Subhuman Conditions
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
Subhuman Conditions Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web By Lynn H. Nicholas Knopf. 632 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Richard C. Hottetet Former CBS News Correspondent This BOOK...
...The answer was euthanasia...
...Within this creature is a cruel chaos of unsuppressed fury, inexpressible will to destruction, the most primitive greed and unconcealed obscenity...
...The peace shaped a different Europe, but one in which ethnic cleansing would erupt again to ravage Yugoslavia in the 1990s...
...Since killing by lethal injection, as performed on children, was not convenient for so large a number, the experts chose a more efficient method, carbon monoxide gas...
...The approach was worldwide, even to Papua New Guinea, once a German colony...
...She looks at political violence around the globe and at different reactions-noble, fearful, hypocritical...
...The verminization of individuals or groups made it easy, and seemingly virtuous, to destroy them...
...Starting with the Spanish Civil War in 1936, through the Austrian Anschluss, the organized rage of the Kristallnacht, and the approach of war in 1939, waves of refugees-welcome nowhere-washed over Europe...
...While the United States, Denmark, Norway, and others had legal sterilization programs, the Weimar Republic did not...
...Their goals were to provide more soldiers for the F??hrer and to populate the vast areas of Poland and the Soviet Union Germany would govern...
...It all ended in 1945, with defeat for Germany and a crisscross flood of some 15 million refugees and displaced persons returning to their homes or finding new ones...
...and still another for the German staff...
...Oppressed from the beginning, millions were excluded, impoverished, harassed, and finally worked to death or gassed in camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau...
...The German nurse who claimed she administered lethal injections to "at least 211" disabled and mentally ill or retarded children was still at it three weeks after the end of the War in Europe...
...He had already proclaimed in Mein Kampf, "A prevention of the faculty and opportunity to procreate on the part of the degenerate and mentally sick...
...Aware that the average German soldier would not easily swallow this, the SS sent in its own special detachments to kill and burn without mercy...
...On what might be reckoned the constructive side of the racist bureaucracy's project-as opposed to the elimination of undesirables-the Nazis made efforts to increase the German population...
...As the subtitle indicates, it focuses on European children under the Nazis, but Lynn H. Nicholas also ranges much farther afield...
...Eligibility for the procedure was expanded beyond the obviously handicapped to include "asocials," a convenient catchall category for anyone who did not fit into the Nazi scheme of things...
...Harping on the purity of German blood, official geneticists created an extraordinary register "several meters in length in which, in tiny millimeter sized letters and numbers, the genealogical tree of all Gypsies living in Germany for the last 10 generations were charted...
...Adolf Hitler brought his twisted eugenics to power with him in 1933...
...As forthe U.S., Vice President John Nance Garner told Roosevelt that if it were left to a secret vote of Congress, all immigration would be stopped...
...Inevitably, Nazi bean counters came to view as exorbitant the cost to the national economy of maintaining the sterilized misfits and asocials, especially if they lived in public institutions...
...In sharp contrast stands the intrepid Dutch woman who bearded Adolf Eichmann in his office to gain the release of children held in Vienna...
...The midday meal was soup but there were separate pots for each nationality of forced laborers...
...Soon after the fall of Poland, plans were drawn up for the racial analysis of the entire Polish population to sift out those, especially young children, who were suitable for Germanization, or "ethnic transformation...
...He launched the program secretly...
...Nicholas opens no new doors to the insane racism of the Nazi regime, which has been thoroughly explored over the past 60 years...
...Not long after Hitler came to power the Nazi party under then Deputy F??hrer Rudolf Hess set about systematically tracking the millions of ethnic Germans living abroad to encourage their return or at least their sympathy for the new regime...
...On the whole, Nicholas' book delivers a cautionary tale about how brutally self-righteous power facing no countervailing force can overturn the world...
...would not only free humanity from an immeasurable misfortune, but would lead to a recovery which today seems scarcely conceivable...
...As late as 1942 Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, was still advocating a postwar plan to recruit German Americans as colonists of eastern territory...
...She provides enough dismal detail, however, to shock even those who already know the story, illuminating Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" in all its vivid practicality...
...The extrapolation of ordinary human sentiments-anger, greed, envy-produced the official sadism, homicide and genocide that became part of modern German life...
...For the millions of Russian prisoners of war and forced laborers in German factories and camps, food was scarce and life was miserable-many found it unendurable...
...the Greek word 'barbarian' simply means 'foreigner,' and forthe Frenchman, more conservative in his habits than the Greek, the foreigner has never ceased to be a barbarian, whether he was an Italian navvy, a Polish miner or a German refugee...
...Under Arab pressure, Britain sharply cut immigration to Palestine...
...the Old Testament laws, social and economic, against the Stranger in Israel could have served as a model for the Nuremberg Code...
...Their pot contained "thick and tasty" soup with meat and vegetables...
...More victims were provided by the Marriage Health Law of 1935, mandating medical screening for hereditary weaknesses before a marriage license could be obtained...
...By July, when it convened, many countries had tightened their immigration laws, while Romania and others had signaled their desire to expel their own Jews...
...Nicholas quotes Arthur Koestler: "Hatred of foreigners...
...Some fanatics called for women of purely Nordic appearance to be moved to southern Germany, which they thought wanting in Nordic blood...
...The "Nordic" countries of Western Europe overrun in 1940, especially Norway, were seen as valuable sources of "good blood...
...German soldiers on the eastern front, where Hitler aimed to exterminate Russia's 5 million Jews and drive the remnants of a decimated Slav population back behind the Ural Mountains, were given a booklet about the subhuman, "the Untermensch": "The Untermensch-which seems biologically similar to humans with its hands, feet, eyes, mouth and a sort of brain, is, in fact, a totally different, terrible creature . mentally and morally lower than any animal...
...Later, when Russian workers arrived, they ate a thin gruel with a few potatoes, beets and oats...
...They also got rice pudding and vanilla sauce for dessert...
...Czech, Belgian, French, and Hungarian laborers, being of Aryan origin, were given less meat in their soup and no pudding...
...Hitler's central, murderous obsession was, of course, the Jews...
...A special office planned for some 100,000 adult deaths to follow...
...Hitler lost no time in passing a law for enforced sterilization, and in the two years after it took effect, nearly 400,000 "denunciations" were filed, mainly by mental institutions...
...Hitler had long considered the practice but, says Nicholas, he did not dare implement large-scale extermination of these useless, "degenerate" citizens until he had the cover of war...
...In March 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called a conference in Evian, France, to give help...
...Those settled in society posed a problem for the regime...
...The theory was that a great deal of German blood had flowed into Poland "through the mistakes of German history" and must be recovered for the Reich...
...The distribution of food was carefully regulated according to racial rules," Nicholas writes...
...Within a few years, an enormous bureaucracy of 12,000 local medical officials working on sterilization and marriage issues had also set up a national heredity index where the racial characteristics of every inhabitant could be recorded...
...The Polish pot had no meat at all, and its potatoes were sometimes transferred to the French pot if it needed thickening...
...Reviewed by Richard C. Hottetet Former CBS News Correspondent This BOOK is a big and very mixed bag of the worst and the best of human nature...
...seems to be the oldest collective feeling of mankind back to the tribal age and anti-Semitism only one of its specified forms...
...Inside the Reich the same measure was applied to Gypsies, many of whom were shipped to concentration camps to be sterilized as criminals and asocials...
Vol. 88 • May 2005 • No. 3
