I

If there was one achievement through which the Weimar Republic could claim the loyalty and gratitude of the masses, it was the creation of a new welfare state. Of course, Germany did not lack welfare institutions before 1914, particularly since Bismarck had pioneered such things as health insurance, accident insurance and old age pensions in an attempt to wean the working classes away from Social Democracy. Bismarck’s schemes, which were elaborated and extended in the years following his departure from office, were pioneering in their day, and cannot be dismissed simply as fig-leaves for governmental authoritarianism. Some of them, notably the health insurance system, covered millions of workers by 1914 and incorporated a substantial element of self-governance that gave many workers the chance of electoral participation. Yet none of these schemes reached anywhere near the bottom of the social scale, where police-administered poor relief, bringing with it the deprivation of civil rights including the right to vote, was the norm right to the end of the Wilhelmine period. Still, even here, the operation of the system had been reformed and standardized by 1914, and the new profession of social work that had emerged on the back of the Bismarckian reforms was busy assessing and regulating the poor, the unemployed and the destitute as well as the ordinary worker.¹⁶⁷

On the basis of this modern version of Prussian bureaucratic paternalism, however, the Weimar Republic erected a far more elaborate and comprehensive structure, combining, not without tension, the twin influences of social Catholicism and Protestant philanthropy on the one hand, and Social Democratic egalitarianism on the other.¹⁶⁸ The Weimar constitution itself was full of far-reaching declarations of principle about the importance of family life and the need for the state to support it, the government’s duty to protect young people from harm, the citizen’s right to work, and the nation’s obligation to provide everybody with a decent home.¹⁶⁹ On the basis of such principles, a whole raft of legislation was steered through the Reichstag, from laws dealing with youth welfare (1922) and juvenile courts (1923) to regulations providing relief and job training for the war disabled (1920), decrees replacing poor relief with public welfare (1924) and above all, as we have seen, the statutory provision of unemployment benefits in 1927. Existing schemes of health insurance, pensions and the like were further elaborated and extended to all. Massive housing schemes, many of them socially innovative, were initiated, with over 300,000 new or renovated homes being provided between 1927 and 1930 alone. The number of hospital beds increased by 50 per cent from prewar days, and the medical profession also expanded accordingly to keep pace. Infectious diseases declined sharply, and a network of clinics and social welfare institutions now supported socially vulnerable individuals, from single mothers to youths who got into trouble with the police.¹⁷⁰

The creation of a free and comprehensive welfare system as the entitlement of all its citizens was one of the major achievements of the Weimar Republic, perhaps in retrospect its most important. But for all its elaboration, it failed in the end to live up to the grandiose promises made in the 1919 constitution; and the gap between promise and delivery ended by having a major effect on the legitimacy of the Republic in the eyes of many of its citizens. First, the economic difficulties that the Republic experienced almost from the outset placed a burden on its welfare system that it was simply unable to sustain. There were very large numbers of people who required support as a result of the war. Some 13 million German men served in the armed forces between 1914 and 1918. Over two million of them were killed. According to one estimate, this was the equivalent of one death for every 35 inhabitants of the Reich. This was nearly twice the proportion of war deaths in the United Kingdom, where one soldier died for every 66 inhabitants, and almost three times that of Russia, where there was one war death for every III inhabitants. By the end of the war, over half a million German women were left as war widows and a million German children were without fathers. About 2.7 million men came back from the war with wounds, amputations and disabilities, to form a permanent source of discontent as the politicians’ promised rewards for their service to the nation failed to materialize to anyone’s satisfaction.

The government increased taxes on the better-off to try and cope, until the real tax burden virtually doubled as a percentage of real national income, from 9 per cent in 1913 to 17 per cent in 1925, according to one admittedly biased estimate.¹⁷¹ Yet this was in no way enough to cover expenditure, and governments dared not go any further for fear of being accused of raising tax revenues to pay reparations and alienating even further those who paid the most taxes. Not only did the economy have to bear the burden of unemployment insurance after 1927, it was in 1926 still paying pensions to nearly 800,000 disabled former soldiers and 360,000 war widows, and supporting over 900,000 fatherless children and orphans, and all this on top of an existing system of state support for the elderly. The payment of pensions took up a higher proportion of state expenditure than anything apart from reparations.¹⁷² Finally, the welfare system boosted an already swollen bureaucracy in the Reich and the federated states, which increased in size by 40 per cent between 1914 and 1923, almost doubling the cost of public administration per head of the German population in the process.¹⁷³ Such massive expenditure might have been feasible in a booming economy, but in the crisis-racked economic situation of the Weimar Republic it was simply not possible without printing money and fuelling inflation, as happened between 1919 and 1923, or, from 1924, by cutting back on payments, reducing the staffing levels of state welfare institutions and imposing ever more stringent means-testing on claimants.

