics see Sir Arthur Keith, Evolution and Ethics (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons,
1946).
6
See Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and
Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), for information on
many possible sources.
Richard Weikart 197
Deutschlands Erneuerung, which Hitler almost certainly read. It contained

numerous articles promoting eugenics, the racial struggle for existence,
and evolutionary ethics.7
Evolutionary ethics also played an important role in several passages
of Mein Kampf, especially in the chapter on Nation and Race. This chap-
ter was the only part of Mein Kampf published as a separate pamphlet, thus
circulating widely during the Third Reich to promote Nazi racial ideolo-
gy.8 In the opening pages of that chapter, Hitler explained why he thought
racial mixing violated evolutionary principles:
Any crossing of two beings not exactly on the same level produces some-
thing in-between the levels of the two parents. This means: the offspring
will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent but not as high as
the higher one. Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against
the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher
breeding of all life. The precondition for this does not lie in associating
[i.e., breeding] the superior with the inferior, but in the total victory of the
former. The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker or, else,
sacrifice his own greatness. Only the born weakling will view this as cruel,
but he is only a weak and limited individual after all; for if this law did not
prevail, any conceivable higher evolution (Hherentwicklung) of organic
living beings would be unthinkable.9
This statement makes clear that Hitler believed that by promoting the
victory of the stronger at the expense of the weaker, he would be operating
according to the will of nature and would thereby promote the higher
evolution of organic living beings. His eugenics and racial policies were
thus based on the understanding that they would advance humans in the
evolutionary process.
A few lines later in Mein Kampf Hitler continued:
7
These influences were discussed at greater length in Richard Weikart, Hitlers
Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress. (New York: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2009).
8
See Othmar Plckinger, Geschichte eines Buches: Adolf Hitlers Mein Kampf
19221945 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2006), pp. 12, 414.
9
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), p. 285. The Ger-
man term Entwicklung is the term biologists commonly used for biological evolu-
tion, though the term also has other meanings such as development. I have trans-
lated the term as evolution in this and other passages, but only when the context
makes clear that Hitler meant change in biological organisms. Though Hitler never
used the term Darwinism in his writings or speeches, but he often described the
evolutionary process in Darwinian terms such as, e.g., transmutation of species
occurring through natural selection and the struggle for existence.
In the struggle for daily bread, all those who are weak and sickly or less
determined succumb, while the struggle of the male for the female grants
the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is
always a means for improving a species health and power of resistance
and, therefore, a cause of its higher evolution (Hherentwicklung).10
Thus, Hitler opposed miscegenation because he thought it hindered the

evolutionary progress, which for him was the highest good. Since the
whole point of this passage was to apply these principles to human racial
relations, it is apparent that Hitler believed that humans had evolved and
were still evolving. Hitlers racial policy aimed at advancing human evolu-
tion.
In the first few pages of Nation and Race Hitler used the term high-
er evolution (Hherentwicklung) several times while describing changes
in biological organisms. Though he did not use the term Darwinism, his
explanation was essentially Darwinian, since he emphasized natural selec-
tion through the struggle for existence as the primary mechanism for bio-
logical evolution. His embracing evolutionary ethics was also apparent
already in the first few pages of this chapter, since he did not only espouse
evolutionary advancement as his main goal but called anything hindering
the evolutionary process a sin. Hitler also claimed that anyone who
disregarded the laws of nature pertaining to race thwarts the triumphal
march of the best race and hence also the precondition for all human pro-
gress.11 Thus, for Hitler, racist philosophy and policies were the means
for improving the human species, biologically.
Elsewhere in Mein Kampf Hitler explained some of the concrete ways
in which evolution influenced his ideas about the population policy and
eugenics. He railed against birth control as, in this case,
the natural struggle for existence which leaves only the strongest and
healthiest alive is obviously replaced by the obvious desire to save even
the weakest and most sickly at any price, and this plants the seed of a fu-
ture generation which must inevitably grow more and more deplorable, the
longer this mockery of nature and her will continues.12
Hitler thus insisted that the natural laws, especially the evolutionary laws,
were beneficial and needed to be obeyed, else biological degeneration
would set in. As he saw the struggle for existence as a progressive force in
evolution he thought that many forms of humanitarianism were misguided.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid., p. 289.
12
Ibid., p. 132.
Richard Weikart 199
Hence he criticized those who objected to his views as inhumane, counter-

ing,
No, there is only one holiest human right, and this right is at the same
time the holiest obligation to wit: to see to it that the blood is preserved
pure and, by preserving the best humanity, to create the possibility of a
nobler evolution of these beings.13
Immediately following this statement Hitler explained the need for Ger-
mans to practice a racist form of eugenics to produce this nobler evolu-
tion.
During World War II Hitler and other Nazi officials wanted to ascer-
tain that German soldiers properly understood the Nazi worldview, espe-
cially as it related to the war effort. Therefore, in 1944, they produced the
anonymously-written pamphlet Wofr kmpfen wir? The opening pages of
this pamphlet contain a facsimile copy of a letter signed by Hitler com-
manding German officers to use this pamphlet as a resource to regularly
instruct their troops in the essentials of the Nazi worldview.14 Aside from
Mein Kampf, this is one of the most official statements about the Nazi
worldview ever produced.
One passage in this pamphlet discusses ethics directly, contrasting
Nordic ethics with Jewish ethics. It claims that Nordic ethics was charac-
terized by idealism and was a community ethics based on socialist prin-
ciples. Jewish ethics, on the other hand, was individualistic and materialis-
tic. While Nordics were selfless and obedient, Jews were self-indulgent
and unrestrained. According to this creed, Jews had no feelings of loyalty
or honor, which were the highest virtues of true Germans.15 Although this
pamphlet does not explain how this radical divergence between Nordic
and Jewish ethics had arisen, Hitler had explained this earlier in his career
in a speech, Why We Are Anti-Semites. There he argued that the Nordic
race had developed the duty to work for the community because of the
harsh conditions it had had to face during the Ice Ages. He stereotypically
characterized the Jews, on the other hand, as work-shy because they had
allegedly faced easier living conditions which did not require as much
cooperation. This difference had shaped their different conceptions of
morality. He stated,
13
Ibid., p. 402 (emphasis in the original).
14
See Wofr kmpfen wir?, published by the Personal-Amt des Heeres (Berlin
1944), pp. iv-vi.
15
See ibid., pp. 56-58.
Aryanism means the moral conception of labor and through it what we

speak about so often, today: socialism, a sense of community, [and] com-
mon good before individual interests: Jewishness means an egotistical con-
ception of labor and thus mammonism and materialism, the direct opposite
of socialism.16
Hitler then went on to explain that these ethical traits were biologically
ingrained hereditary traits.
Although Wofr kmpfen wir? does not explain the evolutionary ori-
gins of morality, it clearly promotes evolutionary progress as the highest
good. The passage providing the most overt answer to the question posed
by the title of the pamphlet makes this abundantly clear:
Thus we believe in the task of the improvement of humans. In the final

analysis, our fighting serves this cause, and our struggle must be inexora-
ble against everything that opposes this task, for the appropriate fulfilment
of this task is dependent on the most highly evolved, most creative, and
most capable race retaining its decisive influence on the living arrange-
ments of the peoples of the earth.17
As the Nazis believed that the Nordic race was superior, they believed that
promoting it at the expense of other peoples would lead to evolutionary
progress. It would bring improvement to the human species.
Following this quotation is a long section explaining the centrality of
race in the Nazi worldview. This passage emphasizes the importance of
evolutionary progress in Nazi racial thought and policies. It quotes the
geneticist Stengel von Rutkowski who stated that the natural laws accord-
ing to which the cosmos of dying and becoming is transformed and
evolves are divine laws. (In this quotation, the phrase which I have trans-
lated as dying and becoming is Stirb und Werde, which was the title
of a book about evolution by one of the most important popularisers of
Darwinism in early twentieth-century Germany, Wilhelm Blsche). These
biological laws include racial inequality, the Nordic character of the Ger-
man people, and the struggle among the different races for living space.
The author then states,
We value the struggle as an irrevocable law of life, for only in the eternal
struggle, the precondition for all selection, will personalities and tough
16
Adolf Hitler, Warum sind wir Antisemiten? (13 August 1920), in Eberhard
Jckel (ed.), Hitler. Smtliche Aufzeichnungen, 1905-1924 (Stuttgart: Deutsche
Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), p. 190.
17
Wofr kmpfen wir, p. 67 (emphasis in the original).
Richard Weikart 201
peoples (Vlker) grow. Only through struggle can great things be

spawned.18
In this context, struggle and selection are clearly shorthand for the struggle
for existence and natural selection, a usage which was quite common
among German biologists and eugenicists in the 1920s and 1930s.
Since the Nazis considered the Germans and related peoples (i.e., Nor-
dic race) to be the biologically most advanced on the evolutionary scale,
they believed that their worldview ought to revolve around promoting the
good of the German people. The pamphlet clearly states the most im-
portant goal of the Nazi worldview: In the first place stands the preserva-
tion and advancement of our people (Volk) and nationality.19 This ad-
vancement was not merely a matter of making Germany a great nation, as
the subsequent discussion clarifies. Rather, it was to entail Germans sup-
planting other races (through territorial expansion), which would result in
evolutionary progress. This whole pamphlet, after all, justifies Hitlers
offensive wars of conquest to gain living space.
However, this was not the only path to evolutionary progress. The
pamphlet continually stresses the duty of Germans not only to preserve but
also to improve their biological traits. It states,
National Socialism is the doctrine of the Peoples Community knit togeth-

er by blood and the doctrine of service for the people (Volk) as the highest
moral law for every German. It is the doctrine of blood and honour.20
By blood, the Nazis meant biological hereditary traits, and they did not
construe these as static. The pamphlet urges Germans to strive not only to
keep their blood pure but also to foster its improvement or higher evolu-
tion (Hherentwicklung).21
After delineating the guiding principles behind the Nazi worldview, the
pamphlet then explains the concrete steps which would secure eternal life
for our people (Volk). These involved combating the three main causes of
decline in any race: a declining birth rate, contra-selection, and racial mix-
ture. It then promotes prolific reproduction and eugenics measures to
achieve biological improvement. It also calls on German officers to wisely
choose their spouses with an eye on biologically improving the German
people.22 In a later section on What has National Socialism Brought the
18
Ibid., quotes on pp. 68, 71 (emphasis in the original).
19
20
21
See ibid., pp. 70, 72.
22
German People? it explains that the Nazi regime was focused on improv-
ing the German race:
The racial question has become a question of life and death for the Ger-
man people (Volk). Thus, the main demand of National Socialism is not
only to preserve the racial hereditary material of the German people, but
to increase its value.23
It explains that racial laws, eugenics legislation, and laws to counter popu-
lation decline were measures the Nazi regime had already implemented to
achieve this goal. The importance of biological improvement is also em-
phasized a few pages later:
Our racial thought is merely the expression of a worldview recognizing

the higher evolution of humans as a divine command.24
This last statement was a clear expression of evolutionary ethics which

suffuses many passages in this pamphlet.
The SS was also eager to disseminate evolutionary ethics as part of the
Nazi worldview. Therefore, sometime after May 1942, they published a
Lehrplan fr die weltanschauliche Erziehung in der SS und Polizei
(Worldview Training Curriculum for the SS and Police), which was orga-
nized into thirty-four lessons. The first four covered the history and organ-
ization of the SS, the next twelve taught the history of Europe and Germa-
ny, and the following ten focused on Hitlers life and significance. The
final section containing eight lessons was on The Biological Foundations
of Our Worldview, which, as the title suggests, contained the core ideas
of the Nazi worldview. The primary message of this final section was that
humans were subject to the same biological laws ruling the rest of nature.
It then focused on the biological laws most important to Nazi ideology:
race, evolution, heredity, reproduction, and eugenics. One entire lesson
was devoted to providing scientific evidence of biological evolution, and
evolutionary concepts such as the struggle for existence and natural selec-
tion which were woven into other segments on heredity and reproduc-
tion.25
Biological improvement and evolutionary progress played a key role in
defining ones moral duty in this SS manual. Indeed, evolution determined
ones role in life:
23
24
Ibid., p. 110.
25
See Lehrplan fr die weltanschauliche Erziehung in der SS und Polizei,
published by SS-Hauptamt, Berlin n.d., pp. 1-4, 71-88.
Richard Weikart 203
Evolutionary theory, i.e., the knowledge of the relationship of all organic

beings, places humans in the whole process of nature and once again de-
termines for us our attitude and behavior toward the organic world.26
These attitudes and behaviors included avoiding racial mixture, preventing

reproduction of those with hereditary problems, and carefully selecting
ones spouse. Following these and other moral imperatives would contrib-
ute to the biological improvement of humanity according to this manual.
Another important contribution of evolutionary theory to understand-
ing ones role in life according to this pamphlet was revealing the im-
portance of the struggle for existence to producing evolutionary progress.
This curriculum claimed that the higher human races had arisen through a
hard and relentless struggle brought about by the harsh conditions of the
Ice Age in Europe.
The fundamental law of the eternal struggle, to which everything weak

and inferior must succumb, thereby finds its high value.
Not only so, but we must also always consider that nature requires the
struggle for the valuable ones. Unfortunately, modern culture has set
aside the natural struggle for existence with its beneficial effects. The
author(s) asserted,
Every primitive people eliminates the inferior, and rightly so. Among the
so-called cultured peoples, a false love of their neighbor borne into the
broad masses above all by church circles even fosters contra-selection.
The pamphlet pleaded for replacing the churchs command of loving ones
neighbor with the imperative to produce the greatest quality and quantity
of children so that the race and species could advance biologically.27
The anonymously-written SS booklet Rassenpolitik (published some-
time after August 1942), communicated many of the same points. It had
evidently been designed as a training manual for SS men and policemen as
a chart at the end of the book divides the material into eleven lessons. It
teaches that the three main racial groups, Europeans, Mongolians, and
Negroes, had diverged about 100,000 years ago. The pamphlet emphasizes
the roles which the struggle for existence and natural selection play in
the evolution of the races, with selection and elimination producing
racial inequalities. The struggle for existence is presented as a positive
force bringing about biological improvement, since in the struggle for
26
Ibid., p. 78.
27
existence, only the strong and fit will triumph. It also states that, in their
struggle for existence, all races were confronted by three main dangers:
declining birth rates, contra-selection, and racial mixture.28 Of the eleven
lessons, three (the fifth, sixth, and seventh) were to be spent on these three
racial dangers.
The final two lessons concern a chapter entitled The Racial Policy
Task of the SS. Although earlier parts of the pamphlet clearly discuss the
evolution of the races through natural selection, they often only imply that
evolutionary progress was the main goal of a racial policy. This final chap-
ter, on the other hand, strongly and overtly promotes evolutionary progress
as the chief moral goal for the SS. The opening section of this chapter
reprints five SS statutes, four of which are measures to improve the Ger-
man race, biologically. They are to encourage SS men to reproduce as
prolifically as possible, but only with women considered hereditarily suit-
able.
The next section of the chapter is on The Meaning of Life and begins
with the exhortation:
To preserve oneself and to reproduce is the deepest meaning of life. []

However, the preservation and reproduction of life includes the urge for
improvement, higher evolution, and perfection which resides in all living
things.29
As this statement and the subsequent discussion make clear, the urge to-
ward higher evolution is a moral imperative that we must obey. The author
implies that this inherent urge of organisms may have some kind of divine
origin, but he still insists that the evolutionary process had occurred over
millions of years, and had proceeded by struggle and selection:
The preservation and reproduction, the evolution and improvement of life

come about in the struggle for existence to which every plant, every ani-
mal, every species, and every genus is subjected. In this struggle they are
weighed, selected, and eliminated. Even humans and the human races are
subject to this struggle, which decides their value and their right to exist.30
SS racial policy was not just a matter of advancing the interests of the
Nordic race, important as this was in their scheme of things. The closing
section of the pamphlet stresses the need for conscious selection within the
28
See Rassenpolitik, published by Der Reichsfhrer SS (Berlin: SS-Hauptamt,
n.d.), pp. 15-16, 25, 27-28, 40.
29
Ibid., p. 61.
30
Ibid.
Richard Weikart 205
Nordic race to promote biological improvement. This would bring the

Nordic people into harmony with the evolutionary process in nature.
For the higher evolution of a race and a people can, just as in all of nature,
only proceed from the individual who, as the best and most capable indi-
vidual, survives and in the course of generations multiplies accordingly
and again and again produces a selection of the best.31
It then suggests some measures to help bring about evolutionary progress:
The selection of Nordic-type men, the choice of spouses according to ra-

cial criteria, the duty to marry and to bear many children are the biological
foundations on which the Order of the SS is built and through which it ini-
tiates and ensures the higher evolution of our people (Volk) for the future.
One of the most important voices spreading racial and eugenics propagan-
da in the Third Reich was the Nazi Party member Martin Staemmler who
was appointed professor of pathology in 1935 by the Ministry of Educa-
tion first at the University of Kiel and later in the same year at the Univer-
sity of Breslau. Staemmler is not well known today, but he caught the
attention of Nazi officials rather quickly because he supported Nordic
racism and eugenics. Nazi officials tapped him in 1933 to teach genetics
and eugenics in three-day physician training courses in Dresden. In the
first year, over 5000 physicians attended these courses.32
Staemmler also published quite a few officially-endorsed books and
pamphlets on eugenics and racial thought in Germany during the Third
Reich. He completed the manuscript for his work Rassenpflege im vlk-
ischen Staat (Racial Care in the Ethnic State) several months before the
Nazis came to power. It sold very well in the Third Reich; an edition from
1937 indicates that 59,000 copies had already been sold in the first four or
five years and, sometime later, 81,000 copies were in print. This work had
the official Nazi imprimatur in several ways. On the page following the
title page there was the official statement that the Nazi Partys Commis-
sion to Protect National Socialist Literature had found nothing objectiona-
ble in it. Further, in 1935, it was issued in a slightly abridged edition by
the Nazi Partys Racial Policy Office, giving it even greater official sanc-
tion.33 Also, in 1937, the Ministry of Education listed it as a book ap-
31
Ibid, pp. 63-64, quote on p. 63.
32
See Ernst Wegner, Rassenhygiene fr Jedermann (Dresden: Theodor Steinkopff,
1934) (which contains three lectures by Staemmler).
33
See Martin Staemmler, Rassenpflege im vlkischen Staat (Munich: J. F.
Lehmanns Verlag, 1937).
proved for use in school instruction.34 Finally, in 1941, the German mili-
tary reissued this book under a new title, Deutsche Rassenpflege (German
Racial Care), to instruct the German troops about race and eugenics.35
Staemmlers 1939 book, Die Auslese im Erbstrom des Volkes (Selection in
the Hereditary Life of the People), was issued by the official Nazi publish-
er as a part of the series, Nationalsozialistische Schulungsschriften (Na-
tional Socialist Educational Works). Staemmler published other works on
racism and eugenics that appealed to the Nazis, including one republished
by the Hitler Youth.
Staemmler perfectly illustrates the Nazi zeal for evolutionary ethics. In
several of his works, including Rassenpflege im vlkischen Staat, Die
Auslese im Erbstrom des Volkes, and Rassenpflege und Schule (Racial
Care and the School), he spent some time explaining biological evolution
and its importance for racial and eugenics ideology. He devoted an entire
chapter in Rassenpflege im vlkischen Staat to The Law of the Evolution
of Living Organisms, wherein he rejected Lamarckian theory in favor of
Darwins theory. He even claimed that Darwin was perhaps the greatest
scientist of all time. Further, he made clear that humans were included in
the evolutionary process.36
The first chapter of the book Volk in Danger sets the tone for the rest
of the book. There, he explains that the perils besetting Germans were
caused by their disregard for the laws of nature. He then lists the most
important laws of nature not sufficiently heeded by Germans:
The law of the struggle for existence, fertility, selection, heredity, and
others. These most holy of all laws, holier than those of the religions, peo-
ples, or associations of nations, holier than all the laws of science, holier
than laws of technology and economy, these holiest laws, some think they
can overlook and brush aside, because they only live according to one law,
that of the crassest materialism.37
The four laws Staemmler called the holiest of all laws were directly con-
nected to evolutionary biology. Thus, he was making evolutionary princi-
ples the highest values guiding human conduct. Not only is this obvious in
34
See Verzeichnis der Lehrmittel ber Erbkunde, Erbpflege, Rassenkunde und
Bevlkerungspolitik, Deutsche Wissenschaft Erziehung und Volksbildung:
Amtsblatt des Reichsministeriums fr Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung
und der Unterrichtsverwaltungen der Lnder, vol. 3 (1937), p. 247.
35
See Martin Staemmler, Deutsche Rassenpflege (Tornisterschrift des Oberkommandos
der Wehrmacht Abteilung Inland, n.p. 1941), p. 3.
36
See Staemmler, Rassenpflege im vlkischen Staat, pp. 17-22.
37
Richard Weikart 207
the passage just quoted, but it is also manifest throughout the entire book.
By ignoring these evolutionary principles, Germans had endangered their
existence because nature is inexorable against those who sin against its
precepts.38 The religious language, holy, sin, etc., makes clear that
Staemmler is setting up evolutionary laws as the arbiter of all morality,
and it implies that he wants to replace religious ethics with ethics derived
from evolutionary laws.
Staemmler also claimed that evolutionary laws supported the Nazi
moral adage of common welfare before individual interest (Gemeinnutz
vor Eigennutz). This, he argued, was because the fundamental law of
nature is struggle, and only the best would survive this competition. He
continued:
These best ones [who survive the struggle for existence] serve the preser-
vation of the species, of the race. The preservation, the strengthening, the
further evolution of the race and species, this is the actual goal of nature.
This is also what we must learn from nature: it is not the individual that
matters; nature is completely indifferent to it [the individual]. The goal,
which is advanced ruthlessly, without compassion, and without sparing
victims, is the preservation of the species, of the race, of the Volk. Thus we
see in nature the old German principle, which National Socialism has taken
up anew: common welfare before individual interest. The individual is
nothing; the Volk, the race is everything.39
Since multitudes of individuals perish in the struggle for existence and,

thus, seem of little consequence to nature, Staemmler thought that we as
humans should not have a high regard for the individual.
Further, Staemmler also justified the anti-democratic and anti-
humanitarian stance of the Nazi regime by appealing to the evolutionary
laws of nature. He argued that modern morality erred by protecting the
weak. Nature teaches us otherwise:
The tasks of racial care are the increase of fertility and selection. Selec-
tion means advancing those with high value and restraining the inferior. If
one wants to carry this out, one must consider one thing above all: There
are no equal rights for all. Those with high value have the right to be ad-
vanced, while the inferior does not have that right. Nature is not democrat-
ic, but rather aristocratic; it produces masses, but then breeds for quality.
38
See ibid.
39
Ibid., p. 20.
Whoever wants to carry out racial care must comply with the laws of na-
ture. He must therefore also be harsh, just as it [nature] is.40
This is one of the clearest statements showing how evolutionary ethics

trumped democratic norms, humanitarian considerations, and equal rights in
Nazi ideology. Nature is harsh against the inferior; so should we be. Nature
is undemocratic; so should we be. Nature selects the best and dispenses with
the inferior; so should we. Equal rights do not exist in the evolutionary pro-
cess; neither should we adopt equal rights. Such was Staemmlers reasoning,
which was commonplace in Nazi racial and eugenics ideology.
In addition to promoting eugenics among Germans to advance the
Nordic race, Staemmler also argued that Germans needed to expand their
living space (Lebensraum). Staemmler wrote this long before Hitler
launched his expansionist war for living space, at a time when Hitler was
publicly proclaiming that he was a man of peace (in order to lull his ene-
mies into false security). He, like Hitler, believed that an important part of
the human struggle for existence was the struggle for living space. Indeed,
he believed that all of history is the struggle of peoples for living space.
He then added that growing nations or races have the moral right to ex-
pand their living space. Elsewhere he called the right to more land a holy
right. He considered a war fully justified if it was fought to provide in-
creased living space for an ethnic or racial group.41 Thus, Staemmler, fully
in line with other Nazi ideologists, promoted offensive warfare; his mo-
rality was not just aimed at Germany defending itself against its foes.
The notion that all actions should be judged as moral or immoral based
on whether or not they contributed to the advancement of the evolutionary
process was a common theme in Nazi ideology and propaganda. Often, as
I have shown, it was explicitly stated. However, even when it was not
explicit, it was often implicit in Nazi propaganda pushing eugenics and
racial policies. Obviously, even though it was a central concept, evolution-
ary ethics does not explain everything about Nazi ideology. It does not
explain why they considered specific races such as the Jews to be inferior,
on the one hand, yet threatening, on the other. However, it does provide a
rationale for the harsh treatment and even the killing of those who, on
whatever grounds, were designated as inferior. The Nazis believed that
natural laws, especially natural selection in the struggle for existence,
granted them the moral license for policies such as compulsory steriliza-
tion, the murder of the disabled, aggressive expansionism, and even geno-
cide.
40
Ibid., pp. 42-43.
41
See ibid, p. 32.
NAZI ETHICS:
THE MEDICAL DISCOURSE
TURNING AWAY FROM THE INDIVIDUAL:
MEDICINE AND MORALITY UNDER THE NAZIS
FLORIAN BRUNS
I. Introduction
Medicine without humanity (Medizin ohne Menschlichkeit), this was the
title Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke gave their report published
in 1960 on the NurembergDoctors Trial. This is a succinct formulation,
expressing the unspeakable crimes German doctors committed during the
Nazi regime, crimes which came to light in the course of the court hear-
ings in 1947. This formulation is still valid for describing the darkest chap-
ter of the history of medicine in Germany if not in the entire world, even
today. An earlier version of this document was published already in 1947
but caused little reaction in Germany. The new edition published in 1960,
however, gained significant attention, and continues to be among the
foremost books on medicine under the Nazis.1
Still nowadays, the offenses tried in Nuremberg, primarily the lethal
experiments on the humans in the concentration camps and the murder
campaign labeled Euthanasie (Euthanasia) carried out on the mentally ill
and the physically handicapped, confront us with the question of how
these crimes against humanity could possibly have occurred. Why did
doctors, who are professionally obliged to provide their fellow men with
special care and protection, so flagrantly contravene the most elementary
precepts of humanity and medical ethics? Why did most of the perpetra-
1
See Alexander Mitscherlich/Fred Mielke, Medizin ohne Menschlichkeit.
Dokumente des Nrnberger rzteprozesses (Fischer Bcherei, Frankfurt a. M.
1960). This book is now in its 17th edition. For the English version see Alexander
Mitscherlich/Fred Mielke, Doctors of Infamy. The Story of the Nazi Medical
Crimes (New York: H. Schuman, 1949). The psychiatrist Alexander Mitscherlich
and the medical student Fred Mielke followed the proceedings as observers of the
trial. For the trial and its aftermath see, amongst others, Paul Julian Weindling,
Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes to Informed
Consent (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
212 Turning Away From the Individual
tors feel not only that they were absolved of any guilt after the war but that
they had in fact acted in a morally correct way? Did all of them have a
sadistic streak or abnormal personality structures which gave them a pre-
disposition to committing such crimes?
Even if such a category of perpetrators indeed existed, a psychopatho-
logical approach does not provide sufficient explanation either for the
behavior of the doctors or that of other groups of perpetrators.2 The fre-
quently made attempt by the elites of various groups in the post-war period
to have the atrocities of Nazi medicine appear to be the work of a few
abnormally predisposed doctors served only the interests of those who
wished to protect the positive self-image of the medical profession. For a
long time, representatives of the medical profession prevented anyone
from exploring the deeper motives behind the behavior of doctors in the
Third Reich. Such research could have brought to light disturbing findings,
seriously incriminated colleagues, and damaged the reputation of the med-
ical profession as a whole. The construct of a medical profession that had
remained intact in its ethical core either, intentionally or unintentionally,
failed to understand the powerful concepts of morality that provided the
foundation for the inhumane medicine under Nazism in the first place.3
This paper centers on the formulation and dissemination of those moral
concepts in medicine which were forged and shaped by Nazism. As a
2
Early studies on the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, such as those by court
psychologist Gustave M. Gilbert, referred more to the normality of the majority
of the defendants. See Gustave M. Gilbert, Nuremberg diary (New York: New
American Library, 1961). Later studies confirmed these findings: Hannah Arendt,
Eichmann in Jerusalem. A report on the banality of evil (New York: Viking Press,
1963); Christopher Browning, Ordinary men. Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the
final solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). Recently: Harald
Welzer, Tter. Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmrder werden
(Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 2005), pp. 7-12.
3
Concerning morality and medicine in Nazism see also Florian Bruns,
Medizinethik im Nationalsozialismus. Entwicklungen und Protagonisten in Berlin
(Stuttgart: Steiner, 2009); Arthur L. Caplan, The Stain of Silence: Nazi Ethics and
Bioethics, in Sheldon Rubenfeld (ed.), Medicine after the Holocaust. From the
Master Race to the Human Genome and Beyond, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010), pp. 83-92; Robert N. Proctor, Nazi Science and Medical Ethics: Some
Myths and Misconceptions, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol. 43 (2000)
no. 3, pp. 335-346; Ulf Schmidt, Medical Ethics and Nazism, in Robert B.
Baker/Laurence B. McCullough (eds.), The Cambridge World History of Medical
Ethics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 595-608. Robert Jtte,
Medizin im Nationalsozialismus. Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung
(Gttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 2011), summarizes the present level of research on
Nazi medicine.
Florian Bruns 213
means of supplementing and differentiating between the existing models

for explaining the way doctors acted under Nazism, in what follows we
shall put forward the theory that the actions of the doctors concerned were
based on convictions arising from concepts of race and racial biology
which lent moral justification to the actions of the perpetrators. The fact
that doctors at that time frequently and relatively freely did things, which
we would without question regard as simply immoral, today, should not
tempt us to dismiss the idea of Nazi ethics as an oxymoron. This would
blind us to the fact that Nazi ideology did indeed have a system of values.
This system, in fact, made clear what doctors were supposed to do if they
wished not only to act correctly but also to conform to Nazi ideology. Nazi
medical ethics were clearly guided by values based on premises we would
certainly reject today, but these premises have not become entirely lost in
history and so remain potentially dangerous.4
First of all, the contemporary debate on moral issues in medicine in the
years between Hitlers seizure of power and the beginning of the Second
World War will be examined. The law on enforced sterilization and the
incipient campaign to murder mentally ill and physically handicapped
individuals were turning points which provided the basis for the radicaliza-
tion of the moral practices of the state in the war years. The subsequent
section will begin by examining two academic disciplines that played a
major role in formulating and mediating Nazi medical ethics:5 the subject
of Medical History attempted the historical legitimization of a new medi-
cal morality while Medical Law and Professional Studies (rztliche
Rechts- und Standeskunde) taught those values to doctors and students.
4
See Peter J. Haas, Morality after Auschwitz. The Radical Challenge of the Nazi
Ethic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), for early general information on ethics
and morality under Nazism. See also Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler.
Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004); idem, Hitlers Ethic. The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Werner Konitzer/Raphael Gross, Morali-
tt des Bsen. Ethik und nationalsozialistische Verbrechen (Frankfurt a. M.:
Campus Verlag, 2009); Raphael Gross, Anstndig geblieben. Nationalsozialistische
Moral (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 2010).
5
Medizinethik (medical ethics; the term rztliche Ethik was customary in the
first half of the 20th century) is not understood exclusively in this context as a
philosophical discipline in the sense of a theory of morality but also as a higher-
level concept for the values and morally justified behavior within medicine, the
medical profession, und the relationship of physicians and patients. For the history
of bioethics see, for example, Albert R. Jonsen, The birth of bioethics (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998); idem, A short history of medical ethics (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
With regard to both disciplines, the question is whether they met the corre-
sponding expectations of the regime, and, if so, in which way. The section
will end with a discussion of overarching aspects of medicine, morality,
and war.
II. The Moral Upheaval in Medicine Before and After 1933

Two things are obvious from any historical classification of Hitlers sei-
zure of power in 1933, and not just with regard to the history of medicine:
on the one hand, the obvious continuities in moral convictions and ways of
thinking and, on the other hand, clear breaks and new beginnings, particu-
larly with regard to the actual practice of what had previously been con-
sidered only in theory. Historical research on medicine under the Nazis
must investigate both of these phenomena.
In retrospect, eugenic and social-hygienic concepts, along with discus-
sions regarding so-called life unworthy of life clearly belong to the con-
tinuities extending from the turn of the century to the time after 1933.6
Even before the First World War, nationalistic doctors and race hygienists
advocated eugenics and Social Darwinism. This development went hand in
hand with a process of weakening humanist ethics centering on the indi-
vidual. Scientists who were driven by a fear of degeneration now propa-
gated nationalist ethics defined on the basis of medical and racial criteria
of inclusion and exclusion. Since these ethics were aimed at a supposed
natural selection within society and at the supposed greater good of the
people and future generations, the term used was generational ethics.7
Losing the First World War was perceived as a damaging counter-
selection from a biological point of view due to the large number of
young men who had been lost in the war. This fanned the flames of a la-
tent feeling of doom and destruction among nationalist circles. Some biol-
ogists, doctors and geneticists subscribed to the world view that the sur-
vival of the people was under threat as a result of the expensive care for
the weak and sick. This view gained increasing numbers of supporters. In
6
See also, most recently, Sheila Faith Weiss, The Nazi Symbiosis: Human Genet-
ics and Politics in the Third Reich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010);
Lynn K. Nyhart, Modern Nature. The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Ger-
many (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2009).
7
See Wilhelm Schallmayer, Generative Ethik, Archiv fr Rassen- und
Gesellschaftsbiologie, vol. 6 (1909), pp. 199-231, for a contemporary view. See
also Sheila Faith Weiss, Race Hygiene and National Efficiency: The Eugenics of
Wilhelm Schallmayer (University of California Press, Berkeley 1987); Weikart,
From Darwin to Hitler.
Florian Bruns 215
this context, Fritz Lenz, later the holder of the first chair of racial hygiene
in Germany and co-author of an influential standard work on the science
of heredity, stated as early as 1917 that:
the individual personality cannot be the final goal of ethics. [] The peo-
ple (Volk)as an organism is the goal of our ethics [].8
The conception of the Volk as a metaphysical entity that has both a life and
a value of its own belonged to the basic principles of Nazi medical ethics.
It was exemplified by the term Volkskrper (peoples body) which played
a crucial role in the rationale of Nazi medical ethicists.
In the crisis years of the Weimar Republic, reputable psychiatrists such
as Alfred Hoche and Ernst Rdin (along with similarly minded doctors
and lawyers) bluntly demanded that individuals should be assessed accord-
ing to their state of health and efficiency and be assigned a graded right to
life on that basis. This launched a discussion on the value of human life
from a medical and economic point of view as early as the beginning of
the 1920s, culminating in proposals to have selection doctors take action
and kill individuals who were incurably mentally ill.9 Supporters of such
endeavors however did not constitute a majority at this time, either among
doctors or within the political hierarchy of the Weimar Republic.10
These brief highlights clearly show that the gradual shift in the stand-
ards and values of the healthcare and social welfare policy had begun long
before 1933. We must not, of course, underestimate what a profound turn-
ing point the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship was in terms of medical
ethics. It was only when Hitler seized power that the Nazi concept of mo-
rality was able to influence and determine actual policymaking and legisla-
8
Fritz Lenz, Zur Erneuerung der Ethik, Deutschlands Erneuerung, vol. 1 (1917),
pp. 35-56, here 37. Lenz published this essay again in 1933 under the title Die
Rasse als Wertprinzip. Lenz stated in the foreword that he did not have to make
substantial changes because all of the elements of the Nazi world view had already
been included in the original text.
9
Ernst Mann, Die Erlsung der Menschheit vom Elend (Weimar: Fink, 1922), p.
96. See also Karl Binding/Alfred Hoche, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung
lebensunwerten Lebens. Ihr Ma und ihre Form (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1920). For an
overview see Michael Schwartz, Euthanasie-Debatten in Deutschland (1895-
1945), Vierteljahrshefte fr Zeitgeschichte, vol. 46 (1998) no. 4, pp. 617-665.
10
The broad rejection of the petition for the destruction of life unworthy of life
to be legally approved by the German Medical Conference in Karlsruhe in 1921
was exemplary of this. Cf. Hans-Walther Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus,
Euthanasie. Von der Verhtung zur Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens 1890-
1945 (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), p. 122.
tion. The new rulers were vehement in pursuing their break with the hated
Weimar morality of sympathy and its Jewish-Christian origins. The
National Socialist German Physicians League (Nationalsozialistischer
Deutscher rztebund, NSDB), an ideological combat unit of doctors
organized in the NSDAP, took the lead in this movement with its pro-
grammatic demand for new medical ethics:
From the first day, we have made it clear that the major turnabout in the
world view of our days, an essential portion of which is vanquishing the
individual through experiencing the people must be the guiding principle
of the morality and ethics of the medical profession.11
The associations periodical, Ziel und Weg, drew the lines of battle with
traditional morality very clearly:
It is specifically Christian charity that has [] through its concentration

solely on the individual - contributed more than its fair share to disregard
for the great nationalistic [vlkisch] laws in the life of the nation. It is
precisely such views and values which have given rise to the exaggerations
of humane and sympathetic emotions which have finally peaked in the sys-
tematic cultivation of sick and inferior life forms. More and more, they
have stolen away from our modern times all feeling for the value of
strength, health, beauty, and youth. They have, in short, stolen our feeling
for the strength of ascendant life.12
The consequences they demanded indicated that, in the rationale of the

Nazis, individuals classified as inferior deserved neither protection nor
support:
If we are serious about our demands that our people and our race be kept
healthy, if we really want to put into practice what the teachings of inherit-
ed health demand - and we will have to fulfill these demands if we wish
our people to have any kind of future - then we will have to overcome this
attitude of charity that not only offers benefit to both valuable and inferior
life without distinction but which has also in fact led to the promotion of
all inferior life to the detriment of the healthy.13
In terms of medical care and governmental welfare services, these state-

ments clearly demonstrate the intention of playing healthy people off
11
Anonymus, Zur Berufsethik des Arztes, Ziel und Weg. Zeitschrift des
Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen rztebundes, vol. 3 (1933), pp. 157-159, here
157.
12
Ibid, p. 158.
13
Ibid.
Florian Bruns 217
against ill people. Or, putting it more simply, to praise the strong and to
deprecate the weak.14 Gerhard Wagner, the chairman of the NSDB, was
responsible for the editorial from which the here quoted passages have
been taken. Wagner was appointed Reich physicians leader (Reichsrz-
tefhrer) in 1934. This gave him the opportunity to make the heralded
break with traditional medical morality on a grand scale, and to make the
new morality a part of everyday medicine. Wagner participated, for in-
stance, in implementing the sterilization law and the Nuremberg laws and
in preparing the euthanasia program. Among the first victims of these
new ethics were not only patients but also doctors. The new ethics perfidi-
ously turned the actual situation on its head by accusing Jewish doctors (or
doctors who simply had different political attitudes) of a counter-morality
that had supposedly damaged the medical profession. Colleagues with
leanings towards Nazism15 accused such doctors of having suppressed
race- specific ethics and morality (arteigene Ethik und Moral) and of hav-
ing falsified the medical concept of honor, and they demanded that these
doctors should be removed from the medical profession, immediately.
Once again it was the NSDB that was in the forefront. A call to the en-
tire German medical profession written by Gerhard Wagner in the Nazi
newspaper Vlkischer Beobachter reads as follows:
Clean up the leadership of our organizations, sweep away whosoever does

not want to see the signs of the times. Make our profession German in spir-
it and esteem, just as the Reich and people have once again become in
these recent weeks.16
A particular concept of morality was also introduced and rigorously en-

forced within the medical profession. Mutual respect among medical col-
leagues, which had been much valued and much vaunted among doctors in
previous decades, was now restricted within a group from which racial and
political undesirables were excluded. This way of proceeding against
members of ones own profession mirrored the particular morality of the
Nazi healthcare policy in society in general, a policy which dictated that
selected groups of the population, for instance, what was known as ballast
existences, were no longer considered a part of the community which was
to be protected.
14
See in this context Harald Ofstad, Our Contempt for Weakness: Nazi Norms and
Values - and Our Own (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1989).
15
Vlkischer Beobachter, Norddeutsche Ausgabe, 25 March 1933, 2. Beiblatt, p. 3.
16
Ibid.
In other words, the principle salus aegroti suprema lex was less re-
spected in everyday medical practice than the principle salus populi su-
prema lex. A formulation emphasizing the priority of the peoples body
(Volkskrper) was also included in the new Reich Physicians Ordinance
(Reichsrzteordnung) of 1935: German doctors are called upon to main-
tain and to improve the health, genetic constitution and race of the German
people for the good of the people and the Reich.17 Nazi healthcare policy
also placed just as much if not indeed more weight on the prevention ra-
ther than the treatment of illness. The idea of prophylactic medicine gave
rise to a belief in a duty to be healthy, a duty young people in particular
were expected to fulfill.18
1. The Forced Sterilization Law

In July 1933 Hitlers cabinet passed the Law for the Prevention of Hered-
itarily Diseased Offspring (Gesetz zur Verhtung erbkranken Nachwuch-
ses) that legitimated forced sterilization of individuals affected by specific
hereditary diseases. The law came into force on 1 January 1934. These
new provisions demanded that doctors register any patient for sterilization
where there was the suspicion of hereditary disease or of serious alcohol-
ism. Hereditary health courts (Erbgesundheitsgerichte) were created spe-
cifically to deal with the cases reported. Medical confidentiality, which
had been a traditional pillar of medical ethics, was no longer applicable in
relation to the patients this affected and indeed gave way to a medical
obligation to inform. Even the pledge never to harm patients, a pledge that,
in the form of primum nil nocere, had been a pivotal component of med-
ical ethics since ancient times, was violated by the law and the doctors
who acted in keeping with the law. The following clearly shows that this
deep fissuring of the ethical framework of inter-human relations was not
universally accepted without question and that it was felt that some at-
tempt at justification was required:
17
Section 19 of the Reich Physicians Ordinance dated December 13, 1935, re-
printed in Rudolf Ramm, rztliche Rechts- und Standeskunde. Der Arzt als
Gesundheitserzieher (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1942), p. 212.
18
Introducing compulsory treatment for patients was considered a logical next step
during the war. The Reichsgericht [Supreme Court of the Reich] affirmed com-
pulsory treatment in 1942 for individuals such as Wehrmacht soldiers. Cf.
Thorsten Noack, Eingriffe in das Selbstbestimmungsrecht des Patienten.
Juristische Entscheidungen, Politik und rztliche Positionen 1890-1960 (Frankfurt
a. M.: Mabuse-Verlag, 2004), p. 179.
Florian Bruns 219
This law constitutes wonderful progress in improving the race of our peo-
ple through racial-hygienic measures. It will prevent the creation of inferi-
or beings and thus reduce misery. We might expect that this aim would be
applauded from all quarters. Unfortunately, that is not the case. There are
certain circles that detect the scent of ancient cruelty and even speak of the
revival of Spartan customs and practices [].19
The initiators of this new law were also aware of the break that was being
made and argued on the basis of the prospective peoples health, a fea-
ture of the aforementioned generational ethics:
[This law] is the beginning of the provision for the race to come, the aim
of which is to create a better and healthier future for our children and their
childrens children. In other words, this law must be seen as a breach in the
debris and small-mindedness of an outdated world view and the exaggerat-
ed suicidal brotherly love of bygone centuries.20
A preliminary draft for some future state of affairs is not only typical of
the generational ethics of the early 20th century. It is also a hallmark of
Nazi medical ethics which had taken it upon itself to realize the utopia of
the pure and healthy Volkskrper. As a result of this aspiration, more than
400,000 people had been forcibly sterilized in Germany by 1945, 6,000 of
whom died from the effects of the operation.21 Over and above these fig-
ures, the overall significance of sterilization for medical ethics is evident:
both professional discretion and the precept of not harming patients, prin-
ciples that had previously been the foundation of medical morality, were,
in effect, had been abandoned, officially.
The attitude of Ernst Rdin, a psychiatrist who was involved in writing
this law, is exemplary of how the understanding of morality had changed
among doctors. Rdin insisted that it was highly ethical to inhibit the
19
Albert von Rohden, Verstt das Gesetz zur Verhtung erbkranken Nachwuchses
gegen das Gebot der Nchstenliebe?, Neues Volk, vol. 2 (1934), p. 8.
20
Arthur Gtt/Ernst Rdin/Falk Ruttke, Gesetz zur Verhtung erbkranken
Nachwuchses vom 14. Juli 1933 (Mnchen, 1934), Vorwort.
21
The figures are cited according to Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nation-
alsozialismus. Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen:
Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986), and quoted from Astrid Ley, Zwangssterilisation
und rzteschaft. Hintergrnde und Ziele rztlichen Handelns 1934-1945
(Frankfurt a. M.: Campus Verlag, 2004), p. 17. The social debasement and exclu-
sion associated with forced sterilization haunted the individuals affected through-
out their whole lives. This fact contrasts dramatically with the argument of con-
temporaries that they wanted to reduce future misery.
unhealthy, in order to open up the field of reproduction to the healthy.22

He also stated that it would be immoral for a doctor in the interests of his
private practice to omit to register for sterilization any individuals suffer-
ing from an inherited disease.23 Apparently, conscientiousness was sup-
posed to replace conscience. It was not the ill persons physical inviolabil-
ity or medical discretion that was given as the point of reference for
morality. It was, instead, the selfless readiness of the doctor in private
practice to accept any financial disadvantages which might result from
denouncing his patients. Rdin does not even consider the possibility that
a doctor would be deterred by anything other than financial considera-
tions.24 We can also see from the attitude of the Halle-based physiologist
and medical ethicist Emil Abderhalden that the standards in medical ethics
had shifted. Abderhalden described eugenic measures as ethics in the
very best sense of the word25 and propagated the notorious Nazi slogan
the common good comes before self-interest (Gemeinnutz geht vor
Eigennutz). In the magazine Ethik edited by Abderhalden there happened a
lively debate on the ethical issues in medicine until 1938 (although the
arguments were increasingly aligned with the partys interests).26
2. Euthanasia as an Internal War

The successive erosion, as we would see it today, of peoples moral con-
science gathered momentum after the outbreak of the Second World War.
The governments campaign of murdering handicapped and mentally ill
individuals, which was launched in 1939, revealed the destructive poten-
tial of medical ethics deformed by Nazism.27 Years before, targeting sick
22
Ernst Rdin, Bedeutung der Forschung und Mitarbeit von Neurologen und
Psychiatern im nationalsozialistischen Staat, Zeitschrift fr die gesamte
Neurologie und Psychiatrie, vol. 165 (1939), pp. 7-17, here 11.
23
Ibid.
24
Studies clearly indicate that doctors in private practice who were afraid of possi-
bly losing their reputation or business volume were much less willing to report
individuals suffering from an inherited disease to the official agencies than their
colleagues in the public health service (for instance, the public health officers). Cf.
Ley, Zwangssterilisation und rzteschaft, pp. 159, 175.
25
Emil Abderhalden, Zum Abschied, Ethik, vol. 14 (1937/38) no. 6, pp. 241-
269, here 263.
26
This magazine ceased publication in 1938. For details see Andreas Frewer,
Medizin und Moral in Weimarer Republik und Nationalsozialismus. Die Zeitschrift
Ethik unter Emil Abderhalden (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus Verlag, 2000).
27
There is substantial literature on the Nazi Euthanasia Program. See, amongst
others, Maike Rotzoll/Gerrit Hohendorf/Petra Fuchs/Paul Richter/Christoph
Florian Bruns 221
or otherwise incapable people, the Reich Physicians leader, Gerhard

Wagner, made the following threat based on a dictum of Hitlers: If an
individual no longer has the strength to fight for their own health, this
individual no longer has the right to life in a world of struggle.28 Howev-
er, in spite of these early clues, there are still questions surrounding the
actual genesis of the campaign of murdering the ill. We do not intend here
to discuss in detail the explanatory models that historical research has
come up with to date.29 However, there is much to be said for the belief
that killing useless patients was the result of a mentality whose ideologi-
cal roots had already taken hold before 1933. Once it had received gov-
ernment sanctioning in 1933, it escalated and was put into practice on a
large scale. The example of the Gttingen-based pathologist and medical
ethicist Georg Benno Gruber shows well the gradual turning to the idea
of euthanasia. In 1937, Gruber still rejected the idea of killing patients,
saying: Nobody, not even a doctor, is authorized to extinguish the flame
of life.30 In 1941, he relativized this assessment:
It does not seem to me to be a new question that extinguishing a doubt-

lessly incurable life that is also devoid of any personal value and complete-
ly fruitless while substantially burdening the community is worthy of con-
sideration.31
The general public, by means of a variety of publications, was step-by-step

prepared for the idea of euthanasia, although the term used in this process
Mundt/Wolfgang U. Eckart (eds.), Die nationalsozialistische Euthanasie-Aktion

T4 und ihre Opfer. Geschichte und ethische Konsequenzen fr die Gegenwart
(Paderborn/Munich/Vienna/Zurich: Schningh, 2010).
28
Wagner, quoted from Leonardo Conti, Reden und Aufrufe Gerhard Wagner.
1888-1939 (Berlin: Reichsgesundheitsverlag, 1943), p. 31.
29
See Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Die Genesis der Euthanasie. Interpretationsanstze,
in Maike Rotzoll et al. (eds.), Die nationalsozialistische Euthanasie-Aktion
T4 und ihre Opfer. Geschichte und ethische Konsequenzen fr die Gegenwart,
pp. 66-73.
30
Georg Benno Gruber, Von rztlicher Ethik. Eine Vorlesung (Stuttgart: Hippo-
krates-Verlag, 1937), p. 28.
31
Idem, Vom ungeschriebenen Gesetz des Arztes, Die Gesundheitsfhrung: Ziel
und Weg, (1941), pp. 197-202, here 200. See also Martin Mattulat, Medizinethik in
historischer Perspektive. Zum Wandel rztlicher Moralkonzepte im Werk von
Georg Benno Gruber (1884-1977) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007), p. 125 for both
passages.
was the euphemism mercy killing.32

Regardless of the incubation period (Hans-Walter Schmuhl) of the
campaign of murdering the ill, the actionist element should be taken into
consideration as it was an integral part of the killing of patients. From this
point of view one might almost be able to interpret the killing campaign as
a spontaneous measure, as a short-term reaction to the economic condi-
tions and necessities of the war, which ultimately unleashed an unbridled
(but, in the final analysis, voluntary) momentum of its own.33 There is no
doubt that the conditions of the increasingly total war encouraged the
murdering of the handicapped and mentally ill. However, it was the eutha-
nasia campaign that provided evidence of the limits of the peoples readi-
ness to abandon sympathy or to engage in excluding certain members from
society. In contrast to its implementation of forced sterilization, the regime
attempted to keep secret their legally unfounded mass murder of patients.
No public or even scientific debate on the topic of euthanasia, as had been
permitted before the war, was permitted after 1939. However, the leaders
of the organization that became known as Campaign T4 (from its location
on Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin) never had any difficulty in winning over
medical personnel for the program of killing. On the contrary, when they
started murdering patients at decentralized locations in 1941 (because of
growing discontent among the population), a large number of directors of
regional psychiatric hospitals eagerly began murdering their patients by
means of lethal injections or by deliberately withdrawing nourishment.
These murders continued right down to the last days of the war, and even
beyond. With regard to this, it would not be an exaggeration to speak of
people firmly believing in their crimes. These perpetrators acted without
being under the pressure of a chain of command or any other military
compulsion, and they put their particular morality into practice in their
institutions as a part of Nazi medical ethics. This had lethal consequences
for whoever was considered worthy of destruction rather than worthy of
32
The novel Sendung und Gewissen, written by the physician Hellmuth Unger and
published in 1936 is an example of an implicit call for the killing of incurably ill
individuals in the sense of mercy killing.
33
See for instance Winfried S, Der Volkskrper im Krieg. Gesundheitspolitik,
Gesundheitsverhltnisse und Krankenmord im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland
1939-1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2003) who goes into detail about the problem of
distributing medical resources (such as personnel, bed capacities, and funds)
during the war. Hitler is said to have made the often-cited statement during the
1935 Reich Party Conference that any euthanasia campaign would be postponed
to a future war because it would be easier to put into practice at such a time.
Florian Bruns 223
protection.34 Given the aforementioned statements by Rdin and Ab-

derhalden, we may reasonably assume that these medical perpetrators
firmly believed that they were doing the morally correct thing. The as-
sumption that some of them still had scruples does not create a contradic-
tion. They were entirely capable of integrating into their medical morality
of killing the awareness of having taken on a tiresome or even unpleasant
job.35 What was more decisive was the inner certainty that it was good and
appropriate to have contributed to the healing of the highly valued
Volkskrper.
III. Legitimizing and Mediating the New Medical Morality

A new moral order can be established more successfully and sustainably if
it can be underwritten and legitimized by creating historical references. It
is also necessary to ensure that the new concepts of morality reach the
people for whom they are intended and that those people adopt the new
concepts. We can see both of these things happening in medical ethics
under Nazism: the attempt to interpret and transform traditional ethics in
terms of Nazism and the communication of the resulting concepts of mo-
rality to doctors and medical students. It is no coincidence that the disci-
plines responsible for this, namely Medical History, Medical Law and
Professional Studies, were generously funded under the Nazis and were
even raised to the level of obligatory subjects in medical courses in the
year the war began. These subjects were used between 1939 and 1945 to
provide a theoretical basis for the Nazi health-care policy and the ideolog-
ical training of prospective medical doctors.
With regard to medical history, we might ask what role the historical
tradition of medical ethics played under Nazism. Looking back at the
medical crimes of the Third Reich and its doctors, the question is often
34
More recent research has demonstrated that criteria such as the capability to
work, social behavior, and the expenditures for care (and less the medical progno-
sis) were decisive with regard to being counted among the patients worthy of
protection as opposed to those to be destroyed. Cf. Gerrit Hohendorf, Die
Selektion der Opfer zwischen rassenhygienischer Ausmerze, konomischer
Brauchbarkeit und medizinischem Erlsungsideal, in Maike Rotzoll et al. (eds.),
Die nationalsozialistische Euthanasie-Aktion T4 und ihre Opfer. Geschichte
und ethische Konsequenzen fr die Gegenwart, pp. 317-324.
35
Cf. Welzer, Tter, p. 37. Remaining decent even while killing people (for
instance, not enriching yourself with the possessions of your victims) was the cen-
tral point in Heinrich Himmlers notorious speech in front of the higher SS leaders
in Posen on 4 October 1943. The speech is a key document of Nazi morality.
asked as to how significant the Hippocratic Oath, in part of ancient origin,

had been in creating the role model of the ideal doctor. Did doctors
betray their ideals and break their medical oaths at that time? A closer
examination of Nazi medical historiography and its representatives may
offer some clarity. In 1939, the office of the Reich Physicians leader
created a new subject for medical students called Medical Law and Pro-
fessional Studies (rztliche Rechts- und Standeskunde). There was, at the
time, no other such course of studies. Surprisingly enough, from our point
of view today, the creation of the new course gave rise to the seemingly
paradoxical constellation in that the Nazis, of all people, were the first to
introduce an obligatory course of instruction in ethics for medical students.
This gives us good reason to question closely the Nazis motivations for
introducing such a course. Who taught this subject at the medical faculties,
and what were its contents?
1. Medical Historiography in the Service of Ideology

The institutional roots of academic and medical historiography are to be
found in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This subject area not only per-
formed genuinely historiographical functions but also laid claim, in part at
least, to sovereignty of interpretation with regard to medical ethics.36 Rep-
utable representatives of this relatively young discipline pointed out to the
many cross-over points between medical history and medical deontology
which medical historians drew upon for a part of their legitimation within
the medical faculties. In fact, this subject played only a small role in the
scientifically and clinically driven canon of subjects in medical studies in
the first decades of the 20th century. Various departments and institutes
were founded in rather a piecemeal manner: the chairs in Leipzig and
Berlin were the foremost schools in Germany for this subject area at the
onset of the 1930s.
The Nazis recognized at an early stage the possibilities this theoretical
field of humanities offered them with regard to ensuring that their ideolo-
gy would grow in importance within medicine. In the years after 1933,
Nazi medical and college functionaries took the first steps to ensure that
this subject could be used for political purposes. In turn, medical histori-
ans, in particular Paul Diepgen, the director of the Berlin Institute for the
36
See Andreas Frewer/Josef N. Neumann (eds.), Medizingeschichte und Mediz-
inethik. Kontroversen und Begrndungsanstze 1900-1950 (Frankfurt a. M.:
Campus Verlag, 2001); Andreas Frewer/Volker Roelcke (eds.), Die
Institutionalisierung der Medizinhistoriographie. Entwicklungslinien vom 19. ins
20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001).
Florian Bruns 225
History of Medicine and Sciences, quickly discovered the benefits that

could be derived from the higher level of attention paid them by the new
rulers:
National Socialism, which has succeeded in arousing enthusiasm for the

great past of German medicine, as no other previous form of government
had done, has not only entrusted the study of the history of medicine in
Germany with tasks of current interest but has also elevated it to the long-
missed rank of equality of dignity with the other branches of medical re-
search and teaching.37
Diepgen directed a large number of messages of loyalty toward the re-

gime, as did his colleagues in Leipzig, Goettingen and other places. The
mutual convergence was made even easier by the fact that important rep-
resentatives of this subject had begun sympathizing with the Nazis at an
early stage for a wide range of reasons.38 Understandably, medical histori-
ography in Germany did indeed experience an upswing. This became
manifested by the fact that in 1939, when the new regulations for courses
of studies were drawn up, medical historiography was included as a man-
datory subject in the curriculum of medical studies. At the same time,
other ideologically significant subjects were introduced to the curriculum
such as the study of race, the science of heredity, and military medicine.39
This fact is worth mentioning in so far as the new regulations for medical
studies were already set up to meet the requirements of a war, medical
history thus having the status of a subject vital to the war effort.
The Berlin Institute under Paul Diepgen was at the center of the alli-
ance between Nazism and medical history, and this is where the closest
personal interconnections between the Nazi party, the SS and medical
historians can be found. Diepgens relationship to Nazism was multi-
faceted. He had been socialized in the bourgeois world of the German
empire and had a German nationalist upbringing. He was also a successful
professor who did not believe it was necessary to join the NSDAP in 1933.
For this reason, and because of his Catholic belief, the leading party gran-
37
Paul Diepgen, The Study of the History of Medicine in Germany, Research
and Progress. Bi-monthly review of German science, vol. 7 (1941), pp. 233-246,
here 234.
38
For details see Florian Bruns/Andreas Frewer, Fachgeschichte als Politikum.
Medizinhistoriker in Berlin und Graz in Diensten des NS-Staates, Medizin,
Gesellschaft und Geschichte. Jahrbuch des Instituts fr Geschichte der Medizin
der Robert Bosch-Stiftung, vol. 24 (2005), pp. 151-180.
39
We will discuss the subject of Medical Law and Professional Studies further
below.
dees did not consider him politically reliable and kept him at arms length
concerning celebrations or representative occasions.40 Understandably, he
accelerated his efforts by offering his services to the regime with his pub-
lications. His writings, published under Nazism, were definitely affirma-
tive and lacked all critical distance or reflection. On the contrary, Diepgen
had been one of the early advocates of sterilization and had expressly
welcomed the fact that Nazism had created a new national code of
ethos.41 With all the means at his disposal he underpinned the medical
ethics of Nazism premised on this racist concept with statements on the
nationally conditioned character of medicine.42
Diepgen also cultivated contacts with the highest representative of the
SS and the health system, and he had close relationships to Reich physi-
cian SS (Reichsarzt SS) Ernst Robert Grawitz (the head of all SS doctors)
and also to Karl Brandt, Hitlers personal physician and general commis-
sioner for health and sanitation (Generalkommissar fr das Sanitts- und
Gesundheitswesen).43 Diepgen had no qualms about putting his expertise
in medical history to the service of the regime and worked directly with
Brandt (who was in overall charge of the euthanasia campaign) supplying
him with literature on medical ethics when this was requested, and even
supplied commentaries on these works.44 There is no record of what
Brandt concluded from this ethical briefing. His responsibility for the
murder of tens of thousands of patients is beyond question.
We can gauge the increasing influence the SS had on medical histori-
ography at the beginning of the war from looking at the staff of the Berlin
Medical History Institute. Grawitz sent two SS doctors to Diepgens insti-
tute as students. They were to write their postdoctoral theses there, and it
was planned that the two should set up an institute on the history of medi-
40
Cf. Bruns, Medizinethik im Nationalsozialismus, p. 58, n. 235.
41
Diepgen, Study, p. 234.
42
Manuscript Wesen und Leistung der deutschen Medizin (1937), UAHU,
Nachlass Diepgen, no. 49, sheet 2.
43
For Brandt see Ulf Schmidt, Karl Brandt. The Nazi Doctor. Medicine and Power
in the Third Reich (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007).
44
Diepgen did not neglect to distinguish between authors according to the catego-
ries of the Nazis: It is strange to see so many Jews among the authors. Diepgen
to Brandt, dated 29 January 1942 (UAHU, IfG, no. 27, sheet 145). Diepgen be-
came an official member of Brandts staff in 1943, cf. Brandt to Diepgen, dated 25
September 1943; Diepgen to Brandt, dated 5 October 1943 (UAHU, IfG, no. 31,
sheet 263 ff.). Diepgen wrote a plea for pardon for Brandt who had been sentenced
to death in the Nuremberg Doctors Trials in 1947 and an expert opinion on
euthanasia from the point of view of medical history although the whereabouts
of the latter have not yet been discovered.
Florian Bruns 227
cine, specifically for the SS. To begin with, Diepgen resisted having stu-
dents who were under the wing of the SS, but over time he came to an
arrangement with them, guiding them to their postdoctoral lecturing quali-
fications. It was the young doctor and medical historian Bernward Josef
Gottlieb who measured up particularly well to the expectations of the SS.
In 1941, he became the first director of the SS Institute for the History of
Medicine (Institut fr Geschichte der Heilkunde beim Reichsarzt SS). The
fact that he was taken under the wing of higher-level SS leaders resulted in
Gottlieb being appointed lecturer at the SS Medical Academy in Graz in
Austria in 1943. Medical history was thus also integrated into the training
courses of SS doctors there.
Many of Gottliebs publications were based not on historical but on
political interests. This consisted of making Nazi medical ethics appear
historically legitimate. It was also no secret that Gottliebs publications
were commissioned works, desired and demanded by Nazis on the highest
level, as we can see from a letter Gottlieb wrote to Diepgen:
I should also report that, within the context of my political commission, I

am processing material from the library of the Reichsfhrer and the
Reichsarzt on the emergence of Freemasonry in England and on the Jewish
question at the time of Paracelsus []. As the Reicharzt-SS informed me,
Reichsfhrer-SS Himmler has praised the work done to date.45
In the writings which emerged from this pseudoscientific approach, Gott-

lieb constructed historical lines of continuity and historical parallels in
order to provide a historical foundation for, e.g., racist anti-Semitism with-
in the medical profession and for the alleged superiority of Nordic-Germa-
nic doctors.46 High on the agenda of this interpretation of history premised
upon racial ideology was a moral justification of Nazi medical practices;
the interpretation was not meant to address a public with a specialist inter-
est in history but the broad sweep of the medical profession: Gottlieb pub-
lished his propagandistic essays in the widely read journal Deutsches rz-
teblatt. Medical history was supposed to help individual doctors who
might not yet have fully internalized the new medical morality or who
perhaps even questioned certain practices. It was supposed to constantly
reassure doctors that they were on the morally correct path. Or, to express
it differently, through new interpretations, the job of medical history was
45
Gottlieb to Diepgen, dated 14 August 1941 (UAHU, IfG, no. 28, sheet 62).
46
See Sepp [sic] Gottlieb, Paracelsus als Kmpfer gegen das Judentum,
Deutsches rzteblatt, vol. 71 (1941), pp. 326-328; Bernward Josef
Gottlieb/Alexander Berg, Das Antlitz des germanischen Arztes in vier
Jahrhunderten (Berlin: Rembrandt Verlag, 1942).
to compensate for any possible ethical deficits in terms of legitimation.

