Believe and Destroy E-Book

Christian Ingrao

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 951

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

There were eighty of them. They were young, clever and cultivated; they were barely in their thirties when Adolf Hitler came to power. Their university studies in law, economics, linguistics, philosophy and history marked them out for brilliant careers. They chose to join the repressive bodies of the Third Reich, especially the Security Service (SD) and the Nazi Party’s elite protection unit, the SS. They theorized and planned the extermination of twenty million individuals of allegedly ‘inferior’ races. Most of them became members of the paramilitary death squads known as Einsatzgruppen and participated in the slaughter of over a million people.

Based on extensive archival research, Christian Ingrao tells the gripping story of these children of the Great War, focusing on the networks of fellow activists, academics and friends in which they moved, studying the way in which they envisaged war and the ‘world of enemies’ which, in their view, threatened them. The mechanisms of their political commitment are revealed, and their roles in Nazism and mass murder. Thanks to this pioneering study, we can now understand how these men came to believe what they did, and how these beliefs became so destructive.

The history of Nazism, shows Ingrao, is also a history of beliefs in which a powerful military machine was interwoven with personal experiences, fervour, anguish, utopia and cruelty.

Leseprobe

Believe and Destroy

For Guido Fanti

This work has been published under thedirection of Anthony Rowley.

Believe and Destroy

Intellectuals in the SS War Machine

By Christian Ingrao

Translated by Andrew Brown

polity

First published in French as Croire et détruire © Editions Fayard, 2010

This English edition © Polity Press, 2013

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7004-1

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Glossary

Part I The young men of Germany

1    A ‘world of enemies’ (I)

The outbreak of war

The silence of the Akademiker

The ‘time of troubles’: an experience of war?

2    Constructing networks

Places to study

Places of association

Networks of solidarity

3    Activist intellectuals

The construction of academic knowledge

Knowledge and activism, 1919–1933

‘Combative science’ and SS intellectuals in the Third Reich

The shadow of the Great War

Part II Joining the Nazis: a commitment

4    Being a Nazi

The foundations of the doctrine

The origins of Nazi fervour: planning a sociobiological re-establishment

The appropriation of a system of beliefs

5    Entering the SD

Whether to enter the Party or not?

Towards the SD: Nazi careers

Recruitment: a social mechanism of enlistment

6    From struggle to control

From the ‘Security Department of the SS’ (SD) to the ‘Reich Security Main Office’ (RSHA)

A ‘world of enemies’ (II)

Control

Part III Nazism and violence: the culmination, 1939–1945

7    Thinking the east, between utopia and anxiety

The curse of Germanic isolation

The Nazi project for a sociobiological re-establishment

Redevelop and settle: forms of Nazi fervour

8    Arguing for war: Nazi rhetoric

From the reparative war to the ‘great racial war’

From the discourse of security to the discourse of genocide

Expressing violence: defensive rhetorics, utopian rhetorics

9    Violence in action

The experience of violence

Demonstrative violence, violence of eradication

A transgressive violence

Violence as rite of initiation

10    SS intellectuals confronting defeat

Defeat rendered unreal

Finis Germaniae: the return of the old anxiety

The denouement

11    SS intellectuals on trial

Strategies of negation

Strategies of evasion

Strategies of justification: the Ohlendorf case

Conclusion: memory of war, activism and genocide

Afterword

A piece of research and its context

A specific conceptual framework

Notes

Sources and bibliography

List of archival collections consulted

Printed sources

Bibliography

Index

Preface

They were handsome, brilliant, clever and cultivated. They were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings. This book tells their story. It is based on my doctoral thesis, written between 1997 and 2001, called ‘Les intellectuels du service de renseignement de la SS, 1900–1945’ (‘Intellectuals in the SS intelligence service, 1900–1945’).1 This studied a group of eighty university graduates, economists, lawyers, linguists, philosophers, historians and geographers, some of whom pursued academic careers while simultaneously devising doctrines, carrying out political surveillance, or gathering intelligence on German or foreign affairs within the repressive organizations of the Third Reich, especially the Security Service (SD) of the SS. Most of them were, from June 1941, involved in the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews of East Europe, as members of the mobile commando units known as Einsatzgruppen and dedicated to slaughter. In this book, I have kept to the same basic methodologies as in the thesis.2

Being a French historian of Nazism, trained in historical studies by the proponents of a cultural history of belief and violence, has played a major role in my choice of analytical tools. Ever since the mid-1980s, a group of historians has addressed itself to reinterpreting the history of the great and decisive conflagration that broke out at the beginning of the twentieth century. This group is international, interdisciplinary and interested in the most varied sources, especially the world of material objects produced by European societies during the Great War, held in the collections of the Historial de la Grande Guerre (Museum of the Great War) in Péronne. The group includes historians such as Jean-Jacques and Annette Becker, Gerd Krumeich, John Horne and Jay Winter, who, with their colleagues, have played a considerable role in the shaping of the conceptual tools that have guided the present work.3

The key role was played by Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau. Through his work on cultures of violence, on the world of children at war,4 on mourning5 and on the forms assumed by the imaginaire – the realm of images and representations – of war, he guided my studies, insisting that certain major factors be foregrounded while leaving the young researcher I then was at complete liberty to follow my own sometimes uncertain paths. I thus realized how great this war, the First World War, had been, and how central its apocalyptic dimensions – in two distinct ways. On the one hand, it had been a revelation for the historian, and on the other, it had indeed assumed a millenarian, seminal and crucial dimension for SS intellectuals.6

I also explored other horizons. The history of the great religious struggles of the medieval and modern periods, and my reading of Alphonse Dupront and, especially, Denis Crouzet, seemed to suggest that there was another way of approaching the question of belief, as well as violence, and that the utterances of the actors in these movements, far from being empty chatter, a mere by-product of sociological mechanisms inaccessible to the actors themselves, comprised a way of getting into their representations.7 My starting point lay in grasping Nazism as a system of beliefs shaped into specific discourses and practices, one that of course emerged also from a machinery of public policies produced by people’s impulses and decisions, but on a deeper level was infused by emotions of a different order from those grasped by the political sciences or sociology – disciplines which, governed for twenty years by the functionalist paradigm, had formed the basic conceptual resources of German historiography. These tools, after all, had not been able to tackle fervour or anxiety, suicide or cruelty, utopia, despair or hatred, or kindred emotions.

