War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2002

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapter 7-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary: “From Revolution to Routine: Nazi Germany, 1933-1938”

This chapter focuses on the pre-World War II Nazi revolution and what Bergen calls the “routinization” of Nazism, wherein Nazi policies and ideologies were normalized and interpolated into everyday German life. She writes, “On the one hand, Hitler revolutionized Germany, but on the other hand, the ways in which he did so seemed undramatic to many participants and observers at the time” (53).

Hitler’s political position at the start of his chancellorship was “not that strong” (53). His first cabinet only included two Nazi party members: Göring and Wilhelm Frick. The rest were conservatives and nationalists.

On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag (German parliament) burned down. Hitler blamed communists, and the German press corroborated this because it relied on Nazi information. Bergen posits that Marinus van der Lubbe, an arsonist with no connection to either the Communist or Nazi parties, caused the fire. Hitler had thousands of suspected communists arrested, tortured, and beaten; several hundred were killed. Germany’s first official concentration camp, Dachau, housed these prisoners.

In March 1933, Hitler passed the Enabling Law, which allowed him to rule by decree without declaring an emergency. Only Social Democrats opposed this law. That summer, Hitler outlawed “all political parties except the NSDAP” (55).

Within his first year as chancellor, Hitler launched attacks on all the groups he declared his enemies, many of which were already broadly disliked in German society. Bergen pays special attention to the systemic humiliation and intimidation measures incited against German Jews and their gentile friends. However, she also notes the early legislative difficulties that arose when singling out Jews, as they were still integrated into mainstream society. While some individuals in Hitler’s targeted groups fled the country at this point in time, others remained.

In July 1933, the Law for Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring—which called for the sterilization of “people with certain physical and psychiatric conditions” (63)—was passed. This resulted in the forced sterilization of roughly 250,000 people.

Nazi domestic policy was designed to punish its targets and reward ethnic German Aryans through a process called gleichschaltung (“coordination”). Nazi organizations subsumed preexisting institutions such as labor unions and artists’ associations. The Nazis introduced Strength Through Joy, a program dedicated to organizing leisure activities for German workers. Much publicity was devoted to economic development and job creation. All these measures were part and parcel of Nazi propaganda’s trademark pageantry.

Bergen states that Hitler’s foreign policy was designed to “make his aims look safely conventional, even while his intentions were dangerously radical” (67). In 1933, he signed a Concordat with the Vatican in Rome that almost unanimously quashed opposition from the Catholic clergy. He also established a nonaggression pact (NAP) with Poland and withdrew Germany from the League of Nations. All the while, Germany prepared for war, setting about rearmament in secret, directly violating the Treaty of Versailles.

In an attempt to centralize power, Hitler initiated Operation Hummingbird, also known as the Night of the Long Knives, in which he ordered the SS to execute “problematic” members of his own coterie. Between 100 and several thousand Nazis and Nazi allies were killed, most famously including the high-ranking stormtrooper Ernst Röhm.

In August 1934, President Hindenburg died. In response, Hitler combined the role of president and chancellor and claimed control of the German armed forces.

In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws—the Law for Protection of German Blood and the Honor and Reich Citizenship Law—were passed. These laws banned intermarriage between Jews and Aryan Germans; Jews were also disallowed from flying the German flag. That same year, the Nazi military machine went public on the global stage. Hitler’s government contravened the Treaty of Versailles and invaded the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. This incurred no military resistance from the French. Hitler’s inner circle launched its four-year plan for war.

Chapter 4 Summary: “Open Aggression: In Search of War, 1938-1939”

This chapter is concerned with a series of violent events, crises, and takeovers that ultimately lead up to World War II. During this time, the German concentration camp system was expanded.

Bergen starts the chapter by examining the testimonials of two contemporary Germans: Alfons Heck, a then-teenaged member of the Hitler Youth, and Victor Klemperer, a professor and World War I veteran who had converted from Judaism to Christianity. While the young Heck was dazzled by Nazi pageantry, Klemperer was dismissed from his position at the Technical University of Dresden; Klemperer was systematically stripped of his rights, privileges, and possessions in the following years.

Hitler and his inner circle began pursuing war. Their first foreign policy success in this period was the Anschluss. Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, despite the Treaty of Versailles provision against uniting Austria and Germany. Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg resisted; however, most Austrians supported Hitler’s annexation and perpetrated violence against their Jewish neighbors in response. Other international powers did not intervene.