There were more than a few medical historians who willingly accepted
this assignment.
2. Ideal and Reality: the Hippocratic Oath

We can more easily trace the way historic sources were put to the service
of a medical ethics driven by Nazism by examining how the Hippocratic
Oath was dealt with. This ancient oath for physicians had frequently been
considered the most important creed of medical ethics, regardless of the
fact that its historical origin and original utilization were not entirely
clear.47 This uncritical view was also widespread among medical doctors
and laypersons at the time of Nazism. The Hippocratic ethos regularly was
the subject of research and debate in reference to medical history, even
though, in fact, it was not customary in the 20th century to demand that
prospective doctors take an oath.48 The essence of the oath, not to harm
patients, never to bring about their death, even if the patient demanded it,
and always to maintain professional discretion toward third parties, fitted
very well with Christian ethics, and thus the oath had a certain binding
nature as an expression of ethical maxims within the medical profession.
Even the Nazis could not ignore the binding effect of the oath (an effect
resulting not only from personal morality but also supported to a certain
extent by law) if they did not want to run the risk of losing the support of
the medical profession and the population at large. To put it more pointed-
ly, did Hitler work with or without Hippocrates?49 The reception of the
Hippocratic ethos within the Third Reich indicates that there were dif-
fering trends in this regard. It was true that the Nazi medical ethicists
avoided officially disputing the validity of the Hippocratic Oath. However,
there were a sufficient number of doctors who, from the onset, attributed
47
For details see Karl-Heinz Leven, The Invention of Hippocrates. Oath, Letters
and Hippocratic Corpus, in Ulrich Trhler/Stella Reiter-Theil (eds.), Ethics Codes
in Medicine. Foundations and Achievements of Codification since 1947 (Alder-
shot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1998), pp. 3-23; David Cantor (ed.), Reinvent-
ing Hippocrates (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2002).
48
See Dale C. Smith, The Hippocratic Oath and Modern Medicine, Journal of
the History of Medicine, vol. 51 (1996), pp. 484-500; Carsten Timmermann, A
Model for the New Physician. Hippocrates in Interwar Germany, in David Cantor
(ed.), Reinventing Hippocrates (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2002), pp.
302-324.
49
Thomas Rtten, Hitler with or without Hippocrates? The Hippocratic Oath
during the Third Reich, Koroth. The Israel Journal of the History of Medicine and
Science, vol. 12 (1996), pp. 91-106.
Florian Bruns 229
no particular significance to the oath. As an example we may refer to those

concentration camp doctors who, when questioned after the war, claimed
that the oath of allegiance to Hitler they had to swear as SS doctors
seemed much more real and binding than any vague rituals or ceremonies
performed at medical school graduations.50 Beyond this, many of them
doubted that this ancient tradition had any meaning to the medicine of the
Modern Age, which is why they were in favor of dispensing with the Hip-
pocratic tradition. For them, the medical ethos was something always
linked to its time: Every age has its own ethos, and ours is that of Nation-
al Socialism.51
Others did not cast any doubt on the basic validity of Hippocratic eth-
ics, but they disputed its applicability in certain situations determined by
the war. The SS hygienist Joachim Mrugowsky was among this latter
group. He was responsible for lethal experiments on concentration camp
prisoners, and he stated during the Nuremberg doctors trial that these
experiments were not carried out on ill individuals but on prisoners who,
from his point of view, were healthy. Therefore, they
were not patients of the doctor in terms of medical ethics or in terms of

the understanding of the relationship between a doctor and a patient. This
is the reason why it would be possible to apply what we comprehend as
medical ethics to this case only in a very limited sense.52
Mrugowsky added that he had never seen the Hippocratic Oath during his
studies and had not been required to swear it. His co-defendant, Karl
Brandt, whom we have already mentioned, questioned the validity for
contemporary medicine of a text that was 2000 years old. Brandt said that
he was convinced that Hippocrates would formulate the oath differently,
today. Mrugowsky, even before the war, had also pointed to the funda-
mental mutability of moral concepts and emphasized the fact that the zeit-
geist had customarily adapted itself to the times and to the dominant social
circumstances.53
50
Cf. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of
Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), p. 207.
51
Ehrhardt Hamann, Gedanken zum Thema: rztliches Ethos, rzteblatt fr
Mitteldeutschland, vol. 3 (1940), pp. 153-154 as well as pp. 161-162, here 162.
52
Mrugowskys testimony in the Doctors Trial, quoted from Bruns, Medizinethik
im Nationalsozialismus, p. 163.
53
Joachim Mrugowsky, Das rztliche Ethos. Christoph Wilhelm Hufelands
Vermchtnis einer fnfzigjhrigen Erfahrung (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag,
1939), p. 7.
During the war, the SS attempted to set up new moral standards for
doctors who belonged to the SS. Himmler and Grawitz, with the support
of the SS medical historian Gottlieb, drafted a brochure reproducing ex-
cerpts from ancient writings on medical ethics. They gave it the title Ewig-
es Arzttum (Eternal Physicianship), and Himmler had it distributed to all
SS doctors.54 Apparently, the editors were aware of the fact that it would
not be in their favor to describe the oath as the eternally valid foundation
of medical morality. The oath itself was not included in the text of Ewiges
Arzttum; the discrepancy between the ancient ideal and what the SS doc-
tors were doing to some groups of patients and concentration camp prison-
ers would have been too obvious.55
On the other hand, it became evident in the course of the Nuremberg
Doctors Trials that the Hippocratic Oath was not a good witness for the
prosecution. Karl Brandt asserted that the euthanasia campaign was noth-
ing else, more or less, than a contemporary way of implementing the oath
if the Volkskrper alone were regarded as the ethical point of reference.
This was a cynical remark in many respects, but given the ambiguous and
somewhat antiquated formulation of the oath it was not possible to con-
vincingly refute this argument.56 The confusion about the fact that the
content of the oath in its formulation could be interpreted in practically
any fashion was combined with the courts recognition that it was not in
fact possible to read the oath as a timelessly valid document (a point which
the defendants themselves always insisted upon). The Hippocratic Oath
lost its claim to timelessness once and for all at the Nuremberg Doctors
Trials and was reduced to no more than a historic document. Against this
background, new attempts at codifying medical ethics (such as in the Ge-
neva Declaration of 1948) must be viewed skeptically. History indicates
that doubts with regard to the preventative effectiveness of such rituals are
well justified.
IV. Indoctrination of Future Doctors: Medical Law

and Professional Studies
For the responsible medical functionaries, securing the acceptance and the
implementation of the Nazi health-care policy among doctors between
54
Cf. Ernst Robert Grawitz (ed.), Hippokrates. Gedanken rztlicher Ethik aus dem
Corpus Hippocraticum. Ewiges Arzttum Band 1 (Prague: Volk und Reich Verlag,
1942).
55
Cf. Bruns, Medizinethik im Nationalsozialismus, pp. 79-83.
56
Cf. Leven, The Invention of Hippocrates. Oath, Letters and Hippocratic Cor-
pus, p. 4.
Florian Bruns 231
1933 and 1945 was a never-ending challenge. It may be assumed that the
spirit in a lot of clinics was not to the liking of the rulers.57 In focusing on
the pointedly ethical issues regarding the medical treatment of certain
groups of the population who could not necessarily count on unconditional
medical care we ought to not overlook the fact that there was a certain
number of doctors who resisted the attempts at indoctrination by party and
state Even if these attempts, when it comes to drawing the line, were not
what we might call resistance in the full sense of the word, the leading
Nazi doctors were in no doubt as to the necessity of continued political
training for a large number of their medical colleagues in order to bring
them into line with the Nazi healthcare policy. In addition to the constant
influence exercised by professional press publications aligned with party
interests, the Nazis introduced new obligatory advanced training for doc-
tors which was intended to advance technical and ideological education.
The Fhrerschule der Deutschen rzteschaft, a special school to promote
Nazi medical ideology to German doctors, was opened in 1935 in Alt-
Rehse, a town in Mecklenburg, to further improve the integration of doc-
tors into the Nazi healthcare policy.
With regard to the indoctrination into Nazi thought, prospective medi-
cal doctors were a particularly important target group. Medical students
were seen as predestined for the future implementation of race-ideology
and the Nazi healthcare policy because they, in contrast to the older doc-
tors, had grown up and been socialized within the Nazi system. Up to this
time, there had been no subject in medical studies that left enough space
for the Nazi world view (Weltanschauung). The subject Medical Law and
Professional Studies (rztliche Rechts- und Standeskunde) was designed
to fill this gap. The study regulations which came into force in April 1939
stated that, starting in the winter semester of 1939/40, rztliche Rechts-
und Standeskunde was an obligatory course during the last semester of
study courses. It also introduced other new subjects such as Medical Histo-
ry into the curriculum. In the course of the subsequent war years, lecturing
positions at all medical faculties of the Reich were given either to external
lecturers or to professors of forensic medicine.
An analysis of the lecturing positions established for rztliche Rechts-
und Standeskunde by 1944 shows that more than 80% were awarded to
regional directors of the NSDAPs Main Office for the Peoples Health
57
Examples in S, Der Volkskrper im Krieg, pp. 373-378. Carly Seyfarth,
Der rzte-Knigge. ber den Umgang mit Kranken und ber Pflichten, Kunst
und Dienst der Krankenhausrzte, 2nd edition (Leipzig: Georg Thieme, 1935),
provides an early form of clinical ethics that did not follow the predominant
morality of 1933-1945.
(Hauptamt fr Volksgesundheit der NSDAP). Of these regional directors,

who in their areas were the medical functional elite of the NSDAP,58
75% were veterans of the Nazi movement (Alte Kmpfer), meaning that
they had joined the NSDAP far earlier than 1933. For these lecturing posi-
tions, only ardent Nazi doctors were selected, doctors who credibly sup-
ported the ideology in practical situations. For instance, the Tbingen
lecturer Eugen Sthle (who joined the NSDAP in 1927) was simultaneous-
ly also the coordinator of the euthanasia campaign in Wuerttemberg.
There is a whole host of similar examples.
Professors of forensic medicine took on the lectures at 19 faculties that
did not have external lecturers in this subject. Of these professors, many
were also members of the SS or demonstrated their active participation in
the Nazi healthcare policy by working at the hereditary health courts
where the decisions were made in regard to performing forced steriliza-
tion.
A closer analysis of individual biographies indicates that all the lectur-
ers in rztliche Rechts- und Standeskunde were dedicated Nazi doctors. In
some cases, the level of political commitment was particularly pro-
nounced. The Berlin-based lecturer Rudolf Ramm is a textbook case. He
not only had a successful party career but simultaneously also held several
other offices. As the representative for postgraduate medical studies he
was responsible for organizing the aforementioned ideological education
courses, and he was a lecturer in Alt-Rehse. During the war Ramm also
managed some of the foremost magazines for the medical profession,
including Deutsches rzteblatt. He even wrote his own articles in the
Walter de Gruyter field such as his 1941 essay on the Solution of the
Jewish Question in Europe.59 In 1942 Ramm authored the standard text-
book for rztliche Rechts- und Standeskunde, which, today, enables us to
draw conclusions regarding the contents taught in this subject.60 In as-
sessing the account of this book, the medical historian Robert N. Proctor
characterized Ramm as the leading Nazi medical ethicist.61
In his book, Ramm first presents, in minute detail, the Nazi world and
its historic view and then speaks about the mission of the doctors in the
58
S, Der Volkskrper im Krieg, p. 114.
59
For details on Ramm see Bruns, Medizinethik im Nationalsozialismus.
60
Cf. Rudolf Ramm, rztliche Rechts- und Standeskunde. Der Arzt als
Gesundheitserzieher (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1942).
61
Robert N. Proctor, Nazi Doctors, Racial Medicine, and Human Experimenta-
tion, in George J. Annas/Michael A. Grodin (eds.), The Nazi Doctors and the
Nuremberg Code. Human Rights in Human Experimentation, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992), pp. 17-31, here 17.
Florian Bruns 233
Nazi state. Ramm is convinced that Nazism has brought the reinstatement
of a high level of professional ethics.62 He welcomes the fact that by the
time this book went into print the profession had been extensively
cleansed of politically unreliable elements foreign to our race and also
welcomes the violent exclusion of Jews from those professions and offic-
es of the state that are vital to our lives.63 Ramm believes in the authori-
tarian role of the doctor as a health leader (Gesundheitsfhrer) and in the
individuals moral obligation to remain healthy:
It is the everlasting service of the Party to have changed the belief in the
right to ones own body - derived from crass individualism - to belief in
an obligation to remain healthy and to have presented this as a demand
arising from the National Socialisms Weltanschauung.64
Along with the issue of forced sterilization, a practice that had apparently
long since been taken for granted in everyday medical practice by 1942,
Ramm also addresses the problem of euthanasia and openly demands
that doctors act as forerunners in killing incurably ill or handicapped
individuals:
These creatures merely vegetate and constitute a serious burden on the na-
tional community. They not reduce the living standard of the rest of their
family members because of the expenses for their care but also need a
healthy person to take care of them throughout their lives.65
Such unequivocal words and, in particular, the unashamed economic justi-

fication for murdering a sick individual were not common at that time,
which makes it that much more remarkable to having been included in a
textbook on medical ethics. No author described the principles of medical
ethics as defined by Nazism so openly and extensively as Ramm. The
morality propagated in his book subordinated the fate of individual pa-
tients to collective interests and, from the onset, excluded certain groups
(such as Jews, the handicapped, or those suffering from an inherited dis-
ease) from the group of moral subjects. There is no direct proof, but we
might perhaps assume that the contents of this book were one of the rea-
sons for its great popularity. In any event, both reviewers and readers were
unanimous in the welcome they gave to this book, and a second edition
62
Ramm, rztliche Rechts- und Standeskunde, p. 46.
63
Ibid.
64
Ibid, p. 148.
65
Ibid, pp. 103.
was necessary as early as 1943. This second edition also sold out within a
year.66
Taken together, the political leanings of the lecturers, as described
above, and the contents of Ramms textbook provide an approximate pic-
ture of what medical students learned in the rztliche Rechts- und
Standeskunde course.
V. Medicine, Morality and War Final Observations

In 1939, the doctor and biologist Joachim Mrugowsky, then a lecturer in
hygiene at Berlin University, published a book on medical ethics linking
his understanding of Nazi medical ethics with the works of Christoph
Wilhelm Hufeland, one of the foremost doctors of the early 19th century.67
In this work, Mrugowsky retraced what had increasingly been medical
practice in Germany since 1933: a movement away from universally valid
ethics derived from the Christian concept of charity and towards a particu-
laristic concept of morality that refused basic rights to certain social
groups. In this concept of morality, Christian values were replaced with
the value of the Volkskrper as the absolute.68 This particularistic morality
was based on the Nazi belief of the natural inequality of people, which
justified evaluating and treating them differently.69 In the context of this
morality, the criteria for exclusion from the protective referential frame-
work were fluid as a matter of principle.
The upheaval in the standards and values accepted in medicine created
new conditions for medical behavior. Doctors were called upon not only to
protect the Volkskrper from imagined dangers but also to permanently
improve it qualitatively (i.e. genetically). The practical framework for this
was provided by a healthcare policy which ruthlessly subordinated the
welfare of the individual to the collective interest. Any individuals unable
to make a contribution to the welfare of the nation by virtue of their own
strengths, or not allowed to do so due to the criteria of racial ideology,
66
Cf. Papiergenehmigung und Planung 1944/45 (Verlagsarchiv de Gruyter,
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Depositum 42, 213/2).
67
Cf. Mrugowsky, Das rztliche Ethos.
68
Christianity encompasses many peoples, but it no longer contains the supreme
maxim for our actions. [] The belief in our eternal people is our world view, and
it is for the sake of it that we have abandoned the belief in teachings of two thou-
sand years ago. Ibid, p. 8.
69
Today, we are aware of differences with reference to human life itself. Life is
not so valuable to our people that it would be worth sustaining due to its mere
existence, but only if it is healthy and powerful. Ibid, p. 10.
Florian Bruns 235
were forced to suffer in the most horrible ways. This might mean having to
undergo forced sterilization for eugenic reasons, being murdered for rea-
sons arising from the economics of war, or becoming the involuntary sub-
ject of human experiments to advance the military medicines super-
ordinated need for knowledge. It is shocking how willing doctors were to
participate in these crimes. Even more shocking is the fact that they did
more than simply obey orders. Many, in fact, frequently acted on their
own initiative in performing forced sterilization, participating in the mass
murder of the ill and the handicapped, or in conducting lethal human ex-
periments at concentration camps.
Other factors also played a role in this development. First of all, when
the Second World War began, ethical standards shifted significantly once
again, and the loosening of moral inhibitions progressed swiftly. Both the
campaigns of murdering the sick and experiments on human beings at
concentration camps became increasingly brutal and anarchical as time
passed. Initially, this corresponded to a similar radicalization in medical
ethics. The morality of war medicine was based on a crude form of utilitar-
ianism and opened up more and more options for action deemed to be
moral.
We cannot, however, simply explain away all lethal experiments on
human beings or wild euthanasia on the basis of the concepts of morali-
ty. Often, reality was even running ahead of the perverted ethical theory.
Other situational factors also played a role. For instance, scientists aggres-
sively engaged in research simply took advantage of the specific opportu-
nities at the concentration camps, using the extremely deregulated moral
situation for their own purposes. Beyond this, an ethics of over-fulfilling
ones obligations based on the Nazi version of the Categorical Imperative
formulated by the Nazi jurist Hans Frank was instrumental in leading to
and encouraging a greater readiness to act on ones own initiative: Act in
such a way that the Fuehrer would approve of your actions if he were
aware of them.70 The effort to make the presumed will of Hitler their own
might offer some explanation for the behavior of the aforementioned di-
rectors of institutions who murdered their patients without situational
constraints or pressure from a chain of command.
In the final analysis, medicine under the Nazis cannot be understood as
arising from an absence of morality. Ethical concepts did in fact exist,
concepts based on values that emerged from the Nazi ideology and dis-
70
Hans Frank, Die Technik des Staates (Berlin: Deutscher Rechtsverlag, 1942), p.
15. See also Kershaws model of Working towards the Fhrer, Ian Kershaw,
Working towards the Fhrer. Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictator-
ship, Contemporary European History, vol. 2 (1993) no. 2, pp. 103-118.
placed the moral maxims which up to that time had been held to be valid.
The possibility that such moral abysses could open up again in the future
can by no means be dismissed. To quote Mitscherlich and Mielke: Moral
standards are an edifice built on volcanic ground.71
71
Mitscherlich/Mielke, Medizin ohne Menschlichkeit, p. 7.
MERCY KILLING AND ECONOMISM:
ON ETHICAL PATTERNS OF JUSTIFICATION
FOR NAZI EUTHANASIA
UWE KAMINSKY
How did the National Socialists justify their campaigns of mass murder?
The view that they were just unscrupulous criminals without any ethics
because they kept euthanasia and the Holocaust a secret is not tenable. The
crime paradigm sheds little light on the matter when considering the wide
range of people in society such as physicians, attorneys, nurses, and gov-
ernment officials who were contributors (and sometimes even accomplic-
es) to these crimes. On the other hand, the notion that there are genuine
Nazi counter-ethics still to be discovered and that these will emerge from
some high plane ideologically independent of existing value patterns also
seems to hold little promise. This viewpoint represents another extreme.
A mediating thesis, according to which it was not necessary to over-
come moral precepts or scruples to be ready to murder people, is followed
by a whole array of approaches to Nazi mass crimes. For instance, Harald
Welzer cites Norbert Elias when he argues that We are confronted with a
social development where respect for human life definitely does not de-
pend on Christian or Enlightenment concepts of humanity. Instead, it de-
pends on whether this life is defined as being functional or dysfunctional
for the social model of the We group with its superior power.1 In his
Studies on the Germans, Norbert Elias had emphasized the code of hon-
or that emerged in the second half of the 19th century and that was valid
among the German bourgeoisie long before any code of morality with
its humanitarian ideals.2
In addition, there was in Nazism a predominant concept of super- and
sub-ordination premised upon a racist world view and the relativity of
1
Harald Welzer, Verweilen beim Grauen. Essays zum wissenschaftlichen Umgang
mit dem Holocaust (Tbingen: Edition diskord, 1997), p. 10.
2
Norbert Elias, Studien ber die Deutschen. Machtkmpfe und Habitusentwicklung im
19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1990), pp. 130.
238 Mercy Killing and Economism
values. That said, there was by no means a majority in favor of killing

those who were different, although various Nazi protagonists saw this
policy as being subjectively correct. Indeed, the killing programs had to be
a blow to the reputation of a Fuehrer who rested his rule on charismatic
legitimation. The justifications cited originally did not come from Nazism.
Instead, they originated from already existing debates on topics such as
racial hygiene and euthanasia.
This essay will sketch out the basic patterns of the debate on euthana-
sia after the turn of the century. The multi-factorial character which is the
trademark of the various Nazi euthanasia campaigns also applies to its
ethical justification. However, two key reasons come to the fore: the meta-
phor of mercy killing and the economic motives that emerged during the
war. Both of these reasons pushed eugenic or racial hygiene reasons (and
therefore exclusively ideological reasons) into the background.
I will begin by surveying the development of the euthanasia discussion
in order to identify the ethical concepts behind it. Here, I will focus on the
interrelation of the euthanasia debate with the debate on eugenics and on
the way the latter was amplified during the Nazi era. Next, I will discuss
the resistance by the Churches as the ethical opposite to the destruction of
life. Finally, I will describe the spontaneity with which euthanasia was
carried out during the war based on the argument that there was an emer-
gency situation. It is especially this emergency argument which recon-
nects the behavior to the ethical values that were respected before and after
Nazism.
I. The Development of the Euthanasia Debate

in Germany (1895-1933)
There was a whole series of euthanasia debates in Germany starting at the
end of the 19th century. The first stages of escalation were marked by
Adolf Josts The Right to Death (Das Recht auf den Tod) from 1895 and
Karl Bindings and Alfred E. Hoches programmatic Approval for De-
stroying Life Unworthy of Living (Die Freigabe der Vernichtung le-
bensunwerten Lebens) from 1920.3 Commencing with a debate on eutha-
3
See the following collection of sources: Gerd Grbler (ed.), Quellen zur
deutschen Euthanasie-Diskussion 1895-1941 (Berlin/Mnster: Lit, 2007). Jochen-
Christoph Kaiser/Kurt Nowak/Michael Schwartz, Eugenik, Sterilisation,
Euthanasis. Politische Biologie in Deutschland 1895-1945. Eine Dokumentation
(Berlin: Buchverlag Union, 1992). See also the discussions by: Udo Benzenhfer,
Der gute Tod? Euthanasie und Sterbehilfe in Geschichte und Gegenwart, revised
and updated edition (Gttingen 2009). Christian Merkel, Tod den Idioten
Uwe Kaminsky 239
nasia alone, the discussion subsequently expanded to include the issue of

destroying life unworthy of living (Vernichtung lebensunwerten Le-
bens). Even if the debate on euthanasia was motivated less by racial hy-
giene and more by considerations of utility, invoking the ideal of autono-
my over ones own life, it would have been inconceivable without a
selectionist social Darwinism, which also abbreviated the concept of hu-
manity.
The abandonment of the idea that human beings were created in the
image of God paved the way for this abbreviated concept. In stark contrast
to the viewpoint of natural law reasoning, human life became a legally
protected interest that could be balanced against other legally protected
interests. The utilitarian version of the idea of euthanasia developed in
close connection with the idea of sympathy.4 The rejection of everything
transcendental made all suffering seem meaningless if there was no pro-
spect of recovery. The secularization of value horizons previously domi-
nated by Christian perspectives was an important historical constraint for
exerting influence on the euthanasia debate.
The initial focus of this debate was on the individuals right to dispose
of his or her own life. The state had the role of providing this right with
validity by means of laws. The debate on euthanasia had been linked to the
legal discussion since the turn of the century about whether killing on
request should be punishable. This was considered a privileged homicide
offence (privilegiertes Ttungsdelikt), the sentence for which could be as
little as three years in prison. The proponents of euthanasia called for a
reduction in the penalty for people guilty of killing byrequest, or even for
letting them go unpunished. However, the primary focus was on assisting
someone to die not on destroying life unworthy of living, where a bal-
Eugenik und Euthanasie in juristischer Rezeption vom Kaiserreich zur Hitlerzeit

(Berlin: Logos-Verlag, 2006). Michael Schwartz, Euthanasie-Debatten in
Deutschland (1895-1945), Vierteljahrshefte fr Zeitgeschichte, vol. 46 (1998) no.
4, pp. 617-665. Idem, Eugenik und Euthanasie: Die internationale Debatte und
Praxis bis 1933/45, in Klaus-Dietmar Henke (ed.), Tdliche Medizin im
Nationalsozialismus. Von der Rassenhygiene zum Massenmord (Cologne/Weimar/
Vienna: Bhlau, 2008), pp. 65-83.
4
See Kurt Nowak, Euthanasie und Sterilisierung im Dritten Reich. Die
Konfrontation der evangelischen und katholischen Kirche mit dem Gesetz zur
Verhtung erbkranken Nachwuchses und der Euthanasie-Aktion, 2nd edition
(Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980), pp. 45-48 and Hans-Walter Schmuhl
following him, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie. Von der
Verhtung zur Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens 1890-1945 (Gttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), pp. 106-114.
ancing of happiness and unhappiness in life was introduced in calculated

units of value.
The degradation of human life witnessed in the mass killing on the
front lines of the First World War constituted a major escalation of this
development. The reference to dying in war was ever-present as a back-
ground argument while the idea of relativizing life was enormously reval-
uated. However, it was not only death on the front lines and the experience
of borderline situations between life and death that precipitated his change
in outlook. It was also the extreme number of deaths at Germanys nursing
homes and mental-health facilities. In the final analysis, physicians were
powerless and exhausted by a war where you couldnt spend any time on
the dying because you had to dedicate your strength to seriously wounded
soldiers who still had prospects of living.5 All of these developments
catalyzed the debate on euthanasia. The horror of the war and the way that
it impressed itself on triage medicine under catastrophic circumstances
shifted the debate away from euthanasia for specific, self-determined cases
toward the wholesale destruction of life unworthy of living. The Berlin-
based attorney Alexander Elster wrote in 1923 that the World War swept
away hecatombs of the best and eugenically fittest people, and it makes us
less fearful of thinking about destroying life unworthy of living than be-
fore.6
The programmatic work Approval for Destroying Life Unworthy of
Living: Its Dimension and Form (Die Freigabe der Vernichtung le-
bensunwerten Lebens. Ihr Ma und ihre Form) by Karl Binding (a teacher
of criminal law) and the psychiatrist Alfred E. Hoche was published for
the first time in 1920. This book raised the question: Is there human life
that has lost the property of being a legally protected interest to such an
extent that its continuation has lost all its value for the individual and the
society?7 The authors answer was in the affirmative concerning three
groups of people. First, it applied to people who were irretrievably lost
due to illness or having been wounded and had an urgent desire to be
delivered from pain. The second group was the incurably imbecilic.
The third group consisted of coma patients who would awaken to name-
5
See, for example, Ewald Meltzer, Das Problem der Abkrzung lebensunwerten
Lebens (Halle/S.: C. Marhold, 1925), p. 70, and Merkel Tod den Idioten, pp.
305-328.
6
Alexander Elster, Eugenetische Lebensbeseitigung, Archiv fr Frauenkunde
und Eugenetik, Sexualbiologie und Vererbungslehre, vol. 9 (1923), pp. 39-47, here
39.
7
Karl Binding/Alfred E. Hoche, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten
Lebens. Ihr Ma und ihre Form (Leipzig: Meiner, 1920), p. 27.
Uwe Kaminsky 241
less misery if they should be aroused from their unconsciousness.8 Bind-

ing and Hoche demanded legal Approval for Destroying Life Unworthy
of Living for these groups.
After this book had been published (and subsequently had led to a
heated debate among attorneys and physicians), the concept of euthanasia
was increasingly considered a generic term which encompassed varying
aspects of killing, including the destruction of life.9 By the end of the
1920s, euthanasia not only referred to painless killing, it also included
destroying life unworthy of living (Vernichtung lebensunwerten Le-
bens). Furthermore, the targeted statutory regulation of assisting someone
to die became a vehicle for expanding the scope of destroying life unwor-
thy of living. Thus, the liberalization of policies on assisted dying was
transformed into an anti-liberal duty to die those individuals had who were
considered unworthy of living (lebensunwert).10
The uprooting of values brought on by the First World War made eu-
thanasia a topic that many physicians and social-welfare politicians
thought they could discuss openly. In addition, the economic problems of
the Weimar social-welfare state meant that some people participating in
this discussion felt euthanasia should be expanded in the direction of de-
stroying life unworthy of living. After all, the costs of nursing care for
those who were mentally ill without hope for a cure seemed too high to
many people in the responsible positions of the social-welfare system,
especially considering the economic misery of healthy people. A case in
point is Paul Erfurth who was the director of the Bergisch Social-Welfare
Institution in Aprath. Erfurths report on the conference of the German
Association for Public and Private Welfare held in Frankfurt, Main on 7/8
March 1925 reflected the mood of many of those attending the conference.
According to Erfurth, the unnamed representative of a very large munici-
pality that is now impoverished had made the following statement: I was
with Bodelschwingh in Bethel where I saw a 30-year-old idiot well cared
for in a nice bed. I have three orphans at home who are normal and they
8
Ibid., pp. 29, 31, 33.
9
See Michael Opielka, Psychiatrie in Deutschland auf dem Weg zur
Vernichtung, in Volk und Gesundheit. Heilen und vernichten im Nationalsozialismus,
ed. by Projektgruppe Volk und Gesundheit (Tbingen: Tbinger Vereinigung fr
Volkskunde, 1982), pp. 127-146, especially pp. 137-143. See also Schmuhl, Ras-
senhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie, pp. 25-28.
10
The practical relevance of assistance to dying discussed here was probably
exaggerated. Meltzer pointed out that he was only aware of two cases in thirteen
years of directing an institution with approximately 220 deaths where I used
narcotics to ease the symptoms and pain of dying (Meltzer, Das Problem der
Abkrzung lebensunwerten Lebens, p. 20).
share one bed. I cannot go along with that. This is the reason why I am for
eliminating these wretched [Elenden] so that my orphans can have a better
bed to sleep in11. Erfurth, previously a dedicated Lutheran proponent of
racial hygiene, although a vigorous opponent of euthanasia,12 complained
of the climate that became predominant after Binding and Hoches book
had been published. Some of the people talking in Frankfurt were not
followers of Binding and Hoche, but in their eagerness to save money they
unconsciously fell prey to the undercurrent.13 Erfurths report notes that
even the Saxon Ministerial Counselor Hans Maier was said to have com-
municated at the same meeting that his ministry intended to make pro-
posals for destroying life unworthy of living to the Interior Ministry of
the Reich.
We should call to mind the emphasis placed on the economic pattern of
reasoning that was set off by the experience of welfare state crises since
these debates on euthanasia intensified whenever the costs for the welfare
of supposedly useless eaters were perceived to be too high in periods of
crisis.14 The debates on euthanasia and all of the arguments had already
taken shape long before the period of Nazism. Euthanasia was discussed
cumulatively or alternatively as a means for unburdening the economy, as
an act of mercy (mercy killing), and as an instrument of eugenics.15 In
ethical terms, this was a mixture of individual ethics and collective ethics,
but by the time the Nazis came into power the emphasis had shifted to a
11
Paul Erfurth, Zur Verordnung ber die Frsorgepflicht vom 13. Februar 1924
und zur Verordnung ber die Durchfhrung des Reichsjugendwohlfahrtsgesetzes
vom 14. Februar 1924, in: Das Evangelische Rheinland II/7 (Juli 1925), pp. 87-89
(partially reprinted in: Gnther van Norden, Das 20. Jahrhundert (Dusseldorf:
Presseverband, 1990), pp. 118-120), here p. 88. See the Christmas request by
Erfurth, arguing in a similar fashion in 1931 (Uwe Kaminsky, Zwangssterilisation
und Euthanasie im Rheinland. Evangelische Erziehungsanstalten sowie Heil-
und Pflegeanstalten 1933-1945 (Cologne/Pulheim/Bonn Rheinland-Verlag, 1995),
pp. 683).
12
Regarding Paul Erfurth (1873-1944): Kaminsky, Zwangssterilisation und
Euthanasie im Rheinland, pp. 142-144, 299-301.
13
Ibid., p. 300.
14
We not only want to emphasize the broad reception of the writings by Bind-
ing/Hoche in 1921-1925 following the radical changes of the First World War and
the hyperinflation, but also the increased number of publications after the Great
Depression and the establishment of Nazi rule in 1933-1936. See the chronological
list of the people participating in the debate, most of whom were attorneys, in
Merkel, Tod den Idioten, pp. 1-10.
15
See, for example, Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie,
pp. 115-125.
Uwe Kaminsky 243
kind of collective ethics individuals had to submit to. The deadly sympa-
thy that shifted the act of mercy from a self-determined life to one
determined by others concealed what had still remained of any memory of
individual ethics, for example, in the later metaphor sacrificing for the
national community (Opfer fr die Volksgemeinschaft). Of course, any-
one who did not accept this sacrificial ethical imperative would have to be
forced to obey a higher-level community ethics as codified in the Law for
the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring (Gesetz zur Verhtung
erbkranken Nachwuchses) in 1933.16
II. Euthanasia Debates at the Time of Nazism

(1933-1941)
Nazisms rise to power marked an important step toward radicalization
because it promoted the implementation of euthanasia into practical terms.
However, there had to be a justification for this step. In his systematic
description of Racial Hygiene, Nazism, and Euthanasia (Rassenhygiene,
Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie), Hans-Walter Schmuhl described the
double-tracked nature of the debates on racial hygiene and euthanasia.17
On the one hand, the racial hygiene paradigm formulated at the end of the
19th century envisioned a program of negative eugenics. The goal of this
program was to once again make what was happening in society subject to
the natural laws which guaranteed the selection of the best genotypes. The
method for achieving this goal was not only promoting people with geno-
types that were considered highly valuable (hochwertig), but also pre-
venting people from propagating if they had genotypes looked upon as
inferior (minderwertig). Eugenic ethics took one of two forms, either
16
A similar point is made by Andreas Frewer with reference to Emil Abderhalden:
Andreas Frewer, Medizin und Moral in Weimarer Republik und
Nationalsozialismus. Die Zeitschrift Ethik unter Emil Abderhalden (Frankfurt a.
M./New York: Campus, 2000), pp. 237.
17
On this point see Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie, pp.
29-126; there are similar overviews in Gerhard Fichtner, Die Euthanasiediskussion in
der Zeit der Weimarer Republik, in Albin Eser (ed.), Suizid und Euthanasie als
human- und sozialwissenschaftliches Problem (Stuttgart: Enke, 1976), pp. 24-40,
and in Jochen Fischer, Von der Utopie bis zur Vernichtung lebensunwerten
Lebens, in Hans Christoph von Hase (ed.), Evangelische Dokumente zur
Ermordung der unheilbar Kranken unter der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft
in den Jahren 1939 bis 1945 (Stuttgart: Innere Mission und Hilfswerk der
Evangelischen Kirche Deutschlands Hauptgeschftsstelle, 1964), pp. 35-65. The
latter misses the double-tracked nature of the intellectual history as analyzed by
Schmuhl, who cited both racial-hygiene theories and the debate on euthanasia.
as developmental ethics (to quote the philologist and Social Darwinist

Alexander Tille) or as generative ethics (to quote the race hygienicist
Wilhelm Schallmayer). In both of these forms, the obligations we have
toward our race and the duty of present individuals to subordinate their
interests to those of future generations gave priority to race as the unit of
maintenance and developmental unity for continuing life (to quote Alfred
Ploetz), especially in terms of values.18
On the other hand, a debate about euthanasia and killing by request had
been initiated in the 1890s, although it was based rather on utilitarian con-
siderations than on racial hygiene. The negative value of an individuals
life was emphasized as a medical indication for killing, both to oneself and
also to society. Adolf Jost demanded the Right to Death (Recht auf den
Tod) in a controversial book in 1895 and took as its basis an individuals
situation where there is a minimum of usefulness to his fellow man and
maximum of suffering in his life. The value of human life might not
only be zero but also negative.19
The connection between these two developments can be seen in how
limited the concept of considering human life as valuable was in those
days. Selectionist Social Darwinism lurking in the background of the ra-
cial hygiene paradigm abandoned the Christian concept of human beings
having been created in the image of God by only allowing for certain types
of people. Considering human beings in terms of their utility while disre-
garding dignity and human rights also limited human existence to whatev-
er human beings had to contribute to society. Still, the euthanasia idea was
not central to the racial hygiene program, where strategies of preventing
conception by prohibiting marriage, confinement in asylums, and later
sterilization were seen as more promising. At the same time, racial hy-
giene considerations did not have a conclusive role to play in the debate on
euthanasia or killing by request. There is, however, a link in the intellectu-
al history of the debates about eugenics and euthanasia. The two con-
18
Peter Weingart, Eugenische Utopien. Entwrfe fr die Rationalisierung der
menschlichen Entwicklung, in Harald Weltzer (ed.), Nationalsozialismus und
Moderne (Tbingen: Edition diskord, 1993), pp. 166-183, especially 175-178.
Weingart states that the evolutionary utopias and ethics did not achieve the status
of a quasi-religion.
19
Adolf Jost, Das Recht auf den Tod. Sociale Studie (Gttingen: Dietrich, 1895),
pp. 6 and 26. For tracing the legal debate on euthanasia see Vera Groe-Vehne,
Ttung auf Verlangen ( 216 StGB), Euthanasie und Sterbehilfe.
Reformdiskussion und Gesetzgebung seit 1870 (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-
Verlag, 2005). Christian Merkel, Tod den Idioten.
Uwe Kaminsky 245
cepts are not just two different pairs of shoes.20 Forced sterilization
carried out after 1933 was an injustice in its own right and cannot be per-
ceived simply as a preliminary stage to euthanasia.21
Most authors agree that the negative eugenic legislation of the Nazi
state facilitated the transition from contraception through forced steriliza-
tion to destruction via euthanasia. However, historical research has proven
that the idea of a programmatic development from contraception to de-
stroying life unworthy of living was not sufficiently differentiated.22 The
principal line connecting eugenics and euthanasia was the biologization
of the social (Biologisierung des Sozialen) under social Darwinist pre-
cepts. This process devalued the principle that all people have the same
rights, replacing it with a calculus of social utility.23 We can be sure that
20
See the criticism of the much too close association of eugenics and euthanasia
by Michael Schwartz, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie?
Kritische Anfragen an eine These Hans-Walter Schmuhls, Westflische
Forschungen, vol. 46 (1996), pp. 604-622 and the answer by Hans-Walter
Schmuhl, Eugenik und Euthanasie Zwei Paar Schuhe? A reply to Michael
Schwartz. Westflische Forschungen, vol. 47 (1997), pp. 757-762. Recently
Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Die Genesis der Euthanasie. Interpretationsanstze, in
Maike Rotzoll/Gerrit Hohendorf/Petra Fuchs/Paul Richter/Christoph Mundt/
Wolfgang U. Eckart (eds.), Die nationalsozialistische Euthanasie-Aktion T4
und ihre Opfer. Geschichte und ethische Konsequenzen fr die Gegenwart
(Paderborn/Munich/Vienna/ Zurich: Schningh, 2010), pp. 66-73.
21
Gisela Bock worked this out in a major study on the ideological framework, the
political actions, and way people were socially affected by forced sterilization:
Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus. Untersuchungen zur
Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986),
especially pp. 348-351, 380-383; furthermore, Christian Gansmller, Die
Erbgesundheitspolitik des Dritten Reiches. Planung, Durchfhrung und
Durchsetzung (Cologne/Vienna: Bhlau, 1987), especially pp. 34.
22
See Michael Schwartz, Medizinische Tyrannei: Eugenisches Denken und
Handeln in international vergleichender Perspektive (1900-1945), especially
considering international developments in eugenics, Jahrbuch der Juristischen
Zeitgeschichte, vol. 7 (2005/2006), pp. 37-54. Idem, Medizinische Tyrannei und
die Kirchen. Christliche Haltungen zu Eugenik und Euthanasie in international
vergleichender Perspektive (1890-1945). Zeitschrift fr bayerische
Kirchengeschichte, vol. 74 (2005), pp. 28-53. Furthermore, the articles in: Regina
Wecker/Sabine Braunschweig/Gabriela Imboden/Bernhard Kchenhoff/Hans
Jakob Ritter (eds.), Wie nationalsozialistisch ist die Eugenik? Internationale
Debatten zur Geschichte der Eugenik im 20. Jahrhundert (Cologne/Vienna/
Weimar: Bhlau, 2009).
23
For this point see Peter Weingart/Jrgen Kroll/Kurt Bayertz, Rasse, Blut und
Gene. Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland (Frankfurt a.
M.: Suhrkamp, 1988), pp. 527.
accepting the idea of mental illness being inherited facilitated the ac-
ceptance of mandatory racial hygiene measures. However, murdering
mentally ill individuals was not at all based on any supposed inheritance of
their condition. The hereditary health policy of the Nazi state provided a
substantial impulse in the direction of overcompensation24 and had an
almost surplus radicalism25 that tended to blur the boundaries between
contraception and destruction.
This crossing of boundaries was evident in the transition from a tradi-
tional form of discrimination, forced sterilization in the public fields of the
economy, policymaking and culture, to a modern form of interfering with
the private sphere, not to mention life and limb. A clear sign of this change
was the introduction of a eugenic indication for abortions in 1935. This
step facilitated the transition from preventing a life that will suffer[s]
from an inherited disease through the destruction of unborn life to de-
stroying already-born and adult life.26 Accepting the science of eugenics
and the discriminatory ideology of the national community of Nazism
doubtlessly lowered the level of inhibition against killing, especially at
psychiatric institutions.27 This is where we should identify what might be
characterized as crossing boundaries in the attempts to merge bioscience
with biopolitics as Hans-Walter Schmuhl has documented in detail, exem-
plarily using the history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropolo-
gy, Human Genetics and Eugenics (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut fr Anthro-
pologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik).28 Only under Nazism was
the state able to institutionalize racial hygiene29 because the polycratic
structure (meaning the existence of various competing carriers of domi-
nance) promoted radicalization on all levels. The fact that there were com-
24
Kurt Nowak, Euthanasie und Sterilisation im Dritten Reich, p. 38.
25
See Schmuhl, Eugenik und Euthanasie Zwei Paar Schuhe?, p. 761.
26
See Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus, pp. 348-349. Idem,
Krankenmord, Judenmord und nationalsozialistische Rassenpolitik: berlegungen
zu einigen neueren Forschungshypothesen, in Frank Bajohr/Werner Johe/Uwe
Lohalm (eds.), Zivilisation und Barbarei. Die widersprchlichen Potentiale der
Moderne (Hamburg: Christians, 1991), p. 302.
27
Peter Weingart, Eugenik Eine angewandte Wissenschaft. Utopien der
Menschenzchtung zwischen Wissenschaftsentwicklung und Politik, in Peter
Lundgreen (ed.), Wissenschaft im Dritten Reich (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp1985),
pp. 314-349, especially p. 331.
28
Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Grenzberschreitungen. Das Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut fr
Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik 1927-1945 (Gttingen:
Wallstein-Verlag, 2005).
29
See Bock, Krankenmord, Judenmord und nationalsozialistische Rassenpolitik,
p. 292.
Uwe Kaminsky 247
peting blocks of power next to and opposite each other in the governmen-
tal and party framework intensified the struggle for special authorization
and the health conduct (Gesundheitsfhrung) of the Nazi state.30 For
instance, the conflict between the governmental and the party health bu-
reaucracy in 1936/37 led to discussions about changing the law on forced
sterilization and resulted in the formation of a Reich Committee for He-
reditary Health Issues (Reichsausschuss fr Erbgesundheitsfragen). This
committee of experts for making decisions concerning disputed cases
provided the preliminary form of an organization for the later childrens
euthanasia (Kindereuthanasie) and euthanasia involving patients at men-
tal health institutions. This is where the radical advocates of the Nazi he-
reditary health policy gathered, simultaneously being the unequivocal
supporters of destroying life unworthy of living. However, due to the
lack of contemporary historical documents, we cannot demonstrate pre-
cisely to this very day whether there were any concrete, long-term, and
deliberate plans to murder children.
Therefore the eugenic argument which gained so much momentum in
Nazism did not automatically lead to destroying life unworthy of living.
In several studies, Michael Schwartz has pointed out that the utopia of a
supposedly human eugenic reconstruction of society by sterilizing people
suffering from inherited diseases could also be used in regard to euthana-
sia.31 Stefan Khl argues that several prominent eugenicists participated in
Nazi euthanasia because they were disappointed by the war with its coun-
ter-selective effects. In the moral universe of these eugenicists, the killing
of people with disabilities was justified because it worked in the opposite
direction and as something like a peace policy (Friedenspolitik).32
30
See Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Sterilisation, Euthanasie, Endlsung.
Erbgesundheitspolitik unter den Bedingungen charismatischer Herrschaft, in
Norbert Frei, (ed.), Medizin und Gesundheitspolitik in der NS-Zeit (Munich:
Oldenbourg, 1991), pp. 295-308. See also Michael H. Kater, Die
Gesundheitsfhrung des Deutschen Volkes, Medizinhistorisches Journal, vol.
18 (1983), pp. 349-375. Winfried S, Der Volkskrper im Krieg.
Gesundheitspolitik, Gesundheitsverhltnisse und Krankenmord im
nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1939-1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2003).
31
Schwartz, Euthanasie-Debatten in Deutschland, pp. 660-664.
32
Stefan Khl, The Relationship between Eugenics und the So-Called Euthana-
sia Action in Nazi Germany. A Eugenically Motivated Peace Policy and the Kill-
ing of the Mentally Handicapped during the Second World War, in Margit
Szllisi-Janze (ed.), Science in the Third Reich, (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001),
pp. 185-210.
On the contrary, the thesis that eugenics was the same as euthanasia (a
view that was repeatedly put forward by many conservative critics)33 was
so threatening to the hereditary health policy and the forced sterilization
program that in the early years of Nazi rule, Nazi advocates vehemently
denied that they had any intention of creating a euthanasia regulation.34
The reason for this was not only to be found in tactical considerations but
also in the fact that the Nazi regimes policy of murdering children had
been unclear in the beginning. Also, the not uniformly held positions of
various representatives on the Nazi side were not brought into line, later.
In June, 1934, Hans Harmsen, the director of the Health Care Depart-
ment at the Central Committee for the Inner Mission, pointed out in the
magazine Gesundheitsfrsorge that frequently the question of steriliza-
tion is linked to the question of destroying life unworthy of living appar-
ently from a lack of knowledge in debates on the law on forced steriliza-
tion. In contrast to this, he emphasized the fact that just as the Church and
the Inner Mission reject the demands made from time to time to destroy
life unworthy of living, the same applies to governmental offices and the
party.35 Harmsen appealed specifically to a speech by the Head of the
Nazi Physicians League, Gerhard Wagner. At the end of 1936, the film
department of the Reich Propaganda Ministry vetoed a scheduled euthana-
sia documentary entitled Ruined Life (Verpfuschtes Leben) because
euthanasia was illegal.36
33
For instance, Paul-Gerhard Braune 1933. See Uwe Kaminsky, Wer ist
gemeinschaftsunfhig? Paul Gerhard Braune, die Rassenhygiene und die NS-
Euthanasie, in Jan Cantow/Jochen-Christoph Kaiser (eds.), Paul Gerhard Braune
(18871954). Ein Mann der Kirche und Diakonie in schwieriger Zeit, (Stuttgart:
W. Kohlhammer, 2005), pp. 114-139, especially 115-122.
34
This is the obligation the NSDAP State Representative Leonardo Conti, later
Reichsgesundheitsfhrer, expressed at the beginning of 1933 in a reply in the
magazine Arbeiterwohlfahrt; he promised to care for people with incurable illness-
es and children with hereditary afflictions as dictated by our peoples common
bond and brotherly love, as such countering the accusation of advocating euthana-
sia. See Schwartz, Euthanasie-Debatten in Deutschland, pp. 630 f. Hans-Walter
Schmuhl, Die biopolitische Entwicklungsdiktatur des Nationalsozialismus und
der Reichsgesundheitsfhrer Leonardo Conti, in Klaus-Dietmar Henke (ed.),
Tdliche Medizin im Nationalsozialismus. Von der Rassenhygiene zum
Massenmord (Cologne/Weimar/Vienna: Bhlau, 2008), pp. 101-117, especially pp.
109.
35
Hans Harmsen, Sterilisierung Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens,
Gesundheitsfrsorge, vol. 8 (1934), p. 125.
36
Karl-Heinz Roth, Filmpropaganda fr die Vernichtung der Geisteskranken und
Behinderten im Dritten Reich, in Gtz Aly (ed.), Reform und Gewissen.
Euthanasie im Dienst des Fortschritts, (Berlin: Rotbuch-Verlag, 1985), pp. 125-
Uwe Kaminsky 249
Hitlers supposed will (he always had the last word in the polycratic
Nazi system of dominance) was not explicit in this respect in 1939. In
Mein Kampf he had spoken more about restricting the reproduction of
people who were inferior in his eyes than of destroying life unworthy
of living.37 Still, his statements delegitimized the right to life of ill and
handicapped people by attempting to eradicate everyone who was ill. This
same program was also advocated in propaganda films by the Racial
Policy Office (Rassenpolitisches Amt) such as The Sins of the Fathers
(Die Snden der Vter, 1935), Off the Path (Abseits vom Wege, 1935),
Hereditarily Ill (Erbkrank, 1936), What You Have Inherited (Was Du
ererbet, 1936), and Victims of the Past (Opfer der Vergangenheit, 1937).
Initially, these productions were only internal party training materials with
limited public impact.38 These films (along with a cultural and a docu-
mentary film that had been planned by the central euthanasia office after
the end of 1939) attempted to promote revulsion when presenting ballast
existences (Ballastexistenzen) and the argument of high expenses in an
effort to morally legitimize and propagate euthanasia. However, these
films did not have any impact on the decision-making process for Nazi
euthanasia which had been underway since the spring of 1939. It was only
the movie I Accuse (Ich klage an), released in 1941 and based on the novel
by Hellmuth Unger that addressed the topic of euthanasia effectively. This
movie had been planned and produced following the autumn of 1940 at
193, here 129. The press instructions were similarly reticent in discussing Ungers
novel Sendung und Gewissen (cf. Claudia Sybille Kiessling, Dr. med. Hellmuth
Unger (1891 - 1953). Dichterarzt und rztlicher Pressepolitiker in der Weimarer
Republik und im Nationalsozialismus (Husum: Matthiesen, 1999), especially p.
75).
37
See the passages compiled in the bill of indictments of the Director of Public
Prosecutions at the Frankfurt a. M. Higher Regional Court against Dr. Werner
Heyde inter alia on 22 May 22 1962 in Thomas Vormbaum (ed.), Euthanasie
vor Gericht. Die Anklageschrift des Generalstaatsanwalts beim OLG Frankfurt/M.
gegen Dr. Werner Heye u. a vom 22. Mai 1962 (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-
Verlag, 2005), pp. 14-16. Somewhat similar to Hitlers final speech before the
1929 Nuremberg Party Conference: Wrde Deutschland jhrlich eine Million
Kinder bekommen und 700.000 bis 800.000 der Schwchsten beseitigt, dann
wrde am Ende das Ergebnis vielleicht sogar eine Krftesteigerung sein. If in
Germany one million children were born each year and 700,000 to 800,000
thousand of the weakest were eliminated, the final result might even be an increae
in power. (Vlkischer Beobachter, 7 August 7,1929, cited in Bock,
Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus, p. 24).
38
Roth, Filmpropaganda fr die Vernichtung der Geisteskranken und Behinderten
im Dritten Reich, pp. 129-132.
which time the protests and the resistance to people having to fill out reg-
istry forms for official records and euthanasia became noticeable.39
The change in the atmosphere after the Nazis seizure of power also be-
came evident in legal documents on the complex of topics concerning
euthanasia.40 The voices previously advocating destroying life unworthy
of living became more publicly prominent, the memorandum by the Prus-
sian Minister of Justice, Hanns Kerrl, from October, 1933 being an early
example. Kerrl wanted to leave the issue of drawing up a legal policy for
euthanasia to the state. The conservative attorneys around Reich Minister
of Justice Grtner in the official commission for punitive law in 1934/35
rejected this proposal, but the majority position in the commission
changed by August 1939, putting forward the following counter-
recommendation for a draft law:
The life of a person requiring permanent institutionalization due to incur-

able mental illness and being incapable of surviving in life can be ended
early and painlessly for that person by imperceptible medical measures.41
Proposals for laws such as those mentioned here were also discussed in the
years when the mass murder of the mentally ill and the handicapped had
long since begun. These attempts to create a statutory regulation on eutha-
nasia (urged by the physicians involved to protect their own interests)
continued until the autumn of 1940, when Hitler rejected them.42 This
meant that, formally, euthanasia remained punishable by law during the
entire period of Nazi rule. The euthanasia program was supposedly legal-
ized only by authorization of the Fuehrer, and this authorization was sup-
posed to be kept secret.43 Thus, during the war, euthanasia was increasing-
39
Ibid., pp. 132-147.
40
See Schwartz, Euthanasie-Debatten in Deutschland, pp. 644, Merkel, Tod
den Idioten, pp. 277-281.
41
See Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie, pp. 291-297.
Schwartz, Euthanasie-Debatten in Deutschland, pp. 656.
42
In a letter of summer 1940 to the head of the Reich Chancellery, Lammers,
Reich Minister of Justice Grtner stated that Hitler had expressly ruled out a statu-
tory regulation in respect to the euthanasia question (Alexander Mitscher-
lich/Fred Mielke (eds.), Medizin ohne Menschlichkeit. Dokumente des Nrnberger
rzteprozesses, 2nd ed, (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Bcherei, 1960), p. 201). See
Karl-Heinz Roth/Gtz Aly, Die Diskussion ber die Legalisierung der
nationalsozialistischen Anstaltsmorde in den Jahren 1938-1941, in Karl-Heinz
Roth (ed.), Erfassung zur Vernichtung. Von der Sozialhygiene zum Gesetz ber
Euthanasie (Berlin: Verlagsgesellschaft Gesundheit, 1984), pp. 101-179.
43
This apparent legality was noted in various proceedings in the post-war era.
Recently, the attorney Friedrich Dencker has argued that one should regard Hitlers
Uwe Kaminsky 251
ly pushed to the sphere of the instrumental Nazi state, a sphere that ex-
panded more and more at the expense of a state governed by moral and
legal norms.
III. The Churches Rejection of Euthanasia

It was not possible to violate the Biblical prohibition on killing in the peri-
od of Nazism without further ado. If we accept the view that Nazi rule was
charismatic in its legitimation using the categories employed by Max We-
ber,44 it was possible to justify the open violation of moral norms only for
good reasons. The Christian Churches remained firm in their moral oppo-
sition to any form of euthanasia. On the Protestant side, the Eugenic
Committee of the Inner Mission had been in existence since 1931; from
1934 on it was called the Standing Committee for Race Maintenance and
Racial Hygiene. This Standing Committee sought to have a hand in formu-
lating the hereditary health policy but also to prevent the extensions of this
policy in the direction of destroying life unworthy of living.45 The com-
mittee criticized the introduction of the eugenic indication for abortion in
1935. In advance, committee members saw this change as a breach in the
dam preventing the destruction of life. They made a public declaration
secret decree as a contemporarily applicable law. He considers the convictions of

the post-war era to be disguised repercussions of a new (politically necessary) law.
See Friedrich Dencker, Strafverfolgung der Euthanasie-Tter nach 1945,
Jahrbuch der Juristischen Zeitgeschichte, vol. 7 (2005/2006), pp. 113-124.
44
For instance, Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie.
45
For contemporary discussions see: Hans Harmsen, Die Verwirklichung
eugenetischer Forderungen innerhalb der evangelischen Liebesttigkeit, in Hans
Roemer (ed.), Bericht ber die Zweite Deutsche Tagung fr psychische Hygiene in
Bonn am 21. Mai 1932 mit dem Hauptthema: Die eugenischen Aufgaben der
psychischen Hygiene (Berlin/Leipzig: de Gruyter, 1932), p. 83-86, here 86: Die
betonte, rein wirtschaftlich zweckvolle Einstellung der Eugenik bersieht die tiefen
Werte und die Bedeutung, die das Leiden in dieser Welt als Schule der
Barmherzigkeit und zur Weckung der menschlichen Liebeskrfte hat. Es erscheint
bedenklich, wenn die eugenetischen Manahmen nicht tiefer begrndet werden, als
in dem bloen Ziel, die Wohlfahrtslasten zu vermindern. d. h. mit reinen
Ntzlichkeitserwgungen. Also see the assessment by Jochen-Christoph Kaiser,
Protestantismus im 20. Jahrhundert. Beitrge zur Geschichte der Inneren Mission
1914-1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989), pp. 358-359, 365-366; concerning the
Treysa Declaration see Kurt Nowak, Sterilisation, Krankenmord und Innere Mis-
sion im Dritten Reich, in Achim Thom/Gennadij I. Caregorodcev (eds.),
Medizin unterm Hakenkreu (Berlin: Verlag Volk und Gesundheit, 1989), pp. 167-
177, here 171.
against the new policy, without being able to prevent its implementation.
On the Catholic side, abortion was in any event seen as equivalent to de-
stroying human life, which they rejected for reasons of natural rights.46
Again, in 1936 and 1937, the Protestant Standing Committee paid a
great deal of attention to the debate on euthanasia. The Medical Counselor
Ewald Meltzer had come to the fore in 1925 with vehement criticism of
Binding and Hoches book which, since 1920, had strongly influenced the
debate on destroying life unworthy of living.47 At a meeting in the
summer of 1937 Melzer restated his position opposing destroying life
unworthy of living. Using arguments that paralleled his 1925 book criti-
cizing euthanasia, he asserted that if there had been an order in 1916 that
idiots were supposed to gently be conveyed out of the realm of the living,
we would have had to apply the emergency paragraph of that time. This is
probably the intention for the new penal code. It states that we are not
interested in destruction and that this will be reserved for a special ordi-
nance. I would understand a step such as this in serious cases of food
shortage or where space is urgently needed for the wounded. A strong and
healthy individual must risk his or her life; in a similar way, also the ill
individual must pay his or her tribute to the fatherland. In a case such as
this, I would consider it acceptable. May God grant that we never have to
find ourselves in such a difficult position.48 In this response to the com-
missions work on the penal code Meltzer espoused a hierarchy of values
which indicated that, in emergency situations, he would agree to destroy-
ing the ill (Kranke). In other words, Meltzer, who also advocated the
same position in published form,49 pointed the way to a specific situation
that would provide a basis for consensus among Conservative/Christian
elites.
46
See Nowak, Euthanasie und Sterilisierung im Dritten Reich, in Katholizismus
und Eugenik in der Weimarer Republik und im Dritten Reich. Zwischen
Sittlichkeitsreform und Rassenhygiene, Ingrid Richter (Paderborn/ Munich/Vienna/
Zurich: Schningh, 2001), pp. 140-176 and 493-510. Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Die
Katholische Kirche und die Euthanasie, Jahrbuch der Juristischen
Zeitgeschichte, vol. 7 (2005/2006), pp. 55-63.
47
Ewald Melzer, Das Problem der Abkrzung lebensunwerten Lebens (Halle/S.:
Marhold, 1925).
48
Verbatim protocol, dated April 14, 1937 (ADW CA/G 1601/1, sheet 91-96, sheet
92-93). Also see Schwartz, Euthanasie-Debatten in Deutschland, pp. 650-654.
Also cited from Ernst Klee, Die SA Jesu Christi. Die Kirche im Banne Hitlers
(Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989), p. 97.
49
Refer to Ewald Meltzer, Die Euthanasie, die Heiligkeit des Lebens und das
kommende Strafrecht, Christliche Volkswacht (1936), pp. 135-143.
Uwe Kaminsky 253
The SS attempted to obtain an expert opinion on euthanasia from the

Catholic moral theologian Josef Mayer50 in advance or in view of the cur-
rent campaign. The date of his memorandum is not sure. Mayer was
apparently regarded as a supporter of euthanasia because of his 1927 dis-
sertation on the Lawful Sterilization of the Mentally Ill (Gesetzliche Un-
fruchtbarmachung Geisteskranker). Critics of Mayers dissertation re-
proached him for his argument that a state of emergency would justify
eugenic action by a society against certain individuals because this action
might also encompass a right to kill.51 There is also an expert opinion
handed down under the name of Erich Warmund with the title of Euthana-
sia in the Light of Catholic Morality and Practice (Euthanasie im Lichte
der katholischen Moral und Praxis) which is attributed to Mayer.52 A short
version was probably not ready until mid-1940 so that it could not be used
to justify the beginning of the campaign for euthanasia. Nonetheless, the
expert opinion highlights the Nazi supporters stance for ethically justify-
ing euthanasia in the case of a state of emergency.
In a similar fashion, it was possible to find open approval for euthana-
sia only among Protestant outsiders. For instance, we might think of the
attitude of the senior physician of the Neuendettelsau Institute, Rudolph
Boeckh as recorded in the manuscripts of the speeches he gave in the
spring of 1939. Boeck wanted to assign the right to kill to the state.53 The
50
According to the statement by SD member of staff Albert Hartl in 1967 at the
Frankfurt Trial Court of General Jurisdiction, Hitler was the one who gave the
command that introduced euthanasia in the expert opinion, due to the fact that he
did not specifically reject it. On the problem of how to assess this statement, see
Wolfgang Dierker in Himmlers Glaubenskrieger. Der Sicherheitsdienst der SS und
seine Religionspolitik 1933-1941 (Paderborn/Munich/Vienna/Zurich: Schningh,
2002), pp. 114-116. Ingrid Richter, Katholizismus und Eugenik in der Weimarer
Republik und im Dritten Reich, pp. 502-507.
51
Josef Mayer, Gesetzliche Unfruchtbarmachung Geisteskranker. Studien zur
katholischen Sozial-und Wirtschaftsethik (Freiburg: Herder, 1927). On the debate,
see Richter, Katholizismus und Eugenik in der Weimarer Republik und im Dritten
Reich, pp. 497-502.
52
See Udo Benzenhfer/Karin Finsterbusch, Moraltheologie pro NS-
Euthanasie. Studien zu einem Gutachten (1940) von Prof. Josef Mayer mit
Edition des Textes (Hannover: Laurentius, 1998). On the supposed authorship and
the great proximity of Mayer to the basic pro-euthanasia statement of the expert
opinion see Richter Katholizismus und Eugenik in der Weimarer Republik und im
Dritten Reich, pp. 507-509.
53
These speeches (assuming they were given at all) did not have a great impact.
See the articles by Hans Rler, Die Euthanasie-Diskussion in Neuendettelsau
1937-1939, Zeitschrift fr bayerische Kirchengeschichte, vol. 57 (1988), pp. 199-
208 and idem, Ein neues Dokument zur Euthanasie-Diskussion in
book by the theologian Wolfgang Stroothenke on Cultivating Inheritance

and Christianity (Erbpflege und Christentum) was published only in 1940.
Stroothenkes book made things much more difficult because it was re-
garded as the expression of a Lutheran theologian.54 Stroothenke advocat-
ed euthanasia in a governmentally regulated procedure in cases of incura-
ble illness. Stroothenkes thesis of a person having the right to escape
meaningless suffering was criticized by Bodo Heyne, the director of the
Bremen institution, who was also familiar with the topic. In a rather nega-
tive review of Stroothenkes book Heyne included the following ambigu-
ous sentence: The author is apparently not aware of what disturbing con-
sequences this basically individualistic principle might have.55 At that
time, there were already various attempts to resist the campaigns for mur-
dering the ill, which became public in the spring and summer of 1940.56
The synods of the Confessing Church and expert opinions especially writ-
ten on this topic by Hermann Diem, Ernst Wilm, and Heinrich Vogel be-
tween 1940 and 1943 rejected destroying life unworthy of living in any
fashion.57 Despite the fact that they had known about the euthanasia action
Neuendettelsau 1939, Zeitschrift fr bayerische Kirchengeschichte, vol. 57

(1988), pp. 87-91 and Christine-Ruth Mller, Die Neuendettelsauer Anstalten und
die Verlegung der Pfleglinge, in Christine-Ruth Mller/Hans-Ludwig Siemen
Warum sie sterben muten. Leidensweg und Vernichtung von Behinderten aus den
Neuendettelsauer Pflegeanstalten im Dritten Reich, (Neustadt a. d. Aisch:
Degener, 1991), pp. 54-58. Boeckh advocated justifying euthanasia in specific
cases following abortions in a draft titled Zur Euthanasie-Frage (on the question
of euthanasia), dated 23 February 1939. Euthanasie ist die letzte Konsequenz der
Eugenik. (Rler, Ein neues Dokument zur Euthanasie-Diskussion in
Neuendettelsau 1939, p. 89). It was possible to date this text to March 1939 con-
trary to Rler dating the speech ber die Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens
to 1937, as the speech was given before the physicians committee.
54
Wolfgang Stroothenke, Erbpflege und Christentum. Fragen der Sterilisation,
Aufnordung, Euthanasie, Ehe (Leipzig: L. Klotz, 1940). Cf. Kaminsky,
Zwangssterilisation und Euthanasie im Rheinland for an assessment of
Stroothenkes views of the Inner Mission, p. 313.
55
Bodo Heyne, Bcherschau, Wchterruf. Evangelische Zeitschrift fr die
Volkssittlichkeit und Volkskraft, vol. 56 (1941) no. 1, pp. 13-14 (book cover).
56
See Uwe Kaminsky, Die Evangelische Kirche und der Widerstand gegen die
Euthanasie, Jahrbuch der Juristischen Zeitgeschichte, vol. 7 (2005/2006), pp.
64-88. Nowak, Euthanasie und Sterilisierung im Dritten Reich, pp. 131-158.
57
See Nowak, Euthanasie und Sterilisierung im Dritten Reich, pp. 152-158.
See also Ernst Wilm, Referat ber die Stellungnahme der Kirche zur Ttung der
unheilbar Kranken, in Hase Hans Christoph von Hase (ed.), Evangelische
Dokumente zur Ermordung der unheilbar Kranken unter der
nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft in den Jahren 1939-1945 (Stuttgart: Innere
Uwe Kaminsky 255
since the summer of 1940, Church institutions, for example, Protestant

institutions, were able to maintain only a broken refusal (gebrochene
Verweigerungshandlung) against the program. They declined to fill out the
report forms on individual patients that had been distributed by the Reich
authorities in charge of the euthanasia program. This cautious approach
can be traced to the institutions loyalty to the state and to their hope that
this action, which violated all customs and morality, would end soon.58 We
should, however, note that the main opponents of destroying life unwor-
thy of living were on the side of the Churches in their ethical evaluations.
IV. The Spontaneity of Euthanasia as a Measure

and a Campaign
The alleged desire of handicapped and mentally ill people, to whom eu-
thanasia or mercy killing was to be administered, was based on the idea
of the individuals autonomy which those people were incapable of ex-
pressing themselves. At the same time, in the debate of the 1920s and
1930s individual euthanasia had been combined with the debate on the
extent to which euthanasia would improve the gene pool and relieve the
nations economic distress. The historical genesis of the euthanasia debate
points to the danger of crossing boundaries to euthanasia which is dis-
cussed and geared to the postulate of autonomy and the execution of mass
murder.59
Mission und Hilfswerk der Evangelischen Kirche Deutschlands Hauptgeschftsstelle,

1964), pp. 23-27 (also see Landeskirchliches Archiv Bielefeld, Bielefelder Archiv
zum Kirchenkampf, Sammlung Wilhelm Niemller, no. 5.1/374 F. 1 sheet 37-41).
Hermann Diem, Das Problem des lebensunwerten Lebens in der katholischen
und in der evangelischen Ethik (1940), in Idem, ed. by Uvo Andreas Wolf, Sine vi
sed verbo. Aufstze, Vortrge, Voten. Aus Anla der Vollendung seines 65.
Lebensjahres am 2. Februar 1965 (Munich: Ch. Kaiser, 1965), pp. 102. The
Lutheran voices gathered and evaluated in an expert opinion for the Limburg
euthanasia trial in: Ernst Wolf, Das Problem der Euthanasie im Spiegel
evangelischer Ethik, in Erich Dinkler (ed.), Zeit und Geschichte. Dankesgabe an
Rudolf Bultmann zum 80. Geburtstag im Auftrag der alten Marburger und in
Zusammenarbeit mit Hartmut Thyen (Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1964), pp. 685-702
(also in Zeitschrift fr evangelische Ethik, vol. 11 (1966), pp. 345-361).
58
See the detailed discussion in Kaminsky Die Evangelische Kirche und der
Widerstand gegen die Euthanasie, pp. 76-80.
59
A view of NS euthanasia reduced to a loss of morality and to crime, declaring
that this story is irrelevant to a philosophical or systematic theological debate,
relieves itself of the historic contextualisation of its own position (see, for instance,
Michael Frie, Komm ser Tod Europa auf dem Weg zur Euthanasie? Zur
Most researchers agree that the negative eugenic legislation of the Nazi
state facilitated the transition from contraception via forced sterilization to
destruction by way of euthanasia. Recent empirical research has demon-
strated that earlier conceptions of a programmatic advance from contra-
ception to destroying life unworthy of living had not been sufficiently
differentiated.60 In fact, the euthanasia idea was not central to the racial
hygiene program, rather this was where concepts such as preventing con-
ception by prohibiting marriages, institutionalization, and later sterilization
were viewed as more promising. Furthermore, racial hygiene considera-
tions played a conclusive role in the debate on assisted dying and assisted
suicide. Nonetheless, there is a link concerning the history of discourse in
the debates on eugenics and euthanasia. These notions are not just two
different pairs of shoes (zwei unterschiedliche Paar Schuhe).61
It is not easy to find an approach to the motives of the planners and ac-
tors because virtually every statement on euthanasia was made in the
framework of providing justification for court proceedings during the post-
war period. This is the reason why the sources on the contemporary mo-
tives are rather sparse. Furthermore, some of the reasons and patterns of
justification can only be discovered indirectly from letters of protest from
the Churches or from the minutes of meetings of attorneys or psychiatrists,
where those responsible at the T4 Central Office made their statements.
The situation is just as difficult in reference to the motives of assisting
physicians, nursing staff, and administrative workers, because their mo-
tives were so diverse. In what follows, I would like to sketch out one ap-
proach to the existing sources.
First, we should begin with the potential planners although these days
it is not possible to document long-term preparations or rather plans for the
euthanasia program. In the early 1930s it was possible to identify radical
groups within the NSDAP and the SS that were proponents of destroying
life unworthy of living. These groups included not only Hitler himself but
theologischen Akzeptanz von assistiertem Suizid und aktiver Euthanasie (Stuttgart:

W. Kohlhammer, 2008), especially pp. 20-32). This oversimplified view, which
asserts that NS euthanasia was a crime that in the present-day debate only works
as a conversation stopper, does not get to the heart of the matter.
60
Especially on the topic of international developments in eugenics, see Schwartz,
Medizinische Tyrannei. Idem, Medizinische Tyrannei und die Kirchen.
Furthermore, the articles in: Wecker /Braunschweig/Imboden/Kchenhoff/Ritter
(eds.), Wie nationalsozialistisch ist die Eugenik?
61
See Schwartzs criticism of the entanglement of eugenics and euthanasia being
too intimate,Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie? and Schmuhls
reply, Eugenik und Euthanasie Zwei Paar Schuhe? Recently also Hans-
Walter Schmuhl, Die Genesis der Euthanasie.
Uwe Kaminsky 257
also the Heads of the Nazi Physicians League, Gerhard Wagner and Leo-
nardo Conti.62 Unfortunately, we cannot rely only on the subsequent (and
therefore unreliable) statements by Karl Brandt, Viktor Brack and others at
the Nazi Doctor Trials in Nuremberg and later court proceedings. These
witnesses testified that, full of excitement, the Head of the Nazi Physi-
cians League, Gerhard Wagner, had suggested a regulation for euthanasia
to Hitler after the decision was made to accept eugenic indications for
abortion at the 1935 party congress in Nuremberg.63 Hitler had then point-
ed out that it would be easier to carry out a euthanasia program in wartime
rather than in peacetime. However, whether Hitler predicted or strove for
euthanasia during a war as early as 1935 is at least doubtful. We can doc-
ument a wide-ranging debate among attorneys and physicians on this topic
during the succeeding years although we cannot prove that Nazi policy-
making had taken any specific steps, and we can only interpret the intro-
duction of the eugenic indication for abortion as the first step toward a
possible euthanasia program from the standpoint of a radical effort to
protect life. Even unintended deaths as a result of forced sterilization can-
not be interpreted in retrospect as a first step toward a contempt for human
life.64 Instead, these accidental deaths reflect a disregard for the individual
rights of those affected. This disrespect led to death in many cases, in a
fashion similar to the deaths of some of the political victims of the Nazi
regime. However, we cannot discover here any systematic campaign of
mass murder.
62
For Conti, see Schmuhl, Die biopolitische Entwicklungsdiktatur des
Nationalsozialismus und der Reichsgesundheitsfhrer Leonardo Conti,
especially pp. 106 and 109.
63
Brandts statement in: Mitscherlich/Mielke, Medizin ohne Menschlichkeit, p.
184. All the statements are compiled in Vormbaum (ed.), Euthanasie vor
Gericht, pp. 21. Burleigh (Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia
in Germany, c. 1900-1994 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp.
97-98) and other researchers interpret Brandts statement as an indication of eu-
thanasia being planned long in advance. This interpretation may be correct alt-
hough these statements are connected to the attempts of a justification because the
same statements also include a rejection by Hitler and his reference to wartime
when it would be better to carry out these measures due the likely resistance on a
part of the Churches. It also placed the sole responsibility on Wagner and Hitler,
who were no longer alive at that time. See the biography of Karl Brandt by Ulf
Schmidt, Hitlers Arzt Karl Brandt. Medizin und Macht im Dritten Reich (Berlin:
Aufbau Verlag, 2008).
64
For instance, in reference to depriving people of their ability to bear or beget
children due to the primacy of the state as presented by Bock, Zwangssterilisation
im Nationalsozialismus, pp. 372-389.
The novel Mission and Conscience (Sendung und Gewissen) by the

writer and ophthalmologist Hellmuth Unger (1891-1953) was published
for the first time in 1936. This book became one of the reference points for
contemporary considerations for a euthanasia regulation by the advocates
of the Nazi regime. This discussion went beyond the academic debates
following Binding and Hoches book. Unger worked at the press depart-
ment of the Head of the Nazi Physicians League, Gerhard Wagner. In this
novel in letter form there is a physician who believes himself justified and
obliged to carry out euthanasia in various specific cases.65 A debate also
erupted during the spring of 1937 in the SS magazine Black Corps (Das
Schwarze Korps) concerning a farmer who had shot and killed his mental-
ly ill son and then been sentenced for it by the Weimar trial court. The
senior public prosecutor said in response to this case that such a killing
would no longer be considered murder under the future penal code. Letters
to the editor of the Black Corps, the official organ of the SS, openly de-
manded a law for mercy killing.66
In addition, there had always been individual voices among the popula-
tion that vigorously favored relaxing the prohibition against killing. For
example, various requests proposed that commissions work out a regula-
tion for the relief of human suffering as defined by the debate that had
followed the Binding/Hoche book.67 These requests were forwarded to
Nazi Party offices or the Chancellery of the Fuehrer.68 For instance, Forest
Superintendant A. von Hippel from Hildesheim reported to the Rosenberg
Office in mid-February of 1939 that he had followed this suggestion and,
as a follower of the euthanasia movement, had sent his draft of a law
on expanding the authority of physicians to the Reich Medical Associa-
65
Hellmuth Unger, Sendung und Gewissen (Berlin: Brunnen Verlag, 1936) (2nd
changed edition Oldenburg 1941). Also see Emil Abderhalden, Grenzflle der
Ethik: Euthanasie Sterbehilfe Gnadentod, Ethik, vol. 13 (1937), pp. 104-109.
For classification: Kiessling, Dr. med. Hellmuth Unger, especially pp. 72-78.
66
See Das Schwarze Korps, dated March 11, 1937 and Zum Thema Gnadentod,
Das Schwarze Korps, dated March 18. 1937, p. 9 (Excerpts in: Kaiser/Nowak/
Schwartz, Eugenik, Sterilisation, Euthanasie, pp. 224-225). Cf. Ernst Klee,
Euthanasie im NS-Staat. Die Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens (Frankfurt
a. M.: S. Fischer, 1983), p. 62. Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus,
Euthanasie, pp. 179.
67
For instance, Binding proposed a release committee with a physician, a psy-
chiatrically trained doctor or psychiatrist, and an attorney who was supposed to be
directed by a neutral chairperson without voting rights (see Binding/Hoche, Die
Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens, p. 36).
68
The statements in the post-war trials always pointed this out; however, it has not
been possible to discover any specific requests to date.
Uwe Kaminsky 259
tion.69 His draft referred both to the book by Binding and Hoche and the
novel Mission and Conscience by Hellmuth Unger. These open demands
for euthanasia were linked to the motive of sympathy, which was consid-
ered the ethical justification that would most likely foster a consensus for
transgressing the prohibition of killing in peacetime.
The only reliable indications for the systematic compilation of the (pro
and con) arguments are from the year 1939. Hitlers personal physician,
Theo Morell, was assigned the role of working out an expert opinion
that would also propose a formulation for a law on destroying life unwor-
thy of living and the various means for implementing the law.70 Morell
took advantage of several files made available to him by the Reich Com-
mission for the Scientific Registration of Hereditary and Constitutionally
Severe Disorders. In the three, out of five still preserved original files
there is a collection of articles on the euthanasia debate between 1901-
1939 as well as a compilation of book reviews collected by the Meiner
Publishing House on the Binding/Hoche book published there. The re-
views were marked with symbols indicating the reviewers evaluation (+ =
pro, = con, 0 = neutral).71 Morells expert opinion was probably submit-
ted in August 1939, and his memorandum contributed to the formulation
of what is known as Hitlers euthanasia decree of October 1939 later back-
dated to 1 September 1939, the day the war started. Hitlers euthanasia
decree emphasized the idea of mercy killing based on a medical evalua-
tion process. The responsibility for such evaluations was not handed to a
government office but to a physician and a party functionary, instead.
The first euthanasia program, the murder of handicapped children and
the adult euthanasia carried out on institutionalized patients, had a
strangely improvised character which was internally designated as a
campaign, the Columbus House Campaign or the Reich Commis-
sion Campaign.72 This linguistic cover-up not only emphasizes the secre-
cy surrounding it but also the near-spontaneity in which euthanasia was
69
See v. Hippel to Reichsleiter Prof. Bumler (Rosenberg Office) o. D. [received
21 February 1939] (Bundesarchiv Berlin [hereinafter referred to as BA], NS
15/211 [old: 62 Di 1 FC NSDAP Rosenberg Office 720P, sheet 359506-359511]).
70
See the imprint in: Kaiser/Nowak/Schwartz, Eugenik, Sterilisation,
Euthanasie, pp. 208-209.
71
Vera Groe-Vehne, NARA, T-253, roll 44, file 81 Euthanasie-Quellen bei
T. Morell, Jahrbuch der Juristischen Zeitgeschichte, vol. 7 (2005/2006), pp. 135-
147. The same indications of certain tendencies were later used by the experts in
the context of Aktion T4 when assessing the report forms for the patients to be
selected!
72
See the documentation corresponding to these designations in Kaminsky,
Zwangssterilisation und Euthanasie im Rheinland, p. 333.
initially implemented. It is important to emphasize the improvised charac-

ter of the program because of the view, especially represented in the dated
literature, that Nazi euthanasia had been a logical next step derived from
racial hygiene. This fallacious view is based on an ideological and pro-
grammatic conception of the former history of euthanasia. The misconcep-
tion ignores both the Nazi polycracy and the dynamism of events fed by
the competition for dominance within the Hitler regime.
The issue of Adolf Hitlers ethics is a fascinating element73 although it
points far beyond the issue considered relevant here as we are not talking
about reducing the history of Nazism to Hitler as an individual. Hitler
played an important role as the final decision-maker, and it would be ab-
surd to speak of euthanasia having been carried out against his will. How-
ever, the following questions still remain:
How was the Nazi campaign for murdering the mentally ill and the
handicapped set into motion and how was it executed?
What motivated the physicians and governmental employees partici-
pating in this program along with the nursing staff in the various social
arenas to violate the prohibition against killing?
The so-called childrens euthanasia program, also called the Reich
Commission Campaign by contemporaries, provided a link between the
forced sterilization and the mass murder by poison gas of institutionalized
patients in the T4 Campaign. The childrens program had an important
connective function. The idea of the mercy killing of seriously handi-
capped children made it easier to cross the boundary to eugenic steriliza-
tion, eugenic contraception, and the destruction of what was termed
worthless lives since in this program killing was more highly individual-
ized and medicated than in all the other campaigns to murder the ill. The
story of the Knauer Child (Kind Knauer) or Leipzig Case (Fall
Leipzig), where a father supposedly asked Hitler to kill his child, seems to
have been resolved by recent research although one historian has also
revised his earlier viewpoint.74 However, the Knauer case seems to have
73
See Richard Weikart, Hitler's Ethic. The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), especially pp. 179-187.
74
See most recently Udo Benzenhfer, Der Fall Leipzig (alias Fall Kind
Knauer) und die Planung der NS-Kindereuthanasie (Mnster: Klemm &
Oelschlger, 2008) and idem, Der gute Tod? Euthanasie und Sterbehilfe in
Geschichte und Gegenwart (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009), pp. 97-
105. Earlier, idem, Kindereuthanasie im Dritten Reich. Der Fall Kind
Knauer, Deutsches rzteblatt, vol. 95 (1998) no. 19, pp. A-1187-A-1189. Idem,
Bemerkungen zur Planung der NS-EuthanasieW, in Der Schsische Sonderweg
bei der NS-Euthanasie, published by Arbeitskreis zur Erforschung der
nationalsozialistischen Euthanasie und Zwangssterilisation, Berichte des
Uwe Kaminsky 261
been more of an ad-hoc action than the start of a murder campaign of long-
standing preparation. In 1938 or 1939, the exact date is still unclear, Karl
Brandt, Hitlers personal physician, came from Berlin to Leipzig to evalu-
ate a mentally and physically handicapped child whose parents had sup-
posedly asked for euthanasia.
Afterwards, according to the post-war statements by individuals who
had been involved, there had been discussions at the Reich Commission
for the Scientific Registration of Hereditary and Constitutionally Severe
Disorders about implementing a euthanasia program for children. This
commission was established in the spring of 1939. The upshot of these
discussions was a registration decreeing that children were to be recorded
in special childrens departments. Willing and eager physicians and
other personnel were quickly recruited. This development not only means
that we can conclude that the idea of euthanasia had spread throughout
society, but also that there must have been a network of involved physi-
cians. Scientific research institutes such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for
Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics which had existed since
1927 and the Institute for Brain Research constituted the organizational
core of this network. A large number of physicians had been scientifically
socialized through these institutes.75 A network such as this could function
without any central direction. It had an impact by making recommenda-
tions to be passed on. In any event, due to the loss of some of the files we
cannot document any prolonged planning phase for the euthanasia of
children.
The brain pathology research carried out in the wake of killing the
children provides the indication of their having been selected for this spe-
cial form of euthanasia. It hadmade all kinds of research possible which
was documented in various ways already at the Trials of the Nazi doctors
in Nuremberg.76 For example, Hans-Walter Schmuhl in using Berlin as an
Arbeitskreises 1 (Ulm: Klemm & Oelschlger, 2001). Idem, Der gute Tod?
Euthanasie und Sterbehilfe in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Munich: C. H. Beck,
1999), pp. 114-123. Furthermore, Ulf Schmidt, Reassessing the Beginning of the
Euthanasia Programme, German History, vol. 17 (1999), pp. 543-550. Idem,
Kriegsausbruch und Euthanasie: Neue Forschungsergebnisse zum Knauer Kind
im Jahre 1939, in Andreas Frewer/Clemens Eickhoff (eds.),Euthanasie und die
aktuelle Sterbehilfe-Debatte. Die historischen Hintergrnde medizinischer Ethik
(Frankfurt a. M./New York: Campus, 2000), pp. 120-141.
75
On this point see Schmuhl, Grenzberschreitungen.
76
See, in general, Ernst Klee, Was sie taten was sie wurden. rzte, Juristen und
andere Beteiligte am Kranken- und Judenmord (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer
Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986), especially pp. 174-187. Gerrit Hohendorf/Volker
Roelcke/ Maike Rotzoll, Von der Ethik des wissenschaftlichen Zugriffs auf den
example (of about 700 victims whose brains had been removed) empha-
sized the intimate symbiosis between brain research and the murdering of
ill people.77 In other words, the research interest of medical scientists had
a co-determining impact on the course of euthanasia involving children,
which was known as the Reich Committee Procedure.
If we disregard the transparent metaphor of compassion presented in a
whole series of post-war trials, the ethically involved people emphasized a
utilitarian calculation that held out the promise of special treatment for
the children. Two decrees required reporting the diseases and/or disabili-
ties of the children. The research on the children to be killed had no heal-
ing or therapeutic value. Instead, the studies were intended to prevent
future defects. The goal was to better understand the supposed heritability
of disabilities. It was the members of the research personnel themselves
who benefitted directly because they were relieved of military service in
order to conduct research projects at university institutes. The researchers
also opened up an interior scientific space with their murderous crossing
of boundaries so that they could claim a higher purpose which even re-
Menschen. Die Verknpfung von psychiatrischer Forschung und Euthanasie im