There was perhaps no great originality in these methodological choices: other French specialists in the human sciences also opted for alternative approaches and produced interesting work in the mid-1990s. Édouard Conte and Cornelia Essner published La Quête de la race. Une anthropologie du nazisme (The Quest for Race. An Anthropology of Nazism),8 which invited us to pick up tools from structuralist social anthropology and apply them to studies of Nazism. Working on images and representations of lineage, on marriage, racial beliefs, funerary rituals and practices of colonization, Conte and Essner showed the benefits of a study that brought together ideological discourses, political decisions and concrete behaviour. And, between the lines, they also worked out a critique of the exaggerated functionalism of German historians.

But the essential interest of the men studied here is that they simultaneously produced a doctrinal discourse that made it possible for me to analyse their system of beliefs in detail, and carried out to their conclusion, at ground level, the practical consequences of this system of beliefs once they assumed command of the Einsatzgruppen that exterminated the Jews of Russia in the occupied territories – Crimea, Ukraine, Belorussia, Russia and the former Baltic States. Thanks to the work of Denis Crouzet, I have been able to sketch out a decisive reinterpretation of Nazi practices of violence. In Les Guerriers de Dieu (God’s Warriors), he postulated that a system of gestures (gestuelle) of violence was itself a language reflecting the cultural system that had made it possible, and that it thus comprised an object in itself that could be grasped by tools taken from anthropology. Françoise Héritier was helpful in this regard,9 as were Véronique Nahoum-Grappe,10 Noëlie Vialles,11 Élisabeth Claverie12 and Catherine Rémy.13 Their work questioned the relationship between violence and human beings or animals, and its link with bodiliness, lineage and belief.14 Hence my decision to take modes of investigation from social anthropology and apply them to the history of Nazism. It is under these auspices, and equipped with these tools, that the present work has been written, following three main guidelines.

My initial ambition was to retrace what the German historian Gerd Krumeich called an Erfahrungsgeschichte, a history of the actual experience of these men,15 so as to understand how the framework of their lives might have shaped their system of representations. This is where I was able to profit most fully from the heritage of the historians of the Great War: I tried to study children’s wartime lives as a crucial experience, scarred by a collective narcissistic wound that was interpreted in apocalyptic and eschatological terms.

Secondly, I wanted to grasp Nazi activism as a cultural reaction to this first experience, and study it in the light of the anthropology of belief. In other words, I tried to analyse Nazism as a consoling, soothing system of beliefs: the coherence of its discourses and practices is underlined by the analytical tools I use, and embodied in the life stories and careers that I narrate.

This left the experience of the terrors wrought during the journey to the east: the genocidal practices of the Einsatzgruppen and their participation in Germanization and population displacement – policies that were fraught with utopian and murderous tensions. Finally, I sought to conclude my study by investigating how these men faced up to defeat, and their judicial fate after the war.

In short, I have tried to understand how these men came to believe, and how their beliefs led them to destroy.

Acknowledgements

To Laetitia.

Unspoken words are the flowers of silence.

As far as I know, no academic has ever confessed to reading the acknowledgements to a thesis before the rest. And yet, what part of academic work is more instructive about the world in which the historian has worked during the years of preparation leading to his or her first published work? It is a crucial moment of scholarly socialization: it crystallizes the places in which he or she has worked and demarcates at least part of his or her emotional world.

My thesis has been all of this. Work on it began in Angoulême, and was continued in Berlin, Warsaw and Ludwigsburg: it was completed in France, between the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Clermont-Ferrand, Poitiers, Lyon and Barjac. In all these places I found a family and friends without whom this work could not have achieved its final shape. Parents, sisters and more distant family have also, from time to time, given this work something of its subterranean rhythm. May they here find evidence of the ties that bind us.

I must also thank all those who have enabled me to pursue the archival and bibliographical explorations that this work required. The team of archivists in Berlin Lichterfelde, Mme Namsler in Dahlwitz-Hoppegarten, Michelina Wysocka in Warsaw, at the archives of the Commission of Inquiry into Nazi Crimes in Poland, Heinz-Lutger Borgert at the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen of Ludwigsburg, and also Anne-Marie Pathé, in Cachan, the archivists of the CDJC and the BDIC of Nanterre gave me free rein to follow my explorations. My thanks to them, as well as to Jean Astruc, the ‘Venerable Jorge’ of the library of the IHTP, who was happy to include German-themed books in his lists of purchases, despite being aware that there was every chance they would find but a single reader. Finally, Gabrièle Muc initiated me into the construction of the index and the table of contents.

A thesis, however, is not made solely from archives, books and computers. This thesis was constructed slowly, between the faculties of Clermont-Ferrand, Paris-IV and Amiens. Bernard Dompnier, Jean-Luc Fray, the late Annie Moulins-Bourret, Bernard Klein, Denis Crouzet and Giovanni Brizzi all contributed in their own ways, through their teaching and their discussions, to putting this work on the right track.

I have also benefited from the kind help of several scholars who shared their wisdom with me at the start of my research. It would be impossible to overstate what this work owes to Pierre Ayçoberry, who guided me through the maze of the bibliography on Nazism, in an erudite series of messages that I then had to include in my database. In Freiburg, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Vienna and Berlin, Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, Ulrich Herbert, Gerhard Botz, Reinhard Rürup and Michael Wildt made time to correspond with a student just starting a doctorate, and discussed my plans, unstintingly giving me their advice and criticism. At the Centre Marc-Bloch, Marie-Claude Lavabre and Peter Schöttler encouraged me, reading my work and opening up valuable theoretical horizons. I would also like to give warmest thanks to Gerhard Hirschfeld, who, one September day in 1997, saw a young Frenchman with shaky German landing in Frankfurt and asking him to co-supervise a thesis. He thereupon decided to give me his support, to supervise the German part of the work, and to open the doors of several archives, at the University of Stuttgart and the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte. My profound gratitude goes to him.