Many claimants thus quickly realized that the welfare system was not paying them as much as they needed. Local administrators were particularly stingy, since local authorities bore a sizeable proportion of the financial burden of welfare payments. They frequently demanded that claimants should hand over their savings or their property as a condition of receiving support. Welfare snoopers reported on hidden sources of income and encouraged neighbours to send in denunciations of those who refused to reveal them. Moreover, welfare agencies, lacking the staff necessary to process a large number of claims rapidly, caused endless delays in responding to applications for support as they corresponded with other agencies to see if claimants had received benefits previously, or tried to shift the burden of supporting them elsewhere. Thus, the Weimar welfare administration quickly became an instrument of discrimination and control, as officials made it clear to claimants that they would only receive the minimum due to them, and enquired intrusively into their personal circumstances to ensure that this was the case.

None of this endeared the Republic to those whom it was intended to help. Complaints, rows, fisticuffs, even demonstrations were far from uncommon inside and outside welfare offices. A sharp insight into the kind of problems which the welfare system was confronting, and the way it went about dealing with them, is provided by the example of a saddler and upholsterer, Adolf G.¹⁷⁴ Born in 1892, Adolf had fought in the 1914- 18 war and sustained a serious injury - not in a heroic battle against the enemy, however, but from a kick in his stomach by a horse. It required no fewer than six intestinal operations in the early 1920s. An old industrial accident and a family with six children put him into further categories of welfare entitlement apart from war injury. Unable to find a job after the war, he devoted himself to campaigning for state support instead. But the local authorities in Stuttgart demanded as a condition of continuing his accident benefits after 1921 that he surrender his radio receiver and aerial, since these were banned from the municipal housing in which he lived. When he refused to do this, he was evicted with his family, a move to which he responded with a vigorous campaign of letter-writing to the authorities, including the Labour Ministry in Berlin. He acquired a typewriter to make his letters more legible and tried to acquire other kinds of benefits reflecting his situation as a war invalid and a father of a large family. The conflict escalated. In 1924 he was imprisoned for a month and a half for assisting an attempted abortion, presumably because he and his wife thought that in the circumstances six children were enough; in 1927 he was fined for insulting behaviour; in 1930 his benefits were cut and restricted to certain purposes such as the purchase of clothes, while his housing allowance was paid direct to his landlord; he was charged in 1931 with welfare fraud because he had been trying to make a little money on the side as a rag-and-bone man, and again in 1933 for busking. He approached political organizations of the right and left in order to get help. An attempt to persuade the authorities that he needed three times more food than the average man because his stomach injury left him unable to digest most of what he ate was rebuffed with stony formality. In 1931, at the end of his tether, he wrote to the Labour Ministry in Berlin comparing the Stuttgart welfare officials to robber barons of the Middle Ages.¹⁷⁵

What angered the somewhat obsessive Adolf G. was not just the poverty in which he and his family were condemned to live, but still more the insults done to his honour and standing even in the lower reaches of German society by a welfare apparatus that seemed determined to question his motives and his entitlements in seeking the support that he felt he deserved. The anonymous, rule-bound welfare bureaucracy insulted his individuality. Such feelings were far from uncommon among welfare claimants, particularly where their claim for support resulted from the sacrifices they had made during the war. The huge gulf between the Weimar Republic’s very public promises of a genuinely universal welfare system based on need and entitlement, and the harsh reality of petty discrimination, intrusion and insult to which many claimants were exposed on the part of the welfare agencies, did nothing to strengthen the legitimacy of the constitution in which these promises were enshrined.¹⁷⁶

