I briefly wanted to reflect on the political utility of minorities for fascists; this is expanding on a point I made in Against Ur-Fascism. I happened to be watching a video1 where one YouTube historian (What Why How) was criticizing another for their defense of the nazis. Specifically, what caught my attention was not anything that the nazi defender said, but something that What Why How quoted a nazi as saying. “It is obvious that the Polish question cannot be solved by liquidating the Poles like the Jews. Such a solution to the Polish question would burden the German people well into the distant future and deprive us of sympathy everywhere, especially since the other neighboring peoples would also have to expect to be treated similarly in due course.” That was stated by Erhard Wetzel with the nazi Office of Racial Policy2. I find it very revealing about nazi logic.
The first question that should come to your mind is “why didn’t liquidating the Jews suggest to other neighboring peoples that they would be liquidated, too?” Now, obviously, many did see things that way and were right to do so, but many did not. There were undoubtedly people who did not feel threatened because they did their own versions of British appeasement. They didn’t resist, they accepted the way things were now. Some of those people would have been caught up under one anti-human nazi policy or another. Certainly, people who lived under the nazi regime could not have known if they were going to be called in or picked up, nor could they have prevented it (outside of fleeing Germany). They took a risk by deciding to allow the nazis to rule over them.
The reason this happened, the reason that people were ultimately fine with the persecution of Jews and other targeted groups, is that such groups were outside of the German mainstream. They were considered others by so much of the population that the brutality they experienced did not spark the solidarity in Germans that it should have, the solidarity borne out of simple self-preservation.
I am not the first to point out that the Nazi Party was highly anti-clerical before taking power, and that measures such as the Reichskonkordat were needed to formalize relations with the Catholic Church. Why didn’t Catholics become targets of the Holocaust? In the United States and in Britain, anti-Catholic sentiment had a history nearly as long as antisemitism, so it stands to reason that the Germans — who took many cues from their Anglo cousins in racial matters — would have tried to eliminate the “Catholic fifth column” as well. The reason is obvious: there are a lot of Catholics in Germany and, furthermore, a hell of a lot of Catholics in neighboring countries. Antagonizing Catholics on a policy level would have been an extremely dangerous move, so the nazis didn’t do that.
The reason that the nazis attacked Jews, gay people, the Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, transgender people, and so on is that they were safe targets. After generations of being dehumanized by the nations of Europe, Jews were not seen as true parts of German society. As the memo from Wetzel states, there are Polish people who can be Germanized, and certainly the same seems to be true for other Slavic people. Even though Jews have lived in Germany since the Middle Ages, Jews were never allowed to become full members of German society. Throughout Europe, attempts by Jews to assimilate were simply rejected; Christian conversion ceremonies might take place but, come the next pogrom, converted Jews were little safer than non-converted Jews. This is not to suggest that Jews should have needed to assimilate, only that the hatred and dehumanization of Jews was such that they, unlike Poles, could not be Germanized (to the nazis and other racists) no matter how long they had lived in Germany.
Though the nazis and many German racists of the time thoroughly denigrated Polish people and all Slavs, they never considered putting Slavic people under a system like they placed the Jews in because they knew that their opinion was not widely held. Should they start persecuting Slavs openly, non-Slavic people might care. The Jews, however? They were so hated that other countries knew about their plight and still refused to take Jewish people in. The Jews were targeted because, in a way, the rest of Europe (and their descendants like the USA) was willing to collude in eliminating them. And by doing so, the nazis built up their power and went on their rampage. The Holocaust was not where the crime began. It was delivering on a promise which the nazis made to Germany as part of their rise.
When I say that fascists find minorities useful for building their power, this is what I mean. Yes, fascists are “actually racist”, they do have racial hatreds that they try to work out, but that is separate from their exploitation of these hatreds. This is why it’s possible for a fascist to “not really hate” their victims and yet never object to victimizing them. The point is not whether or not the perpetrator themselves has racist views. The point is if the perpetrator can get something by utilizing racist ideas. Fascists are capable of restraining their racist impulses when it would be disadvantageous, so we must assume that there is some strategy behind the groups they choose to target while out of power. As I showed, it wasn’t that the nazis didn’t hate Slavic people, they just knew that they could not deal with that hatred in as public and power-seeking a way as they exercised themselves upon Jewish people.
- “The WORST channel? Zoomer Historian DEBUNKED by facts and logic” by What Why How https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeAIZaoFFdc ↩︎
- https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/heftarchiv/1958_3_5_heiber.pdf page 308 (in German) ↩︎