Nationalsozialismus und einige Implikationen fr die heutige Diskussion in der
medizinischen Ethik, in Matthias Hamann/Hans Asbeck (eds.), Halbierte
Vernunft und totale Medizin - Zu Grundlagen, Realgeschichte und Fortwirkungen
der Psychiatrie im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Schwarze Risse, 1997), pp. 81-
106. Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie, pp. 278-284.
Jrgen Peiffer, Hirnforschung im Zwielicht. Beispiele verfhrbarer Wissenschaft in
der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus. Julius Hallervorden, J.-J. Scherer, Berthold
Ostertag (Husum: Matthiesen, 1997). Idem, Die wissenschaftliche Auswertung
der Gehirne von Opfern der Krankenttungen 1940-1944 im Raum Berlin-
Brandenburg sowie in Bayern, in Martin Kalusche (ed.), Arbeitskreis zur
Erforschung der nationalsozialistischen Zwangssterilisierungen und Euthanasie,
Frhjahrstagung 1997 (25.-27. April 1997, Diakonie Stetten, Kernen i. R.).
Tagungsdokumentation, Ebeleben 1997, pp. 85-97. Tuberculosis inoculation tests
were performed on handicapped children in Kaufbeuren und Stadtroda. See Gernot
Rmer, Die grauen Busse in Schwaben. Wie das Dritte Reich mit Geisteskranken
und Schwangeren umging: Berichte, Dokumente, Zahlen und Bilder (Augsburg:
Presse- Druck- und Verlags- GmbH, 1986). Martin Schmidt/Robert Kuhlmann/
Michael v. Cranach, Die Psychiatrie in der Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Kaufbeuren
1933-1945, in Michael von Cranach/Hans Ludwig Siemen (eds.), Psychiatrie im
Nationalsozialismus, Die Bayerischen Heil- und Pflegeanstalten zwischen 1933
und 1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999), especially pp. 39-41.
77
See Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Hirnforschung und Krankenmord. Das Kaiser-
Wilhelm-Institut fr Hirnforschung 1937-1945 (Berlin: Max-Planck-Institut fr
Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2000) (also in Vierteljahrshefte fr Zeitgeschichte, vol.
50 (2002) no. 4, pp. 559-609).
Uwe Kaminsky 263
sisted political influence. This perspective provided strategies for defend-

ing ones actions after the end of the Nazi rule by claiming to have pre-
vented things which might otherwise have been even worse.78
We can only document specific steps taken in the direction of the T4
Campaign (i.e., adult euthanasia) from the summer of 1939 on.79 Within
the regime, there was apparently a genuine struggle behind the scenes for
the leadership role in carrying out euthanasia. According to a letter from
Reich Director of Health Leonardo Conti to Bormann dated June 1943 we
know for certain that Conti had been permitted to address Hitler on this
topic.80 In spite of this, Conti was not given the position to implement this
measure. Instead it was given to Hitlers personal physician, Karl Brandt,
and the director of Hitlers Chancellery, Philipp Bouhler. It took until
spring 1940 to set up a central administrative office in Tiergartenstrasse 4
in Berlin which is where the abbreviation T4 originates from. The T4
leadership had to recruit personnel within an institutionalization phase of
just less than half a year as well as to guarantee the cooperation of various
health departments in the Prussian provinces and the German states. All
the circumstances, including the regional fluctuations during the imple-
mentation, indicate an ad hoc project, one which was carried out without a
long planning phase. By August 1941, the mass murder set in motion had
claimed about 70,000 lives.
Especially during the course of the war, medical selection criteria came
second to economic and utilitarian considerations and focused on the data
in the registration forms used for selection. This approach favored the
dominance of economic usefulness and, due to the high expenditures for
78
Some examples of this defensive strategy can be found in: Sigrid Oehler-
Klein/Volker Roelcke (eds.), Vergangenheitspolitik in der universitren Medizin
nach 1945. Institutionelle und individuelle Strategien im Umgang mit dem
Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007).
79
See the attempt at a reconstruction in Bernd Walter, Psychiatrie und
Gesellschaft in der Moderne. Geisteskrankenfrsorge in der Provinz Westfalen
zwischen Kaiserreich und NS-Regime (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schningh, 1996),
especially pp. 651-666. Schmuhls thesis seems plausible that the various blocs
surrounding Hitler and vying for power were decisive for issuing the order to
murder and the type of order. See Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus,
Euthanasie, pp. 190/191. Jeremy Noakes, Philipp Bouhler und die Kanzlei des
Fhrers der NSDAP. Beispiel einer Sonderverwaltung im Dritten Reich, in Dieter
Rebentisch/Karl Teppe (eds.), Verwaltung contra Menschenfhrung im Staat
Hitlers. Studien zum politisch-administrativen System, (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1986), pp. 208-236, especially 227-229.
80
Conti an Bormann 23.6.1943 (BA, R 18/3810), cited in Kaminsky,
Zwangssterilisation und Euthanasie im Rheinland, p. 433.
nursing care on the institutional level, the selection criteria.81 One-third of

the patients killed were incapable of working and required a great deal of
costly nursing care while only five percent were productively employed;
74.6% of the victims records contained negative behavioral evaluations.82
The people selected for euthanasia were different from the group of vic-
tims affected by forced sterilization. Those who suffered forced steriliza-
tion were primarily people with slight mental handicaps or a minor mental
illness; they were not likely to have a long stay at an institution if they
were institutionalized at all. The ones murdered were primarily those with
severe handicaps or serious illnesses necessitating extended stays in insti-
tutions. 83
81
This view is also advocated by Philipp Rauh, Medizinische Selektionskriterien
versus konomisch-utilitaristische Verwaltungsinteressen. Ergebnis der
Meldebogenauswertung und Gerrit Hohendorf, Die Selektion der Opfer
zwischen rassenhygienischer Ausmerze, konomischer Brauchbarkeit und
medizinischem Erlsungsideal, in Maike Rotzoll/Gerrit Hohendorf/Petra
Fuchs/Paul Richter/ Christoph Mundt/Wolfgang U. Eckart (eds.), Die
nationalsozialistische Euthanasie-Aktion T4 und ihre Opfer. Geschichte und
ethische Konsequenzen fr die Gegenwart (Paderborn/Munich/Vienna/Zurich:
Ferdinand Schningh, 2010), pp. 297-309, 310-324.
82
Gerrit Hohendorf/Maike Rotzoll/Paul Richter/Christoph Mundt/Wolfgang U.
Eckart, Die Opfer der nationalsozialistischen Euthanasie-Aktion T4. Erste
Ergebnisse eines Projektes zur Erschlieung von Krankenakten getteter Patienten
im Bundesarchiv Berlin, Der Nervenarzt, vol. 11 (2002), pp. 1065-1074, p. 1072-
1073. Further, Petra Fuchs/Gerrit Hohendorf/Philipp Rauh/Annette Hinz-
Wessels/Paul Richter/Maike Rotzoll, Die NS-Euthanasie-Aktion-T4 im Spiegel
der Krankenakten. Neue Ergebnisse historischer Forschung und ihre Bedeutung fr
die heute Diskussion medizinethischer Fragen, Jahrbuch der Juristischen
Zeitgeschichte, vol. 7 (2005/2006), pp. 16-36. Finally, the essays in: Maike
Rotzoll/ Gerrit Hohendorf/Petra Fuchs/Paul Richter/Christoph Mundt/Wolfgang U.
Eckart (eds.), Die nationalsozialistische Euthanasie-Aktion T4 und ihre
Opfer. Geschichte und ethische Konsequenzen fr die Gegenwart (Paderborn/
Munich/Vienna/Zurich: Ferdinand Schningh, 2010).
83
Regional research has discussed this development for a longer period of time.
For instance, refer to Bernd Walter, Anstaltsleben als Schicksal. Die
nationalsozialistische Erb- und Rassenpflege an Psychiatriepatienten, in Norbert
Frei (ed.), Medizin und Gesundheitspolitik in der NS-Zeit (Munich: Oldenbourg,
1991), pp. 217-233, especially 230-232. Petra Fuchs/Maike Rotzoll/Paul
Richter/Annette Hinz-Wessels/Gerrit Hohendorf, Die Opfer der Aktion T4:
Versuch einer kollektiven Biographie auf der Grundlage von Krankengeschichten,
in Christfried Tgel, Volkmar Lischka (eds.),Euthanasie und Psychiatrie
(Uchtspringe 2005), pp. 3778. Petra Fuchs/Maike Rotzoll/Ulrich Mller/Paul
Richter/Gerrit Hohendorf (eds.), Das Vergessen der Vernichtung ist Teil der
Vernichtung selbst. Lebensgeschichten von Opfern der nationalsozialistischen
Uwe Kaminsky 265
The Wehrmacht, the SS, and the Main Welfare Office for Ethnic Ger-
mans accelerated the removal of the inhabitants from institutions in an
attempt to assert their interest for utilizing the asylums and care facilities
for new and different purposes. Some of these special interests influenced
the timing and the methods used for killing the ill. In the provinces of
Pomerania and Eastern Prussia as well as in the occupied Polish areas later
on, the ill and the handicapped were shot or killed in gas vans during the
early stage in 1939. Once emptied, the Polish institutions were almost
exclusively turned over to the SS. The three government agencies tempo-
rarily used former institutions as resettlement camps and, later on, as bar-
racks84 and accelerated the killing during the T4 Campaign in certain
regions including Bavaria, Wuerttemberg, Badania, and the Rhineland.85
Euthanasie (Gttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 2007). Rotzoll inter alia (ed.), Die

nationalsozialistische Euthanasie-Aktion T 4 und ihre Opfer, p. 191-219. See
also: Boris Bhm/ Ricarda Schulze (eds.), ist uns noch allen lebendig in
Erinnerung. Biographische Portrts von Opfern der nationalsozialistischen
Euthanasie-Anstalt Pirna-Sonnenstein (Dresden: Stiftung Schsische
Gedenksttten zur Erinnerung an die Opfer Politischer Gewaltherrschaft, 2003).
84
See Volker Rie, Die Anfnge der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens in den
Reichsgauen Danzig-Westpreuen und Wartheland 1939/40 (Frankfurt a.
M./Berlin/Bern/New York/Paris/Vienna: Peter Lang, 1995), and Heike Bernhardt,
Anstaltspsychiatrie und Euthanasie in Pommern 1933 bis 1945. Die
Krankenmorde an Kindern und Erwachsenen am Beispiel der Landesheilanstalt
Ueckermnde (Frankfurt a. M.: Mabuse-Verlag, 1994), pp. 87-90.
85
Patients were moved to make room for the accommodation of resettlers, setting
up hospitals for the Wehrmacht, and establishing a national political education
facility at Bavarian institutions (such as the Lutheran nursing homes in Neuen-
dettelsau and various Catholic institutions) as well as at institutions in Wuerttem-
berg and Badania. A similar action occurred when the Rheinische Provinzial-
Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Bedburg-Hau was emptied in order to create a reserve
hospital in March 1940. Only after the transfer of patients did the euthanasia
Central Office with its apparatus become involved in the selection, transport, and
killing of patients. See Mller/Siemen, Warum sie sterben mussten, especially pp.
96-108, 148-157, and the documents on pp. 204-224. Furthermore, the statements
in: Ein Jahrhundert der Sorge um geistig behinderte Menschen, vol. 2: Hans-Josef
Wollasch, Ausbau und Bedrngnis: Die erste Hlfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, edited
by Verband katholischer Einrichtungen fr Lern- und Geistigbehinderte (Freiburg
1980), pp. 99 (Attl), 105 (Burgkunstadt), 109 (Ecksberg), 115 (St. Josefshaus/
Gemnden), 116-117 (Gremsdorf), 124 (Lautrach), 128 (Reichenbach), 129
(Schnbrunn), 130-131 (Schweinspoint), 131 (Straubing), 132 (Ursberg). Heinz
Faulstich, Von der Irrenfrsorge zur Euthanasie. Geschichte der badischen
Psychiatrie bis 1945 (Freiburg i. Br.: Lambertus, 1993), pp. 223, 269 and the
references in Gtz Aly, Endlsung. Vlkerverschiebung und der Mord an den
V. War and the State of Emergency

We should not underestimate feelings of pity or their flipside revulsion
and fear of the mentally ill and physically handicapped as motives. These
motives also played a role in the argumentation those responsible at the
central euthanasia office threw into the balance in speeches at various
gatherings, linking the euthanasia program to an economic strategy. In
view of the war already underway, this was the most decisive factor
brought up to convince the advocates of the Churches as well as municipal
leaders, judges, and physicians.86 For example, the people gathered at a
meeting of the German Association of Town Councils in Berlin on 3 April
1940 were told of the nursing care expenditures that had accrued for
worthless social misfits. They vegetate like animals and only take
away healthy peoples food. If we have to implement precautions today
for maintaining healthy people, then it is that much more necessary to
eliminate these creatures, even if this measure were to be only for the
better maintenance of the ill in nursing homes who can be cured.87
Friedrich von Bodelschwingh and Paul Gerhard Braune were the insti-
tute directors and representatives of the Lutheran Church who protested
against killing the ill at a meeting that took place at the Reich Interior
Ministry on 10 July 1940. Viktor Brack and Herbert Linden told them that
the necessity of the war demanded that food, peoples strength, and space
needed to be saved. This is the reason why these ill people must be sacri-
ficed.88 Karl Brandt also justified Nazi euthanasia in a conversation with
Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, the director of the Bethel institution, at
Bellevue Castle in February 1943. He referred to the many people dying
in Stalingrad: All other deaths are minor in relation to that.89
At the conference of the Presidents of Regional Appeals Courts and
Chief Public Prosecutors on 23 April 1941 Werner Heyde emphasized that
europischen Juden (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1995), pp. 190, Kaminsky,

Zwangssterilisation und Euthanasie im Rheinland, pp. 337-338.
86
See for the metaphors of war: Merkel, Tod den Idioten, pp. 305-328.
87
Quoted based on the report of the representative of the City of Plauen on the
secret discussion at the German Local Government Conference on 3 April 1940,
in Gtz Aly (ed.), Aktion T4 1939-1945. Die Euthanasie-Zentrale in der
Tiergartenstrae 4 (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1987), pp. 50-52.
88
Quoted from Kaminsky, Zwangssterilisation und Euthanasie im Rheinland,
pp. 691-693.
89
According to v. Bodelschwinghs stenographic notes quoted from: Anneliese
Hochmuth, Spurensuche. Eugenik, Sterilisation, Patientenmorde und die V.-
Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten Bethel 1929-1945, published by Matthias Benad
(Bielefeld: Bethel-Verlag, 1997), pp. 154-156, here 155.
Uwe Kaminsky 267
only incurably ill people and those who were useless for common and
productive life were the ones targeted for euthanasia.90 Heydes com-
ments were recorded in the outline notes taken by the President of the
Cologne Regional Appeals Court during the speeches by Heyde and
Viktor Brack. The reasons cited there for destroying life unworthy of
living find their vanishing point in emphasizing usefulness and the sup-
posed state of emergency of the war situation. In addition, the registration
according to the directives of the planned economy appealing to catching
the people in the planned economy, which was the reason given in the
cover letter accompanying the registration form for selection in the T4
Campaign, underscores the importance of usefulness concerning the
goals of the program despite all the veiled metaphors.91
The rationale of a supposed national emergency was accepted only
by a part of the conservative critics of euthanasia it targeted. For instance,
during the post-war period, the Goettingen professor of psychiatry, Gott-
fried Ewald, was considered as having been a shining example of uncom-
promising resistance. In addressing his refusal to collaborate with the
euthanasia program he stated at a meeting of physicians that he would
have accepted the argument of an emergency situation if the situation had
really been as it was described.92 It is a fact that Ewald and the representa-
tives of the Churches, who had some understanding for the argument in
respect to an emergency situation, at that time did not assess the situation
in Germany as that of an emergency. They assigned a higher value to some
of the arguments against euthanasia such as the programs intrusion upon
Gods magisterial rights, the right to personality, the destruction of the
peoples feelings for morality, the loss of Germanys status as a cultural
nation, and the promotion of distrust against physicians. These considera-
tions left little room for doubt about where the limits of the Conservative
Christians readiness to cooperate were.93 The Lutheran theologian Her-
90
Quoted from the facsimile of the meeting notice in: Gtz Aly (ed.), Aktion T4
1939-1945. See Vormbaum (ed.), Euthanasie vor Gericht, pp. 303-316. Ernst
Klee (ed.), Dokumente zur Euthanasie (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch
Verlag, 1985), pp. 216-220. Merkel, Tod den Idioten, pp. 288-293.
91
See Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie, pp. 197.
92
See his report quoted as a facsimile in: Gtz Aly (ed.), Aktion T4 1939-1945, pp.
58-63. See also the subsequent letters from Ewald to Heyde, Conti etc. in Vorm-
baum (ed.), Euthanasie vor Gericht, pp. 290-299.
93
The counter-arguments mentioned can be found in Braunes memorandum dated
9 July 1940, Wurms letters to Reich Interior Minister Frick dated 19 July 1940
and 5 September 1940, the letter of the chairperson of the Fulda Bishops Confer-
ence, Cardinal Bertram to the head of the Reich Chancellery, Lammers, and Reich
Minister of Justice Grtner dated 11 August 1940 and 16 August 1940, and the
mann Diem made this position clear in his expert opinion written in 1940
on the Problem of Life Unworthy of Living (Problem des lebensun-
werten Lebens). Diem asserted that hypothetically there might be an
indication in favor of euthanasia during a state of emergency in analogy to
the medical indication for abortion. However, there was no such indication
in the present war situation, and, if there were, it would be necessary to
cast doubt on the goals of the war.94
Reich Director of Health Contis reply to Ewalds reasons for rejection
has been preserved. Conti had been Ewalds student when he attended
Ewalds lectures in Erlangen. Conti did not want to set down in writing
his diverging opinion: I would just like to say that I am entirely con-
vinced that the attitudes of the entire German people are going through a
transformation in these matters, and I can very well imagine that things
that seem reprehensible in one period will be declared the only correct
thing in the next. We have experienced this innumerable times in the
course of history, let me just refer to the sterilization law as the most re-
cent example. This is how far the process of reshaping our thinking in
reference to this matter has progressed already.95 The hoped-for trans-
formation in the German peoples attitude concerning euthanasia thus
refers to ones own minority opinion which will have to show in the future
whether it was correct to attempt to reshape the peoples thinking con-
cerning this matter. This self-immunizing and self-righteous ethics of a
supposed avant-garde was only conceivable within the framework of the
bio-political development of the dictatorship of Nazism.96
letter from the Archbishop of Munich-Freising, Faulhaber, to the Reich Minister of

Justice dated 6 November 1940; all of these documents are reprinted in: Vormberg
(ed.), Euthanasie vor Gericht, pp. 262-284. Also the sermons by the Catholic
bishops Galen und Machens (see Gabriele Vogt, Bischof Dr. Joseph Godehard
Machens (1934-1956) und die Caritas im Dritten Reich, in Hans Otte/Thomas
Scharf-Wrede (eds.), Caritas und Diakonie in der NS-Zeit. Beispiele aus
Niedersachsen (Hildesheim/Zurich/New York: Olms, 2001), pp. 129-157, esp.
155.
94
Diem, Das Problem des lebensunwerten Lebens in der katholischen und in der
evangelischen Ethik, pp. 104. Diem believed that he could use the constructed
example of an emergency in connection with food scarcity during the occupation
of La Rochelle in the Huguenot Wars to demonstrate that it could not be Gods
will to sacrifice people who were unfit for living; instead, it would be necessary
to revise the war goals.
95
Conti to Ewald 11.9.1940, cited in Vormbaum (ed.), Euthanasie vor Gericht,
p. 299.
96
On this point see Schmuhl, Die biopolitische Entwicklungsdiktatur des
Nationalsozialismus und der Reichsgesundheitsfhrer Leonardo Conti. Idem,
Uwe Kaminsky 269
The arguments of saving expenditures and averting a state of national

emergency during wartime projected outwardly played a pivotal role in the
legitimization of the central euthanasia offices own stance in various
discussions and addresses. The euthanasia office was not merely attempt-
ing to bring conservative opponents into the fold with reasons linked to
their range of values. This thesis is validated in part by the subsequent
calculation of the costs saved by murdering sick and handicapped people
in what became known as the Hartheim Statistics. These statistics can be
dated back to the summer of 1942.97 When Karl Brandt talked to Curd
Runckel, the Director of the central euthanasia office in mid-1944 he re-
quested a comparison of the deaths at German nursing homes during the
years 1914-1918 and those of the first four years of the ongoing war.98
Along with its purely statistical purpose, this reference to the numbers of
patients who had died during the First World War was to serve as a justifi-
cation to the questions raised by some of the departments. In addition,
what was known as the planning department of the central euthanasia
office, left behind a whole series of reports on trips that had been planned
to various parts of the nation. The fact that this department had been in
existence already since the spring of 1941 indicates that saving expendi-
tures at mental institutions had been targeted by central planning at the
Reich level. There, it was self-evident that euthanasia would find its
place.99 It is true that the activities of the planning department were limited
to dry runs after the official stop of the T4 gas murder campaign in August
1941 since wartime conditions made it impossible to effect fundamental
changes at the institutions. However, plans were being made.
Das Dritte Reich als biopolitische Entwicklungsdiktatur. Zur inneren Logik der
nationalsozialistischen Genozidpolitik, in Tdliche Medizin. Rassenwahn im
Nationalsozialismus, published by Jdisches Museum Berlin (Berlin: Wallstein-
Verlag, 2009), pp. 8-21.
97
See the reprint of the statistics in Klee, Dokumente zur Euthanasie, pp. 232-
233 and Andrea Kugler, Die Hartheimer Statistik. Bis zum 1. September 1941
wurden desinfiziert: Personen: 70.273, in Wert des Lebens. Gedenken Lernen
Begreifen. Begleitpublikation zur Ausstellung des Lande O in Schloss Hartheim,
published by Institut fr Gesellschafts- und Sozialpolitik an der Johannes Kepler
Universitt Linz (Linz: Trauner, 2003), pp. 124-131.
98
See Runckels letter to Nitsche, dated July 24, 1944 including Runckels note on
his conversation with Brandt on 18 July 1944 (BA, R 96 I/7, p. 127916-127923).
99
See Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie, pp. 265-278.
The report forms that the institutions had to fill in out 1940 not only included the
notorious report form 1 for individual patients but also report form 2, which re-
quested statistical data on each of the institutions.
The reasons supplied for moving marginalized patients, who after 1941
became the victims of decentralized euthanasia, ran from anti-aircraft defense
work to evacuation. Furthermore, the leaders of the NSDAP districts (Gau-
leiters), almost all of whom also were Reich Defense Commissioners, ordered
these moves.100 The rationale was to provide space and supplies for national
socialist comrades who were convalescing and still capable of doing work.
The Allied war effort, in particular the air war against German cities, formed
the backdrop for an effort to achieve efficiency and economy in a society from
which mentally ill people and physically handicapped people had long since
been permanently desocialized.
Due to the impact of events on the home front, the vehemently criti-
cal voices that had arisen in 1941 and played their part in bringing the T4
Campaign to a halt, became more and more restrained. In the subjective
understanding of growing numbers of Germans, the doubts that had been
cast on a state of emergency on the home front gradually dissipated. The
notions that the status of a cultural nation should to be maintained or that
national morality needed to be preserved were increasingly undermined.
The involvement of more and more parts of the Wehrmacht, the SS, and of
ordinary Germans in the Nazi regimes policy of destruction throughout
Europe also became apparent. The fact that the number of deaths of the
inhabitants of nursing homes and mental institutions grew larger than ever
before after the supposed halt of the T4 Campaign in August 1941
demonstrates the process of marginalization institutionalized patients suf-
fered and the loosening of moral principles during state emergency situa-
tions.
This study has examined the euthanasia campaigns with the largest
number of victims although there were other murder campaigns that can
also be seen as a part of Nazi euthanasia. By their very nature, however,
those campaigns were much rather cases of racial extermination. First of
all, this concerned the people kept at asylums pursuant to Paragraph 42b of
the Reich Penal Code due to the fact that their behavior had overstepped
legal boundaries. Some of these forensic inmates were deported from
institutions to the gas murder institutions in the spring of 1940 via inter-
mediate stops at special locations in the context of the T4 Campaign.101
100
See Winfried S, Zur Rolle der Gaue in der regionalisierten Euthanasie
(1942-1945), in Jrgen John/ Horst Mller/Thomas Schaarschmidt (eds.), Die NS-
Gaue. Regionale Mittelinstanzen im zentralistischen Fhrerstaat (Munich:
Oldenbourg, 2007), pp. 123-135.
101
See Sonja Schrter, Psychiatrie in Waldheim/Sachsen (1716-1946). Ein Beitrag
zur Geschichte der forensischen Psychiatrie in Deutschland (Frankfurt a. M.:
Mabuse-Verlag, 1994). Martin Roebel, Forensische Patient/innen als Opfer der
Uwe Kaminsky 271
Beyond this, German, Polish and Soviet citizens living in asylums were
murdered in present-day Poland (then called the Danzig-Western Prussia
and Wartheland Reichsgaue), Eastern Prussia, and Pomerania as early as
1939/40 and at the beginning of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
These killings were carried out by firing squads of the SS task forces or
the Wehrmacht or by portable or stationary gas chambers. There was no
direct organizational connection between these murders and the central
euthanasia office at the Chancellery of the Fuehrer. Instead, they were
based on the arrangements made by the regionally responsible Gauleiters
with the SS. The institutions were cleared out to make room for resettled
Baltic Germans and for SS units.102 Several thousand residents of institu-
tions were considered a mass that could be disposed of at will, and they
were killed simply in order to put their space to different use. This fact
alone bears witness to the loss of all levels of inhibition that still had an
influence at the beginning of the war. This concerned not only citizens
from enemy states in reference to whom we might think of the shooting
Aktion T4, in Maike Rotzoll/Gerrit Hohendorf/Petra Fuchs/Paul Richter/

Christoph Mundt/Wolfgang U. Eckart (eds.), Die nationalsozialistische
Euthanasie-Aktion T4 und ihre Opfer. Geschichte und ethische
Konsequenzen fr die Gegenwart (Paderborn/Munich/Vienna/Zurich: Schningh,
2010), pp. 137-142.
102
For an account of the murders at the beginning of the war see Volker Rie, Die
Anfnge der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens in den Reichsgauen Danzig-
Westpreussen und Wartheland 1939/40 (Frankfurt a. M./Berlin/Bern/New
York/Paris/Vienna: Peter Lang, 1995). Rie emphasizes pure destruction as a
motivation (such as in the Wartheland, apparently due to the lack of well thought-
out utilization plans; ibid., p. 359) and the interests of the SS as the subsequent
user of the institution . The desire to use the buildings for the accommodation of
Baltic Germans is also not disregarded as a motivation. See ibid., pp. 29-53 (using
the Conradstein institution as an example), especially p. 104 (on Pomerania), pp.
355-62 (altogether). In contrast, Aly clearly argues for putting clearing these insti-
tutions into a single framework. In his view, the evacuations were conducted pri-
marily to accommodate ethnic German resettlers, even if it is not possible to un-
ambiguously answer the question of prior planning or using the institutions
subsequently opened up by murdering, due to a lack of documents. See Gtz
Aly, Hinweise fr die weitere Erforschung der NS-Gesundheitspolitik und der
Euthanasie-Verbrechen, in Eberhard Jungfer/ Christoph Dieckmann (eds.),
Arbeitsmigration und Flucht. Vertreibung und Arbeitskrfteregulierung im
Zwischenkriegseuropa (Berlin-Gttingen: Schwarze Risse/Rote Strasse, 1993), pp.
195-204, especially 203 as well as idem, Endlsung, pp. 114-126. To weigh
these issues against one another, see Heike Bernhardt, Euthanasie und
Kriegsbeginn. Die frhen Morde an Patienten aus Pommern, Zeitschrift fr
Geschichtswissenschaft, vol. 44 (1996) no. 9, pp. 773-788.
deaths of the Polish clergy, the Jews, and local prostitutes but especially
also of psychiatric patients (Polish and German). The killing carried out by
SS task forces continued during the clearing out of nursing homes and
mental institutions in the Soviet Union after the summer of 1941.103 Final-
ly, the killing of the Jewish patients from German mental institutions in
1940/41 ought to be seen as a race policy action of a slightly different
shade and in anticipation of the later Jewish Holocaust, regardless of the
patients psychiatric diagnoses.104 After 1943, Polish citizens and so-called
eastern workers i. e. Soviet citizens who were forced to do slave labor in
Germany were murdered also in a similar fashion for racist reasons. If these
slave laborers proved to be mentally ill or handicapped and incapable of work-
ing, they were moved from the asylums in special transports and then killed.105
The fact that they were useless due to their incapacity to work was also the
main motive for killing the Jewish concentration camp prisoners and and
others termed social misfits in the 14f13 campaign after the spring of
1941 as can be seen from the code name for their files.
103
See the example of the White Russian Institution in Mogilew: Ulrike
Winkler/Gerrit Hohendorf, Nun ist Mogiljow frei von Verrckten. Die
Ermordung der Psychiatriepatienten in Mogilew 1941/42, in Babette
Quinkert/Philipp Rauh/Ulrike Winkler (eds.), Krieg und Psychiatrie 1914-1950
(Berlin: Wallstein-Verlag, 2010), pp. 75-103.
104
Henry Friedlander, Der Weg zum NS-Genozid. Von der Euthanasie bis zur
Endlsung (Berlin: Berlin-Verlag, 1997), pp. 418-448. Idem, Jdische
Anstaltspatienten im NS-Deutschland, in Gtz Aly (ed.), Aktion T4 1939-1945.
Die Euthanasie-Zentrale in der Tiergartenstrae 4 (Berlin: Edition Hentrich,
1987), pp. 34-44. Lutz Raphael, Euthanasie und Judenvernichtung, in
Euthanasie in Hadamar. Die nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik in
hessischen Anstalten. Begleitband zu einer Ausstellung des
Landeswohlfahrtsverbandes Hessen, published by Landeswohlfahrtsverband
Hessen, p. 79-90; Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie, pp.
215-216.
105
See Matthias Hamann, Die Ermordung psychisch kranker polnischer und
sowjetischer Zwangsarbeiter, in Gtz Aly (ed.), Aktion T4 1939-1945. Die
Euthanasie-Zentrale in der Tiergartenstrae 4 (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1987),
pp. 161-167. Idem, Die Morde an polnischen und sowjetischen Zwangsarbeitern
in deutschen Anstalten, in Gtz Aly/Angelika Ebbinghaus/Matthias Hamann
(eds.), Aussonderung und Tod. Die klinische Hinrichtung der Unbrauchbaren, 2nd
edition (Berlin: Rotbuch-Verlag, 1987), pp. 121-187; as well as Schmuhl,
Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie, pp. 237-239.
Uwe Kaminsky 273
VI. Summary
Upon closer scrutiny, the question as to which kind of ethics was pivotal
for implementing the Nazi euthanasia campaigns as well as the question
whether a new and independent form of ethics had possibly emerged there
indicates an insidious devaluation of human life during the period of Na-
zism which became more radical following the beginning of the war. All
the relevant patterns of reasoning had been established already in the early
years of the 20th century and only required updating to become suitable for
the new political framework of Nazism.
There was no straight path to euthanasia from eugenics and forced ster-
ilization. Instead, we can describe a long and winding road to euthanasia,
picking up on the twisted road metaphor for the Jewish Holocaust. How-
ever, in spite of the insidious devaluation of institutionalized patients in
the 1920s and 1930s which became accelerated both by the welfare crises
in the Weimar Republic and the Nazi racial ideology, euthanasia was by
no means an automatic consequence of the ideology of racial hygiene.
There was a debate about destroying life unworthy of living among
medical and legal circles as early as between 1918-1939. This kind of
destruction was most vehemently opposed by the Christian Churches.
When the Nazis came to power they enforced the policy of legally codify-
ing forced sterilization. Also, it is a fact that the eugenic tendency of the
social policy of the Nazis delegitimized the right to life of handicapped
and mentally ill people. However, it is still not possible today to document
any long-term plans for the destruction of life. Nonetheless, pro-euthanasia
voices in medicine, the justice system, and among the general population
became more prominent during the 1930s. Within the NSDAP, especially
the radical advocates of euthanasia felt encouraged to take action although
the Nazis did not create any legal regulations on the destruction of life nor
was there any open call for it until the beginning of the war in September
1939. Hence, euthanasia was organized by secret commissions competing
with each other within the party, whose temporary point of regulation was
the secret Fuehrer decree dated 1 September 1939.
Scientific and economic arguments and reasons became pre-eminent
when the campaigns for killing the sick and the handicapped were carried
out starting in 1939 with those committing these crimes attempting to
ethically justify transgressing the prohibition on killing by appealing to a
state of emergency created by the war. Even when this reasoning was
aimed at the Christian Conservative elites in the Nazi state, many people
did not accept it, particularly those within the Churches. It is a fact that we
can only discover a broken attitude of rejection in real-life practice.
However, both the Catholic and the Protestant Churches rejected euthana-
sia throughout the entire war. The disrespect for the lives of handicapped
people and psychiatric patients became most murderous during the second
half of the war. The society at war saw things in terms of their usefulness
and many of its citizens lost all moral sensitivity so that they accepted the
deaths of tens of thousands of institutionalized patients without protest.
These findings place Nazi euthanasia in the framework of war events that
caused all inhibitions to be removed, and, due to being under the domi-
nance of the Nazism apparatus, promoted the most severe radicalization.
Speaking more generally, it points to the real dangers of the modern-day
world placing a primarily economic value on people and loosening the
prohibitions on killing in a social state of emergency. Placing a pre-
eminent emphasis on the moral imperatives of community ethics in con-
trast to individual rights, whether in wartime or during a civil catastrophe,
is an indicator of a societys moral condition.
THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST PATIENT MURDERS
BETWEEN TABOO AND ARGUMENT:
NAZI EUTHANASIA AND THE CURRENT
DEBATE ON MERCY KILLING
GERRIT HOHENDORF
I. Introduction: In the Name of a Higher Morality

and National Socialist Morality
At the end of their work on Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensun-
werten Lebens (Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy or Life) the au-
thors, the renowned penologist Karl Binding and the well-known psychia-
trist Alfred Hoche, place their demand to put people who are ill and unfit
for life out of their misery into a wider historical context:
There was a time, which these days we consider barbaric, when it was a
matter of course to get rid of those born or otherwise become unfit for life;
then there was the period, still running today, when finally the preservation
of any life, no matter how worthless, was considered the highest moral ob-
ligation; there will be a new time which, from the point of view of a higher
morality, will give up on permanently implementing the demands of an ex-
aggerated idea of humanity and its overestimation of the value of life, thus
making severe sacrifices.1
In this time of higher morality as is Hoches prophecy we will mature

to understanding that getting rid of the mentally completely dead is no
crime, no immoral attitude, no emotional brutality but a legal, useful
1
Karl Binding/Alfred Hoche, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten
Lebens. Ihr Ma und ihre Form (Leipzig: Meiner, 1920), p. 62 (italics in the
original edition). On the historic classification and the impact of the study see
Ortrun Riha (ed.), Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens.
Beitrge des Symposiums ber Karl Binding und Alfred Hoche am 2. Dezember
2004 in Leipzig (Aachen: Shaker, 2005).
276 The National Socialist Patient Murders between Taboo and Argument
act.2 Accordingly, Binding and Hoche move from infanticide in Sparta

and the ancient idea of understanding (medically provoked) death as a
liberator3 as far as to revaluating human life according to its social useful-
ness. By way of logical legal arguments and the evidence of medical expe-
rience they attempt to define certain kinds of human life as not falling
under the protective scope of the state, and while doing so they consider
themselves in contrast to contemporary prejudices of exaggerated hu-
manity the vanguard of a higher morality to which a dozen years
later, in the period of National Socialism, there was constant reference.
How perfectly this revaluation of human life formulated in 1920, without
reference to any political party, however with a vlkisch-national orien-
tation fit to programme and propaganda of the National Socialist state
was demonstrated by Joseph Goebbels in a speech on the occasion of the
Reichsparteitag 1938, delivering a parody of the ideal of bourgeois chari-
ty, as it is formulated by the six corporal works of mercy according to Mt.
25, 35-36:
We do not assume that there is only one Man, we do not support the idea
that one must feed the hungry, quench the thirsty and cloth the naked [...].
Our motivations are of quite a different kind. Most succinctly, they can be
summarized by this sentence: We must have a healthy people to push
through in the world.4
Thus, essential norms of National Socialist morality are identified,

which place health and the power of ones own people above the interests
of the individual as well as above the interests of humans belonging to
other peoples and races. This way quite in the sense of social-Darwinist
thought charity and caring for weak, ill and poor people are devaluated
as being unbiological or unnatural. Now one may argue that this way Jo-
seph Goebbels is outside any discourse on morality. For, can there be any
ethical behaviour which categorically places the rights of the more power-
ful as well as the rights of ones own people above the justified interests of
individuals? Insofar as ethics are a method to judge morally on actions
2
Ibid., p. 57 (italics in the original edition).
3
On the concept of euthanasia in antiquity see Udo Benzenhfer, Der gute Tod?
Euthanasie und Sterbehilfe in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Munich: C. H. Beck,
1999), pp. 13-42.
4
Goebbels delivered his speech to the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt on the
occasion of the Reichsparteitag on September 12th, 1938. It is partly printed in:
Hellmuth Strmer, Das rechtliche Verhltnis der NS-Volkswohlfahrt und des
Winterhilfswerks zu den Betreuten im Vergleiche zur ffentlichen Wohlfahrtspflege
(Berlin 1940), p. 36.
Gerrit Hohendorf 277
and rules of actions which necessarily relativizes the interests of individu-

als or individual groups of humans and claims universal validity, a particu-
lar or vlkisch morality categorically supporting the interests of a hered-
itarily healthy, powerful and racially pure German people cannot be an
ethical theory in the closer sense.5 Also, this kind of vlkisch morality
cannot claim universal validity, even if formally and linguistically it
claims to be moral and refers to being obliged to virtues such as faithful-
ness and honour.6 Insofar as such a kind of morality refers to a higher
morality, it cannot claim to be human. However, the National Socialists
were precisely not interested in humanity but in reestablishing the laws of
nature (struggle for life). Insofar it does not come as a surprise that such
a higher morality was enforced by terror and violence resulting in de-
struction and death.
Thus, the debate on any National Socialist morality might leave it
with this, referring to the answer given by Article 1 of the Federal Repub-
lic of Germanys Basic Law from 1949, which is the claim for the univer-
sal validity of the dignity of man and the thus connected basic rights.7
II. The Ethical Question of Life Unworthy of Living

Now there are definitely more subtle moral gateways through which the
idea of the destruction of life unworthy of living has made its way, as far
as to justifying the National Socialist euthanasia actions. These are:
5
See the contribution by Wulf Kellerwessel in this volume, see also the reasons
given by Ernst Tugendhat to an egalitarian, universalist morality from the point of
view of contractualism, Der moralische Universalismus in der Konfrontation mit
der Nazi-Ideologie, in Werner Konitzer/Raphael Gross (eds.), Moralitt des
Bsen. Ethik und nationalsozialistische Verbrechen (Frankfurt a. M./New York:
Campus, 2009), pp. 61-75.
6
See Wolfgang Bialas, Die moralische Ordnung des Nationalsozialismus. Zum
Zusammenhang von Philosophie, Ideologie und Moral, in Ibid., pp. 30-60.
7
According to the traditional jurisdiction of Germanys Constitutional Court, the
dignity of man or of human life is solely due to being man, independently of spe-
cific human qualities such as moral autonomy and freedom currently being
realized. By this transcendental way of giving reasons to the core of human dignity
the Constitutional Court follows the concept of dignity in Immanuel Kant. There is
a violation of human dignity particularly if man is degraded to being merely an
object of (state) acting and is no longer recognized as a subject, i.e. as an end in
itself, see Tatjana Geddert-Steinacher, Menschenwrde als Verfassungsbegriff.
Aspekte der Rechtsprechung des Bundesverfassungsgerichts zu Art. 1 Abs. 1
Grundgesetz (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1990), pp. 31-38.
1. the demand for a right to death the autonomous individual is said

to have, including the right to decide about ones own life and
body,8
2. the idea that in situations of incurable illness and unbearable suffer-
ing humans and in particular physicians should provoke death out
of pity,9
3. the idea that the value of human life cannot only be defined subjec-
tively by somebody being concerned him/herself but that it may al-
so be defined from the outside, according to the degree of his/her
usefulness for society and after having dropped out of societal rela-
tions.10
These from an ethical point of view debate-worthy assumptions form

the theoretical foundation of the above mentioned work by Binding and
Hoche. The crucial question of this work is:
Are their individual human lives which have lost their status of being a
legally protected interest to such a degree that their continuation has per-
manently lost any value both for the bearers of these lives and for socie-
ty?11
From this rhetoric question Binding does not only deduce the impunity of
suicide under the condition of this life having no value anymore but also
the legality of voluntary euthanasia in case of incurable illness, the killing
of those being unconscious who would wake up to unbearable suffering as
well as redeeming those ballast lives at asylums who are considered
mentally dead. The latter are neither willing to live nor to die, and thus
killing them is not illegal.12 The crucial aspect from the ethical point of
view is that considering certain states of suffering or kinds of human life
8
See Adolf Jost, Das Recht auf den Tod. Sociale Studie (Gttingen: Dietrich,
1895), p. 37: Thus he who, when being incurably ill and suffering from pain, is
able to evade life, shouzld not be excused but justified if he commits suicide; he
simply acts according to what he is entitled to. (italics in the original edition).
9
See ibid., p. 6.
10
See ibid., p. 13: From a purely natural point of view, the value of a human life
can only consist of two factors. The first factor is the value of this life for the one
concerned himself, that is the balance of joy and pain he experiences. The second
factor is the balance of usefulness and damage this individual means for his fellow
humans.
11
Binding/Hoche, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens, p. 27
and 51 (italics in the original edition).
12
Ibid., pp. 13-34 and 53-58.
unworthy of living as well as redemption desired by those concerned

and the destruction of those who (allegedly) are not able anymore to ex-
press their will seems to be justified. In this context, considering life un-
worthy of living from an outside perspective depends on how value is
defined by society. Accordingly, also the autonomously expressed desire
for terminating life by medical means induces a slippery slope, that is if
criteria set by society are supposed which make the termination of life by
medical means legal. For, then these conditions (incurability of illness,
unbearable suffering, uselessness of further living) also suggest the invol-
untary termination of life e. g. in states of mental death.
III. The Consequences of the Permission to Destroy Life

Unworthy of Living the Economy of Putting
out of Misery
In the Weimar Republic, Bindings and Hoches study was debated among
both jurists and physicians.13 The interpretation pattern of life unworthy
of living, however, became the point of reference of the debate on eutha-
nasia still in the 1960s.14 It also served for the ideological and legal justifi-
13
On the debate on euthanasia in the Weimar Republic see Michael Schwartz,
Euthanasie-Debatten in Deutschland (1895-1945), Vierteljahrshefte fr
Zeitgeschichte, vol. 46 (1998) no. 4, pp. 617-665, here 625-640 and Gerrit
Hohendorf, Von der medizinischen Sterbebegleitung zur Vernichtung
lebensunwerten Lebens. Euthanasiedebatten in Deutschland und sterreich 1895
1945, in Brigitte Kepplinger/Florian Schwanninger/Irene Zauner-Leitner (eds),
Geschichte und Verantwortung. Der Lern- und Gedenkort Schloss Hartheim,
Trauer, Linz, in press.
14
See e.g. the appellate decision of the Federal Court of Law from December 6th,
1960 (1 StR 404/60), which resulted in clearing the head of the health department
of the Bavarian Home Ministry, Walter Schultze, from all accusations. Schultze
had been responsible for the transfer of patients at Bavarian asylums to the death
institutions of the National Socialist euthanasia Action T4. It might not be ruled
out that the defendent [] was of the opinion that Hitlers death action referred
only to those incurably mentally ill persons who were lacking any natural will to
live and that thorough examinations by renowned physicians would guarantee that
only such ill people would be concerned by the action. In the opinion of this Assize
Court this cannot be refuted. Then, however, [] the defendent with his alleged
mistake of law had been in accordance with the opinion of scientists who can
hardly be accused of having had criminal intentions and who, within the aforemen-
tioned strict limits, had spoken in favour of the destruction of `life unworthy of
living even before the appearance of National Socialism, something to which the
appeal rightly points out. Quoted after: Ermittlungsverfahren gegen Walter
cation of the killing of ill people during National Socialism.15 In the 1930s,
the terms coined by Binding and Hoche are also found in individual psy-
chiatric medical files, which may not claim to be representative for Ger-
man psychiatry but sheds a dubious light on the attitude of individual
heads of asylums and might explain why the deportation of the patients
who had been entrusted to them to the death asylums of the euthanasia
action did not on the whole meet more resistance among German psychia-
trists. For example, about 32 years old Adelheid B., who was suffering
from a mental development disorder and had been at asylums since her
childhood, it says: Still terribly difficult and troubling. Life unworthy of
living! Another entry says: Nothing new. Every few weeks there is some
injury or ulceration. But survives every mishap. More animal-like than
any animal.16 About Helene N, suffering from schizophrenia, one of the
last entries of her records says: Same as before. Mentally dead. The file
should be closed, as also in the future there will be no change. The only
entry worth the effort is noting the date of death.17 In 1940 both patients
were transferred to the gas murder institution of Grafeneck on the
Schwbische Alb and murdered.
Schultze Staatsanwaltschaft Mnchen 1 Js 1793/47 (Staatsarchiv Mnchen StA

19501, Bd. 3, S. 370-377, here p. 374 recte).
15
After the war, one of the officials in charge at the Fuehrers Chancellory, which
was in charge of the killing of ill people during the period of National Socialism,
stated that one had built on the insights of scientists who had had nothing to do
with National Socialism, such as Katl Binding and Alfred Hoche, see Udo Ben-
zenhfer, Bemerkungen zur Binding-Hoche-Rezeption in der NS-Zeit, in Ortrun
Riha (ed.), Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens. Beitrge des
Symposiums ber Karl Binding und Alfred Hoche am 2. Dezember 2004 in Leipzig
(Aachen: Shaker, 2004), pp. 114-133, here 131.
16
Medical files of Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Wiesloch (Bundesarchiv Berlin R
179/24496), on the biography of Adelheid B. see Gerrit Hohendorf, Adelheid B.
...wiederholt fast bestndig eine eigentmliche Reihe von Tnen, in Tdliche
Medizin. Rassenwahn im Nationalsozialismus, published by Jdisches Museum
Berlin (Gttingen: Wallstein, 2009), pp. 24-29, on the context see also Juliane C.
Wilmanns/Gerrit Hohendorf, Der Verlust des Mitgefhls in der Psychiatrie des
Nationalsozialismus, in Hans Frstl (ed.), Theory of Mind. Neurobiologie und
Psychologie sittlichen Verhaltens (Heidelberg: Springer, 2007), pp. 183-206, here
199-201.
17
Medical files of Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Wiesloch (Bundesarchiv Berlin R
179/24884).
In the German Reich, from spring 1939 on, a circle of experts at the
Fuehrers Chancellery18 organized both the selection of mentally and
physically disabled children at the childrens wards and the recording and
selection of patients at asylums (Aktion T4, 1939-1941), seemingly
legitimated by a writing by Adolf Hitler which had been dated back to the
beginning of the war on September 1st, 1939. On the territory of the Ger-
man Reich alone, a total of about 300,000 people became the victims of
the various forms of National Socialist euthanasia. This includes those
who were purposefully starved to death or overdosed, ways of killing of a
practice of decentralized euthanasia which over the years of the war
became ever more undifferentiated and were continued until the end of the
war in 1945, that is even after the tactical stop of Aktion T4 in the sum-
mer of 1941. In the context of Aktion T4, from autumn 1939 on, asy-
lums on the then territory of the Reich received one-page registration
forms with more or less differentiated questions about person, family
members, clinical picture, duration of stay at the asylum, kind of admit-
tance as well as about behaviour and labour performance at the asylum.
The decision about life or death was made exclusively according to the
information provided by these registration sheets, by 4 experts from a
circle of psychiatrists. Based on the decisions of these experts, transport
lists were made at the T4 headquarters, according to which finally the
selected patients were directly or indirectly via intermediate asylums de-
ported to the gas murder institutions.19
18
From the spring of 1940 on, the department at the Fuehrers Chancellory which
was in charge of organizing the murder of ill people had is seat at Tiergartenstrae
4 in Berlin, thus the shortage T4.
19
On the history of NS euthanasia see the standard works by Ernst Klee, Eu-
thanasie im Dritten Reich. Die Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens, revised
edition (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2010). Michael Burleigh, Death
and Deliverance. Euthanasia in Germany c. 1900-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994) (German: Tod und Erlsung. Euthanasie in Deutschland
1900 1945 (Zurich: Pendo, 2002)). Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi
Genocide. From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill/London: University
of North Carolina Press, 1995) (German: Der Weg zum NS-Genozid. Von der
Euthanasie zur Endlsung (Berlin: Berlin-Verlag, 1997) and Heinz Faulstich,
Hungersterben in der Psychiatrie 1914-1949. Mit einer Topographie der NS-
Psychiatrie (Freiburg: Lambertus, 1998), for a summary see Gerrit Hohendorf,
Ideengeschichte und Realgeschichte der nationalsozialistischen Euthanasie im
berblick, in Petra Fuchs/Maike Rotzoll/Ulrich Mller/Paul Richter/Gerrit
Hohendorf (eds.), Das Vergessen der Vernichtung ist Teil der Vernichtung
selbst. Lebensgeschichten von Opfern der nationalsozialistischen Euthanasie
(Gttingen: Wallstein, 2007), pp. 36-52.
In recent years it has been possible to gain essential new insights on

how Aktion T4 was carried out, as unexpectedly 30,000 medical files
out of a total number of 70,000 victims were discovered at an archive of
the GDRs Ministry of State Security.20 In the context of a research pro-
ject, a random sample of the 30,000 preserved files of the victims of the
centrally organized Aktion T4 was analyzed. This way it was possible to
reconstruct by help of a comparative random sample of surviving pa-
tients the criteria for the selection of victims. Judging on the labour per-
formance at the asylum proved to have been the decisive criterion for
selection: whereas 46.3% of T4 victims did not work at all and 26.9%
were considered to be of little use, 43.5% of the survivors were considered
productive workers, and the labour performance of 26.5% was judged
on as average.21 Only who was able to work productively had a chance to
survive. This economy of putting out of misery becomes obvious also by
the so called Hartheim Statistics where the public funds saved by the
20
On the history of the medical files of victims of Aktion T4 see Peter Sandner,
Die Euthanasie-Akten im Bundesarchiv. Zur Geschichte eines lange
verschollenen Bestandes, Vierteljahrshefte fr Zeitgeschichte, vol. 47 (1999) no.
3, pp. 385-400 and idem, Schlsseldokumente zur berlieferungsgeschichte der
NS-Euthanasie-Akten gefunden, Vierteljahrshefte fr Zeitgeschichte, vol. 51
(2003) no. 2, pp. 285-290.
21
Maike Rotzoll/Petra Fuchs/Paul Richter/Gerrit Hohendorf, Die
nationalsozialistische Euthanasieaktion T4. Historische Forschung, individuelle
Lebensgeschichten und Erinnerungskultur, Der Nervenarzt, vol. 81 (2010), pp.
1326-1332, here 1330, see also Gerrit Hohendorf, Empirische Untersuchungen zur
nationalsozialistischen Euthanasie bei psychisch Kranken mit Anmerkungen
zu aktuellen ethischen Fragestellungen (Munich: Habilitationsschrift Technische
Universitt, 2008), pp. 79-116 and Gerrit Hohendorf, Die Selektion der Opfer
zwischen rassenhygienischer Ausmerze, konomischer Brauchbarkeit und
medizinischem Erlsungsideal, in Maike Rotzoll/Gerrit Hohendorf/Petra
Fuchs/Paul Richter/Christoph Mundt/Wolfgang U. Eckart (eds.), Die
nationalsozialistische Euthanasie-Aktion T4. Geschichte und ethische
Konsequenzen fr die Gegenwart (Paderborn/Munich/Vienna/Zurich: Schningh,
2010), pp. 310-328. In the context of the statisticaI assessment a logistic regression
of the criteria of lacking productive labour performance was conducted: a stay at
the asylum of more than four years, trouble-making behaviour at the ward, in-
creased intensity of care, unusual social behaviour before the stay at the asylum
and hereditary nature of the illness, in order to decide about killing or survival.
Lacking productive labour performance proved to have been the most important
factor.
disinfection of 70,273 people until August, 1941, are given as

885,439,800 Reich marks.22
Whereas as a result of the impossibility to keep secrecy, increasing un-
easiness among the population and the public protest by the Bishop of
Mnster, Clemens August Kardinal von Galen, Aktion T4 was inter-
rupted in August, 1941,23 the murder of children and youths at the so
called Kinderfachabteilungen (childrens wards) was continued until the
end of the war and at some places even after the end of the war.24 In con-
trast to the summary selection procedure of Aktion T4 mentally or phys-
ically disabled children were usually observed over a more or less longer
period of time before the Reichsausschuss zur wissenschaftlichen Erfas-
sung erb- und anlagebedingter schwerer Leiden issued a permission for
treatment, i.e. killing. The parents were told that any available modern
possibilities of treatment would be exhausted, which was not according to
the facts, and one tried to suggest natural death as a result of pneumonia.
In reality, the children were killed by overdose. Preserved letters or mem-
os show that parents did not only express their hopes for an improvement
of their childrens physical condition or protest against assumed killing,
but in a number of cases there is an outspokenly ambivalent attitude. This
group of parents considered the death of their children a relief but did
not want to be included in decision-making on the killing of their children,
indeed they did not want to know about it, if possible.25 The following
22
So called Hartheim Statistics, a document found by Major Charles H. Dameron
on June 21st, 1945, at the killing institution of Hartheim near Linz/Austria, listing
the money and food saved by the disinfection of 70,273 asylum patients calcu-
lated for ten years after 1941 (National Archives an Records Administration, Col-
lege Park/MD, US-Army Europe, Record Group 549, Box 491, p. 4).
23
See Heinz Faulstich, Hungersterben in der Psychiatrie 1914-1949, pp. 273-288
and Winfried S, Der Volkskrper im Krieg. Gesundheitspolitik,
Gesundheitsverhltnisse und Krankenmord im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland
1939-1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2003), pp. 127-151.
24
See Sascha Topp, Der Reichsausschu zur wissenschaftlichen Erfassung erb-
und anlagebedingter schwerer Leiden. Zur Organisation der Ermordung
minderjhriger Kranker im Nationalsozialismus 1939-1945, in Thomas
Beddies/Kristina Hbener (eds.), Kinder in der NS-Psychiatrie (Berlin: be.bra
Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2004), pp. 17-54. For the continuation of the killings of
patients inside the Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Kaufbeuren after may 8th, 1945 see
Michael von Cranach/Hans-Ludwig Siemen (eds.), Psychiatrie im
Nationalsozialismus. Die Bayerischen Heil- und Pflegeanstalten zwischen 1933
und 1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999), p. 295.
25
See Petra Lutz, NS-Gesellschaft und Euthanasie: die Reaktionen der Eltern
ermordeter Kinder, in Christoph Mundt/Gerrit Hohendorf/Maike Rotzoll (eds.),
Psychiatrische Forschung und NS-Euthanasie. Beitrge zu einer
letter from 1943, by a mother to Johann Duken,26 the Director of the Hei-
delberg paediatric hospital, on whose orders three-years-old Christel had
been transferred to the childrens ward at Eichberg, illustrates the signifi-
cance of the idea of putting out of misery for the parents of the murdered
children.
Dear Professor!
[...] After a stay of five days at the asylum of Eichberg, our dear little
Christel died on June 30th. This sudden death at Eichberg came as a severe
shock to me, and at first I thought the child had not been sufficiently cared
for there, as she was so lively when I took her there from Heidelberg. Had
I had an idea that this little life would soon come to an end anyway, I
would not have undertaken this cumbersome journey and would have let
the child in Heidelberg. Did you believe already then that the child would
die so soon?
I remember your words, that probably the child would not have lived for
many years and also that it would never be healthy, and I find comfort by
the thought that now it has been put out of its severe misery. Thus we par-
ents have been relieved from great concerns for the future.
I express my dear thanks and am
Yours sincerely
Mathilde N.27
In another letter the desire for relief is expressed more clearly. After the
Director of the asylum at Eichberg, Dr. Walter Schmidt, had informed the
father of two-years-old Heinz that there is little hope for improvement,
the father wrote to the physician:
Truly, for us it is a difficult task to know that a child is still alive while
there is no hope for rescue anymore. What will be left to him of his life is
Gedenkveranstaltung an der Psychiatrischen Universittsklinik Heidelberg

(Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 2001), pp. 97-113.
26
On Johann Duken as well as on the Heidelberger Kinderklinik in the period of
National Socialism see Gerrit Hohendorf/Maike Rotzoll/Sigrid Oehler-Klein, Der
Pdiater Johann Duken im Dienst nationalsozialistischer Gesundheitspolitik, in
Sigrid Oehler-Klein (ed.), Die Medizinische Fakultt der Universitt Gieen im
Nationalsozialismus und in der Nachkriegszeit: Personen und Institutionen,
Umbrche und Kontinuitten (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007), pp. 323-357.
27
Brief der Mutter von Christel N. an Prof. Duken vom 6.7.1943 (Universittsarchiv
Heidelberg, Bestand Kinderklinik Acc. 15/01 L-II, Krankenblatt Christel N. Prot.-
Nr. 1648/1943).
his suffering, possibly suffering without end. Judging from your last letter,
according to current medical experience there is no hope for improvement.
Thus, there is only one last favour we ask for, if there is no rescue a. im-
provement, or healing over the time; So take care that the dear little boy
will not have to bear his severe suffering all too long. We suppose that op-
erating the brain is as impossible as operating the heart. We are ready for
everything, both for him dying and for his death.28
Indeed, the parents desire for putting their mentally disabled children out
of their misery is not just a product or National Socialist propaganda, this
desire is already impressively documented by a survey the head of the
Katharinenhof, a Protestant asylum for mentally disabled children in Sax-
ony, Ewald Metzger, had conducted in the early 1920s among the parents
of the children entrusted to him. Originally, Metzger had intended to em-
pirically refute the demands by Binding and Hoche. However, the result
came as a surprise: the majority of parents did not object against putting
their children out of their misery: to the question if they would accept the
lives of their children being terminated without pain if experts had found
that their children were incurably imbecile, 119 out of 162 parents an-
swered yes and only 43 no. Among those saying no there were only
20 who rejected the painless killing of their children under all circum-
stances.29 It is conspicuous that for the positive answers economic reasons
played a considerable role. A letter by a miner expresses this openly: Is it
not that these mentally dead are a burden for state and society as well as
for their relatives?30 Apart from these or similarly expressed utility con-
siderations, the idea is stated that putting these children out of their mis-
ery was a charitable act.
28
Schreiben des Vaters von Heinz F. an Dr. Schmidt vom 25.10.1941 (Hessisches
Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden, Abt. 430 / Nr. 11074 Krankenakte Heinz F.). The
words nicht mehr zu denken and sein schweres Leiden ertragen were under-
lined by the asylum at Eichberg, which indicates that for the perpetrators it was of
significance that the killing was legitimated by the parents wish. On the childrens
ward at Eichberg see Gerrit Hohendorf/Stephan Weibel-Shah/Volker Roelcke/
Maike Rotzoll, Die Kinderfachabteilung der Landesheilanstalt Eichberg 1941
bis 1945 und ihre Beziehung zur Forschungsabteilung der Psychiatrischen
Universittsklinik Heidelberg unter Carl Schneider, in Christina Vanja/Steffen
Haas/Gabriela Deutschle/Wolfgang Eirund/Peter Sandner (eds.), Wissen und irren.
Psychiatriegeschichte aus zwei Jahrhunderten Eberbach und Eichberg (Kassel:
Landeswohlfahrtsverband Hessen, 1999), pp. 221-243.
29
Ewald Meltzer, Das Problem der Abkrzung lebensunwerten Lebens
(Halle/S.: Marhold, 1925), pp. 85-101.
30
Ibid., p. 93.
Precisely by the example of the killing of disabled children in the peri-

od of National Socialism it is possible to demonstrate that the National
Socialist functional elites, physicians, jurists and administrative experts,
had skilfully known how to solve a question which was considered a prob-
lem by society, that is the question of medically putting the incurably ill
out of their misery, in a radical way, while hoping for tacit agreement by
parts of the population. The result is both horrifying and brutal.
The results of scientific research on the genesis and practice of the Na-
tional Socialist killings of ill people can be summarized as follows:
1. For the debate on euthanasia, the individuals free decision about

his/her life and death was the starting point, however it was not an
inflexible limit. Rather, the euthanasia discourse showed an inher-
ent tendency of progressing from killing those who had clearly
stated their wish to die to putting also those out of their misery
who were not able anymore to express their will or who were con-
sidered to be incapable of willing.31
2. The connection of putting out of misery according to the expres-
sive wish of those concerned and the killing of those who were in-
capable of stating their minds was essentially overarched by pity,
which also covered people incapable of stating their minds, as well
as considering their lives as being unworthy of living. By the
concept of life unworthy of living it was possible to define a cer-
tain group of people as not falling under the scope of the protection
of life as guaranteed by the state. Not worthy of life was not only
defined according to the subjective feeling that ones own life or
suffering did no longer make any sense but most of all by its lack-
ing usefulness for environment and society. This way the concept
of life unworthy of living was given a quasi objective nature, de-
termined by social values. People in need of care, being physically
or mentally disabled became ballast lives. By the example of the
31
See also Michael Wunder, Des Lebens Wert. Zur alten und zur neuen Debatte
um Autonomie und Euthanasie, in Maike Rotzoll/Gerrit Hohendorf/Petra
Fuchs/Paul Richter/Christoph Mundt/Wolfgang U. Eckart (eds.), Die
nationalsozialistische Euthanasie-Aktion T4. Von den historischen
Bedingungen bis zu den Konsequenzen fr die Ethik in der Gegenwart
(Paderborn/Munich/Vienna/ Zurich: Schningh, 2010), pp. 391-401, here 391, see
also Michael Wunder, Medizin und Gewissen. Die neue Euthanasie-Debatte in
Deutschland vor dem historischen und internationalen Hintergrund, in Andreas
Frewer/Clemens Eickhoff (eds.),Euthanasie und die aktuelle Sterbehilfe-
Debatte. Die historischen Hintergrnde medizinischer Ethik (Frankfurt a. M./ New
York: Campus, 2000), pp. 250-275.
euthanasia of children it is possible to demonstrate that under the

special conditions of the war the covered offer of putting the chil-
dren out of their misery was accepted by a part of the population.
3. An analysis of the selection criteria of Aktion T4 makes the cold
economic calculus of National Socialist euthanasia obvious inde-
pendently of the justification strategies of the physician-
perpetrators. Historically seen, the allegedly high-minded claim of
putting out of misery of the idea of euthanasia is based on deter-
mining the value of human life first of all according to its economic
usefulness.
IV. Regarding the Current Debate on Euthanasia:

the Autonomous Decision by Those Concerned
Does not Provide a Stable Limit
The current debate on euthanasia in Germany is strongly characterized by
the idea of autonomy and the right to decide about ones own life and
death.32 Also the German advanced health care directive act from 2009
must be understood this way.33 However, the current international and
German debate on euthanasia shows that even presently the autonomy
postulate does not provide a stable limit.34 In the Netherlands, worldwide
the first country with a euthanasia law,35 apart from ways of medical kill-
32
Concerning the number of publications, the current debate on euthanasia in
Germany is hardly assessable anymore. Two compilations may be mentioned:
Adrian Holderegger (ed.), Das medizinisch assistierte Sterben. Zur Sterbehilfe aus
medizinischer, ethischer und juristischer und theologischer Sicht, 2nd advanced
edition (Freiburg i. Ue./Freiburg i. B./Vienna: Herder, 2000) with regard to the
international debate, and currently with emphasis on the concept of autonomy, and
Felix Thiele (ed.), Aktive und passive Sterbehilfe. Medizinische, rechtswissen-
schaftliche und philosophische Aspekte, 2. Edition (Munich: Fink, 2010). As a
monograph and still worth reading, while presenting interesting ways of arguing in
the context of the euthanasia debate: Markus Zimmermann, Euthanasie. Eine
theologisch-ethische Untersuchung, 2nd advanced and revised edition (Freiburg i.
Ue./Freiburg i. B./Vienna: Herder, 2002).
33
Drittes Gesetz zur nderung des Betreuungsrechts, Bundestagsdrucksache
593/09, adopted by the German Bundestag on 19/06/2009, see the overview
Thorsten Verrel/Alfred Simon, Patientenverfgungen. Rechtliche und ethische
Aspekte (Freiburg i. Br./Munich: Alber, 2010).
34
See also Wunder, Des Lebens Wert, p. 394.
35
See Elena Fischer, Recht auf Sterben?! Ein Beitrag zur Reformdiskussion der
Sterbehilfe in Deutschland unter besonderer Bercksichtigung der Frage nach der
bertragbarkeit des Hollndischen Modells der Sterbehilfe in das deutsche Recht
ing while keeping certain criteria of carefulness (killing by the expressive

demand of those concerned and suicide under medical assistance) there
still exists a practice of involuntary euthanasia. According to empirical
surveys, in 2005 there were about 550 cases (0.4%) per year in which the
lives of seriously ill people were medically terminated without expressive
demand by those concerned; in the overwhelming majority of these cases
the termination of life was on demand of relatives.36 Compared to previous
surveys from 1990, 1995 and 2001, the number of cases of involuntary
euthanasia has slightly declined. What is worrying, however, is the fact
that before killing them there had been the possibility to ask some of the
patients, most of whom were in the final stages of an incurable illness, if
they wanted to be put out of their misery by help of a deadly medicine; at
least this is suggested by the studies from the years 1990 and 1995.37 The
current survey does not provide sufficient information on the question if
the killed patients had been capable of agreement. In 60% of cases the
interviewed physicians stated that they had acted according to the previ-
ously expressed desires of the patients.38 Thus, in respect of quantity one
(Frankfurt a. M./Berlin/Bern/Bruxelles/New York/Oxford/Vienna: Peter Lang,

2004), pp. XIX-XXVI. In the Netherlands, the criteria for the permission of killing
on demand and medically assisted suicide are: the voluntary nature of the demand
as well as previous thorough consideration. 2. No hope for improvement as well as
the suffering being unbearable. 3. Being informed about the medical situation. 4.
Lack of any other acceptable solution. 5. The independent opinion of a second
physician. 6. The measure must be carried out with all medical care.
36
Agnes van der Heide/Bregie D. Onwuteaka-Philipsen/Mette L. Rurup/Hilde M.
Buiting/Johannes J. M. van der Delden/Johanna E. Hanssen-de Wolf/Anke G. J.
M. Janssen/H. Roeline W. Pasman/Judith A. C. Rietjens/Cornelius J. M. Prins/
Ingeborg M. Deerenberg/Joseph K. M. Gevers/Paul J. van der Maas/Gerrit van der
Wal G, End-ofLife Practices in the Netherlands under the Euthanasia Act, The
New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 356 (2007) no. 19, pp. 1957-65.
37
The 1990 study considered 36% of patients killed without expressive demand to
have been capable of judgement (competent), see Loes Pijnenborg/Paul J. van
der Maas/Johannes J. M. van Delden/Caspar W. N. Looman, Life-terminating
acts without explicit request of patient, The Lancet, vol. 341 (1993), pp. 1196-99,
here 1198, table II. According to the study from 1995, 21% of patients killed with-
out expressive demand had been capable of judgement, see Paul J. van der
Maas/Gerrit van der Waal/Ilinka Haverkate/Carmen L. M. de Graaff/ John G. C.
Kester/Bregje D. Onwuteaka-Philipsen/Agnes van der Heide/Jacqueline M. Bos-
ma/Dick L. Willems, Euthanasia, Physician-Assisted Suicide and other Medical
Practices Invilving the End of Life in the Netherlands., The New England Journal
of Medicine, vol. 335 (1996) no. 22, pp. 1699-1705, here 1704, table 4.
38
Van der Heide et al., End-of-Life Practices in the Netherlands under the Eutha-
nasia Act, p. 1960.
will not be able to speak of an increase of euthanasia without the person

concerned expressively demanding it, but we may state that during the past
20 years there has been some kind of uncontrolled abuse of the existing
regulations. Furthermore, however, in the Netherlands the scope of the
medical termination of life has been extended in a way as weakening the
originally strict criteria for euthanasia. For example, there is a debate if
active termination of life by physicians shall be possible also for people
suffering from dementia, both in respect of expected suffering in the early
stages of this illness and by preliminary demand for the case of not being
capable to express agreement.39 Furthermore, currently in the Netherlands
a euthanasia practice for severely disabled newborn children on demand of
the parents is being established,40 although this is not in accordance with
the original definition of euthanasia.
Also the debate in Germany is currently on incapacitated people: e. g.
on the question of terminating artificial nutrition in cases of persistent
vegetative state according to the patients assumed wish and on the ques-
tion of so called early euthanasia concerning severely disabled newborn
children.
In this context, the perception of society and the ethical judgement of
patients in so called persistent vegetative state has clearly changed in the
past 10 years. If still in the 1990s it was undebated that people in persistent
vegetative state, due to the fact that they are incapable of clearly com-
municating their will, are particularly vulnerable and need particular
care,41 the debate on the legally binding nature of the advance health care
directive has resulted in a situation in which the termination of artificial
nutrition and thus letting (vigilant) coma patients die is an option which is
said to be justified if it is in accordance with the assumed or stated in ad-
vance (in written form) will of the patient. The Munich lawyer Wolfgang
Putz who, by being cleared of the accusation of attempted homicide by the
German Federal Court on June 25th, 2010, has achieved a pioneering ver-
39
Tony Sheldon, Dutch approve euthanasia for a patient with Alzheimers dis-
ease, British Medical Journal, vol. 330 (2005), p. 1041.
40
Eduard Verhagen/Pieter J. J. Sauer, The Groningen Protocol Euthanasia in
Severly Ill Newborns, The New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 352 (2005) no.
10, pp. 959-962.
41
See Dirk Lanzerath, Selbstbestimmung und Frsorge. Zur ethischen Diskussion
um die Behandlung von Patienten mit komplettem appallischen Syndrom,
Zeitschrift fr medizinische Ethik, vol. 42 (1996), pp. 287-305.
dict on the legal judgement on terminating medical treatment,42 gives an

illustrative description of a definitely happening change of societal values:
The increasing spread of advance health care directives will contribute to

influencing general values. The more people will resist a medically possi-
ble continuation of life, the more the basic consensus of society will be
shifted. Then even people who did not perfectly care for themselves in this
way will benefit from this changed world of values. The situation will be
reversed: who in the future wishes continuation of life at any cost will
have to state this by an appropriate advance health care directive. In the
normal case there will not be any years long vegetating on the feeding
tube.43
By these sentences it becomes obvious that finding out about the patients
will if the latter is incapable of agreement does not happen as inde-
pendently as demanded by the originally intended concept of autonomy.
Wolfgang Putz predicts a change of societal values in the sense of nor-
mally considering life under the conditions of reduced consciousness and
artificial nutrition to be undignified. However, if according to generally
accepted values a society considers life under conditions of reduced con-
sciousness as well as artificial nutrition and intensive care to be uncom-
mon or unusual, the leeway for decision-making about a continuation of
such a life will be reduced, and the individuals autonomy will be restrict-
ed, after all.
In respect of active euthanasia in case of severely disabled newborn
children, from different angles the jurists Norbert Hoerster and Reinhard
Merkel have spoken out in favour of legalizing this kind of involuntary
as not being based on an autonomous decision by the individual euthana-
sia if severe, otherwise incurable suffering is stated. Reinhard Merkel
believes that already according to established law the active killing of
severely disabled newborn children in case of incurable suffering is justi-
fied as a necessity as justification according to 34 German Penal Code
if the newborn childs interest in dying is clearly bigger than its interest
42
Verdict by the Federal Court from June 25th, 2010 (BGH 2 StR 454/09). The
lawyer Mr. Putz had advised a client to cut the tube for her mothers artificial
nutrition, after the home for old aged people, despite a previously negotiated com-
promise, had restarted the artificial nutrition of her mother, who had been in a
coma for five years as a result of cerebral bleeding. The Federal Court considered
this a termination of treatment justified by the mothers actual wish (stated by
the mother to her daughter during a conversation) and thus not a penal killing.
43
Wolfgang Putz/Beate Steldinger, Patientenrechte am Ende des Lebens.
Vorsorgevollmacht, Patientenverfgung, selbstbestimmtes Sterben, 3rd edition
(Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2007), p. 27.
in life.44 Merkel admits that this decision must be made from the outside,
by physicians and the concerned parents. Hoerster, on the other hand,
believes active euthanasia in case of newborn children and on demand of
the parents to be justified if medical euthanasia is in accordance with the
assumed desire of the newborn child: The childs state of suffering must
be so grave that the child itself, if it was capable of judgment and informed
about its state and after careful consideration, would opt for euthanasia.45
In Hoerster, the justification of this kind of involuntary euthanasia follows
from the basic justification of humane (active) euthanasia on expressive
demand of those concerned. For, Hoerster asks, why should humans living
in states of comparable suffering be disadvantaged only because they are
not able to expressively ask for it?46 Analogously, Hoerster also justifies
involuntary euthanasia for adults who have never been capable of judge-
ment. In his book Sterbehilfe im skularen Staat (Euthanasia in the Secu-
lar State) Hoerster constructs the following example, to at least theoreti-
cally justify the ethical legality of involuntary active euthanasia:
Assuming that A has been severely and incurably mentally ill for his en-
tire life. Now he has also an incurable kind of cancer which will cause un-
bearable pain until his natural death, without any possibility to compensate
for this by any positive experiences which might be possible for him. In
such a case, as definitely A has never rejected active euthanasia, and con-
sidering his state of suffering, is it not that we must assume that he does
desire death as soon as possible, that is active euthanasia?47
Just like in the case of severely disabled newborn children, also with this
example there is strictly spoken no place for speculations on the pa-
tients will, as there exist no statements made when being capable of
agreement which would allow for finding out how precisely this individual
44
See Reinhard Merkel, Frheuthanasie. Rechtsethische und strafrechtliche
Grundlagen rztlicher Entscheidungen ber Leben und Tod in der
Neonatalmedizin (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2001), pp. 528-534. 34 StGB says:
Who in case of a current danger for life, freedom, honour, property or any other
legally protected interest which could not be prevented otherwise commits a deed
to prevent this danger from him/herself or from somebody else, does not act ille-
gally if, under consideration of the conflicting interests, namely the concerned
legally protected interests and the degree of the threat, the protected interest is
considerably higher than the affected one.
45
Norbert Hoerster, Neugeborene und das Recht auf Leben (Frankfurt a. M.:
Suhrkamp, 1995), pp. 106-107 (italics in the original edition).
46
Ibid., pp. 104-106.
47
Norbert Hoerster, Sterbehilfe im skularen Staat (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp,
1998), p. 97.
patient would decide in this situation of grave suffering, if he would be

capable of a decision. Thus, the point of view taken by Hoerster depends
exclusively on general values and attitudes, as becoming obvious already
by the suggestive nature of his question: a value which humans capable of
judgement would reasonably support in such a situation is assumed as the
patients presumable will: is it not that anybody in such a situation of una-
voidable and unbearable suffering would desire to die soon, thus conse-
quently demanding active euthanasia? However, Hoerster ignores one
crucial point: the wish to die soon does not necessarily, so to speak auto-
matically, result in a desire to be killed. One may definitely hope for death
without wanting to be killed by somebody else. On the other hand, in Ho-
ersters opinion there exist states of suffering which are so unbearable that
in such a situation any reasonable human would opt for being killed by a
physician. Thus, so to speak objectively, that is independently of the pa-
tients individual, subjective point of view, these states of suffering must
be considered not to be worth living anymore, thus resulting in the as-
sumption that the concerned individual, if he/she could, would demand
active euthanasia. The outside view at states of severe suffering requires a
value judgement for which no reasons can be given by the subjective feel-
ing of a human capable of expressing his/her mind. Even if the example
given by Hoerster is a constructed one and he emphasizes that one should
be particularly careful when investigating the presumable will in order to
justify active euthanasia, this point makes also a fundamental problem of
the justification of active euthanasia on expressive demand of the con-
cerned person obvious: there is the logical question if not also humans
who are no longer capable of expressing their mind and are in situations of
grave suffering have a right to active euthanasia, as they would be disad-
vantaged if they were refused active euthanasia. Both the historical dis-
course on euthanasia and the current German and international debate on
euthanasia show this tendency towards an extension, from voluntary to
involuntary euthanasia. Accordingly, in the already mentioned study by
Adolf Jost, titled Das Recht auf Tod (The Right to Death), it says:
If we watch an incurably ill person lying in agony, under unbearable pain,

with the dull prospect of maybe months-long infirmity, without hope of re-
covering, if we walk the rooms of an asylum, and the look of a man raving
with madness or that of the paralytic make us feel as sorry as ever possible,
then, despite all the prejudices we are soaked with we must have this
thought: is it not that these people have a right to death, is it not that hu-
man society has the obligation to grant them this death with as little pain as
possible?48
The crucial point for both cases, that of the (capable of agreement) incura-
bly ill person and that of the (incapable of agreement) incurably mentally
ill person, is the pitiful suffering which is considered to be so unbearable
that it can only be ended by the right to death. However, Jost makes the
right of the physically ill person who is capable of agreement the first of
his demands. Putting the (incapable of agreement) mentally ill out of their
misery is only the second step of a process of fundamentally reforming the
way of dealing with life and death in society.49
If we see the current debate on euthanasia in its historical context, from
which it cannot be completely separated, it becomes clear that there is a
transition from voluntary to involuntary euthanasia which results from the
logic of the discourse. Thus, and this can definitely be learned from dis-
cussing the history of the modern idea of euthanasia, the debate on eutha-
nasia cannot be restricted to the autonomous decision of the individual
because as a second condition for legal active euthanasia there is the un-
bearable suffering of the concerned person which, as is considerably evi-
dent, is true also and particularly for people who are currently incapable of
agreement or unable to express their minds.
V. Structural Features Through the Epochs:

Life Unworthy of Life
For the Australian bioethicist Peter Singer and his co-author Helga Kuhse
a debate on life unworthy of living is unavoidable also in Germany, as
Helga Kuhse writes in Deutsches rzteblatt, 1990.50 Singers and
Kuhses justification of euthanasia for disabled newborn children caused
great sensation in those days.51 However, Singers fundamental argumen-
48
Jost, Recht auf den Tod, p. 6.
49
Accordingly, accepting the right to death of mentally ill persons will in practice
be less considered, as naturally in this case the patients agreement with being
killed would be lacking, and as this condition, at least in the early stages of the
reform, might be slightly problematic., ibid., p. 47.
50
Helga Kuhse, Warum Fragen der Euthanasie auch in Deutschland
unvermeidlich sind, Deutsches rzteblatt, vol. 87 (1990), pp. 1243-1249.
51
For example, in his book Practical Ethics, published in 1979, Peter Singer
writes: When the death of a defective infant will lead to the birth of another infant
with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater
if the defective infant is killed. According to Singers interpretation of classical
utilitarianism, newborn children are in principle replaceable (Peter Singer, Practi-
tation on the right to death and his criticism of the principle of the sacred-
ness of human life goes much farther. For him, humans have an inviolable
right to live only if they meet the criteria for being a person and show the
qualities of self-consciousness, rationality and autonomy, i.e. the capabil-
ity to develop preferences for their own future.52
Non-personal human beings such as newborn children who are not
yet able draft their own future or people with restricted consciousness, are
subject of a simple, utilitarian account of expected feelings of happiness or
pain. If this account is negative, the life of non-personal human beings
should be terminated, as their lives mean more suffering than happiness.53
Given different philosophical or ideological premises, there is an astonish-
ing analogy with which Peter Singer in 1979 and Alfred Hoche in 1920
exclude certain groups of humans from the state-guaranteed and inviolable
right to live. Both here and there we find comparisons with the animal
world. For example, in Singer it says provocatively: Killing a snail or a
day-old infant does not thwart any desires of this kind, because snails and
newborn infants are incapable of having such desires [regarding their
future].54 Both here and there we find the argument that a lack of self-
consciousness rules out any personal interest in living. Accordingly, in
Hoche it says about the mentally dead:
cal Ethics, Cambridge/London/New York/New Rochelle/Melbourne/Sydney 1979,

p. 134, see also Peter Singer, Praktische Ethik, 2nd revised and advanced German
edition (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994), p. 238). His conclusion regarding the problem of
euthanasia for disabled newborn children is: Nevertheless the main point is clear:
killing a defective infant ist not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often
it is not wrong at all., ibid. (1979), p. 138, ibid. (1994), p. 244. See also Helga
Kuhse/Peter Singer, Should the Baby Live? The Problem of Handicapped Infants
(Oxford/New York/Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985).
52
On the definition of a person in Singer see Singer, Practical Ethics (1979), pp.
76-84 and Singer, Praktische Ethik (1994), pp. 120-136, critically on this see
Robert Spaemann, Personen. Versuche ber den Unterschied zwischen etwas und
jemand (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1996), pp. 252-264.
53
Singer, Practical Ethics (1979), pp. 84-90 and 130-139, see also Singer, Prak-
tische Ethik (1994), pp. 136-146 and 232-246.
54
Singer, Practical Ethics (1979), p. 78, almost identical Singer, Praktische Ethik
(1994), p. 123. For sure, Singers criticism of giving reasons to the right to live in a
way which only refers to man, without taking the right of animals to live into
consideration, is justified and requires a differentiated reaction. But the inversion
of the argument, concluding from the lack of respect towards the lives of higher
animals to devaluating the right to live of those humans who in Singers opinion
are no persons is very dubious.
The crucial point, however, is the lacking possibility to become aware of

ones own personality, the lack of self-consciousness. The mentally dead
are at an intellectual level as we find it only in the animal world, and also
their emotions do not go beyond most elementary processes which are tied
to animal life. Thus, a mentally dead is also incapable of inwardly making
any subjective claim to life, just as he is incapable of any mental process-
es.55
And Singer defines the connection between self-consciousness and the

right to live as follows: it seems to be plausible that the capacity to envis-
age ones own future should be a necessary condition of possessing a
serious right to live.56 And consequently it says elsewhere:
The lives of those who are not in a coma, and are conscious but not self-
conscious, have value if they experience more pleasure than pain; but it is
difficult to see the point of keeping such beeings alive if their life is, on a
whole, miserable.57
Even if Bindings and Hoches work must be understood as being a prod-

uct of social Darwinism, whereas Singer belongs to the tradition of the
utilitarianism of British Enlightenment and tries to present rational argu-
ments, regarding the problem of euthanasia both come to the conclusion
that the right to live must be made dependent of certain criteria, such as
self-consciousness, autonomy and rationality. These criteria are not met by
non-personal human beings. Their lives are subject of negotiation in the
case that their suffering outweighs their joy. However, their lives are
threatened with being terminated most of all if under worsened economic
conditions social solidarity and human affection do not seem to be worth
the effort anymore. That is something Peter Singer would have been able
to learn from discussing the genesis of the crimes of National Socialist
euthanasia.58
55
Binding/Hoche, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens, pp. 57-
58 (italics in the original edition).
56
Singer, Practical Ethics (1979), p. 83 (italics by the author), see somewhat more
differentiatedly Singer, Praktische Ethik (1994), p. 133: To have a right to live,
one must at least at some time have (had) an idea of continous existence. Here
Singer discusses the position of the American philosopher Michael Tooley.
57
Singer, Practical Ethics (1979), p. 83, see also Singer, Praktische Ethik (1994),
p. 245.
58
In contrast to this, discussing the crimes of National Socialist euthanasia is not
done in a much differentiated way in Singer. For example, in the first edition of
Practical Ethics it says: The Nazis committed horrendous crimes; but this does
not mean that everything the Nazis did was horrendous. We cannot condemn eu-
VI. The Value of Life and the Slippery Slope

The strongly formulated position of the Prussian Royal physician and
Director of the Charit in Berlin, Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, who as
early as in 1806 warned against the purposeful medical termination of life,
must be seen against the background of euthanasia as it was practiced
already in the 19th century:59
If an ill person is plagued by incurable illness, if he himself calls for death

[...] how easily, even in a good mans soul, may thus rise the idea: should it
not be allowed, should it not even be an obligation, to relieve this suffering
individual from his burden [...]? No matter how much seems to support
such a consideration, no matter how much it may even be supported by the
heart, still it is wrong, and acting this way would be highly unjust and in-
dictable. It really contradicts the nature of being a physician. His task is to
preserve life, and nothing else is allowed for him; if this is good or bad
luck, if it is of value or not, this is not his concern, and not even does he ar-
rogate to himself to make this consideration part of his business, as the
consequences are unforeseeable, and the physician becomes the most dan-
gerous man in the state; for if once the line has been crossed, suddenly the
physician believes to be entitled to decide about the necessity of a life, only
step by step progress will be needed to apply the demerits and thus the
needlessness of a human life also to other cases.60
thanasia just because the Nazis did it, anymore than we can condemn the building
of new roads for this reason. (Singer, Praktische Ethik (1979), p. 139, in the
second German edition (1994) this sentence is missing). Certainly, together with
Singer we must emphasize that the motivations of the National Socialist leadership
for carrying out the murders of ill people cannot be compared to those being pre-
sented by euthanasia supporters in our days. Such a comparison is not at all intend-
ed. Rather, it is about the impossibility of understanding the practice of the Nation-
al Socialist murders of ill people without understanding the justification patterns of
the right to death, of life unworthy of living and of the idea of mercy death
resulting from pity. Insofar, a differentiated debate on the continuities and discon-
tinuities of the historical and the current debate on euthanasia does make sense.
59
See Michael Stolberg, Active Euthanasia in Pre-Modern Society, 1500-1800:
Learned Debates and Popular Practices, Social History of Medicine, vol. 20
(2007) no. 2, pp. 205-221 and idem, Pioneers of Euthanasia: Two German Physi-
cians Made the Break around 1800, The Hastings Center Report, vol. 38 (2008)
no. 3, pp. 19-22.
60
Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, Die Verhltnisse des Arztes, Hufelands Journal,
vol. 23 (1806), pp. 15-16, quoted after: Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, Enchiridion
medicum oder Anleitung zur medicinischen Praxis. Vermchtni einer
fnfzigjhrigen Erfahrung, 3rd edition (Herisau: Litteratur-Comptoir, 1837), p. 502.
Certainly in retrospect, given the history of euthanasia in the 20th century

and of medicine during National Socialism, the correctness of this prophe-
cy can be stated. What Hufeland formulates here, however, is a classical
argument of the slippery slope: an action which is understandable from an
ethical point of view is nevertheless considered wrong because its social or
legal admission will bring a number of side effects which contradict the
original intention and produce an undesired final result. Thus, also the
argument of the slippery slope does not refer to fundamental or categorical
ethical judgments but is based on the application practice of moral
norms.61 It is quite obvious that in this context also historical experiences
may play a role. Referred to Hufeland, the argument of the slippery slope
can be reconstructed as follows: both emotional and reasonable arguments
seem to support the admission of medical euthanasia, however the inclu-
sion of killings into the repertoire of medical activities would change the
physicians tasks and occupational image in a way which is highly unde-
sired: the physician would become the most dangerous man in the state,
which was terribly confirmed during National Socialism in those days
apart from justice, police and Wehrmacht physicians indeed counted
among the most important executors of the National Socialist policy of
destruction. The reason for restricting the physician to his/her original task
of preserving life (we might add the tasks of alleviating suffering and
caring for the dying),62 as demanded by Hufeland, is that after all the phy-
61
On the structure and classification of arguments of the slippery slope see Barba-
ra Guckes, Das Argument der schiefen Ebene. Schwangerschaftsabbruch, die
Ttung Neugeborener und Sterbehilfe in der medizinethischen Diskussion
(Stuttgart/Jena/Lbeck/Ulm: G. Fischer, 1997), pp. 15-78, see also the
differentiated judgement on arguments of the slippery slope in the euthanasia
debate by Roland Kipke, Schiefe-Bahn-Argumente in der Sterbehilfe-Debatte,
Zeitschrift fr medizinische Ethik, vol. 54 (2008) no. 2, pp. 135-146. The power of
differentiatedly stated arguments of the slippery slope is in confronting the concep-
tually normative level of justifying active euthanasia by referring to the right of
self-determination with the empirical level of the practical application of moral
norms. Ach and Gaidt attribute a discursive meaning to arguments of the slippery
slope: they result in a reversal of the burden of proof. Supporters of the admission
of active euthanasia would have to prove that the plausible fears of their opponents
are unjustified, see Johann S. Ach/ Andreas Gaidt, Am Rande des Abgrunds.
Anmerkungen zu einem Argument gegen die moderne Euthanasie-Debatte, Ethik
in der Medizin, vol. 6 (1994), pp. 172-188.
62
See Bundesrztekammer, Grundstze der Bundesrztekammer zur rztlichen
Sterbebegleitung, Deutsches rzteblatt, vol. 108 (2011) no. 7, pp. A 346-348,
here 348: It is the task of the physician to preserve life while respecting the pa-
tients right to self-determination, to protect and reestablish health as well as to
alleviate suffering and to care for the dying until their death.
sician is not capable of judging on the value of a human life and thus
should stay away from it. For, such a judgment on the value of a human
life, on which medical killing is necessarily based even if it happens on the
expressive and serious demand of the person concerned, may indeed be
extended onto people who are considered incapabable of agreement. Thus,
these are the steps of progress feared by Hufeland, which are due to the
logic of the debate on active medical euthanasia (both historically and
currently seen). Now, certainly the value of a human life could be defined
in different ways, for example by its value for society, as Binding and
Hoche did, or by hypothetically weighing the positive and negative expe-
riences and emotions somebody may experience in the future, as they
result from a utilitarian position.63 After all, however, judging on the value
of a life cannot be a concern of others; it may well be that subjectively,
under the given circumstances of severe suffering, somebody considers
his/her life unworthy of living and desires his/her own death as well as
medical assistance for it. Only, there is the question if (painless) killing by
a physician or medical assistance for suicide are the appropriate answer to
such desires.64 In this context, the ambivalence expressed by patients
desire for death must be particularly taken into consideration, as often it is
not really about the desire for death as such than about not wanting to live
anymore under the given circumstances of suffering. On the other hand,
the well-considered, direct killing of a human is necessarily based on the
judgement that under the given circumstances a certain life shall be no
more, unless the physician considers himself somebody submissively
obeying the patients wishes. But also in case of medical assistance for
suicide the message of agreeing with the patients desire for death is com-
municated. Thus, at least the negative judgement on the life of the person
intending suicide is comprehended and confirmed. However, in my opin-
ion the appropriate answer to desires for medical euthanasia is doing eve-
rything possible to physically, emotionally, socially and spiritually allevi-
ate the patients suffering and to give him/her a feeling that his/her life, no
63
See already Adolf Jost, Recht auf den Tod, p. 13: From a purely natural point of
view the value of a human life can only consist of two factors. The first factor is
the value his life has for the concerned person, that is the balance of joy and pain
he will have to experience. The second factor is the balance of usefulness and
damage this individual will mean for his fellow humans. On the judgement on
non-self-conscious forms of human life in the sense of classical utilitarianism see
Peter Singer above.
64
See Gerrit Hohendorf/Fuat S. Oduncu, Der rztlich assistierte Suizid. Freiheit
zum Tode oder Unfreiheit zum Leben?, Zeitschrift fr medizinische Ethik, vol. 57
(2011) no. 3, pp. 230-242, here 231-232.
matter how much it is marked by imminent death or by severe disable-

ment, is a welcome part of his/her relationship to the physician, to those
caring for him/her, and to his/her relatives. What makes us obliged to this
beyond any indoctrination by a specific doctrine or a specific religious or
metaphysical orientation, is the solidarity of a society in the face of suffer-
ing, death and severe disablement. Both dealing with death wishes and
with people after suicide attempts as well as experiences from palliative
care demonstrates that desires for death and for active euthanasia are tem-
porary and can be absorbed if the emotional suffering and desperation
behind them are recognized and meet response.65 That in individual cases
there may be a borderline situation as well as relationships in the context
of which one may feel obliged to lend assist to suicide because for this
particular person one may not see any alternative, no way to live a life, can
definitely not be denied. Only, such actions in exceptional situations
should not lead to any norming of professional codes of practice66 or ethics
of a legality of euthanasia or medically assisted suicide. Accordingly, there
may be single cases when a norm is violated for good reasons, it is only
that in each individual case reasons must be given why there is no alterna-
tive to this violation of norms. These are situations of an ethical dilemma
which evade any generalized norming. Giving reasons to the ethical legali-
ty of medically assisted suicide and active euthanasia on the basis of ex-
ceptional situations and individual cases would mean declaring such ex-
ceptional situations a frequent, regular situation. In this case, however, we
may predict that an originally very strict regulation will be extended in the
course of its practical application. Furthermore, due to the lacking objec-
65
Ibid., pp. 235-239.
66
The amendment to the code of ethical ethics, passed on the 114. Deutschen
rztetag in Kiel in 2011, expressively bans physicians from lending assistance to
suicide ( 16): Physicians must care for the dying while preserving their dignity
and while respecting their will. They are forbidden to kill patients on the latters
demand. They are not allowed to assist suicide, (http://www. bundesaerztekam-
mer.de/downloads/MBO_08_20111.pdf from 24.10.2011). On the legal-ethical
possibility of medically assisted suicide see Gunnar Duttge, Der assistierte Suizid
aus rechtlicher Sicht Menschenwrdiges Sterben zwischen Patientenautonomie,
rztlichem Selbstverstndnis und Kommerzialisierung, Zeitschrift fr
Medizinische Ethik, vol. 55 (2009) no. 3, pp. 257-270, here 263-265. Critically on
active euthanasia and medically assisted suicide being banned by professional law
see Bettina Schne-Seifert, Ist Assistenz zum Sterben unrztlich?, in Adrian
Holderegger (ed.), Das medizinisch assistierte Sterben. Zur Sterbehilfe aus
medizinischer, ethischer und juristischer und theologischer Sicht, 2nd advanced
edition (Freiburg i. Ue./Freiburg i. B./Vienna: Herder, 2000), pp. 98-118 and
Urban Wiesing, Ist aktive Sterbehilfe unrztlich?, in Ibid. pp. 229-241.
tivization of concepts a regulation working with after all only subjective

concepts which must be determined from the point of view of the con-
cerned person, such as unbearable suffering, will prove to be unre-
strictable. And if we try to objectivize them, i.e. leaving the decision about
the legality of active euthanasia to the physicians, the principle of the
patients autonomy which is crucial for the legality of active euthanasia
will be restricted. This may be called a moral paradox.67
Physicians are well advised to stay away from judging on a human life
as being unworthy of living in an objective sense, i.e. on grounds of
medical facts. However, such a decision about the value of a human life is
implicitly or explicitly made if the physician actively terminates a life or
participates in a patients suicide: for, if an act of killing is supposed to be
ethically grounded, it cannot be separated from stating that in a certain
situation of suffering a certain life shall be no more. This is also true if this
statement is in accordance with the patients personal judgement. This is
not all to say that any human life must be continued at any cost. For the
problem of starting and terminating life-prolonging measures it is crucial if
these measures are intended by the patient and if these measures are suita-
ble at all for achieving the treatment goal. The termination of life-
prolonging measures (so called passive euthanasia) mean that somebody is
allowed to die, it means that the tools of the medical prolongation of life
are removed, that a death which sooner or later will be inevitable is ac-
cepted. Of course, this acceptance of dying must be in accordance with the
patients wishes. In the case of killing a human by applying medical
means, on the other hand, it is the physician who is causal for this death,
who must want this death on demand of the patient and must make it the
goal of his own actions to be capable of this action at all. Insofar despite
any consequentialist arguing68 - in respect of judging on human life as
being unworthy of living there is a fundamental difference between active
and passive euthanasia, between killing and letting somebody die.
Against the background of the historical experience of the National
Socialist murders of ill people and their genesis from the debate on mercy
death,69 we may formulate an argument of the slippery slope in two ways:
67
See Henk ten Have, Euthanasia: moral paradoxes, Palliative Medicine, vol. 15
(2001), pp. 501-511 and Fuat S. Oduncu, In Wrde sterben. Medizinische, ethische
und rechtliche Aspekte der Sterbehilfe, Sterbebegleitung und Patientenverfgung
(Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), pp. 145-146.
68
See James Rachels, Aktive und passive Sterbehilfe, in Hans-Martin Sass (ed.),
Medizin und Ethik (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1989), pp. 254-264
69
See also Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Die Geschichte der Lebens(un)wertdiskussion.
Bruch oder Kontinuitt, in Ute Daub/Michael Wunder (eds.), Des Lebens Wert.
1. As the active killing of incurably ill people on their demand (and in

principle also medically assisted suicide) requires a value judge-
ment on certain states of life, there is the danger that this judgement
will be extended also on people who are no longer capable of an
autonomous decision. Both the historical and the current debate on
euthanasia make obvious that the autonomy principle does not pro-
vide stable limits.
2. It may be that the legalization of killing on demand or medically
assisted suicide by the penal law or in the context of professional
codes of practice make feel patients with severe disablement or in
states of suffering urged to express such a desire because they do
not want to be a burden for themselves, for others or for society.
Between the lines of the euthanasia debate, which is characterized
by the idea of autonomy, the message that in certain situations it is
appropriate or common to demand ones own death cannot not be
hidden completely.70
Accordingly, those in support of active euthanasia would have to state

clearly if and how they want to prevent any extension of active euthanasia
on people who are currently capable of expressing their mind. Those in
support of making medically assisted suicide legal in the context of pro-
fessional codes of practice would have to explain if and how they want to
avoid a transition to making active euthanasia legal (for assisted suicide is
only an option for people who are capable of acting). And finally it would
have to be made clear in how far for both kinds of euthanasia explicit of
implicit judgments from the outside perspective on the value of a particu-
lar human life could be avoided. And finally it would have to be made
clear how much space and appreciation a solidarity-oriented society is
ready to grant the ill, the disabled and the old-aged.
The historical findings on the reception of the idea of euthanasia
among the German population during National Socialism is ambivalent;
Zur Diskussion ber Euthanasie und Menschenwrde (Freiburg i. Br.: Lambertus,

1994), pp. 51-60.
70
See Gerrit Hohendorf, Die nationalsozialistischen Krankenmorde zwischen
Tabu und Argument. Was lsst sich aus der Geschichte der NS-Euthanasie fr die
gegenwrtige Debatte um die Sterbehilfe lernen?, in Stefanie Westermann/
Richard Khl/Tim Ohnhuser (eds.), NS-Euthanasie und Erinnerung.
Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung Gedenkformen Betroffenenperspektiven (Berlin/
Mnster: Lit, 2011), pp. 211-229 and Hohendorf, Empirische Untersuchungen zur
nationalsozialistischen Euthanasie bei psychisch Kranken, pp. 174-182.
we find acceptance, agreement, but also courageous resistance,71 not at last

as a result of a courageous word by the Bishop of Mnster, Clemens Au-
gust Count Galen, it was possible to stop the T4 gas murder action. This
was the easier from the point of view of the holyness of human life
the more clearly the right to live of any innocent human could be ex-
pressed.72 Sobering on the other hand is our view at the physicians.
Among them there was gloom and withdrawal, however no open re-
sistance. By far the great majority of asylum doctors actively contributed
to the various ways of murdering the ill, either out of conviction or of
opportunism and belief in authority.
VII. The Euthanasia Taboo: National Socialist

Euthanasia as a Knockout Argument?
Often supporters of active euthanasia see the sheer reference to the genesis
of National Socialist euthanasia as a kind of knockout argument, stat-
ed for the purpose of preventing an open debate.73 I believe that the oppo-
site is true.74 The history of euthanasia in Germany and Europe (the mur-
71
Kurt Nowak, Widerstand, Zustimmung, Hinnahme. Das Verhalten der
Bevlkerung zur Euthanasie, in Norbert Frei (ed.), Medizin und Gesundheitspolitik
in der NS-Zeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1991), pp. 235-251.
72
Clemens August Count Galens public sermon from August 3rd, 1941, is printed
Klaus Drner/Christiane Haerlin/Veronika Rau/Renate Schernus/Arnd Schwendy
(eds.), Der Krieg gegen die psychisch Kranken. Nach Holocaust: Erkennen
Trauern Begegnen. Gewidmet den im Dritten Reich getteten psychisch,
geistig und krperlich behinderten Brgern und ihren Familien, 2nd edition
(Frankfurt a. M./Bonn: Mabuse-Verlag, 1989), pp. 112-124.
73
E.g. Frank Czerner, Das Euthanasie-Tabu. Vom Sterbehilfe-Diskurs zur Novel-
lierung des 216 StGB (Dortmund: Humanitas, 2004), pp. 87-88: Thus, the
sometimes superficial-apodictic instrumentalization of [National Socialist] eutha-
nasia (as the true killer argument) does not only put an end to a social- and crimi-
nal-political debate but finally also it results in a complete legislative refusal. In
this context, coming to grips with the German past works a quasi-legitimation for
the normative passivity of the lawmaker.
74
Regarding an appropriate reception of the state of historic research on the dis-
cussion of the historical argument see critically Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Nation-
alsozialismus als Argument im aktuellen Medizinethik-Diskurs. Eine
Zwischenbilanz, in Andreas Frewer/Clemens Eickhoff (eds.), Euthanasie und
die aktuelle Sterbehilfe-Debatte. Die historischen Hintergrnde medizinischer
Ethik (Frankfurt a. M./New York: Campus, 2000) pp. 385-407. On the justification
of a historical way of argumenting in the debate on euthanasia see a. o. Karl Heinz
Leven, Die NS-Euthanasie und die gegenwrtige Debatte um aktive
Sterbehilfe, in Franz-Josef Illhardt/Wolfgang Heiss/Matthias Dornberg (eds.),
ders of ill people happened in the majority of the territories dominated by

Germany) in the 20th century cannot so easily be excluded from a societys
cultural and moral memory and be attributed to a far away age which has
nothing to do with our current situation and our current problems. The loss
of trust, particularly in the realm of psychiatry, which results from the
medical destruction of life, is too complete; the hidden continuity of the
idea of euthanasia and the destruction of life unworthy of living far
into the post-war decades, which found its expression by declaring the
euthanasia physicians innocent, by lacking recognition of euthanasia
victims by society and by lacking compensation for their relatives,75 is too
much alive. The euthanasia taboo can only be lifted by recognizing the
genesis of the National Socialist murders of ill people as a part of our
history, and also as a part of the history of the medical profession, and by
thus making the historical experience of NS euthanasia a topic also of
current debating, in a critical way and without fixed expectations.
Sterbehilfe. Handeln oder Unterlassen. Referate einer medizinethischen

Fortbildungsveranstaltung vom Zentrum fr Ethik in der Medizin und dem
Zentrum fr Geriatrie und Gerontologie Freiburg am 19. und 20. Januar 1996
(Stuttgart/New York: Schattauer, 1998), pp. 9-23.
75
E.g. for the field of psychiatry see Franz-Werner Kersting/Karl Teppe/Bernd
Walter (eds.), Nach Hadamar. Zum Verhltnis von Psychiatrie und Gesellschaft im
20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Schningh, 1993) and Gerrit Hohendorf, The
Representation of Nazi Euthanasia in German Psychiatry 1945 to 1998. A Prelimi-
nary Survey, Korot The Israeli Journal of the History of Medicine, vol. 19
(2007/2008), pp. 29-48.
THE SS AS A MORAL ORDER
SS ETHICS WITHIN MORAL PHILOSOPHY
ANDR MINEAU
In a sense, it may look strange to talk about SS ethics or about an SS pre-

occupation with morality, given the origins and tasks of the Black Order.1
The SS emerged from the notion of shock troop, in relation to the battle-
field experience of the Great War. A first version of it was the Stotrupp
Hitler of the year 1923. When this elite bodyguard was recreated as the
Schutzstaffel in 1925, it specialized in the protection of Hitler and other
key Party speakers. It was a police force inside the Party before it succeed-
ed in invading Germanys police apparatus between 1933 and 1936.
Throughout the duration of the Nazi regime, the main task of the SS was
to fight and to eliminate the enemies of the interior, and the notion of in-
terior expanded along with the Reichs borders during the first half of
World War II. More specifically, when the country was at war once again
in 1939, the SS had to see to it that the Dolchsto of 1918 would not be
repeated, and that the war would have a happy ending this time.
Obviously, given the type of action in which SS and police forces in-
dulged, the use of the term ethics may not seem appropriate. The SS
committed evil of a great magnitude, by waging war against the civilian
populations in occupied Europe, and by organizing and supervising the
Holocaust. Knowing that they committed the absolute evil, one may ask
whether an ethics of evil could ever be conceivable, since ethics, after all,
is about the Good.
The SS was one of the main power instruments of Nazi totalitarianism:
its activity, consequently, made sense in relation to an ideology that con-
veyed a strong moral component. Here, we must bear in mind the nature of
totalitarian regimes. Totalitarianism may be defined as a political attempt
at invading social life in its totality for the sake of a regenerative Weltan-
schauung encompassing the essence of truth and good. In other words, it
1
In the notes, the primary sources are designated as follows: BA for Bun-
desarchiv in Berlin-Lichterfelde (Germany) and IMT for the International Mili-
tary Tribunal in Nuremberg (Germany). The author wishes to thank the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its financial support.
308 SS Ethics within Moral Philosophy
seeks to force upon anyone and anything a vision of the superior interest
of the community, along with a system of morality that tells the right from
the wrong. And Nazi ideology was obviously totalitarian, since it was out
to implement a scientific vision of the racial Volk as the supreme value
or as the embodiment of the Good, thus commanding an all-encompassing
morality in relation to which any political action would be justified. By the
way, it is worth mentioning here that the Nazis never succeeded in control-
ling the totality of life in Germany, which proved to be impossible. In fact,
totalitarianism is always an intention, a political project, or a series of
steps towards an absolute that, as such, can never be reached.
Thus, in a totalitarian system, the main power brokers are always con-
cerned with ideology along with ethics attached to it because the global
political venture in which they participate would have no meaning, no
raison dtre, outside ideology and ethics. In this sense, it is not only pos-
sible but also necessary to posit a system of ideas and norms called SS
ethics under the auspices of Nazi ideology as, by necessity, the former
grew out of the latter. Globally, the SS leaders believed in the Nazi notion
of the Good that is to say in the nations grandeur, militarism, claim to
Lebensraum, and racial purity, and they approved of a morality that would
help the SS serve the Nazi common good, regardless of the fact that they
themselves often failed to abide by their own moral norms.
But the SS did not confine itself to a passive role in the world of Nazi
ideology and ethics. It was not interested in merely defending a regime,
the ideology and ethics of which would be conceived by other agencies of
the Party and the state. To the contrary, it played a major part in conceptu-
alizing and in teaching ethics through numerous speeches, lectures, and
written publications intended for various audiences. In other words, the SS
was a key agency of ethical thinking in Nazi Germany, and this was due
largely to the idiosyncrasies of Reichsfhrer SS Heinrich Himmler. The
latter, who occupied the top position in a hierarchical system largely of his
own making, attached a large amount of value to ethics. He saw himself as
a clever and skilled moralist,2 and he envisioned Nazi ideology and SS
practice in terms of the necessary accomplishment of a moral system.3 He
spent a great deal of time and energy lecturing about morality, in general,
and about the SS as a Nazi apparatus governed by ethics. Of course, SS
ethical thinking cannot be reduced to Himmler since many SS leaders of
all ranks participated in the thinking and in teaching ethics. Although he
2
Richard Breitman. The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).
3
Andr Mineau. Operation Barbarossa: Ideology and Ethics Against Human
Dignity (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2004).
Andr Mineau 309
was very meticulous, Himmler could not control all that was said or writ-
ten by SS authors and speakers. But he was very much present within the
system and, obviously, enjoyed the priority of control and communication
in his own apparatus. His influence therefore was enormous, as was the
importance of ethical thinking in the SS system.
I. The Framework of Moral Philosophy

An ethics is a system of ideas, values, norms, and practical judgments
aimed at giving weight to the alter against the ego, that is to say, at actual-
izing a concept of the good that transcends individuality. Obviously, sev-
eral types of meaningful constructions are possible in the domain of ethics,
given the vast array of possible meanings for concepts such as value,
norm, good, evil, duty, other, and ego. The theoretical limits of ethics,
however, are marked by nihilism and egotism. On the one hand, pure ni-
hilism, insofar as it entails the negation of any claim to truthfulness or to
goodness, cannot carry an ethics as it would negate it by definition. On the
other hand, pure egotism would not be able to be a form of ethics either
because the complete identification of the Good with the pursuit of self-
interest would disqualify ethics as exceedingly redundant and therefore
meaningless since someone would necessarily be ethical somewhere at all
times. In practice, people seldom go to extreme forms such as egotism or
nihilism. But we may say in a relative manner that marked tendencies
toward either pole weaken the case of any discourse that claims to be valid
as an ethics.
On such a basis, prima facie, SS ethics could fly. It valued some forms
of the other as limitations to individualism, and it purported to serve some
common good that should have precedence over self-interest. It was not
nihilistic as such since it aimed at constructing reality according to con-
cepts of truth and good presented as valid and undisputable. Of course, it
was not egotistic since it insisted so much on self-sacrifice for the sake of
much-valued otherness.
Looking back at the history of moral philosophy, and leaving aside the
critical stances that considered as invalid some or all ethical concepts, we
can see that there always were three main approaches to ethics: deontolog-
ical, consequentialist, and perfectionist. The deontological approach posits
that human actions are moral inasmuch as they result from an a priori
knowledge of duty, entailing that duty is a necessary and sufficient condi-
tion for moral action. The consequentialist perspective, especially in its
modern formulation, bases itself on an a posteriori knowledge of the prac-
tical good, stating that morality lies in the performing of actions that result
in good consequences in a way that increases the utility for the great many.
And perfectionism understands ethics as a reflection on the meaning of
human life in terms of happiness resulting from personal growth and from
the progressive betterment of the self. Here, we realize that these three
approaches take the alter into consideration, making him or her the pole of
attraction of morality. In the deontological perspective, the notion of duty
establishes a relationship that makes sense as recognition of the others
status and value. Consequentialism, in its modern version, insists on
achieving the good of the many since human equality forbids any favoring
of the favoring of the ego against the alter. And perfectionism values a
form of personal excellence from which others will ultimately benefit
since moral virtue is called justice as soon as it turns itself toward the
community and fellow-citizens.
These three main approaches were present in SS ethics. The latter con-
sidered that human actions had to abide by some principles known a priori,
that they had to carry good consequences for the many that is to say the
German Volk, and that they had to be the reflection of personal attitudes
testifying to personal growth in maturity. In other words, SS ethics were
based on a structure of ideas and judgments that articulated these three
aspects together. It revolved around duty, the common good, and virtue.
II. SS Ethics as a Deontological System

The notion of duty played an important part in SS ethics because it con-
ferred a moral character to all actions performed within the service in
compliance with orders formulated by competent authorities. By defini-
tion, a duty is a morally appropriate action aimed at accomplishing a form
of the good that is so important that reality and practice cannot ignore it. In
this perspective, of course, it was obviously assumed within the SS that
the Nazi ideology encompassed truth and the good. Therefore, any instruc-
tion from competent SS authorities or from Hitler himself was considered
as encapsulating the good, making the ordered action dutiful and thus
moral. And the moral character and value of the ordered action was en-
hanced by the fact that the SS man would choose to do his duty against his
personal feelings and sentiments.
As a moralist, who was at the same time the Reichsfhrer SS, Himmler
was the most competent authority with regard to the definition of duty in
SS ethics. According to him, the morally appropriate action was the action
accomplished not only in compliance with duty but also and mostly out of
duty, which tended to achieve a superior good located above the individual
and excluded personal feelings and sentiments from the determination of
Andr Mineau 311
the act. Understood in this manner, Himmlers categorical imperative

was obviously a distortion of Kants. Yet Himmler conceived it in these
terms, as exemplified in numerous speeches. According to him, any SS
agent should always act in such a way as determined by duty: morality
required the psychologically difficult exclusion of any usual human feel-
ing that might oppose duty.
To Himmler, the Holocaust represented the ultimate test to which his
moral concept of duty was ever to be submitted. On the one hand, the mass
murder of civilians in general, of helpless women and children in particu-
lar, generated powerful, almost overwhelming feelings of repulsion, which
were quite normal in decent human beings such as SS officers. On the
other hand, however, the duty to proceed to these mass murders was abso-
lutely compelling, not only because the Jews embodied a mortal threat to
the Volk in a war in which the repetition of 1918 should be avoided at all
costs but also, and mostly, because a superior order demanded the geno-
cidal procedure. Himmler insisted that he had received an order to elimi-
nate the Jews and that such an order weighed heavily on his shoulders.
In several speeches, Himmler harped on this extreme challenge to his
concept of duty. For example, in Posen on 4 October 1943, he praised his
superior officers who had gone through genocide and remained decent
(anstndig). We had the moral right, we had the duty toward our Volk to
bring down the hostile Jewish people.4 In Bad Schachen on the 14th,
Himmler made it plain that he expected harshness whenever necessary,
even to put out small fires.5
In 1944, in speeches to Wehrmacht superior officers, Himmler was
even more explicit about the psychological conflict generated by the oppo-
sition of feelings to moral duty. As he said to his audience, the Jewish
question was solved without any compromise. Since he considered himself
a soldier, too, he had received a soldierly order that proved extremely
difficult to carry out. But he did what he had to do, nonetheless, out of
obedience and persuasion. And he reacted to possible objections with
regard to the inclusion of children: He said that this was a conflict with
Asia (the European moral standards did not apply to this) and that Ger-
mans were not authorized to allow these hateful avengers to grow up so
that German children and grand-children would have to confront them due
4
Rede Himmlers bei der SS-Gruppenfhrertagung in Posen am 4. Oktober 1943,
pp. 145-146. IMT, 1919-PS.
5
Rede Himmlers auf einer Befehlshabertagung in Bad Schachen vom 14. Oktober
1943. IMT, 070-L.
to this generations weakness and cowardice.6 Here, Himmler posited a

logic of duty that contradicted normal human feelings, except that duty
required precisely that these feelings had to be left aside. Also, he linked
the murder of children to morality: it was the moral thing to do whereas
the alternative was obviously immoral given the consequences that would
result from moral vices such as cowardice and weakness. Furthermore,
Himmler repeated what he had told other groups earlier: they would be
able to get through this experience without suffering damage to their
soul and to their morality, and this was the most difficult thing of it all.
Therefore, the morality and the soul were endangered due to the normalcy
of humanitarian sentiments, but the inflexibility of duty was moral in it-
self.
The same line of argumentation about duty was presented in another
speech to a comparable audience. Regarding the Jewish question, Himmler
declared that it was good that we had the harshness to exterminate the
Jews in our sphere. He mentioned once again how difficult it was to carry
out such an order. Yet, it was necessary. Once again, he came back to the
issue whether the children should have been included. As he said, these
children would grow up eventually. Do we want to be so indecent (unan-
stndig) as to be weak and let the German children deal with Jewish
avengers in the future? This would be irresponsible. Since we could not
act cowardly, a clear solution was implemented, regardless of how diffi-
cult it was.7
One month later he declared that the German soldiers first duty was to
show no compassion and to expel anything unworthy.8 As he said some-
where else, misplaced sentimentality could not win wars. Sometimes,
we must have the harshness to kill even our own blood, even if it proves
very difficult. Duty is something serious and sacred.9
Himmler remained consistent with himself. Years before, in the Le-
bensregel fr den SS-Mann, he had extolled the duty of performance. In
fact, the whole line of presentation was couched in the language of duty
with regard to the Volk as the ultimate reference. As he said in substance:
6
Rede des Reichsfhrers SS auf der Ordensburg Sonthofen am 5. Mai 1944, fol.
70-72. BA NS 19 / 4013.
7
Rede des Reichsfhrers SS in Sonthofen am 21.6.1944 vor Generlen der
Wehrmacht, fol. 173-176. BA NS 19 / 4014.
8
Rede des Herrn Reichsfhrers SS und Befehlshaber des Heimat-Heeres vor
Offizieren am 21.7.44, fol. 17-27. BA NS 19 / 4015.
9
Rede des Reichsfhrers SS in Salzburg am 14. Mai 1944, fol. 172, 189. BA NS
19 / 4013.
Andr Mineau 313
we have the duty to employ any strength, which is in any German, for
performances and, with it, for our Volks grandeur.10
In this perspective, the Holocaust could be understood and was mean-
ingful through the prism of duty. It appeared as the result of a series of
moral acts accomplished by duty, for the sake of the Volks superior good.
III. SS Ethics in a Consequentialist Perspective

Within SS ethics, duty was oriented toward the accomplishment of the
Nazi notion of the general good. On such a basis, actions were evaluated
in the function of their potential consequences on the common good. More
specifically, morally appropriate actions were actions that resulted in the
maximization of utility for the Volk as a whole to the point of suppressing
any legitimacy linked to self-interest as such. In its racial definition, how-
ever, the Volk represented the ultimate ontological locus of value as well
as the limit of the sphere of morality.
In a document intended for potential recruits of the German police, SS
values were presented in the function of the Volk as their ultimate point of
focus in reference to the general guidelines laid down in a speech by
Himmler. As the representatives of the State, a police officer must be the
best friend of the Volk, while he must be the representative of the Volks-
gemeinschaft against all criminal elements it is possible to be at the same
time the true friend of every anstndig German and the resolute adversary
of every enemy of the Volk. The task of the police is always: to help
strengthen the Volks body inside, to help purify this Volks body from the
noxious elements that do not belong to him, and to contribute to the wor-
thy representation of this Volks body toward the outside. Police service
is honor service to the Volk. The policeman is like a soldier: in the police
force, he can stay faithful to his desire to be a soldier, and he guarantees
the protection of the nation toward the inside.11 And in accomplishing
police duties, as Himmler said, we must always be harsh. This may
sometimes be cruel, but this behavior serves then the good of the
whole.12
To the SS, morally appropriate actions were dutiful actions intended to
serve the good of the whole, which had to be understood in terms of the
preservation of the Volks racial substance. However, this valuable racial
10
Lebensregel fr den SS-Mann, p. 1. BA NS 19 / 1457.
11
Willst Du zur Polizei? 3rd edition, pp. 5,12, 14. BA RD 18 / 25.
12
Ansprache des Reichsfhrers-SS und Chefs der Deutschen Polizei Heinrich
Himmler anlsslich der Besprechung der Kommandeure der Gendarmerie am 17.
Januar 1941, fol. 5. BA NS 19 / 4008.
substance was threatened mostly with three major dangers: declining birth
rates, counter-selection, and racial mixing. Consequently, the Volks gen-
eral good entailed the multiplication of healthy heredity and the protection
of blood purity: morally good actions were those resulting in these conse-
quences, and they were all the more mandatory as the Volks survival was
at stake. A Volk that maintained its blood pure would live eternally.13
The Volks ontological value was connected to the notion of immortal-
ity. In a short text entitled Ewig ist das Blut, an SS author expressed the
view that blood is immortal. According to him, people live in a communi-
ty whose borders are made by blood. And this community is where our
soul survives, in our children and in our works. We exist through time
today as we existed yesterday and will exist tomorrow. What flows in us is
the blood of free Germanic peasants who have always been the pillars of
higher culture due to the outstanding creativity of the blood. And he con-
cluded with this recommendation: Fight for the future of that blood! In
this way, you were, you are, and you will be, from eternity to eternity. You
are immortal in your Volk.14
Himmler liked to dwell on this motif as well. He thought that the Volk
would have access to eternal life if it could preserve its blood, which rep-
resented a fountain of youth. To him, this was the knowledge underlying
the marriage law of 1931: A Volk may have eternal life only if its pure
blood is transmitted as the holiest heritage from generation to generation
We, SS, military order of Nazi men, we believe that we are the ancestors
of future generations, for the eternal life of the Germanic Volk.15
According to the author of the SS Handbltter fr den weltanschauli-
chen Unterricht, the general good entails the building up of an order of life
that guarantees the Volks eternal life. Such an order requires that good
and valuable blood be maintained and promoted, and that anything mind-
erwertig and foreign be eliminated. And this is precisely what morality is
about: Sittlich ist, was der Arterhaltung des deutschen Volkes frderlich
ist. Unsittlich ist, was der Arterhaltung des deutschen Volkes
entgegensteht.16
The Volk lives within nature, where struggle for survival represents the
basic law. Everything (food, soil, etc.) must be won by means of fighting.
The deepest meaning of that eternal fight for destruction is that anything
13
Rassenpolitik, pp. 27-28, 51. BA NSD 41 / 122.
14
SS-Leithefte, L. 2 / 25 March 1936. BA NSD 41 / 77.
15
Magyarsag of 20 December 1942. Die Deutsche Schutzstaffel: Die SS bei
Himmler, fol. 4. BA NS 19 / 1454.
16
SS Handbltter fr den weltanschaulichen Unterricht, p. 3 and sq. BA NSD 41 /
75.
Andr Mineau 315
weak or minderwertig will be exterminated. Consequently, maintaining the

handicapped and the incurably ill is irrational and costly. State policies
must serve only the maintaining and promotion of the Volks valuable
body and its best race. And anyone who is aware of hereditary defects and
still has useless children infringes upon the laws of life: he sins against his
Volk and race. When and where this sense of responsibility is lacking, the
states duty is to meddle in the individuals so-called rights. It is a duty to
avoid giving birth to burdensome lives.17
In Nature as the locus of a permanent state of war, the general good
comes before private interests. The individual is nothing, but the Volk and
race is everything. The Volk, therefore, and not the individual, posits any
moral standards of the good.
By and large, in SS ethics, the concept of the good excluded a humani-
ty whose ontological value was too low for being granted access to the
sphere of moral obligations. On the basis of this exclusion, which appar-
ently complied with the laws of nature and with the discoveries of racial
science, the Holocaust was a set of morally appropriate actions which, as
such, were to bring about positive consequences for the many the Volk
was and would be composed of, now, and in the future.
IV. SS Ethics as a Form of Perfectionism

In Greek moral philosophy, the notion of virtue designated the individuals
excellence in the art of living that is to say in actualizing the demands of
the good concerning all circumstances of daily life. SS ethics recycled the
notion and used it in this specific sense especially in Himmlers moral
language. In this perspective, virtues qualified individual SS excellence in
pursuing the Volks good through the accomplishment of duty. SS educa-
tion aimed at fostering a process of self-perfectionism in the SS man, lead-
ing to moral excellence in the art of forgetting the self for the sake of the
Volk.
In Himmlers mind, moral excellence could be accomplished in a way
that accounted for inevitable differences between different people. There
was however a minimal level that was compulsory for everyone in the SS:
correctness or decency (Anstndigkeit). It referred to the capability of
practicing virtues in general, of performing ones duties, and of living
ones life as a responsible moral agent. In most of his speeches, Himmler
insisted a great deal on the encompassing virtue of Anstndigkeit.
17
SS-Mann und Blutsfrage, pp. 5,6,34. BA RD 18 / 19.
To an audience of gendarmerie commanders, he declared that he

wished to have a German police that would be incorruptible, faithful to
duty, anstndig, willing to fight (kmpferisch), and courageous, a police
that would be harsh where it should be so. We are capable of solving all
tasks given to us if we keep in mind the spirit of the Nazi Weltanschauung,
the recognition of the value of our Volk and our blood.18
The notion of Anstndigkeit designated general virtues as the accom-
plished or actualized good. It was applied to the moral characterization of
the SS and of the racial Volk that the SS represented, but it drew a line of
demarcation between good and evil, a line where morality ceased to apply.
On 13 July 1941, Himmler said in Stettin that Germany was now engaged
in a struggle between Weltanschauungen, a struggle of races. In this
struggle, there is Nazism, a Weltanschauung built on the value of our
Germanic Nordic blood, and there is a world [...] that is beautiful, anstn-
dig, and socially just [...] On the other side, there is a 180-million-people,
a mix of races and peoples [...] whose form (Gestalt) is such that one can
shoot them together without mercy and compassion [...] Your holy duty is
there, at any place where you are, to fight in faithfulness to your oath.19
Himmler used to dwell at length on the virtues which he deemed essen-
tial in the context of SS moral perfectionism. He classified them in differ-
ent ways depending on the audience and the circumstances etc., but the
same key principles and virtues worded differently were repeated most of
the time. For example, in an article published in late 1942, he wrote that
SS moral thinking could be summarized in four essential principles. The
first principle was blood, recognized as selection principle favoring all
those who embodied the ideal of Nordic humanity: over time, those with-
out character, the weak-willed and those who were not there with heart
and soul, would be excluded. The second principle concerned love for
freedom and the fighting spirit. The third principle lay in faithfulness and
honor. To Himmler, they were inseparable. Hitler had expressed this in the
form of: Meine Ehre heisst Treue. This meant that many things in life
could be forgiven but never unfaithfulness as it was a matter of the heart
and not of reason. Reason might be wrong, but mistakes could be correct-
ed whereas the heart always beats in the same rhythm. Faithfulness des-
ignated faithfulness to Hitler and, through him, to the Germanic-German
Volk, to its values and nature, to its blood, to its grandfathers and grand-
18
Ansprache des Reichsfhrers-SS und Chefs der Deutschen Polizei Heinrich
Himmler anlsslich der Besprechung der Kommandeure der Gendarmerie am 17.
Januar 1941, fol. 11-12. BA NS 19 / 4008.
19
Der Reichsfhrer-SS zu den Ersatzmannschaften fr die Kampfgruppe Nord am
Sonntag, dem 13. Juli 1941, in Stettin, fol. 34-35, BA NS 19 / 4008.
Andr Mineau 317
sons, to its future and past, to its comrades, to its honesty.20 As to the
fourth principle, obedience, it referred to unconditional obedience to all
the orders from Hitler or from other authorities.
In the Lehrplan fr die weltanschauliche Erziehung in der SS und
Polizei, we encounter a similar classification. The general order formulat-
ed by the Reichsfhrer SS posits in substance that only noble blood, only
real race can guarantee real performances in the long run. Hence, there is
the necessity of selection to recruit the best in terms of blood and charac-
ter. This selection is to be guided by four principles and virtues: 1) the
realization of the racial idea, so as to select those who are as close as pos-
sible to Nordic humanity in height and general look; 2) the fighting spirit
or the commitment to struggle; 3) faithfulness and honor toward the Fueh-
rer, the German Germanic Volk, blood, ancestors, descent, and the laws of
decency (Anstand); 4) obedience.21
Himmlers often-quoted speech to the SS-Gruppenfhrer, in Posen,
contains a complete treatise on virtues. In regard to the matters of ethics
Himmler says that a basic SS principle is absolute: SS men must be hon-
est, decent, faithful, and comradely toward people of our own blood and
toward nobody else. Our duty is our Volk. Then, SS virtues are presented
as follows:
Faithfulness represents the capital virtue directed toward Volk, Reich,

and Fuehrer: the lack of faithfulness cannot be forgiven.
Obedience concerns high-ranking officers as well as lower ranks. It is
presented as unconditional, and it is linked to responsibility.
Courage must be strengthened by faith and optimism.
Truthfulness applies especially to giving ones word. One must keep ones
promises and honor ones commitments. However, this is morally
binding only within the German Volk: only toward Untermenschen,
usefulness or practical utility would be the only criterion. It is im-
portant to remark that the status of Untermenschen was sufficient for
abrogating morality along with any moral obligation or duty.
Honesty is linked mostly to respect for property and to struggle against
corruption.
Comradeship means the avoidance of conflicts, good manners, and the
avoidance of expressions of anger.
20
Magyarsag of 20 December 1942. Die Deutsche Schutzstaffel: Die SS bei
Himmler. BA NS 19 / 1454.
21
Lehrplan fr die weltanschauliche Erziehung in der SS und Polizei, pp. 9-12. BA
NSD 41 / 61.
Joy toward responsibility is a strange formulation in a sense, and Himmler

is not very coherent in his description. What he means however is that
the individual officer is to accept responsibilities joyfully, gladly wel-
coming and executing them.
Valiance refers to a daily necessity, especially because of the war, and any
type of work that is useful to Germany is valuable.
Avoidance of alcohol is also an important virtue, and Himmler insists a
great deal on self-control.22
When talking to Wehrmacht superior officers, as in many other speeches,

Himmler harps on the necessity of an uncompromising ideological educa-
tion aimed at promoting the major SS virtues: faithfulness, obedience,
truthfulness, harshness, strength, and justice.23 Several weeks later, once
again, he presents ideological education as directly connected with SS
virtues: courage, stability, obedience including abstaining from criticism,
discretion, truthfulness, and true comradeship which remains subordinated
to faithfulness toward Volk and Fuehrer.24
For obvious reasons, self- control is a key virtue within a self-
perfectionist moral approach. On numerous occasions, Himmler rehashes
the theme of moderation and praises the virtue of temperance against the
excessive consumption of alcohol and nicotine. Responding to Himmlers
inspiration, other authors and speakers also address these issues. For ex-
ample, in an SS newsletter one can read that SS members must be warned
against the excessive consumption of alcohol as it suppresses healthy
inhibitions, and against the cravings for nicotine as it has a lulling effect
on ones nerves and on ones willpower. For the education of troops, some
posters were to be mounted in the dormitories, featuring a selection of
phrases such as: Maintain your health for your Volk, National Social-
ism is the fight against individual desires and unrestrained drives, Dont
only talk about National Socialism: live it.25
Since SS moral perfectionism applies to the SS moral agent as a whole,
it concerns also all personal aspects related to private and family life. In a
text entitled Unser Ziel: Die rassisch wertvolle, erbgesunde, kinderreiche
22
Rede Himmlers bei der SS-Gruppenfhrertagung in Posen am 4. Oktober 1943,
pp. 122-123, 149-165. IMT, 1919-PS.
23
Rede des Reichsfhrers SS auf der Ordensburg Sonthofen am 5. Mai 1944, fol.
79- 92. BA NS 19 / 4013.
24
Rede des Reichsfhrers SS in Sonthofen am 21.6.1944 vor Generalen der
Wehrmacht, fol. 188-192. BA NS 19 / 4014.
25
Ausbildungsbrief Nr. 5 des SS-Sanittsamtes, 15. November 1938, fol. 22-25.
BA NS 33 / 87.
Andr Mineau 319
SS-Sippe, one reads that an essential part of the Nazi construction plans
for the future is the reorganization of the German family. More specifical-
ly, the goal of the Nazi family policy is the creation and the promotion of
families that can display these characteristics: high racial value, hereditary
health, and many children. In the future, people of valuable heredity must
reproduce more than the bearers whose heredity is of a lower value. The
SS clans, stemming from a selection of bearers of the best German heredi-
ty, carry special responsibilities, here. Any SS man must get personally
involved in such a project by making the right choice for a spouse and by
procreating many children: this is part of the moral way to virtue and self-
perfection. In that perspective, the author establishes a list of Ten com-
mandments for choosing a spouse:
1. Remember that you are a German: you are who you are not because
of your own merits but through your Volk. You belong to your
Volk whether you like it or not. The general good stands above in-
dividual interest.
2. If you are healthy, you should not remain single. The qualities of
your body and mind are a piece of heritage, a gift from your ances-
tors, and they are alive in you through an unbroken chain. Whoever
remains single breaks that chain. Your life is nothing but a fleeting
phenomenon: the clan and the Volk have precedence.
3. Keep your body pure (so as to be able to serve your Volk)
4. You have to keep your mind and soul pure. Keep away from every-
thing that is foreign to you, that contradicts your nature, and that
goes against your conscience.
5. As a German, choose only a spouse of the same or of Nordic blood.
Racial mixes lead only to degeneration and ruin, but Nordic blood
binds the whole Volk together.
6. Ask your potential spouse about her ancestors. Remember that you
marry not only your spouse, but her ancestors as well. And valuable
children depend on valuable ancestors.
7. Health is the precondition also for external beauty.
8. Get married only out of love
9. Marriage is not a game but a lasting bond, the meaning of which is
the child.
10.You must wish to have as many children as possible. Three or four
children are necessary to secure the future of the Volk. You will
pass, but what you pass on to your progeny will remain. Your Volk
is eternal.26
26
SS-Leithefte, L. 2 / 25 March 1936, pp. 14-17). BA NSD 41 / 77.
SS authors understand moral agency as a path toward personal develop-

ment through education and the actualization of virtue. In the words used
by Reinhard Heydrich, We the SS, we must work on ourselves. We must
keep and anchor to ourselves the eternal foundations of our Weltanschau-
ung, given to us by the Fuehrer. [...] In order to protect our Volk, we must
be hard toward the adversary. We must deepen the good elements of our
German heredity. In all hardness, we must be just or fair, we must be the
most faithful, and our comradeship must be the best one [...] we must
become the best ones in all domains [...] We must work at increasing our
knowledge about our ancestors. This is the knowledge of all the values
that God has given to our Volk: our blood, our nature, our true historical
past. We must be examples and live in tune with the eternal principles
given by the Fuehrer [...] And we, the SS, want to be the ideological Stoss-
trupp and the Schutzstaffel of the Fuehrers idea as well as an inner protec-
tion corps of the Nazi state by fulfilling our tasks as state police.27
Obviously, genocide took place in the wake of self-development and
decency. In fact, the moral excellence of individual SS men made the
Holocaust possible, as a result of virtue.
V. Conclusion
By and large, SS ethics failed to live up to the standards of the philosophi-
cal approaches from which its concepts were directly or indirectly bor-
rowed. It organized itself around moral concepts such as duty, the good,
and virtue. Yet, on the basis of Nazi logic, it deprived these concepts of
their characteristic universality.
With regard to the concept of duty, Kant excluded all sentiments from
the moral determination of action because they could have no claim to
universality apart from respect for the law and respect for humanity whose
rationality understands the law. However, when the SS authors pleaded for
the exclusion of sentiments to the benefit of duty, they meant specifically
humanitarian (therefore, more universal) sentiments, but they proposed in
fact the precedence of another sentiment, namely love for the German or
Germanic Volk. More importantly, they chose to disregard Kants second
formulation of the Categorical Imperative which commands one to act in a
way that always considers humanity as an end and never as a means.
However, humanity per se had no value within SS ethics.
27
Reinhard Heydrich, Wandlungen unseres Kampfes (Munich/Berlin: Verlag
Franz Eher, 1935), pp. 18- 20.
Andr Mineau 321
Similarly, SS ethics focused on a notion of the good that lacked in uni-

versality. The ultimate good that was to be pursued was the Volks good
located above that of the individual according to the laws of nature. Yet
these laws legitimized any sort of violence as well as any form of biologi-
cal egotism. The supreme good, thus, was racially limited. Consequently,
it fell short of universality by denying the value of humanity per se.
Now, excellence in the art of performing ones duty for the sake of the
Volks good was called virtue, and SS ethics celebrated several types of
virtue. By extolling the virtue of harshness, however, the SS ethics of
virtue became murderous. Also, it was somewhat bizarre to posit human
excellence and self-perfectionism in relation to mental dispositions that
gave a moral character to the destruction of humanity.
Due to its denial of universality, SS ethics ultimately failed doubly be-
cause of excessive egotism and nihilism. By valuing only a racial subset of
humanity, SS thinking proposed nothing but a natural form of egotism
that excluded any genuine otherness. And by denying a significant value to
other subsets of humanity, SS ethics had a strong nihilistic component.
SS ethics could and did legitimize any sort of violence against humani-
ty for the sake of a racial subset that embodied the apex of ontological
value. It represented biological egotism turning nihilistic according to the
laws of nature. SS ethics was predicated on SS ontology, into which it
ultimately imploded.
DAS SCHWARZE KORPS AND THE VALIDATION
OF THE SS SIPPENGEMEINSCHAFT
AMY CARNEY
On August 10, 1939, Das Schwarze Korps, the newspaper of the SS, pub-
lished an article entitled Is this unmanly?1 The subject in question was
fatherhood; was being a father and taking care of ones children unmanly?
Throughout the text of the article, the author asserted that the answer was
no. He averred that a father should not take over the responsibilities of a
mother, but that it was permissible for a man to help his wife with her
domestic duties. With this assistance he would prove his position as a
genuine man and a proper husband.2 The pictures accompanying the
article reaffirmed this message and demonstrated the care that a father, or
any SS man for that matter, should provide for his children. The captions
below the pictures gave further encouragement, arguing specifically,
Why shouldnt the father also provide for his child []? In such a case
he loses nothing of his masculinity, but he shows that his love for his wife
and his child is not only lip-service.3
This article was one of many pieces routinely published in Das
Schwarze Korps which focused on fatherhood, children, and the SS fami-
ly. Such depictions furnished a persuasive argument with respect to the
vital participation of a father in the daily life and upbringing of his chil-
dren; they demonstrated that while mothers still remained the primary
caregivers within a family, fatherhood encompassed far more than biologi-
cal responsibility. The articles imparted the vision of an active father who
cared for his family, and they publicly stated that fatherly admiration and
care were acceptable and admirable traits. There was nothing unmanly in
fatherly affection. By including such material, the newspaper created a
public discourse on fatherhood and the family. It articulated for its readers
the family values that this particular Nazi organization espoused.
1
Ist das unmnnlich?, Das Schwarze Korps, 10 August 1939, 14.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
324 Das Schwarze Korps and the Validation of the SS Sippengemeinschaft
In fact, fatherhood and the creation of a family represented essential

ideals within the SS which helped define its current and future purpose.
The SS had begun in 1925 as a small elite bodyguard unit staunchly dedi-
cated to Adolf Hitler. However, its function and image as an elite organi-
zation shifted over the course of the two decades which followed. The
person primarily responsible for shaping the SS and defining its status as
an elite order was its final leader, Reichsfhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler. He
was not interested in creating an organization that would simply serve the
needs of the Nazi party and the Nazi state in the present; he wanted to
establish a community (Gemeinschaft) which would become the vanguard
and new aristocracy of Hitlers Thousand-Year-Reich.4
In particular, Himmler envisioned creating a family community (Sip-
pengemeinschaft) to which not only his SS men but their wives, children,
and all future descendents had the potential to belong to and to contribute.
However, unlike communities in the past, which were built on commonali-
ties such as class, ethnicity, history, language, and/or religion, the one that
Himmler sought to construct was based on something far more immutable:
a persons biological lineage. A persons heredity defined whether he (or
she) would be able to belong to this community; although specific traits
such as blond hair and blue eyes were valued, the more important aspect of
an individuals heredity was proving that he (or she) belonged to the es-
teemed Nordic race.5 Both popular and scientific literature from the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century had proclaimed that the Nordic race
represented the apex of civilization and culture.6 As an advocate of this
perspective, Himmler used this racial ideology when fostering his SS
family community. Among the resources he selectively utilized was the
science of eugenics; eugenic-based measures constituted the foundation of
4
The concept of the SS as an aristocracy was developed by Herbert Ziegler in Nazi
Germanys New Aristocracy: The SS Leadership, 1925-1939 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1989).
5
Fritz Lenz, a prominent eugenicist whose work Himmler selectively drew upon
and who periodically worked with the SS on racial matters, had specifically argued
that blond hair does not guarantee a noble race and dark [hair] does not exclude
it. Fritz Lenz, Die Stellung des Nationalsozialismus zur Rassenhygiene, Archiv
fr Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie 25 (1931), pp. 300-308, here 303.
6
A few authors who describe the importance of the Nordic race to western and
German civilization include Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race or the
Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1921),
Hans F. K. Gnther, The Racial Elements of European History (Port Washington:
Kennikat Press, 1970) and Richard Walther Darr, Neuadel aus Blut und Boden
(Munich: JF Lehmann, 1934).
Amy Carney 325
the family community and provided scientific legitimacy to his goal of

establishing a racial and blood-based aristocracy.
By only allowing people of Nordic descent to join the SS either as
members or spouses, Himmler limited the biological right to belong. His
family community was therefore directly defined by who was allowed to
become a member as well as indirectly defined by the exclusion of every-
one else.7 However, Himmlers goal of creating a community concerned
more than excluding the majority and including a minority. Using biology
to delineate the SS family community was the cornerstone of a much larg-
er ideal, one which sought to re-conceptualize the purpose and value of the
family. With this greater end, the SS family community was as much a
cultural construct as a biological entity. Although not an independent na-
tion but an organization within the Nazi party, the SS can as such be con-
ceived of as community within the Third Reich by applying the definition
of a community as outlined by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communi-
ties.8
The SS was not only defined by its political dimensions, but by its so-
cial, cultural, and economic ones as well. With a population reaching al-
most 800,000 men at its apex, the members of this community were bound
together by a common Nordic heritage although they would never all
know one another.9 It was also a limited community, one designed solely
to accept people whose heritage was deemed to be racially impeccable.
This community was almost sovereign; once the SS had proved its fealty,
the organization and its leader were limited by one thing, the will of the
7
As both Anthony W. Marx and Olivier Zimmer have shown, the use of inclusion
and exclusion to define a community or a nation has a long history in Europe.
Anthony W. Marx, Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003) and Oliver Zimmer, Nationalism in Europe, 1890-
1940 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
8
See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (Verso: London, 1983), 6-7. Although he created a slightly
different definition of a nation and nationalism, Eric Hobsbawm also suggested
that a nation is a cultural construct in Nations and Nationalism Since 1870: Pro-
gramme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 9-11.
9
Strke der SS am 30.6.1944, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde [hereafter BA]
NS19/1471, 5 and letter from Richard Korherr to Heinrich Himmler, 19 September
1944, United States National Archives and Records Administration [hereafter NA]
T175/103/frames 2625511-2625512. Koehl cited higher numbers based on taking
in account wartime losses; see Robert Lewis Koehl, The SS: A History 1919-1945
(Stroud/Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing Limited, 1989), p. 237, and idem,
The Character of the Nazi SS, The Journal of Modern History 34 (1962), pp.
275-283, here p. 275.
Fuehrer. Nonetheless, as long as the SS operated within the boundaries set

by Hitler, and remained loyal to him, it was fairly free to carry out what-
ever operations and functions it deemed necessary to sustain its existence
and to increase its power. Finally, it aspired to be a community not simply
because of the many varied uses of the word Gemeinschaft, but because
the SS, through its ideal of the Sippengemeinschaft, sought to build an
eternal camaraderie among its members and their families.10 All other
factors that might have divided them, including religion, regional identity,
or socio-economic status, were to be overcome through unity based on
their common possession of Nordic blood.
In order to construct this racially-based community, Himmler needed
to convince his SS men, and by extension their wives and families, of its
purpose and value. He and officials within the relevant branches of the SS,
especially the Race and Settlement Main Office (Rasse und Siedlungs-
hauptamt, RuSHA), needed to provide a framework through which they
could educate SS men and promote race-conscious attitudes. They needed
to develop a system that would foster positive attitudes and feelings to-
ward racial biology and eugenic thinking among SS men and their fami-
lies. To achieve these aims and, consequently, build the family communi-
ty, Himmler and other SS officials had to cultivate a discourse which
expounded on the relevant topics and promoted the validity and the objec-
tives of the Sippengemeinschaft as a biological and cultural entity.11 The
subsequently created discourse embraced a wide range of measures. Some
of these measures were solely designed for an SS audience, including
commands, speeches, letters, pamphlets, and ceremonies. Others aspired to
show the entire German nation how the SS sought to become the vanguard
of the Nazi racial state through its population policies and goals.12
One of the most important resources through which the organization
was able to articulate its views publicly was its newspaper, the aforemen-
tioned Das Schwarze Korps. This newspaper was not just the most promi-
nent SS publication, but it was also a leading weekly newspaper in the
10
Other uses of Gemeinschaft included Volksgemeinschaft, Blutsgemeinschaft,
and Lebensgemeinschaft.
11
The concept of a regulated discourse, especially with regards to sexuality, was
developed by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol-
ume 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pp. 11, 34, 39, 108-09, and 147.
12
The concept of the racial state comes from Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang
Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991).
Amy Carney 327
Third Reich, second in circulation only to Das Reich.13 Due to this promi-
nence, Das Schwarze Korps was a conduit through which the SS was able
to reveal its ambitions to the German people. As SS-Gruppenfhrer Au-
gust Heimeyer, the head of the SS Main Office (Hauptamt), asserted just
two months into the run of the paper in May 1935, in no other press
product is the spirit of the SS presented in so clear a manner as in [Das]
Schwarze Korps.14 For SS readers, the articles presented in their newspa-
per reinforced the private initiatives beckoning them to be mindful of their
familys biological heritage when marrying and establishing a hereditarily
healthy family that would augment the SS family community. For the
greater German audience, the articles in Das Schwarze Korps provided the
SS with an outlet to demonstrate how dedicated its men were to their
Fuehrer and to the Reich and what an example they were setting for the
entire Volk by adhering to the principles of eugenics. By publicly display-
ing the domestic goals of the organization, the newspaper divulged how
the most loyal members of the party and the regime were poised to lead
the German Volk when it came to family life and reproduction in the name
of creating a racial state and a greater Volksgemeinschaft.
The newspaper covered a wide range of topics. However, the SS re-
mained at the forefront of the contents in Das Schwarze Korps and was
always presented in a positive light, thus helping to create a public percep-
tion of the SS. In this regard, the newspapers chief editor, Gunter
dAlquen, created a newspaper geared toward the SS although it was
aimed at and reached a wider audience. Having an extensive readership
meant that Das Schwarze Korps was an ideal conduit through which the
SS could expound on the biological and cultural aspects of its family
community as well as justify its legitimacy. With this justification, most of
the articles dedicated to marriage, children, and the family espoused the
promotion of racially healthy unions and legitimate offspring. However,
13
Das Reich was launched by Joseph Goebbels in 1940; by 1943, each weekly
edition was running approximately 1.5 million copies. Das Schwarze Korps sold
over 1 million copies by 1939, and the next closest weekly newspaper was Der
Strmer, Julius Streichers anti-Semitic screed, which ran almost 400,000 copies as
of March 1944. Richard Grunberger, 12 Year Reich: A Social History of the Third
Reich (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), p. 400, Norbert Frei and Johannes
Schmitz, Journalismus im Dritten Reich (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989), p. 102,
William L. Combs, The Voice of the SS: A History of the SS Journal Das
Schwarze Korps (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), p. 20, Fritz Schmidt, Presse in
Fesseln, eine Schilderung des NS-Pressetrusts (Berlin: Verlag Archiv und Kartei,
1947), p. 218 and Befragung von Herrn Gunter dAlquen am 13/14 Januar 1968
im Mnchen-Gladbach, Institut fr Zeitgeschichte, ZS/2, pp. 29-31.
14
SS-Zeitung Das schwarze Korps, 27 May 1935, BA NS31/354, 47.
the newspaper did not limit itself to the conventional definitions of family.
Many articles did accept extramarital relations among racial peers for the
purpose of procreation; such children were welcome additions to the fami-
ly community and the racial state.15 Yet, few illegitimate children were
born to SS men, meaning that while the newspaper endorsed the more
liberal sexual mores advanced by the head of the SS, most articles, includ-
ing the ones discussed here, primarily focused on the promotion and appli-
cation of racial values within the context of children born to and raised by
SS men and their wives.16
One of the biological topics important in the SS as well as in Nazi
Germany was hereditary hygiene and racial care. Das Schwarze Korps
therefore ran articles emphasizing the significance of population politics
(Bevlkerungspolitik) in the Reich and the value of preserving and passing
on healthy Nordic blood.17 Articles about blood and race also mentioned
their importance for the goals of the SS, emphasizing that it was an organ-
ization of racially valuable soldiers who respected racial selection.18 A
couple of articles explained the process that an SS applicant had to go
through to join the order.19 One article from late 1935, The Inner Security
of the Reich, summarized the overall purpose of the SS, connecting its
vetting process with its core ideals of honor and loyalty.20 Twice, this
article declared that the SS had imposed the selection laws on itself and
was taking them so seriously that the children born to SS men would not
have the privilege of being accepted into the organization automatically;
15
Selected articles that discussed illegitimacy include An ihren Frchten, Das
Schwarze Korps, 9 July 1936, 11, Kind = Kind, Das Schwarze Korps, 18 March
1937, 9, Darauf knnen wir stolz sein, Das Schwarze Korps, 16 November 1939,
1, Ich fand wieder zu mir selbst zurck, Das Schwarze Korps, 9 May 1940, 6
and Gute Gelegenheit, Das Schwarze Korps, 4 July 1940, 2.
16
For more information on the regulation of extramarital sex, see Annette M.
Timm, Sex with a Purpose: Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and Militarized Mas-
culinity in the Third Reich, Journal of the History of Sexuality 11 (2002): 223-255
and for more on illegitimate children, namely those born in the Lebensborn pro-
gram, see Georg Lilienthal, Der Lebensborn e.V.: Ein Instrument nationalsozialis-
tischer Rassenpolitik (Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer, 1985).
17
For example, Erbgesund Erbkrank, Das Schwarze Korps, 3 March 1935, 11,
Ewiges Blut, Das Schwarze Korps, 26 June 1935, 14, Der neue Weg, Das
Schwarze Korps, 10 March 1938, 3-4 and Erst hinterher wei man es, Das
Schwarze Korps, 1 June 1944, 4.
18
Lebensgestaltung, Das Schwarze Korps, 27 March 1935, 1.
19
Was bin ich fr ein Rassentyp?, Das Schwarze Korps, 12 December 1935, 14
and Wer will unter die Soldaten, Das Schwarze Korps, 17 December 1936, 3.
20
Die innere Sicherung des Reichs, Das Schwarze Korps, 21 November 1935, 1-2.
Amy Carney 329
they too would have to be evaluated so that only individuals with the very
best German blood would belong to the SS.
Including this last point appears axiomatic in hindsight, given the
Gruppenfhrer oath that Himmler required of all SS Gruppenfhrer and
Obergruppenfhrer.21 He had created this oath asserting that one of the
greatest dangers to the future of the SS would be if the wives and sons
and daughters of SS men were automatically admitted into the organiza-
tion as members without prior examination. Future generations, he argued,
would not be admitted solely based on the merits of their forefathers. Just
because their fathers had belonged to the SS was not reason enough to
allow their admission as strict conditions for entry needed to be imposed
on each generation. As a result, the Gruppenfhrer oath bound the highest-
ranking officers to serve as the guardians of the blood and life laws of the
Schutzstaffel.22 These officers were responsible for inspecting all possi-
ble candidates and spouses while simultaneously being aware that such
scrutiny might lead them to have to reject their colleagues wives and
children, or even their own. However, Himmler created this oath in No-
vember 1936, one year after the newspaper had printed the aforementioned
article. A segment within the SS, the young editorial staff of Das
Schwarze Korps, had anticipated such an element in the Reichsfhrers
population policies and goals.23
Beyond this precept, the article The Inner Security of the Reich
brought up another issue: the engagement and marriage order. Himmler
had issued the original order on December 31, 1931.24 It was the first and
most significant of his eugenic-based orders. It established the racial and
biological foundation of the SS family community, consequently legiti-
mizing the purpose and value of all subsequent racial politics. The article
in Das Schwarze Korps acknowledged that this 1931 order represented the
first SS selection law, although it was neither the first nor the last article to
discuss the order. Others explained the purpose of the order, delving into
the various aspects of it, such as elucidating why RuSHA required both an
SS man and his fiance to submit a genealogical tree tracing their respec-
tive lineages back to 1800 as well as clarifying why the wife of an SS man
21
Grundgesetz ber die Vereidigung der SS-Obergruppen- und Gruppenfhrer als
Hter des Bluts- und Lebensgesetzes der Schutzstaffel, BA NS19/3902, 125.
22
Ibid., 126.
23
At the start of the newspaper, Gunter dAlquen was 25. His co-editors were his
brother Rolf dAlquen, aged 23, and Rudolf aus den Ruthen, aged 22. Mario Zeck,
Das Schwarze Korps: Geschichte und Gestalt des Organs der Reichsfhrung SS
(Tbingen: M. Niemeyer, 2002), pp. 68, 71, and 73.
24
SS-Befehl A Nr. 65, 31 December 1931, BA NS19/1934, 147.
had to be racially and hereditarily worthy to be accepted.25 Subsequent

