Given the already describedstrains on the Jews, the negative effect of the heat, and thegreat overloading of most of the cars, the Jews attemptedtime and again to break out of the parked train cars, asdarkness had already set in toward 7:30 p.m.

Withthe coming of deep darkness in the night, many Jews escapedby squeezing through the air holes after removing the barbedwire.

in which I emphasized that aliquidation of the Jews could not take place arbitrarily. Thelarger portion of Jews still present in the city consisted ofcraftsmen and their families. One simply could not do withoutthe Jewish craftsmen, because they were indispensable for themaintenance of the economy

The battalion commander claimed that he protestedbut was merely told by the operations officer and division�mmander that the German police could provide the cordonand leave the shooting to the Lithuanians.

Forthis first shooting of large numbers of Jewish women, the authorof the war diary felt the need to provide a justification. Theywere shot, he explained, "because they had been encounteredwithout the Jewish star during the roundup . . . . Also in Minskit has been discovered that especially Jewesses removed themarking from their clothing.

The action was performedwithout incident. 'Ibere was not a single case of resistance. "

instructed continuously aboutthe political necessity of the measures.

spiritual care of the men who participate in thisaction

blotted outthrough the holding of social events in the evenings

spectators at the executions. Executions and grave sites arenot to be made known

The graves are to be leveled in such a way that no pilgrimagesite can arise.

away from cities, villages, and thoroughfares

all maleJews between the ages of 17 and 45 convicted as plunderersare to be shot according to martial law

The battalion arrived in Bialystok on July 5, and two days laterwas ordered to carry out a "thorough search of the city , , , forBolshevik commissars and Communists," The war diary entry of,the following day makes clear what this meant: "a search of theJewish quarter,"

Every member had to be careful, he advised, "toappear before the Slavic peoples as a master and show them thathe was a German.

he official daily record, or wardiary (Kriegstagebuch),

When General Pflugbeilsent a messenger to Major Weis to inquire about the fire, themajor was found drunk. He claimed to know nothing about whatwas happening. Weis and his officers subsequently submitted afalse report of the events to PHugbeil.

"Barbarossa decree,"

Kommissarbefehl, or "commissar order,"

our special mobileunits of the SS known as Einsatzgruppen were formed andtrained in the late spring of 1941. The core of these units camefrom Heydrich's Security Police (Gestapo and Kripo) as well ashis intelligence apparatus (Security Service, or SD).

they seemed to offerthe guarantee of completing one's alternative to regular militaryservice not only more safely but closer to home.

In 1938 and 1939, the Order Police expanded rapidly as theincreasing threat of war gave prospective recruits a furtherinducement. If they enlisted in the Order Police, the new youngpolicemen were exempted from conscription into the army.

Reinhard Heydrich were thenotorious Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo), to combat the regime's political enemies, and the Criminal Police (Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo), which was basically adetective force for nonpolitical crimes.

After the Nazi regime was established in 1933, a "police army"(Armee der Landespolizei) of 56,000 men was created. Theseunits were stationed in barracks and given full military trainingas part of Germany's covert rearmament.

reintroduced military conscription in 1935,

counterrevolutionaryparamilitary units known as the Freikorps

the OrderPolice (Ordnungspolizei, or Orpo) and on its role in the Nazipolicy of murdering the Jews of Europe

he male Jews of working agewere to be separated and taken to a work camp. The remainingJews-the women, children, and elderly-were to be shot onthe spot by the battalion.

The Jews had instigatedthe American boycott that had damaged Germany,

. Ifit would make their task any easier, the men should rememberthat in Germany the bombs were falling on women and children.

“The beginning and end of Olte’s transformation,” commentsKlaus Latzel, “can be best illustrated by two letters from his corre-spondence home: ‘Oh I’d love to be out there with the soldiers,’ inMay 1940, and ‘When will this endless murdering be over?’ fromMay 1944.”17 Soldiers such as Albert Neuhaus and Hans Olte con-tinued to fight and to kill, mostly out of a sense of duty and a desireto protect Germany itself, but they no longer thought of themselvesas vanguards of National Socialism

Unit commanders subsequentlydistributed instructions on “The Art of Writing a Letter,” urgingsoldiers to write “manly, hard and clear letters.” Many impressionswere “best locked deep in the heart because they concern only sol-diers at the front . . . Anyone who complains and bellyaches is notrue soldier.

“Actuallythe impact of letters from the front, which had been regarded as ex-traordinarily important, has to be considered more than harmfultoday,” he noted: “soldiers are pretty blunt when they describe thegreat problems they are fighting under, the lack of winter gear . . .insufficient food and ammunition.”