Next came the Sudetenland crisis. In 1938, Czechoslovakia was home to a minority of ethnic Germans who “became increasingly vocal with complaints of mistreatment at the hands of the Czech government” (85). Hitler hatched plans to invade Czechoslovakia on their behalf and was met with the mobilization of Czech forces. Representatives of other European powers organized the Munich Conference to negotiate a resolution between Germany and Czechoslovakia, ultimately reasoning that the Sudetenland should be granted to Germany.

Bergen highlights British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain as the “most famous spokesman” (85) of the Munich Conference. Though he is frequently criticized for his appeasement of Hitler, Bergen asserts that a greater show of force would not have prevented war. Shortly after the Sudetenland was ceded to Hitler, he ordered German troops to invade the rest of Czechoslovakia.

Kristallnacht, “the night of broken glass,” took place on November 9, 1938, the anniversary of the failed Beer Hall Putsch. Goebbels chose the name “Kristallnacht” to describe this pogrom, a mass riot enacted against an ethnic or religious group with the intent to massacre or expel. On Kristallnacht, 14,000 Polish Jews were violently expelled from Germany. Poland refused this diaspora reentry, resulting in weeks of “limbo” before they were permitted inside. The remaining Jewish community was forced to pay $500 million for the damages incurred that night, due to attacks on Jewish synagogues and other property by Nazi soldiers, activists, and rioters. Bergen writes,

The attackers did not spare Jewish homes. They forced their way in, robbing, beating, raping, and demolishing. Memoirs describe the cloud of feathers that surrounded Jewish residences as the aggressors slashed bedding in their quest for valuables and their lust for destruction. They burned scores of synagogues all over Germany and Austria and killed about a hundred Jews. Nazi authorities rounded up some twenty-six thousand Jewish men and sent them to concentration camps. Those men seized in the Kristallnacht pogrom were the first Jews in Germany arrested simply for being Jewish (87).

In May 1939, Germany established the Pact of Steel with Italy, laying the foundation for what would become the Rome-Berlin Axis. Throughout summer 1939, Germany established nonaggression treaties with Estonia, Latvia, and Denmark. That August, a German-Soviet NAP was also established. Stalin and Hitler divided Eastern Europe “between German and Soviet spheres of interest” (96), and Hitler publicly declared friendship with Stalin.

At this time, Hitler was openly calling for the “annihilation” of European Jews, and Germans had been steadily fleeing the country since 1933. German communists typically fled to Russia and were “forced into labor camps in Siberia, imprisoned, and even killed” (97). Likewise, famous German exiles included the likes of Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Marlene Dietrich. Jews, queers, liberals, pacifists, feminists, and other critics of National Socialism fled to the United States, Shanghai, Great Britain, Switzerland, Cuba, Canada, and Australia.

Chapters 3-4 Analysis

Chapters 3 and 4 chronical Germany’s transition from social discontentment to outright fascism. These chapters also trace the broad social trends that swept across Germany and greater Europe. In doing so, Bergen draws heavily from contemporary civilian testimony shared by both victims and perpetrators of Nazi violence. She also explores the details of the domestic policies and programs that shaped Nazi Germany.

Bergen’s frequent use of contemporary eyewitness testimony provides the reader with snapshots of everyday life in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe; these testimonials also lend a human element to towering events in Nazi Germany’s history. One autobiographer to whom Bergen frequently returns is Alfons Heck. Heck was a child during the events of Kristallnacht and witnessed the pogrom firsthand. He was also a committed Hitler Youth: “Alfons Heck recounts how he and another boy eagerly joined a crowd singing as it stormed a synagogue. For them, the pogrom was a chance to throw rocks and ‘smash some stuff’” (88). In his writings, Heck reflects on both his youthful credulity and passionate adherence to Nazi ideology. His work reveals an example of a German Nazi’s psyche at its most naïve.

Bergen presents the Nazi authorities as simultaneously brazen and sly. One example of this is the verbosely titled “Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditarily- and Congenitally-Based Illnesses” (99), a 1939 program that authorized the euthanasia of children with disabilities. Though the means this program proposed were extreme, the language in the document is clinically sterile and long-winded. Bergen refers to this program as “The Program to Kill Handicapped Children” (99). The bluntness and simplicity of her language lives up to War and Genocide’s promise to be concise and highlights the obfuscatory nature of Nazi language by contrast.