Abstract
Reviewed by: Paul Bookbinder, University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA, USA
Johann Chapoutot’s Law of Blood is intensively researched, tackles important questions, and is deeply disturbing. He argues that, by the time German armies were marching East during World War II, large numbers of Germans were prepared for a war of enslavement and extermination. They accepted the portrayal of the enemy, particularly the Jews, as less than human and, in fact, as vermin. The imagery in Fritz Hippler’s film, The Eternal Jew, was a common perception. Adolf Hitler’s words, SS publications, and many military communications presented Germany’s enemies, particularly Jews, by mirroring the words of Paul de Lagarde, ‘You don’t negotiate with trichina or bacilli. You exterminate them, as quickly and carefully as possible’ (400). Chapoutot observes that, ‘What had been virulent and hate filled but still largely metaphorical discourse in the nineteenth century became literal truth in Nazi Germany’ (400).
To gauge the extent of public support for Nazi ideas and programmes, the author uses a large variety of sources – books, speeches, newspapers, scholarly journals, films and posters – as the basis of his research. He concludes that, while the sources were varied in length, style and language, ‘Nevertheless, the texts I investigated were all based on postulates and assumptions; they followed specific paths of reasoning and formulated concepts that either explicitly or indirectly, by imitation or quotation, were present everywhere, including newsreels, films, ideological teaching materials, tracts, posters, and meeting agendas’ (409). Nazi ideological education had far-reaching goals. ‘It must unite the entire nation to uncompromising fanaticism’, Chapoutot observes, ‘and ensure that each person feels he is a soldier and a fighter for Adolf Hitler’ (245). Most significant is his conclusion that most Germans, along with the Nazi leaders, were true believers.
Chapoutot argues that racialization was key to the eugenics programme endorsed by political leaders and many doctors who supported Nazi policies designed to improve German society, and, with racialized biological criteria at its core, the eugenics programme logically expanded to euthanasia. The author is shocked by how many of the participating doctors still held these ideas years after the war’s end. The same biological criteria are manifested in the words of Joseph Meiniger, Director of the Central Department for the Repression of Homosexuality and Abortion, who declared that homosexuality was ‘Asiatic like the Jews, the plague and the rats, it too came from the East’ (228). The very existence of such a department speaks volumes about the nature of the Nazi regime. As Hitler contemplated Germany’s defeat in January 1944, his obsession with the Jews still dominated his thoughts. He declared, ‘The eternal Jew, the fomenter of destruction, will celebrate his second triumphal Purim among the ruins of a devastated Europe’ (179).
Nazi law was crucial to the implementation of Nazi doctrines and programmes, and Chapoutot demonstrates how major legal theorists and law professors worked to transform laws they viewed as corrupted by alien influence. They constructed a view of historical development to explain how the natural Aryan people’s law had been sullied. Reaching back to Rome to trace the origins of the corruption, and with greater concentration on Cardinal Richelieu and the Peace of Westphalia, they saw corrupting influences in France, the Pope, Internationalism, Liberalism, and of course the chief corrupters, the Jews. They argued that such laws were foreign to Aryan Germans and their history and had tragically become the basis of the Jewish-dominated liberal democratic society that had crippled Germany and was now being rejected and replaced. The legal scholar Chapoutot most frequently cites is Carl Schmitt who was among the most prominent German jurists to promote the reformulation of Nazi law. Schmitt had an international reputation, and, in the early years of the Nazi regime, he was a key player in dismantling liberal democratic law and endorsing Hitler as the embodiment and the arbiter of the new law. Consequently, Schmitt argued, because the Führer’s views now defined the law, it was impossible for him to violate true, German law.
The Nazis used merciless cruelty to further their objectives in their war of conquest and domination. Noting the effectiveness of this tactic in the earliest days in the war during the invasion of Poland and the destruction of much of Warsaw, Chapoutot argues, ‘The fate of the Polish capital most likely did weaken the desire to fight and resist among many French, Belgian and Dutch people’ (247). He also describes how the Nazis worked to reduce the Polish people to servile subjects and cites Hitler’s pronouncement that Poland could have only one master and therefore all the intellectuals had to be killed. In his speech to urge his troops to terrorize the Poles when the German army was about to invade Poland, Hitler borrowed from Wilhelm II’s Hunnrede, which had been designed to inspire the Imperial troops to ferocity towards the Chinese during the Boxer Rebellion, and bragged that ‘no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German’ (350). Chapoutot judges that while the German decimation of Poland may have worked for them in the invasion of the West, it certainly did not in their campaigns in the East. He argues, ‘It was precisely because the German Army and police forces had violated every law of war and humanity that they found themselves faced with the most desperate forms of resistance’ (255).
Chapoutot’s book will thus play a role in the ongoing debate to explain the Nazi war in the East and the widespread and enthusiastic participation of large numbers of Germans in the Nazi mass-murder programmes.