From the perspective of the regime, lettersfrom the front served to justify the war and to bind together the na-tion in a common purpose. Military officials underscored the im-portance of writing home; letters from the battle front supplied “akind of spiritual vitamin” for the home front and reinforced its “at-titude and nerves.

In World War IIas in World War I, soldiers classified friends and foes in terms of rel-ative cleanliness, but in this conflict they were much more apt tomake sweeping judgments about the population and to rank peopleaccording to rigid biological hierarchies. Even the ordinary infan-tryman adopted a racialized point of view, so that “the Russians”the Germans had fought in 1914–1918 were transformed into anundifferentiated peril, “the Russian,” regarded as “dull,” “dumb,”“stupid,” or “depraved” and “barely humanlike.”

It was with an uncomplicated sense of superi-ority that even ordinary Landser (as German soldiers called them-selves) regarded themselves in the first two years of the war.

Lettersand photographs, and the effort to archive them, indicated the ex-tent to which soldiers deliberately placed themselves in world his-tory and adopted for themselves the heroicizing vantage of theThird Reich

In the letters, it is clear that he does not just influencethem as a propagandist would, but, on closer examination, servesas their mouthpiece.”

the simple act of writing or mailing a letter distin-guished Germans from Jews. The distinction affected the abilityof people in the war to bear witness, to send news, and to makesense of extraordinary events. It indicated the destruction of onecommunity of remembrance and the survival of another.

In time ofwar, families frequently established archives in order to documenttheir role in national history

In time of war and separation, the letters to andfrom soldiers serving on the front lines were precious signs of life.They were avowals of love and longings for home. They describedthe battlefield and conditions of military occupation and eventuallyprovided historians with crucial documents about popular attitudestoward the war and knowledge about the Holocaust.

With smuggled letters, private diaries,and secret archives, Jewish victims made enormous efforts to leavebehind accounts of the atrocities the Nazis were committing.

Among the items most frequentlyconfiscated from German Jews as they boarded deportation trainswere blank postcards and postage stamps; authorities in Würzburgcollected 358 six-pfennig postcards, 142 six-pfennig stamps, and273 twelve-pfennig stamps before sending deportees on their wayon 24 March 1942

One Berliner “watched his fellow passengers as he trav-eled past the burning Fasenenstrasse synagogue between the S-Bahnstations Savignyplatz and Zoologischer Garten the next morning:‘only a few looked up to see out the window, shrugged their shoul-ders, and went back to their paper.

The cities are administeredby mayors and councilmen drawn from his movement. The govern-ments of the states and the state parliaments are in the hands ofparty members

recisely becauseGermans had begun to think in terms of Feindbilder, or “visions ofthe enemy,” Goebbels regarded exhibitions such as these a “fantas-tic success.”

Setapart from the familiar social contexts of family, work, and school,the closed camp was designed to break down identifications withsocial milieus and to promote Entbürgerlichung (purging bourgeoiselements) and Verkameradshaftung (comradeship) as part of theprocess of Volkwerdung, “the making of the people,” as the pecu-liar idiom of National Socialism put it.

Emigration meant the dispersion of the archive of Jewishlife in Germany, scattering the traces of ancestors and the signs ofcollective history. While German “Aryans” were driving their an-cestries deep into Germany’s past, German Jews were cutting loosefrom their heritage.Racial Grooming • 141

on 30 January 1939, Hitler prophesied “the annihilation ofthe Jewish race in Europe” in the event that “international financeJewry” succeeded in “plunging the nations once more into a worldwar.”

apoliceman’s “perp book”: “a small selection” of photographs fea-tured photographs of the imprisoned physicians, lawyers, and otherprofessionals whose newly shaven heads created the “eternal sem-blances” by which Jews dissolved into criminals.1

Sühneleistung, or “atonement fine,” which a ministerial conferenceset at one billion marks. Jewish taxpayers were required to handover 20 percent of their total assets in four installments ending inAugust 1939.

certainly indicated outrage at the brutality of theNazis but also astonishing unawareness of the generally depress-ing conditions in which Jews lived in the Third Reich. Gossiperswere basically passive, telling about but not intervening in dramaticevents.

