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Ostraum, The Holocaust, and the Thousand Year Reich
From the Here There Are Blueberries further learning guide
By Chase J. Padusniak
When we look back now, the rise of Nazism seems like a forgone conclusion. In school, and even from our families for some, we hear about the quick rise and begrudging fall of Adolf Hitler and his genocidal movement, the undeniable bravery it took to defeat a hate-filled party imbued with historical necessity. But this is only true in retrospect. In reality, the rise of Nazism was a process filled with setbacks, serendipities, and unexpected turns. When we view the Third Reich as a foregone conclusion, one that required no apathy or complicity from everyday people, we misread, fall into Sontag’s false reality trap, as if the image were the thing, and as if lives and memories were static rather than dynamic.
In 1923, Adolf Hitler first attempted to take power by leading a putsch and a halfcocked rush to Berlin, modeled on Benito Mussolini’s famous March on Rome. It failed. While incarcerated, he finished writing his autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf, a work rife with the hate that would later characterize the regime. Hitler’s popularity among locals in Munich, including with the judge at his two trials, Georg Neithardt, led to few consequences despite this violent attempt to seize power. He began to believe that the democratic path, coupled with the tacit and explicit support of prominent professionals and leaders, would prove a better way. He was right. From the late 1920s onward, regular elections produced unstable governing coalitions. At the same time, Hitler’s party exploited this instability and continued its rise, tailoring its approach to individual voting blocs, including farmers suffering from falling prices and inflation, anticommunists, antisemites, and nationalists disturbed by defeat in World War I. In 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler, head of the largest party in parliament, chancellor. A career soldier and statesman, Hindenburg thought he could control the new leader. He was wrong.
Four weeks later, the Reichstag or parliament building burned. A young Dutch communist was blamed, though Hitler may have secretly ordered the arson. The shock to the nation allowed the Nazis to push for the suspension of most civil liberties. What we now think of as the Nazizeit, or Nazi Period, had begun. German professionals, by and large, submitted to the new project.
Acquiescence meant that a consolidation of power followed. In 1934, the Nazis purged prominent members of the Sturmabteiling (SA), which had previously acted as the party’s shock troops in beating Jews and other undesirables. Only four years later on the night of November 9-10, 1938, the Nazis led and allowed pogroms, property destruction, and the burning of synagogues. These events are now known as Kristallnacht. This attack on German Jews came long before there was an Auschwitz or extermination camps. And yet, the violent assault is a prelude to what we now know transpired. What could have taken the Nazis from these first steps to their so-called “Final Solution”?
Aktion T4, a concerted campaign of forced euthanasia for the disabled and chronically infirm inspired by early 20th-century American experiments in eugenics, furnishes a key precursor. Led by soldier and former philosophy student Philipp Bouhler and Hitler’s personal physician Karl Brandt, this program, which began in 1939, killed between 275,000-300,000 people in an effort to improve the Reich’s “racial hygiene.” As World War II began, the drive to clear out eastern territories grew, leading the chemist and SS functionary August Becker to design gas vans that could be used to kill large numbers of people quickly and efficiently with carbon monoxide. A means to “scientific” mass murder had finally been invented.
After 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, the Nazis accelerated this policy of “efficient” murder. If Hitler’s Reich was really to last one thousand years, it would need space, space to the East of what was then Germany, on which to settle and proliferate the Aryan race. They called this land Ostraum or “Eastern Space,” the land which, as Nazi economist and head of the Reichsbank Walther Funk put it, was “rich in raw materials and not yet opened up [to] Europe, [it] will be Europe’s promising colonial land.” The Nazis began removing the local population, especially its Jews, vastly overpopulating the existing forced labor camp system, and leading the authorities to build more and more.