More ominous by far, however, was the fact that health and welfare agencies, determined to create rational and scientifically informed ways of dealing with social deprivation, deviance and crime, with the ultimate aim of eliminating them from German society in generations to come, encouraged new policies that began to eat away at the civil liberties of the poor and the handicapped. As the social welfare administration mushroomed into a huge bureaucracy, so the doctrines of racial hygiene and social biology, already widespread among welfare professionals before the war, began to acquire more influence. The belief that heredity played some part in many kinds of social deviance, including not only mental deficiency and physical disability but also chronic alcoholism, persistent petty criminality and even ‘moral idiocy’ in groups such as prostitutes (many of whom were in fact forced into sex work by economic circumstances), hardened into a dogma. Medical scientists and social administrators began to compile elaborate card-indexes of the ‘asocial’, as such deviants were now commonly called. Liberal penal reformers argued that, while some inmates in state prisons could be reclaimed for society by the right sort of educational programmes, a great many of them were completely incorrigible, largely because of the inherited degeneracy of their character.¹⁷⁷ The police played their part, too, identifying a large number of ‘professional criminals’ and ‘habitual offenders’ to place under intensive surveillance. This frequently became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as surveillance and identification left released prisoners no chance of engaging in an honest trade. In Berlin alone, the police fingerprint collection numbered over half a million ten-finger cards by 1930.¹⁷⁸

The spread of such ideas through the professional worlds of medicine, law enforcement, penal administration and social work had very real consequences. Psychologists asked to assess the mental health of convicted criminals began to use biological criteria, as in the case of an unemployed vagrant, Florian Huber, convicted of armed robbery and murder in Bavaria in 1922: ‘Huber’, concluded a psychological assessment of the young man, who had suffered severe injuries in war action, earning him the award of the Iron Cross,

although in other respects he cannot be proven to be hereditarily damaged, demonstrated some physical evidence of degeneracy: the structure of his physiognomy is asymmetrical to the extent that the right eye is situated markedly lower than the left, he has a tendency towards full-thfoatedness, his earlobes are elongated, and above all he has been a stutterer since youth.¹⁷⁹

This was taken as evidence, not that he was unfit to stand trial, but that he was incorrigible and should therefore be executed, which indeed he was. Legal officials in many parts of Germany now made liberal use of terms such as ‘vermin’ or ‘pest’ to describe criminals, denoting a new, biological way of conceptualizing the social order as a kind of body, from which harmful parasites and alien micro-organisms had to be removed if it was to flourish. In the search for more precise and comprehensive ways of defining and applying such concepts, a medical expert, Theodor Viernstein, founded a ‘Criminal-Biological Information Centre’ in Bavaria in 1923, to gather information about all known criminal offenders, their families and their background, and thereby to identify hereditary chains of deviance. By the end of the decade Viernstein and his collaborators had collected a vast index of cases and were well on the way to realizing their dream. Soon, similar centres had been founded in Thuringia, Württemberg and Prussia as well. Many experts thought that once such dynasties of ‘inferior’ human beings had been mapped out, compulsory sterilization was the only way to prevent them reproducing themselves further.¹⁸⁰

In 1920 two such experts, the lawyer Karl Binding and the forensic psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, went one crucial step beyond this and argued, in a short book in which they coined the phrase ‘a life unworthy of life’, that what they called ‘ballast existences’, people who were nothing but a burden on the community, should simply be killed. The incurably ill and the mentally retarded were costing millions of marks and taking up thousands of much-needed hospital beds, they argued. So doctors should be allowed to put them to death. This was an ominous new development in the debate over what to do with the mentally ill, the handicapped, the criminal and the deviant. In the Weimar Republic it still met with impassioned hostility on the part of most medical men. The Republic’s fundamental insistence on the rights of the individual prevented even the doctrine of compulsory sterilization from gaining any kind of official approval, and many doctors and welfare officers still doubted the ethical legitimacy or social effectiveness of such a policy. The very considerable influence of the Catholic Church and its welfare agencies was also directed firmly against such policies. As long as economic circumstances made it possible to imagine that the Republic’s social aspirations could one day be realized, the continuing debate on compulsory sterilization and involuntary ‘euthanasia’ remained unresolved.¹⁸¹