Criticism of the disruption of publicorder was widespread, but should not be taken completely at facevalue. It undoubtedly veiled deeper moral objections that were oth-erwise difficult to articulate in Nazi Germany

Well-appointed homes were ransacked and formerly prominent cit-izens tormented because Jews were regarded as profiteers whosewealth and social standing mocked the probity of the Volksgemein-schaft; children and the elderly were terrorized because they were“the Jew” whose very existence threatened Germany’s moral, polit-ical, and economic revival

But the rapid and uni-form responses by local Nazis indicated a basic readiness and desireto carry out anti-Jewish actions

The vernacular tag, at least in Berlin, of Reichskristallnacht, or“night of shattered glass,” to designate what should be considered anationwide pogrom against more than 300,000 Germans Jews inNovember 1938, was inflected with sardonic humor, which mockedthe pretentiousness of Nazi vocabulary in which Reich-this andReich-that puffed up the historical moment of the regime

The requirement that Jews add “Sarah” or “Israel” to their legalnames in January 1938 made even more clear the aim of the Nazisto register Jews as a prelude to physical expulsion.

fears based on recollections of the general strikes in 1919and 1920 and gruesome stories about atrocities in the Russian civilwar. It also fortified the image of the Jew as an intractable, immedi-ate danger.

In the context of the Spanish CivilWar, which broke out in July 1936, the Moscow “show trials”against old Bolsheviks in August 1936, and the November 1936anti-Comintern pact between Germany and Japan, the Nazis persis-tently linked Germany’s Jews to the Communist threat.

There was no synchronization of thepolicy of “Aryanization,” but it was largely accomplished by 1938

most Germans welcomed legis-lation clarifying the position of Jews and hoped it would bring to anend the graffiti and broken windows of anti-Jewish hooliganism.

half-Jews and quarter-Jews carried both good and bad genes and therefore could not beregarded as completely Jewish. Gross and others argued that mixedJews would eventually be absorbed into the Aryan race if they wereprohibited from marrying each other.

Jewish men who were imagined to prey on Germanwomen: the gender of the Jewish peril was male, while Aryan vul-nerability was female

“What am I going to do?” won-dered Richard Tesch, an owner of a bakery in Ballendstedt’s mar-ketplace: “Israel has been buying goods from me for a long time.Am I supposed to no longer sell to him? And if I do it anyway, thenI’ve lost the other customers.

The acknowledgment that there was a fundamental differencebetween Germans and Jews revived much older superstitions hold-ing that physical contact with Jews was harmful or that Jewish mendefiled German women.

Neighbors in Wedding who remarkedthat “the Jews haven’t done anything to us” despised antisemitismbut upheld the separation between “us” and “them” at which itaimed.85 Custom and habit gave way to self-conscious and inhib-ited interactions structured by the unambiguous knowledge of race

The startling events of the spring of 1933, when more andmore Germans realized that they were not supposed to shop inJewish stores and when German companies felt compelled to fireJewish employees and remove Jewish businessmen from corporateboards, moved Germany quite some distance toward the ultimategoal of “Aryanizing” the German economy.

Public humiliations such as these depended on bystanders willing totake part in the spectacle. They accelerated the division of neigh-borhoods into “us” and “them.

As thousands of new converts joined the para-military units of the SA, whose numbers shot up ninefold from500,000 in January 1933 to 4.5 million one year later, the scale ofantisemitic actions expanded dramatically. Becoming a Nazi meanttrying to become an antisemite as well.

It was along this circuitry,in which Germans imagined themselves as the victims of Jews andother “back-stabbers,” that “self-love” could turn into lethal “other-hate.”

Anti-semitism did not arrive on the scene as something completely new,but it acquired much greater symbolic value when people associ-ated it with being German.

part of a larger struggle to protect what so many Ger-mans regarded as the wounded, bleeding body of the nation.

the Nazis considered theJewish threat to be “lethal” and active, a perspective that gavetheir assault on the Jews a sense of urgency and necessity that madeGerman citizens more willing to go along

The idea of normality had become racialized, so that entitlement tolife and prosperity was limited to healthy Aryans, while newly iden-tified ethnic aliens such as Jews and Gypsies, who before 1933had been ordinary German citizens, and newly identified biologicalaliens such as genetically unfit individuals and so-called “asocials”were pushed outside the people’s community and threatened withisolation, incarceration, and death.

one of the key purposes of popu-lar entertainment in the Third Reich: the creation of a commonlyshared culture to define Germans to one another and mark themoff from others.

s aresult, Victor Klemperer could repeatedly “run into” one of Hitler’sReichstag speeches. “I could not get away from it for an hour. Firstfrom an open shop, then in the bank, then from a shop again.”66Radio as well as film turned Nazism into spectacle.