articles also defended the original engagement and marriage order, pro-
claiming that the Reichsfhrer had intervened in the private affairs of his
men as a means of protecting the German race. Promoting healthy mar-
riages meant promoting healthy children, which in turn promoted a healthy
Volk.26
These selected articles revealed the marital ideals, racial beliefs, and
future ambitions of the SS. Others conveyed the overall importance of a
healthy marriage to the entire Volk and presented a larger context for
readers beyond the immediate SS audience. Part of that larger context was
provided by a Reich ministry health official, Dr. Arthur Gtt.27 Contrib-
uting an article in late October 1935, he briefly outlined the various he-
reditary health laws passed by the Nazi government.28 Among them, he
discussed the Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the Ger-
man Volk (Gesetz zum Schutz der Erbgesundheit des deutschen Volkes),
which the state had issued one week prior. Gtt defined the law as one
designed to promote the birth of valuable children by ensuring healthy
unions and preventing undesirable ones based on racial and hereditary
grounds. This law showed how race and hereditary health were insepara-
ble, a point which, as Gtt acknowledged, the SS had already recognized.
The organization had taken a leading role in protecting the blood and he-
reditary health of the German Volk. Gtt further proclaimed that the gov-
ernment could pass the laws, but that individuals themselves were ulti-
mately responsible for achieving the goals laid down in them, something
that SS men and their wives recognized and accepted with regard to their
marriages and families.
Additional articles promoted the biological merits of healthy marital
bonds, classifying marriage as the germ cell (Keimzelle) of the Volk. They
reinforced the idea that a marriage represented the beginning of a family
whose task was to preserve its heritage for the future. Its importance lay in
producing children; therefore, a childless marriage would be unable to
25
Wie ich meine Ahnen suche, Das Schwarze Korps, 3 October 1935, 4, Seine
Braut war zwei Zentimeter zu klein, Das Schwarze Korps, 26 December 1935, 5,
Eine Mahnung an Saboteure, Das Schwarze Korps, 13 February 1936, 6 and
Die arische Gromutter, Das Schwarze Korps, 3 December 1936, 4.
26
Warum Heiratsgenehmigung?, Das Schwarze Korps, 3 April 1935, 10 and
Das sogenannte Privatleben, Das Schwarze Korps, 16 March 1939, 1-2.
27
Gtt was also the chief of the SS Office for Population Politics and Hereditary
Health Care (Das Amt fr Bevlkerungspolitik und Erbgesundheitspflege im Stabe
des Reichsfhrers-SS).
28
Arthur Gtt, Ehegesundheitsgesetz und SS, Das Schwarze Korps, 24
November 1935, 1-2.
Amy Carney 331
contribute to the Volk.29 As one piece directly noted, the marriage is the
child and its upbringing in healthy and harmonious surroundings.30 The
newspaper continually promoted the connection between marriage and
family by publishing articles emphasizing the efficacy of an early mar-
riage. The basic message remained the same in every article: the younger
the couple was at the time of marriage, the greater the possibility for rais-
ing a family consisting of four or more children.31
Overall, these articles connected race and heredity with marriage and
family, thus promoting the biological worldview espoused by the SS and
the Nazi state and highlighting their ambition to endorse the notion of
purposeful sexuality, that is having sexual relations for the purpose of
procreation rather than pleasure.32 In addition, the racially-based discourse
found within the pages of Das Schwarze Korps promoted the SS family
community as a legitimate biological entity with the specific purpose of
establishing the future of the Third Reich. The articles clearly articulated
that race and heredity defined the SS family community. However, while
race and heredity formed the core of all SS population policies and goals,
the SS family community was more than a simple biological entity. Das
Schwarze Korps also printed articles that publicized other ideals relevant
to the foundation and success of the SS family community. These ideals
promoted the validity of the Sippengemeinschaft as a cultural entity. Tak-
en in tandem with the biological basis, they justified the objectives and
importance of the SS family community within the Third Reich.
One of the frequent topics in the newspaper was the family, and there
were two sections dedicated to familial matters, one or both of which ap-
peared in nearly every edition of the newspaper. The first was called On
Relations and Family (Aus Sippe und Familie). The initiative for this
29
Ein Rechtswahrer zur Ehescheidungsreform, Das Schwarze Korps, 24 December
1936, 6, Ahnenehrung einst und heute, Das Schwarze Korps, 18 February 1937, 6
and Das Kind heiligt die Ehe, Das Schwarze Korps, 21 October 1937, 6.
30
Im Mittelpunkt: das Kind, Das Schwarze Korps, 21 October 1937, 6.
31
Wann sollen wir heiraten?, Das Schwarze Korps, 10 September 1936, 2, Ein
Problem, das noch nicht geklrt ist, Das Schwarze Korps, 31 December 1936, 2,
Eine unerlliche Voraussetzung, Das Schwarze Korps, 21 January 1937, 2,
Weitere Vorschlge erwnscht, Das Schwarze Korps, 18 February 1937, 2,
Unsere Leser schlagen vor, Das Schwarze Korps, 4 March 1937, 6 and Jung
gefreit, Das Schwarze Korps, 8 June 1939, 10-11.
32
The term purposeful sexuality comes from Timm, Sex with a Purpose, 225.
In addition, both she and Dagmar Herzog have shown that sexuality was about
more than procreation, namely also pleasure. Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism:
Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2005).
segment came from Himmler, who wanted all family news published un-
der this heading. He requested that the men be made aware that they need-
ed to report their family news to RuSHA, which then forwarded the mate-
rial to Das Schwarze Korps.33 This column ran periodically from May 8,
1935 until the last edition of the paper on March 29, 1945. As one of the
semi-regular columns of the paper where SS men could list their marriages
and the births of their children, On Relations and Family communicated
the everyday reality of SS families. Throughout the publication of the
newspaper, the style of this column and its placement in the paper varied,
but the information it presented remained relatively consistent. Early edi-
tions listed engagements and marriages first and then births in a column
primarily located on page four of the more than twenty-page newspaper.
The column took up about one quarter of a page on which engagements,
marriages, and births were divided according to the unit in which a fianc,
husband, or father served; the date of birth and the gender of the newborns
were often listed as well.
In August 1936, Himmler decided that engagements should no longer
be included.34 Other than this omission, the column remained the same for
most of the pre-war period. It varied only in the first five issues of 1939.
Its heading changed to the lengthier We have the will for the victory of
the children, and we are gaining this victory and only recorded births.35
At that time, the newspaper did not list the men by unit or the children by
date of birth; instead, the five issues were organized completely at random.
After this alteration, the heading returned to On Relations and Family.
For the remaining months of 1939 the column, however, appeared on page
five of the still more than 20-page newspaper, now taking up the entire
page instead of only a column. The most dramatic change was that the
column now also contained pictures of newborn babies, infants, and tod-
dlers. Starting with the May 18 edition, one final change was implement-
ed: the birth announcements now stated the number of children per SS
family. Although the number went as high as ten children for some fami-
lies, the majority of the SS families announced the birth of their first, sec-
ond, or third child.
33
Familien-Nachrichten fr Das Schwarze Korps, 30 March 1935, BA
NS31/354, 46 and Familien-Nachrichten fr Das Schwarze Korps, 15 June
1937, BA NS2/155, 4.
34
Letter from Rolf dAlquen to Heinrich Himmler and RuSHA, 1 August 1936,
NA T580/329/ Ordnung 50/no frame number.
35
Wir haben den Willen zum Sieg des Kindes und wir werden diesen Sieg
erfechten.
Amy Carney 333
Following a twenty-one month hiatus from mid-August 1939 through

mid-May 1941, the On Relations and Family column was resumed,
returning to a text format similar in size and style to that of earlier edi-
tions.36 Marriage announcements and some intermittently included en-
gagement announcements were still placed above the birth listings. How-
ever, the latter were organized differently: the births were listed by gender
with the boys born to SS men heading the list followed by the girls, both
in order by date of birth. These announcements also gave the newborns
first name. The 1942-1945 editions continued this format, although when
it came to reporting births, they often announced how many children an SS
man had altogether. Most of the articles were to be found on page six,
occasionally turning up instead on page seven, eight, or nine, which was
closer to the end of the paper. During the war, the total length of Das
Schwarze Korps shrank to about eight to ten pages per issue. On Rela-
tions and Family was consistently placed near the end of the much shorter
newspaper. In fact, in the final edition of Das Schwarze Korps on March
29, 1945, On Relations and Family was the last column listed on the
backpage.
Appearing almost 300 times throughout the ten-year-run of the news-
paper, the On Relations and Family column made a significant contribu-
tion regarding the topics of marriage and the SS family. First and fore-
most, this column publicly demonstrated the establishment of Germanys
new racial elite; it literally catalogued the naissance of Nazi nobility, giv-
ing tangible credence to Himmlers population policies. Publicizing the
birth announcements on a superficial level demonstrated the success of
eugenics as it gave definitive evidence of the growing number of births.
Seen from this angle, the number of the most racially fit members of the
German Volk was continually growing.
Additionally, this birth announcement column served to promote the
ideal of prolific parenthood. It highlighted the merits of having a large
family, especially during 1939 when the announcements were listed by the
number of children a family had. This type of familial announcement
openly demonstrated eugenic success since announcing the birth of their
child publicly revealed that an SS man and his spouse had fulfilled their
biological duty to the Reichsfhrer SS, the Fuehrer, and the Reich. Like-
36
The newspaper halted publication of this column between August 17, 1939 and
May 15, 1941 without citing a reason. As these dates roughly correlate with the
weeks prior to the opening of the Second World War through a month before the
commencement of Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, perhaps the
paper felt it necessary to concentrate on the successful war efforts of the German
armed forces, including the Waffen-SS, which had its own section in the paper.
wise, the birth of a baby literally meant the childs victory on the home
front parallel to military triumph on the battlefield during the early years
of the war. These newborn babies were to be the Germans who, in the
future, would safeguard what their fathers had conquered.
Lastly, On Relations and Family kept the ideal of parenthood alive
for a decade. Its continual presence in the newspaper connected children
with the sustenance of Germany. The column clearly held greater im-
portance in the early years when it occupied a position closer to the front
of the newspaper. It was never headline news, but it warranted considera-
ble attention due to having been placed in the front section of the paper. Its
significance grew during 1939 when photographs of babies, infants, and
toddlers accompanied the announcements, thus bolstering the idea of fami-
ly in the pre-war months. During the middle and later years of the war, the
significance of this column diminished, which could be seen by its place-
ment close to the end of the increasingly shorter newspaper. Nonetheless,
once Das Schwarze Korps had resumed its publication in 1941, the On
Relations and Family column remained until the end to uphold the idea
that the children of the SS represented a key element to the future of the
Third Reich.
Another section in Das Schwarze Korps relating to familial matters
was called Family Announcements (Familien Anzeigen). First appearing
on June 19, 1935 and running fairly consistently through the last edition
on March 29, 1945, the column served a similar function as the On Rela-
tions and Family column.37 Featured in the classified section of the news-
paper well over 450 times, it also announced engagements, marriages, and
births. However, Family Announcements differed from On Relations
and Family in several ways. To begin with, the initiative for this column
did not come from Himmler, and the newspaper did not receive any in-
formation for it from RuSHA. On the contrary, Family Announcements
were privately placed and paid for advertisements.38 The newspaper rou-
tinely ran a small blurb on the page of the column that indicated when and
where the information to be published had to be received and how much it
would cost. The editors requested that the material be submitted by the end
of the week to the advertising department located at the papers main of-
fice.39 As with most classified sections of newspapers, the Family An-
37
There were only two gaps without this section, in April and May 1937 and from
mid-May to late July 1941.
38
This concept is much clearer in German as the word Anzeigen also means adver-
tisements.
39
At first, ads had to be submitted by Saturday morning. Then, as of July 1936, the
newspaper requested submission by Friday morning. From then until the end of the
Amy Carney 335
nouncements column was located toward the end of the paper and, de-
pending on how many announcements there were, the column took up
anywhere from one-fifth of a page to two full pages.
Most of the announcements were placed by SS families. While the par-
ents of a couple periodically placed ads, most SS couples announced their
engagement and marriage themselves. In every case, a couple would an-
nounce their names and the date of their engagement or marriage and the
mans SS rank and military unit. For example, SS-Standartenfhrer Kuno
von Eltz-Rbenach, later a Brigadefhrer in RuSHA, announced both his
engagement and his marriage, as did SS-Standartenfhrer Gunter dAlquen
and SS-Untersturmfhrer Rolf dAlquen who, like his brother, worked for
the newspaper.40 As for the birth announcements, again, they were primar-
ily placed by SS couples, although on a few occasions, it was only the SS
man who made the announcement or an entire SS unit which placed a
collective announcement on behalf of its men.41 The parents typically
listed the name, gender, and date of birth of their newborn. Occasionally,
they added which number child it was. Sometimes they even phrased the
announcement in a somewhat cutesy manner such as stating that their first
son had become a big brother or that their three boys had a baby sister to
welcome into the family.
Some of the SS officers who announced the birth of their children in
Family Announcements included SS-Obergruppenfhrers Richard Wal-
ther Darr, Friedrich Krger, and Udo von Woyrsch, SS-Gruppenfhrers
Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, August Heimeyer, Reinhard Heydrich,
Gnther Pancke, and Karl Wolff, and SS-Brigadefhrers Werner Best and
Richard Hildebrandt.42 Similar to On Relations and Family, these pur-
chased announcements served two purposes. Within the SS, routinely
papers run, the day changed periodically, primarily back and forth between
Thursday and Friday.
40
The announcements were placed on the following dates: Kuno von Eltz-
Rbenach (7 October 1937, 22 and 19 May 1938, 18), Gunter dAlquen (21 Octo-
ber 1937, 18 and 11 November 1937, 18), and Rolf dAlquen (30 December 1937,
18 and 14 April 1938, 17).
41
For an example of the latter, see 20 March 1941, 12.
42
The ranks listed were not necessarily the highest obtained by each man, but the
rank listed at the time of the announcement: Richard Walther Darr (8 September
1938, 18), Friedrich Krger (19 March 1936, 14), Udo von Woyrsch (16 July
1936, 18), Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski (27 August 1936, 19), August Heimey-
er (19 March 1936, 14, 7 October 1937, 22 and 12 December 1940, 14), Reinhard
Heydrich (20 April 1939, 32), Gnther Pancke (19 November 1936, 18 and 24
August 1939, 18), Karl Wolff (23 January 1936, 12 and 30 March 1938, 18), Wer-
ner Best (3 August 1939, 17), and Richard Hildebrandt (16 July 1936, 18).
including such information in Family Announcements promoted the

celebration of a new life and the expansion of the SS family community. It
also set a good example for other SS men to follow, especially when high-
ranking SS officers placed announcements; their announcements sent a
stronger message than the listings in On Relations and Family because
SS men voluntarily announced their family news as opposed to RuSHA
supplying the relevant details.
There was one other noteworthy element to Family Announcements.
Engagements, marriages, and births only constituted one part of the col-
umn; many spaces were filled with the obituaries of fallen soldiers.43 The
vast majority of these obituaries were those of SS men, although occasion-
ally SS men and their families placed an announcement to commemorate
the loss of a parent.44 Most of the obituaries, however, were placed by SS
men seeking to honor a fallen comrade from their unit, and sometimes a
soldiers widow placed an announcement. Standing out from the other
three types of announcements by its black bold print edging, an obituary
gave the deceased soldiers name, rank, age, military unit, and death date;
oftentimes it also included kind words about the departed comrade, com-
mending him for his bravery and loyalty.
Prior to the war, obituaries took up no more than half the space allocat-
ed for Family Announcements. They frequently occupied little space or
none at all. This greatly changed as the war progressed and death began to
occupy more space than life to the point where an entire page or more was
often devoted to mourning those who had lost their lives fighting for Ger-
many. Within a few editions after the start of the war, most of the obituar-
ies also displayed a cross with a small swastika in the middle, the same
basic design as that of the various medals which soldiers could earn while
alive. Therefore, while the other announcements attested to the steady
growth of the SS family community, the obituaries drew attention to its
potential decline as soldiers lost their lives fighting for the fatherland.
Furthermore, as of late July 1941, there was a correlation between the
Family Announcements and the On Relations and Family columns:
the former only reported deaths and the latter only marriages and births.
There were a few editions where one appeared and the other did not (nor-
mally Family Announcements did and On Relations and Family did
43
Aus Sippe und Familie did list deaths, but these listings were rare and only at
the beginning of its run.
44
The families of Darr, Himmler, Heydrich, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner all pur-
chased announcements following the loss of a parent: Darrs mother (30 July
1936, 17), Himmlers father (5 November 1936, 18), Heydrichs father (1 Septem-
ber 1938, 18) and Kaltenbrunners father (15 September 1938, 18).
Amy Carney 337
not), but on the many occasions when both were issued, they appeared on
the same page, one above the other. By the later years of the war, the col-
umns appeared in tandem, bearing witness to the state in which the SS
family community found itself. Combined, On Relations and Family and
Family Announcements were the most important columns of Das
Schwarze Korps dedicated to the SS family. They illustrated to both the SS
readership and a wider audience the place which marriage, children, and
family occupied in the organizations population policies. These two col-
umns were a prominent means of public discourse that promoted the sig-
nificance of the SS Sippengemeinschaft as a cultural community.
However, other individual articles published in the newspaper support-
ed the notion of showcasing the SS family as a model for the Volksge-
meinschaft, thus demonstrating that the ideal for these families was to
serve as both the racial ideal and the role model for German society. One
way in which Das Schwarze Korps endorsed the significance of the SS
family was by publicizing family-related events of the SS. The most nota-
ble of those events was the family night (Sippenabend). These evenings
were promoted by RuSHA, which wanted the get-togethers to be occa-
sions where the family and friends of SS men could gain greater insight
into the purpose of the SS.45 In particular, it was important for the wives
and fiances of SS men to attend these get-togethers so that they could
gain some understanding about the community to which they and their
men belonged and become willing to participate actively in that communi-
ty. On a dozen occasions, Das Schwarze Korps ran small blurbs reporting
on family nights that had taken place in various SS units throughout the
Reich.46 Most of these articles commented that the evenings were meant to
solidify the SS family community. Invited speakers, generally high-
ranking SS officers, spoke on relevant topics such as the development and
the tasks of the SS, the responsibility to have a healthy family, and the
45
RuSHAs expectations for the Sippenabend can be found in Wie gestalten wir
einen Sippenabend?, BA NS2/82, 185 and Der Sippengedanke der SS im
Kriege, BA NS2/42, 1-2.
46
Sippenabend der Sanitter, Das Schwarze Korps, 25 March 1937, 3,
Sippenabend der Sanitter, Das Schwarze Korps, 1 July 1937, 4, Erster
Sippenabend in Linz, Das Schwarze Korps, 7 July 1938, 4, Sommerfest mit
unserem FM, Das Schwarze Korps, 18 August 1938, 3, Sippenabend, Das
Schwarze Korps, 16 March 1939, 4, Sanittsabteilung, Das Schwarze Korps, 13
April 1939, 4, Sippenabend, Das Schwarze Korps, 4 May 1939, 4,
Sippenabend, Das Schwarze Korps, 18 May 1939, 4, Sippenabend, Das
Schwarze Korps, 25 May 1939, 4 and Sippenabend, Das Schwarze Korps, 8 June
1939, 4. Although all of these citations are from before the war, the documents
from RuSHA cited above indicate that family nights were still held during the war.
fight against the declining birthrate. In addition, there were refreshments,

singing, and dancing as well as musical and artistic performances.
The inclusion of the SS family nights demonstrated how the newspaper
kept its SS readership updated on activities within the organization and its
non-SS audience informed about how the SS was contributing to the Volk.
It was one more way for Das Schwarze Korps to succeed in exemplifying
how the SS family was an integral and leading element of the Volk. How-
ever, the newspaper was not satisfied with simply speaking about the fami-
ly in generalities. Active parenting was another component, and many
articles promoted the parents involvement in raising their children. For a
long time, the mother had been seen as the primary caregiver in the Ger-
man family, and the newspaper maintained this perspective.47 Whereas it
certainly never argued for parity between parents or suggested that a hus-
band take over the responsibility for child-rearing, it did publish articles
emphasizing a fathers essential role in the life of his children. While nev-
er downplaying the significance of race and heredity with regards to re-
production, the newspaper nevertheless promoted the view that fatherhood
was not limited to a biological contribution. As already shown in the
aforementioned piece Is this unmanly?, fathers were expected to partici-
pate in raising and educating their offspring in addition to, although never
in replacement of, the care provided by mothers.
One article which emphasized the active role of the father was entitled
Best Friends. It focused on the time a father should spend with his older
children, especially his sons.48 The authors emphasized the fond memories
47
The following articles praised women for their work as mothers: Wie man die
deutsche Mutter nicht ehren sollte, Das Schwarze Korps, 22 May 1935, 5,
Aussicht auf Mutterschaft, Das Schwarze Korps, 22 May 1935, 16, Die
Mutter, Das Schwarze Korps, 19 June 1935, 10, Frauen sind keine Mnner!,
Das Schwarze Korps, 12 March 1935, 1-2, Junge Mutter, Das Schwarze Korps,
28 May 1936, 11, Noch einmal das Generationsproblem, Das Schwarze Korps,
11 June 1936, 6, Frau soll Frau sein, Das Schwarze Korps, 3 December 1936,
12, Mutter, Das Schwarze Korps, 7 October 1937, 8, Heilig ist uns, Das
Schwarze Korps, 30 December 1937, 3 and 9, Die ganze Aufgabe der Frau, Das
Schwarze Korps, 22 June 1939, 6 and Das Wunder nach einmal erleben, Das
Schwarze Korps, 22 February 1940, 4. Many historians have also researched wom-
en as mothers including Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Society (New York:
Barnes and Noble, Books, 1975), Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland:
Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martins Press, 1987) and
Lisa Pine, Nazi Family Policy 1933-1945 (Oxford: Berg, 1997).
48
Die besten Freunde, Das Schwarze Korps, 17 August 1939, 8-9.
Amy Carney 339
they had of their fathers.49 These interactions included playing boyhood

games and listening to their fathers telling them about when they were
young. The authors claimed that in this time together, the father ceased to
be an authority figure and instead became a comrade who taught his sons
the value of love, respect, and trust. [We] believe today, the authors
contended, that something like a camaraderie developed between us and
our fathers in these hours.50 They argued that all fathers could make time
for their children and that no father was able to claim the opposite because,
if nothing else, he could spend time with them when he was on vacation.
The authors also derided as cowardly the fathers who would not be seen
outside cavorting with their children, chastising Daddy, you are fool-
ish!51 Nothing can replace the time a father spends with his children and,
while acknowledging that the activities might be tiring, the authors en-
thused that the rewards were worthwhile.
As with the article Is this unmanly?, Best Friends was written in
the month preceding the start of the Second World War. With the outbreak
of the war, the newspaper had many new issues and concerns to address.
Nonetheless, the family remained a relevant topic, as already seen in the
continuing presence of On Relations and Family and Family An-
nouncements. The same can be said for the issue of fatherhood; the
newspaper published many articles upholding fatherhood as a responsibil-
ity no less significant than any other contribution to the war effort. Article
after article appealed to SS men to have children: [T]he victory of arms
must also be the victory of the commitment to the child.52 However,
while the basis of this responsibility was biological in nature, many arti-
cles continued to sustain the argument that fatherhood was about more
than just biology and that all fathers had the possibility to continue to
participate in the lives of their children in spite of the war.
One means of sustaining an active paternal role was through corre-
spondence. Das Schwarze Korps printed letters from fathers at the front,
showing them taking pride in their children from far away. For example,
the newspaper reported the immense joy felt by SS-Obersturmfhrer
Jurgen V. when he became the father to both a son and a daughter within
two years of his February 1940 marriage. Through my splendid children,
49
The article was written anonymously in the third person plural. However, it was
most likely written by Gunter dAlquen, Rudolf aus den Ruthen, and/or Rolf
dAlquen, all of whom were fathers of at least one child when this article was
published.
50
Ibid., 8.
51
Ibid., 9.
52
Neues Leben fr vergossenes Blut, Das Schwarze Korps, 15 May 1941, 8.
he wrote, whom I could hold in my arms for only a few days, I have
become infinitely rich.53 Juergen V. found in his children a reason for
fighting the war, as did other soldiers who professed that despite the hard-
ship of being separated from their offspring and having to miss out on
seeing them grow up, they now fought so that their sons would not have to
fight in the future.54
Beyond finding in their children a reason for fighting the war, these
letters demonstrated how fathers remained a part of their childrens lives
during the war. Das Schwarze Korps published several letters from fathers
at the front to their children to demonstrate how men could still influence
the upbringing of their offspring. In a letter from February 1941, a father
used his own frontline experiences to teach his son about the value of
vigilance. As a soldier in the Waffen-SS, he related everything in terms of
military preparation. He advised his growing boy to perform his duties
thoroughly, and he warned his son never to hesitate, but to act decisively,
especially when facing an opponent.55
Whereas the communication between a soldier and his children for the
most part took place by way of letters, occasionally a soldier would have
the opportunity to see them when on leave from the front.56 This time at
home, according to the newspaper, allowed the father to influence his
children, as shown in the article Father on Leave.57 It shared the daily
interactions of a father with his family while on a reprieve from military
service. Neither the father nor his children could conceal their elation at
seeing one another. The boys vied for their fathers attention and bom-
barded him with questions about the front, which the father patiently an-
swered. The article related how the family members found mutual comfort
in each others presence. Even after the father had returned to the front, the
sons did not let his memory slip away. They relived their encounter with
him over and over again and recalled what their father had said and done
while at home. As in earlier articles that highlighted the interaction be-
tween fathers and their children, this one had pictures of the father playing
games with his children, tucking them into bed, and demonstrating his
53
Strker als alle Einwnde: Ein glcklicher Vater, Das Schwarze Korps, 1
October 1942, 4.
54
Fr meine drei Jungen, Das Schwarze Korps, 25 January 1940, 7 and
bertriebene Lebenssicherung, Das Schwarze Korps, 7 September 1944, 2.
55
Frontsoldat schreibt seinem Sohn, Das Schwarze Korps, 27 February 1941, 7.
56
Other examples of letters from fathers to their children are in Der Soldat an
seinen Sohn, Das Schwarze Korps, 15 May 1941, 7 and Brcke der Gedanken,
Das Schwarze Korps, 18 December 1941, 5.
57
Vater auf Urlaub, Das Schwarze Korps, 4 January 1940, 11-12.
Amy Carney 341
duties at the front. These pictures proved that even during wartime, a man
had the ability to serve as both a soldier to the Reich and a father to his
children.
Overall, as these few examples illustrate, Das Schwarze Korps empha-
sized both the biological and cultural aspects of the SS family community.
Its articles justified the value of the family community as a legitimate
biological entity with a specific purpose in the SS and the Third Reich, and
they aspired to show how the SS sought to become the racially superior
vanguard of the Nazi state. The material published in the newspaper was
completely relevant to the SS as the men of this organization remained its
target audience. Yet, the newspaper also aimed at reaching a wider audi-
ence, and as the second largest weekly in the Third Reich, Das Schwarze
Korps was the public voice of the SS.58 There is no doubt that anyone
who read this newspaper would have had a clear idea of what the SS stood
for and how its family community was an important part of its identity. By
the end of the Third Reich, the SS family community had not achieved the
population goals that Himmler had hoped it would. Nonetheless, exploring
its contours and some of the public measures used to create an SS commu-
nity within the larger Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, such as the articles found
in Das Schwarze Korps, provides a stronger understanding of the organi-
zation and how it sought to validate its attempt to become the racial aris-
tocracy within a racial state
58
Combs described the newspaper using this term.
THE MORAL RIGOR OF IMMORALITY:
THE SPECIAL CRIMINAL COURTS OF THE SS
CHRISTOPHER THEEL
I. The Criminal Jurisdiction of the Armed SS and Police

Former SS Oberfhrer Dr. Gnther Reinecke unwittingly described the
essence and efficacy of the SS and police criminal courts when he was
questioned as an SS witness in the Trial of the Major War Criminals be-
fore the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg on 6 August 1946:
If an organization has criminal goals and has developed criminal behav-
ior, the criminal courts of an organization such as this by their structure,
content, and activities give evidence that they back these criminal purpos-
es and activities.1 Afterwards, he asserted that exactly the opposite was
the case. As long as it existed, the SS had the principle of combating crim-
inality at all costs in conjunction with an entirely well-ordered administra-
tion of justice.2
However, we may assume that Reinecke knew better. Since 1936, he
had been the head of one of the main departments of the SS Court3 that
reported directly to the Reichsfhrer-SS, Heinrich Himmler. In this posi-
tion he had directed the preparations for the introduction of SS and police
criminal courts and had promoted the process of establishing them in Oc-
tober 1939. Later on, he supervised their expansion. He became the head
of the central SS Legal Office of the SS Court which, because it had just
1
Testimony of Dr. Gnther Reinecke on 6 August 1946. In: Der Prozess gegen die
Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen Militrgerichtshof Nrnberg 14.
November 1945 - 1. Oktober 1946, 42 volumes, volume XX, Nuremberg 1947-
1949, pp. 453-472, here 467.
2
Ibid.
3
Cf. Die SS. Geschichte, Aufgabe und Organisation der Schutzstaffeln der
NSDAP, ed. on behalf of the Reichsfhrers SS by SS-Standartenfhrer Gunter d
Alquen (Berlin 1939), pp. 15-16, 21, 30 (organigram) and Organisationsbuch der
NSDAP, 1st edition, published by Reichsorganisationsleiter der NSDAP (Munich,
1936), pp. 419 and 422.
344 The Moral Rigor of Immorality
been raised to the level of an independent Main Office SS Court

(Hauptamt SS-Gericht) in June 1939, made it the central office and min-
isterial level for the special criminal courts of the SS and the police.4 As
such, it was his job to rearrange the entire legal system on behalf of the
Reichsfhrer SS [...] that was supposed to find its way from the SS to the
people.5 The idea behind the new SS Court was to subject members of the
SS to courts that were filled with SS members who had not only proved
themselves as soldiers but also by their world view. They were best-suited
to determine the laws in the SS.6 It was also to develop truly National
Socialist legal practices that would later sweep away the general criminal
justice system.7 Since 1942, Reinecke had also been the permanent
chairman of the Supreme SS and Police Court at the Main Office SS Court
in Munich. The SS Legal Office and the chairmanship of the Supreme SS
and Police Court were linked to each other, to guarantee the uniformity of
legal views and court decisions in the SS and the police.8 This is the rea-
son why all verdicts by the SS and Police Courts constituting more than
one year of imprisonment were assessed by their own department (current
criminal cases) at the Main Office SS Court. In other words, the overall
direction of the legal and court system of the SS and the police was in
Reineckes hands long before he finally became the nominal deputy head
of the Main Office SS Court in July 1944 pursuant to Basic Guideline
4
Organisationsbuch der NSDAP, 7th edition, published by Reichsorganisationslei-
ter der NSDAP (Munich, 1943), p. 420. See the order by the Reichsfhrer-SS and
Chief of the German Police, dated 1 June 1939, on transforming the SS Court into
an independent SS Court Main Office (BArch Berlin, NS 19/3901: SS-Befehle,
volume 2 (1934-1944), sheet 77).
5
Assessment in the proposal for promotion to SS-Standartenfhrer, dated 23 Feb-
ruary 1943 (BArch Berlin, previously BDC, film role SSO 019 B: SS-Fhrer-
Personalakte Dr. Gnther Reinecke * 18 April 1908).
6
Dr. Gnther Reinecke, Referat ber den Entwurf einer SS-Strafgerichtsordnung,
given on May 31, 1938 in Dresden, in Werner Schubert (ed.), Akademie fr
Deutsches Recht 1933-1945. Protokolle der Ausschsse, volume VIII: Ausschsse
fr Strafrecht, Strafvollstreckungsrecht, Wehrstrafrecht, Strafgerichtsbarkeit der
SS und des Reichsarbeitsdienstes, Polizeirecht sowie fr Wohlfahrts- und
Frsorgerecht (Bewahrungsrecht) (Frankfurt a. M., 1999), pp. 475-480, here 475.
7
Bericht ber die Dienstbesprechung der dienstltesten SS-Richter in Danzig und
Zoppot vom 30. April bis 2. Mai 1942 (BArch Berlin, NS 7/4: Erlass-Sammlung
des Hauptamtes SS-Gericht volume 3 (January to June 1942), sheet 110-117, here
110).
8
Letter from SS-Obersturmbannfhrer Dr. Gnther Reinecke to the SS judge with
the Reichsfhrer-SS, SS-Obersturmbannfhrer Horst Bender, dated 4 August 1942
(BArch Berlin, NS 7/8: Organisation des Hauptamtes SS-Gericht (1940-1944),
sheet pp.9.
Christopher Theel 345
No. 1 by Reichsfhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler that a lawyer may never be

the head of the SS Court.9
II. The Tubner Trial 1943

Three years before Reinecke was interrogated as a witness in Nuremberg,
he served as the presiding judge of the Supreme SS and Police Court in
Munich, which imposed a ten-year penal sentence on SS Untersturmfhrer
Max Tubner on 24 May 1943. Tubner had been the commander of a
maintenance repair platoon at the Command Staff of the Reichsfhrer-
SS in the Ukraine. On this assignment, he had instigated his subordinates
to shoot and kill large numbers of Jewish men, women, and children be-
tween September and November 1941. Additionally, many of the victims
had been brutally maltreated before they were murdered, something in
which Tubner had also been involved. Altogether, Tubner and his men
had murdered approximately one thousand people in only two months.
Furthermore, Tubner had the atrocities committed by himself and his men
photographed. As the Supreme SS and Police Court declared in its judg-
ment, these were for the most part pictures that record the most frighten-
ing disturbances, and many of them are shameless and arouse disgust.10
When soon afterwards he had even bragged about his deed and shown the
photographs around for this purpose, the SS and police criminal courts
became aware of his activities and had him arrested at the end of April
1942.11
The verdict of the Supreme SS and Police Court in Munich in the
Tubner criminal case started with the words: The defendant is a fanatical
enemy of the Jews.12 The grounds for the judgment state that the de-
9
Grundstzliche Richtlinie Nr. 1 des Reichsfhrers-SS, dated 16 August 1942
(BArch Berlin, NS 19/1913: SS- und Polizeigerichtsbarkeit. various matters
(1942), sheet 9).
10
The wording of the verdict of the Supreme SS and Police Court in Munich, dated
24 May 1943, is printed almost in its entirety in Ernst Klee/Willi Dressen/Volker
Rie, Schne Zeiten. Judenmord aus der Sicht der Tter und Gaffer, 5th edition
(Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 1988), pp. 183-192, here 185. An English translation is
available under the title The Good Old Days (New York: Free Press, 1988), pp.
196-207.
11
Yehoshua Robert Bchler offers the most detailed description of the facts and
circumstances Unworthy Behavior: The Case of SS Officer Max Tubner,
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 17 (2003) no. 3, pp. 409-429, here 412-416.
12
Verdict by the Supreme SS and Police Court, dated 24 May 1943, quoted by
Klee/Dressen/Rie, Schne Zeiten, p. 184. Cf. also Dick de Mildt, Getting
Away with Murder: The Tubner Case, in Nathan Stoltzfus/Henry Friedlander
fendant shall not be punished because of his activities involving the Jews
as such. The Jews have to be destroyed, thus none of the dead Jews is a
loss. Even if the defendant were to have said that destroying Jews was the
job of commandos especially set up for this work, we should make allow-
ances for the fact that he might have believed to be authorized to partici-
pate in the destruction of Jewry. Actual hatred of Jews is the driving moti-
vation for the defendant. Unfortunately, he let himself get carried away
[...] to perform acts of cruelty unworthy of a German man and an SS Fueh-
rer [...] It is not the way of Germans to apply Bolshevist methods when
destroying the worst enemy of our people. Unfortunately, the defendants
actions border alarmingly on this type of behavior [...]13
III. Military Jurisdiction of the German Waffen-SS

Being the military courts of the Waffen-SS and the police, the SS and
police criminal courts probably prosecuted most of the normal crimes of
SS and police members. Altogether, we only have a minority of verdicts
by the SS and Police Courts because the SS judges (turning a well-known
phrase by Rolf Hochhuth from Causa Filbinger on its head) were smarter
than those in the Army, Navy and Air Force and destroyed their files at the
end of the war.14 To judge from its content and the choice of words, the
Tubner verdict rendered by the Supreme SS and Police Court may have
been an extreme exception. In other words, there were greater odds of its
escaping the ravages of war and being passed down to posterity because of
its exceptional significance. Truth be told, the reasons for the verdict in the
Tubner case express the substantial legal convictions of the SS that
emerged from their elitist and exclusive concept of law and decisively
shaped the way in which the SS and police criminal courts applied the
(eds.), Nazi Crimes and the Law (Cambridge/Massachusetts: Cambridge Universi-

ty Press, 2008), pp. 101-112.
13
Klee/Dressen/Rie, Schne Zeiten, pp. 187-188, see also BArch Berlin, NS
7/1017: Strafsache Max Tubner (copies from his SS Fhrer Personal File, BArch
Berlin, previously BDC, film role SSO 171 B: Max Tubner *22 May 1910).
14
Cf. Rolf Hochhuth, Schwierigkeiten, die wahre Geschichte zu erzhlen, Die
Zeit, dated February 17, 1978, No. 8, p. 41, and generally Heinz Hrten/Wolfgang
Jger/Hugo Ott, Hans Filbinger, Der Fall und die Fakten. Eine historische und
politologische Analyse (Mainz: v. Hase & Koehler, 1980) and Wolfram Wette
(ed.), Filbinger eine deutsche Karriere (Springe: zu Klampen, 2006).
law.15 It was no coincidence that after its introduction it reads triumphant-

ly:
The times belong to the past when the SS man was subject to civil courts
that were not capable of empathizing with the vision of the SS and were
therefore incapable of doing justice to their functions.16
In general, the same laws were valid in the Wehrmacht as in the Waffen-
SS during the war. However, just as the courts of the Wehrmacht, the SS
and police criminal courts did not have independent jurisdiction according
to the rule of law. Instead, they were an instrument of military leader-
ship.17 Their main task was maintaining the manly discipline of the
soldiers and the troops fighting effectiveness. We can see the extent to
which the special criminal courts of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS
had the mission of being an instrument of military leadership from the fact
that the lord of the court (Gerichtsherr), meaning every military com-
mander, was the sole master and convening authority of military criminal
proceedings in the war.18 It was he who ordered preliminary investiga-
tions, and it was he who then ordered either an indictment or the proceed-
ings to be discontinued. He also appointed the court and those judging the
case and decided on the council for the prosecution. When the court had
come to a verdict, the lord of the court subsequently decided whether or
15
Cf. Bernd Wegner, Die Sondergerichtsbarkeit von SS und Polizei. Militrjustiz
oder Grundlegung einer SS-gemen Rechtsordnung?, in Ursula Bttner (ed.),
Das Unrechtsregime. Internationale Forschung ber den Nationalsozialismus,
volume 1 (Hamburg: Christians, 1986), pp. 243-259, as an excerpt also printed in
Bernd Wegner, Hitlers Politische Soldaten: Die Waffen-SS 1933-1945. Leitbild,
Struktur und Funktion einer nationalsozialistischen Elite, 3rd extended edition
(Paderborn/Munich/Vienna/Zurich: Schningh, 1997), pp. 319-332. Bianca
Vieregge, Die Gerichtsbarkeit einer Elite. Nationalsozialistische Rechtsprechung
am Beispiel der SS- und Polizei-Gerichtsbarkeit, 1st edition (Baden-Baden:
Nomos, 2002).
16
Disziplinare und gerichtliche Bestrafung (BArch Berlin, NSD 41/3 1940/41:
Mitteilungen ber die SS- und Polizeigerichtsbarkeit. Herausgegeben vom
Reichsfhrer-SS und Chef der Deutschen Polizei, Hauptamt SS-Gericht. volume I
(1940/41), issue 2 (Oktober 1940), pp. 25-30, here 27 f), also quoted by Vieregge,
Die Gerichtsbarkeit einer Elite, p. 17.
17
Cf. Manfred Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmachtjustiz 1933-1945 (Paderborn/
Munich/Vienna/Zurich: Schningh, 2005). See also James J. Weingartner, Law
and Justice in the Nazi SS: The Case of Konrad Morgen, Central European His-
tory (CEH), vol. 16 (1983) no. 3, pp. 276-294.
18
Cf. Manfred Messerschmidt, Der Gerichtsherr, Zeitschrift fr Geschichtswissenschaft
(ZfG), vol. 52 (2004) no. 6, pp. 493-504.
not to confirm the judgment. The court judgment was only final, and thus
enforceable, if the lord of the court had confirmed it. Otherwise, the judg-
ment had only the status of an expert opinion.19
Contrary to the Wehrmacht, the military laws within the SS were not
only meant to maintain manly discipline. They also had the special pur-
pose of safeguarding the ideological foundations of the Order and the
world view of the SS man.20 This is the reason why manly discipline was
not only equivalent to soldierly obedience, but also obedience to a world
view, meaning complying with other duties that are the responsibility of
the other national comrades.21 The SS judges were very casual in han-
dling the legal facts and circumstances. They believed that there is no
longer law in and of itself with an independent existence in paragraphs
bearing no relationship to the life of the people,22 and Nazi criminal law
did not assign any decisive meaning to them anyway.23 Both general crim-
inal law and military criminal law were supposed to be interpreted and
applied analogously and in a form commensurate to the basic views of
the Schutzstaffel.24 When the special concerns of the Schutzstaffel
called for it, SS judges should be able to deviate from applicable law in
their rulings while disregarding the fundamental concept of a law. In cases
such as these, they should delve into the legal situation in detail, so as not
to expose themselves to the charge of a lack of legal knowledge.25 When
in doubt, the SS judges were not supposed to be hindered by a contrary
19
See Erluterungen zur Verordnung ber das militrische Strafverfahren im
Kriege und bei besonderem Einsatz (KStVO), dated 17 August 1938, in Rudolf
Absolon, Das Wehrmachtstrafrecht im 2. Weltkrieg. Sammlung der grundlegenden
Gesetze, Verordnungen und Erlasse (Kornelimnster: Bundesarchiv Abteilung
Zentralnachweisstelle, 1958), pp. 179-189.
20
Fehlurteile (BArch Berlin, NSD 41/3 1940/41: Mitteilungen ber die SS-
und Polizeigerichtsbarkeit, volume I (1940/41), issue 6 (Dezember 1941), pp. 147-
150, here 150).
21
Ibid. (Italics in the original).
22
Ibid., p. 149 (Italics in the original).
23
Cf. especially Wolfgang Naucke, Die Aufhebung des strafrechtlichen
Analogieverbots 1935, in NS-Recht in historischer Perspektive. Kolloquien des
Instituts fr Zeitgeschichte (Munich/Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1981), pp. 71-108,
printed again without changes in Wolfgang Naucke, ber die Zerbrechlichkeit des
rechtsstaatlichen Strafrechts. Materialien zur neueren Strafrechtsgeschichte
(Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2000), pp. 301-335.
24
Auf dem Wege zu einem selbstndigen SS- und Polizeistrafrecht (BArch Berlin,
NSD 41/19: Hinweise fr den SS-Richter. Herausgegeben vom Reichsfhrer-SS,
Hauptamt SS-Gericht, issue 3, dated 15 December 1944, pp. 37-43, here 37).
25
Bericht ber die Dienstbesprechung der dienstltesten SS-Richter in Danzig und
Zoppot 1942 (BArch Berlin, NS 7/4, sheet 112).
law but to apply the best of their knowledge and belief to find the law
that best serves the community of the SS.26 True to the principle of the
community relationship of all law all law is rooted in the community
and grows and thrives with it27 the SS judges had to assess actions that
are contrary to duty and qualified for punishment in terms of whether
and to what extent they have damaged our community and call for retribu-
tion for the sake of protecting this community and its honor.28 This
means that it was not just the legal facts and circumstances that determined
the punishable nature of a crime. First and foremost, it was the communi-
tys need to be protected and its call for retribution.29
This was how the head of the special jurisdiction of the Wehrmacht,
the highest ranking judge in the German Armed Forces High Command
(OKW), Dr. Rudolf Lehmann, described the mission of the preserver of
the law of the Wehrmacht: It is not the function of a court to search for
any truth that does not exist in and of itself. It is the function of a court in
the framework of the community that it is placed in to use the instrument
of the law to sustain the said community. In this sense, also for us, there
applies the well-known quotation by the Reich Legal Leader concerning
what is legal,30 namely: law is whatever is useful to the Wehrmacht, and
injustice is whatever is detrimental to it.31 In the opinion of the Main Of-
fice SS Court, this elasticity32 in handling criminal law would have to
play out in favor of the perpetrator. It would consequently have the effect
26
Ibid. Also refer to Dr. Gnther Reinecke for this, Vom Richtertum (BArch
Berlin, NSD 41/19: Hinweise fr den SS-Richter, issue 1, dated 1 January 1944,
pp. 2-3, here 2).
27
Auf dem Wege zu einem selbstndigen SS- und Polizeistrafrecht (BArch Berlin,
NSD 41/19: Hinweise fr den SS-Richter, p. 37). Also refer to Georg Dahm in this
framework, Verbrechen und Tatbestand, in Karl Larenz (ed.), Grundfragen der
neuen Rechtswissenschaft (Berlin: Junker & Dnnhaupt, 1935) [ND 1995], pp. 62-
107, here 85: Alles Handeln und Sein hat Sinn nur aus der Gemeinschaft [...]. Die
Gemeinschaft wird nicht von auen geordnet, sondern trgt ihr Recht in sich.
28
Fehlurteile, p. 149 (emphasis in the original).
29
Reinecke, Vom Richtertum (BArch Berlin, NSD 41/19: Hinweise fr den SS-
Richter, issue 1, p. 2).
30
Rudolf Lehmann, Die Aufgaben des Rechtswahrers der Wehrmacht,
Deutsches Recht 9 (1939), Edit. A Vol. 25, 5 August 1939, p. 1265-1269, here
1267.
31
Also see my article, Von Metz nach Wiesbaden. Die Geschichte des SS- und
Polizeigerichts XIV, Nassauische Annalen, vol. 122 (2011), pp. 325-336, here
328.
32
Cf. Manfred Messerschmidt, Elastische Gesetzesanwendung durch
Wehrmachtgerichte, in Wolfram Wette (Hg.), Filbinger eine deutsche Karriere,
zu Klampen (Springe: Zu Klampen 2006), pp. 65-80.
that incidents constituting a punishable offense in and by themselves

would be more leniently punished or even go completely unpunished if
they could be attributed to an appropriate attitude or are in accordance
with an SS position (dismissal because of insignificance), assuming this is
in conformity with our communitys sense of justice, so that any other
ruling would seem to be a misjudgment.33 The judgments of the SS and
police courts, such as those against Max Tubner and others, have to be
read and comprehended in this context. Hermann Lbbe described the
ideological legal views and the purposive concept of law in the SS as an
expression of their totalitarian legal devoutness,34 and, simultaneously,
Wolfgang Naucke calls them an expression of a particular social morality
with the corresponding need to punish. Put together, they formed a general
standard for assessing certain crimes during the war that can be illustrated
by the example of treating Shooting Jews without Orders or Authority,
as Tubners crimes were officially designated.
IV. The Random Execution of Jews

In Tubners case, the judgment of Shooting Jews without Orders or
Authority was probably also known to Reineckes associate judge at the
Supreme SS and Police Court, SS Obersturmbannfhrer Dr. Hans-
Bernhard Braue. In a 1942 letter addressed to Horst Bender, senior SS
judge on the Reichsfhrers personal staff, Braue asked for Himmlers
ruling while simultaneously making the opinion of the Main Office SS
Court clearly known. The occasion was the criminal proceedings against
Police District Lieutenant Wlfer of the Order Police before the SS and
Police Court XV in Breslau. In February 1942, Wlfer, along with his
colleagues, had shot dead the Jew Mandelmann in Radom; the victim was
supposedly an informer performing services for the Security Police who
had also incriminated Wlfer and his colleagues. Braue wrote the follow-
ing about this incident: It is intolerable that everybody goes around shoot-
ing Jews without any orders or authority. The motivations have to be deci-
sive for assessing this unauthorized shooting. The laws on murder and
manslaughter would have to be applied if they were shot dead out of hei-
33
Fehlurteile, p. 150 (emphasis in the original).
34
Cf. Hermann Lbbe, Totalitre Rechtglubigkeit. Das Heil und der Terror, in
Hans Maier (ed.), Wege in die Gewalt. Die modernen politischen Religionen
(Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000), pp. 37-35. Hermann Lbbe,
Politischer Moralismus. ber die Selbstermchtigung zur Gewalt, in Maria-
Sibylla Lotter (ed.), Normenbegrndung und Normenentwicklung in Gesellschaft
und Recht (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1999), pp. 87-95.
nous or selfish motives, in particular for covering up their own crimes or

the offenses of third parties. If they are shot dead purely for political rea-
sons, we would probably be able to refrain from criminal persecution,
unless punishment is called for to maintain order.35 However, Braue
apparently thought that murdering the Jew Mandelmann was acceptable.
In any event, he remarked that just using a Jew as a contact to observe
others of his race or persons belonging to foreign national traditions
seemed acceptable, although it may never lead to spying on German na-
tional comrades. When a Jew is held accountable for accusations against
policemen, regardless of the cause, this would not be objectionable [...].36
Himmler concurred with the attitude of the Main Office SS Court in this
fundamental matter right down to his formulations and notified his jurists
that:
There will not be any punishment in cases of purely political motives, un-
less it is called for by the need to maintain order [...] The person shall be
punished by the court if his motives are selfish or sadistic or if the person
has sexual motives, even in cases of murder or manslaughter.37
The SS judges also followed these rules in the Supreme SS and Police
Courts verdict against Max Tubner. They repeatedly pointed out that the
defendant Tubner was a fanatical enemy of the Jews, so that a genuine
hatred of the Jews [..] was the driving force for the defendant who there-
fore did not act out of sadism, but founded on a genuine hatred of the
Jews.38 This is how they justified why the defendant was not supposed to
be punished because of the activities against Jews as such [...].39 Since
the SS judges assessed Tubners murderous anti-Semitism as a political
motive for his crimes, they exempted him from punishment for these
35
Letter from SS-Sturmbannfhrer and SS Judge Dr. Hans-Bernhard Braue to the
SS Judge with Reichsfhrer-SS, SS-Obersturmbannfhrer Horst Bender, dated 26
September 1942 (BArch Berlin, NS 7/1168: Strafsache gegen den Revierleutnant
der Schutzpolizei Wlfer u. a. wegen Judenerschieungen ohne Befehl und
Befugnis vor dem SS- und Polizeigericht XV in Breslau (1942), unpaginated).
36
Ibid.
37
See the letter from the SS Judge with Reichsfhrer-SS, SS-Obersturmbannfhrer
Horst Bender, to the Main Office SS Court, dated 26 October 1942 (BArch Berlin,
NS 7/247: Bestrafung von Judenerschieungen ohne Befehl und Befugnis (1942),
sheet 2 = IMT Nuremberg Document NO-1744), printed by Vieregge, Die
Gerichtsbarkeit einer Elite, p. 263.
38
Judgment of the Supreme SS and Police Court dated 24 May 1943, quoted by
Klee/Dressen/Rie Schne Zeiten, pp. 184 und 188.
39
Ibid., p. 187.
crimes, a decision which was in accordance with the orders of the

Reichsfhrer-SS and the Main Office SS Court for punishing the Shoot-
ing of Jews without Orders or Authority.
In spite of this, Tubner was punished because punishment was called
for to maintain order i.e. manly discipline. In the eyes of the SS judg-
es, Tubner had allowed his men to become so horribly brutalized that
they followed his example in acting like a wild horde. This means that the
defendant had put manly discipline at risk in a way that could hardly be
imagined worse.40 In other words, he had neglected his supervisory duty
in such a blatant manner, which in the opinion of the SS also included that
he did not allow his men to become emotionally depraved. Beyond this,
the SS judges identified a serious lack of character and an extensive
inner brutality in Tubners personality because he allowed himself to be
carried away and perform acts of cruelty and maltreatment during the
necessary destruction of the Jews.41 Furthermore, the judges were
worried about the photos Tubner had taken and shown around: These
pictures can bring about the greatest hazards to the security of the Reich if
they get into the wrong hands. How easily might they have been leaked
from Southern Germany, where Tubner had the pictures developed on
home leave and instantly showed them to his wife and friends, through
Switzerland to enemy propaganda.42 The SS judges saw this as a par-
ticularly serious case of disobedience. Luckily, these pictures were only
known to a small group of people.43
Tubner was sentenced to a ten-year penal sentence for not maintain-
ing manly discipline and partially due to the aggravation of his sentence
pursuant to Section 5a of the Special Wartime Criminal Law Ordinance
(i.e. exceeding the legal range of punishment). His crime was violating
the Fuehrer principle, which not only included neglecting his supervisory
duty but also military disobedience as well as various other crimes. He
was expelled from the SS and declared unworthy of fighting. However,
he only had to serve one- and-a-half years of his ten-year sentence at the
SS and Police penal camp in Dachau. The Reichsfhrer-SS pardoned
Tubner in mid-January 1945 and placed him on probation at the front,
where Himmler expressed the expectation that T. will show in every way
that he is worthy of this pardon and act just as correctly at the front as he
40
Ibid., p. 188.
41
Ibid., p. 189.
42
Ibid., p. 188.
43
Ibid., p. 189.
had at the penal camp.44 Although it has got around among the troop that
you are quickly sent to the front with serious crimes and major punish-
ments, as the Main Office SS Court notified the Reichsfhrers jurists in
1944,45 Himmler also held the view in Tubners case that we cannot let
any condemned criminal stay in penal execution any longer than necessary
in the present war situation. We will have to accept the discrepancy be-
tween a major punishment and brief enforcement period during the war.46
V. The "Events" in the Soldau Transit Camp

While the SS and police criminal courts played a limited role, the so-called
Occurrences at the Soldau Transit Camp47 in East-Prussia provides an
example of the type of inner attitude the SS leadership expected from the
people who committed mass murder. Years after these events, they were
ordered to investigate the suspicion that prisoners had been subjected to
arbitrary and very serious maltreatment, although in the final analysis their
investigations did not have any consequences. The Soldau Transit Camp
was built in the winter of 1939/40, specifically as a civil prison camp to
discreetly kill members of the Polish elites who were viewed as political
activists and enemies of the state in the context of ethnic and political
purges.48 Soldau had been used by the East-Prussian Gestapo as a cen-
tral place of execution since the beginning of February 1940. Patients from
nursing homes from all over East-Prussia and the Wartheland region were
murdered there.49 Beyond this, the Gestapo had been using the Soldau
44
Letter from SS-Sturmbannfhrer and SS Judge d.R. Helmut Gieelmann, office
of the SS Judge with Reichsfhrer-SS, to the Main Office SS Court, dated 16
January 1945, quoted by Klee/Dressen/Rie, Schne Zeiten, p. 192.
45
Speech note of the SS Judge with the Reichsfhrer-SS, SS-Standartenfhrer
Bender, dated 20 June 1944 (BArch Berlin, NS 7/319: Divergenz zwischen hoher
Strafe und geringer Vollzugszeit bei Urteilen der SS- und Polizeigerichte (1944),
sheet 1).
46
Letter from the SS Judge with Reichsfhrer-SS, SS-Standartenfhrer Bender, to
the director of Office in the Main Office of the SS Court, SS-Standartenfhrer Dr.
Reinecke, dated 17 July 1944 (BArch Berlin, NS 7/319, sheet 2).
47
Cf. BArch Berlin, NS 7/1187: Ermittlungsverfahren wegen Erschieungen und
weiteren kriminellen Vorkommnissen im Durchgangslager Soldau (1943-1944).
48
Cf. Minutes of the interrogation of SS-Brigadefhrer Dr. Dr. Otto Rasch, dated
16 June 1943 (BArch Berlin, NS 7/1187, unpaginated = IMT Nuremberg Docu-
ment NO-1073).
49
Gabriele Lotfi, SS-Sonderlager im nationalsozialistischen Terrorsystem: Die
Entstehung von Hinzert, Stutthof und Soldau, in Norbert Frei/Sybille
Steinbacher/Bernd C. Wagner (eds.), Ausbeutung, Vernichtung, ffentlichkeit.
Camp since May 1940 as a labour education camp for Polish forced
labourers who were unwilling to work.50 Several thousand people met
their death in Soldau in the early years due to mass executions as well as
from brutal maltreatment, criminal neglect, disease and hunger.
It was only in 1943, when the conditions at this camp sparked off in-
ternal SS investigations against the camp commander and his supervi-
sors.51 The commander of the Soldau Transit Camp from the beginning of
1940 to the end of September 1941 was SS Hauptsturmfhrer Hans
Krause. He had previously been a member of the SS-organized ethnic
German Self-Defense, but now he was overtaxed with the job of a camp
commander. Krause not only ordered the shootings commanded by his
superiors, but he also participated in them, using his own service pistol. In
1943, the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) questioned SS Hauptsturm-
fhrer Dr. Friedrich Horst Schlegel on the occurrences in Soldau; Schlegel
was the former personal assistant of the inspector of the Security Police
and Security Service of the SS (SD) and temporary deputy Stapostellenlei-
ter of Knigsberg. Schlegel supervised the Soldau Camp, representing the
responsible inspector of the Security Police and SD. He had reported that
he knew that Krause repeatedly expressed the fact that liquidating the
Poles was not a pleasant thing to him, but that he carried out his duty in
loyalty to the cause.52 The inspector of the Security Police and SD in
Knigsberg from November 1939 to May 1941 was SS Brigadefhrer and
General Major of the police, Dr. Otto Rasch. He subsequently led the Task
Force C in the Ukraine from June to the beginning of October 1941 and
carried out mass murders of Ukrainian Jews; approximately eighty thou-
sand people had been murdered by the end of October 1941.
Rasch (who ordered the Soldau Camp to be established in 1939) was
also questioned about the incidents at the camp in 1943. He told the fol-
lowing about the camp commander: I had an excellent experience with
Krause from the beginning. He was an extraordinarily dutiful person with
Neue Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Lagerpolitik (Munich: Saur, 2000),

pp. 209-230, part.(!) 216-223, here: 222.
50
Ibid., and more detailed on this Uwe Neumrker, Soldau, in Wolfgang
Benz/Barbara Distel (eds.), Der Ort des Terrors. Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen
Konzentrationslager, volume 9 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009), pp. 612-621.
51
See the report by the Chief of the Security Police and SD, SS-Gruppenfhrer and
Major General of the Police Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner to the SS Judge with
Reichsfhrer-SS, dated February 1943 (BArch Berlin, NS 7/1187, unpaginated =
IMT Nuremberg Document NO-1076).
52
Minutes of the interrogation of SS-Hauptsturmfhrer Dr. Friedrich Horst Schle-
gel, dated 3 June 1943 (BArch Berlin, NS 7/1187, unpaginated = IMT Nuremberg
Document NO-1074).
a high level of moral earnestness who took on his difficult task with a
dedication that could only have been nurtured by the most profound Na-
tional Socialist attitude. He also maintained strict discipline among his
men and never asked anything of them that he did or would not be willing
to do himself [...]. I exchanged views with Krause very frequently on the
necessity of the harsh measures we are undertaking and found that he
accepted this policy completely. I also noticed that he had the moral inhi-
bitions he needed not to sink into uncontrolled behaviour [...].53 Based
upon this testimony, Krause was released from imprisonment at the Gesta-
pos own prison in the Prinz-Albrecht-Strae in Berlin and the investiga-
tion by the SS and Police criminal courts came to an end. Even if Krause
supposedly gave the impression of being a completely broken man and
lived in constant fear of being arrested again, he was told when he was
released from imprisonment that there was nothing else against him and
that everything was all right.54
What Rasch and Schlegel tell about Krause provides an image of the
decent criminal55 who did his difficult duty in an objective, cool, and
rational manner in loyalty to the cause and who was convinced of its
necessity and had the moral inhibitions he needed not to sink into uncon-
trolled behaviour. This means that he acted in an exemplary fashion to-
wards his subordinates and was aware of his responsibility, and he made
sure (as Himmler himself repeatedly expressed in speeches in 1943) that it
was possible to carry out the difficult task of the mass murder of Euro-
pean Jews without our men and our officers having suffered damage to
their spirits or souls, as I believe I can say.56 Krause, as Rasch and Schle-
gel describe him, was just the sort of person the SS wanted to carry out
53
Minutes of the interrogation of SS-Brigadefhrer Dr. Dr. Otto Rasch, dated 16
June 1943 (BArch Berlin, NS 7/1187, unpaginated = IMT Nuremberg Document
NO-1073).
54
Letter from the Higher SS and Police Leader with the Oberprsident of East
Prussia to the SS Judge with Reichsfhrer-SS, dated 17 August 1943 (BArch Ber-
lin, NS 7/1187, unpaginated).
55
See Karin Orth, Die Anstndigkeit der Tter. Texte und Bemerkungen,
Sozialwissenschaftliche Informationen, vol. 25 (1996) no. 2, pp. 112-115.
56
Speech in front of the Reich Leaders und Gauleiters in Posen on 6 October 1943,
printed in Bradley F. Smith/Agnes F. Peterson (eds.), Heinrich Himmler
Geheimreden 1933 bis 1945 und andere Ansprachen (Frankfurt a.M./Berlin/
Vienna: Propylen-Verlag, 1974), pp. 162-183, here 169-170, as well as in his
speech in Posen before the SS-Gruppenfhrers on 4 October 1943, printed in: Der
Prozess gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen
Militrgerichtshof Nrnberg, volume XXIX, pp. 110-173, here 146 (= IMT
Nuremberg Document 1919-PS).
mass murder. He represented the exact opposite of the unpredictable and

excessive criminal as embodied by Max Tubner who was without any
moderation and does not possess any inner discipline.57
VI. Nationalsocialism and Legal Thought

Whoever speaks of the moral rigor of a special criminal court cannot ig-
nore the legal circumstances that define the essence of this court. This is
especially true when the court contributes to creating a climate that sets the
backdrop for atrocities (or at least did not prevent them), atrocities that
under other circumstances would have to have been punished by the courts
pursuant to criminal law.
There cannot be any doubt that court decisions will have to leave the path
of the old methods so that the SS and Police Courts will be pioneers. The
laws that have come down to us are inadequate. Still, it is not enough just
to have new and better laws. The main thing is not just applying a law. We
have to find justice. And that is the mission of strong judicial personalities
who as stated above operate on the assumption that there is no longer
justice in and of itself carrying on an independent existence in paragraphs
bearing no relationship to the life of the people [...]58
The head of the SS and Police Court VI in Cracow, thirty-one-year-old SS

