ABSTRACT
Martyn Housden’s article, True believer: racism and one Nazi ideologist, investigates the convictions of an official in the Third Reich. The true believer in question is Helmut Nicolai, who studied state, law, and economics and completed a doctoral thesis before entering the civil service. His early essays on economics were ripe with anti-Semitism. In a study written in 1933 and dedicated to Adolf Hitler, he advocated a racial definition of German citizenship which partly anticipated the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935. During 1934-1935, Nicolai was thrown out of the Party following a bitter professional fight and, eventually, banned from publishing for the life of the Third Reich. The process of expulsion involved an extreme personal attack and accusations of homosexuality. Banned from working in state and industry by the occupying Allies, he refused to distance himself from his earlier convictions, continuing to author doctrines of inheritance and race. The article poses the wider question of what weight to assign to personal, subjective motivation from the point of view of historiography. To functionalist historians like Martin Broszat (1966, 1981) and Hans Mommsen, (1976, 1991), racism was not important in its own right, but only
as a tool to bind together National Socialism’s heterogeneous body of support. The author argues that functionalist approaches fail to explain why racial imagery here became acceptable as a propaganda device, why some people chose knowingly to put themselves in positions where they had to compete over specifically racial policies; and they leave open the possibility that racism, for some people, was not just something to be pursued for other reasons, such as material expediency, but rather a matter of principle. As against Zygmunt Bauman’s (1989) famous critique of bureaucracy and modernity which de-emphasises anti-Semitism in the Holocaust, Housden argues that this interpretation underestimates intrinsic human capacities for reflection and exercise of moral imagination. The persecution of the Jews involved more than careerism and a commitment to being a disinterested state official. Without a shared spirit and ideological conviction, Hitler’s officials could barely have carried out their horrible jobs day in and day out. Housden makes use of Erich Fromm’s psychoanalysis, which emphasises the importance of Man’s choosing, reasoning, problem-solving capacity, and how having to solve problems on our own responsibility can leave us lonely and entail considerable stress, so that people may fear their essential human freedom and try to escape it. Helmut Nicolai’s unshakable attachment to doctrines of inheritance was an attempt to address the pressing problems of the 1920s in the economy and state. Rather than reasoning freely, he rooted himself in the anti-Semitism and pseudo-science of the day. His economic and his legal texts stressed what he thought of as the traditional German virtue of constancy. About the personal side to Nicolai’s commitment to race and inheritance, we are told that his book Der Stammbaum Christi (1950a) is dedicated to his mother, whose maiden name was Mannel. He wrote extensively about his mother’s family lineage, showing that it contained distinguished civil servants. Rejected by the Prussian army but taken up by the civil service, Nicolai saw himself as inheriting the privilege that went with the Mannel family, which marked him out as something special and successful. By contrast, Nicolai’s memoirs tell us very little about his father, an officer in the Prussian army who died when he was eighteen, and whose career he failed to follow. He later disparaged traditional Prussian virtues like obedience and militarism. Thus, to point to a paradox the author leaves unexplained, one might state that Nicolai did and did not believe firmly in heredity, in so far as he blotted out his father
and his father’s line, dwelling solely on that of his mother. Combating his fear of aloneness intellectually, professionally, and personally, it is concluded, a doctrine of inheritance and racism bolstered Nicolai’s selfcertainty in a number of ways, which is why, when he died in December 1955, he had not recanted his beliefs.