Tacked onto the doorways of apartments, posters, labels, and badgesattested to the fact that nearly all residents belonged to the People’sWelfare or contributed to Winter Relief.

Millions of people acquired new vocabularies, joined Nazi organi-zations, and struggled to become better National Socialists. Whatthe diaries and letters report on is not simply the large numberof conversions among friends and relatives but the individual en-deavor to become a Nazi.

Young people don’t walk anymore; they march.” “Ev-erywhere friends are professing themselves for Hitler.” To livein Nazi Germany, Ebermayer wrote, was to “become ever morelonely.”

“Hei hatte sagt, wer non ganz un gar nichwolle, vor dän in Deutschland keine Raum”—“he said there is noroom in Germany for people who simply refuse to take part.”

Hermann Aue “(very Left),” thoughtthe Nazis would be gone within a year, so he was inclined to stickwith the Social Democrats. But several Communists who had re-portedly joined a local SA group suspected that the Nazis would bearound for some time.

May 1933 phy-sicians in Bremen called for comprehensive legislation to enablethe state to sterilize genetically unfit people

Local Nazidoctors in Dortmund greeted “the new era” with an April 1933proposal to establish a municipal “race office” that on the basisof 80,000 files on schoolchildren would prepare a “racial archiveof the entire population of greater Dortmund.”

As early as July 1933,the Ministry of the Interior drew up legislation that authorized thesterilization of allegedly genetically unfit citizens.

Beginning on 1 May 1936, laws required state registry of-fices to present all newlyweds with a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf

“Law for the Protection of German Blood”of 15 September 1935, which prohibited Germans from marryingJews

The Ahnenpass enabled the Nazi regime to enforce the Septem-ber 1935 Nuremberg racial law

In September 1939, after the invasion of Po-land, unter uns became legally enforced Aryan space when a decreeprohibited Jews from owning or listening to radios;

Two days after the Day of Potsdam, the Nazis won passageof the Enabling Act. Supported by all the parties except the SocialDemocrats (Communist deputies had been banned), it provided thelegal framework for dictatorship

Thecalamity of the unexpected surrender, the “bleeding borders” re-drawn in the postwar settlement at Versailles, and the overwhelm-ing chaos of the inflation in the early 1920s were collective experi-ences that made the suffering of the nation more comprehensible.During the Weimar years, the people’s community denoted the be-leaguered condition Germans shared, while expressing the politicalunity necessary for national renewal.

In this case it was the Nuremberg Laws, which distinguished Ger-man citizens from Jewish noncitizens: “hunting down innocentpeople is expanded a thousand times,” he raged; “hate is sown amillionfold.”

The fact is that it is totally possible,” he carefully noted,“that the National Socialist state would use such a law to make it aduty for those without means and who are dependent on handoutsfrom the state to more or less ‘voluntarily’ take their lives.

The euthanasia “actions” anticipated the Holocaust. Figuringout by trial and error the various stages of the killing process, fromthe identification of patients to the arrangement of special trans-ports to the murder sites to the killings by gas in special chambersto the disposal of the bodies, and mobilizing medical experts whoworked in secret with a variety of misleading euphemisms to con-ceal their work

ventuallythe criminal charges that relatives threatened to bring against hos-pitals, the dismay of local townspeople who wondered why the pa-tients “are never seen again”—“in one south German village, peas-ant women refused to sell cherries to nurses from the local statehospital”—and finally, in August 1941, the open denunciation ofinvoluntary euthanasia by Clemens August von Galen, the Catholicbishop of Münster in Westphalia, prompted Hitler to order the spe-cial killing centers dismantled.

. The Nazis carried out involuntary euthanasia in order“to purge the handicapped from the national gene pool,” but war-time conditions gave the program legitimacy and cover.

he sterilization proceedings put the voices ofvictims into the historical record, an unusual occurrence in NaziGermany. Whether they were “pleading or imploring, beseechingor threatening, complaining or accusing, bitter or outraged, fright-ened or self-confident, resigned or enraged, oral or written, rhymedor unrhymed,” the appeals were generally free of the “condescend-ing” scientific language of biological racism

In Berchtesgarden, in southern Germany, schoolteachers an-notated the tables of ancestors prepared by schoolchildren andhanded them over to public-health officials

Sterilization proceedings began almost immediately after the“Law for the Prevention of Genetically Damaged Offspring” wentinto effect in January 1934.

