Volksgemeinschaft

Volksgemeinschaft (German for "people's community" or "folk community") is a concept that became central to Nazi Germany and Nazism. In Nazi usage it denoted a racially unified and hierarchically organized national body in which the interests of individuals were to be strictly subordinate to those of the nation, or Volk. The term, however, did not originate with the Nazis; it gained wide use during World War I and remained a dominant political idea in Weimar Germany before being adopted and reshaped by the Nazi Party.

Etymology and early usage

The word Volk is cognate with the English "folk" and can mean "people" in an ethnic or national sense. Gemeinschaft means "community". Among 19th-century scholars who used "Volksgemeinschaft" were Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, and others. The sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies had a lasting influence through his 1887 work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft ("Community and Society"), which contrasted organic community with modern contractual society. Tönnies later joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1932 to oppose the Nazis and protested their use of his ideas.

World War I and Weimar period

The idea of a people's community became widely current during World War I, when Germans rallied behind the war effort. In August 1914 the German Emperor Wilhelm II proclaimed that he no longer knew "parties, only Germans", a statement that resonated with many who hoped for unity across social and political divisions. This wartime truce was often called Burgfrieden ("peace in the castle"). After the November Revolution of 1918 and the establishment of the Weimar Republic, the concept of Volksgemeinschaft remained influential across the political spectrum. Liberals stressed a harmonizing, inclusive aspect "above classes"; the Social Democrats spoke of a community of all who worked; and republican figures such as Friedrich Ebert invoked Volksgemeinschaft to bind citizens to the new constitution. On the right, the term was used in opposition to Marxism and class struggle, and was taken up by the Nazi Party in the 1920s.

Nazi conception

For the Nazis, the creation of a Volksgemeinschaft was a central aim of their revolution. Adolf Hitler held that inequality between races and individuals was part of an unchangeable natural order and that the natural unit of mankind was the Volk, with the German Volk the greatest. The state was to serve the Volk; the Weimar Republic was portrayed as having betrayed that mission. All morality and truth were judged by whether they served the interest and preservation of the Volk. The unity of the Volk was held to be embodied in the Führer, who possessed absolute authority.

Membership in the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft was defined by race. Only people of "Aryan blood" could be full members; Jews and others deemed non-Aryan or racially harmful were excluded. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 forbade marriage or sexual relations between Jews and Germans and assigned Jews a lower legal status. The regime presented its project as "Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer" ("One empire, one people, one leader") and directed hostility against socialists, Jews, and those it accused of having "stabbed in the back" the German army in World War I.

Nazi policy combined racial purification with measures intended to strengthen the "Aryan" population. The Law for the Protection of Hereditary Health (July 1933) allowed for the sterilization of people deemed hereditarily unfit. The Marriage Subsidy Law of 1933 aimed to raise the birth rate among "Aryan" couples through loans that were partly forgiven with the birth of children. The legal and political framework built around the Volksgemeinschaft was part of the basis on which the Holocaust was later carried out.

Volksgenossen and Gemeinschaftsfremde

Nazi legal and administrative practice divided Germans into those who belonged to the Volksgemeinschaft—Volksgenossen ("fellow nationals" or "comrades of the people")—and those who did not: the Gemeinschaftsfremde ("community aliens" or "alien to the community"). The 1920 NSDAP programme stated that only a Volksgenosse could be a citizen, and only "German blood" could make one a Volksgenosse; no Jew could therefore be a Volksgenosse. The inclusion of Volksgenossen went together with the exclusion and persecution of those classified as Gemeinschaftsfremde.

Propaganda and mobilization

The regime gave the "folk community" a prominent place in propaganda. It presented the events of 1933 as a "Volkwerdung"—a people coming into its own—and portrayed individuals as part of a greater whole. Organisations such as the Hitler Youth, the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the Winterhilfswerk (Winter Relief), and the Reich Labour Service were presented as embodiments of the Volksgemeinschaft. Welfare bodies such as the National Socialist People's Welfare directed aid to "racially worthy" Germans and excluded Jews and others deemed unfit. The regime continued and expanded social welfare initiatives from the Weimar period and used campaigns such as Winter Relief to foster a sense of shared sacrifice and to reinforce racial ideology.

Historiographical debate

Historians disagree over whether a Volksgemeinschaft was ever realised as a social reality between 1933 and 1945. It is widely accepted that the "Volksgemeinschaft" as proclaimed by the regime did not exist as an actual, unified social order; structural differences of class and status persisted. Some scholars have treated the term mainly as a propaganda formula. Others have argued that the promise of Volksgemeinschaft and the regime's mobilising efforts—for example through the labour service and Winter Relief—produced a "felt equality" or sense of belonging among much of the non-Jewish population that helped secure loyalty to the regime. One approach is to study Volksgemeinschaft not as a fixed social fact but as a set of practices—the ways in which inclusion and exclusion were produced, and how people aligned with or distanced themselves from the regime.

See also

• Blood and soil
• Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft
• Nazism
• Volk
• Weimar Republic