At the IHTP – as in Berlin – Florent Brayard was a pleasant travelling companion in the history of Nazism. He and I formed, together with Pieter Lagrou, Fabrice Virgili, Valeria Galimi and Benn Williams, a group that was agreeably able to mingle laughter with far-reaching discussions. Again at the IHTP, Danièle Voldman, Michel Trebitsch and Marc-Olivier Baruch read my work, listened to me and invited me, thus contributing to the progress of my research. And yet again at the IHTP, the group on ‘wartime violence’ was, together with the ‘Monday seminars’ and the ‘Saturday seminars’, the place for real scholarly work. Nicolas Werth, John Horne, Gerd Krumeich, Jean-Jacques and Annette Becker, and Denis Crouzet, Marc Lepape and Claudine Vidal, Luc Capdevila and all those who took part gave my work a decisive fillip. The same goes for Roland Beller and Jean-Jacques Pont, who guided me in the arcana of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Thanks to all who showed confidence in me and answered my questions.

Nicolas Werth was probably the researcher with whom I worked most closely over the last two years. He read my work, and allowed me to discover the subtleties of his own and of the historiography in which he works. In short, he made time to bring me into his own field of research. I was exceptionally grateful for the warmth of his welcome. Christian Delage has also read my work – almost all of it – during my time at the IHTP. His generosity and his friendship have meant a great deal to me.

I found in Raphaëlle Branche the historian whose preoccupations were the closest to my own. The friendship that sprung up from our exchanges and my reading of her work have been most valuable. Her questions, as well as those of Anne Duménil, who also agreed to read part of my work and to annotate it, were crucial. From Berlin to Paris, ‘Del’ Corteel and Valentine Meunier initiated me into anthropology and ethnology, providing me with books, remarks and paths for research, during discussions which combined Claude Lévi-Strauss and Françoise Héritier with the fruits of the coast at Blaye.

The fact remains, however, that this work would never have seen the light of day without the confidence of Nadine-Josette Chaline, dean of the University of Amiens, who, when I was still a young Parisian student, ensured I received the first research grant awarded in ten years to the UPJV, only to see me head off straight away for Germany. At the Centre Marc-Bloch, the warm welcome of Étienne François, his advice, the ‘seminar on method’ that he started up, nursed my taste for teaching and an interdisciplinarity that, as practised in Berlin, hardly needs long and learned debates, but emerges from daily life.

Henry Rousso welcomed me when, as I was starting my research, I went to his office at l’Amiral-Mouchez for advice and addresses. He later continued at Cachan, thereby giving me the opportunity to finish writing this work, involving me in the activities of his research laboratory, full of indulgence for my inefficiency.

Finally, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau supervised my work with unique precision, constancy and scrupulousness, even though, as I was taking my DEA, the first task he assigned to me was that of finding … another thesis supervisor. If I have so far pretended to have forgotten him, this is doubtless because the Book of Changes, the I Ching of the Chinese, attributes the last place to the figure of the Waker.

Esteban and Nathan have nothing, or almost nothing, to do with all this. They are my armour, and the chink in it.

What I learn from them sustains my work.

Paris, 23 July 2001

In the gap that separates the present words from those of before, there is now Gaïa, the Heiress; in this gap, there are faces, figures, absences, names – all too numerous to mention all of them.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.

To Esteban, Nathan and Gaïa: we are the Army of those who dream of Laetitia.

Paris, 26 January 2010

Glossary

Abteilungsleiter: head of department or section

Ahnennachweise: genealogical tree (as proof of ancestry)

Akademiker: person who has studied at university

alter Kämpfer: old fighter (i.e., generally speaking, someone who joined the Nazi Party before the elections of September 1930)

Amtschef: (another term for) head of department (Amtsleiter or ‘office leader’ was a specific rank in the Nazi Party)

Bildungsbürgertum: educated bourgeoisie

Burschenschaft: student association

Daseinskampf: struggle for existence

Ereignismeldung (EM): report on activities

Gleichschaltung: coordination, bringing into line

gottgläubig: believing in God (but not a Christian)

Gruppenleiter: head of a group (Gruppenführer, ‘group leader’, was a rank in the SA and SS)

Judenräte: Jewish councils (especially those established by the Nazis in the ghettos)

Komilitonen: comrades

Landser: soldier(s) in the troops, private(s)

Lebensgebiet: life domain

Lebenslauf: life story, detailed curriculum vitae

Machtergreifung: seizure of power

Oberrealschule: technical high school

Promotionsordnung: text regulating access to a doctorate

Proseminar: seminar

Rassenwahn: racial madness

Sippe: lineage

Staatsexamen: state examination (at university, for entry to certain professions)

Trek: convoy of migrants

Umvolkung: ethnic dissemination

Vehme: secret organization practising political assassination

Vernichtung: annihilation

völkisch: ethno-nationalist

Wandervögel: youth movement (‘migrating birds’)

Part I

The young men of Germany

Chapter 1

A ‘world of enemies’ (I)

The first experience common to the members of the group we are studying (which I will henceforth simply call ‘the group’) was the First World War. This formed the background to their childhoods, especially as it was followed by several years of upheaval, up until 1924. This was a decade in which everyday life was shaken from top to bottom – a decisive decade in which the members of the group grew from childhood to adolescence.

Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker have sought to explain how combatants as well as civilians expressed their thoughts with such urgency after the Great War, pointing out that the hankering to give words and narrative form to ‘their’ war had driven a great number of Europeans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to take up their pens for the first – and often the last – time to communicate the intensity of their war experience. So one might have expected that SS Akademiker,1 being men of letters, would also have resorted to introspection, to communicate their wartime childhoods. Far from it: in fact they kept silent about it, and it is this silence on which we first need to focus.