Most candidates for sterilization came from lower-classbackgrounds, and since it was educated middle-class men who weremaking normative judgments about decent behavior, they were bothmore vulnerable to state action and less likely to arouse sympathy

German legal com-mentators reassured the German public by citing U.S. programs asprecedents and quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1927 opinion,“three generations of imbeciles are enough”

The rou-tine intervention of the police in the corners of daily life of Germancitizens explains why the Gestapo assumed the “almost mythicalstatus as an all-seeing, all-knowing” creature that had placed itsagents throughout the land to overhear conversations in order toenforce political conformity

Run largely alongside the state justice and penal system, concen-tration camps became a dumping ground for Gemeinschaftsfremde,“enemies of the community,” who were to spend the rest of theirlives thrown away.

“the police have theresponsibility to safeguard the organic unity of the German people,its vital energies, and its facilities from destruction and disintegra-tion.” This definition gave the police extremely wide latitude. Any-thing that did not fit the normative standards of the people’s com-munity or could be construed as an agent of social dissolutiontheoretically fell under the purview of the police.

However, crime could be reduced by removing the dan-gerous body, either by isolating “asocials” in work camps or bysterilizing genetically “unworthy” individuals. In the Nazi legal sys-tem, genetics replaced milieu as the point of origin of crime

“In the language used by both the Nazis and the sci-entists, this policy was called ‘Aufartung durch Ausmerzung,’”improvement through exclusion.

heNazis responded to an intense desire for order in Germany in 1933.Fears of Communist revolutionaries mingled with more generalanxieties about crime and delinquency.

Did shesympathize a little bit with people who were not considered wor-thy? Perhaps so, because Gisela recalled the incident in postwar in-terviews; but other Germans continued to improve themselves bygrooming themselves as Aryans, sitting up straighter, filling out thetable of ancestors, and fitting in at the camps, which gave legiti-macy to the selection process that had created Gisela’s anxiety inthe first place

With the massive expansion of the Hitler Youthto include girls as well as boys, more than 765,000 young peoplehad the opportunity to serve in leadership roles. Many advancedin the ranks and received formal training and ideological instruc-tion in national academies such as the Reich Leadership School inPotsdam.

The Ministry of Education authorized the National So-cialist Teachers’ League to organize retraining camps in order to“equip,” as Rust put it, teachers with lesson plans in “heredity andrace”; an estimated 215,000 of Germany’s 300,000 teachers at-tended two-week retreats at fifty-six regional sites and two nationalcenters that mixed athletics, military exercises, and instruction.

Arbeitsdienstmänner worked together as a unit, marched toget-her, and relaxed together, an unending group existence designed topull together the people’s community.

We have to go with the times, even if thereare many, many things that we do not agree with. To swim againstthe current just makes matters worse.”

More thana third of the 1938 graduating class of the Athenaeum Gymnasiumin the north German city of Stade hoped to pursue a career as an of-ficer in the Wehrmacht or a youth leader in the Hitler Youth

The consciousness of generation, and the assumption thatold needed to be replaced with new, undoubtedly opened youngminds to the tenets of racial hygiene, which were repeatedly parsedin workshops and lectures.

the national sports competition organized by the Hit-ler Youth enrolled seven million boys and girls in 1939, twice asmany as in 1935, and provided opportunities to achieve distinc-tion.

Boththe Hitler Youth and the Reich Labor Service aimed to mix bour-geois and working-class youths in order to pull down social barriersto the formation of national race consciousness.

Enrollment for four years in theHitler Youth and then six months in the Reich Labor Service wasmade mandatory for boys in 1936 and for girls three years later

Nazi pedagogues extolled das Lager, “the camp,”as the privileged place where the “new generation was finding itsform.”

Filled with photographs, graphs, and tables, thepropaganda of the Office for Racial Politics made the crucial dis-tinction between quantity and quality—Zahl und Güte—easy tounderstand. Unlike Streicher’s vulgar antisemitic newspaper, DerStürmer, the Neues Volk appeared to be objective, a sobering state-ment of the difficult facts of life

By the middle of 1937 the Office of Racial Politics hadtrained over 2,000 “racial educators,” who on the basis of an eight-week course in Berlin received a special speaker’s certificate enti-tling them to address Germans on population and race policy. Certi-fication was part of the effort to make German racism objective

Repeated references to the “false humanity”and “exaggerated pity” of the liberal era indicated exactly whatwas at stake: the need to prepare Germans to endorse what univer-sal or Christian ethics would regard as criminal activity.

