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Race, “value” and the hierarchy of human life: ideological and structural determinants of national socialist policy-making

Since the 1980s the idea that National Socialism possessed an overwhelmingly rigid nucleus of values, focusing on race and a strong belief in the mission of the German Volk, has commanded the majority view of the historiography. In many occasions this argument has been used in order to cast shadow on “generic” interpretation of fascism, extracting Hitler’s movement and regime from the framework of a common fascist “ideal type” in interwar Europe. The centrality of the racial factor in National Socialist Germany, with all its far-reaching implications in the areas of procreation, hygiene and eugenics, was obviously not replicated in other “fascist” cases. While many other interwar movements and regimes were openly racist (anti-Semitism is but one facet of this belief) and introduced fairly systematic policies of racial discrimination and persecution, nowhere else was this project elevated to the status of a defining ideological and political orientation. As Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann stressed in their seminal work on Nazi racialism, the National Socialist state was unique in its function as a primarily “racial state.” Even at the height of their racist/anti-Semitic fervour other “fascist” movements/regimes never treated the concept of race in a singular and unyielding fashion that amounted to an ideological sine qua non. 4 It is not the aim of this article to challenge the centrality of racialist ideology in the intellectual and political orientation of the National Socialist state. However, quite like National Socialist ideology appealed to an instituted society with longterm social and moral values, quite like the Nazi state emerged through a compromise between pre-existing political forms and Nazi intentions, the NS concept of “race” in itself was embedded into the values of German society and politics alongside an array of intrinsic and extraneous factors. From a Nazi point of view, it operated as a blanket metaphorical term with both qualitative (“health of the Volksgemeinschaft”) and quantitative (birth rate, “strength in numbers”) Journal of Genocide Research (2005), 7(1), March, 5–30