The outbreak of war

Every war opens up a breach in the slow unfolding of works and days. Of course, it leaves certain times and spaces untouched: but, directly or indirectly, it affects all the protagonists. In Germany, the war which broke out in 1914 was no exception. Children – with a few rare exceptions – were neither combatants nor labourers. Thus, future SS members played practically no part in the German war effort. They were, however, spectators. They were central actors in family relations disrupted by the departure of the menfolk; so their perceptions were mainly restricted to the private sphere, to family emotions and intimate bonds. The fact remains that western societies had decided to keep children under supervision from an early age by subjecting them to the school system: all children went to school – in Germany, from the age of five. Thus the perception of the event of the war also takes on a cultural and social dimension. How are we to grasp the ‘wartime experience’ of these children?

War meant that the men marched off to the front and entire populations were mobilized. In the immediate pre-war period, in the big German cities, populations lived in expectation of a Serbian reply to the Austrian ultimatum. The delivery of daily newspapers led to stampedes, with people elbowing each other out of the way to be first to read the headlines and get news of how the situation was developing, hot off the press. When war was declared, there were demonstrations of support, but seriousness and gravity were the dominant note rather than warmongering elation. A positive response was to be found elsewhere, in the sprawling suburbs, where most of the middle classes to which belonged the vast majority of the group we are studying were concentrated. So their own families probably experienced going to war as an occasion for wild enthusiasm and a sense of determination. Though they never mentioned it later on, we should nonetheless note that Jeffrey Verhey sees in this ‘spirit of 1914’ a crystallization of the basic völkisch (ethno-nationalist) desire to unify the nation, a desire which the members of the group were later to share uncompromisingly.2 It is, then, surely permissible to speculate that, in spite of the silence they would observe on the outbreak of war in their later writings, this period may well have left an enduring impression on them.

The second salient fact of the war relates to the experience of loss and bereavement among the combatants, and even the suffering brought about when a family member was wounded. Such a trauma, though elusive for lack of any written account, doubtless left deep traces. Let us postulate, as demographers do, that every death in the Great War was at the very least surrounded by two concentric circles of sociability, each with perhaps ten people in it. The German Empire lost 2 million soldiers, so 18 million people were directly plunged into mourning. And some 36 million people may have been affected in the more distant circles of sociability.3 In this way, half of the German population would have had to mourn a family member. And even this calculation fails to take into account reactions to the news of a wounded relative in the forces, and the stress of waiting for information about a missing person – an integral part of the mourning process4 – whether he was later found on the list of prisoners or not. Thus everything suggests that the loss of men sent to the front, whether this loss was definitive or only temporary, was a mass trauma.

Then there were the food shortages. Though these affected all the societies at war, nowhere were they more intensely felt than in Germany. Right from the summer of 1914, in fact, the blockaded Reich was more or less forced to become self-sufficient. In 1914, Germany already seemed to have attained relative independence in food production. Over 90 per cent of basic foodstuffs were produced on Reich territory.5 But this relative self-sufficiency was based on maintaining rates of agricultural production, which relied on the massive acquisition of fertilizer and keeping a large workforce busy in the fields. Furthermore, especially after 1916, supplies of food were mainly destined for the army. So the cities found it really difficult to get enough to eat. In Berlin, the reduction in daily rations became very serious; prices rose throughout the war. Potato and sugar rations were kept at sufficient levels to avoid famine, but meat, fish and fat – significant foodstuffs, the distinctive intake of the middle classes – more or less disappeared from market stalls and fuelled a flourishing black market. From 1916 onwards the Germans felt that they were literally earning their ‘daily bread’ by the sweat of their brows. The Allied blockade did not create problems of food supply for them, but it did contribute to exacerbating these problems by provoking panic among the working and middle classes.6 After the war, this blockade was indeed seen as a direct Allied attack on the civilian populations, a war waged on women and children.7 Hunger, bereavement, the sense of fighting for one’s daily survival – these were the three main elements in children’s experience of war, especially since these were part and parcel of a specific interpretation of everyday life.

German society, like the other wartime European societies, developed a system of representations to give meaning to the conflict. Once they were at war, the Germans considered the combats in Belgium and France to be profoundly defensive in nature: if the Reich had to invade Belgium to implement the Schlieffen Plan, this was so as to stop Britain invading Germany using Belgium as a bridgehead. On the basis of this model, newspapers, political commentaries and soldiers’ letters constructed the image of a conflict into which Germany had found itself thrown unwillingly, and fighting for its safety alone. The song ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ (‘The Watch on the Rhine’), a great favourite among German troops facing the British during the great battles, is evidence of this set of ideas.8 Likewise, the German army was fighting on French soil in order to protect the territory of the Fatherland. Susanne Brandt has shown how images of destruction, showing the damage caused by the war, always cast blame on an enemy who, if the Germans were defeated, would wreak similar havoc on their national territory.9 The war was a question of security: final victory was necessary to break the strategy of encirclement set up by the Allies. And reporters vied with each other in expressing this: ‘They [French civilians] do not or will not acknowledge that it is the ruling classes of their country who, last August, tried to break through into our territory and inflict on us the fate that they themselves are suffering today. Attack is the best form of defence.’10

In summer 1914, this representation was reinforced by events in the east. At the outbreak of war, Cossack troops invaded East Prussia, leading to a massive exodus of local populations. The devastation that followed aroused a wave of panic that intensified the representations created by the invasion of Belgium. In the east as in the west, whether invading or invaded, Germany was fighting to defend its Kultur and its territory, encircled and threatened as it was by a ‘world of enemies’.11

