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.

instructed continuously aboutthe political necessity of the measures.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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”

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 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.

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

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

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.

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,”

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.