An important step toward the Holocaust was the establishment of creative measures to apply Darwinian eugenics that included
Racial hygiene, eugenic choice of marriage partners, the breeding of human beings by the methods of selection on the one hand and extirpation on the other. The guiding aide of the “race-attached soul” made all cultural and creative achievements dependent on external appearance and at the same time linked the ability and hence the right to found states and empires.19
Fest noted that behind these programmes was the vision of creating a “people of pure blood,” which was described by race theorist Hans F. K. Gunther as men who were
“blond, tall, long-skulled, with narrow faces, pronounced chins, narrow noses with a high bridge, soft fair hair, widely spaced pale-coloured eyes, pinky-white skin colour.” The efficacy of this racial image, however, was so repeatedly undermined— particularly by the physical appearance of most of the leading National Socialists—that it must not be seen as too binding. Yet there were frequent attempts to reconcile the leaders of the Third Reich To this racial picture, some of them so outrageous as to be comic.20
The motive for solving the Jewish “problem” based on the fact that the Nazi
Race theory contained a utopian element that gnawed into the ideology of Hitler and his closer followers with the force and exclusiveness of an obsession. Hitler was influenced above all by the theories of the nineteenth-century social Darwinist school, whose conception of man as biological material was bound up with impulses toward a planned society. He was convinced that the [Aryan] race was disintegrating, deteriorating through faulty breeding as a result of a liberally tinGed promiscuity that was vitiating the nation’s blood.21
The “useless eaters” and those the eugenicists regarded as inferior humans, including the Jews and Slavics, must all be eliminated because, as Heydrich explained, if any survived they would “form a new germ cell from which the Jewish race would again arise. History teaches us that.”22 Some, such as Hohne, claimed that Heydrich did not personally hate Jews—“he was no racial fanatic”—but was just doing his job.23
Others have argued, with much justification, that Heydrich did his job far too well for someone who did
Not have a strong personal commitment to the Nazi Darwinist goals. For example, Heydrich chaired the 1942 Wannsee Conference, held near Berlin in what some claim was a confiscated home of a Jewish family, where they planned and implemented the rapid extermination by the gassing of all Jews in German-occupied territories. In 1941, Goring ordered Heydrich to develop a programme to resolve the
Jewish problem using any means available. Heydrich announced this at the Wannsee Conference on 20 January, 1942, using it as a carte blanche from the movement’s leaders to proceed to annihilation. Goering was not present at the meeting, but was represented by his state secretary, Neumann. It was his wish that he be kept closely informed about the SS policy toward the Jews and it can be assumed that the SS carried out their tasks with Goering’s knowledge and blessings.24
Already by 1941, besides the elimination of many “inferior” humans including Asians, Slavs, Gypsies and German Jews, “Heydrich informed the Fuhrer that 363,211 other Jews had been killed.”25 After Germany invaded Poland, Heydrich organized the killing of various racial groups including Jews, Catholic clergy and others the Nazis judged as undesirable.26 He had a list of 61,000 names slated for death and by 1939, about 50,000 Poles were murdered, including 7,000 Jews.
Next, the Soviet Union was targeted for racial eugenics. The purpose of invading the Soviet Union was to eliminate or subjugate the “inferior” Slavic humans and clear the way for German colonization of their land. When the Soviet invasion ended, over 20 million Soviets had been murdered, many in the effort to eliminate “inferior” races.27 To determine who was racially superior, “Heydrich appointed racial experts to examine all applicants for German citizenship.” These racial experts often were professors or university-trained eugenicists.
Although the “physical appearance of most of the leading national Socialists” did not fit the ideal blond, blue-eyed Aryan racial character “Reinhard Heydrich seemed to be the exception.”28 Heydrich looked like an Aryan because he “was tall, blond, athletic, and combined high intelligence with a metallic streak in his nature which was regarded as proof of a special racial grace.”29
Heydrich may have looked like the Nazi racial ideal, but inside he was a “nervously irritable individual, subject to secret anxieties and continually plagued by tension, bitterness and self-hatred.”30 Hohne described Heydrich as one of the “radical, merciless rebels against tradition, morality and all humanitarian rules of conduct.”31 The Nazi ideal was very superficial, at least for some of the leading Nazis such as Heydrich.
World History