The Germans were able to subscribe to this representation of an encircled Reich, forced to wage a total defensive war, mainly because of the way an inhuman image of the enemy had crystallized in the very first days of the conflict.12 The Belgians and the Russians in particular were associated with countless acts of cruelty committed on wounded German soldiers and on civilians in the invaded regions. Thus the German units invading the territories of Belgium and the north of France were swept by waves of panic that led them to believe stories of the physical abuse perpetrated on their wounded comrades by civilians, women and children, which ‘proved’ the inhumanity of the enemy and legitimized the summary executions carried out by German troops. This ‘body of evidence’ – and this is the essential point – was spread throughout Germany by the press, by images and by schools. Also, many depictions focused on the dirtiness of the Russians and their backwardness, part of the cultural inferiority of the population: in the same spirit, a quasi-colonial set of images, made up of a sense of superiority and racial prejudice, presided over the plans laid by the Oberost, the German military administration on the Eastern Front.13 The Great War was interpreted as a defensive struggle in which the fate of Germany was at stake, faced as it was with a ubiquitous enemy distinguished by the inhumanity of its fighting methods – an inhumanity that resulted at least in part from an essentially ethnic and biological hostility.14

Although it was defensive, the Great War was all the same endowed by the warring powers with great expectations that gave meaning to the sufferings experienced. Observers claimed that it was necessary to struggle through the misfortunes of the age. War was an ordeal in the medieval sense, and it paved the way to a new era: this was one of the themes that gave meaning to the conflagration, in the front lines as well as behind them.15 For example, the historian Friedrich Meinecke resorted to the metaphor of the Roman Ver Sacrum, the ritual of human sacrifice prefiguring the fertility of a new spring,16 as a way of expressing the mass deaths of the Flanders battlefields. It was the great millenarian expectation that gave meaning to the hecatomb:

Our Ver Sacrum is now occurring on the canals of the Yser, where young reserve regiments of war volunteers have launched an assault. For us, their sacrifice means a new sacred spring for the whole of Germany.17

During the actual hostilities, soldiers created the myth of the battlefield as a place of initiation.18 One young secondary school teacher, who had been a participant in the youth movements, tried to find adequate words to express this in a letter to his mother dated 26 May 1915:

My dear Mother, I need to write you a really special letter and try to express what I’d like to say – as a sort of consolation, since […] Erich too has now become one of those who have helped to build the future of a greater Germany, with all the blood and the strength of his heart.

The war has powerfully shown us that our lives had a completely different meaning from that of simply unfolding along the normal paths of middle-class family life. They are part of a great and sacred aim. This aim we cannot know. It has been implanted in us from eternity, and is leading us on towards something great and eternal. We can sense it already.

God is now forging out great paths for world history and we are the chosen ones, the chosen tools. Should we really, truly be happy at this? Around me everything is verdant and blossoming, and the birds are exuberant and joyful in the light. How much more grand and beautiful will be the spring that follows the Great War!19

The immanence of hope and the millenarian imaginings20 here expressed are all the more powerful when we reflect that Walter I. was a product of that Bildungsbürgertum (cultivated bourgeoisie) that gave its consent to the conflict, as did European society as a whole. He was active in the pre-war youth movements that expressed a desire for social and intellectual renewal: this rekindled desire gave meaning to the conflict and fused warlike fervour with the militant tendencies of the Wandervögel (the youth groups or ‘migrating birds’).21 Crucially, the author of this letter differs from the members of our group only by his date of birth: his precocious activism, his membership of the cultivated classes and his extreme youth give him an overall profile similar to that of the young adolescents who stayed behind the front lines. The few years’ difference between them explains, nonetheless, why he actually underwent the baptism of fire, unlike the future SS intellectuals.

This letter, the hundred and seventh of those written in ten months by this young man to his family,22 also shows how intense were communications between the front and the rear. In addition, the continual sending and receiving of letters, bringing hope, anguish, sorrow, millenarian expectations and daily worries, explains the extremely porous nature of the divide between the system of representations prevalent among civilians and that of their relatives living in the trenches. While the experience of combat, assault and interpersonal violence remained to a large degree unspoken, acquiescence in the conflict, its fluctuations, its crises and its resurgences, continued to circulate between the front and the rear throughout the war.23 In this gigantic struggle against an enemy that was at least partly branded as barbarous and bestial, and utterly pitiless, the fate of the nation was being decided. In many of the well-off, cultivated homes that constituted, sociologically speaking, the heart of German consent to the conflict, the war thus became the site of a derivative form of millenarian utopia.

These issues were too important in the eyes of those involved for their children to be shielded from them. And indeed, the Great War was the first conflict in which children were ‘mobilized’, in the sense that they were the object of a specific discourse that provided them with an explanation of the war, its meaning and their enemies. Experience of the war took the form – in a way impossible to evaluate in general terms – of a dialogue between parents and children, but it also irrupted into the systems of perception prevalent among children and adolescents by means of toys, books and newspapers. As early as the autumn of 1914, the German toy industry, the biggest in the world in terms of production and global trade, fell into step with the culture of war.24 Certain firms, such as Otto Maïer Verlag – the future Ravensburger – and the famous electric train manufacturer Märklin, produced toys that related directly to the war, or even to the fighting. In this way, violence was ‘trivialized’, as George Mosse likes to put it:25 toys made it less real, while at the same time introducing it into children’s daily lives. Toymakers, indeed, had fully realized the cultural issues at stake. At the end of 1914, their official organ declared:

The toy industry is unfairly classified as one of the luxury industries. It has its own specific mission in wartime: it is important to make use of toys to imbue children with recent developments, and to inoculate [verimpfen] them with an upright, national and patriotic spirit.26

The pedagogical efforts made by society and state thus took the form of a discourse of legitimization of the conflict that was handed down to children and adolescents in primary and secondary schools. Textbooks, exercise books and lectures all started to discuss the war, its development and its meaning, by adopting and adapting a certain discourse that was placed in the service of definite aims and objectives. The ideal pursued by teachers was that of a serious, preoccupied generation of youngsters, filled with gratitude towards the heroes laying down their lives at the front in defence of the nation: ‘mobilization of minds, mobilization of hearts’, said one of the texts describing ‘those who stayed in the rear’.27 In 1917, this effort was taken over by the educational system via ‘classes in patriotism’ that summed up the culture of war. This sudden generalization of the effort of mobilization, evident in primary and secondary education thanks to the institutionalization of a pedagogy of conflict, formed the main way of transmitting a heroic sense of morality and applying it to the daily lives of children and young people.28 The latter were urged to follow the events of the conflict, to communicate in thought with the combatants, and to act in a serious, responsible way in everyday life. A young boy found himself the oldest male member of the family and eventually had to transform himself into a hero of day-to-day existence, able to make up for the absence of his father and/or brothers. While the soldier was someone to admire, this discourse did not, however, encourage the young boy to imitate him by setting off for the front, even though the fantasy of the child-hero, so vivid in France, did have a few equivalents in Germany: certain illustrations in albums for young people showed children or adolescents guarding the frontier all by themselves, against the assembled Russian and French enemy,29 while others had young people weeping with frustration at not being able to set off with their fathers, and yet others depicted the child in uniform, daydreaming.30 All these illustrations insisted on the importance of the home front, a front on which the child had his rightful place.

