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.

instructed continuously aboutthe political necessity of the measures.

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

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”

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.

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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,”

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.”

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.”

“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.

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

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.

“Something had to be done”—these were the simple, conclusive words voiced by a friend of KarlDürkefälden’s, jobless and a new convert to Nazism. His wordswere echoed by thousands of workers in the winter and springof 1933; though a socialist, Karl himself understood—“it’s truetoo,” he added parenthetically in his diary entry.

When Karl pro-tested that local Nazis had arrested young workers in the neigh-borhood and seized a trade union building, his father retorted indialect, “Ordnung mot sein,” “You have to have order.”

the Nazis recognized only Volkskameraden, people’s com-rades, and Volksfeinde, enemies of the people, whom they sub-jected to deliberate and refined cruelties in a “willful transgressionof norms.

The state of permanent emer-gency declared by the National Socialists helps explain the tremen-dous efforts that they and their followers made to reconstruct thecollective body and the satisfaction they took in images of unityand solidarity. It also helps explain the violent exclusions they ac-cepted as part of the rebuilding process.

restricting their rep-resentation in the professions to their proportion in the population:“that is one percent.” Moreover, she explained, “Jews want to rule,not serve.” The proof: “have you ever heard of a Jewish maid or aJewish laundry woman?”

The strong presence of the police,who tended to sympathize with the National Socialists, restrictedthe mobility of opponents, while Nazi toughs broke into SocialDemocratic or trade union offices and Nazi officials banned so-cialist newspapers.

the officially organized boycott of Jewish businesses on 1April 1933 required a more considered answer. Elisabeth beganwith a concession, contrasting the “happiness” of the world-histor-ical events taking place in Germany with her “sympathy” for “thefate of the individual.”

sincediscussions about Jewish suffering frequently switched to the sub-ject of German suffering: “Versailles” had taken the “opportunitiesfor life” away from Germans, who were now “completely under-standably” fighting back on behalf of their “own sons.”