What was necessary, he insisted, was to“recognize yourself” (“Erkenne dich selbst”), which meant identi-fying with the idealized portraits of new Germans and following thetenets of hereditary biology to find a suitable partner for marriage,to marry only for love, and to provide the Volk with healthy chil-dren.

new visual regime repeatedly in-troduced the German body, most often in portraits of sunnyathletes, large families, and marching soldiers, and sometimes bycontrast in juxtaposed close-up shots of misshapen, degenerate

vast network of Gemeinschaftslager or com-munity camps was established across Germany; at one point or an-other, most Germans passed through them. Alongside concentra-tion camps and killing camps, the training camps were fundamentalparts of the Nazi racial project.

In November in Weimar, he promised that “if to-day there are still people in Germany who say: ‘We are not goingjoin your community, but stay just as we always have been,’ then Isay: ‘You will die off, but after you there will a young generationthat doesn’t know anything else!’”

It was the modern, scientificworld of “ethnocrats” and biomedical professionals, not the anti-communist Freikorps veterans of the SA, who devised Ahnenpässeand certificates of genetic health and evaluated the genetic worth ofindividuals.

But it also made demands on ordinary Germans, who neededto visualize the Volk as a vital racial subject, to choose appropriatemarriage partners, and to accept “limits to empathy.”

he Germanpopulation was being resorted according to supposed genetic val-ues, a project that required all Germans to reexamine their rela-tives, friends, and neighbors.

A wide rangeof public health-care professionals from doctors to nurses to social-welfare officers were enlisted in the effort to locate undesirables.

The journalistSebastian Haffner noted that people in his circle in Berlin suddenlyfelt authorized to express an opinion on the “Jewish question,”speaking fluently about quotas on Jews, percentages of Jews, anddegrees of Jewish influence

a ministerial committeeon “population and race,” which met on 28 June 1933 to draftcomprehensive racial legislation giving the state the right to sterilizecitizens

On 7 April 1933 the government drew up the“Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,” whichforcibly retired all Jewish civil servants in addition to providing thelegal means to dismiss political opponents of the regime.

a domestic-sounding vocabulary; a rhetoric of “cleaning,” “sweeping clean,”“housecleaning” strengthened the tendency to see politics in thedrastic terms of friends and foes

Racial thinking presumed thatonly the essential sameness of the German ethnic community guar-anteed biological strength. For the Nazis, the goal of racial puritymeant excluding Jews, whom they imagined to be a racially alienpeople who had fomented revolution and civil strife and divided theGerman people.

In place of the quarrels of party, the contests of inter-est, and the divisions of class, which they believed compromised theability of the nation to act, the Nazis proposed to build a unified ra-cial community guided by modern science. Such an endeavor wouldprovide Germany with the “unity of action” necessary to surviveand prosper in the dangerous conditions of the twentieth century

. It drew up a long list of internaland external dangers that imperiled the nation. At the same time, itrested on extraordinary confidence in the ability of racial policy totransform social life.

cultivate racial solidarity by overcoming social divi-sions, prohibiting racial mixing, and combating degenerative bio-logical trends

In other words, biology appeared to provideGermany with highly useful technologies of renovation. The Na-zis regarded racism as a scientifically grounded, self-consciouslymodern form of political organization.

thousands of“ethnocrats” and other professionals mobilized to build the newbiomedical structures of the Third Reich. They oriented their ca-reers and ambitions toward the wide spaces that Nazi Germany’sracial vision had opened up.

Race defined the new realities of the ThirdReich for both beneficiaries and victims—it influenced how youconsulted a doctor, whom you talked to, and where you shopped.

As parents, educators, volunteers, and soldiers, millions of Ger-mans played new parts in cultivating Aryan identities and segregat-ing out unworthy lives. They did not always do so willingly, andthey certainly did not anticipate the final outcomes of total war andmass murder.

most Germans had little reason tothink of the Third Reich as particularly sinister. “It was possible tolive in Germany throughout the whole period of the dictatorship,”

More than ten mil-lion Germans obtained a certificate of genetic health, which wasnecessary in order to claim entitlements such as marriage loans.

until the very end of the Reich in 1945, they handedout hundreds of thousands of copies of the eight-mark “people’sedition” along with pamphlets providing advice on how to main-tain good racial stock and prepare Ahnenpässe, “Germans, HeedYour Health and Your Children’s Health,” “A Handbook for Ger-man Families,” and “Advice for Mothers.”