The silence of the Akademiker

In spite of the high profile of the conflict and the efforts at mobilization deployed by the state, however, the members of our group who had an opportunity to relate their childhood experiences of war did not in fact do so. On entering the SS or getting married they were almost all impelled to set down their life story – a mixture of curriculum vitae and personal text in which were described the narrators’ family backgrounds, their academic studies and sometimes even their emotional worlds. Even if only in cursory form, these Lebensläufe should logically have mentioned their wartime experiences. But only five of them make any mention of these, and even this is often a passing reference – to a father’s death, exodus or captivity.

Ernst Turowsky was born in 1906, into a family of landowning farmers near Johannisburg, in East Prussia. When war broke out, he experienced the Russian invasion. Without going into too much detail, he mentions his status as a war refugee and the enlistment of his father. Turowsky also explains that his schooling was interrupted for nearly two years in succession following the invasion, and says that he had returned to his land with his family only in 1922 – in other words, as he himself put it, ‘after the return of [his] father from the war and the stabilization of the situation on the borders’.31 These are the only traces of the war that he was ready to divulge.

Thus, the SS candidate stuck strictly to the facts. He did not feel it necessary to talk about what he, as an eight-year-old boy, had thought about it. And yet we know that Turowsky’s home town, Johannisburg, was one of the epicentres of the atrocities committed by the Cossacks and the ensuing panic. In line with a practice that spread during the first months of the war, the German government systematically collected evidence of the acts of brutality carried out by Russian troops. While a great deal of this evidence came from German soldiers and prisoners who had managed to escape, another series of statements was made by civilians, both men and women, who had witnessed – or claimed to have witnessed – enemy abuses. Stories of rapes, mutilations, summary executions of civilians and prisoners alike were thus spread by the classic institutional channels of blue books, but also via rumours, as the refugees streamed into German territory.32 Turowsky belongs precisely to this category of persons who for a while found themselves trapped within the first circle of war. Nowhere, however, does the SS candidate mention the atrocities or the panic that presided over the exodus. Nowhere does he give any information on his family’s state of mind. And nowhere, finally, does he explain how this family of refugees managed to subsist, having lost their lands and their means of earning a living, during the long years of exile. Is it unreasonable to think that, in spite of the adult’s silence about his childhood, the 1914 exodus had been experienced by his family with such traumatic intensity that it took them eight years to return to East Prussia? However, Turowsky ignores this aspect, as if exile had not affected him in the slightest.

While Ernst Turowsky’s war experience was that of a refugee and civilian victim, it also constituted the matrix of a ‘border’ identity: born in East Prussia, surrounded by Poles and Russians, Turowsky wrote his doctoral thesis in medieval history on the problems of border administration between Poles and Germans in the fifteenth century.33 This surely showed a scholarly interest linked to his boyhood experience of the war. This thesis, a veritable attempt at a retrospective legitimation of the German identity of these border territories, doubtless marks a commitment to defence of one’s territory – an intellectual defence, admittedly, but one directly related to the ‘intellectual mobilization’ (geistige Mobilmachung) initiated by the Bildungsbürgertum in the Great War.34 While the traumatic experience of the war is not expressed, and while the war is not for the most part even mentioned, this silence does not mean that the experience was insignificant. Quite the opposite: silence is not a lack of something, but a sign – the sign of a trauma.

Another example was Heinz Gräfe, the son of a Saxon bookseller, the product of an educated milieu. Heinz’s father, mobilized on the outbreak of war, was killed on the front in Flanders in 1914. Even though Heinz’s Lebensläufe are among the most elaborate, this fact is mentioned in only one of them, and only in parenthesis (he had to give his father’s occupation). So we have no idea what the death of Heinz Gräfe’s father meant to him. However, he wrote that his mother took a job with the postal service, which involved abandoning the family bookshop, a loss of social status, and a loss of income. But Gräfe says nothing about this, or of his bereavement, or even of his life during the war, even though he was probably forced back onto his own resources since his mother was away, forced to work outside the home. He does, however, detail his career after 1918, discussing his discipline problems while at school, and providing us with the image of a disturbed adolescent – he was then fourteen – who nonetheless managed to make up for his lost time at school while beginning a political career dominated by rejection of the Treaty of Versailles and the Weimar Republic.35

The cases of Ernst Turowsky and Heinz Gräfe thus illustrate the fact that war could be implicitly present in people’s Lebensläufe, but that its traumatic dimension ruled out any more substantial analysis of it. These cases merely reflect a German society that passionately discussed the origins as well as the consequences of the conflict36 – the question of responsibility – but not of its actual progress. This was a collective attitude close to psychological repression.

Even more disturbing is the universal absence of any mention of the German defeat in 1918. Unlike the war itself, this is never mentioned, even by people who were obliged to leave their homes after the armistice or the peace treaties.37 In the Lebensläufe, the war does indeed exist as a fact, but not in discourse; as for the defeat, this has neither factual nor discursive existence. Between the two treatments of the event, there is the same difference of nature and degree as between repression and foreclosure in psychoanalysis, where the latter involves a splitting-off of material that cannot be expressed even indirectly.