Sturmbannfhrer and SS Judge Dr. Norbert Pohl, considered himself pre-
cisely such a judicial personality. Just as many lawyers of his time, Pohl
dreamed of revitalizing jurisprudence and saw its mission as once again
giving the German people a legal system and legal formulations that did
not spring forth from logic but from a national sense of justice [...] These
lawyers were of the opinion that it is the eternal mission of the Germanic
and Old German judge and preserver of the laws not to create the law but
to make the law already existing in the German way of life visible, i.e. to
find it.59 The primary task for Pohl and many other NS lawyers was re-
newing criminal law because it is most intimately linked to a states polit-
57
Judgment by the Supreme SS and Police Court, dated 24 May 1943, quoted by
Klee/Dressen/Rie, Schne Zeiten, p. 190.
58
Fehlurteile, pp. 148 (Italics in the original).
59
Ernst Anrich, Die deutschen Universitten und der Geist unserer Zeit, Volk
und Reich, vol. 17 (1941) no. 11, pp. 752-769, here 757-758 initially quoted by
Lothar Kettenacker, Nationalsozialistische Volkstumspolitik im Elsa (Stuttgart:
Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1973), p. 188.
ical foundation.60 This was where the reorganization after the Nazi sei-
zure of power was intended to be a totally political reorganization, found-
ed upon the quality of the law as a world view and avowing a dynamic
conception of the law.61 This was the precondition for the SS and its
jurisdiction, as stated, for example, in 1941 in an official bulletin of the
Main Office SS Court on the occasion of Church protests against the mur-
dering of ill people at euthanasia institutions in the course of the T 4
Campaign: [finding] the right answers to questions that our laws have
not yet satisfactorily given, such as the question of killing worthless life.
There is no doubt for us. But we do not want to fool ourselves: our people
also have to be educated to feel and think correctly.62
Given these facts, at the beginning of 1942 Pohl wrote to the head of
the Main Office SS Court in Munich on a different aspect of renewing
criminal law that was also significant for the case of SS Untersturmfhrer
Max Tubner:
An upheaval of gigantic proportions is taking place in criminal law right

before our eyes in the sense that the person of the perpetrator will be the
key issue not only in the trial today and in future but also in the legal de-
termination. This is what is new, and we will not tire in working on. In the
final analysis, this is what the destiny of SS jurisdiction is founded on as
the Fuehrer wants to see it. It is not the formal trial that we need the person
of the defendant for. The defendants personality also commands the legal
determination, not primarily the law.63
Pohl still thought that the law remained a very essential source of insight
into justice. However, it has to remain bloodless and reduces judges to the
level of a mechanical tool if the defendants personality and his communi-
ty orientation, meaning the needs of the troops, are not taken as sources of
insight before the law.64 This is the reason why Pohl made his urgent
60
Gottfried Boldt, Rechtspolitische Wandlungen unter der Herrschaft des
Reichsstrafgesetzbuches, Zeitschrift fr die gesamte Staatswissenschaft (Zges-
StW), vol. 96 (1936), pp. 475-509, here 475.
61
Ibid.
62
Fehlurteile, p. 149 (Italics in the original).
63
Bericht des Chefrichters des SS- und Polizeigerichts VI, Krakau, SS-
Sturmbannfhrer und SS-Richter Dr. Norbert Pohl, an den Chef des Hauptamtes
SS-Gericht, SS-Gruppenfhrer Paul Scharfe, dated January 22, 1942 (BArch
Berlin, NS 7/318: Bericht des SS-Sturmbannfhrers Dr. Pohl ber die Probleme
mit der gutachterlichen Ttigkeit des Hauptamtes SS-Gericht (1942), sheet 1-31,
here 4, Italics in the original).
64
Bericht des Chefs des SS- und Polizeigerichts VI, Krakau (BArch Berlin, NS
7/318, sheet 6).
appeal to the head of the Main Office SS Court, referring to the most cur-
rent development in Nazi criminal law at that time:
We will not be able to pioneer any new developments if we do not first

gain insight into the significance of this normative type of perpetrator that
[Georg] Dahm called him in forming the facts of the case and the issue of
the crime committed and the perpetrators guilt. We can see everywhere
that ordinary jurisdiction uses what is known as the criminological type
of perpetrator for sentencing.65
However, the goal both for the ordinary criminal courts and the special
criminal courts of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS was finding material
justice out of the perpetrators personality and only out of it as a part of a
community placing obligations on it. However, we must initially take this
path and I am putting all of my strength of purpose into this as long as I
am allowed to be active in SS jurisdiction.66
This concept of a national community justice for our own species
was not specific to the SS and Police criminal courts. However, during the
war we might say that it was extensively implemented in court decisions.
They found their origin in thinking within specific frameworks or also
along a concrete philosophy of order (Carl Schmitt)67 which placed the
interests of the community above those of the individual meaning that it
was very appropriate to the constitution of a Fuehrer State and Volks-
gemeinschaft. In the Third Reich, justice did not exclusively include
the moral requirements of the community cast in the form of the law alt-
hough it also contained this. Rather, it had to serve the communitys need
to protect and desire for retribution. Simultaneously, legal thinking
meant thinking in moral categories in the framework of the communitys
purposes and interests and the substance of injustice, and therefore the
punishable nature of a crime was primarily dictated by the damage it
caused to a community. The sentence was set forth based upon the perpe-
65
7/318, sheet 4, Italics in the original).
66
7/318, sheet 4, Italics in the original).
67
Cf. Carl Schmitt, ber die drei Arten rechtswissenschaftlichen Denkens
(Hamburg Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1934) and idem, Nationalsozialistisches
Rechtsdenken, Deutsches Recht, vol. 4 (1934) no. 10 pp. 225-229. See also the
assenting discussion with Georg Dahm, Die drei Arten rechtswissenschaftlichen
Denkens, ZgesStW, vol. 95 (1935), pp. 181-188 or also Dahms report on
literature, Gegenstand und Methoden des vlkischen Rechtsdenkens, ZgesStW,
vol. 98 (1938), pp. 735-744.
trators personality, his or her position in the community and his or her
duties in relation to the community. The decision was made as to what
punishment the perpetrator deserved for his or her crime. Substantial
values of the Nazi world view were consulted to assist in making decisions
and also as a measure of assessment (in the sense of substantial decision-
ism).68
While SS judge Dr. Norbert Pohl hoped that future criminal law would
increasingly be the law of criminals and no longer the law of offenses,
Georg Dahm, a member of the Kiel School69 on which Pohl based his
scholarly ideas, realized at a relatively early stage that the dream of a na-
tional criminal law would breed monsters. He pointed out as early as 1940
that criminal law is initially criminal law of offenses today and that it will
remain a criminal law of offenses in the future. In any event, it is not crim-
inal law of perpetrators that links punishment to the criminological exist-
ence of a perpetrator. Instead, even today the judge makes his judgment
based upon more or less defined crimes, in specific mentalities and the
guilt for a specific crime, although not in the criminals overall personali-
ty.70 And in 1944, when everything around him was transformed into ruin
and ashes, he stated with resignation: a purely criminological criminal
law of perpetrators is just a dream, an ugly dream.71
68
Cf. Hubert Rottleuthner, Substantieller Dezisionismus. Zur Funktion der
Rechtsphilosophie im Nationalsozialismus, in Idem (ed.), Recht, Rechtsphilosophie
und Nationalsozialismus. Vortrge aus der Tagung der Deutschen Sektion der
Internationalen Vereinigung fr Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie (IVR) in der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland vom 11. und 12. Oktober 1982 in Berlin (West)
(Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1983), pp. 20-35.
69
Cf. Jrn Eckert, Die Kieler rechtswissenschaftliche Fakultt Stotruppfakultt,
in Heribert Ostendorf/ Uwe Danker (eds.), Die NS-Justiz und ihre Nachwirkungen
(Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2003), pp. 21-55.
70
Georg Dahm, Der Ttertyp im Strafrecht, in Festschrift der Leipziger
Juristenfakultt fr Dr. Heinrich Siber zum 10. April 1940, volume I (Leipzig:
Weicher, 1941), pp. 183-246, here 189 p. (Italics in the original).
71
Georg Dahm, Gerechtigkeit und Zweckmigkeit im Strafrecht der
Gegenwart, in Probleme der Strafrechtserneuerung. Eduard Kohlrausch zum 70.
Geburtstage dargebracht (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1944), pp. 1-23, here 18.
VII. Rsum: The Criminal Jurisdiction of Waffen-SS

and Police as an Instrument of Power
As we know, Max Tubner survived the war.72 He returned to Germany
from Soviet captivity in 1949. The attempts of the criminal prosecution
authorities to bring him to justice for his atrocities were unsuccessful be-
cause the courts (including the Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe) were
not prepared to question the principle of ne bis in idem (not twice for the
same) determined by the rule of law just to satisfy the desire for punish-
ment in his case.73 The efforts of the Memmingen Department of Public
Prosecution to put Tubner on trial again in 1959 drew the attention of the
Bavarian Judiciary to the 1943 verdict of the Supreme SS and Police Court
in Tubners case as well as to former SS Oberfhrer and chairman of the
Supreme SS and Police Court, Dr. Gnther Reinecke who was responsible
for that verdict. He had established himself as an attorney in Munich in
1950. His attorneys license was revoked by order of the Bavarian State
Ministry of Justice in 1961, justified by the fact that Reinecke had partici-
pated in a verdict that was so dehumanizing as to make himself guilty of
behaviour that made him appear unworthy of exercising the profession of
an attorney.74 All of the people involved in the Tubner trial of 1943 came
together once again in Munich in the subsequent professional tribunal
proceedings of the Bavarian Bar Association at the end of 1961 and the
beginning of 1962.75 The former SS judges defended themselves by saying
that the incriminating formulations in their judgments, namely the Jews
have to be destroyed and none of the dead Jews is a loss, were Himmlers
own words. The operative part of the judgment took on these anti-Semitic
72
Refer to Bchler, Unworthy Behavior, pp. 424-425, and de Mildt, Getting
away with Murder, pp. 110.
73
See a wide range of things in Edith Raim, [Review of] Nathan Stoltzfus/Henry
Friedlander (Eds.), Nazi Crimes and the Law, Cambridge/Massachusetts 2008, in
Sehepunkte, vol. 9 (2009) no. 6 (URL: http://www.sehepunkte.de /2009/06/
15904.html, last access on 1 July 2011.
74
See Order of the Bavarian State Ministry of Justice, dated March 13, 1961
(Ludwigsburg State Archives, EL 317 III B 968, sheet 3-11, here 10). This order
was suspended again by the decision of the Bavarian Professional Tribunal for
Lawyers on 20 February 1962.
75
See Unterlagen des Bayerischen Ehrengerichtshofs fr Rechtsanwlte betr. Dr.
Gnther Reinecke, Bay. EGH I 4/1961, contained in the files of the preliminary
investigations at the Stuttgart Department of Prosecution from 1973 against Horst
Bender for shooting Jews dead and participating in persecuting individuals who
had participated in the attempted assassination of Hitler (Ludwigsburg State Ar-
chives, EL 317 III B 965-974, here 968).
expressions to make sure that the lord of the courts with jurisdiction,
Reichsfhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, would confirm their judgments. After
all, only four months after the verdict against Tubner, Himmler addressed
the highest ranking SS and Police officers at Posen, stating: We had the
moral right and we had the duty to our people to kill the people that want-
ed to kill us.76
We cannot rule out the possibility that these considerations actually
were the attitude of the SS judges at that time. In any event, they definitely
did not correspond to the facts. Tubner was not supposed to be punished
because of his activities with the Jews as such. The SS judges believed
the defendants testimony when he said that political motivations had been
decisive for his actions, namely his extreme hatred of Jews. Himmlers
directive on the assessment pursuant to criminal law of Shooting Jews
without Orders or Authority as dated 26 October 1942 did not provide for
any punishment with purely political motive unless punishment is called
for to maintain order. Since Tubner was supposed to be sentenced and
punished only because of the accompanying circumstances, namely the
lack of discipline when committing his crimes, which was most certain-
ly the way Himmler wanted it, there could not be any doubt in the judg-
ment being confirmed.
However, this was not the essential point in assessing the SS and po-
lice criminal courts. What was more decisive was the fact that the SS
judges conceded the possibility of not having to punish a perpetrator be-
cause his crimes were committed in loyalty to the cause. As in Tub-
ners case, they took advantage of this justification and only sentenced him
because of the accompanying circumstances of his crimes while, contrary
to truth, deeming his crimes just retribution for the suffering the Jews had
inflicted on the German people.77 We can clearly assume that the SS
judges saw the crimes as such. However, since they subjected themselves
to the moral rules of their Order and made it an element of their court
decisions, they made themselves accomplices regardless of what their own
moral convictions were, both with their clients and the people committing
crimes.78
76
Himmlers Posener Rede vor den SS-Gruppenfhrern am 4. Oktober 1943 printed
in: Der Prozess gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen
Militrgerichtshof Nrnberg, volume XXIX, pp. 110-173, here 146.
77
Klee/Dressen/Rie, Schne Zeiten, p. 188.
78
Generally see Hubert Rottleuthner, Krhenjustiz, in Dick de Mildt (ed.),
Staatsverbrechen vor Gericht. Festschrift fr Christiaan Frederik Rter zum 65.
Geburtstag (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), pp. 158-172.
This is an extreme expression of the nature of courts whose right to

make their own decisions had been taken away from them or who surren-
dered it themselves. As a political and military instrument of leadership
they only punished crimes if the political and military leadership had an
interest in punishment. At an early stage, Dr. Hans-Bernhard Braue, later
an SS Standartenfhrer and the head of Office IV at the Main Office SS
Court (also the court associate of Reinecke in the Tubner proceedings)
developed something akin to an ethos from the spirit of obedience in-
volved while describing the mentality of the military judges. The SS and
police criminal courts were supposed to be an instrument of the political
and military leadership.79 However, the SS judge was not supposed to be
just a passive and mindless tool but a follower who consciously included
himself in the ranks and gave his best. He differed from the normal
subordinate by actively going along and by happy and willing obedience,
by the manly discipline of a comrade-in-arms.80 In particular, the SS
judge was supposed to be the preserver of the roster of duties of our
community in his capacity as a teacher from our order [...] and guardian
of its most holy values and simultaneously a conscious political fighter
and aggressive soldier in his basic attitude.81 Therefore, it was
no question that he follows the greater insight of higher leadership that,

for the judge who thinks in terms of leadership, originates from the same
will and desire for the whole [...]. This means that without exception he
works as an assistant to the political leadership and has to be grateful when
this leadership unequivocally communicates to him what it considers nec-
essary. He will look upon obeying these necessities as his self-evident du-
ty.82
The SS and police criminal courts were primarily the internal courts of the
Waffen-SS, the military subdivision of an ideologically sworn Order
whose political program included the destruction of other people. The SS
judges were supposed to be the guardians of the most holy values of the
79
Rundschreiben des Chefs des Amtes I im Hauptamt SS-Gericht, SS-Obersturm-
bannfhrer Dr. Gnther Reinecke, an die Chefs der SS- und Polizeigerichte vom 5.
November 1942 (BArch Berlin, NS 7/5: Erlass-Sammlung des Hauptamtes SS-
Gericht volume 4 (July-December of 1942), sheet 209-211, here 210).
80
Hans-Bernhard Braue, Fhrer und Richter in soldatischen Verbnden,
Zeitschrift fr Wehrrecht (ZWR), vol. 3 (1938/39), pp. 81-96, here 84 (emphasis in
the original).
81
Fehlurteile, p. 149.
82
Vom Fingerspitzengefhl (BArch Berlin, NSD 41/19: Hinweise fr den SS-
Richter, issue 2, dated 1 April 1944, pp. 18-20, here 19).
roster of duties of this community which they therefore had to make a

component of their court decisions. In other words, they had to serve the
needs of the community. All crimes harming the community were to be
rigorously prosecuted, and all other crimes which may have conformed to
the communitys purposes were to be prosecuted only if the political and
military leadership had an interest in it. It was not infrequent that the SS
and Police Courts were supposed to cover such actions in loyalty to the
cause and even facilitate them with the judicial means in their hands
while always avoiding anything that might taint the reputation of the SS
and Police criminal courts to the outside.83 Even though we should not
overestimate the influence of the SS and police criminal courts on condi-
tioning the behaviour of SS men, it certainly had a role to play in ena-
bling crimes with its court decisions that served the purpose of immorali-
ty in the sense of reassessing all values84 and possibly even more so by
refraining from taking action.
.
83
Refer, for example, to the note of SS-Hauptsturmfhrers and SS Judge d.R.
Helmut Gieelmann, dated 4 June 1944 on his speech at the Reichsfhrer-SS on 2
June 1944 (BArch Berlin, NS 7/264-2: Politische Aktionen in Belgien
Terroristische Handlungen von germanischen und freiwilligen Angehrigen der
Waffen-SS, der Devlag und der Rex-Bewegung: Allgemeines und Einzelflle
(1944/45) sheet 65) and the file memorandum of SS-Hauptsturmfhrer and SS
Judge d.R. Friedrich Killing on Weisungen des Reichsfhrers-SS ber die
Behandlung von Gegenterror in Belgien, dated 2 August 1944 (BArch Berlin, NS
7/405: Gegenterrormanahmen im besetzten Belgien (1944/45), unpaginated).
84
Roland Freisler at a conference at the Reich Ministry of Justice, dated 24 Octo-
ber 1939, quoted by Ralph Angermund, Recht ist, was dem Volke nutzt. Zum
Niedergang von Recht und Justiz im Dritten Reich, in Karl Dietrich Bracher/Man-
fred Funke/Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (eds.), Deutschland 1933-1945. Neue Studien zur
nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft, 2nd complemented edition (Dusseldorf:
Bundeszentrale fr Politische Bildung, 1993), pp. 57-75, here 68.
POST-HOLOCAUST DEBATES
AND MEMORY POLITICS
UNIVERSALISM AND MORAL RELATIVISM:
ON SOME ASPECTS OF THE MODERN DEBATE
ON ETHICS AND NAZISM
WULF KELLERWESSEL
I. Introduction
The aim of this essay is to point out a serious difficulty in some of the
contemporary moral theories resulting from the possibility of rational
criticism of the Nazi standards of behavior. It is meant to demonstrate that
some modern relativistic and some only apparently universalist concep-
tions of morality are not capable of convincingly criticizing the Nazi moral
precepts (which in turn are also relativistic). For the same reason, we will
also hereinafter criticize the relativism of Gilbert Harman and Bernard
Williams, the normatively inadequate universalism of Michael Walzers
reiterative universalism, and the so-called historic universalism of
Rolf Zimmermann. Of course, none of the moral philosophers mentioned
above are suspected of having any sympathy whatsoever for an inhuman
ideology such as that Nazism. However, this does not rule out the possibil-
ity that their moral theories are not suited to convincingly criticize the
moral precepts of Nazism. Only a normative universalism, as e.g. implied
by the discourse-analytical ethics sketched at the end of this paper, has the
potential for an effective criticism of this kind.
The first thing we need to do is to elucidate the meaning of the terms
relativism and universalism. Afterwards, we shall clarify in which
sense the Nazi moral precepts should be classified as relativistic. Having
done so, we will then be able to demonstrate why the positions mentioned
above are not capable of convincingly criticizing the Nazi moral precepts
in contrast to the full-blooded normative universalism provided by dis-
course-analytical ethics.
368 Universalism and Moral Relativism
II. Relativism and Universalism

In ethics and legal philosophy, a moral or legal system is called relativ-
istic if and only if its application or validity is limited to a certain claim.
According to relativism, every morality or legal system seems to depend
on context, time, culture or, generally speaking, on communities. Accord-
ing to the opinion of relativists, the validity of norms, principles, rules,
standards, values, and assessment criteria for morality, the binding nature
of virtues, or even of laws or rights are limited to cultural, ethnic, or lin-
guistic communities, world views, or social groups. In other words, they
cannot be considered binding beyond the limits of the relevant group of
individuals. Validity seems to be relative to the groups specified. In
contrast, universalism takes the opposite position and claims that some
moral norms, principles, rules, standards, values, virtues, and rights are
justifiable for all individuals. This means that they do not depend on any
ethnic or other group affinity.
We can distinguish between descriptive relativism (which states that
there are in fact different systems of morality in the world), meta-ethical
relativism (which holds that there are different moral terminologies that
cannot be translated back and forth), and normative relativism (which
asserts that there are diverging and contradictory moral contents such as
norms, principles, values, or virtues) and that it is not possible to make a
purely rational decision in terms of their validity. This is the kind of nor-
mative relativism on which this paper focuses.
In the course of this paper we want to demonstrate that Nazi concep-
tions of morality meet the criteria of normative relativism (Chapter 4).
However, at first, some pivotal elements of this conception will have to be
pointed out (Chapter 3). Having done so, a serious problem for modern
normatively relativistic conceptions of morals comes into view which has
not received sufficient attention as yet: the above mentioned incapability
of criticizing normatively relativistic moral conceptions such as Nazism
(Chapter 5).
III. Elements of the Nazi Conception of Morality

The pivotal elements of the Nazi conception of morality are relativistic in
a normative way.1 Some examples are the hostility toward universalist
1
As sources, apart from Hitlers Mein Kampf and Rosenbergs Der Mythus des
20. Jahrhunderts, we would like to mention the following publications: Otto
Dietrich, Die philosophischen Grundlagen des Nationalsozialismus. Ein Ruf zu den
Waffen deutschen Geistes (Breslau: Ferdinand Hirt, 1935). Heinrich Himmler,
Wulf Kellerwessel 369
(liberal or individualistic) Enlightenment and universalist concepts of

natural law (both towards liberal Enlightenment and Catholic concepts).2
We might also mention the emphasis on Volk (people) and race as
the only organic source of morality and law, that is, racism. The idea
that peoples are different not only in a genetic but also in a morally
relevant sense was furnished by race theories which were accepted by the
Nazis as the scientific foundation for their moral views (although these
theories were not entirely uniform). The construction of hierarchies of
peoples of different value leads to relativism by way of a naturalistic
fallacy about the way things should be: individual peoples are assigned
different virtues and values and also different missions (in connection to
the generally insinuated mission of preserving ones own people) and
therefore diverging moral rules and norms. All this is embedded in Social
Darwinism which supposedly justifies the struggle of a people for its
survival in history.
According to Dietrich, the German Reich rests on the immortal values
of the Nordic race3 and, according to Himmler,4 being German means
being (as proven by members of the SS) honest, decent, faithful, and
good comrades [] toward those belonging to our own blood and to no
one else. Obedience, bravery, truthfulness, justice, honesty, industrious-
ness, and acceptance of responsibility are added to this list of alleged
German characteristics which are reinterpreted in a relativistic fashion
because their field of application is restricted by basic racist assumptions.5
Furthermore, protecting ones own people is considered a holy law. This
Einige Gedanken ber die Behandlung der Fremdvlkischen im Osten vom

15.4.1940, in www.nationalsozialismus.de/dokumente/texte/heinrich-himmler-
einige-gedanken-ueber-die-behandlung-der-fremdvoelkischen-im-osten-vom-15-
04-1940.html. Idem, Speech in Posen on October 4, 1943, in http://www.
nationalsozialismus.de/dokumente/texte/heinrich-himmler-posener-rede-vom-04-
10-1943-volltext.html. Cf. also David E. Cooper, Ideology, Moral Complicity and
the Holocaust, in Eve Garrard/Goeffrey Scarre (eds.), Moral Philosophy and the
Holocaust (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003), pp. 9-24. Richard
Weikart, Hitlers Ethic. The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
2
Cf. Fabian Wittreck, Nationalsozialistische Rechtslehre und Naturrecht. Affinitt
und Aversion (Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008).
3
Cf. Dietrich, Die Philosophischen Grundlagen des Nationalsozialismus, p. 35.
4
Cf. Himmler, Speech in Posen on October 4, 1943.
5
Cf. Gesine Schwan, Wussten sie nicht, was sie tun? Die Deutschen in der Zeit
des Nationalsozialismus, in Werner Konitzer/Raphael Gro (eds.), Moralitt des
Bsen. Ethik und nationalsozialistische Verbrechen (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus,
2009), pp. 140-167, here 145.
means that according to Himmler individuals belonging to other nations

may be used at will for German purposes whether or not 10,000 Rus-
sian women collapse from exhaustion or not when building a tank trench
only concerns me [Himmler] to the extent that the tank trench will be
completed for Germany.6 Worrying about these Russian women would be
a crime against Germans. Finally, in Himmlers opinion shooting people
in Poland was morally justified for the same reasons as exterminating the
Jews: it was expressly declared a duty toward ones own people. Hey-
drich believes the Jews to be the deadly enemy of all racially healthy
peoples governed by Nordic principles.7 Himmler adds: We want to
apply Asian laws to those foreign (i.e., non-Germanic Slavic) peoples.
Furthermore, Himmler states that Norwegians or Dutch individuals of
good race should be treated in a friendly fashion, according to pan-
Germanic laws.8 The non-German population of the East should learn
that it is a divine law to be obedient to the Germans.9
Altogether, we can agree with Bialas that the moral precepts of the Na-
zis focused on the following pairs of opposites: they assumed a higher
morality for themselves in opposition to common sense morality, a Ger-
man morality in contrast to a non-German morality, a racially con-
scious morality instead of a racially foreign, and a national (vlk-
ische) morality in contrast to an international morality or a universalist
morality.10 This means that relativistic differentiations in terms of the
value of individuals and obeying to rules replaced universal values and
rules. The different norms and the motives associated with them for the
various groups of the population together with the relativism of the Nazi
ideology are as obvious as the belief that the members of the group cannot
avoid being assigned to a group due to the underlying racist premises of
this conception. This means that racist divisions prevented people from
overstepping the boundaries between groups.
6
Himmler, Speech in Posen on 4 October 1943.
7
Cf. Heydrich, Wandlungen unseres Kampfes, in www.nationalsozialismus.de/
dokumente/texte/reinhard-heydrich-wandlungen-unseres-kampfes.html.
8
Himmler, Speech in Posen on 4 October 1943.
9
Himmler, Einige Gedanken ber die Behandlung der Fremdvlkischen im
Osten, dated 15 April 1940.
10
Cf. Wolfgang Bialas, Die moralische Ordnung des Nationalsozialismus. Zum
Zusammenhang von Philosophie, Ideologie und Moral, in Werner Konitzer/
Raphael Gro (eds.), Moralitt des Bsen. Ethik und nationalsozialistische
Verbrechen (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2009), pp. 30-60, here 39.
The Nazi philosophers also defended nationalistic, racist, and relativist

positions.11 For example, if we follow Lehmanns text Die deutsche Phi-
losophie der Gegenwart (German Philosophy of the Present), it states
that the concepts of politics and philosophy are very intimately linked to
each other.12 Further on we read: the political philosophy of the present
is in this sense [referring to the national community] obviously the expres-
sion of the new order of our social and governmental structure brought
about by Nazism as a national political movement.13 In accordance with
this conception, the assumption of different characteristics of peoples
(with corresponding differing value) pervades Haerings study of Die
deutsche und die europische Philosophie (German and European Phi-
losophy 1943). It declares culture and essence to be partially deter-
mined by their racist foundations. Finally, Gnther introduced his own
moral imperative which is apparently formulated along Immanuel Kants
Categorical Imperative. However, in contrast to Kants universalist moral
imperative, Gnthers moral imperative is racist and relativistic: Act in
such a way that you could always think of the direction of your will as the
basic direction of a Nordic race-legislation.14
IV. The Nazi Conception of Morality

as a Form of Normative Relativism
Taking the aforementioned as a foundation, the moral precepts of Nazism
can be characterized as a form of normative relativism as they set forth
various standards for the correct behavior of various actors, demand the
corresponding motivations, and also put forward various criteria for the
individuals affected by these actions. Even if the (or at least some) Nazis
11
For the philosophy of Nazism, cf. Bialas, Die moralische Ordnung des
Nationalsozialismus. Gereon Wolters, Der Fhrer und seine Denker. Zur
Philosophie des Dritten Reichs, Deutsche Zeitschrift fr Philosophie, vol. 47
(1999) no. 2, pp. 223-251. Also cf. the articles in Werner Konitzer/Raphael Gro
(eds.): Moralitt des Bsen. Ethik und nationalsozialistische Verbrechen
(Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2009).
12
Gerhard Lehmann, Die deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Alfred
Krner, 1943), p. 493.
13
Ibid., p. 494.
14
Quoted according to Dietrich Bhler, Die deutsche Zerstrung des politisch-
ethischen Universalismus. ber die Gefahr des heute (post-)modernen
Relativismus und Dezisionismus, in Zerstrung des moralischen Selbstbewutseins:
Chance oder Gefhrdung? Praktische Philosophie in Deutschland nach dem
Nationalsozialismus, ed. by Forum fr Philosophie (Bad Homburg) (Frankfurt a.
M.: Suhrkamp, 1988), pp. 166-216, here 193.
believed that they were objectivists and universalists due to their scien-
tific concepts of race, they were by no means universalists in their moral
philosophy.15 The content of the conception of morality of National So-
cialism varies in terms of its morally relevant actions and moral rules (just
as with the values and virtues connected to them) in accordance with eth-
nic origins both of the actors and the individuals affected (race in Nazi
terminology). This means that it introduces a normatively relativistic ele-
ment at a pivotal place. It uses racism to deny the equality of all people
and even designates the assertion of equality as absurd and unaccepta-
ble.16 In contradistinction, the idea of race arises from the basic ine-
quality of people and groups of people.17 Furthermore, it is necessary for
their own race-related subjectivity to form the basis for their value
judgment on races.18 For this reason, it is self-evident that Nordic people
especially respect the achievements of the Nordic race and their es-
sence.19 There are no absolute (meaning no race-related) objective
judgments.20 Accordingly, just distribution should replace equal rights
and obligations based on to each his own according to a principle of
achievement (that is not defined in any greater detail at this point) which
is non-egalitarian.21 Therefore, the Nazi moral precept has relativistic
15
Bhnigk stresses the Nazis claim that their world view was scientific and uni-
versal, and he also emphasizes the claim by a part of the Nazis that race theories
were universally valid; cp. Bhnigk, Kant und der Nationalsozialismus. Einige
programmatische Bemerkungen ber nationalsozialistische Philosophie, p. 6 and
passim. But the fact that some representatives of Nazism refer to Kant is no evi-
dence of any moral universalism. Those who did not outright reject Kant (such as
Krieck) or were not trying to overcome him based their ideas on Kants concept
of the activity of thinking and placed the emphasis on wanting in practical philoso-
phy. In general, the Nazi philosophers who were favorably disposed towards Kant
reinterpreted Kants ethics in a nationalistic or racist fashion (such as Dietrich).
But it is worth mentioning that there are nationalistic images to be found in Kants
Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht and statements on human races in
Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen (1775) and Bestimmung des
Begriffs einer Menschenrace (1785) outside of his main writings on moral philos-
ophy.
16
Walther Gross, Der Rassegedanke der Gegenwart, Nationalsozialistische
Monatshefte, vol. 14 (1943), pp. 508-525, here 513.
17
Ibid., p. 514.
18
Ibid., p. 517.
19
Cf. ibid.
20
Cf. ibid.
21
Cf. ibid., pp. 518.
consequences due to its racist foundation,22 and its content should be char-
acterized as normatively relativistic.23 In the words of Tugendhat: The
Nazis rejected universalism.24 Bhler speaks of the destruction of univer-
salism,25 and Konitzer notes: morality is looked upon in Nazism so to
speak as a characteristic of groups.26
This means that we have unacceptable positions that are based on in-
sufficient arguments and preliminary assumptions: an unfounded racism
(dividing peoples into races), an unfounded biological determinism
(defining characteristics of individuals based on their race), a naturalistic
fallacy, if this is meant to generate values and norms from (supposedly)
factual statements or a genetic/naturalist fallacy due to racist voluntarism
or decisionism (evaluating the racial characteristics according to history,
inclination, and prejudice).27 Beyond this, we can note a lack of insight
into the meaning of the moral vocabulary or the language of morality and
language games for providing justifications. Nevertheless, there are posi-
tions in present-day moral philosophy which can be shown as incapable of
effectively criticizing the Nazi concept.
22
Also cf. Bhler, Die deutsche Zerstrung des politisch-ethischen Universalismus,
pp. 196.
23
Where moral decisions are thought to be justified only because a specific person
made them, the moral philosophy of the Nazis is highly subjective. This is ex-
pressed in Hans Franks moral imperative: Act in such a way that the Fuehrer
would approve of your actions if only he had knowledge of that action (quoted
according to Werner, Konitzer, Moral oder Moral? Einige berlegungen zum
Thema Moral und Nationalsozialismus. in Werner Konitzer/Raphael Gro
(eds.), Moralitt des Bsen. Ethik und nationalsozialistische Verbrechen (Frank-
furt a. M.: Campus, 2009), pp. 97-115, here 112). The immense difference be-
tween this and Kants Categorical Imperative (which he is apparently attempting to
imitate in formal terms) is all too obvious because it calls for suspending ones
own practical reason.
24
Ernst Tugendhat, Der moralische Universalismus in der Konfrontation mit der
Nazi-Ideologie. in Werner Konitzer/Raphael Gro (eds.), Moralitt des Bsen.
Ethik und nationalsozialistische Verbrechen (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2009), pp.
61-75, here 61.
25
Cf. Bhler, Die deutsche Zerstrung des politisch-ethischen Universalismus,
p. 171.
26
Konitzer, Moral oder Moral?, p. 108.
27
Cf. Bhler, Die deutsche Zerstrung des politisch-ethischen Universalismus,
pp. 178.
V. Systems of Morality and Their Assessment

Based on a Different Understanding of Morality:
A Problem of Relativism and some Inadequate
Universalisms
Harman and Williams argue explicitly in favor of a normative relativism.
Unfortunately, the moral conceptions of Walzer and Zimmermann display
an undesirable, implicit proximity to this kind of relativism even though
both of them call their conceptions universalistic. All of the aforemen-
tioned moral theories are equally inadequate as a basis of a well-founded
criticism of the Nazi conception of morality.
Harmans normative relativism is based on his meta-ethical relativism
and his distinction between two types of moral judgments, evaluative
judgments and inner judgments which leads to normative relativism.28
Inner judgments say that NN should (not) carry out action H if NN is
a normal member of the moral community. This means that NN feels
obliged to follow the same moral principles as the person who expresses
this judgment. The personal morality of NN needs to be taken into consid-
eration by inner judgments and also the fact that NN has a reason for
acting like other members of his moral community.29 However, it is dif-
ferent with moral judgments concerning outsiders about whom we can
form evaluative judgments saying, for example, that they are evil. These
judgments do not assume that the person judged had any reasons to act
differently.
Harmans opinion is that inner judgments are relative to the reasons
for acting. In relation to extremely serious political criminals such as Hit-
ler this means that it does not make any sense to formulate an inner
judgment about Hitler because he was moving outside the limits of our
morality.30 This is the reason why, in the final analysis, he cannot be
made the object of inner judgments such as Hitler should not have
ordered the extermination of the Jews since he does not share our mo-
rality and reasons for acting.31 Of course, Hitler could be judged and eval-
uated as evil. However, from a relativistic point of view based on an
inner judgment we might not say of Hitler that his behavior was morally
28
Cf. Gilbert Harman, Moral Relativism Defended, Philosophical Review, vol.
84 (1975) no. 1, pp. 3-22, here 4.
29
Cf. ibid., p. 8.
30
Cf. ibid., p. 7. Idem, Das Wesen der Moral (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1981),
p. 109.
31
Cf. ibid., p. 109.
wrong when he ordered the Jews to be murdered because he did not have
any objective reasons for not doing so.32 Therefore, according to Harman,
an important class of moral statements, i.e. the class of normative obligato-
ry statements, is relative and Harman conceives of moral obligations as a
four-point relationship. This concerns the actor, an action, the circum-
stances of the action, and the motivational attitude of the actor, that in-
cludes his or her reasons which depend on his or her morality. In this con-
text, a moral norm is binding only for those who accept it, that is, those
who are motivated by this principle.33
In other words, Harmans opinion is that there are diverging consistent
systems of moral norms that allow totally different actions. Which actions
are morally right or wrong depends on the context one happens to select or
accept.34 Morality also depends on interests so that morally obligatory
statements cannot be accepted without any regard to the interests that play
a role for practical reasons. The demand that NN do something although
NN does not have any reason for the demanded action is a muddled state-
ment. Since an actor must accept a moral demand he or she is confronted
with, there are no universal claims (i.e. no moral demands which are not
relative to an actor and his or her group).35 This means that the basic prem-
ise for Harmans argument is the interlocking of motivational and norma-
tive statements or his internalism which, in view of their motivational
positions, rules out any criticism concerning NNs actions through inner
judgments.
Also, Williams advocates a kind of normative relativism although, in
contrast to Harman, he does not justify it by means of internalism. Wil-
liams subscribes to a descriptive relativism saying that there are different
systems of morality within different societies with incompatible options
for action.36 Actors may either accept such a normative system seriously,
or not. A case in point for us would be the fact that we cannot really con-
sider the possibility of adopting the form of life of a Medieval Japanese
32
Cf. Gilbert Harman/Judith J. Thompson, Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivi-
ty (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), pp. 60, 62 - All references to this book
refer to passages in Harman.
33
Cf. Harman, Das Wesen der Moral, p. 67.
34
Cf. Harman/Thompson, Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity, pp. 3, 13, 41.
35
Cf. Gilbert Harman, What is Moral Relativism?, in Alvin I. Goldman/Jaegwon
Kim (eds.), Values and Morals. Essays in Honor of William Frankena, Charles
Stevenson and Richard Brandt (London: D. Reidel, 1978), pp. 143-161, here 152.
36
Cf. Bernard Williams for this and the following, Die Wahrheit im Relativ-
ismus, in Idem (ed.), Moralischer Zufall (Knigstein i. T.: Hain, 1984), pp. 143-
154, here 151-153. The following remarks are limited to a central argument of
Williams normative relativism but do not apply to his meta-ethical relativism.
Samurai or a Bronze Age chief with their respective systems of moral

rules. Moreover, it is stated that there are no issues of ethical evaluation in
the case of being confronted with foreign ways of life such as these. These
foreign contexts of action elude any evaluation at least to a limited extent
(as they are in no relevant relationship to our concerns), and we would
have to consider these actions as relative to our ways of life, at least to
some extent.
Internalism, i.e. linking actual motives to what one should do, is pivot-
al to Harmans relativism and its limited potential for criticism but it is
highly disputable. In particular, there are considerations which counter
Harmans internalism:
1. There may be a good reason for or against a certain action even if it

does not motivate. People might not follow a specific reason due to
motives such as dominating inclinations, fears, drive, or egotism.
This does not rule out the possibility that the actor could or should
have been motivated by this reason.
2. Motives for an action cannot be solely decisive for evaluating ac-
tions if it is possible to explain that we do something morally good
based on bad motives (and vice versa).
3. There are cases where an actor may have reasons but is not aware
of them due to a lack of information or a lack of readiness to pro-
cure the information, thus being morally responsible. Here, respon-
sibility is not actually linked to having the motivating reasons for
acting but to the capability and opportunity to acquire the reasons
for acting.
This means that motives for action and reasons for acting are two distinct
entities and that they are logically independent of each other. In addition,
motives are not the sole decisive factor for morally judging actions. What
is relevant are the reasons given. Furthermore, acquiring reasons for not
doing so may be subject to moral evaluations. This points to a significant
distinction: we should distinguish between actually existent motives and
reasons one should have and the latter are significant for assessing moral
issues. Considering something a reason means accepting a standard, re-
gardless of ones inclinations. This differentiation makes it possible for us
to distinguish between reasons and irrational desires motivating our ac-
tions, and it also allows for a rational criticism of the Nazi moral precepts.
This shows that Harmans main argument of relativism with its lack of
potential for criticism is untenable.
Williams espouses that we should refrain from criticism when two

forms of life diverge so dramatically that a transition from one to the other
is not possible. Unfortunately, this limits the possibilities for criticizing the
Nazi moral precepts. Williams relativist criterion and its consequences are
unacceptable as an example by Putnam makes clear. If there is a confron-
tation between a Jew and Nazism, there is no transition to that other way
of life for the Jew. Nonetheless, a Jew would hardly abstain from evaluat-
ing Nazi actions.37 On account of the racism it involves, this example can
be applied to other groups of people who also do not have any transition
option. Therefore, in such cases, this seems to leave no room for criti-
cism. This means that Williams conception of ethics does not have any
appropriate potential for criticism in such cases, either.38
Moreover, Williams has not shown that it is generally impermissible or
impossible to abstract from the contexts when evaluating actions so that
actions derived from foreign contexts cannot be evaluated. An example
will demonstrate that such evaluations are possible. There could be a mor-
al norm in my society which, according to Williams, I would be able to
criticize as a part of my lifeworld. A moral norm with the same precepts
that would demand the same actions or refraining from actions might also
apply in a society that is sufficiently foreign to me. In Williams opinion
this would be beyond my evaluation. By the same token, a member of the
other society would be able to criticize moral norms in his or her own
lifeworld but not the same norms in my lifeworld! This seems unaccepta-
ble because of the fact that a norm which belongs to a specific society is
hardly a necessary criterion for criticizing it. The applicability of criticism
or evaluations of moral norms do not depend on the particular speaker and
his or her relation to the society whose norm is being criticized or evaluat-
ed. It depends on the reasons that can be cited for following it, and it is
certainly true that these reasons can be the same in two vastly different
societies. To this extent, we should reject seeing the fact that somebody
cannot realize or choose a specific way of life for him-/herself as a reason
37
Cf. Hilary Putnam, Fr eine Erneuerung der Philosophie (Stuttgart: Reclam,
1997), p. 104.
38
Moreover, there is another serious problem in Williams conception. Williams
believes that theoretical contents can be known objectively. For example, it might
turn out that the religious beliefs of the Aztecs were based on factually incorrect
premises concerning the existence of their gods. If the practice of the Aztecs was
based on untrue convictions which were supposed to be subject to criticism while
theory and practice were interwoven, this would hardly protect the practice from
criticism (cf. ibid., p. 106). This would also apply to Nazi racism provided that it
functioned in a morally relevant fashion as a basis for behavior.
for thinking that evaluations of this way of life are impossible. Apparently,
the only general prerequisite for a critical statement is understanding the
norms in question (and their social consequences). Therefore, the possi-
bilities of (mutual) rational criticism go far beyond what Williams is will-
ing to concede. This means that only a lack of comprehension can be iden-
tified as a limitation placed on (justifiable) rational criticism. This deprives
Williams type of relativism of its foundation. There are serious reserva-
tions toward explicitly relativistic moral theories that are incapable of
criticizing Nazi moral precepts. Their critical limitations should not be
accepted as they are based solely upon factual motives or facts about
membership in a society.
Walzer attempts to avoid this normative relativism in his reiterative
universalism,39 a kind of universalism that supposedly emerges from
interpreting sharedrepeated basic experiences from various societies.
Morality is said to arise from inside a society while taking inner-societal
motivations into account. On the one hand, the resulting human rights
emerging in or from various societies are universalistic and contrary to the
Nazi moral precepts. On the other hand, it does not include other moral
common grounds, criteria, or reasons which are inter-societal or transcend
the community.
Zimmermanns moral universalism is explicitly directed against Na-
zism and is supposed to provide a motivationaler Begrndungssinn
(motivational sense of justification)40 as historical universalism.41 How-
ever, in the final analysis it leads to normative relativism because, just like
Harman, it relies on motives and, like Walzers conception, it relies on
inner-societal developments that are supposed to lead to universalism
although they cannot guarantee it argumentatively or make it reasonable.
Regarding Nazism, Zimmermann is probably correct when stating that
39
Cf. Michael Walzer, Zwei Arten des Universalismus, in Idem (ed.), Lokale
Kritik globale Standards (Hamburg: Rotbuch-Verlag, 1996).
40
Cf. Wulf Kellerwessel, [editorial on] Rolf Zimmermann: Philosophie nach
Auschwitz, Totalitarismus und Demokratie, vol. 4 (2007) no. 1, pp. 194-198.
Wulf Kellerwessel, Geltungstheoretischer, begrndungsorientierter Universalismus
versus motivationalem, historischem Universalismus, Erwgen Wissen Ethik,
vol. 20 (2009) no. 3, pp. 444-446. Tugendhat, Der moralische Universalismus in
der Konfrontation mit der Nazi-Ideologie.
41
Cf. Rolf Zimmermann, Philosophie nach Auschwitz. Eine Neubestimmung von
Moral in Politik und Gesellschaft (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt-Taschenbuch-
Verlag, 2005). Idem, Moral als Macht. Eine Philosophie der historischen
Erfahrung (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 2008). Idem,
Moralischer Universalismus als geschichtliches Projekt, Erwgen Wissen
Ethik, vol. 20 (2009) no. 3, pp. 415-428.
some Nazis believed that many of their actions were morally correct.
They had an alternative morality as well as their own experiences, val-
ues, moral precepts, and motives which frequently led to their murderous
actions. They were supposed to be justified by the Nazi moral precepts
that did not recognize all human beings as equivalent moral subjects, and
therefore were not taken into consideration for their actions. Zimmermann
thinks that human rights universalism is an advisable reaction to these
experiences of injustice in the Nazi period.
Walzers reiterative universalism, like Zimmermanns version of uni-
versalism, shows deficits in its foundational parts. After all, even if the
same experiences encountered by many nations may have contributed to
the general acceptance of human rights as Walzer claims, this fact (if it is a
fact) is not a reason supporting universal moral norms or human rights.
Walzer restricts himself to statements on the genesis of these norms or
rights. Unfortunately, we cannot deduce anything normative or obligatory
from factual experience. In particular, we cannot deduce anything that is
universally obligatory as long as there are no binding or general criteria for
interpreting or choosing moral contents. If we confine ourselves to inter-
pretations whose starting points are actually existing systems of morality,
these rules may contain something that would be immoral in a different
system of morality. After all, representatives of the Nazi moral precepts
believed that they were reacting in a morally appropriate way to what they
regarded as wrong societal developments based on what they believed to
be scientific discoveries on race. If we intend to evaluate these systems
critically, we will need a standard and point of view that is independent of
its genesis. And, as Walzer confirms, it does not make any relevant differ-
ence that a similar experience sometimes actually leads to actually estab-
lished similar systems of morality (as shown by Nazi ideology and Fascist
ideology) since other interpretive reactions remain open. Walzer says that
systems of morality should fit the particular experience and requirements
arising from them42 and that even if these experiences are confronted in-
appropriately or dishonestly, it is hardly conceivable that they will ignore
them altogether.43 To be able to decide this, it seems that we need a stand-
ard that does not depend on any particular genesis. Only if we accept such
a moral standard will we be able to criticize the grave transgressions of
Nazism.44
42
Cf. Walzer, Zwei Arten des Universalismus, p. 162.
43
Cf. ibid., p. 162.
44
A comprehensive criticism of Walzers conception of morality can be found in
Wulf Kellerwessel, Michael Walzers kommunitaristische Moralphilosophie (Mn-
ster: Lit, 2005).
If we, like Zimmermann, intend to reject the particular Nazi morality,

we must describe moral universalism as a morally superior alternative. We
cannot just present it as one alternative among others that one may be
motivated to follow without demonstrating that one should reasonably
prefer it. But this implies that it cannot just be an issue of historic experi-
ence and experience-based motivation such as that of Zimmermann. After
all, also the Nazis drew their conclusions from historic l experience and
their historically developed concepts of racism. For example, Gro says:
The idea of race originated from a view of the nature of man and the
course of history.45 Strub confirms: The only valid strategy for justifica-
tion is then [in the framework of emphasizing the Germanic features of
Nazi ideology] genealogical stories of what is presented as German histo-
ry;46 however, the content of the resulting moral norms is completely arbi-
trary.47
All this suggests that the basic difficulty emerging from Zimmer-
manns and Walzers positions is the fact that the representatives of Na-
zism had their experience in the light of their preliminary ideological as-
sumptions and interpreted it within the framework of their ideologies. This
is the reason why they arrived at different evaluations or interpretations
which, in turn, led them to different motives or norms. As Zimmermann
says, the Nazis believed that they were acting correctly, which means
that they believed to be acting in accordance with justifiable motives,
every one deriving his motives from the way he understood history. Their
psycho-moral attitude and their inclinations might be substantially dif-
ferent from those of other people due to their different ideological founda-
tions. Hence, in contrast to Harman and Zimmermann, it does not suffice
philosophically to start with attitudes and motives without placing con-
vincing reasons in moral theory.
Furthermore, it is only possible to prove that universalism should be
preferred if it is an alternative that is not simply equivalent to other histor-
ically developed systems of morality arising from specific groups, experi-
ences, interpretations, and evaluations. This holds true regardless of
whether they are explicitly conceived as relativistic as in Nazism (and in
theories such as Harmans or Williams), or if they are only implicitly
relativistic (as in Walzer and Zimmermann). Instead, it is important to
45
Gross, Der Rassengedanke der Gegenwart, p. 524.
46
Christian Strub, Gesinnungsrassismus. Zur NS-Ethik der Absonderung am
Beispiel von Rosenbergs Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, in Werner
Konitzer/Raphael Gro (eds.), Moralitt des Bsen. Ethik und nationalsozialistische
Verbrechen (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2009), pp. 171-197, here 182.
47
Cf. ibid., p. 183.
make it unmistakably clear that universalism is a normative position able

to correctly or convincingly claim validity.
The positions discussed exhibit the same common flaw in different
forms. They all place too much emphasis on the issue of the origin of
moral aspects or the genesis of morality. Harman attributes a particularly
high value to the significance of the origin of motives while neglecting
aspects of validity, and Williams links moral evaluations to their societal
origin, thus curtailing their critical range and limiting their application.
Walzer emphasizes the origin of moral rules in communities but overlooks
the fact that facts about origin have no justificatory force per se. The same
is true for the development of universal moral precepts in specific societies
as Zimmermann sees them. All of them apply a method also applied in
Nazism: you create a morality (or important components of a morality)
that fits your own motives and experiences as a reaction to societal cir-
cumstances, believing to have found a workable justification for your
moral concept. But validity cannot be deduced from genesis, otherwise
everything that has happened would also be valid, and this prevents any
and all criticism. What is more, societal situations do not provide any
normative standards for development: the Nazi moral precepts also
emerged as a reaction to the circumstances of their time as they interpreted
them, even if they were filled with entirely different contents than the
positions mentioned above.
VI. Discourse-Analytical Universalism48

A justifiable universal morality rejects all normative relativism and distin-
guishes itself from reiterative and historical universalism primarily by the
fact that it is not only derived genetically from motives or experiences but
that it aims at rational justification as well. After all, comprehending uni-
versalism from the dynamics of history toward universalization or from its
genesis is something entirely different than giving reasons for universal-
ism. The latter is a question of the rationality of arguments while the for-
mer is a question of contingent historic development (which may be in
harmony with reason, but does not have to be). This means that neither the
actual existence of different systems of morality nor a descriptive relativ-
ism or an account of the genesis of these moralities can decide matters of
validity.
48
Cf. for details: Wulf Kellerwessel, Normenbegrndung in der Analytischen Ethik
(Wrzburg: Knigshausen & Neumann, 2003), ch. 3 and idem, Michael Walzers
kommunitaristische Moralphilosophie, ch. 3.3.
This is why efforts to improve justificatory arguments for morality and

the provision of a discursive rationale of fundamental moral norms intelli-
gible to any language user are so important. All we need for our founda-
tional effort is to appeal to discursive capabilities concerning basic norms.
The justificatory reference to discourses and language games of justifica-
tion is a kind of linguistic apriorism based only on the capability of partic-
ipating in a rational discourse that goes beyond cultural borders and ethnic
affiliations. Anyone capable of correct rule-conforming language use is
provided with the required insight into the correct way of justifying basic
norms, and the task of moral philosophy is to uncover the best reasons.
Justification has to do with language and especially with those lan-
guage rules which provide criteria for successful justification. In ones
search for important moral norms and human rights which all individuals
capable of language use (or obeying rules) can accept and protect, it is
therefore natural to take advantage of the considerations concerning justi-
fication. This rules out racism and anti-Semitism from the outset as well as
any other politically motivated group selection. Even Nazis who attempt to
justify their positions use the rules of ordinary language and are subject to
their inter-subjectively applicable rules. This also extends to the rules of
argumentation stating that a justification is only convincing if it can be
made intelligible to everyone capable of language use and if that individu-
al can pass this insight on to any other language user who is capable of
mastering the rules of the language game of justification.
There is no doubt that this also includes all language users from groups
the Nazis attacked or persecuted. Finally, this implies that all individuals
participating in the discourse remain unharmed members of the discourse
for the entire time and should therefore be protected as individuals partici-
pating in the discourse.
One way to spell out the basic idea behind discourse-analytical justifi-
cations is as follows: If we conceive of a discourse as the linguistic
medium of arguing, disputing, and justifying, then there are various rules
for applying language in discourses, including the following: Speakers
implicitly accept certain obligations in their justificatory practice when
they assert, argue, and dispute something. After all, their statements would
not only lack justification but would also be pointless if not even their
authors believed them to be worth defending. Everyone participating in the
discourse has these obligations because an argument can only be said to be
convincing if it can convince (theoretically) any one individual capable of
participating in a discourse i.e. anyone who is capable of observing the
rules of correct argumentation. This means that claims to validity (once
again considered theoretically) can be made and redeemed vis--vis any-
one capable of discourse if arguments are supposed to be convincing. Of

course, they can only be really convincing if they can be defended against
critical queries or alternative theses. This includes the possibility of indi-
viduals participating in the discourse to ask such questions or to set up
such theses. However, since all participating individuals need to be con-
vinced, everyone would have to be able to ask questions or submit theses.
To this extent, there is a formal equality in the discourse regarding the
choice of speech acts of asserting and denying etc. In this process, the
ethnic origin of the speakers does not play a role, in contrast to their lin-
guistic skills or capability to act in accordance with the rules of language.
Certain rules apply to every discourse, thus restricting the range of
statements (statements formulated by a speaker) that can be justified con-
vincingly. There are not only semantic (logical) contradictions, i.e. (for-
mal) logical fallacies such as violating the principle of contradiction that
should be avoided. There are also pragmatic contradictions that should not
be accepted. The hallmark of pragmatic contradictions is the fact that
something is done with an expression that is ruled out by its content (the
information for the addressee). A case in point is when somebody says
something such as Im not talking now or Im dead. This means that
the act of expression and the content of the expression are in a contradicto-
ry, non-semantic relationship to each other. The fact of expressing some-
thing is incompatible with what is expressed.
These pragmatic contradictions play a crucial role in discourse-
analytical ethics because pragmatic contradictions which arise in the
course of claiming validity for normative correctness are also unaccepta-
ble. The following example might shed some light on this. If a speaker
states that Norm N1 should be complied with, but this statement does
not claim to be correct, the speakers statement should be classified as
pragmatically contradictory: its second part implicitly demands not con-
sidering that N1 is actually obligatory. In an analogous fashion, it is not
possible for a speaker to argue convincingly for the fact that the speaker
does not have any justificatory obligations when justifying normative
demands. If someone asks for the justification of a normative thesis, it
either remains unjustified so that there is no reasonable justification for the
questioning individual to accept it, or the speaker tries to justify his or her
thesis so that the speaker will seek to comply with his or her justificatory
obligations. This indicates that the speaker has accepted this obligation,
and it reveals the pragmatic contradiction implied in the act of disputing.
This can also be illustrated by an example: Nobody should justify any
normative claim (if asked) is in and of itself a normative claim. If it re-
mained unjustified when queried, an opponent would in any event be free
to reject it (without committing a mistake in the argumentation). If an

individual arguing for this thesis tried to justify it, he or she would thereby
produce a pragmatic contradiction because he or she would feel obliged to
justify a normative claim when queried. This would mean that this person
would accept or at least follow a normative claim for justification.
Carrying out speech acts such as asserting, disputing, or doubt-
ing always constitutes entering into discursive proceedings where various
rules of language or rules concerning argumentation apply. It follows that
there is no justification toward anyone who is not subject to the rules of
discourse. These rules of discourse (still to be explicated) equally apply as
linguistic rules to all individuals participating in the discourse, which does
not rule out the possibility of any de facto violations of rules. In other
words, there are presuppositions for discourses which must be respected if
we intend to argue without making a mistake. This means that certain rules
are presumed and that the individuals participating in the discourse must
accept them (which may be done implicitly). This also applies to discours-
es about normative matters.
Our next task is to show that such a discourse also presupposes some
basic moral norms so that anyone participating in it has already accepted
these fundamental norms or is bound to accept them. The corresponding
basic thesis for justifying norms in discourse analysis states that anyone
participating in the discourse (and therefore inquiring the validity of moral
rules) has already (explicitly or implicitly) accepted certain fundamental
moral norms (not just concerning correct language use as such). Therefore,
such an individual cannot dispute them without running into pragmatic
contradictions. In other words, the disputant cannot meaningfully call
norms into question which are accepted, at least implicitly, by all the dis-
putants. This is precisely the reason why they are argumentatively con-
vincing and protected from any expressions of doubt: everyone participat-
ing in the discourse has permission to select and carry out such speech acts
as asserting (i.e. proposing theses) or disputing. Furthermore, as we have
shown, they have the obligation to justify their claims (at least theoretical-
ly) to whoever is participating in the discourse. The crucial point is that all
participants in a discourse must make claims of correctness to all the par-
ticipants and that those claims must be redeemed for or against them. This
is only possible if individuals participating in the discourse are not ob-
structed in their communication so that we can no longer speak of convinc-
ing someone of the correctness claimed. It follows that individuals partici-
pating in the discourse are under obligation not to prevent the other
individuals from contributing what he or she intends to say. In other
words, the discourse must be free of coercion. This also means that accept-
ing the rules of discourse constitutes accepting certain moral norms. This
implies that neither the latter nor the former can be correctly disputed in
terms of their validity in the discourse. After all, there is one rule of dis-
course which has always been accepted as valid: that of stating that every-
body is free in his choice of speech acts. Hence, everyone must presume
that the (basic moral) norms presupposed by participating in the discourse
and the choice of speech acts are valid.
This can be shown by uncovering some pragmatic contradictions in
cases where this assumption is disputed. The statement I accept that you
are free to choose and carry out speech acts in our discourse and, at the
same time, I deny that I must accept the minimum necessary condition
which includes not murdering you can be classified as pragmatically self-
contradictory. When such a statement is produced, the second part of the
sentence renders the first invalid. Giving oneself both the permission to
generally obstruct (by way of murder) an individual from carrying out a
freely chosen speech act and acknowledging the freedom of that individual
to freely engage in that choice renders the utterance altogether invalid.
In other words, there are non-contingent relationships between the
rules of discourse and some basic moral norms. Some of these fundamen-
tal moral norms or the compliance with them are necessary conditions for
respecting the rules of discourse. If someone violates these fundamental
norms, this individual violates per se the rules of discourse to be accepted.
If it is proven that the latter is not permissible, the violation of these moral
norms that secure or maintain the discourse is not permitted either. There-
fore, certain non-linguistic intrusions in speech acts are ruled out in the
discourse, and this is the reason why certain basic norms must be complied
with and violations of these fundamental norms must be prevented. In
other words, if we want to make sure that speech acts can be chosen freely,
it is evident that the following cannot be permitted:
1. Murdering an individual participating in the discourse, because this

(forever) deprives said individual of an opportunity to select and
carry out any speech acts. Accordingly, the following basic moral
norm applies: you are not allowed to murder anyone.
2. I Other individuals participating in the discourse frustrating the free
choice of speech acts by invading their autonomy. This includes
impairing others health as well as encroaching upon their freedom
to act and their freedom to will. This leads to a prohibition of muti-
lation, injury (physical and psychological), rape, a prohibition of
depriving someones freedom, extortion, and the forced administra-
tion of drugs. These actions are not permitted at any time (at least
assuming there is no conflict of moral norms) because all of them

(at least temporarily) impair the capability of the individuals in
question to participate in the discourse. Threatening actions such as
these are also prohibited provided they hinder the free choice or use
of speech acts.
3. Beyond this, the moral right to freedom of opinion and freedom of
speech emerges from the prohibition of preventing others from the
free choice of speech acts. We should also add the prohibition of
lies and deceptions which eliminate or undermine the lied to or de-
ceived individuals capability of participating in the discourse.
In short, this means that life, limbs, including an individuals freedom of

movement, and the psyche should be protected normatively to ensure that
individuals can freely participate in the discourse.
In this context, it is worth emphasizing that questioning these basic
moral norms of the discourse is one thing and that doubting the validity of
other moral norms which do not secure the discourse or protect the mental
integrity and physical autonomy of the individuals participating in the
discourse is another. The difference becomes obvious as the fundamental
norms which secure the discourse can no longer be the subject matter of
negotiations. Casting doubt on them leads to conflicts with the rules of
discourse which manifest themselves in pragmatic contradictions. This
means that you cannot honestly grant someone free choice and the egali-
tarian option of carrying out speech acts while at the same time depriving
individuals participating in the discourse of that possibility by way of
murder, mutilation, injury, or the deprivation of their freedom (or threaten-
ing them with such actions). Thus, if these basic norms become an issue in
the discourse, they will be recognized as already being complied with or as
something that should be complied with in the discourse.49
These general conditions of the discourse apply to all creatures capable
of participating in a discourse, and therefore they also apply to representa-
tives of the Nazi persuasion. To the extent to which they are incompatible
with the needs of discourse-analytical ethics, they should be abandoned
because they cannot be convincingly defended or justified in a discourse.
It is also not possible to evade the aforementioned arguments in a justifia-
ble manner by not participating in the discourse as whosoever refuses to
participate in the discourse has no possibility of justifying his or her posi-
49
However, the individuals participating in this debate can rationally and voluntar-
ily suspend their compliance with these basic standards in reference to themselves
as in giving ones permission to a physician to use anesthesia before an operation
or to cause pain etc. in order to maintain ones capability to debate in the future.
tion. This also extends to Nazis who refuse to participate in the discourse.
No-one who has the required linguistic capability (these attempts are
pragmatically self-contradictory) can justifiably exclude him- or herself
from the discourse. It is also not possible to justify an arbitrary decision as
to who may or may not participate in the discourse; this prevents anyone
from being excluded due to their ethnic affiliation or racist positions such
as that of Nazism.
This universalist discourse-analytical ethics also generates a universal-
ist criticism of the Nazi moral precept, which should be obvious from this
outline sketch of justification. This is the reason why this position, in con-
trast to normative relativism, is not subject to the critique that it lacks the
capability of criticizing the Nazi moral conception. Since discourse-
analytical ethics implies that criticizing the Nazi moral precept is justified,
it is in this sense superior not only to the apparently universalist positions
of Walzer and Zimmermann but also to the relativist conceptions of Har-
man and Williams.
NATIONAL SOCIALISM BOLSHEVISM
UNIVERSALISM:
MORAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN HISTORY
AS A PROBLEM IN ETHICS
ROLF ZIMMERMANN
In recent years, I have developed various interpretations of National So-

cialism (NS) and Bolshevism that aim at a moral conceptualization of the
specific traits of these socio-political formations. By taking the analysis of
the moral catastrophes of the Holocaust and the Holodomor as starting
points, I have come to the conclusion that an understanding of the motives
of the protagonists of these epochal crimes leads to a seemingly paradoxi-
cal diagnosis. The extermination of the Jews or kulaks is carried out under
normative premises which indicate an image of alternative moralities or a
moral otherness of their own. This means that we can speak of racial or
social murder in the name of morals.1
A reading such as this may provoke objections if one is only disposed
to speak of morals in the sense of true morals or presumes that mor-
als should always be conceived of as a singular unit in combination with
connotations of an unchangeable or holy level of authority. However, it is
impossible to follow such a way of thinking any further, if we take experi-
ences which reveal substantial moral changes and moral transformations
of humans seriously. Additionally, the question arises as to how to come
to grips with the historical status of modern universalism itself and how to
deal systematically with the problem of a plurality of moralities standing
in opposition to each other. In what follows, I will give an outline of my
comparative approach to a historical reading of substantial moral alterna-
1
Cf. Rolf Zimmermann, Philosophie nach Auschwitz. Eine Neubestimmung von
Moral in Politik und Gesellschaft (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2005). Idem,
Moral als Macht. Eine Philosophie der historischen Erfahrung (Reinbek bei
Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2008).
390 National Socialism Bolshevism Universalism
tives in the context of discussions that were stimulated by it.2 My major

points are to show the relevance of moral diversity and to develop con-
cepts adequate to such a diversity.
First, it is necessary to make some distinctions in speaking of morals
and to put a comparative study of morals in its right place (1.). Secondly,
to pursue this comparative study further, it is necessary to work out the
essential characteristics of divergent moralities by taking moral universal-
ism as a descriptive and normative orientation. In this way I arrive at con-
trasting characterizations of NS (2.) and Bolshevism (3.) which include the
self-interpretations of these formations in moral terms. One outcome of
such an analysis is that not only Nazism but also Bolshevism represents a
form of particularistic morality of its own. By analyzing in this fashion,
deep moral diversity newly poses the question of the moral image of man
and stimulates the view of a historical conception of egalitarian universal-
ism (4.).
I. Introductory Remarks on Morals and Method

The moral contrasts and transformations I am going to discuss are related
to three levels of research. To begin with, we can ask in a rather formal
way what is to be understood by a general concept of morals or morality
without deciding in advance what must be considered the true or only
acceptable sort of morals. On this level, we can speak of a set of norms
or imperatives shared by a community to regulate its social life and a cor-
responding set of sanctions which are mutually accepted in cases of devia-
tions which are seen as relevant. I do not intend to develop a concept of
morals on this general level for which I have mentioned only some catch-
words. Instead, I wish to simply distinguish the problem of a general con-
cept of morality from the different ways for filling it with moral content.3
It is important to stress the question of a formal concept of morality in
advance because this helps avoid an unreflected limitation to an already
2
Cf. idem, Moralischer Universalismus als geschichtliches Projekt. Hauptartikel
mit kritischer Diskussion, Erwgen Wissen Ethik (EWE), vol. 20 (2009) no. 3, pp.
415-485. Idem, Replik: Moralisch-geschichtliche Selbstauslegung als Problem
der Ethik, EWE, vol. 20 (2009) no. 3, pp. 485-496.
3
A general social concept of morality which formally points out to the reciprocity
of claims has already been developed by Peter F. Strawson, Social Morality and
Individual Ideal, in Idem, Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London:
Methuen, 1974), pp. 26-44. A productive version of a formal concept of morality is
nowadays to be found in: Ernst Tugendhat, Anthropologie statt Metaphysik, 2nd
edition (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2010), Ch. 5.
Rolf Zimmermann 391
accepted morality and it opens the view towards an empirical study of

different moral self-interpretations of humans. This also meets certain
desiderates derived from disciplines such as social anthropology4 as well
as from my perspective of hermeneutic ethics of historical experience.
This leads to the second level of research which concerns one of the
crucial points of my considerations. Here it is relevant to discern different
conceptions of morality as manifested in NS, Bolshevism, and the univer-
salist paradigm of Western communities and to assess them comparatively.
The main emphasis is on a qualitative comparison of the essentials of
those moralities which have gained world historical importance. To my
mind, we can only arrive at results in this field if we combine historical
research focusing on NS and Bolshevism with a philosophical sensitivity
for moral questions.5
There is no doubt that Hannah Arendts work on totalitarianism stimu-
lates research to the present day. The analysis of the moral dimension of
both sorts of totalitarianism, however, deserves a revised conceptual
framework which enables us to situate moral self-interpretations of hu-
mans in history. The last years have shown articulations of a moral turn
in history.6 Parallel to such an endeavour, I would like to argue for a his-
4
Cf. Monica Heintz, Introduction: Why There should be an Anthropology of
Moralities, in Idem (ed.), The Anthropology of Moralities (New York/Oxford:
Berghahn Books, 2009), pp. 1.
5
This is in accordance with Jonathan Glover, Humanity. A Moral History of the
Twentieth Century (London: Pimlico, 2001). To my mind, it is not possible to
study Aushwitz without the competence of historical research as suggested by
Jean-Franois Lyotard, Le Diffrend (Paris: Les ditions de Minuit, 1983), sect.
93. I do not believe global approaches like those of Adorno's and Horkheimer's
dialectics of enlightenment to be helpful for any interpretation of Nazism. From
a gobal perspective, Agamben declares the concentration camps the nomos of
modernity. His interpretation of Aushwitz seems little more than an echo of Ar-
endt's banality of evil and a comment on Primo Levi's well-known report on
Aushwitz which tries to identify the Muselmann as the clue to the whole phe-
nomenon: Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive
(New York: Zone Books, 1999). Albeit Agamben is right in seeing a break of
ethical thinking, his reflections are not far-reaching enough for an adequate con-
ceptualization in terms of moral philosophy.
6
Cf. George Cotkin, History's Moral Turn, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol.
69 (2008) no. 2, pp. 293-315. Cf. also Charles S. Maier, Consigning the Twenti-
eth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era, American
Historical Review, vol. 105 (2000) no. 3, pp. 807-831. With regard to the Twenti-
eth Century Maier develops the perspective for moral narratives.
torical turn in ethics.7 To be terminologically clear, I am speaking of

ethics in the sense of moral philosophy, whereas moralities or morals in
whatever sense constitute the universe of the ethics discourse.
Finally the third level of my discussion is guided by the question of
how to understand historically the morals of egalitarian universalism, of
how it unfolds into human rights and of how to justify it systematically. In
particular, I only delve into the question of justification in outline. In any
event, it suffices for my present purposes if I succeed with convincing
readers that hopes for a priori justifications of universalism are as vain as
the trust in anthropological structures. What we can hope for, so it seems,
are inter-human relationships cultivating psycho-moral attitudes of toler-
ance towards diversity and non-discrimination.
II. Rupture of Species: The Problem of Moral Otherness

in Nazism and the Analysis of Moral Diversity
The moral catastrophe of the Holocaust stimulates ongoing efforts of anal-
ysis and explanation and is rightly seen as the most disastrous outcome of
Nazism. Its unprecedentedness - as Yehuda Bauer says8 spells out a
challenge, not only to historians but also to philosophers in questioning the
moral view of man. In the last twenty years, the broad research carried out
on Nazism and the Holocaust has pieced together a detailed image of the
Holocaust encompassing the development of Jews-baiting after 1933, the
terroristic suppression after 1938/39, the mass murders in the context of
the German Ostfeldzge and what is known as the final solution in
the gas chambers of Aushwitz and other extermination camps after 1942.
It is eminently important to study the Holocaust in its various aspects and
to provide a holistic view of it. In the context of the work of historians
such as Saul Friedlnder or Peter Longerich to give just two examples of
outstanding historical research my interpretation of the Holocaust in
moral terms runs as follows: The pivotal feature of Nazism is its denuncia-
tion of Judaism or the Jews and its permanent struggle against the Jewish
enemy. Nazism denies the Jews the right to exist and, by its exterminat-
ing strategies and practices, leaves the path of moral unity of the human
species. No longer does mankind refer to all human beings but is split into
7
Cf. Berel Lang, Philosophy's Contribution to Holocaust Studies, in Eve Gar-
rard/Geoffrey Scarre (eds.), Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust (Alder-
shot/Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), p. 8: [] the Holocaust should teach
philosophy to speak history.
8
Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven/London: Yale University
Press, 2001), p. 20.
Rolf Zimmermann 393
those who are real humans and those who are not. Nazism establishes a
new order of values under its Weltanschauung, part of which is the cen-
tral dogma of a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world which is set forth
in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Albeit a forgery, this document
was considered absolutely authentic by Nazism. The Jews were seen as the
main enemy, not only of the Aryan-German community but of all man-
kind. Nazism constructs an enmity toward the Jews as a homogeneous
collective that incorporates certain essential qualities as a people or race in
strict contrast to the Aryan-German collective designated the Volksge-
meinschaft. The Jews obstruct the mission of the Aryan-German race to
advance its creative and idealistic potential and dispute the principle of
history that consists of a never-ending struggle between races.9
The construct of adversarial qualities in collectivistic terms of race
leads to a view of the Jews as a spiritual race that is responsible for a
universalistic picture of man brought to power in the French Revolution
under the idea of equality. This is the reason why the Nazis fight against
the Jews is a struggle against a universalistic self-image of man.10 The
radicalism of this type of anti-Semitism provides the leading motive for
the Holocaust. This does not rule out other motives, so that not every hu-
miliation or atrocity committed during the processes of persecution and
extermination of the Jews can and must be seen under this heading. But
the existential enmity toward an alleged threat of a collective Jewish pre-
dominance over the world constitutes the framework of anti-Jewish activi-
ties and operations on any level. I propose the term rupture of species
(Gattungsbruch) to characterize the radicalism of Nazism in moral
terms.11 This term is meant to signify the overthrowing of traditional moral
limits in order to transform mankind into a new world of moral other-
9
Cf. the illuminating study of Barbara Zehnpfennig, Hitlers Mein Kampf. Eine
Interpretation (Munich: Fink, 2000).
10
This in general agreement with Avishai Margalit/Gabriel Motzkin, The
Uniqueness of the Holocaust, Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 25 (2006) no. 1,
pp. 65-83. The significance of humiliation of the Jews, which doubtlessly played
an important role, is, however, somewhat overstated by the authors to construe a
Nazi-identity.
11
In the moral significance of the term I feel close to: Emil L. Fackenheim, To
Mend the World. Foundations of Future Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken,
1982), p. 250: The continuity is broken, and thought, if it is not itself to be and
remain broken, requires a new departure and a new category [] because the
Holocaust is not a relapse into barbarism, a phase in a historical dialectic, a
radical-but-merely-parochial catastrophe. It is a total rupture. Fackenheims
theological reflections, of course, are not my concern.
ness.12 In the long run, however, it was not only the Jewish ideas of
human equality that were supposed to be abolished but also the Christian-
humanistic tradition. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfhrer-SS, denounced
Christianity as an enemy comparable to the Jews.13 The road to moral
otherness was interwoven with a utopia of founding man anew (neues
Menschentum) which found its expression by a vision of an empire of
thousand years. Thus one can interpret the dynamics of the moral change
induced by Nazism as a moral transformation of mankind as a whole.
We can see that this is not a view that is very far away from actual his-
tory, as can be witnessed by the substantial support the Nazi project was
able to generate on all levels of German society, not to mention parallel
tendencies abroad. It was no illusion to conceive of a substantial moral
transformation and to expect a broad tendency of solidarity in this fashion.
It was not even unrealistic to expect the new society to accept or tolerate
the extermination of the Jews, for some time to come. This is a lesson that
can be learned from the work of historians who have documented how
little resistance was encountered when Germans became witnesses of the
deportation of Jews or other discriminated peoples and how openly the
extermination-project was communicated at certain times by the Nazi lite
or the Nazi press. The dissolution of traditional moral boundaries in a
dominant mainstream of engagement for the Nazi movement forces us to
take these historical experiences seriously and to recognize the fragility of
moral standards hitherto believed sacrosanct.
Therefore, on the one hand the Nazi project of moral transformation
can be seen in the moral rupture of species with regard to its active dynam-
ics. On the other hand, it can be seen in a moral fading away of the con-
cept of species in its various modes of everyday support or silent tolera-
tion. Terminologically speaking, one can refer to this process of
dissolution as a failure of species-commitment. In Saul Friedlnders term,
the central focus of Nazisms radical anti-Semitism is a redemptive anti-
Semitism14 which attempts to liberate the Aryan-German community
12
In analyzing Hitler's writings and other sources, Heinsohn (Gunnar Heinsohn,
What makes the Holocaust a uniquely unique genocide?, Journal of Genocide
Research, vol. 2 (2000) no. 3, pp. 411-430) stresses the moral antithesis between
Hitler's thought and Jewish morality concentrated on the sanctity of life in a
universal sense. I agree with the moral antithesis but leave it to historical research
whether Jewish morality can be interpreted as universalistic from the beginning.
13
Cf. Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), Ch. III.
14
Saul Friedlnder, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. I: The Years of Persecution
1933-1939 (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), Part I, Ch. 3.
Rolf Zimmermann 395
and the whole of mankind from the Jews. The moral transformation I have
characterized enables us to speak similarly of a morality of redemption.
The religious meaning of redemption is converted to a mundane project
of this world. No longer there is an otherworldly redemption, and the Last
Judgment is exercised in real history.
The shocking historical experience of Nazism and the Holocaust lays
bare in a very general sense the opposition that existed between a Nazi
morality of redemption and a type of morality we might call a morality of
integration. Integration is the leading idea in so far as it is presumed that
every human being is a part of the human species and a member of man-
kind simply by his or her existence. Nazism contests this seemingly trivial,
standardized inclusion of every human into the species. It is indeed true
that the Jews are recognized as members of the human race, although the
Jews are not part of true mankind. A morality of integration can also be
ascribed in an elementary sense to a hierarchical or otherwise traditional
society which denies equal rights to all humans but holds it to be self-
evident that every human is an integral part of mankind. To be clear, moral
norms inaugurated by religions of whatever kind should also be placed
under the heading of a morality of integration and not under the above
mentioned meaning of a morality of redemption.
In contrast to Christianity, according to which redemption is not of
this world but otherworldly in a realm of transcendent salvation, the orien-
tation of the Nazi morals of redemption is purely intramundane. By these
distinctions it becomes obvious that the specific sort of a morality of inte-
gration, which has developed in the Western world since the eighteenth
century as a universalism of the equality of man and equal rights for all
men, marks fundamental and insurmountable opposition to Nazi morals.
Hannah Arendt was one of the first to come to see Nazism as being in-
compatible to the Western moral traditions and to give a reading of it as an
order of its own.15 I further propose considering this opposition in a sys-
tematic fashion by taking into account the fact that Nazism had succeeded
with constituting a type of revolutionary moral order which, in contrast to
other forms, one might call a form of moral sozialization or communitari-
15
Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany,
Commentary, vol. 10 (1950), pp. 342-353. Idem, The Origins of Totalitarianism
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951), Part III. In the following I will
leave aside discussions on Arendt's concepts of radical evil or the banality of
evil which I have interpreted elsewhere: Zimmermann, Philosophie nach Ausch-
witz, pp. 25. My concepts of rupture of species and failure of species-commitment
avoid the complications of these concepts.
zation. To simplify matters, I will speak of divergent moral orders and

characterize them in the sense of Weberian ideal types:
First, there has to be a basic moral self-understanding as a moral cen-
tre, defining obligations for the respective I-orientations or We-
orientations. For the Western-universalistic type this means that every
woman and man ascribes the same moral status to herself or himself as to
every other woman and man and is led by the self-understanding as a
member of a We-community in which every member follows just this self-
understanding. The relevant self-understanding becomes manifest in the
reciprocal recognition of equal rights for every member of whatever com-
munity. Nazism sets a centre of its own against this universalistic centre.
The Germans or the Aryans claim a higher moral status than Non-
Germans or Non-Aryans and follow the self-understanding of a We-
community which gives dominance to an order of normative inequality
under racial standards. The particularistic self-understanding is strictly
opposed to any universalistic conviction which is seen as Jewish in
principle.
Second, there is a network of social norms and institutions tied to the
moral centre. For the universalistic type, some of the elements of this
network are a civil life free of violence, social and public protection
against discrimination of whatever kind, and a system of law founded on
human rights which also defines constraints in respect of the political
sphere of constitutional democracy both in domestic and foreign affairs.
Contrary to this setting, Nazism aims for the strengthening of the German-
Aryan community under the guidance of the Fuehrer (Fhrerprinzip).
Neither domestic nor foreign affairs are limited by law, the interests of the
peoples community (Volksgemeinschaft) are given priority over all
other considerations. Carl Schmitt, one of the leading jurists and intellec-
tuals of the Nazi period, created the doctrine of Der Fhrer schtzt das
Recht (The leader defends the law), thus giving the leader authority on
a higher sphere of lawmaking where he is in a position to create the true
law of the community.16
Third, there is its relation to violence which characterizes a certain type
of moral order. The universalistic type requires note that I am speaking
of ideal types reconciling conflicts within a community by means of
non-violent processes and by respecting the state monopoly of legitimate
violence. For the Nazi morality type, violence is a legitimate means of
enforcing the homogeneity of the community against its enemies, defined
in racial terms or other unhealthy elements. Analogously, in Hitlers
16
Cf. Carl Schmitt, Der Fhrer schtzt das Recht, Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung,
vol. 39 (1934) no. 15, pp. 945-950.
Rolf Zimmermann 397
opinion, the violent fight for race domination in the context of a global
struggle is the true human right of a community. Even the constitutional
law is overridden in order to secure the place of the Germans in history.17
By the same token, wars of aggression are declared actions of self-defense.
Compared with this, the universalistic type limits military power and vio-
lence to situations of self-defense and demands respect for the law of na-
tions.
The existence of divergent thus characterized moral orders poses a sys-
tematic problem to ethics. It no longer seems justifiable to speak of mo-
rality simply in the singular because historical experience indicates a far-
reaching moral variability of humans and their possible moral transfor-
mations. The stronger the moral oppositions appear, the weaker seems the
belief in moral convictions or principles, regardless of historical contexts.
To differentiate my argument further, let me point out to Dan Diners
concept of the rupture of civilization (Zivilisationsbruch).18 Originally
this term was conceived to analyze the major difficulties the Jewish vic-
tims had with rationalizing the motives and deeds of the Nazis. The Nazi
project of exterminating the Jews was pursued further, contrary to their
own economic interests and contrary to priorities in their conduct of war.
From this perspective Diner ascribes a cognitive incoherence to the Nazis
because they abandoned the focus on purposive rationality and self-
preservation which can be called self-evident in the tradition of Western
civilization. The Nazis, therefore, did not simply act irrationally. They
stood for a counter-rationality which doomed the hope of some Jewish
leaders to failure that they might survive with their community by working
efficiently for the Nazi system. This strategy could be successful to a cer-
tain degree, but on the whole the recourse to the rationality of the homo
oeconomicus was negated by Nazism.
My concept of rupture of species is designed to clarify the moral di-
mension which must be taken into account with regard to Diners epistem-
ic concept. My concept serves as a clue to the counter-morality of Nazism,
characterized above as being in opposition to Western civilization in nor-
mative terms. However restricted in details Western tradition may be it
is the normative tradition of egalitarian universalism. If we become aware
of the counter-morality of Nazism, even the prima facie counter-rationality
17
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 248.-251. Edition (Munich: Zentralverlag der
NSDAP, 1937), p. 105.
18
Dan Diner (1987), Zwischen Aporie und Apologie. ber Grenzen der
Historisierbarkeit des Nationalsozialismus, in Idem (ed.), Ist der
Nationalsozialismus Geschichte? (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag,
1987), pp. 62-73.
Diner exposes transforms itself into a fatal logic of its own. Recently,
Diner has once again stressed the epistemic meaning of his concept. Fur-
thermore, he has taken issue with tendencies to water down the exception-
ality of the Holocaust by shifting away from the specific fate of the Jews
to anthropological considerations about a new phenomenon of evil or to a
dubious international culture of morality now in crystallization for
which the Holocaust is merely the icon of the negative.19
I consider criticizing such tendencies and arguing for relevant distinc-
tions in comparative perspectives on different genocides justified. But it
should also be evident that we need a moral concept of rupture which
avoids a levelling of the moral problem we are dealing with. This is the
function of my concept of the rupture of species.
That a concept such as this is required can be grasped in contemporary
talk about historical responsibility where just the moral meaning of rupture
is articulated in German-Jewish dialogues. In a speech delivered in the
Knesset (2008) the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, used the term
rupture in civilization and at the same time declared German responsibil-
ity for the moral catastrophe of the Shoah. It seems clear that there is a
desideratum to articulate the Shoah in a moral vocabulary adequate to the
moral significance of this epochal event. In my opinion, the concept of the
rupture of species does clarify the moral significance of the Holocaust.
There are three additional points I would like to clarify: the question of
the coherence of NS morality, the question of normality of the perpetra-
tors, and the relevant contrast between universalism and particularism. As
to the coherence of NS morality, it is not necessary to work with the fic-
tion of a closed system of inner consistency. To my mind, it is sufficient to
contrast the normative essentials of moralities in opposition as above and
to describe the details of the concomitants and consequences within the
socio-political rule of NS. Detailed studies of the moral order of NS20 have
always to be aware of the dynamics of NS and the moral developments in
processes of human transformation. Such processes pertain, for example,
to the relation of morality to law, to give a perhaps remote example in this
field. Roland Freisler, subsequently presiding judge at the Volks-
gerichtshof, identifies morality with vlkische Sittenlehre and emphati-
19
Idem, Rupture in Civilization. On the Genesis and Meaning of a Concept in
Understanding, in Moshe Zimmermann (ed.), On Germans and Jews under the
Nazi Regime (Jersualem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2006), p. 47.
20
Cf. Wolfgang Bialas, Die moralische Ordnung des Nationalsozialismus, in
Werner Konitzer/Raphael Gross (eds.), Moralitt des Bsen. Ethik und
nationalsozialistische Verbrechen (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2009), pp. 30-60.
Rolf Zimmermann 399
cally declares it the nutritive substance of law to revise the rules of crim-
inal law.21
The substantial transformation of society and man invoked by leading
figures of the NS ideology22 was not a creatio ex nihilo but had to con-
stantly distinguish itself from prior norms of morality or political institu-
tions.23 Thus the constitution of the Weimarer Republik was never sus-
pended officially but superposed by new lawmaking. That is to say that
adherents of the former republic with its constitutional enumeration of
personal rights were, albeit in minority, the representatives of a still vivid
morality in opposition to the NS transformation. On the other hand, former
adherents of NS who subsequently became critical of the system on moral
grounds relied on resources of Western moral traditions or of Christian
morality. The historical constellation, therefore, seems adequately de-
scribed as a permanent conflict of divergent moralities, no matter how
dominant the Nazi morality was at times.
The process of moral transformation can be studied in parallel within
the armed forces (Wehrmacht) or in the descriptions given by special
units that participated in killing campaigns, thereby transforming their
moral identity.24 Even the leading figures of NS, such as Himmler, devel-
oped their plans for the final solution only step-by-step. Although the
extermination of the Jews was a steady option for the NS leaders, its
modes of realization changed over time. In 1940 Himmler favoured the
Madagascar Plan which avoided physical extermination, as this was
deemed alien to the Teutonic spirit.25 There is little doubt that this plan of
establishing a ghetto on the island of Madagascar was motivated by the
idea of exerting some pressure against Great Britain and the United States
to reduce the influence of Jewish activists especially in the US. Albeit far
away from concrete realization, it shows the transformations of the Nazis
options to fight the Jews. This does not alter the disposition to give the
21
Roland Freisler (1936), Gedanken zur Technik des werdenden Strafrechts und
seiner Tatbestnde, Zeitschrift fr die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, vol. 55 (1936)
no. 1, p. 511.
22
Cf. Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hoheneichen
Verlag, 1935): In a preface he explains that the political revolution of the state has
to be accomplished by the transformation of mentalities.
23
Cf. Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge/MA/London: Belknap,
2003).
24
Cf. Harald Welzer, Tter. Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmrder
werden (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 2005).
25
Cf. Peter Longerich, Holocaust. The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), Ch. IV, E.
genocidal project its radical scenario at Aushwitz, but it underlines the

