National comrade

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The word Volksgenosse ( Vg., Vgn. For short ) has been traceable since 1798 and was originally used emphatically exaggerated for “compatriot”. At the beginning of the 20th century, Volksgenosse was also used in the sense of “member of a solidaristic social community”. Early sect-like ethnic groups attached the term to the meaning of "member of the blood community".

time of the nationalsocialism

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In point 4 of the 25-point program of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) from 1920 it was stipulated: “You can only be a citizen if you are a national. Only those who are of German blood can be a national, regardless of their denomination . No Jew can therefore be a national comrade. ”As a result, the term was semantically limited to its racial ideological component at this time .

In his 1924 work Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler coined the terms “people's and racial comrades ” and “racially and nationally conscious people's comrades ” as an opposite of the address “ comrade, comrade ” in socialist organizations (e.g. SPD , KPD ).

After 1933, was member of the race for the much-used word in the Third Reich , were initiated with the speeches and rallies. It was a uniform address for all members of the national community , whereby all alien in the sense of the ideology were excluded by the term. Only those who were pure blood according to the racial doctrine could also be a national. In National Socialist parlance , the three accents mentioned above merged. The focus was on the racial aspect: the term excluded “non -German-blooded ” citizens from the start. Population groups that were defined as " anti-social " or "disabled" were not considered to be national comrades. An appeal was made to the common sense of the people's comrades, for example, in the case of collections for the winter aid organization .

According to the National Socialists, the term Volksgenosse referred to the members of "German blood ". In the early years of the Nazi regime , Slavs were also considered to be members of a blood "related to the German", but already with the so-called Poland decrees of March 8, 1940 and at the latest by a secret order of the RFSS and RKF Heinrich Himmler of March 23 In 1942 there was then a “clear demarcation of the non-Germanic peoples, especially the Slavs and foreign workers ”, from “members of non-Germanic peoples to be regarded as capable of Germanization for racial reasons”. There was no binding definition. Although notions of belonging to the German people traditionally fell back on ethnic , cultural and denominational similarities, a special position of the other "Germanic peoples" compared to the Germans was affirmed by the Scandinavians , Dutch and Flemings - as members of the same racial family - for a long time View “spiritually in the unity of the Reich and biologically in a common blood body with the German people” should be transferred. The earlier German citizenship law of 1913 basically relied on the ius sanguinis and thus stipulated the inheritance of citizenship. However, it was not familiar with the “ blood-related ” biological ideas of race that the National Socialists introduced with the Race Laws of 1935 and that were closely linked to ethnicity ; the Reich and Citizenship Act (RuStAG) was not formally changed for this.

Party comrade was used as the opposite of the salutation in SPD and KPD the identification word z. B. in a letter to officials with which the sender, as a member of the NSDAP, invoked special preferential treatment. Colloquially these were the "Pgs".

After 1945

Sponsorship certificate from the Bayreuth City Council from 1955 for the expelled “tribal and national comrades” from Franzensbad

As the “password of National Socialism”, “Volksgenosse” is avoided in today's parlance.

See also

literature

  • Nicole Kramer: People's comrades on the home front. Mobilization, behavior, memory. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-525-36075-0 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cornelia Schmitz-Berning: Vocabulary of National Socialism. 2., through u. revised Ed., Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-11-019549-1 , p. 660 f.
  2. ↑ The 25-point program on LeMO
  3. ↑ Cf. Wolfgang Ayaß : "Accordingly, for example, is asocial ...". On the language of social exclusion in National Socialism , in: Contributions to the history of National Socialism 28 (2012), pp. 69–89.
  4. ↑ a b Isabel Heinemann: "Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut": The SS Race & Settlement Main Office and the New Racial Policy in Europe , 2nd edition, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2003, ISBN 3-89244-623-7 , p. 476 .
  5. ↑ "So far, 'the blood of all peoples who settle in Europe has been described as related'. [...] All non-Germanic European peoples: Slavic, Romanic, Celtic, Baltic peoples were 'related to bloods of different tribes'. "Quoted from Josef Goldberger, Oberösterreichisches Landesarchiv (ed.): NS-Gesundheitsppolitik in Oberdonau: The administrative construction of the" inferior value " , OÖLA, 2004, ISBN 3-900-31372-5 , p. 201.
  6. ↑ Helmut Heiber, Institute for Contemporary History (ed.): Files of the party chancellery of the NSDAP , Volume 1, Part 1, RKF 15680 - K 101 13763 f. (722), Oldenbourg, Munich 1983, p. 671 .
  7. ↑ Cf. Isabel Heinemann: "Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut": The SS Race & Settlement Main Office and the new racial order in Europe , 2nd edition, Wallstein, Göttingen 2003, p. 477 ff.
  8. ↑ See on all this Cornelia Schmitz-Berning: Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus , de Gruyter, reprint of the edition from 1998, Berlin / New York 2000, ISBN 3-11-016888-X , pp. 70 f. , 149 f. , 508 , 662 f. mwN
  9. ↑ See in particular Isabel Heinemann, ibid., P. 341 ff.
  10. ↑ Cf. Ingo von Münch : The German Citizenship: Past - Present - Future , Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-89949-433-4 , p. 149 f.
  11. ↑ Cornelia Schmitz-Berning: Vocabulary of National Socialism , p. 664.