More Dull German History—The Stuff That Led to Nazism

Are you ready for yet another brief history lesson? History is important because the mistakes, hatreds and prejudices of the past will ever emerge anew, albeit in different forms. This time I speak about the rise of nationalism in Germany and how that led to Nazism and their horrible attempts to cleanse Germany of Jews, Gypsies and others to create a pure Aryan race.

Of course, there's no one definition of nationalism. A nation is not a state. A nation is not simply an ethnic group, although many would like to make it so. It seems that a nation is defined as a group of people who view themselves as united. So in the United States, we have always struggled with what it means to be a nation. We have continued to this very day with a healthy tension between the rights of individual states and the control of the federal government.

But back to Germany in the late 19th century. Until 1871 Germany was nothing but a fragmented patchwork of states of all kinds and sizes. It had been so since the 16th century reformation. Some were called kingdoms. Others were called duchies. Yet others were city states. There were Prussians, Saxons, Bavarians, Austrians and Hungarians. The two most powerful nations dominated by German-speaking aristocrats were the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire. The Austrians had many ethnic groups. German-speaking people had no absolute numerical majority. In 1867 the Austrian House of Hapsburg agreed to share power with the central European Kingdom of Hungary, forming the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the second largest in Europe, after Russia.

Not to be outdone, the Kingdom of Prussia under Prince Wilhelm Frederick and his Chancellor or Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck created the Second Reich—Hitler later formed the Third Reich. Wilhelm was declared German Emperor. The emperor was president of the new federation, with a bunch of other dukes and principalities sharing in the rule of the new nation.

 I won't go into all the complicated politics, jealousies, tensions, attempted assassinations and revolutions that ultimately led to the horrors of World War I. The only point I wish to make is that Bismarck's new empire was a disappointment to those who longed for a unified Germany. The Second Reich did not include Austria.

In the imagination of these pan-Germans, there was no room for Jews. They were not part of the Aryan race, but rather a rootless, desert people who exploited true Germans. They had no right to be called Germans.

Anti-Semitism was strong across Europe and particularly in Germany and France. By the time of Bismarck, over sixty years before Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the idea of a German race, the Aryans, dominated the imaginations of millions. Hitler did not create anti-Semitism. He exploited it to his own ends as he formed a truly German-Aryan nation that included Austria.