processes of transformation in practicing the moral rupture as such.
The SS and its organizations were an exemplary community of moral
transformation. In our context it is important to remember that the SS
represents not only the highest type of a Nazi community in respect of the
militant combination of ideology and racial struggle. At the same time this
community delivered the elitist paradigm of ideal Nazi socialization and
moral transformation, which could serve as an educational model for the
whole society. Ideal virtues like loyalty, obedience, honor or comradeship
were posed in direct relation to Adolf Hitler as a person and the personifi-
cation of those concepts culminated in every SS-mans oath of allegiance
to maintain loyalty to Hitler to the death. This development shows the
suspension of a concept of conscience in the Christian tradition which was
open to each individuals moral reflection. This way, breaking the moral
limits was continuously encouraged.26 The moral significance of the trans-
formations I have outlined is echoed in Hitlers phrase that the breakdown
of Christianity was one of the greatest revolutions history had ever seen.27
Christianity and egalitarian universalism are on equal footing, as far as
integrating every man into the human species is concerned.
My second additional point can be put briefly. The Nazi movement
was not a product far away from our world but generated under the social,
cultural, and political conditions of Europe. The bewilderment caused by
the Holocaust and other moral catastrophes is a bewilderment about deeds
of people like ourselves: [] the tragedy of the Shoah was not its inhu-
manity but the fact that the Nazis were humans, just as we are.28 Espe-
cially in the moral context we are dealing with it is important not to ex-
clude the protagonists, supporters or perpetrators of NS from the domain
of human normality in a broad sense of the term, however sharply their
ideology or moral convictions may be criticized. We have to leave open
the field of human possibilities and take a realistic view of history which
26
Cf. Bernd Wegner, Hitlers Politische Soldaten: Die Waffen-SS 1933-1945, 7th
edition (Paderborn/Munich/Vienna/Zurich: Schningh, 2006).
27
Cf. Rainer Zitelmann, Hitler. Selbstverstndnis eines Revolutionrs (Stuttgart:
Klett-Cotta, 1987), pp. 104.
28
Yehuda Bauer, Einige berlegungen zur Shoah, Zeitschrift fr
Geschichtswissenschaft, vol. 54 (2006) no. 6, p. 547. (My translation). Cf. analo-
gously: Peter J. Haas, Morality after Auschwitz. The Radical Challenge of the Nazi
Ethic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), p. 232: Although the Holocaust is
unique in its awfulness, it is a firm part of normal human history [] In studying
the Holocaust, we study not only a particular society of the past but ourselves as
well.
Rolf Zimmermann 401
presents human developments with very different outcomes.29 Moral di-

versity has to be recognized also in the wide field of human unfoldings.
The third point I want to add is the reading of NS morality as particu-
larism in opposition to egalitarian universalism. Sometimes my concept of
the rupture of species is countered by the argument that the Nazi move-
ment did not negate the human status of the Jews. This is in one sense
right, but in the relevant sense it is wrong.30 We have to account for an
ambiguity in the concept of mankind. On the one hand, mankind is used
as a descriptive term of ordinary language and refers to the facts of global
conditions of individuals, groups, peoples, nations and religious communi-
ties as a whole. In this sense, Jews are part of mankind. On the other hand,
however, mankind stands for true mankind (wahres Menschentum)
as a normatively limited concept not at all accepting the common facts of
mankind. In this sense, the Jews are not part of mankind but are eliminated
in order to achieve a purified kind of mankind. This normatively restricted
concept is the counterpart of the rupture of species. Hannah Arendt
made this clear when she concluded her report on the Eichmann trial with
a critique of the Nazi hybris of being entitled to decide who should live on
earth and who should not.31
The morality of redemption I have exposed above, therefore, is in ac-
cordance with the normatively restricted concept of mankind. Its claim to
save mankind as a whole is pseudo-universalistic, as it aims at the predom-
inance of a certain form of life. In reality, its claim is radically particularis-
tic not least of all in view of its own morality. Thus the substantial opposi-
tion to egalitarian universalism defines the frame for further discussion.
III. Creating the New Man: Bolshevik Utopia

and Moral Transformation
As in the case of NS, one can take the moral catastrophes of Stalinism as a
starting point to delve into the history of Bolshevism and the moral trans-
formations it has led to. By following this track I am in agreement with
29
Cf. Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), pp. 111-112: I do not pretend that understanding men like Hitler,
or Himmler, or Stangl is an easy matter. I would only insist that the problem is not
qualitatively different from the problem inherent in understanding any other human
beings and that our understanding of our fellow human beings will not be and
cannot be complete.
30
Cf. Zimmermann, Replik, p. 488.
31
Cf. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
(New York: Penguin Books, 1994), Epilogue.
recent historical research which very differentiatedly underscores the fruit-

fulness of making comparisons between Stalinism and Nazism.32 The
question of a specific Bolshevik morality, however, is goes far beyond the
epoch of Stalinism. We must also consider the family resemblance be-
tween Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin to get the clues to Bolshevik morality.
There is little doubt that Trotsky is not at all responsible for the cultural
revolution under Stalin. However, his conceptual endeavours to define
Bolshevik morals can be taken as an ideal type for founding a morality in
the sense of a communist morality of redemption which does not differ in
principle from the Stalinist form of Bolshevism. In the following I would
like to briefly call the moral disasters of Stalinism to mind in the context
of Bolshevik utopia. Then will I consider the ongoing moral change during
the Stalinist period as worked out by historians. In relation to communist
utopia, the impetus of moral transformation can be studied on a general
level in Trotskys Their morals and ours. This opens the question of
adequate conceptual interpretations of Bolshevik morality and puts it in
the larger context of the vision of New Man in Modernity.
The term Holodomor pertains to the rigid collectivization of agricul-
ture which caused the death of millions of people in the years 1932/33. It
is composed of the Ukrainian words holod for hunger and mor for
epidemic disaster. The regions of the Ukraine, Northern Caucasus and
Kazakhstan were the main countries devastated by a broad wave of starva-
tion with the sum total of victims being estimated to have been 6 millions
or more. More than half of the victims died in the Ukraine which in the
meantime has inaugurated a commemoration day of Holodomor every
year in November. This catastrophe was not the wellspring of natural
forces to cause a human disaster but the result of the revolutionary strategy
toward a liquidation of the kulaks as a class (Stalin).33 Kulaks were
32
See Michael Geyer, Introduction, in Michael Geyer/Sheila Fitzpatrick (eds.),
Beyond Totalitarianism. Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge/MA: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2009), pp. 1-37 for a history of research on relevant com-
parisons and contemporary perspectives.
33
As I give only a minimal sketch I refer in sum to a few sources: Robert Con-
quest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, 3rd
edition (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Nicolas Werth, Ein
Staat gegen sein Volk. Gewalt, Unterdrckung und Terror in der Sowjetunion, in
Stphane Courtois/Nicolas Werth/Jean-Louis Pann/Andrzej Paczkowski/Karel
Bartoek/Jean-Louis Margolin/Rmi Kauffer/Pierre Rigoulot/Pascal Fontaine/Yves
Santamaria/Sylvain Boulouque/ Joachim Gauck/Ehrhart Neubert, Das Schwarz-
buch des Kommunismus (Munich: Piper, 1998), pp. 45-295. Cheryl A. Madden,
The Holodomor, 1932-1933, Canadian American Slavic Studies, vol. 37 (2003)
no. 3, pp. 13-26. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers. Private Life in Stalin's Russia
Rolf Zimmermann 403
generally denounced as an exploitive class without providing any clear

definition to the term kulak itself. In reality there was no homogeneous
class of kulaks, which means that kulak vacillated between a small
group of wealthy peasants, peasants who were in opposition to the project
of collectivization or just people whose attitudes put them under the suspi-
cion of being kulaks. Some Bolshevik groups advancing collectivization
decided by drawing lots who was to be counted as kulaks and who was
not.
To illustrate the grotesque scenery of class struggle by just one exam-
ple, let me call to mind a letter by the writer Sholokhov. He was an eye-
witness in Northern Caucasus and addressed his complaints to Stalin about
the brute force, including torture, by which Bolshevik activists were about
to break the real or presumed resistance of peasants who were afraid of
losing all their reserves. To put an end to the excesses, he asked Stalin to
send true communists to save the kolkhozes. Stalin answered by regret-
ting the transgressions but insisted that there was a life-or-death struggle
going on with the peasants who were acting against the Soviet state. To be
sure, some leading Bolsheviks like Bukharin or Rykow opposed Stalins
rigorous line at times because they saw the danger of famine, although
they were silenced by Stalins dominance. I am not discussing here the
extent to which the famine can be characterized as a strategic means for
restructuring rural population and agriculture. But one can hardly dismiss
even the strong verdict of genocide through famine. At any rate, it was a
catastrophe Stalin and his adherents consciously accepted as a conse-
quence of the fight against the kulaks in order to create the higher society
of communism.
The Holodomor revealed not only the brutality of installing a new form
of life against rural social conditions and agricultural science. At the same
time, it brought about the intensification of deportations and the broad
extension of the Gulag system. This system of repression, which totally
deprives people of all of their rights and threatened civil life with perma-
nent arbitrariness of denouncement and punishment, became another sali-
ent trait of Stalinism. As a final culmination of repression may be added
the phase of the great terror (1936-38) which finally brought about the
liquidation of former Bolshevik stars like Bukharin. The dimensions of
the crimes under Stalinist rule can only be understood and analyzed in the
context of Bolshevik ideology and its dimension of the utopia of New Man
with new moral standards. I am going to use Jrg Baberowskis character-
ization of the cultural revolution under Stalin as a context for my further
(London: Lane, 2007). Norman M. Naimark, Stalins Genocides (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2010).
considerations: what in the writings about Stalinism is called cultural

revolution was a fight to gain the souls of the subjects the cultural revo-
lution was no mere epoch, it was the heart of Stalinism. During the cultur-
al revolution the Bolsheviki not only cleared out the memory of society
and tried to construe it anew but at the same time removed the enemies
from society. The communist engineers of the soul (Stalin) could carry
out their work only if the former representatives of social interpretations
lost their dominance and were deprived of power. The social enemy could
be imagined and fought by the Bolsheviki only as a member of a collec-
tive. As the friend belonged to the proletariat, so the enemy belonged to a
society of adherents to the old times, the owners of properties, the capital-
ists, the kulaks. Because there was no possibility to escape the group of
stigmatized people, finally the revolution became successful as a campaign
of extermination. Thus the cultural revolution, the dream of a new man,
took up the form of a terrorist orgy of violence. This symbiosis of cultural
revolution and violence is called Stalinism.34
This telling characterization is in accordance with the broad historical
research of the last years. I take it as a summary of the cultural dynamics
of Stalinism in continuing Bolshevik ideals. Such a transformation of
society would not have been possible without a substantial change relating
to psycho-moral attitudes and the moral self-interpretations of members of
the new social world. This process of transformation encompasses not
only Bolshevik agents on different levels but equally all cultural and social
surroundings influenced or dominated by the Bolsheviki. There is much
evidence that, notwithstanding its own specifics, the Stalinist era was part
of the Bolshevist project as a whole. Stalins engineers of the soul sound
similar to Lenins phrase that man can be made in a way the Bolsheviks
desired him/her to be or to Trotskys construction of a higher social-
biological type, something to which I will discuss below. It is no accident
that a Tsheka bulletin declares the old systems of ethics and humanity
obsolete as early as 1919 and proclaims a new ethics of absolute humani-
ty, the ideal of which is said to legitimize bloody violence. With this and
other examples, it seems plausible to view Stalin as an heir of Lenin35 and
to study processes of moral transformation over the whole era of Bolshe-
vist rule.
We can learn a lot about the Bolshevik discourse on the psyche in
the 1920s and 1930s from impressive studies by Igal Halfin who focussed
34
Jrg Baberowski, Der rote Terror. Die Geschichte des Stalinismus, 2nd edition
(Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2004), p. 112 (My translation).
35
Cf. Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler. The Age of Social Catastrophe
(London: Cape, 2007), Part I.
Rolf Zimmermann 405
on the Bolshevic attempts to construct proletarian identities and an ade-

quate moral self-interpretation.36 They used the term Bolshevik moral-
ists to refer to a wide group of otherwise diverse experts who expressed
concern with Communist ethics. There were autobiographical tests and
self-reflections to scrutinize the inner attitude of becoming a true proletari-
an. Discussions at universities among Bolshevik students focused on ques-
tions of morals, including questions of sexual behaviour. Bukharins rec-
ommendations for a dramatic change in human qualities, habits, feelings,
wishes, including the everyday life of man, was echoed in Komsomol
commandments which transformed the biblical decalogue. In a sense, the
classic Marxist conception of the social class was transposed into a con-
cept of class as a psychological type. The Bolshevik work on the self
qua inner purification of man became predominant for Stalinism and de-
fines the normative ground of the Great Purge. Therefore one can speak
of Stalinism as an ethical system.37 This fits well with my above-made
proposal to distinguish divergent moral orders.
Now will I turn to the more general diagnosis of Bolshevik morality,
by using Trotskys elaboration as a guideline. I will concentrate on some
essentials of Trotskys Their morals and ours while leaving aside the
polemical parts of his essay, including his critique of Stalinism. First of all
it is relevant to the moral phenomena in question that Trotsky himself uses
a conceptual frame by which he distinguishes different concepts of morals.
Our morals refers to Bolshevik morals, the morality of the proletarian
revolution, which not only is opposed to democratic morality as related
to the epoch of liberal capitalism and to the morality of fascism (10) but
also to the reactionary police morality of Stalinism (16).38 Trotsky insists
on Bolshevik morality in the spirit of Lenin and accomplishes the well-
known Marxist view of morality as a function of class struggle which
more than anything else dominates social relationships and behaviours of
men. That there is no general morality beyond the social classes expresses
Marxist common sense. But to this creed Trotsky adds specific elements
which disclose his Bolshevik radicalization.
36
Cf. Igal Halfin, Terror in my Soul. Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cam-
bridge/MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2003), Ch. 3. To the following
especially pp. 108. See as well Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind. Writing a
Diary under Stalin (Cambridge/MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2006).
37
Halfin, Terror in my Soul, p. 2. In my terminology this is equivalent to moral
system.
38
For simplicitys sake I use the following source putting side numbers in brack-
ets: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/morals/morals.htm
To begin with: The highest pitch of the class struggle is civil war
which explodes into mid-air all moral ties between the hostile classes. (8)
The construction of the revolutionary party of the proletariat can only
succeed in complete independence from the bourgeoisie and their morali-
ty (17) and only the party can pave the way for the inauguration of a
society without social contradictions. But to reach that society, it is neces-
sary to use revolutionary, that is, violent means (19) because the class
struggle is a life-or-death struggle. The heart of the fight is the revolution-
ary party which is everything to a Bolshevik. (24) Thus to a revolution-
ary Marxist there can be no contradiction between personal morality and
the interests of the party, since the party embodies in his consciousness the
very highest tasks and aims of mankind (25). The morality of the prole-
tarian revolution and the mission of the Bolshevik party are the crowning
achievements in world history.
The Bolsheviks are the inveterate warriors (5) of the socialist idea
who found in Lenin the superior leader of a higher human morality (25).
With his eulogy to Lenin and the actualization of true Bolshevik morality
twenty years after the Russian Revolution (1938), Trotsky is not only in
continuity with his former proclamation of the transformation of morals
(1923).39 He also makes explicit the systematic problem of Bolshevik
morals conceived in a dialectics of class struggle. The construction ne-
glects moral individuality, in favour of party consciousness without fixing
any standards of liability or commitment.
The consequences of this neglect are twofold. On the one hand the
leading group of the party or their leading figure, whoever may be in this
position, is given carte blanche to decide what is the best way to pursue
the development towards a classless society. There is no argument that
reflects the partys organization in terms of rational rules for dealing with
possible alternatives in face of the high social goals; the dialectics of
class struggle guarantees for all. Correspondingly, no one takes the idea of
institutionalizing rules seriously to govern a democratic process of form-
ing the partys will. The democratic deficits range from Lenins prohibi-
tion to forming party factions which was sustained by Trotsky (1921) up
to Stalins democratic centralism. It is true that this does not preclude
any discussions within the party or on party conventions, but the Bolshe-
viki did not realize the need for a canon of moral or political liability.
Especially if violent means are declared the medium of revolutionary
action and progress, the absence of definite moral limits to repression,
physical threat, terror or torture will become fatal, as shown by the history
39
Leon Trotsky, The Transformation of Morals (1923), in http://www.marxists.
org/archive/trotsky/1923/ 10/morals.htm
Rolf Zimmermann 407
of Stalinism and its catastrophes. Again we should not blame Trotsky for
special traits of Stalinism; but the credo of the revolutionary party is very
similar. For Stalin as well, the party is everything and sometimes de-
clared a knights order of swords building the soul of the organs and
doings of the Soviet state.40 On the other hand, the carte blanche of the
partys leadership to govern the dialectics of the revolutionary process
confronts the individual with the hard question of how to identify ade-
quately with the partys will and how to integrate the moral self into the
partys consciousness of social advancement. As Trotsky postulates the
congruence of personal morals and the partys moral substance as there
was the permanent question for individuals to purify themselves in order
to become true proletarians worthy to participate in historical progress.
The conception of Bolshevik morality Trotsky is arguing for, therefore,
cannot be separated from the consequences concerning an essential syn-
drome of personal tragedies under Stalinism: how to merge with the party-
line.41
Trotskys self-interpretation of Bolshevik morals could be analyzed
further, above all in respect of his dialectics of means and ends to expli-
cate systematic deficiencies.42 Instead, I turn to the relation of Bolshevik
morality to the utopia the revolutionary party is striving for as the highest
aims of mankind. In Trotskys words we meet a megalomania of the New
Man on the basis of the economics of socialist society:
The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter
into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become
an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psy-
cho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution Man will
make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the
heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of
his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to
create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman ... Social
construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects
of one and the same process the shell in which the cultural construction
and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all
the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will be-
come immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become
40
Sergej Slutsch, Macht und Terror in der Sowjetunion, in Volkhard
Knigge/Norbert Frei (eds.), Verbrechen erinnern (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2002), p.
113.
41
Cf. Igal Halfin, Stalinist Confessions: Messianism and Terror at the Leningrad
Communist University (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2009), p. 10.
42
Cf. John Dewey, Means and Ends, in Idem, Later Works, vol. 13 (Carbon-
dale/IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), pp. 349-354.
more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical.
The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human
type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And
above this ridge new peaks will rise.43
The utopian verve of Trotsky conceives of moral transformation as part of

a transformation of mankind as a whole. At the same time we see the in-
fluence of Nietzsche on the language of New Man. Before commenting
these points further, let me briefly reflect on the peculiarity of Bolshevik
morality and its comparison with Nazi morality. First of all, we must clear-
ly distinguish the pseudo-universalism of Bolshevism from egalitarian
universalism. It is correct in descriptive terms to say that Bolshevik com-
munists believed in a universal humanity, professed themselves the heirs
and perfectors of enlightenment values.44 However, this is wrong in terms
of normative judgment. Why? Because of the diagnosis Halfin himself
gives of the Stalinist purge, calling it hyperrational, a result of the iron-
clad resolve to enfold all reality into the communist order. This exactly is
the qualification which made Bolshevism a pseudo-universalistic ideology
- in other words: a form of particularism - because of its attempts to estab-
lish a form of life on a global scale. On the contrary, egalitarian universal-
ism does not induce a homogenic form of life but provides a normative
frame for different forms of life.
This point is important enough to be argued further. We can go back to
a version of classic Marxism which can be called universalistic to make
the difference to Bolshevism more transparent. I do not maintain that this
version is the only Marxist ideal type one can build, although certainly it is
a possible reading of Marx or some of his pre-Bolshevik successors. In
this reading, which combines evolutionary and revolutionary means of
social emancipation, it is conceivable that the abolition of class society
does not rule out the possibility of integrating the adherents of the old
classes into the new society without denying to them their social or moral
membership. They lose power or dominance through revolution, but not
elementary rights. There is, however, a problem in respect of the Marxist
critique of human rights as an ideology of the bourgeois class. However, a
self-reflective critique in the tradition of enlightenment might illuminate
this point.
43
Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (1924), in http://marxists.org/ ar-
chive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo /index.htm, last section.
44
Halfin, Stalinist Confessions, p. 2, the following quotation ibid., p. 8.
Rolf Zimmermann 409
In this version, the Marxist slogan From each according to his abili-
ties, to each according to his needs could be called a coherent universalis-
tic outlook and not a travesty.
Contrary to a Marxist ideal type such as this, Bolshevism and Stalinism
pursue a utopian project which transforms the social revolution into a
particularistic movement of social and moral discrimination with ongoing
practices of physical extermination. The Marxist ideal type takes on the
function of an ideological make-belief of emancipation. Bolshevik particu-
larism does not subscribe to social mediation or moral tolerance any long-
er.
Similar to Nazism, Bolshevism also favoured the extermination of en-
emies of the new society here: class enemies as the most promising
strategy to accomplishing its goal of creating the New Man. Like with NS,
mankind is normatively restricted by Bolshevism, and its hybris could
equally be characterized by the presumption of being able to decide who
should live on earth and who should not.
To come back to my reading of Nazi morality, there is a parallel to
Bolshevism in terms of a morality of redemption. This is directed to a
mundane project of this world which carries out the Last Judgment by
establishing a purified mankind. The differences, however, have to be
dealt with in greater detail. The term I employed above, the rupture of
species, will not do to cover the specific traits of Bolshevik outrages.
Nazism was focussed on one main active enemy, the Jews, who had to be
exterminated.45 Bolshevism, on the other hand, was directed towards a
plurality of enemies who had to be fought (nobility, bourgeoisie, kulaks,
counterrevolutionaries) and annihilated in different contexts. But it was
possible to give up membership in those hostile classes or groups to join
the proletarian movement under the Bolshevik party. In principle it was
possible to gain a new Bolshevik identity, whereas Jewish identity was
fixed as unchangeable.
Thus the extermination strategy in Bolshevism is more appropriately
characterized as a development of successive sociocides to purify socie-
ty. This matches the term cultural racism which is proposed by histori-
ans for Stalinism.46 I leave the question of to which extent the cultural
revolution of Stalinism was supported or accepted in a broad sense by the
people of the Soviet Union to the historians. In my terminology, this
would be the question as to how grave the failure of species-commitment
45
This implies no discrimination of other victims but only states the priorities of
Nazism.
46
Jrg Baberowski/Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Ordnung durch Terror (Bonn:
Dietz, 2006), p. 89.
(cf. above 2.) was. It is true that the Soviet people consisted of a much
wider range of heterogeneous sections than the German population which
can be called more homogenous in their standards of civilization and
which in its majority supported Nazism. A comparison on this level seems
more difficult in the case of the Soviet people.
In retrospect of my clarification of divergent moral orders, I can sum-
marize the Bolshevik morality as follows: first, there is a basic moral self-
understanding of every man as being part of an exclusive community of
proletarian equals which is held to be morally superior to all other forms
of socialization hitherto known. Second, there is the revolutionary party as
the leading level of authority for all social norms and institutions, defining
the priorities of communist development and setting rules of law (includ-
ing criminal law) on all levels. Third, there is the partys monopoly on
organizing violence in the name of the state and in the interest of revolu-
tionary progress to secure the homogeneity of proletarian socialization
against all class enemies however defined.
Given the comparison of egalitarian universalism and Nazi morality as
explained above in the ideal-typical way, the divergence of the three moral
orders is evident. As in the case of Nazi morality, Bolshevik morality
challenges a view of ethics which abstains from historical contexts, at least
with regard to the historical epoch in which the divergent moralities ap-
pear. It is perhaps no accident that the thesis of a divergence of moralities
in history was put forward by Friedrich Nietzsche who at the same time
created the vision of a new morals for the higher man. Nietzsche can be
seen as a seismograph for social and cultural tendencies which were given
full weight in the twentieth century. Albeit sensible in his historical view
on moralities, Nietzsche was an ardent critic of egalitarian universalism
and in this respect close to both Nazi morality and Bolshevik morality. In
addition, his radical critique of Christian morality and the French Revolu-
tion poses the question of how to interpret and justify egalitarian univer-
salism itself in the course of modern developments since the eighteenth
century.
It is significant that the above quotation of Trotskys utopia relates to
the Nietzschean superman, perhaps better translated as higher man
(bermensch). This shows the influence of intellectual sources on the
Bolshevik self-image which were not at all random.47 The same can be
said of influences in terms of eugenics which are foreign as such to tradi-
47
Cf. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World. From Nietzsche to Stalin-
ism (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).
Rolf Zimmermann 411
tional Marxism.48 Thus extending the horizon of cultural reinforcements of

the Bolshevik utopia of the New Man, we acquire an awareness of the
ambivalence of modernity which is simultaneously brought out by the
New Man of Nazism. Here again we meet Nietzsche as a relevant cultural
source. Without blaming Nietzsche for later radicalizations in Bolshevism
or Nazism, it is indisputable that his philosophy opened dimensions of
moral transformations in construing the New Man.49
Studying conceptions of the New Man in Stalinism and Nazism, Peter
Fritzsche and Jochen Hellbeck point out to alternatives of modernity
which have to be considered seriously to beware of a simplistic narrative
of Western progress:
The New Man was an alternative, but not completely unfamiliar figure
because he was designed by help of the tools of science and rationality and
in accordance with basic premises of Western progress. In exploring this
design, we ultimately pose the question about the still dominant assump-
tion that liberalism is the basic default position of the West. We show that
liberalism is a highly contingent position, under furious attack for much of
the twentieth century.50
If we take egalitarian universalism as the moral centre of liberalism and

follow my reading of divergent moralities as explained above, we are in a
position to analyze what is contingent in the normative story of the
West, what can be said of its normative progress, and what is the ele-
mentary moral opposition it sets against different types of illiberal mo-
dernity.
IV. Egalitarian Universalism and Moral Diversity in History

The various subsets of moral orders standing in opposition to egalitarian
universalism throw light on a historical dynamics of moralities within
which we have to situate egalitarian universalism itself. This not only
means a closer look at its history but also questioning its normative peculi-
arity. As is well-known, there is Richard Rortys thesis of contingency of
48
Cf. Gerd Koenen, Utopie der Suberung. Was war der Kommunismus? (Berlin:
Fest, 1998), ch. 6. Hans Gnther, Der sozialistische bermensch. M. Gorkij und
der sowjetische Heldenmythos (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1993).
49
For details see Zimmermann, Moral als Macht, ch. 2.
50
Peter Fritzsche/Jochen Hellbeck, The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi
Germany, in Michael Geyer/Sheila Fitzpatrick (eds.), Beyond Totalitarianism.
Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009),
p. 302. The following quotation ibid.
universalism, who radicalizes his critique of an objectivist or transcenden-

talist version of universalism to the dictum of the ethnocentricity of
universalism and human rights.51 With Rorty I share the historical ap-
proach, although I see no cogent reason to suspend the talk of universalism
if it is conceived of as historical universalism in the universe of divergent
moral orders. My distinctions explore substantial differences in moral
content which define the orientation of its adherents for every moral order.
Therefore the metaethical vocabulary adequate to reflect these moral con-
stellations in history would be pluralism and not relativism with all its
pejorative connotations.52 A monistic conception runs contrary to a
pluralistic view of morals in history.
The pluralistic view of morals I propose gets its framework of refer-
ence from the unfolding of divergent moral orders in real history and not
from armchair reflections of what might be. That is why in the Euro-
American sphere the talk of universalism has been intertwined with the
growth of moral self-understanding and forms of social practices since the
eighteenth century. The reading of universalism as a historical achieve-
ment is the first step - as is the historical diagnosis of its adversaries. Ethi-
cal reflection, critique or justification start out from historically situated
forms of moral socialization and the order I have formulated by typical
ideal types.
I am giving a sketchy picture of some essentials of universalism as a
basis for further philosophical reflection. It is important to take the epochal
events of the American and French Revolutions not only as changes in the
political dimension but as innovations towards a new self-image of man.
On the one hand, the well-known declarations of human rights can be
traced back to concrete contexts of social and political conflicts. On the
other hand, they inaugurated a new moral and political semantics accepted
by relevant and successively predominant parts of society. Notwithstand-
ing their racial and sexist limitations, the egalitarian messages of the Revo-
lutions were transformed into real processes of emancipation. The fight
51
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), ch. 3. Idem, Truth and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), ch. 2. In a commentary on a critique Rorty says that his
ethnocentric particularism reduces to a denial of an objectivist universalism.
This is compatible with a historical reading of universalism: Idem, Erwiderung
auf Udo Tietz, in Thomas Schfer/Udo Tietz/Rdiger Zill (eds.), Hinter den
Spiegeln. Beitrge zur Philosophie Richard Rortys (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp,
2001), p. 108.
52
This comes close to a constructive reading of Rorty in: Richard J. Bernstein,
Can We justify Universal Moral Norms?, in Don Browning (ed.), Universalism
vs. Relativism (New York: Roman & Littlefield, 2006), pp. 16.
Rolf Zimmermann 413
against slavery and the progress of womens struggle for equal rights are
main issues of permanent advances in building communities according to
egalitarian principles. Different stages of these developments can be ex-
emplified in constitutional law and corresponding activities of higher
lawmaking in Western countries. One can speak, therefore, of a univer-
salization of egalitarian universalism in the course of history and the inter-
dependence of a dynamics of universalization and constitutional dynam-
ics.53
Speaking of a universalization of universalism is not redundant if we
define universalism as a moral content in opposition to other moralities.
The content of universalism and its relation to human rights can be sum-
marized as follows: the same human status is ascribed to every human
being, i.e. every human being is recognized as a member of a community
of beings capable of moral attitudes and attitudes of respecting each other.
Every man is held to have his own dignity and is simultaneously expected
to respect the dignity of others. The basic postulate of egalitarian univer-
salism consists, therefore, of a postulate of mutual respect among men as
men. Whosoever follows this postulate abstains from insulting other hu-
mans or from threatening or injuring them physically. Discriminating
against others for reasons of race or gender is also ruled out. From the
perspective of each individual, practicing mutual respect means commit-
ting yourself to a position of interhuman respect and expecting the same
attitude from others. There is a complementarity between committing
oneself to interhuman respect and self-ascribing a claim to interhuman
respect. To this extent we can set down a concept of egalitarian universal-
ism independent of the issue of human rights.54 But it is conceptually co-
gent and historically adequate to continue the universalistic postulate of
mutual respect in terms of human rights basically conceived of as individ-
ual rights. The mutual commitment to interhuman respect is then articulat-
ed as a mutual commitment to moral rights shared by every individual.
Political and juridical rights spell out the message of moral rights.
Taking rights seriously (Dworkin) in my reading, therefore, amounts
to taking seriously the dynamics of egalitarian universalism while at the
same time leaving the traditional view of natural rights. Moral rights in a
universalistic sense should be seen as shared by volition and not by nature.
This corresponds to a volitive norm of equality which can be traced back
to the eighteenth century when humans started considering themselves
53
Here I make use of: Bruce Ackerman, Rooted Cosmopolitanism, Ethics, vol.
104 (1994) no. 3, pp. 517-535.
54
Cf. the discussion in: Zimmermann, Moralischer Universalismus als
geschichtliches Projekt, p. 483. Idem, Replik, p. 486.
anew. To give a stylized version in retrospect of the moral innovation, one

could state: From now on we will understand ourselves as humans amidst
humans in such a way that we ascribe to ourselves the same moral status
and see ourselves as endowed with equal rights. From a contemporary
perspective we can reaffirm that postulate and follow the Dworkian line of
explication in maintaining that what matters is the right of all men and
women to equality of concern and respect, a right they possess not by
virtue of birth or characteristic or merit or excellence but simply as human
beings with the capacity to make plans and give justice.55
It seems to be a typical feature of volitive equality that it is always in
opposition to a main historical adversary which has to be overcome: tradi-
tional authorities and hierarchical structures in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, Nazism and Bolshevism in the twentieth century, viola-
tions of human rights all over the world in the present century. In our
context, it is significant to stress the meaning of our volitive concept of
equality as a concept of the equality of individuals and their individual
rights, leaving room to individual peculiarities and differences. Nie-
tzsches reading of equality in the sense of modern levelling is incorrect,
as is the radicalization of equality to proletarian equality in Bolshevism or
to racial homogeneity in the Nazi community.
In addition, I would like to call to mind the ideal type design of my
concept of volitive equality as the moral centre of the Western form of
socialization noted above. We all know that there is a multitude of social
inequalities in the realm of Western communities and that there is are man
unsolved questions of justice. Nonetheless, these questions can only be
discussed on the understanding that the moral centre is defined in the egal-
itarian sense. The same is true in a global perspective set by the UN decla-
rations of human rights. As their history shows, the Western origins of
universalism and human rights have meanwhile been integrated into an
autonomous process of adopting moral universalistic content and rights.
This too is reflected in my interpretation of the universalization of univer-
salism.
To complete these differentiations, let me also call to mind the ques-
tion of balance between universalism and forms of particularism which is
not strictly adverse to universalism. There is a broad range of particularis-
tic phenomena, from local patriotism through athletic patriotism right
down to national or economic egoisms, that should be dealt with in a spirit
of mediation consistent with universalistic criteria. Maintaining a symmet-
rical balance of interests seems a never-ending task in a universalistic
55
Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge/MA Harvard: University
Press, 1978), p. 182.
Rolf Zimmermann 415
frame within which particularistic tendencies can be simultaneously toler-

ated and criticized.
For the sake of clarity, I would like to add another reflection concern-
ing the meaning of universalism and particularism. Grasping upon my
characterization of divergent moral orders and focusing on the meaning of
universalism as a morality unfolding in historical dimensions, one may
wonder whether universalism itself may be said to be, in a very general
sense, a form of particularism. A reflection such as this may seem plausi-
ble especially in view of discussions in social anthropology.56 However,
for conceptual and historical reasons, the term egalitarian universalism
has the advantage of keeping things more distinct. The particularity of
egalitarian universalism does not make it a form of particularism. There is,
particular indeed, the integration of all human beings within mutual rela-
tions of equality. All tendencies towards a rupture of species or other
forms of breaking species-integration are normatively ruled out, as seen
above. But this may also be said of traditional forms of moralities that may
nonetheless be moralities of hierarchical inequalities. It follows that we
have to distinguish moralities not only with regard to the alternative de-
fined by the opposition between moralities of redemption (Nazism, Bol-
shevism) and moralities of integration (cf. above p. 4), but additionally
with regard to the concept of equality they assume to be basic. Moralities
can be grouped along their leading concepts of equality: equality of Ger-
mans/Aryans in the Volksgemeinschaft, proletarian equality in com-
munism, human equality with hierarchical restrictions etc. None of these
concepts coincides with the specific qualification that is constitutive of
egalitarian universalism: equality of humans simply as humans, and equal-
ity of individual rights.
We can rest assured that appreciating the success of universalism and a
culture of human rights in the course of history cannot foster the hope of
securing the objectivity of universalism by argumentations in the mode of
a priori justifications or of essentialist criteria. Notwithstanding the inter-
nal difficulties of these kinds of justifications, there are the historical expe-
riences of divergent moral orders which constituted their norms in a radi-
cal way beyond species-commitments. To my mind, therefore, Kantian
paradigms of ethics are obsolete, not simply due to historical facts but by
systematically reflecting historical facts and moral experiences.57 The only
56
See Thomas Widlok in, discussion: Zimmermann, Moralischer Universalismus
als geschichtliches Projekt, pp. 479. Idem, Replik, p. 494.
57
Arguing this point further would be, evidently, a discussion of its own. In prin-
ciple, I agree with John Silber's critique of Kant as presented in: Richard J. Bern-
stein, Radical Evil: Kant at war with himself, in Maria Pia Lara (ed.), Rethinking
possible means for egalitarian universalism to get, in a sense, an a-

historical standing is in the course of history itself, in other words: to be-
come increasingly accepted by global processes of universalization and
achieve a de-historization of universalistic content in this fashion.
The history of human rights can demonstrate how universalistic con-
tent has been successively anchored in psycho-moral attitudes of mutual
respect and tolerance that are motivated by emotional and rational protest
against repressions of whatever kind as well as the desire to open up hu-
man avenues of free exchange as equal persons.58 This can be expressed in
systematic terms by focusing on a basic attitude of inter-personal recogni-
tion, of personal inclusion in I-You-relations or We-You-relations, setting
up the open dimension for all to participate. The substance of this basic
attitude is confirmed even in conflicts, emotional resistance, social crises
or moral critique and condemnation. All problems appear to leave the
basic attitude of personal inclusion intact, whatever difficulties may be
faced. Conceived in this fashion, the predominance of the basic attitude of
personal inclusion is not at all self-evident but has its sources in motiva-
tions related to socio-cultural contexts and historical constellations.
As it is adequate to ascribe motives only to individuals, it is cogent that
people can compare their motives in order to combine them and give them
weight in common attitudes or actions. My comparative perspective on
egalitarian universalism, Nazism, and Bolshevism could thus be enlarged
by an analysis of motivations and the role they play as reasons for attitudes
and actions. The psycho-moral profile of a basic attitude of personal inclu-
sion, however, is sufficient for my present context. Once again we are
pointing to the contrast to moralities of redemption which in both cases,
Nazism and Bolshevism, militantly refrain from basic attitudes of personal
inclusion, in order to build exclusive moral orders beyond any species-
commitment. The judgment that these orders are orders of inhumanity in
an elementary sense is well founded by the standard of universalism and
the weight of historical experiences, especially when we take the victims
of their militant actions and exterminations into account. Another aspect of
judging Nazism and Bolshevism by the standard of universalism consists
of reflecting on the asymmetry between the opposite moral orders we are
dealing with. If we identify ourselves with universalism, it follows that
species-commitment includes all perpetrators such as Hitler, Stalin and
Evil (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 80. Cf. my
critique of Christine Korsgaard in Zimmermann, Philosophie nach Auschwitz, pp.
46.
58
Cf. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (New York/London: W. W. Norton &
Co, 2007).
Rolf Zimmermann 417
their followers. They belong to mankind and its diversity in history, albeit
they themselves defy an unrestricted concept of human inclusion.
Set in the context of the analysis I have given thus far, I am now going
to conclude with some remarks as how not to conceptualize the moralities
of Nazism or Bolshevism. There are proposals for reading Nazism as
twisted deontology and Bolshevism as twisted consequentialism.59
Sometimes Nazism is seen as a radicalized version of utilitarianism paral-
lel Bolshevism.60 The specific traits of both moralities I have characterized
thereby seem lost in rather vague analogies. I therefore renounce these
proposals in respect of the clear contrast between the particularism of both,
Nazism and Bolshevism, to universalism. In the modern context, however,
deontological or utilitarian or consequentialist conceptualizations of ethics
are on equal footing with universalism, notwithstanding the different uni-
versalistic explications they may deliver. To characterize, therefore, Na-
zism and Bolshevism under headings of deontological or utilitarian ethics
would make sense only if their moralities could in some sense be called
universalistic. But this would necessitate seeing mankind not normatively
restricted and in agreement with species-commitment which is a contra-
diction to the normative contents of the moralities of redemption.
An interesting wrinkle on the idea of including Nazi morality in a con-
ventional frame of morals was recently suggested by Lothar Fritze.61 He
concentrates on totalitarian perpetrators and develops the thesis that
perpetrators of this sort might agree with basic moral norms shared by
citizens of a constitutional democracy. The difference does not lie in the
basic norms but in the range of the norms and in additional moral rules
which both are dependent on divergent extra-moral convictions. Extra-
moral convictions are those which relate to characteristics of the world,
facts of social life and human behaviour or considerations of value, alt-
hough not to those of judging in the sense of moral right or wrong.
For the sake of argument, I ignore for a moment the contrast I have
drawn between the moral order of Nazism and the Western-universalistic
type. In a sense, it may be said that both orders have something in com-
59
Jonathan Glover, Humanity. A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London:
Pimlico, 2001), p. 327. In many other points I agree with Glover, especially with
his characterizations of moral transformations in Nazism and Bolshevism (ibid.,
pp. 26, 33.).
60
Cf. Micha Brumlik, Michael Hauskeller in, discussion: Zimmermann,
Moralischer Universalismus als geschichtliches Projekt., pp. 430-431, 435-436.
61
Lothar Fritze, Moralische Rechtfertigung und auermoralische berzeugungen.
Sind totalitre Verbrechen nur in einer skularen Welt mglich?, Leviathan, vol.
37 (2009) no. 1, pp. 5-33.
mon if we take the norm of not killing other humans as being relevant to
both orders, a norm Fritze uses as a paradigm. But this only shows that
every society has to lay down rules in respect of questions of violence and
questions of life and death. Which answers are given in detail, for example
in fields such as criminal law, depends on the relevant normative-moral
centre of the community. It is no surprise that, in justifying purification
and extermination, the Nazis tried to argue that basic norms of not-killing
had to be suspended. This is not the least because of the traditions of
norms such as these and with regard to constituting acceptance both within
and outside the Volksgemeinschaft. If one concedes Hitler and Himmler
and others that they were driven by motivations of a moral kind, then it
seems clear that they did not limit the range of quasi-universally shared
basic moral norms depending upon their extra-moral convictions. Instead,
they tried to make their actions and plans coherent with their own norma-
tive-moral convictions.
This point can be argued further by considering the reasons which, in
Fritzes view, were crucial for legitimizing the extermination of the Jews.
The belief in the Jewish danger and conspiracy as a threat to the whole
of mankind was the extra-moral conviction that dominated the actions
taken against the Jews. This belief caused them to go beyond moral limits
in order to fight the Jewish enemy with all means at hand. There is no
question that this type of argument was used frequently by NS leaders and
NS perpetrators. But the important question is how the extra-moral convic-
tion that there was a Jewish danger could gain overwhelming predomi-
nance without leaving behind conventional moral standards hitherto be-
lieved to be self-evident.
The best example to demonstrate this case is to see how the NS leaders
stubbornly adhered to the above-mentioned forgery of the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion. Interestingly enough, these Protocols were dis-
cussed in the international press during the 1920s and temporarily de-
scribed as authentic. A short time afterwards, however, the London Times
reported that the Protocols were in all probability a forgery. Hitlers
comment in Mein Kampf was that just the fact that the Frankfurter
Zeitung, a Jewish foundation, was reporting the forgery-story should be
proof enough of their authenticity,62 whereas Himmler said that the state-
ment of forgery was either a product of the Jews themselves or influenced
by Jewish money.63
62
Cf. Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 337.
63
Felix Kersten, Totenkopf und Treue. Heinrich Himmler ohne Uniform
(Hamburg: Moelich, 1952), p. 40.
Rolf Zimmermann 419
The moral relevance of these statements is in refuting empirical tests

for presumed facts of utmost moral importance because of the conse-
quences regarding the fight against the Jews. If we assume traditional
moral standards, it seems clear that planning potentially deadly actions
against enemies can, if at all, be only legitimated by verifying as scrupu-
lously as possible the extra-moral convictions which are serving as rea-
sons for these actions. Whosoever refuses to do this can only be judged as
acting morally wrong or in the name of another morality. This other mo-
rality normatively blocks relevant information in terms of Fritzes extra-
moral beliefs. He is right in stressing the analysis of the Nazi system of
beliefs. Whereas moral attitudes need to be analyzed in the mode of asser-
toric sentences, normative conceptions organizing the beliefs need to be
analyzed as practical reasons relating to motives and normative identifica-
tions.
This can be decisively brought out by granting for a moment that the
conviction of a Jewish conspiracy may be correct. But what follows from
this? Evidently there are practical options differing widely from the Nazi
strategy of extermination. It would be possible to react more defensively in
the frame of species-commitment by searching coalitions to ban and con-
tain the danger, etc. In any event, it is not at all a cogent consequence to
draw the conclusions the Nazis drew. Evidently, therefore, it is the process
of moral transformation in and of itself and not simply some kind of ex-
tra-moral conviction that is responsible for the disastrous consequences.
The radical particularism bringing about these consequences should be
conceptually held apart from traditional ethical vocabulary. We have to
face the phenomenon of a moral otherness which deserves an interpreta-
tion in a terminology of ethics close to its main traits. The same can be
said of the morality of Bolshevism.
ETHICS AFTER THE HOLOCAUST:
JEWISH RESPONSES
ISAAC HERSHKOWITZ
I. Introduction
Eliezer Berkovits (19081992),1 an American rabbi who was very well
known and highly respected for the profundity of his thought, wrote in his
collection Faith after the Holocaust2 that, as he himself was not a Holo-
caust survivor, he could not permit himself to judge any survivors behav-
ior from a religious perspective. He explains that whereas he completely
empathizes with those Holocaust survivors who decided that they could no
longer adhere to Gods decrees as they had undergone the experience of
his absence in such a tangible and painful way, the opposite reaction is no
less valid. Thus, he says, just as he cannot censure those who lost their
1
Born and raised in Hungary and a student of Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg,
Berkovits was the author of many books and articles on the nature of Jewish phi-
losophy and Jewish law. During the years before WWII he served as a rabbi in
Berlin, but with the outbreak of hostilities he fled to England. After the war, he
accepted a rabbinical post in Sydney, Australia, and later in Boston. From 1958
until 1976, he was the head of the Department of Jewish Philosophy at the Hebrew
Theological College of Skokie, Illinois. Upon his retirement, he relocated in Israel.
On Berkovits complex Holocaust theology and moral thought, see: David Hazony,
Eliezer Berkovits and the Revival of Jewish Moral Thought, Azure 11 (2001)
2365; Zachary Braiterman, Anti/Theodic Faith in the Thought of Eliezer
Berkovits, Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 7,1 (1997), pp. 83100.
Braitermans perspective is dealt with in length in Marc A. Krell, Eliezer Ber-
lovitss Post-Holocaust Theology: A Dialectic Between Polemics and Reception,
Journal of Ecumenical Studies 37, 1 (2000), pp. 2846. Also see: John J. Johnson,
Are We Asking the Wrong Questions about the Shoah? Eliezer Berkovits as Post-
Holocaust Jewish Apologist, Conservative Judaism 57, 1 (2004), pp. 6586.
2
Faith after the Holocaust (Jersey City/NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 1973), pp.
94107. The idea of human responsibility for the world, as opposed to philoso-
phies that emphasize Gods responsibility, is fully developed in his important
compilation: Not in Heaven: The Nature and Function of Halakha (Jersey City/NJ:
KTAV Publishing House, 1983).
422 Ethics after the Holocaust: Jewish Responses
faith, by the same token, it was inappropriate from an ethical perspective

to express anger or bewilderment toward those who found Gods presence
in the midst of the abyss. He contends that anyone who did not experience
the horrors first-hand must refrain from any attempt to derive direct theo-
logical implications from the events and the atrocities. Such a person, he
writes, simply cannot comprehend the overwhelming spiritual upheavals
that Holocaust survivors must have experienced.
Nonetheless, Berkovits claims that every human being, and specifically
every Jew, must derive certain moral lessons from the Holocaust as a met-
aphysical event of enormous import:3
In a sense, God can be neither good nor bad. In terms of His own na-
ture He is incapable of evil. He is the only one who is goodness. But since,
because of His very essence, He can do no evil, He can do no good either.
God, being incapable of the unethical is not an ethical being. Goodness for
Him is neither an ideal, nor a value; it is existence, it is absolutely realized
being. Justice, love, peace, mercy are ideals for man only. They are values
that may be realized by man alone. God is perfection. Yet because of His
very perfection, He is lacking as it were one type of value, the one
which is the result of striving for value.
This text, strongly influenced by Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Hacohen
Kook,4 contains a significant theological concession for a rabbinic figure.
Berkovits boldly expresses a notion that many would deem heretical: God
should not be measured in ethical terms. Thus, according to Berkovits,
God is to be released from responsibility for any ethical misdeeds both
during the Holocaust years as well as more generally throughout the totali-
ty of human history. God teaches humanity how to act ethically, and He is
the source of our knowledge and intuition, but He Himself is not subject to
human ethical norms.
Berkovits thus marginalizes the deeply entrenched religious notion of
Imitatio Dei and, consequently, also raises questions regarding the concept
itself as his formulation leads us to the conclusion that God is not He
3
Faith after the Holocaust, pp. 104105.
4
Rabbi Kook (18651935), a Lithuanian rabbi and thinker, was the first Chief
Rabbi of the Land of Israel and one of the most influential figures of twentieth-
century Judaism. His influence is especially noticeable within religious Zionist
circles of Modern Orthodoxy in present-day Israel. On Rabbi Kook see: Dov P.
Elkins, Shepherd of Jerusalem: A Biography of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook
(Northvale/N.J: Jason Aronson, 1995). For a more thorough analysis on Rabbi
Kooks influence on ideological circles in Israeli society see: Dov Schwartz, Faith
at the Crossroads: A Theological Profile of Religious Zionism (Leiden: Brill,
2002).
Isaac Hershkowitz 423
whom we should look to as a model to be imitated in order to attain moral

perfection. I emphasize that this is only one possible conclusion of
Berkovits words since I believe that he assuredly meant otherwise.
In this chapter, I am following in Berkovits footsteps by attempting to
flesh out a Jewish ethical response to the Holocaust or, to be exact, a meta-
ethical study on Jewish responses to the Holocaust.5 However, before
embarking on this somewhat impossible endeavor, I will first outline what
a Jewish response must entail by its very definition and explain how
such a rough generalization can be both meaningful and of significant
value in our attempts to incorporate ethical concepts into a discussion of
the Holocaust.
The remainder of this chapter will hopefully provide satisfactory an-
swers to some of these perplexities.
II. What Is a Jewish Response?

One of the methodological protests raised against definitions of any ethnic
ethical stance, strongly influenced by Lawrence Kohlberg and Jean Piaget,
focuses on the pretension involved in the very attempt to speak of a
them or, in this case, to speak of a Jewish ethical response to the Hol-
ocaust. Since morality, according to Kohlberg, should be reviewed in light
of the individuals moral development, a range of moral responses to any
phenomenon is in fact a sequence of moral stages. According to this mod-
el, there is little room for ethnical uniqueness. Moral development is de-
5
A similar initiative was carried out by Michael L. Morgan in his paper: Jewish
Ethics after the Holocaust, The Journal of Religious Ethics 12, 2 (1984), pp. 256
277. However, the two papers have very little in common. Morgan, even though
discussing the Jewish element of ethics, derives his theory from Jewish history
and traditional morality as expressed in Jewish Law (halakhah) and does not estab-
lish his insights on the Jewish ethical responses to the Holocaust as a distinct gen-
re. This is a result of his exclusive reliance on the religious ethical responses of
Emil Fackenheim to whom I do not intend to relate, specifically. Fackenheim, a
worthy thinker and master of Jewish and modern philosophy, cannot be considered
the sole ethical thinker regarding the Holocaust, or even the most important one.
Thus, conversely, my intention here is to establish a broad range of Jewish ethical
responses with which, I believe, we can associate most thinkers that deal with
Jewish ethics and the Holocaust. A phenomenological review of this range of
ethical responses gives us a more probable authentic model of Jewish responses,
the criteria Morgan endeavored to trace in Fackenheims works (see idem., pp.
258259, and throughout the paper).
rived from an objective justice, a prima facie absolute justice.6 Piaget,

however, agreed with Emile Durkheim, who called for a study of human
morality as motivated by a persons attachment to society.7 Durkheim
contended that morality is part of society and is not external to actual so-
cial life and culture.8
Following Immanuel Kant who required a rational foundation for hu-
man morality, Durkheim also identified the need for individuals to reach
beyond their natural selves. Yet, Durkheim did not dissociate moral rules
and development from society but rather identified them as emotionally
grounded products of society.9
However, since world- Jewry is very diversified and made up of nu-
merous ideological, social, and religious subdivisions it would be preten-
tious or perhaps even childish to so much as claim to define a Jewish
response, even within a framework that might accept such a definition in
principle. Yet, I believe that the attempt to illustrate a basic common de-
nominator shared by two major sources of Jewish ethical perspectives can
be useful. This is true even though I readily concede that these sources
present the views of hypothetical communities and not necessarily those of
actual assemblages. Thus, I do not wish to superimpose a category of
Jewish ethics on Jewish responses but to trace mutual elements within
various Jewish responses to the Holocaust which, intuitively, but not es-
sentially, are distinct from general responses outside of Jewish society.
In order to initiate our search for a Jewish response, we must first
identify what the word Jewish means, today. The twentieth century
found Judaism in a very fragile state, numerous inner schisms threatening
to tear apart what had previously been regarded as a unified people. Or-
thodoxy, conservative, reform, reconstructionist, neolog, and so on are all
names denoting different Jewish religious factions. Moreover, Orthodoxy
itself contains dozens of different distinct subgroups, some of which do
not communicate with one another owing to the deep ideological differ-
ences between them. Yet, when we talk about the Jews, we usually do
6
See Lawrence Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development, Vol. 1: The Philosophy
of Moral Development (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981).
7
See Emile Durkheim, Progressive Preponderance of Organic Solidarity, in
idem., On Morality and Society, edited by Robert N. Bellah (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 6385; Jean Piaget, Judgement and Reasoning in the
Child (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1928).
8
Also see Anthony Cortese, Ethnic Ethics: The Restructuring of Moral Theory
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp. 742.
9
Chris Shilling and Philip A. Mellor, Durkheim, Morality and Modernity: Collec-
tive Effervescence, Homo Duplex and the Sources of Moral Action, The British
Journal of Sociology 49, 2 (1998), pp. 193209.
not refer only to the religious component but rather mean to include in the
discussion camps of both atheists and assimilated Jews. Thus, it seems that
when we speak of the Jews, World Jewry, and so on, we must admit
that, in truth, we are describing an imagined community, not a real one.
Louis Newman formulated the problem of both defining Judaism and
attributing it a common ethical code:10
Within the history of Judaism a wide range of positions on questions of

both applied and theoretical ethics have been held and are preserved in
Jewish literature. Although the fact that this diversity exists has been rec-
ognized, its implications have generally not been fully appreciated.
Moreover, it would seem that anti-Semitic speakers and thinkers tend to

utilize generalizations relating to all Jews as one united group sharing a
joint vision as well as a view in respect to the appropriate means for actu-
alizing it. The truth, of course, is a far cry from any such simplistic gener-
alization.
This methodological problem of definition becomes even more in-
volved when we try, for instance, to trace the Jewish elements in a per-
sons philosophy, commentary, or speech. What do we mean by a Jewish
element? Is it the reference to literary sources in the Old Testament or the
massive rabbinical legacy of the oral Torah, halakhah, and thought that
makes a text Jewish? Perhaps the criterion is some specific mental or
cognitive propensity, one that can be discovered through recourse to an
accepted approach to confronting and dealing with various issues?11
There is, however, an additional, more general and troubling problem
as well. As noted by Joseph Sermoneta:12
It is impossible to relate to Jewish Philosophy as cut off from general

thought. Philosophy is ex definition something universal. It raises questions
which a person asks himself in every period [] you cannot attach to these
questions a particular label, assigning them to one specific group.
The difficulty inherent in the attempt to define a Jewish philosophy is

identical to the one we meet when we attempt to describe and discuss a
10
Louis E. Newman, Past Imperatives: Studies in the History and Theory of Jew-
ish Ethics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), p. 3.
11
See Raphael Jospe, What is Jewish Philosophy? (Tel-Aviv: The Open University
of Israel, 1988).
12
See Shalom Rosenberg, Jacob Levinger & Joseph B. Sermoneta, What Is Jew-
ish Philosophy? A Symposium, in Moshe Hallamish & Moshe Schwartz (eds.),
Revelation, Faith, Reason (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1976), pp. 145
169 (Hebrew).
Jewish ethical response, and, thus, we find ourselves back at square

one: (a) there is no way to trace the Jewish element in any response. (b)
Ethics as well as philosophy deal with human cognitive achievements.
Ethical claims should therefore not be assigned national or ethnic labels,
for such labeling contradicts their existence as universally valid argu-
ments.
Moreover, as Judaism does not embrace a united and coordinated
community, it is impossible to speak of the Jewish stance or the coordi-
nated Jewish viewpoint in regard to any given issue.
III. Guidelines for Jewish Responses

I believe, then, that we have to aim for a more modest goal, one that can
allow for a greater degree of precise definition. We must focus on the
attempt to trace a number of competing Jewish ethical responses to the
Holocaust in the plural and at the same time note and delineate certain
common denominators within them.13 Despite the ideological and educa-
tional differences among the different thinkers, their responses often re-
semble one another. I believe that through this approach we will discover
that the attempt to draw the contours of a Jewish discourse on the question
of the ethical lessons to be learned from the Holocaust can be a fruitful
endeavor.
When examining the major paths of Jewish ethical confrontation with
the Holocaust, one finds a clear distinction between two divergent trends:
the particularistic as opposed to the universalistic approach. The particu-
laristic approach characteristically includes a call for an inner-directed
rectification of Jewish misbehavior both from a religious as well as a
nationalistic point of view. In other words, such an approach identifies
some concrete flaw purported to have existed in Jewish communal life and
then proceeds to interpret the horrors of the Holocaust as a divine clarion
call intended to ignite a wholesale re-evaluation of Jewish lifestyle and
faith.
As opposed to what one might instinctively assume, such a theological
standpoint is not limited to the Ultra-Orthodox circles. (I in no way mean
to imply, of course, that all Ultra-Orthodox religious thinkers and leaders
13
A large number of works deal with aspects of ethical issues in Jewish philosophy
regarding the Holocaust. Yet, these works did not attempt to trace the Jewish
gene of these responses. See, e.g.: John K. Roth, Ethics during and after the
Holocaust (Hampshire-New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); David Patterson
and John K. Roth, After-Words: Post-Holocaust Struggles with Forgiveness, Rec-
onciliation, Justice (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004).
relate to the Holocaust in this way.) Somewhat surprisingly, a similar

mode of thought was also found within certain nonreligious circles in the
immediate aftermath of the war. It was prevalent as well among hard-core
Zionist ideologues in the early stages of the war, before the horrific magni-
tude of the events had been properly appreciated. A thorough analysis of
this last claim can be found in Dina Porats work.14 To sum up this ambiv-
alent attitude toward the catastrophe, I will cite the words of Francis R.
Nicosia:15
These attitudes included the notion that the Yishuv considered the Jews in
Palestine as the only worthy Jews, as the antithesis of Diaspora Jews who
were doomed and hardly worth saving. In reality, however, Zionist com-
mitment to the rescue of European Jews after 1942 was based on deep em-
pathy in the Yishuv for the Jews of Europe in their suffering, coupled with
a pragmatic realization that, ultimately, there might not be a Jewish state
unless the Jews of Europe survived in appreciable numbers.
There was a similar mode of self-criticism in the Ultra-Orthodox circles,

albeit in a counter direction. Here, the catastrophe was understood as a
divine punishment resulting from the general trend toward assimilation,
secularism, and, above all, Zionism, which had been so widespread in the
prewar Jewish communities.16
The main problem with these types of responses, and the reason I
do not focus on them hereinafter, is that they contain little more than the
writers attempt to convince the general public to adopt his or her own
ideological worldview. I find that the vast majority of the responses are
not derived from the study of the Holocaust as an unprecedented flagitious
historic occurrence but as outgrowths and continuations of well-known
and established ideological stances that had been preached years before the
atrocities began. As such, they cannot be seen as ethical lessons derived
14
Dina Porat, The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David: The Zionist Leadership in
Palestine and the Holocaust, 19391945 (Cambridge/MA: Harvard University
Press, 1990).
15
Francis R. Nicosia, The Yishuv and the Holocaust, The Journal of Modern
History 64, 3 (1992), pp. 533540 (Review). This citation is from p. 536. Also see
idem, Ein ntzlicher Feind: Zionismus im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland,
19331939, Vierteljahrshefte fr Zeitgeschichte 37 (1989), pp. 367400.
16
The leading figures espousing this position were Rabbis Elchanan Wasserman,
Yoel Teitelbaum among others. See: Gershon Greenberg, Foundations for Ortho-
dox Jewish Theological Response to the Holocaust, 19361939, in Alice L. Eck-
ardt (ed.), Burning Memory: Times of Testing and Reckoning (Oxford: Pergamon
Press, 1993), pp. 7194; Zvi J. Kaplan, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, Zionism, and
Hungarian Ultra-Orthodoxy, Modern Judaism 24, 2 (2004), pp. 165178.
from the historic event but must rather be regarded as little more than an
ideological pitch in disguise.
Therefore, I will now focus on the universalistic responses as these
may provide us with effective moral edification as well as with a message
that can be appreciated by all of humankind.
IV. Orthodox Ethical Responses

Many Jewish Holocaust thinkers, including Emanuel Levinas, Elie Wiesel,
and Primo Levi among others, are known for their humanistic ethical calls
resulting directly from the horrors they witnessed, first hand. Yet, before
turning to some of the better-known ethical responses, I want to begin this
section with a discussion of approaches suggested by some less well-
known thinkers. The fact that these responses have remained relatively
unknown has to be attributed, I believe, primarily to their authors Ortho-
dox identity as well as to the fact that their writings have not been translat-
ed from the original Hebrew.17 Despite their relative anonymity, these
religious leaders ethical responses are morally inspiring, anchored in the
traditional religious proof-texts, which thus endows their calls with an aura
of pious merit at least in the eyes of their religious disciples.18
Rabbi Shimon Efrati (19081988)19 is known as one of the most im-
portant response authors on halakhic (religious legal norms) questions that
were raised during the Holocaust. This specific genre includes works by
Rabbis Tzvi Hirsch Meizel, Ephraim Oshri, and Joseph Tzvi Karlebach as
well as by many other European rabbis. The questions dealt with in these
works evidence the despair in which Orthodox Jews lived during the Hol-
ocaust not only in the struggle to simply survive but also in coming to
terms with the impossibility of adhering to the religious norms as regarded
eating (kashrut), praying, and marital obligations as well as the observance
17
See Meir Ayali, Ethischer und religiser Widerstand im Spiegel der Response
Literatur,
Kairos 3637 (19941995), pp. 105110.
18
For a broader discussion of the responses of some of the thinkers cited here, see
Isaac Hershkowitz, Rabbinic Nazi Camp Survivors and the Call for a Religious
Protection of Human Prerogatives, in Marianne Neerland-Soleim (ed.), Prisoners
of War and Forced Labor: Histories of War and Occupation (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), pp. 138149.
19
Efrati, a rabbi in Bessarabia, was expelled to Siberia during WW II. After being
liberated from Russia he returned to Poland and served as a rabbi for displaced
refugees. He eventually immigrated to Israel and became an important figure in the
Chief Rabbinate.
of the holidays and the Sabbath.20 They looked for guidance and support
as to how they could or should meet these soul-rending challenges. Efrati
wrote an ethical preface to his halakhic work,21 in which he derived a
unique lesson from the Holocaust:22
The Five Books of Moses instruct us that our goal in life is not to be led
by our evil inclination, inasmuch as human inclination is faulty from
youth. The aim and purpose of our Pentateuch is to revolutionize human
nature and create a turning point in the worlds behavior []
Our Mosaic laws tell us to do that which is right and good, and inculcate
within us the eternal sentiments of love and fraternity toward all who were
created in Gods image. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation;
neither shall they learn war anymore (Isaiah 2:4)23 []
The world is possible only within God, meaning, the entity that is the
world is but a degraded divine revelation, so that in every existing object
resides a Godly essence, all the more so in mans soul. One Hassidic sage
explained the verse:
There shall be no strange God within thee (Ps. 81:10) He shall not be a
stranger in the inner realms of the soul.24 Mans duty is to raise and ele-
vate himself, and to emulate Gods moral characteristics. [] As He is
merciful so must you be; as He is compassionate so be you.25
20
For a comprehensive appraisal of this genre see: Hirsch J. Zimmels, The Echo of
the Nazi Holocaust in Rabbinic Literature (New York: KTAV Publication House,
1977); Jonathan I. Helfand, Halakha and the Holocaust: Historical Perspectives,
in Randolph L. Braham (ed.), Perspectives on the Holocaust (Boston: Kluwer-
Nijhoff, 1983), pp. 93103. Also see: Isaac Hershkowitz, Netivei Halakhah Insti-
tute, Holocaust Responsa Project (A Comprehensive Database of Scholarly Re-
sponsa Pertaining to the Holocaust) (Jerusalem, 2006); and Holocaust Studies: A
Journal of Culture and History, 15, 3 (2010), pp. 9799 (review).
21
From the Valley of Slaughter (Jerusalem, 1961), pp. 1016.
22
Ibid., pp. 1415.
23
Efrati did not wish to establish a utilitarian ethical system that strives to create a
functional society. Rather, he believed that the Pentateuchs primary social goal is
that of utilizing the Jewish community to spearhead a campaign designed to spread
and transmit a moral message of goodwill to the rest of humankind. Not all Jewish
ethicists agree with this educational aim; see, i.e. Maimonides The Guide for the
Perplexed 3:27 for a more modest vision of the ethical demands in the Torah.
24
See Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl, Maor Einayim (Slavita, 1808),
78a-b.
25
This is an alternative method of practicing the aforementioned religious precept
of Imitatio Dei.
Efrati wrote of a religious decree to honor and respect all of humankind,

regardless of ethnicity or of any other social separation among people.
Asserting a panentheistic outlook much inspired by Hassidic sources that
traditionally emphasized Gods inherent presence in the world and, espe-
cially, in ones soul, he calls for a lifestyle with respect for all because
wherever man looks, Godliness is present, residing within other people.
One might think that Efratis use of a theological basis on which to ground
his demand for a moral code of human conduct is merely a rhetorical tool.
In line with such conjecture, one could claim that his true goal was to
establish a general regard for the value and respect of human dignity. Alt-
hough I cannot disregard such a possibility, I believe his use of the Hassid-
ic notion of God as a potential stranger within the individuals psyche is
an authentic one.26 He sincerely believes that only religious piety can grant
man the power to overcome his evil inclinations.
Rabbi Yissakhar Shlomo Teichtal (18851945), a rabbi in Piestany,
Slovakia who died in Auschwitz, treads along a similar path but without
employing any mystical parlance. He asserts that the core problem of
Western morality is its powerlessness in the face of the imperfections of
human nature. Kantian naivet led to the formulation of pure and sublime
yet inefficient moral norms, which were logically inspiring but abstract
and unrealistic. According to Teichtal, these categories merely serve as
ornaments for decorating the pages of philosophical works, entirely devoid
of any practical value. Moreover, he contends that only a religious moral
code, a code emanating from a transcendent entity, offers the hope of truly
influencing human behavior.27
Both Efrati and Teichtal believed that the secular bases of moral inter-
personal relations had proved utterly lacking, to say the least, in any at-
tempt to create a human community based on the notion of the preserva-
tion of moral prerogatives. A divine element must be present in order to
ensure the maintenance of long-term moral human relationships. Accord-
ing to Efrati, God is present within every human being, and it is this divine
spark within man that must be preserved and safeguarded. Teichtal, on the
other hand, had a more conservative view in which God is portrayed as the
divine master of human moral behavior. Both men, however, believed that
only Gods presence and the imprint of that presence in human conscious-
ness can restrain human behavior.
26
See Tzipi Kaufmann, Keoved Leuvda Zu: A Strange God and Idolatry in
Hassidic Thought, Akdamot 19 (2007), pp. 87104 (Hebrew).
27
Yissakhar Shlomo Teichtal, Refined Faith in the Holocaust Furnace, vol. 1
(Jerusalem, 1995), pp. 93106.
Seen in the light of Teichtals and Efratis meditations, Berkovits pre-

sented a remarkable ethical response. In absolute contrast to Teichtal he
calls upon humankind to liberate itself from the dependency on God:28
Man can be frightened; but he cannot be bludgeoned into goodness. If

God did not respect mans freedom to choose his course in personal re-
sponsibility, not only would the moral good and evil be abolished from the
earth, but man himself would go with them. For freedom and responsibility
are of the very essence of man. Without them man is not human. If there is
to be man, he must be allowed to make his choices in freedom. If he has
such freedom, he will use it. Using it, he will often use it wrongly.
Not only does Berkovits reject the call for the Almighty to frighten hu-
mankind and to restrain men and women from doing evil, he declares that
in Gods eyes freedom is the essence of human life in the world. God, he
wrote, was coerced into allowing man to do evil in order to justify the
worlds autonomous state. Without such permission, the world would
become valueless, with the theological experiment of creating a world of
good will revealed as doomed to fail.
Hence, the source of ethical behavior cannot originate from a divine
decree but, rather, should be found in human nature and tendency. Yet,
this is not Kants imperative: Berkovits still believes that God has a part in
human normative behavior:29
If man is not to perish at the hand of man, if the ultimate destiny of man is
not to be left to the chance that man will never make the fatal decision,
God must not withdraw His providence from His creation. He must be pre-
sent in history [] He is present without being indubitably manifest. He is
absent without being hopelessly inaccessible.
In other words, God plays a role especially in human aspirations for good
and salvation. Man should leave room for divine providence; he must feel
as if he is watched and monitored even though there is no actual deterrent
to his actions.
Despite the fact that they differed on substantial points, all three think-
ers made room for a divine entity in the moral code of life. They all under-
stood that humanity needed help in order to incorporate an appropriate
ethical system for all mankind. Indeed, they wrote of universal values, yet,
it is clear that all three called for a Jewish re-thinking: their writings were
addressed to Jews, and they used Jewish terminology, so I believe that
28
Faith after the Holocaust, p. 89.
29
Ibid.
their work can be considered Jewish ethical responses, colored by the

uniqueness of Orthodoxy, which attributes a crucial role to God as the
starting point.
In the following pages I will attempt a more difficult task: I will seek
to find a Jewish common denominator among Jewish thinkers who did not
speak and write in an Orthodox context.30
V. Primo Levi and the Call for God as a Moral Source

In this section, I will relate to several thinkers in parallel in order to trace
the Jewish gene of their moral lessons. I decided not to focus on promi-
nent Jewish thinkers such as Elie Wiesel, Emil Fackenheim, and Emanuel
Levinas but, rather, to deal with some innovative conclusions from less
well-known personalities which, I believe, complement the meditations of
those well-studied thinkers. However, as an exception, I am relating here
to Primo Levi, the famous writer and intellectual, because the moral as-
pects of his thought regarding the Holocaust that I wish to emphasize are
rarely studied.
Immediately after the Holocaust, Levi wrote a poem called Shema.31
The Shema, considered the most important Jewish prayer, which is recited
at least twice a day should be the focus of intellectual efforts to strengthen
the notion of monotheism. While reciting the Shema, one should articu-
late ones understanding of the perfect dominion of God on every spatial-
temporal level and, of course, specifically, in ones own soul. It is this
basic notion known to every Jew who has been granted even the most
elementary religious education that Levi was challenging when he penned
this ambiguous poem, which is described by Rowland as one that com-
prises a bitterly ironic parody:32
You who live secure