There was some attempt to give expression to this trauma, almost impossible to speak of between the wars, during the period following the Second World War. Werner Best, for example, an ex-deputy leader of the RSHA,38 tried to do so in 1947, while in prison. His biographer, Ulrich Herbert, correctly points out that these narratives of childhood echo both the real childhood experienced by Werner Best and the stylization that he, in common with others of his generation, wanted to impose on this story.39 In the tales he tells of his life, the former Nazi dignitary always makes a very clear break between the years before and after 1914. The year of the war’s outbreak became a year of bereavement as early as 4 October. This was when his father, mobilized at the start of the conflict, died from his wounds, in a Trier hospital.

My father’s heroic death [Heldentod] threw me back on myself when I was eleven. My mother collapsed and sought more support from her sons than she could bestow on them herself. As a result I was brought up by the family tradition rather than by the family itself […]. My father had left us a letter in which he commended our mother to us and exhorted us to become men, Germans and patriots. At the age of eleven, I thus felt responsible for my mother and my young brother. And from the age of fifteen, I felt responsible for the new direction Germany should take. In my youth, all I knew was seriousness, worry, work and responsibility. […] The financial hardship – my mother had no widow’s pension – also cast a pall over my youth.40

What Best forgets to say here, though he mentions it in his 1965 account,41 is that his paternal grandfather passed away a few weeks after his father’s death: the bereavements came one on top of the other, with the first perhaps hastening the second.42 Likewise, Best does not always manage to talk about the 1918 defeat. He does partly suggest it, saying that he felt ‘responsible for the new direction Germany should take’ at the tender age of fifteen, but he says nothing about his reaction to the catastrophe. For this too, one had to wait until 1965:

What a painful surprise the end of the war had been, with the November revolution – even in the very tame version which it assumed in Mainz – and especially the occupation of the city!

The fact that all those sacrifices had been proved futile seemed unimaginable to me. And when the conditions of the armistice in Compiègne were made public, I was so convinced that they could not be accepted and that the war needed to be continued that – from the lofty perch of my fifteen years – I decided with a friend to go to the Rhine to join some troops that would continue fighting.43

At almost fifty years’ distance, the war retrospectively seemed intolerable, since the huge sacrifices that had been accepted – by him personally and by the population as a whole – had been useless. In another text, he uses the term umsonst (‘in vain’) in the same circumstances, identifying it this time just with his father’s death. It was the combined impact of bereavement and defeat, private grief and collective trauma, that made the inexpressible intolerable. Refusal to accept defeat found a particularly clear expression in the young schoolboy: the defeat, unnamed, unnameable, was also unimaginable and made it obvious that hostilities should be continued. And indeed, what Best deemed to be the most painful aspect was the fact that the enemy was occupying his city. After communicating with the soldiers who, for four years, had brought the war into enemy territory, Best could logically perceive this occupation as an invasion, even though it had taken place after the cessation of hostilities.44 This meant deciding that, to his mind, the defeat had not really happened. After all, the first sentence in his text basically states ‘end of the war’ while denying the real meaning of these words – defeat.

Such is this set of images embodying a longing to continue the struggle and a series of violent emotions: it involves the perception of a defeat that is mentioned only to be rejected immediately, even when the associated images have been entirely moulded by the culture of war. As well as bereavement and its economic and social consequences, Best’s testimony provides evidence of his whole attitude during the struggle. And Best does indeed confess that he had followed ‘with feverish interest’ the events of the conflict, and experienced the ‘greatest trauma’ of his life at the fact that he had ‘not been able to fight for a German victory’.45 In 1947 or 1965, these accounts invariably portrayed a mature, serious, responsible child, whose behaviour conformed to the discourse of children’s mobilization developed during the war.46 This discourse, while presenting them with models of heroic children, continued to deny young people any possibility of heroism on the battlefield, so that the ideal of the child-soldier was consigned to fantasy.

On the other hand, these accounts of war and defeat bring out the way that the political and military field was invaded by individual passions. This process is attributable to the huge emotions invested in the war by the affected populations, caught up in a ubiquitous discourse of legitimation of the conflict, and able to experience its outcome only as a massive shock. Through Werner Best’s story, however, this feeling becomes blurred, giving way to a chain of numerous events of which defeat is merely the trigger. Of course, Best cites the armistice first and foremost, but he also insists on the revolution and the occupation. This, in fact, is a constant element in German narrators: they cannot represent the defeat in isolation. The year 1918 means the defeat, but also the Communist revolutions, the French invasion, the dismembering of the eastern territories, and the separatist putsches; 11 November cannot be isolated from 9 November [the date of the Kaiser’s abdication – Tr.] any more than it can from the occupation of the Rhineland and then the Ruhr in 1921–4. But while the war and the defeat fall prey to the silence we have mentioned, the troubles that followed them resurface all the more forcefully.

The ‘time of troubles’: an experience of war?

The Lebensläufe very often mention an active participation in one or other phases of the troubles that shook Germany after 1918. The narration of Richard Frankenberg, a future teacher and officer in RSHA Amt III B in charge of the surveillance of interethnic relationships in Nordic countries, provides us with a sort of inventory of the events that marked the period.

