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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

“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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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 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

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

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.

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

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.

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

. 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?”

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

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.

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.

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.

Coordination was a process of disso-lution and affiliation.

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.

But thepressure to comply was unmistakable. Dürkefälden’s father-in-lawwas out every night one week in August 1933 because he had toattend meetings or risk losing his garden plot.

This is thesignificance of the Day of Potsdam: the images of unity were madeavailable for national consumption. The growth in radio ownershipespecially in 1933 and 1934 indicates how great the desire was topartake in Nazi spectacle, although the fact that radios remainedmuch less common in rural areas

“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.

Socialists around the worldhad celebrated May Day as a festival of labor since the 1880s; butin Germany they had failed to get the official recognition the Nazisnow offered. So strong were the hopes for national unity that theGerman Free Trade Unions welcomed the Nazi gesture and encour-aged members to participate in the celebrations.

the stunning media spectacle of thespeeches and celebrations of 1 May also contrasted with 2 May,when stormtroopers sealed off and took over the operations of thesocialist Free Trade Unions and incorporated them into what be-came the German Labor Front, an integral part of the National So-cialist apparatus.

The construction of the firstconcentration camps to media fanfare in March 1933, and therapid migration of the shorthand kz, for Konzentrationslager, intoordinary speech, left the public well aware that Nazis recognizedonly friends or foes;

National Socialism offered acomprehensive vision of renewal, which many Germans found ap-pealing, but they combined it with the alarming specter of nationaldisintegration.

. It was the experience of conversion, which left peoplelike Dürkefälden and Ebermayer isolated, that was new and pro-vided the Third Reich with legitimacy and energy.

In the national broadcast, selected party members spoke out thescripted reactions of “ordinary citizens,” who, appearing from allwalks of life, expressed support for Hitler.

ample, “is now a Nazi because of his job, but only for show.”Peine’s barber was in the SA, but Karl thought for “professionalreasons” only.

what he saw was an increas-ingly Nazified community in which neighbors now took notice ofKarl’s behavior and club members adjusted their own. What Karlwas resisting as he stood alongside his wife was the pressure to con-form, if only for the sake of appearances.