In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:
30
I wish not to label any of these thinkers, but only to introduce them in their own
contexts: some were religious thinkers, i.e., concerned with religious ideas, and
some were non-religious thinkers, i.e., concerned with universal, secular ideas.
31
On Levis poem, see Anthony C. Rowland, Poetry as Testimony: Primo Levis
Collected Poems, Textual Practice 22, 3 (2008), pp. 487505. Rowland defines
Shema as a meta-testimony, in which Levi calls for legitimizing the survivors
voice as a critic of human evaluation of the Holocaust.
32
Primo Levi, Collected Poems, trans. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann (London:
Faber, 1988), p. 9. Also see: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/shema/
Consider whether this is a man,

Who labors in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.
Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.
Levis unrestrained rage should not divert us from the dissonance between
the poems title and its content. The title has a religious implication, espe-
cially when it appears in a foreign language (as the word shema is the
imperative form of the Hebrew word hear; when given in Hebrew, it
might have a neutral meaning as well, even though that is not likely)
whereas the poem itself does not have a religious motif.33 Moreover, in its
original context, the Shema is a divine call for mankind to hear and pro-
claim Gods voice and being whereas the shema in Levis poem is a call
among humans.
A radical theological interpretation of the poem as a call for Gods
awareness and evaluation of a dire situation that developed under His
providence might also be legitimate. In that case, the curse on the head
of the one who did not prevent it is, in fact, a defiance targeted at God.
This poem articulates the early stages of Levis evolving ethical outlook,
which was further developed in his masterpiece, If This Is a Man.34 Levi
called for a human obligation to listen to and identify the essence of hu-
33
On Levis (non-)religious character and influence see: Michael Rothberg and
Jonathan Druker, A Secular Alternative: Primo Levis Place in American Holo-
caust Discourse, Shofar 28, 1 (2009), pp. 104126. Their paper compares the
Holocaust ethos inspired by Levi to Elie Wiesel as the two major models of inter-
preting the Holocaust in America: a secular versus a sanctified model.
34
Levi, If This Is a Man (New York: Orion Press, 1959). The manuscript was
completed in 1946.
manity. Man is human not only in his individual vitality and his involve-
ment in community life but also in his agony, loneliness, and despair.
Perhaps the true man would be the man who has no normal life, who is
shorn of his protective covering, and remains naked in a state of simple
humanness. He should be the subject of a moral call; he should be called
man. Yet, is this really a dialogue with God? Does Levi need God in this
equation, or is God the means by which Levi searches for answers to:
What is humanity? and to: What should be humanitys moral attitude to-
ward the other who is weird and vile?
It seems that in his attempt to define the essence of humanity, Levi
comes to the source of life in order to evaluate it at its final and most in-
significant moments. The moral call here (and the sanctions that Levi
wishes to impose on those who disregard that call) is not for a change in
behavior or a reassessment of social codes but rather for an attitude of
honor and dignity, for an intrinsic appreciation of human life.
VI. Ignaz Maybaums Early Holocaust Meditations

Ignaz Maybaum was one of the most well-known and controversial Jewish
thinkers in the context of the Holocaust.35 Born in Vienna and raised in
Germany, he received his rabbinical ordination from Berlins Hochschule
fr die Wissenschaft des Judentums in 1926.36 He earned a Ph.D. from the
University of Marburg and held pulpits in Bingen, Frankfurt an der Oder
and, eventually, in Berlin. In the wake of the Kristallnacht and the Nazi
persecutions against prominent lay and spiritual Jewish leaders, he and his
family immigrated to Great Britain, where he served as a rabbi in London
and taught at the re-established Leo Baeck Institute.
Maybaum is particularly well known for suggesting the concept of the
Akedah (The Binding of Isaac) as a pivotal element in the Jewish response
to the Holocaust. I am not in any way arguing with this association, but I
35
For contemplative biographical notes on Maybaum, see the recently published
work of Friedrich Lotter, Rabbiner Ignaz Maybaum Leben und Lehre (Berlin:
Frank & Timme, 2010), pp. 1316. Also see Alisa Jaffa, Ignaz Maybaum: Memo-
ries of My Father, in Nicholas de Lange (ed.), Ignaz Maybaum: A Reader (New
York: Berghahn Books, 2001), pp. ixxv. For a vivid description of Maybaums
contribution to the Leo Baeck College after the war, see Hillel Avidan, My Stu-
dent Years at Leo Baeck College, European Judaism 39, 1 (2006), p. 50.
36
On the Hochschule and its mission, see Edward Ullendorff, The Berlin
Hochschule fr die Wissenschaft des Judentums: Marginalia, Personalities, Remi-
niscences, in Glenda Abramson and Tudor Parfitt (ed.), Jewish Education and
Learning (Chur/Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994), pp. 195202.
do contend that it was his final assessment of the Holocaust that brought
Maybaum to this conclusion, rather than intuitive reasoning.
As early as in February 1941 Maybaum published a book entitled Man
and Catastrophe,37 in which he recorded some of his initial responses to
the Kristallnacht and the persecution of the Jews in Germany. At this
point, not long after the outbreak of World War II, he also thought it in-
cumbent upon himself to introduce his audiences in the synagogues as
well as Christian readers to homilies designed to calm their anxious souls
and to suggest moral and spiritual goals.
As implied in the title, Man and Catastrophe deals with the existential
problem of calamity. Yet, most of the book does not confront existential
matters but, rather, emphasizes the collectivity of Judaism and the mean-
ing of being a Jew in a liberal Christian world. Firm in his belief that Juda-
ism is a universal mission, Maybaum does not include any mystical or
even particularistic concepts in his Jewish outlook. He does, however, deal
with the basic Jewish concepts of spirituality, priesthood, suffering, and
responsibility. He gives expression to true altruism when he notes the
following:38
People today speak of it as a crusade. We do so. And it is right that we

should do so. For since Revelation is the possession of all and people either
accept Revelation or they are pagans, so every war must be more than a
struggle for our own selfish interests [] if they wage war they may wage
it, may lift up their swords against others, only if their war is a holy war
[] To use the word good as synonymous with my own interests is the
pagan point of view which prevails today in Germany [] Good is what is
just, and also what is true.
This deontological stance creates a distinction between Nazi utilitarianism

and Jewish morality (or perhaps monotheism would be a better term).
Moreover, this call for a war against preserving a societys interests when
those interests trample on innocent people is, in fact, a call for an inner
war within each individual. Every human being, even the righteous and the
pure, sometimes wishes to promote some particular interest such as his or
her prosperity and welfare many times without considering the other. This
is an imperfect stance in Maybaum's view but a very common one. Na-
zism, according to Maybaum, is an extreme example of this condition, and
it led to a time that saw the consequences of unrestrained human evil in-
clinations. But what are the means by which such a profound message can
37
Man and Catastrophe (London: Allenson & Co., 1941).
38
Ibid., pp. 144145.
be advanced to reach and lodge in the public soul? Following his great
master, Franz Rosenzweig, Maybaum asserts:
What is the Jew? [] the Jew is the wandering priest [] we are aliens in
our priestly destiny [] we can say to the world. And behold, holiness vis-
ible to all eyes.39
It is the Jew, each and every Jew, who should move from place to place
and educate his society to adopt an altruistic way of life. As opposed to all
of the thinkers I have surveyed so far, Maybaum imposes a highly de-
manding mission on the individual Jew. He is the only one among the
writers that I have discussed here who specified the Jewish mission of
morality in the world as a unique and distinctive form of moral undertak-
ing as a transitive as well as an intransitive action.
VII. Conclusions
I have discussed several major Jewish ethical responses to the Holocaust
and attempted to trace their shared foundational components. To do so, I
followed two major trends in the various responses, the first a particularis-
tic one and the second a universalistic one. The particularistic trend calls
for an inner rectification of misdeeds from both a religious and a national-
istic point of view. As I noted earlier, my focus is on the universalistic
trend which may provide effective moral edification regarding humankind.
Within the universalistic trend we can find yet another division. Some
of the universalistic thinkers take a stand that calls for an autonomic moral
code, somewhat based on the Kantian imperative. They believe that the
horrors of the Holocaust exemplify the fate of humans who did not listen
to their inner voice, and that the slaughtered victims call upon us to rein-
force the human code of respect for the other and the responsibility for
their well-being. As in Kants meditations, yet with a different emphasis
on the infrastructure of human morality, they believe that moral behavior
is natural to humans and that the unique mission of the Jewish nation (an-
other common denominator of many Jewish thinkers) is to encourage
adherence to these concepts within society. This group includes Primo
Levi and Emmanuel Levinas, among others.
The second division of the universalistic trend is fascinating because of
its call for a change in Jewish/non-Jewish relationships on both a historical
and a moral account. This stand is motivated principally by religious pas-
sion, an existential need to rectify the human misdeeds that caused such an
39
Ibid., pp. 6365.
appalling desecration of Gods name and image (in Hebrew: Hillul Ha-
Shem, one of the most serious religious faults).
The moral call for a change in human behavior comes from and goes to
a universal sphere for which, owing to the eternal covenant between Israel
and God, Jewry is responsible. The covenant does not grant its two sides
with special rights, only with extra responsibility for humankind. Facken-
heims critique on Kants Moral Imperative, for example, derives its foun-
dation from the fundamental recognition of Gods voice commanding
humanity Thou shalt not murder! The priestly status, to use the words of
Rosenzweigs pupil Maybaum, is to dictate a lifestyle of liability on the
worlds moral level. It is not a Jewish interest but rather a Jewish decree.
The lesson is an internal one: Judaism must take its place as the beacon of
humankind, and the guardian of all who are oppressed. This latter outlook
is shared by reform, Orthodox, and conservative thinkers, as well as by
non-religiously identified Jewish intellectuals.
Despite the fact that these two factions of the universalistic trend set
and emphasize different ethical missions and goals, they have something
unique in common: a moral restlessness. All of these prominent thinkers
who come from very different backgrounds and cultural milieus contend
that the mending of the world lies on their shoulders.
Notwithstanding the problematic aspects of speaking of a Jewish
ethical response to the Holocaust, one can speak of Jews feeling driven by
the Holocaust toward actions to restore the worlds moral image. This
drive is indeed common to almost every post-Holocaust Jewish thinker,
and its interpretation is derived from the spiritual and moral stature of each
and every one of them.
ON THE MORAL PROFILE OF PUBLIC HISTORY:
GERMAN TELEVISION, NAZI PERPETRATORS,
AND THE EVOLUTION OF HOLOCAUST
MEMORY
STEWART ANDERSON AND WULF KANSTEINER
Holocaust memory is a deeply moralistic discourse. Stories about the Fi-

nal Solution seek to convey moral lessons to their audiences, and the
proper representation, packaging, and teaching of the Holocaust have
always been debated in moral terms.
The moral charge of Holocaust memory becomes particularly obvious
when existing memorial practices are criticized and recalibrated according
to changing moral and political priorities. In spring 2012, Dana Giesecke
and Harald Welzer pursued just this kind of recalibration when they ar-
gued that German Holocaust education, as it is carried out in schools, the
media, and public memorial sites, forces young people to adopt a political-
ly correct memorial habitus. In their opinion, the institutions of public
history thus undercut the teaching of democratic values and non-
conformist behavior that are presumably the overriding objective of all
Holocaust education. Giesecke and Welzer advocate divesting historical
education from explicit moral instructions and broadening the contents of
our curricula and media practices. They hope to educate young generations
about the terror as well as the moments of happiness, success, and civili-
satory progress that are also part of human history.1 The Giesecke/Welzer
intervention, echoed by a number of their peers,2 is a provocative exercise
1
Dana Giesecke/Harald Welzer, Das Menschenmgliche: Zur Renovierung der
deutschen Erinnerungskultur (Hamburg: Krber, 2012), p. 25; see also Welzer,
Vom Zeit zum Zukunftszeugen: Vorschlge zur Modernisierung der
Erinnerungskultur, in Martin Sabrow/Norbert Frei (eds.), Die Geburt des
Zeitzeugen nach 1945 (Gttingen: Wallstein, 2012), pp. 33-48.
2
Volkhard Knigge, Zur Zukunft der Erinnerung, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte
60/25-26 (2010), 10-16; Ulrike Jureit, Gefhlte Opfer: Illusionen der
Vergangenheitsbewltigung (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2010); Martin Sabrow,
440 On the Moral Profile of Public History:
in applied ethics. They are not favoring replacing existing value systems;
in their perception, current teaching practices are out of sync with long-
held convictions and objectives. Such provocations are a routine element
of democratic historical cultures -- rendered more intriguing in this case
since the criticism appears to reflect the formation of a post-1968 political
generation whose members seek to retool the historical culture of their
predecessors.3
Any attempt to escape the gravitational pull of the Holocaust paradigm
and cast history, including 20th century German history, in a more positive
light constitutes a considerable political risk as a historiographical debate
from the 1980s nicely illustrates. In 1986, Rainer Zitelmann, a member of
the Welzer generation but operating from a very different political vantage
point and in a different ethical context, pursued a re-emplotment of Nazi-
era economic and social policies as value-neutral catalysts in the march
towards modernization in Germany. He was promptly denounced by many
historians.4 In one review, the historian Peter Longerich contended that
Zitelmanns conclusions were not only empirically unsound (because he
attributed intention and inner conviction to Hitlers ramblings about mo-
dernity when other evidence suggests that Hitlers mention of moderniza-
tion was primarily a rhetorical and tactical ploy), but also morally ques-
tionable. Longerich argued that any reconstruction of Hitlers
sociological worldview which did not pay attention to his perception of
the Jewish Question would necessarily paint a flawed picture.5 Other
academic readers similarly demanded recognition that the Holocaust cast a
shadow over German modernization both before and after the war. At no
point did the critics offer explicit ethical arguments in support of this posi-
tion. Zitelmann was taken to task for not recognizing Hitlers evil schemes
and the suffering of Holocaust victims and depriving uninitiated readers of
the moral truth. That ethical position appeared self-evident within the
Welche Erinnerung, wessen Geschichte?: Das neue Interesse an der

Vergangenheit, in Kulturpolitische Gesellschaft (ed.), kultur.macht.geschichte:
Kulturpolitik und kulturelles Gedchtnis (Essen: Klartext, 2010), pp. 36-46.
3
Birgit Schwelling, Memory Fatigue: Some Reflections on the Current Debate on
Memory Practice and Memory Studies in Germany, public lecture at the confer-
ence The Future of Memory, Konstanz, Germany, 7 May 2012.
4
Rainer Zitelmann, Nationalsozialismus und Moderne: Eine Zwischenbilanz, in
W. S, ed., bergnge: Zeitgeschichte zwischen Utopie und Machbarkeit (Berlin:
Duncker und Humblot, 1989), 195-223; Zitelmann, Selbstverstndnis eines
Revolutionrs, 3rd rev. ed. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990).
5
Peter Longerich, Adolf Hitler ein Revolutionr?, Die Zeit, October 2, 1987,
pp. 39-40. (eine Rekonstruktion der soziologischen Vorstellungen Hitlers, ohne
Einbeziehung der Judenfrage, ergibt zwangslufig ein schiefes Bild)
Stewart Anderson and Wulf Kansteiner 441
context of the Holocaust paradigm but it marked a decisive departure from

the moral universe of historical scholarship during previous decades when
academics had pursued all kinds of research projects about the rise and fall
of the Nazi regime without paying much attention to its genocidal poli-
cies.6 The Zitelmann case raises interesting didactic and moral questions
about Giesekes and Welzers initiative, questions reminiscent of the dis-
cussion about the historicization of National Socialism. One wonders what
balance of positive and negative history Gieseke and Welzer have in mind
and how many and what kind of positive elements they would like to inte-
grate into their teachings of Nazi history.
The moral dimension of Holocaust memory has clearly varied over
time both in terms of its intensity and in terms of the kind of moral argu-
ments that different artifacts of Holocaust memory present. Holocaust
stories reflect a wide range of values, notions of historical justice, and
moral truths. In light of that fairly self-evident observation it is somewhat
puzzling that a hyper-self-reflective field such as Holocaust studies lacks a
tradition of meta-ethical inquiry.7 Ethics and the Holocaust have attracted
considerable scholarly attention since at least the 1990s. But most publica-
tions focus on the impact of the Holocaust on ethical thinking in continen-
tal philosophy or highlight the moral shortcomings of specific objects of
Holocaust memory.8 The texts do not provide a comprehensive critical
analysis of the history and structure of the moralistic world of Holocaust
remembrance. As a result, we do not know how Holocaust morality has
changed over the years, what moral strategies have been deployed particu-
larly frequently and which types of interventions have been embraced by
their respective audiences.
6
For the historiographical context and an analysis of the debate see Wulf Kan-
steiner, In Pursuit of German Memory. History, Television, and Politics after
Auschwit (Athens/Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006), pp. 100-104.
7
The Encyclopedia of Ethics defines metaethics, also called second-order ethics as
the philosophical study of the nature, justification, relationality, truth-conditions,
and status of moral codes, standards, judgments, and principles, abstracting from
their specific content, Lawrence Becker/Charlotte Becker (eds.), Encyclopedia of
Ethics (Routledge, London, 2001), p. 1079; see also John Roth (ed.), International
Encyclopedia of Ethics, p. 622; and esp. Marcus Dwell/Christoph Hbenthal/
Micha Werner (eds.), Handbuch Ethik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2011), pp. 25-35.
8
For recent examples see Jennifer Geddes/John Roth/Jules Simon (eds.), The
Double Binds of Ethics after the Holocaust: Salvaging the Fragments (New York:
PalgraveMacmillan, 2009); Berel Lang, Philosophical Witnessing: The Holocaust
as Presence (Waltham/MA: Brandeis UP, 2009); and Dorota Glowacka, Disap-
pearing Traces: Holocaust Testimonials, Ethics, and Aesthetics (Seattle: Universi-
ty of Washington Press, 2012).
Holocaust memory has become a moral imperative since the 1970s.

But simply considering the Holocaust a mandatory lesson in German his-
tory ignores at least two potential meta-ethical problems. First, participants
in a conversation may not share the same ethical codes and consequently
produce and perceive memory texts with very different objectives in mind.
Thus, it seems vital to examine the ethical foundations of any particular
memory product as a first step to assessing its moral usefulness. Second,
Holocaust representations differ from one another not only in terms of
ethical assumptions, but also in terms of form. Moral interventions, much
the same as any other discursive gestures, differ in their structure, ap-
proach, and purpose.
We take our conceptual cues from the discipline of ethics, i.e., the sys-
tematic philosophical study of human morality, which encompasses gen-
eral reflections about the nature of human goodness and human justice,
inquiries into the nature and operative procedures of existing and desirable
normative systems, and reaches all the way into the variegated field of
applied ethics. As non-experts, we take the liberty of suggesting four heu-
ristic analytical categories that should help us define a given interventions
primary point of ethical concern.
In general terms, four types of moral interventions seem the most rele-
vant ones for the topic at hand. We differentiate between primarily onto-
logically, ethically, normatively, and applied-ethically oriented moral
statements.9 Ontological strategies for depicting morality center, as the
term suggests, on the question of being. An ontological moral lesson re-
veals a moral truth that constitutes a considerable moral challenge.10 For
example, when Sophocles Oedipus discovers that he has killed his father
and that his wife is really his mother, the moral decisions and choices he
makes immediately take on a very different character. He is no longer a
king and honorable warrior, but a murderous son and an incestuous hus-
band. For the intended audience of a Holocaust production, then, an onto-
logical intervention will seek to inform viewers about the gravity and
9
For these four types of moral interventions see Stewart Anderson, Big Lessons
from the Small Screen: Television Fiction, Media Consensus, and the Reinvention
of Morality in East and West Germany, 1956-1970 (PhD Diss., Binghamton Uni-
versity, 2011), pp. 31-37.
10
The notion of moral ontology owes a heavy debt to Martin Heidegger and his
critic David Webb, who both understood the term as a commonly assumed or
shared set of assumptions about human nature. See Webb, Heidegger, Ethics and
the Practive of Ontology (New York: Continuum, 2009).
immensity of the event, for instance by revealing the moral essence of the
perpetrators actions.11
Programs pitched on an ethical level focus on the central questions of
moral self-reflectivity, i.e., how to lead a good life and attain justice, by
giving principled answers to clearly circumscribed moral dilemmas.12 A
relatively pure example of an ethical intervention is Aesops fable The
Ant and the Grasshopper. While the ant gathers food all summer, the
grasshopper feasts on what it finds in the field, never storing anything for
the winter. When winter finally comes, the ant survives and the grasshop-
per perishes. The simple question here, to work or to play?, finds a definite
answer: work. In terms of memory and television, ethical interventions tell
viewers what guidelines should be followed in the tasks of working
through the Nazi past and defining ones own relationship to that past.
Ethical interventions may, for instance, identify the principles best applied
in the process of remembering the crimes and punishing the perpetrators.
Normative interventions aim to prescribe (or proscribe) types of behav-
ior and actions in concrete terms.13 More than the other categories, norma-
tive moral lessons involve the visualization of a complex character or
situation, showing viewers how to implement ontological insights or ethi-
11
Throughout the 20th century, scholars have argued a great deal about the exist-
ence of ethical truths. For many years most experts assumed that existing episte-
mological protocols do not permit us to arrive at ethical truths that exist inde-
pendently of a given observers point of view and standards of judgment. Since the
late 20th century and not coincidentally after the demise of post-structuralism and
the rise of Holocaust consciousness, ontological skepticism has given way to onto-
logical curiosity about context-independently valid moral judgments, see Marcus
Dwell/Christoph Hbenthal/Micha Werner (eds.), Handbuch Ethik (Stuttgart:
Metzler, 2011), pp. 31-33.
12
Jonathan Glover has argued that ethics is the complex phenomena of good and
evil, not a set of strictly philosophical arguments and principles. Our understanding
of ethical in this chapter proceeds from this point. Glover, Humanity: A Moral
History of the Twentieth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999), p. 11; for a
succinct definition see also Otfried Hffe (ed.), Lexikon der Ethik (Munich: Beck,
2008), p. 71-72.
13
This notion of normative morality accords with David Copps, who argues that
they are based on an intricate understanding of standards of judgment. See Copp,
Morality, Normativity, and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.
9. Our category of normative statements is derived from the conventional differen-
tiation between normative and descriptive ethics. While the latter seeks to describe
existing moral systems or practices from an external and ideally neutral point of
view, the former engages in moral judgments in pursuit of social justice and moral-
ly sound ways of living, see Dwell/Hbenthal/Werner, Handbuch Ethik, p. 25;
Roth, International Encyclopedia of Ethics, p. 621.
cal premises. A classic example of this is Shakespeares character Hamlet.

Having been confronted with ontological U-turns (he learns from his fa-
thers ghost that his uncle murdered his father) and soul-penetrating ethical
questions (should Hamlet seek revenge for this treachery? Should he kill
himself? Should he run away?), the audience watches his ultimate reaction
and is implicitly encouraged to do the same in similar situations: he con-
fronts and duels with his uncle. In the realm of Holocaust memory, the
most applicable role models are: the German rescuer, who encourages
viewers to protect victims of racism, poverty, sexism, or any number of
injustices or hardships; the self-flagellant, but largely innocent, German
bystander, who likewise encourages viewers to do more to help their fel-
lows; and the negative role model, often a concentration camp guard or
Nazi official, who embodies immoral selfish, racist, or conformist behav-
ior and attitudes. Normative interventions feature concrete emotional entry
points, offering viewers for instance a chance to engage with moral di-
lemmas on the basis of a strong sense of empathy for the victims of the
Holocaust.
The final category, applied ethical interventions, plays an important
quantitative role in public history and differs only in degrees from norma-
tive interventions. Applied ethical statements focus on the real or imagined
outcomes of specific discursive interventions. In an effort to reduce moral
complexity, the texts in question pay little attention to the origins and
theoretical foundations of their moral positions or the examination of ab-
stract questions of what constitutes right and wrong as distinct from the
representation of a specific moral dilemma.14 Thus, for example, the au-
thor of a Holocaust memory play in which Catholic nuns rescue Jewish
children from deportation hopes that the audience focuses its attention on
the nuns specific, noble actions and not on what the play omits: the fate of
the childrens parents. Only a very specific moral decision is scrutinized
and stripped of its context, and the result, a valorization of the nuns ac-
tions, says little about how to develop a basis for moral judgment generally.
As the last two categories illustrate, our heuristic model is best imag-
ined as a spectrum of interdependent and overlapping gestures of moral
self-reflection, reaching from far-flung abstract interventions all the way to
14
Applied ethics did not play an important role in philosophical studies until the
1960s but has since turned into a philosophical growth industry spawning off
important new subdisciplines such as bioethics. Considered from this perspective,
public Holocaust history is part of a pervasive moralization of a number of profes-
sional and public settings of which television has perhaps the greatest cultural
reach, on applied ethics see Dwell/Hbenthal/Werner, Handbuch Ethik, pp. 243-
247; and Becker/Becker, Encyclopedia of Ethics, pp. 80-83.
very concrete, narrowly conceived moral judgments. As complex cultural

artifacts, TV programs feature components of all four different categories,
although they are generally considered particularly suitable for the deliv-
ery of normative and applied ethical lessons. We will explore this spec-
trum by examining the types of moral arguments forwarded by ZDF tele-
vision programs about the Holocaust between the mid-1960s and the
present. We argue that televisual representations of the Holocaust, particu-
larly because they assume moral dimensions so readily, are ripe for this
type of formal analysis and that such a move will be useful in explaining
motives and trends, as well as in expressing concerns about the direction
of Holocaust memory production.
I. Invisible Nazis
In the 1960s and early 1970s, during the first decade of ZDF broadcasting,
the stations editorial staff had a tough time living up to the specific moral
challenge of representing the perpetrators of the Final Solution. At that
point in time, generations whose members were adults during the Third
Reich were still running the show and representing a large share of the
audience (including, invariably, the people in control of the dial). As a
result, the SS criminals and their many German and Eastern European
collaborators who had committed the genocide of European Jewry rarely
appeared in the ZDF coverage of Nazi history. The record is more mixed
on the memory front. When ZDF journalists and directors reported on
contemporary attempts to come to terms with the Nazi past, they focused
on legal history and individual attempts at Vergangenheitsbewltigung
without depicting the crimes in any detail. Nevertheless, a few select
broadcasts in the memory category provided self-critical and morally am-
bitious representations of the perpetrators and their crimes and thus dif-
fered markedly from the vast majority of strictly historical programs.
In 1967 and 1970 respectively, ZDF broadcast two primetime TV
plays demonstrating vividly that West German society had never come to
terms with the challenge of having so many Nazi perpetrators in its midst.
Death of a Fellow Citizen by Jrgen Gtt dealt with the panicky reactions
of friends, relatives, and political allies of an industrial tycoon who reveals
in his will that he is a wanted war criminal and insists on being buried
under his real name.15 Confession by Oliver Storz focuses on a priest who
is deeply troubled by the confidential, anonymous confession of a former
15
Der Tod eines Mitbrgers, 8 March 1967.
member of an Einsatzgruppe who refuses to give himself up.16 Both plays

ran head to head against very popular programs on ARD and therefore
received poor ratings, although Confession was at least a critical success.17
More importantly, however, both TV plays, while dedicated to the cause
of historical education, never visualized the war crimes nor, for that
matter, the criminals themselves. The well-intended interventions support-
ed the problematic assumption that West German society had no choice in
the matter and needed to wait for the invisible Nazi ghosts to come out of
the woodwork on their own volition. Lacking a concrete blueprint to guide
viewers actions and responses, these early dramas proved unable to gen-
erate effective ethical and normative lessons. Viewers were not subjected
to clear moral instructions in the tradition of Aesops fable; nor did they
see credible, Hamlet-like role models providing concrete behavioral ad-
vice about finding and confronting the hidden Nazis among them. Instead,
Gtt and Storz highlighted their own moral helplessness with disarming
honesty. In this way they raised as yet unfocused but disturbing questions
regarding the moral challenge of the Nazi past in 1960s Germany. Death
of a Fellow Citizen and Confession were not seminal moments in the pro-
cess of coming to terms with the past. Instead, they represent the kind of
ontological rumblings that permeated West German historical culture 20
years after the war and laid the foundation for the self-critical memories of
future decades.
The ambiguous aesthetic choices in the realm of TV fiction correspond
to belated, often timid attempts of visualizing the perpetrators of the Final
Solution in non-fiction programs. The features and documentaries in
question are part of the coverage on the attempts by West German courts
to punish Nazi perpetrators, and most were marginal television events. In
the end, for the years from 1963 to 1991, we are left with a handful of non-
fiction programs which attained average ratings of merely 10% of televi-
sion households, comprised each less than 50 minutes of air time, and,
with two exceptions, were broadcast during off-primetime hours. 217
minutes in 28 years! The first noteworthy production entitled The Last
Stop was aired in 1964 on the occasion of the Auschwitz trial in Frank-
furt.18 Director Thomas Gnielka summarized the events in Auschwitz
relying on photographs and excerpts from a Polish documentary by Maria
16
Die Beichte, 11 November 1970. See also Der Fussgnger, 7 August 1988.
17
Both TV plays were watched by 16% of TV households, for a representative
review of Die Beichte see Ulrike Piper, Die Beichte, Vorwrts, 19 November
1970.
18
Die letzte Station: Eine Dokumentation zum Auschwitz-Prozess, 11 January
1964.
Kwiatkowska. In addition, Gnielka offered a short synopsis of the lives of

six of the defendants, telling viewers about their behavior in Auschwitz
and their unremarkable postwar careers.
After 12 years of silence, ZDF broadcast a first truly remarkable perpe-
trator documentary entitled Dr. W.: An SS physician in Auschwitz.19 Dutch
director Rolf Orthel assembled a complex picture of Eduard Wirth on the
basis of extensive interviews with friends and relatives. Wirth had served
in Auschwitz for several years, participated regularly in selections, but had
occasionally also helped prisoners. He committed suicide in 1945. Dr. W.
is an excellent example for the early pensive engagement with the legacy
of the Final Solution which presents Auschwitz as a moral enigma and
refrains from espousing ontological truths or ethical-normative certainties.
The documentary was part of a modest increase of Holocaust coverage
that was produced by ZDF and ARD a few years before news about the
NBC mini-series Holocaust crossed the Atlantic. This coverage laid the
foundation for the remarkable reception of Holocaust and later turned into
a wave of TV stories about the victims and survivors of the Final Solu-
tion.
The invention of the Holocaust paradigm represents an important turn-
ing point in the historical culture of the West, among other reasons be-
cause survivors finally received the public recognition they deserved. In
Germany, however, the special attention paid to the survivors of the Final
Solution quickly turned into yet another factor deflecting attention from
the perpetrators. On several occasions, survivors participated in this pact
of silence. Some were simply not able to talk about their tormentors. Oth-
ers were appreciative of the educational efforts of their mostly younger
German interviewers and conscious of the political difficulties which they
might face at home. Consequently, with polite reserve, they refrained from
what could be perceived as inflammatory statements and failed to volun-
teer information about the names and specific crimes of the Germans who
had caused them so much pain. Consider, for example, the truly excep-
tional and path-breaking documentary Mendel Schainfelds Second Trip to
Germany by Hans-Dieter Grabe which ZDF broadcast in 1972.20
Schainfeld and Grabe talk at length about Schainfelds family back-
ground, his experiences in ghettos and camps, and his continued physical
and psychological suffering. Whenever the talk turns to perpetrators they
use the passive voice and generic phrases for the bad people whose
names I prefer not to mention (5:10). The earlier dramas and documen-
taries lacked a precise ethical and normative profile but kept insisting, for
19
Dr. W.: Ein SS-Arzt in Auschwitz, 12 September 1976.
20
Mendel Schainfelds zweite Reise nach Deutschland, 13 March 1972
instance by taking a more or less probing look at the average Nazi perpe-
trators, that the Final Solution constituted an essential moral challenge
for German society. With survivor dramas like Mendel Schainfeld, the
Holocaust coverage assumed a clear moral focus. Now television high-
lighted the ontological centrality of the Holocaust for the history of the
20th century and provided implicit or explicit ethical guidelines concerning
German responsibility for the wellbeing of said survivors. But as one mor-
al element of the Holocaust came into focus, another retreated further into
the background. As far as the perpetrators are concerned, Schainfelds
suffering barely registers as an ethical model because the Nazis remain
nameless and faceless; even the grasshopper from Aesops fable seems to
have more depth of character. With precision and restraint Grabe presents
Schainfeld as a gracious victim who deserves our empathy and may serve
as an excellent vehicle of historical education. But the program fails to
convey a similar sense of normative urgency regarding the fate of the
perpetrators.
Despite this important qualification, the early 1980s i.e, the period
after the invention of the Holocaust paradigm and before the commerciali-
zation of German television and the onset of Knopp TV represent the
most self-reflective and self-critical era of German history TV. A number
of noteworthy perpetrator documentaries were broadcast during those
years, including the subtle My Grandfather: KZ-Guard Konrad Keller.21
Director Paul Karalus accompanied the young journalist Kurt Kister dur-
ing his attempts to research the life of his grandfather who was a guard in
Dachau and also a much-loved family patriarch. As Gnielka and Orthel
before them, Karalus and Kister put the perpetrator front and center, visu-
ally as well as discursively, and explored the disconcerting concurrence of
extreme brutality and everyday kindness that characterized the lives of so
many NS perpetrators and never seemed to have caused them much dis-
comfort during or after the war. But the strained self-reflectivity of the
programs often turned them into moral liabilities. The documentaries and
features, few as they were, are best characterized as self-involved and self-
sufficient contemplations of the complex enigma of the Nazi perpetrators.
The programs urge viewers to contemplate German innocence lost but
otherwise cast their audiences into a passive ethical position; they are
sedate, elegiac exercises in mourning, not forceful ontological statements
or effective calls for normative or applied-ethical memory activism and
that despite the fact that the filmmakers celebrate themselves and their
subjects as memory trailblazers.
21
Mein Grossvater: KZ-Aufseher Konrad Keller, 25 July 1982.
Apparently, it took exceptionally favorable conditions and a lot of

determination to land an NS perpetrator documentary in ZDF prime time.
Jrgen Meyer accomplished that feat in 1977 with his devastating report
about the Majdanek trial, one of the longest NS trials in West German
history.22 Meyer presents a few of the defendants and calmly documents
the extensive use of Neo-Nazi jargon by the defense attorneys, the terrible
treatment of survivors by officers of the court, and the complete indiffer-
ence of the public towards the proceedings. Only the determined philo-
semite Lea Rosh really broke the mold of contemplative passivity and, at
the same time, managed to retain a prime time broadcasting slot. In No-
vember 1982, a week before the re-broadcast of Holocaust on ARD, ZDF
aired her bluntly entitled feature Holocaust: The Crime and the Perpetra-
tors.23 Rosh had done her homework and presented a seemingly endless
sequence of West German judicial scandals. Like her few predecessors
dealing with the unpopular genre of perpetrator television, Rosh described
the lives and crimes of a few Nazi thugs but added another devastating
level of analysis by informing the ZDF audience about the outrageously
lenient sentences that German courts meted out to the perpetrators. One
could argue, as some reviewers have done, that Roshs fury clouded her
judgment and that she failed to present a balanced view of the West Ger-
man judiciary.24 Also, judging by the production file, Rosh must have
been difficult to work with.25 Nevertheless, The Crime and the Perpetra-
tors stands out as the only prime time document that deals with perpetrator
history and conveys emotions of rage and grief that, in an ideal world,
would have been expressed by many more journalists, politicians, and
normal citizens.
The Crime and the Perpetrators features a new frame of judgment and
thus demonstrates how (West) German TV could have attained a sense of
moral justice in its perpetrator coverage. Roshs documentary marks a turn
away from the vagueness and passivity with which earlier productions
approached the challenge of assessing the crimes of the Nazis. Roshs
unconcealed outrage at the failures of the FRG court systems, fueled by
22
Die Vergangenheit kehrt zurck: Nach 33 Jahren der Majdanek-Prozess, 27
November 1977.
23
Holocaust die Tat und die Tter: Die Amnestierung der NS-Gewaltverbrechen
durch die deutsche Justiz und Nachkriegsgeschichte, 1 November 1982.
24
Kritisch gesehen: Holocaust: Die Tat und die Tter, Stuttgarter Zeitung, 11
November 1982.
25
A substantial production file documenting for instance serious budget disagree-
ments during and after the production of Die Tat und die Tter is retained in the
ZDF archive Zentrale Registratur under the production number 6471/0284.
the perception of the Holocaust as a crime of singular importance, consti-

tutes an unprecedented, powerful ontological statement about the moral
essence of the Final Solution. For this purpose, Rosh unabashedly ma-
nipulates the feelings of her audience. The opening shot of the documen-
tary features, for instance, the restaged execution of a pregnant Polish
woman by two Nazi officials. Right after witnessing the harrowing scene
the audience is informed that the two murderers never served a day in
prison for their crime. In essence, the program visually and discursively
performs what Rosh perceives as a fundamental mismatch: the absolute
evil that was the Holocaust cannot be appropriately grasped, let alone
redeemed, through the laborious rituals of Western justice rendered impo-
tent by right-wing judges and cunning defense attorneys. That impotence
is again nicely captured in a visual metaphor: the film contains extensive,
digitally remastered footage of Nazi defendants whose anonymity is pains-
takingly protected. The former Nazis have committed unspeakable crimes,
but the rules of due process prevent the camera team from showing their
faces to the audience.
Rosh thus combines absolute ontological certainty with an indictment
of large-scale normative failures. But she also places the audience in an
(applied-)ethical void. By focusing exclusively on the shortcomings of the
West German justice system Rosh invites her viewers to share her rage,
but she does not outline any alternative venues of meaningful, morally
sound memory work. The new ontological framework is not (yet) translat-
ed into corresponding operational norms and applied ethical procedures.
II. The Visual Construction of German Innocence

The relative dearth of perpetrator history on German TV was one of the
preconditions for the success of the ZDF division for contemporary history
in the 1990s. TV historian Guido Knopp and his associates started to fill
the void by pursuing concepts of Nazi history and Nazi crimes that had a
long tradition in other realms of German historical culture. For the purpose
of visualizing conventional perceptions of Hitler and his henchmen as the
primary perpetrators of war and genocide, Knopp and Co. relied extensive-
ly on visual documents crafted by the Nazis themselves. The films and
photos would be digitally remastered and integrated into slick, fast cut
sequences of eyewitness testimony, animation, and restaged historical
scenes. The resulting documentaries filled a long-existing gap in Germa-
nys visual culture and gave ZDF an edge in the competition with recently
founded, increasingly successful commercial TV networks. But the films
accomplished a lot more. By combining explicit, politically correct anti-
Nazi messages with much more ambivalent visual products celebrating

Nazi power, Knopp and Co. invited their viewers on an unprecedented
ride. The ZDF audience was offered an opportunity to play Nazi while
remaining (safely?) grounded in Germanys mainstream, anti-totalitarian
historical culture.26
Without empirical reception studies there is no way of determining if
this type of historical coverage had positive or negative consequences for
the development of collective memories in Germany. The illicit pleasure
of temporarily reveling in Nazi power might have brought viewers into the
ZDF fold who otherwise had little interest in historical education. But the
ZDF media revolution had problematic consequences for the representa-
tion of ordinary perpetrators. Part of Knopps innovation consisted of a
shift in emphasis from addressing traditional historiographical problems
why did the Nazi catastrophe happen to pursuing much more emotional-
ly driven questions how did it feel to experience the Nazi era, how did it
feel to be a victim or a bystander. This shift engendered an innovation in
normative morality, providing viewers with a present-day emotional entry
point and inviting them to participate in the memory construction process.
Such an intervention required evocative editing techniques which, among
many other consequences, put a premium on the emotional, not the histo-
riographical content of eyewitness testimony.
The turning point in the visual construction of historical witnesses oc-
curred in the late 1990s. The success of Hitler: Eine Bilanz catapulted a
number of Knopps programs into primetime slots. The extraordinary
import of this programming decision is illustrated by the fact that in the
two decades before Hitlers Helfer ZDF only broadcast two non-fictional
programs about National Socialism in the 8:15 pm slot (which traditional-
ly marks the beginning of prime time on German television). Historical
witnesses have been handled in a completely different way since this deci-
sive turning point, especially at ZDF. In visual terms, the interviewees are
rendered radically anonymous and interchangeable. Their appearances are
limited to short clips of about 20 seconds and are subordinated to the off-
screen narration. As a result of this set up, the witness can no longer con-
vey personal memories that contradict the producers aesthetic and ideo-
26
On the exceptionally successful Hitler-focused Knopp productions, including the
series Hitler: Eine Bilanz (1995) and Hitlers Helfer (1997-98), see Kansteiner, In
Pursuit of German Memory, p. 167-180; and Kansteiner, Macht, Authentizitt
und die Verlockungen der Normalitt: Aufstieg und Abschied der NS-Zeitzeugen
in den Geschichtsdokumentationen des ZDF, in Martin Sabrow/Norbert Frei
(eds.), Die Geburt des Zeitzeugen nach 1945 (Gttingen: Wallstein, 2012), pp.
320-353.
logical design. The producers simply cut out what does not fit and replace
it with a sound bite from another witness.
The ZDF producers succeeded in adapting and weaving together tradi-
tionally incompatible components of the history documentary genre, i.e.,
film and photo material, witness testimonies, and animations (for instance
maps) so that a well integrated tapestry of images appeared on the screen.
This carefully calibrated product was further visually enhanced by innova-
tive and evocative re-stagings of historical scenes. In its traditional appear-
ance, the historical documentary constantly frustrated its viewers interests
in entertainment and immersion. The long-winded interviews, copious
black-and-white film clips, and clumsy didactic visual aids, all of which
displayed at best tenuous connections to the accompanying academic off-
screen commentaries, were in and of themselves hardly capable of engag-
ing viewers visually and emotionally. Moreover, this slow-moving dis-
course was constantly interrupted, as the films ponderously switched aes-
thetic gears by cutting from tedious historians sitting in front of brightly-
colored bookcases to extensive quotes from black-and-white newsreel
footage. The traditional historical documentary thus featured a deadly
combination of intellectual-emotional stagnation and aesthetic interrup-
tions and had consequently been banned from prime time.27
Knopps new film language worked very differently. On the one hand,
the editing rythm had been accelerated to neck-breaking speeds. On the
other hand, all individual segments were now carefully aesthetically inte-
grated. A seamless stream of images, nicely attuned to the commentary,
offers the viewer an opportunity of emotional immersion that last for the
entirety of the broadcast. This documentary style cultivates feelings, not
historical knowledge.28 The sonorous voice of the commentator, the meas-
ured, catchy music, and the carefully constructed visual homogeneity
convey a sense of emotional security, especially for the experienced
Knopp audience. At the same time, on the basis of this sense of visual
Heimat, the productions rush from one borderline experience and emo-
tional highlight to the next, staging in short order stories of suffering, love,
loneliness, redemption, power, and death. The programs are powerful,
technologically sophisticated elegies which broke a number of political
27
For a description of this documentary aesthetic, see, Zur Geschichte
dokumentarischer Formen und ihrer sthetischen Gestaltung im ffentlich-
rechtlichen Fernsehen, in Rainer Wirtz, Thomas Fischer, Alles authentisch
(Konstanz: Uvk Verlags GmbH, 2008), pp. 109-136.
28
The critic Dieter Deul consequently wrote of Siegeszug des Gefhlsfernsehens
ber die teuflische Zeitgeschichte, General-Anzeiger, 16 November 2003.
taboos and, in the very specific historical context of the 1990s, enticed
many viewers to enter the imaginary landscape of ZDFs Hitlerland.
Knopps innovation gave rise to a remarkably effective assembly-style
manipulation of eyewitness testimony: the interview partners are cleverly
illuminated in front of the famous black/blue background.29 With spot-
lights from above, the entire face is easily recognized, although one half
(usually the left) is much more brightly illuminated. The contrast gives the
faces depth and plasticity. Highly visible wrinkles mark the old men and
women as historical and convey an aura of gravitas and authenticity. But
this visually constructed authority is quickly passed on to the production
because nobody actually listens to the witnesses. The short interview ex-
cerpts, often presented in 20-second-segments, serve as visual footnotes to
the commentary. They anecdotally confirm the speakers general state-
ments about dispair, death, torture, and suicide. Captured from the same
camera angle, the individual witnesses and their comments are easily in-
terchangeable. Their appearances and statements lend credibility to the
slick documentaries without interrupting their aesthetic flow.
In the new paradigm, the editors have won the power battle with gen-
erations of historical witnesses. They have robbed them of their individu-
ality and reduced them to convenient markers of authenticity. But they
have done this so elegantly that the programs have become, visually as
well as symbolically, far more attractive than their predecessors. The TV
historians thus inadvertently exposed our historical desires vis--vis the
historical witnesses. We do not want to listen to awkward, uncomfortable,
boring old men on television; rather, we appreciate our elders cut up into
small, entertaining, user-friendly media packages. In this fashion we wel-
come their baldness, wrinkles, and old-fashioned glasses as hallmarks of
historicity which prove that the old people have actually suffered during
the terrible 1930s and 1940s.
It would be misleading, however, to conclude that the new documen-
tary genre cannot advance historical education. In Holokaust, broadcast in
2000, television producers deployed the tools of their trade with remarka-
29
This famous background could not gain any traction and was only used by ZDF
and ARD. Cf. Reinhold Viehoff, Edgar Lersch, Geschichte im Fernsehen (Berlin:
Vistas Verlag, 2007), p. 203. As a result, the witness interviews, originally de-
signed to be deployed at will appeared so dated within a few years that they could
no longer convey the important illusion that the TV viewing experience and the
witness testimony were roughly contemporaneous events. (see Frank Bsch,
Geschichte mit Gesicht: zur Genese des Zeitzeugen in Holocaust-
Dokumentationen seit den 1950er Jahren, in Fischer, Alles authentisch, pp. 51-72,
here 68).
ble precision. For instance they carefully interlaced commentary and subti-
tles providing precise syntagmatic and paradigmatic cross references
which anchor the witness testimony in time and place. In this way the
testimonies of German soldiers were lined-up with the testimonies of Jew-
ish survivors, forming precise, multi-perspectival descriptions of individu-
al crimes. In the first episode of Holokaust this technique succeeds with
describing the mass murders in Libau with exemplary vividness.
It remains to be determined if the viewers are interested in such precise
cross referencing or whether they primarily appreciated Holokaust as a
rapid sequence of standard Holocaust narratives and iconography. In any
event, during key segments of the program historical consultants on Holo-
kaust helped attain an impressive level of historical rigor and thus demon-
strated that televisual and historiographical appropriations of Nazi history
can be integrated in a complex, multifaceted media product without com-
promising each other. At one point, however, this peaceful coexistence
ends. Holokaust contains a number of serious shortcomings most likely
not caused by any conscious apologetic motives on the part of Knopp and
his co-workers but attributable to the fact that they have fallen victim to
their own editing techniques and strategies of witness management. By
deliberately adapting the programs to the apparent emotional sensitivities
of the German public the producers create a surprisingly flat moral terrain
while addressing events of moral extremity. In this way they honor alleg-
edly normal moral behavior and construct an implicit viewer who avoids
all kinds of extremes.30
As with many Holocaust programs, the Jewish survivors remarkable
competence and aplomb is immediately noticeable. In a certain way, their
competence decreases the emotional effect of their testimonies. To their
credit, the ZDF producers never tried to undermine their composure
through aggressive interviewing methods, as for example pursued by Claude
Lanzmann (and as one only seldom observes on ZDF screens).31 However,
against the backdrop of the competent, composed survivor statements,
ZDF producers stage a number of emotional testimonies by German sol-
diers whose status as non-perpetrators and empathy-deserving normal
witnesses is carefully protected in Holokaust. The testimony of one Ger-
30
See the helpful analysis of media constructions of social normality by Jrgen
Link, Versuch ber den Normalismus: Wie Normalitt produziert wird (Gttingen:
Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht, 2006).
31
On Lanzmann see Dominick LaCapra, Lanzmanns Shoah: Here There is No
Why, Critical Inquiry 23/2 (1997), pp. 231-269. Perhaps the most problematic
broadcast from a moral perspective in Knopps voluminous oeuvre is the docu-
mentary, Kinder des Feuers: Die Zwillinge von Auschwitz, 15 March 1992.
man soldier constitutes the emotional highlight of the first sequel. The
commentator lays the groundwork by stressing that the soldier is speaking
for the first time about the mass shootings in Libau which he observed as a
witness. Since the soldier is crying heavily, his remarks are not easily
decernible and might not have been understood by all viewers. But his
statements are so problematic that he should have been highlighted for the
audience. The soldier says: If I had reported it at once, perhaps it would
have been stopped. The soldier invokes here the important myth that the
crimes took place without Hitlers or the army leaderships knowledge and
that notifying them would have stopped the murders. Because no producer
followed up on his remarks, however, the myth not only remained un-
scathed, but the program never touched upon the essential question of how
one should morally judge on the behavior of the many German witnesses.
What can one expect of people in such a situation? Are they morally guilty
and, if so, how could they have avoided this? Did they perhaps become
perpetrators themselves? These questions attain even more relevance
through the fact that many of the interviewed soldiers, only identified by
name and their former military rank, belonged to the leadership of the
German military after the war (for instance, Ulrich Maiziere). Both Ger-
man soldiers and survivors appear as victims of history and equally de-
serving our empathy.
The second episode contains a similar scene in which the focus on the
interviewees emotional suffering as a result of becoming a genocide wit-
ness eclipse questions concerning the crimes of the German perpetrators.
In this case, however, normality is protected at the expense of honoring
exemplary integrity, not at the expense of the critical deconstruction of
dubious contemporary rationalizations. A German soldier is visibly shaken
as he recalls seeing children being shot. He reports that this experience has
haunted him ever since. No one asks which conclusions the soldier drew
from his experiences. The scene is constructed in precisely the same man-
ner as the interview with the soldier from the first episode. One could
suppose, then, that the emotional suffering of a German soldier is again
given center stage and that questions about moral failures and the perpetra-
tion of violent crimes are systematically avoided. The two interviews are
certainly constructed in the same way. But in the latter case the disinterest
in the person of the witness and the focus on the emotional highlights of
his testimony keep the viewer completely ignorant about the mans coura-
geous resistance activities in the Third Reich. The witness is none other
than Heinz Droel, who rescued numerous Jewish victims of Nazi perse-
cution and has been honored as one of the Righteous Gentiles. The aver-
age viewer, who knows nothing of this, is protected from the important,
difficult moral questions that Droels courage raises about the behavior of
all the other German witnesses. The program forcefully endorses the os-
tensibly normal, passive behavior of the average German soldier of the
Wehrmacht.
In addition to collected victims and emotional bystanders, Holokaust
features a few real, non-German perpetrators, including the Lithuanian
Hilfspolizist Maliksanas. According to his testimony, he always tried to hit
the Jewish star so that his victims would die quickly. Even in Maliksanas
case, the witnesss confession and admittance to the gallery of Holocaust
witnesses leads to a relativization of his moral responsibility. The moral
integrity of the Holocaust survivors is apparently automatically extended
to all witnesses, including perpetrators, by way of the programs homoge-
nous aesthetic design and flat moral profile. One could almost speak of a
visually-based expectation of innocence for all historical witnesses who
would have to go to extraordinary lengths to forfeit this bonus on cam-
era.32 The German witnesses in Holokaust certainly elegantly avoided this
danger, with the help of ZDF aesthetics. They represent the emotional
point of gravity of the series and therefore their outbursts constitute the
psychological-visual highlights of the shows. The German witness is ac-
cepted as a normal human being just like you and I and offered up as a
comfortable projection screen for viewer identification. But this media
figure embodies a very problematic guideline for action: the normal citi-
zen, equipped with a healthy moral conscience, avoids risky acts of re-
sistance, keeps his opinions to himself, and gives teary-eyed testimony
once the danger has subsided.
The visual assumption of innocence attributed to the witnesses in Ho-
lokaust resurfaced in many subsequent programs. One good example
(among many) is the Knopp program Die Gefangenen (The Prisoners),
aired at primetime in 2003.33 The series is an intellectually dissatisfying
production. The suffering of Russian soldiers, prisoners of war, and civil-
ians is dutifully mentioned and supported with statistics, but all five parts
32
On the aesthetic production of collective innocence in Knopp TV, see especially
Judith Keilbach, Geschichtsbilder und Zeitzeugen. Zur Darstellung des
Nationalsozialismus im bundesdeutschen Fernsehen (Mnster: LIT Verlag, 2008),
pp. 224-236; see also Michael Elm,
Zeugenschaft im Film. Eine erinnerungskulturelle Analyse filmischer Erzhlungen
des Holocaust (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2008), pp. 279-283.
33
Die Gefangenen 1: Ab nach Sibirien, ZDF, October 14, 2003; Die Gefangenen
2: Willkommen im Camp, ZDF, October 21, 2003; Die Gefangenen 3: Schlimmer
als die Hlle, ZDF, October 28, 2003; Die Gefangenen 4: Zwischen Tod und
Liebe, ZDF, November 4, 2003; Die Gefangenen 5: Die Heimkehr der
Zehntausend, ZDF, November 11, 2003.
of the series concentrate on the experiences of German PoWs during the

war. Die Gefangenen reached an average of 4.11 million viewers per in-
stallment, which equals a market share of 12.9%. With such numbers, the
series represents one in a long line of successful broadcasts of ZDFs divi-
sion of contemporary history. The series liberally employs Holocaust
iconography railway tracks, barbed wire, camp architecture for the
moral restitution of the German PoWs. The visual embedding of the sol-
diers of Hitlers armies into the ultimate victim discourse represents a
stylish, well calculated transgression in a post-unification context in which
the German society imagined itself as the historical victims of Allied
bombing raids and persecutions.34
The Knopp paradigm presents itself as a complex moral landscape
consisting of various levels of moral reflection that exist independently of
each other and often call each other into question. The programs features
role models of various background and experiences whose memories and
past actions are subsumed under a halo of innocence. As a result of this
generosity, the viewers are not enabled to discern positive from negative
behavior. On the normative and applied-ethical level, the Knopp paradigm
of historical entertainment strenuously avoids passing judgment on any-
body other than Hitler and a few select Nazis who obviously never appear
as eyewitnesses in front of the camera. At the same time, the programs
routinely invoke the evil of Nazism as an ontological principle and thus
leave their viewers with a fairly useless piece of advice, i.e., that they
should avoid becoming victims of history and genocide. The combination
of one-dimensional ontological truths and similarly flat and hollow norma-
tive lessons amounts to a massive failure of ethical self-reflectivity. The
programs simply refrain from asking any difficult moral question about the
past, which should be the very essence of historical education conceived as
an exercise in moral self-definition. The participation of large numbers of
German citizens in genocide, the culpability of the (German) bystanders,
the decades of relative silence on the subject, and the memory obligations
of future generations devoid of political responsibility none of these
ethical dilemmas are addressed in any meaningful way. The programs take
flight from all ethical questions, leaving only an implicit, and highly prob-
lematic, ethical framework in which the past simply serves the psycholog-
ical needs of those living in the present.
The success of the Knopp paradigm thus appears to depend on a seri-
ous ethical disconnect and a great deal of slippage between the different
34
The mixture of political correctness and victimsdiscourse was well captured by
the critic Heinen, Geschichte wird gemacht: ZDF-Doku-Reihe ber Deutsche in
Kriegsgefangenschaft, Frankfurter Rundschau, October 14, 2003.
channels of communication and levels of moral self-reflection. On the

basis of seemingly firmly established ontological truths, the programs
engage in considerable, aesthetically driven normative and applied-ethical
obfuscation. On the ontological level, Knopp and Co. incessantly confirm
the centrality of the Holocaust for modern German history and the special
status of its survivors. These ontological insights imply, among other
things, that there is a fundamental moral difference between the victims,
bystanders, and perpetrators of genocide. But when faced with the task of
conveying the truths through specific narrative and visual examples, the
ZDF staff members systematically equate very different historical experi-
ences and present-day vantage points. As a result of a number of ingenu-
ous and pervasive editing strategies, all historical eyewitnesses assume, for
example, an aura of innocence and integrity that, once translated into more
abstract ethical principles, directly contradicts the apparently firmly estab-
lished ontological certainties. Also, given TVs penchant for applied eth-
ics, one may safely assume that most viewers found the moving yet ethi-
cally sterile witness testimony more engaging than the routine incantation
of Holocaust exceptionalism.
III. Violent Holocaust Memory

The combination of Holocaust curiosity, philosemitic values, and the
overcoming of important representational taboos and inhibitions caused
another interesting twist in the infatuation of German media with Nazi
history and inadvertently revealed the drawbacks of Holocaust culture. By
the mid-1990s a considerable share of Germanys elite had been engaged
in memory work for many years. As a result, television could report on
particularly laudable exemples of the new species of self-reflective Ger-
mans and their philosemitic deeds.35 A particularly revealing program
about good Germans, entitled Temporary Grandchildren: German Con-
scientious Objectors in Prague, was broadcast in 1995 and illustrates that
the best-intended memory work may yet have unwelcome consequences.36
35
In this vein, in 1988, ZDF highlighted the path-breaking memory efforts of
twenty-five German adolescents who had helped build a synagogue in Lyon in the
1960s; see Kontext: Reise in die Vergangenheit: 1963 Junge Deutsche bauen
eine Synagoge in Lyon, ZDF, October 28, 1988.
36
Enkel auf Zeit: Deutsche Zivis in Prag, ZDF, December 10, 1995. The feature by
Michael Koechlin was originally scheduled for 9:15 P.M. on July 21, 1995, but
postponed on short notice; see ZDF-Programm for July 21, 1995, and December
10, 1995. It was watched by 1.4 million viewers, representing 3 percent of TV
households in unified Germany.
For ten days a ZDF camera team observed three German conscientious
objectors who provided essential social services to Holocaust survivors in
Prague. But six minutes into the program the producers felt the need to
share with their viewers a harmless slip of the tongue that they had caught
on tape. The conscientious objector Fabian and the survivor Ms. Ernstowa
appear side by side on an outdoor bench while the interviewer asks the
young man whether he finds any important differences between knowing
abstractly about the Holocaust and sitting next to a survivor who has lived
through the actual events. Fabian dutifully confirms the difference and
adds that in fact he finds it impossible to relate the two:
Fabian: It is something different and somehow I cannot integrate these

two images. Ms. Ernstowa as a living women [she is laughing, he is blush-
ing] as, I mean, alive in terms of her personality [...]
Ms. Ernstowa (interrupting quietly): Yes, I know, yes.
Fabian: and the reports that have so much hopelessness about them and
that are just on paper.
While Fabians lapse appears not to have damaged his good relationship
with Ms. Ernstowa, one cannot help but wonder about the psychological
fallout from another scene included in Temporary Grandchildren.
The interviewer, who has already asked the Aushwitz survivor Ms.
Pechanowa how important Fabians daily visits are for her, has pointed out
that she was tortured by young Germans and now has a young German in
her apartment. As a result of these less than subtle inquiries, the interview-
er elicits from her explicit statements affirming Fabians innocence and his
superior work ethic. But the interviewer has a very specific plan in mind
in fact, it seems that he has already decided on the title of his film and
therefore digs deeper. The camera first offers a close-up of an old red and
black photograph depicting three Soviet soldiers and two women in camp
uniform. The camera then slowly moves up the arm of the person holding
the photograph before coming to rest on the tattoo on the womens left
forearm. After a cut the camera provides a top-down close-up of the face
of Ms. Pechanova, an old, small woman who sways awkwardly back and
forth (the viewers already know that she walks with the help of a cane).
The scene is accompanied by voice-over comments before we hear Ms.
Pechanova herself. For the duration of the scene the camera remains close-
ly trained on her face:
Comment: A Russian soldier took this photo. The bowed down Hedwiga
Pechanowa during the liberation of Aushwitz on her 30th birthday. The
concentration camp number 74901 is the external sign for that what has
changed her life forever.
Ms. Pechanova: There is, there is in me [...] I had during the Heydrich
years here, I had tragically lost both parents, both parents and 52 relatives.
Now I am all alone in the world. Interviewer: Is it under these circum-
stances particularly important that Fabian comes by every day?
Ms. Pechanova: Yes, it is very important.
Interviewer: What kind of relationship do you have to him? How would
you describe it? Ms. Pechanova (swaying more intensely and briefly leav-
ing the field of vision of the camera, then laughing a little): Very friendly
. . . Interviewer: If the war, the persecution, and the Nazi period had not
occurred, a grandchild, perhaps ones own grandchild would come to you.
Is Fabian [...]
Ms. Pechanova (swaying, interrupting the interviewer quickly, speaking
fast then remaining silent): Yes, yes, yes, no. It is like you say it. Inter-
viewer: What kind of, what kind of grandchild is he? Is he a good grand-
child? Ms. Pechanova (nodding and laughing a little, then remaining si-
lent): Good, good, good, good, good. (21:5323:43)
A camera, a good conscience, and steadfast dedication to the cause of

coming to terms with the past can create a sanctimonious, even violent
mix. The scriptwriter and the interviewer of Temporary Grandchildren
seem strangely reticent when they refer to Nazi crimes in general terms
(e.g., that which has changed her life) but pull no punches when en-
gaged in the face-to-face questioning of survivors. The interviewer cannot
quite make himself say your grandchild, but he otherwise forces Ms.
Pechanova to walk the line established by his script and his underlying
assumptions. Watching Temporary Grandchildren one has to wonder
whether the history of German memory politics is really one of unequivo-
cal progress. Are the self-righteous memory professionals of the 1990s
with their allegedly postallosemitic disposition (that is, neither philo- nor
antisemitic) really more open and self-aware than the inhibited, hypocriti-
cal philosemites of the 1960s? Both groups are masters of flowery, cir-
cumspect communication about German crimes and German guilt, but at
least the philosemites of the earlier period did not seize the opportunity to
abuse survivors on national television.
Temporary Grandchildren is not a perpetrator documentary and yet it
draws its whole raison detre from the powerful symbolic presence of the
absent Nazi grandfathers. 50 years after the end of the war, Fabian and his
peers are cast in the role as moral counterpoints to their forefathers and
despite their own personal integrity they will never attain a similar media
presence. Moreover and more importantly, the program illustrates in ex-

emplary fashion how quickly the best intentioned normative agenda de-
scends into symbolic violence against the victims of Nazism once the
producers shift focus from the plight of the victims to the admittedly admi-
rable deeds of a few German Gutmenschen. Half a century after the Holo-
caust, German memory obviously still proved to be a very slippery slope
for a group of well trained media professionals far removed from any
personal responsibility for the Nazi catastrophe. We have our doubts that
things have drastically changed in the meantime. Therefore, we are also
skeptical about desires to present a balanced view of German history that
pays a lot of attention to the positive aspects of 20th century German histo-
ry even if the positive coverage merely consists of an altogether too
enthusiastic celebration of the moral accomplishments of people like Fabi-
an.
High school students and TV viewers might very well feel that they
have engaged with every aspect of Nazi history and do not need to be
bothered any more. But that is hardly an accurate assessment of recent
media history. As our analysis has clearly demonstrated, ZDF television,
which represents one of the key players in the German memory landscape,
has very rarely directly and successfully responded to the extraordinary
moral challenge of crafting stories about Nazi perpetrators. The programs
of the 1960s failed to develop compelling normative role models for Ger-
man memory work, although a few notable productions kept insisting that
the Nazi criminals constituted a severe moral challenge still to be reckoned
with. The programs of the late 1970s and 1980s attained considerable
ontological progress without necessarily being able to fill the applied-
ethical and normative void. Knopp and his associates seized on that oppor-
tunity and invented an altogether fictitious normative landscape that, under
the cover of ontological Holocaust memory, displayed a great deal of
empathy for German suffering during the war. As far as ZDF is concerned,
the Nazi perpetrators are still waiting for their fair share of media atten-
tion, since the really difficult ethical questions have not yet been addressed
at prime time.
CONTRIBUTORS
Wolfgang Bialas (*1954) just finished a research project on Nazi Ideology

and Ethics at the Hannah-Arendt-Institute Dresden. His areas of speciali-
zation are Nazism and the Holocaust, political Philosophy and European
intellectual history. He is the author of Politischer Humanismus und
Versptete Nation. Helmuth Plessners. Auseinandersetzung mit Deutsch-
land und dem Nationalsozialismus (2010) and the co-editor of the volume
Nazi Germany and the Humanities (2007).
Lothar Fritze (*1954) is a scientific collaborator at the Hannah-Arendt-

Institute Dresden and professor at the Technical University of Chemnitz.
He is the author of nine books and numerous articles in scientific journals
and co-editor of the scientific journal Aufklrung & Kritik. His areas of
specialization are the ideology of totalitarian societies, political philosophy
and ethics. His last publication is Anatomie des totalitren Denkens.
Kommunistische und nationalsozialistische Weltanschauung im Vergleich
(2012).
Stewart Anderson (*1979) received his PhD from Binghamton University

in August 2011 and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Brigham
Young University in Provo, Utah. His main research interests include
postwar Germany, media history, and collective memory. Besides his
dissertation, he has published articles in several journals, including a piece
entitled Modern Viewers, Feudal Television Archives: How to Study Ger-
man Fernsehspiele of the 1960s from a National Perspective (in Critical
Studies in Television).
Florian Bruns (* 1978) is currently Research Assistant at the Institute for

the History of Medicine, Center for Health and Human Sciences at the
University of Berlin (Charit), Germany. His research topics are: History
of Medicine in the 19th and 20th century, History of Medical Ethics, and
Clinical Ethics. Latest publication: Bruns, F./Frewer, A.: Ethics Consulta-
tion and Empathy. Finding the Balance in Clinical Settings (2011).
464 Contributors
Amy Carney (*1981) is an Assistant Professor of History at Pennsylvania

State University, the Behrend College where she teaches courses in mod-
ern European and German history. She earned her PhD in German history
in 2010 from Florida State University. Her research examines the notion of
fatherhood in the Nazi SS. She analyzes how SS leaders selectively em-
ployed eugenic-based ideas in order to transform the SS into a racially
superior family community that could become the blood-based aristocracy
of the Third Reich.
Mary Fulbrook, FBA (*1951) is Professor of German History at Universi-

ty College London. Recent books include Dissonant Lives: Generations
and Violence through the German Dictatorships (OUP, 2011). In addition
to books surveying the broad sweep of German history, and on historical
theory, she has written widely on the GDR, including Anatomy of a Dicta-
torship: Inside the GDR (OUP, 1995) and The Peoples State: East Ger-
man Society from Hitler to Honecker (Yale UP, 2005).
Peter Haas (*1947) earned a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies in 1980 from Brown
University in Providence, Rhode Island. He has been on the faculty of
Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee and has held the Abba Hil-
lel Silver professorship of Jewish Studies at Case Western Reserve Uni-
versity in Cleveland, Ohio since 2000. His publications have dealt with
moral discourse, military ethics, and Jewish and Christian thought after the
Holocaust. His most recent book is on human rights in Judaism. He re-
ceived ordination as a Reform rabbi in 1974.
Gunnar Heinsohn (*1943) is a German sociologist and economist and the

head of the Raphael-Lemkin Institut for Comparative Genocide Research
at the University of Bremen. His contributions to genocide research in-
clude an encyclopedia of genocides, a generalized version of youth bulge
theory and a new theory of Hitlers motivation for the Holocaust.
Isaac M. Hershkowitz (*1977) works at the Department of Philosophy

Bar-Ilan University, Israel where he teaches talmudic, biblical and philo-
sophical aspects of the Jewish heritage. His areas of specialization are
religious Zionism, Jewish Ethics, Jewish Studies and Holocaust Studies.
Gerrit Hohendorf (*1963) lectures history and ethics of medicine at the

Technical University of Munich and works as a psychiatrist at
the University Hospital in Munich. His research interest is medicine in
National Socialism, its after-effects and its ethical implications for modern
Nazi Ideology and Ethics 465
bioethics. He co-published Das Vergessen der Vernichtung ist Teil der

Vernichtung selbst - Life Histories of Victims of the Nazi Euthanasia.
(2007).
Uwe Kaminsky (*1962) studied history and social sciences in Essen. He

works as a scientific collaborator at the Ruhr University of Bochum, facul-
ty of Christian Social Science. His research interests include modern histo-
ry and social history. He co-published Gehorsam - Ordnung - Religion.
Konfessionelle Heimerziehung in der Bundesrepublik 1945-1975 (2012)
and Abschied von der konfessionellen Identitt? Skularisierung und
konomisierung sozialen Handelns als Herausforderungen fr Caritas
und Diakonie (2012).
Wulf Kansteiner (*1964) is Associate Professor of European History at

Binghamton University (SUNY). He has published widely in the fields of
media history, memory studies, historical theory, and Holocaust studies.
He is the author of In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television,
and Politics after Auschwitz (2006) and, most recently, co-editor of Den
Holocaust erzhlen: Historiographie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Empirie
und narrativer Kreativitt (2013). He is also co-founder and co-editor of
the Sage-Journal Memory Studies.
Wulf Kellerwessel (*1963) is Professor of Philosophy in Aachen. His areas

of specialization are Ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of language
and analytical philosophy. His publications include Normenbegrndung in
der analytischen Ethik (2003) and Wittgensteins Sprachphilosophie in den
Philosophische Untersuchungen (2009).
Andre Mineau (*1955) is currently Professor of Ethics and History at the

University of Quebec at Rimouski, Canada. He is the author of Operation
Barbarossa: Ideology and Ethics against Human Dignity (2004) and SS
Thinking and the Holocaust (2012).
Regina Mhlhuser (*1971) works as a researcher at the Hamburg Insti-

tute of Social Research in the research group "War and Gender" and the
international working group "Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict". Her
research areas include sexual violence in war, the history of international
law, gender and sexuality in Nazism and memory politics in Europe and
Asia. She is the author of Eroberungen. Sexuelle Gewalttaten und intime
Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion 19411945 (2010).
466 Contributors
Christopher Theel (*1978) studied modern history, political science and

constitutional law at Dresden University. In October 2008 he joined the
School of International Studies at Dresden University as a lecturer and
administrative official. In his current doctoral research he focuses on the
military jurisdiction of the Waffen-SS. His further research interests are
German legal history in the twentieth century, history of political thought
and international relations, history of National Socialism and the Second
World War.
Richard Weikart (*1958) is professor of history at California State Univer-

sity, Stanislaus. He has published four books, including Hitlers Ethic: The
Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (2009) and From Darwin to Hitler:
Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (2004). He has
published numerous scholarly articles and reviews on the history of social
Darwinism, evolutionary ethics, bioethics, and related issues. He is cur-
rently working on a book on Hitlers religion.
Rolf Zimmermann (*1944) worked as a Professor of Philosophy at the

University of Konstanz. He is the author of Philosophie nach Auschwitz.
Eine Neubestimmung von Moral in Politik und Gesellschaft (2005) and
Moral als Macht. Eine Philosophie der historischen Erfahrung (2008) and
wrote the main article Moralischer Universalismus als geschichtliches
Projekt for Erwgen Wissen Ethik (2010).

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Nazi Ideology and Ethics

Nazi Ideology and Ethics

Wolfgang Bialas and Lothar Fritze

This book first published 2014

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright 2014 by Wolfgang Bialas, Lothar Fritze and contributors

ISBN (10): 1-4438-5422-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5422-1

Nazi Ethics and Morality: Ideas, Problems and Unanswered Questions

Did the National Socialists Have a Different Morality?

Hitlers Motive for the Holocaust

Nazis with a Clear Conscience? Civilian Functionaries and the Holocaust

A Question of Honor: Some Remarks on the Sexual Habits of German

Nazi Ideology and Propaganda

Nazi Military Ethics during Total Combat

The Role of Evolutionary Ethics in Nazi Propaganda and Worldview

Nazi Ethics: The Medical Discourse

Turning Away From the Individual: Medicine and Morality

Mercy Killing and Economism: On Ethical Patterns of Justification

The National Socialist Patient Murders between Taboo and Argument:

The SS as a Moral Order

SS Ethics within Moral Philosophy

Das Schwarze Korps and the Validation of the SS Sippengemeinschaft

The Moral Rigour of Immorality: The Special Criminal Courts of the SS

Post-Holocaust Debates and Memory Politics

Universalism and Moral Relativism: On Some Aspects of the Modern

National Socialism Bolshevism Universalism: Moral Transformations

Ethics after the Holocaust: Jewish Responses

On the Moral Profile of Public History: German Television, Nazi

Contributors ............................................................................................. 463

WOLFGANG BIALAS AND LOTHAR FRITZE

Historiographic work on National Socialism has made much progress.

ology of National Socialism, studies on National Socialist morality are

the conditioning of a new man as a race warrior or political

the opportunistic career offenders, so that, as they saw it, they

The second editor of this volume, Lothar Fritze, Hannah-Arendt-

particularly the ban on infanticide and genocide as well as on the killing of

an autonomous decision, as is Hohendorfs thought, it is still the physician

Socialism and its rules of conduct. A normative kind of universalism,

begun using buzzwords such as Nazi perpetrators with a good con-

I. The Nazi Value Revolution: Racial Ethics

Apparently, it is necessary to plausibly portray immorality as the morality

Nazism attempted to establish a scientific ethics by means of a biopo-

a higher morality geared towards absolute values and ideas in con-

a racially conscious morality in contrast to a racially indifferent

The following theoretical justifications and thought patterns were sup-

the subordination of the individual to the functionality of a greater

Nazi morality was conceived as a procedural virtue ethics. It combined

were to be capable of participating in the persecution of the Jews without

culpable for its estrangement. Conditioning people to act instinctively

II. The New Morality: Superseding Bourgeois Racial

During National Socialism, questions of ethics and morality were dis-

As a eugenic ethics28 it was supposed to be grounded in racial

As a biological ethics it aimed at bringing about a rebirth of the bi-

Nazi racial ethics was incompatible with the political humanism of

A racial instinct was to be triggered in Germans that would condi-

The inexorable bonds between the Nazi critique of bourgeois morality,

anti-humanist rhetoric to criticize these and other fundamental values of

The Germans were supposed to listen to their conscience and moral

These examples demonstrate the contradiction between universal ethi-

of the superior race which jeopardized its survival.48 Unconditional empa-

the inferior. As morality had been designated as a testing ground of natural

turmoil.58 Non-Aryans and those deemed inferior had to be excluded from