The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi

513 Pages·2018·3.5 MB·English

by  Johann Chapoutot

The Law of Blood

The Law of Blood
Thinking and Acting as a Nazi
Johann Chapoutot
Translated by Miranda Richmond Mouillot
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
cambridge, mas sa chu setts • london, england
2018
Copyright © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
First Printing
This book was originally published as La loi du sang: Penser et agir
en nazi © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2014
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Chapoutot, Johann, author. | Richmond Mouillot, Miranda, translator.
Title: The law of blood : thinking and acting as a Nazi / Johann Chapoutot ;
translated by Miranda Richmond Mouillot.
Other titles: Loi du sang. En glish
Description: Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts : The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2018. | “This book was originally published as La loi du sang:
Penser et agir en nazi © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2014.” |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017039800 | ISBN 9780674660434 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: National socialism— Historiography. | National socialism—
Moral and ethical aspects. | Antisemitism— Germany— History—
20th  century. | Germany— Politics and government—1933–1945.
Classification: LCC DD256.5 .C547513 2018 | DDC 940.53 / 43— dc23
LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2017039800
Jacket image: Farming Family from Kalenberg, 1939, by Alfred Wessel.
Property of the Federal Republic of Germany / Bridgeman Images

Jacket design: Graciela Galup
To Marie Anna —J.C.
To Armand Jacoubovitch —M.R.M.

Contents
Introduction 1
part i: procreating
1. Origins: Nature, Essence, Genesis 23
2. Alienation: Acculturation and Denaturing 64
3. Restoration: Re nais sances 112
part ii: fighting
4. “All Life Is Strug gle” 155
5. The War Within: Fighting the Volksfremde 194
6. The War Outside: “Harshness Makes the Future Kind” 242
part iii: reigning
7. The International Order of Westphalia and Versailles:
Finis Germaniae 277
8. The Reich and Colonization of the Eu ro pean East 321
9. The Millennium as Frontier 353
Conclusion 405
Notes 417
Bibliography 457
Glossary 483
Index 489

Introduction
In 1945, eigh teen physicians from Hamburg, all of them on the staff
of the Rothenburgsort Pediatric Hospital, were brought before the
German criminal justice system at the behest of the British Occupying
Forces. All eigh teen were charged with murdering, or acting as acces-
sories to the murder of, fifty- six children who had been diagnosed as
permanently unfit between 1939 and 1945, by means of lethal injection.
In 1949, the Landgericht (regional court) of Hamburg dismissed the
charges. Yes, “it has been objectively verified” that “at least fifty- six
children were killed at the Rothenburgsort Pediatric Hospital.” Yes,
these acts were “against the law.” The judges argued, however, that
“all of the defendants . . . deny their guilt . . . and contest the charge
that they committed any acts in objective violation of the law, explaining
that they believed their actions to be permitted u nder the law.”1
The physicians’ arguments were in fact sound. In his exchanges
with the British investigators, the hospital’s director, Dr. Wilhelm
Bayer, objected strenuously to the charge of a “crime against humanity.”
“Such a crime,” he asserted, “can only be committed against p eople,
whereas the living creatures that we were required to treat could not
be qualified as ‘ human beings.’ ”2 Dr. Bayer, with great sincerity, kept
reiterating that doctors and legal experts had for de cades been advising
modern governments to shed the weight of useless mouths, burdens
that hampered their military and economic per for mance. These beings
were barely h uman, they asserted; they were corrupted biological ele-
ments, and their defects and pathologies risked being passed on if they
reproduced. The doctor’s words reflect the recent discovery of the laws
of heredity, as well as lingering fear from the panics that swept Eu ro-
pean society at the close of the nineteenth c entury and in the after-
math of the First World War. On July 14, 1933, the Nazi government
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