“Why, that is awful, Milo!” declared Arabella. “How could those poor Germans live? Why would the winners so terribly mistreat the helpless, defeated Germans?”
“Some of the oldest reasons in the human lexicon, Arabella: envy, greed, revenge and hatred. The French were leaders in heaping every possible indignity and humiliation on Germany, Austria and Turkey, which countries had been their principal opponents in the war. Then their occupation troops sat back and watched while the German people starved, sold everything that had not already been expropriated for little or nothing just to keep themselves and their families alive for a few more days or weeks or months. Few Germans had meaningful income, for many factories had had to close because of total lack of capital, and none of the international banking houses would extend credit on reasonable terms to the defeated, robbed and stripped German nation or any of its businessmen and industrialists.
“In such an atmosphere, in a nation aswarm with unemployed men, many of them former soldiers, those extremists who find their most fertile fields to be helpless, hopeless, frustrated and desperate people flourished—Communists, Anarchists, Fascists, religious fanatics of every stripe and persuasion, visionaries, perverts and out-and-out lunatics. Two groups finally emerged from the chaos as the major contenders. One was the Communist Party, which very nearly took over the southern portion of Germany, Bavaria. The other was a group calling itself the National Socialist German Workers Party—the Nazis, for short.
“Both of these major contenders formed bands of armed men—virtual private armies—and waged pitched battles in the streets and the countryside, while the overworked police and the tiny, ill-equipped army rushed madly from place to place in vain attempts to maintain some semblance of order, lest the occupiers take more severe action against the nation and people as a whole.
“Although both parties were made up of extremely violent, sadistic, murderous and clearly psychotic men, large numbers of otherwise sane and ordinary Germans flocked to swell their ranks and to give them support in attempts to legally attain to public office. They did this for two basic reasons, Arabella. The near takeover of Bavaria by the Communists had horribly frightened a great many people, and these Nazis, if they were nothing else, were clearly, openly, avowedly anti-Communists. The other reason was that they offered something that the legitimate, but foreign-imposed, government could not offer. They offered hope—hope of a brighter future in a strong, powerful, respected Germany, a Germany freed of its crushing debts and of its virtual enslavement to alien peoples and nations, a Germany in which all of the traditional German lands would be reunited and all people of German blood would be citizens, a Germany in which there was work and bread for all Germans, a Germany flushed clean of foreign troops and of alien ideologies and once more united behind a single, strong leader—the German word for ‘leader’ is Fuhrer, Arabella—such as their Kaisers had supposedly all been.
“The German parliament was called the Reichstag, and early in the 1930s, a large number of Nazi members were voted into it, whereupon the feeble, dying, politically impotent old onetime field marshal who was the figurehead that the victors had imposed upon the vanquished to govern them had no alternative but to name the leader of that party, one Adolf Hitler, to the Reichschancellorship. Very shortly thereafter, the old field marshal died and then the new Reichschancellor took up all the reins of government and began to shape the nation and its policies to conform to standards laid down by him and his personal advisers and staff.
“In his long and rocky road to power, Hitler had gathered about him a singular crew of men, some of them the very dregs of any imaginable society—sociopaths, sexual perverts, sadists, hatemongers of the worst sort, alcoholics and narcotics addicts, and a few brilliant but mentally and emotionally twisted men. The only thread that had held them all together through so many vicissitudes, through years of difficulties that had included shootings, stabbings, beatings resulting in not a few deaths within their ranks, persecution and imprisonment by the legal government, uncertainty every morning of whether or not the evening might find them in a jail or a coffin, that thread had been their belief in the goals of National Socialism and the personal charisma of their chosen leader, Adolf Hitler.
“Once installed in more or less legal office, however, Hitler found certain of the men who had with their blood and suffering put him where he was a definite liability, and he took care of that liability in a very firm and permanent manner: he had another group of his personal thugs—the Schutzstaffel or SS—murder the most of them, which deed so terrified the rest of them that he never had trouble from them again.
“Now Hitler and certain others of his cronies had early on become imbued with some crackpot theories of inborn racial superiority. That is to say, they had mentally divided all of the world’s people into two classes, which they called by the names of Herrenvolk and Untermenschen. Herrenvolk were all said by them to be tall, muscular, highly intelligent, fair of hair and skin, blue or gray of eyes, with oval skulls, fine facial features and a natural noble bearing—which constituted a type that very few of Hitler’s original staff fitted very well, least of all Adolf Hitler himself.
“The so-called Untermenschen were made up of everyone else of every race and ethnicity inall of the world. Herrenvolk means ‘superpeople,’ Arabella, while Untermenschen has the meanings of ‘submen’ or ‘barely human.’ The Nazis felt that it was the inescapable destiny of the few superpeople to rule, be the slave-masters of the vast hosts of subpeople, and in order to, make certain that there should be no further mixing of the precious Herrenvolk blood with the inferior peoples, they used and abused their power, going to extremes that were ridiculous and lunatic and would have been considered ludicrous, had the end results not been so ghastly, so terrible, so sickening to all decent men.
“It began innocently enough with a form of state-controlled marriage licensing—Herrenvolk were not allowed to marry anyone not of reasonably pure Herrenvolk descent—and encouragement of Herrenvolk wives to breed more of their approved kind, with honors and money given to those who produced larger than usual numbers of children. The next step was to mandate that unmarried Herrenvolk women and girls fornicate with pure Herrenvolk men—mostly officers and other ranks of the aforementioned SS, with the single-minded purpose of producing still more Herrenvolk children for the future of the race, the party and the state. Up to that point, the Nazi racial-purity obsession could at the very worst have been considered to be but a form of nationalism taken to ridiculous, insane extremes, for there was not then anything approaching a pure race upon the face of the earth, with the widely scattered exceptions of some few tiny tribes of stone-age primitives.
“But there was another side of the Herrenvolk coin, Arabella, and that other side was far more sinister and more dangerous to all other races upon the earth. It consisted of nothing less than the total extirpation or enslavement of all peoples not, by the peculiar standards of the Nazis, racially pure Herrenvolk.
“Soon after the Nazis took power in Germany, and then in the German-speaking nation of Austria, camps had been established to contain dissident elements such as Communists, criminals, deviant types and the physically or mentally abnormal. Later, leaders and members of religious groups that opposed various aspects of state policy were added. These people all were, in the beginning at least, legally tried and sentenced to these camps; and, though primitive and brutal, these camps were really labor camps wherein the residents worked at manual labor for the length of their sentences, then were freed.