[…] In Dortmund, during the putsch [illegible], I took part in the combats against the Red Army (I was in a militia of Dortmund residents, and batman with the Epp Freikörper). In 1919, I was co-founder of the National Youth League in Dortmund. In 1919, co-founder of the League of National Youths. […]

In 1923, during the occupation of the Ruhr, [active] in the organization of the propaganda service, and head of the department for combat on the Rhine with the Deutsche Hochschulring (DHR).47

In Flensburg, co-worker in charge of border policies in the League of Schleswig-Holstein. [Active] as teacher in [Arg illegible] in Schleswig-Holstein when separated [from Germany and handed over to Denmark – Tr.] 1929: trip to Flanders to the home of the Flemish nationalist leader. In 1930, trips to Finland, Estonia, and Lithuania. In 1931, trip to Alsace to study the independence movement. In 1933, trips to Memel and Danzig. In North Schleswig, significant activity in border policies, leader of German boy scouts of North Schleswig.48

Richard Frankenberg was thus involved in many varied political activities, initially fighting the Communists, then joining the armed militias. He then moved to passive resistance and intelligence against the French during the occupation of the Ruhr, and finally worked towards the preservation of German identity in all the German communities separated from the Reich by treaties made in the suburbs of Paris. Like Frankenberg and Best, the vast majority of the members of the group encountered, during childhood or adolescence, one or other of the political crises engulfing Germany. The schoolboy Georg Herbert Mehlhorn, later head of the administration of the SD between 1932 and 1937, took part in various paramilitary nationalist organizations. At the age of sixteen, Mehlhorn, in conformity with the myth of the child-hero suggested by the war literature for children, participated in camouflaging weapons, thus acting against the Allied Disarmament Commission.49 Too young to play any direct role in the fighting of German militias against Polish groups, he nonetheless reacted to the threat of annexation menacing Silesia by working underground in passive resistance.

Reinhard Höhn, a future professor of law in the universities of Jena and Berlin and head of the SDHA II/1 from 1931 to 1939, did not limit his activities to armed struggle and militancy:

I studied at the secondary school in Meinigen and developed a certain precocious political competence. I first began to fight against vermin and filth when I was sixteen, as leader of the youth circle of South Thuringia. I was active in youth movements until I was eighteen, in my final school year. That was the time of the Abwehrkämpfe [defensive struggles – Tr.] against Communism. I was active in those combats and in 1922 entered the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund.50 I was jailed […].

When the NSDAP was banned, I became an active member of the Jungdeutsche Orden [Young German Order – Tr.] which was then attempting to unify the völkisch forces in Bavaria. I then lived for two and a half years in Munich […]. This was when I first led an intelligence section and fought against separatist plots.51

The enemies – Communists and separatists – here described as ‘vermin’ and ‘filth’; the defensive dimension of the combat; Höhn’s extreme youth at the time he started to join the ‘struggle’ – all these show how the culture of war born from 1914–18 had been preserved intact. In his Lebensläufe of the 1930s, Werner Best also highlights his varied activities during the ‘time of troubles’. His precocious militancy, his participation in the founding of the Jungnational Partei of Mainz, and his activism in the Deutsche Hochschulring are all detailed with the greatest care. The fact remains that he continues to keep silent about the images and representations that dictated this militancy.

It is in a tract of the Deutsche Hochschulring published at the time of the French invasion of the Rhineland that Best most clearly reveals his deeper motivations:

Komilitonen [comrades]! We are again at war. The enemy is in the heart of Germany […] Every French and every Belgian person is our enemy, a member of a people that has set itself above all law and all morality. Every German who gives them the least support, tolerates them in his house, treats them on equal terms, will be struck down by the Vehme [a secret organization that organized political assassinations].52

The image of war is here quite explicitly placed at the heart of the author’s representations. Franco-Belgian intervention, motivated by financial considerations,53 is seen as an invasion without any prior declaration of war. The tract depicts an enemy behaving treacherously, which justifies the assertion that it has ‘set itself above all law and all morality’. Best finally launches an appeal for resistance which, under these auspices, can only be an out-and-out fight. He reveals what is at stake here in two articles that were published in a Rhineland newspaper:

However, the resolution to hold firm is present. But the Rhineland cannot succeed in this unless it is backed by a brave and resolute Reich. Defeatists should be brought before a war tribunal, or be struck down by the Vehme, since they are stabbing our western front in the back as it fights on […]. On 4 February, the French entered Baden. Their aim is to divide Germany into three parts, one, the biggest possible, in the west under a French protectorate, a south under French influence, and a Prussian remainder, destined for the Poles to gobble up. The end of the world war is taking place at this moment. We need to throw our last strength into it – our physical strength but, even more, our moral strength.54

The issues at stake in this combat were vital, since it was a matter of fighting off a French army hell-bent on annihilating Germany. In the view of the student Best, partitioning Germany into multiple zones of influence would mean the end of Germany as a state and as a nation. At the beginning of the text quoted below, the activist expresses the risk of his nation completely disappearing in more precise and explicit terms:

We are now confronted by an ambitious French plan of extermination [Vernichtungsplan]. Our government, thank God, is resolved to resist. It is doing only what is possible and thinkable. The German people, too, lives with the same desire. Social democracy fears national union in any case and sabotages it wherever it can. We need now to clarify for our people the consequences and the ruthless nature of the French extermination plan. Resistance and combat, or annihilation [Vernichtung] without mercy! For us, more than ever, one thing alone counts: to be ready. Nothing more need be said.55

Faced with what he thinks is the final phase of a concerted plan, Best vividly describes the ultimate aims of the French invasion. The Akademiker who became involved in the local militias or the Freikörper very largely internalized these representations.56 This quasi-apocalyptic anguish surely forms the kernel of the images and representations that dictated the behaviour of the members of our group during this time of troubles. And it was doubtless also at the heart of the culture of war that coalesced during the great conflagration of 1914–18. The book Sperrfeuer um Deutschland (Barrage Around Germany), by Werner Beumelberg, which saw the Great War as a ‘decisive combat’ against the ‘desire for annihilation’ of the Entente Cordiale, sets the tone for this – which explains its huge sales figures between 1929 and 1941.57

The shaping of a belief in the more or less imminent disappearance of Germany, as a state, of course, but also as a biological entity, thus seems, in the final analysis, to have lain at the heart of representations of the Great War and the ‘time of troubles’. This was doubtless the very essence of the initial traumatic experience of the members of our group, an experience so painful that it made it practically impossible for them to describe their childhoods at all. Once they had become adults, they could rekindle their wartime lives by means of the Abwehrkampf, or defensive struggle, and thus manage at least partly to objectify it. The intensity of their perception of war seems to have comprised a crucial aspect of the choices made by the Akademiker.

Chapter 2

Constructing networks

Places to study

Once their secondary studies had come to a conclusion with the Abitur