During the war Klemperer, like so manyother Jews, was forced to move into the drastically smaller quartersof a “Jew house,” which meant that he had to dispose of books andpapers. “[I] am virtually ravaging my past,” he wrote in his di-ary on 21 May 1941. “The principal activity” of the next daywas “burning, burning, burning for hours on end: heaps of letters,manuscripts.

Family archives, racial categories, and individual identitiesbecame closely calibrated with one another over the course of theThird Reich

“glitterwords” such as “normal,” “gene,” and “alien,” passed into ev-eryday speech

all the humor about Jewishness in Germany, the fear of stum-bling upon Jewish grandmothers and the relief when only a “Jewishgreat-grandmother,” “who cannot hurt you anymore,” turned up,did not dispel the suspicion that Jews were different.

Significantly, thestate did not issue racial passports; Germans had to prepare thempersonally. They thus attained for themselves their racial status asAryans.

Whereas an Aryanidentity opened the way for a future in the Third Reich, a Jewishone closed it down.

By 1936 almost all Germans—all who were not Jewish—had begun to prepare for themselves an Ahnenpass, or racial pass-port, which laid the foundation for the racial archives establishedin all German households

the sheerforce of the imagery and the busy schedules of national acclamationmade dissent politically risky; but even more: dissent also appearedto be futile.

As a result, Germans could imagine one another infront of the radio listening to the same program: “Sunday isWunschkonzert,” wrote one soldier to his family back home; “youcertainly will be listening too.”

He believed Germans feltthat “it’s just us now” when they lived without Jews. “Just us” alsoexpressed the closed circle in which Germans could see and experi-ence “ourselves” as “we are” and as “we have become.”

With the cheerful slices of German life they broadcastand the national audience they pulled together, radio plays recrea-ted the people’s community. It produced the effect of being unteruns, “just us.”

On these occasions, friends and neighbors knew they wouldfind one another in front of the radio and could later share im-pressions—in this sense, Gemeinschaftsempfang, collective recep-tion, had been achieved.

In what it touted as the triumph of “socialism ofthe deed” over “private capitalism” and “economic liberalism,” in1933 the Propaganda Ministry pressed a consortium of radio man-ufacturers to design and produce a Volksempfänger, or “people’sradio,” for the mass market.

The eventfulness of the Day of Potsdam was the reason “all three,father, mother, and Emma” Dürkefälden, had gone to Kaune’s tav-ern, but it was also what they themselves produced by going there

Nazis wanted the Germanpeople to comprehend events on the order of grand history by hear-ing broadcasts on the radio, seeing the reassembly of marchers onfilm, and taking photographs of their own part in the making of thepeople’s community

Germans even went to warwith preprinted diaries that left space for snapshots. All this was anacknowledgment of the desire to be part of and to share the Ger-man history that was being made.

With banners, flags, marches, and “Heil Hitler!” the Nazis pro-duced a distinctive public choreography and accompanying soundtrack that seemed to affirm the unanimity of the people’s commu-nity.

Radio helped to create the collective voice of thenation.

Thus, for leading opponents of the Nazis, and for the Jews andother minorities that the regime tormented, there seemed to be littlealternative but to abandon Germany altogether. Since most exilesnever returned, Germany’s political and intellectual life continuedto be structured by the Nazis long after their defeat

but even then nothing made the “com-munity of fate” more compelling than “the conviction that therewill no longer be future for Germany after a lost war.”

“Ifonly the good old days would come back again, just one more time.Why do we have to have this dreadful war, which has disrupted ourpeaceful lives, broken our happiness, and dissolved all our big andlittle hopes for a new house into nothing?”

But when the German cheers wouldnot stop, “Hitler sensed a popular mood, a longing for peace andreconciliation.” This was also an indication of the general content-ment with things as they were.

However, Germans did not want the war Hitler was determinedto wage in order to gain living space and empire.

crowds acclaimed the reestablishment of amass conscription army, the Wehrmacht, recalling for observers the“August Days” of 1914. Again socialists conceded: “For the over-whelming majority, 16 March is the definitive end to a shamefulpast, much more so than 30 January 1933; the day marks ‘the dawnof a new age.’” All this patriotic hoopla mattered; Versailles hadleft deep wounds, and, anyway, Germans were apt to be “childishlyproud of their army.”

heexplained in tears that her two sons had fallen in battle and the bal-lot had been their voice. 61The text precisely captures the way many people thought of Ger-many: as the tenacious underdog finally asserting its rights.

In January 1935, huge fanfare welcomedthe Reich’s incorporation of the Saar region, where over 90 percentof the population had voted for reintegration into Germany in aLeague of Nations referendum

“its touristic spectaclesencouraged its participants to see a cause-and-effect relationshipbetween their own well being and the Nazi regime’s attempts to re-make Germans into the master race.”

“People looked to Nazism as a great and radical sur-gery or cleansing” and therefore saw “the movement as a sourceof rejuvenation” in public life.

hile“Strength through Joy” vacations were budget affairs, third-classrailway journeys to Thüringen rather than Bavaria, and parsimo-nious meals at second-rate hotels, they offered millions of Ger-mans the opportunity to travel, to see the seaside, or visit theReichshauptstadt—Berlin was one of the favorite “Strengththrough Joy” destinations.

The dreamof the Volkswagen seemed to promise “a new, happier age” thatwould make “the German people rich and Germany beautiful,” asHitler put it. Indeed, the Volkswagen functioned as a symbol for thenewly won capacity to dream about the future: in this fundamentalsense, the Nazis appeared as “men of the future.”

Mem-ories of the Third Reich corresponded in large part to the Nazis’own prewar media representation of “good times” both now and tocome.

n 1937 German households achieved the standard of living en-joyed in 1928, before the onset of the Great Depression.

he reports confirm that workers creditedHitler, in particular, for the restoration of economic stability.

the reports indicate that “workers not only wereunfree . . . but that most of them felt they were unfree, exploited,discriminated against and the victims of an unfair, class-ridden soci-ety.” Even during the boom years of 1937–39, “signs indicated thatNazism was further losing ground among workers.”

On the eve of the war, in 1939, most Germans ex-perienced the Third Reich as a cherished period of economic andpolitical stability. These were achievements that the population wasdetermined to hold on to.

Interweaving economic opportunity with the dangers thatmight prevent it, whether it was the threat of air attack, the pres-ence of “asocials,” or the power of Jews, Winter Relief and air-de-fense campaigns made the premises of the people’s community tan-gible and persuasive

A jumble of Nazi acronyms (WHW, DAF, RAD, HJ), workadayabbreviations (Bomber, Laster), and a thoroughly militarized vo-cabulary, including words like Einsatz, Sturm, and Kampf

Propaganda displays of bombs andbombers, and the destruction they could wreak, revealed the ex-posed, trembling body of the nation, which the Nazis claimed toprotect through a nationwide program of air defense.

Ger-mans wore special badges to show they had donated their marks;the badges functioned so as to make citizens accountable to them-selves. “On Sundays,” Hauser remarked, “when collecting for theWinter-Relief Fund is going on in the streets no one would darewalk abroad without a badge pinned conspicuously to his coat.”

Moreover, the impression thatGermans were assembling behind the Nazis reinforced itself. Moreand more people adjusted to the “new direction” when they sawthat others had done so.

The Day of Potsdam and May Day indi-cated that there was considerable desire among Germans to partici-pate in rituals of national renewal

One-potmeals on the first Sunday of every month provided opportunitiesfor party representatives to go from door to door in the evening asthey collected the pfennigs that had been “saved,” and to snoop.

these auxiliary organiza-tions gave Germans semiofficial responsibilities as they collecteddonations, distributed coal, or trained as air-raid wardens.

The SA, Hitler Youth, and Reich LaborFront worked the same way, striving to identify a new generationof leaders drawn from all social classes;

citizens found the constant donations of time andmoney onerous, but they gradually accepted the new practices, andthe slew of regulations, advisories, and prohibitions associated withthem, as the best way to manage collective life. And they expectedneighbors to comply.

Themedicalization of politics pulled thousands of new professionalsinto state service as nurses, teachers, health-care administrators.Newly opened public-health offices dotted the cities and country-side, building on the social-welfare accomplishments of the repub-lic.

a“Machbarkeitswahn,” modernity’s heady sense of the possible thatepitomized National Socialism as it charged into the future.

Coordination was a process of disso-lution and affiliation.

National Socialists assaulted the “alternative culture” of work-ing-class socialists in order to coordinate it, but they also attemptedto overcome the very idea of “alternative,” which structured the so-cial divisions typical of Germany’s neighborhoods.

Working-classchoirs had a better chance of survival if they rewrote club statutesto exclude Social Democratic activists from leadership posts.

Coordination, or Gleichschaltung, hit working-class as-sociational life especially hard.

In a brief two years between the autumn of 1939 and the autumn of1941, Nazi Jewish policy escalated rapidly from the prewar policy of forcedemigration to the Final Solution as it is now understood—the systematic at-tempt to murder every last Jew within the German grasp.