() was a pejorative term used for groups which were in political opposition to the system of the German Reich during the tenure of Otto von Bismarck as chancellor of Germany and during the Nazi regime. Under Bismarck, the term was mainly employed against Catholics and Social Democrats to justify their political suppression. The Nazis added the Jewish people to this list of enemies and violently pursued their destruction for being "non-German".
Imperial Germany The German Empire was founded in 1871 after the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War, with France, as a result, being perceived as the main foreign enemy of the new Reich. The external enemy of FranceSzilvia Odenwald-Varga: ‚Volk‘ bei Otto von Bismarck. Eine historisch-semantische Analyse anhand von Bedeutungen, Konzepten und Topoi. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/New York 2009, ISBN 978-3-11-021241-9, S. 117. was contrasted with the internal Reichsfeinde: Any societal or political forces that did not want to conform to the Protestant nation-state. Besides Catholics and the Labour movement, this also included national minorities such as the Danes, the Poles, the Alsace-Lorrainians (who voted for minority protest parties until 1890 in Reichstag elections), and adherents of the Guelph Party, who opposed the 1867 Prussian annexation of Hanover. Quickly, this was also extended to the German Jews. All of these groups were stigmatised as "un-German", they were accused of being unreliable and of undermining (and thereby weakening) national unity.Eckart Conze: Schatten des Kaiserreichs. Die Reichsgründung von 1871 und ihr schwieriges Erbe. dtv, München 2020, ISBN 978-3-423-28256-7, S. 139. A large part of the population of the empire was thus pushed out of imperial affairs;Szilvia Odenwald-Varga: ‚Volk‘ bei Otto von Bismarck. Eine historisch-semantische Analyse anhand von Bedeutungen, Konzepten und Topoi. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/New York 2009, S. 116. in the 1881 German federal election, the parties marked as Reichsfeinde by Bismarck achieved, according to American historian Otto Pflanze, a two-thirds majority.Otto Pflanze: Bismarck. Der Reichskanzler. C.H. Beck, München 1998, ISBN 3-406-42726-X, S. 314.
Central targets of Bismarck's persecution constituted political Catholicism and the Centre Party on one side, and the Labour movement on the other, with the latter unifying in 1875 through the merger of the General German Workers' Association (ADAV) and the Marxist Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP), forming the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAP). The Catholic population of the empire was accused of not being primarily loyal the newly founded state, but rather to the pope. The Social Democrats were accused of being internationalists, since Karl Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto in 1848: "The working men have no fatherland." They were thusly called "vaterlandslose Gesellen", meaning "fellows without a fatherland".Walter Mühlhausen: Gegen den Reichsfeind – Anmerkungen zur Politik von Staat und Gesellschaft gegenüber der Sozialdemokratie im Kaiserreich. In: Ulrich Lappenküper (Hrsg.): Otto von Bismarck und das „lange 19. Jahrhundert". Lebendige Vergangenheit im Spiegel der „Friedrichsruher Beiträge“ 1996–2016. Schöningh, Paderborn 2016, ISBN 978-3-506-78697-5, S. 329–352, hier S. 332. The leading Social Democrats August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht were sentenced to two years custodia honesta (Festungshaft) for opposing the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, which was viewed as high treason, in 1872.Michael Epkenhans: Die Reichsgründung 1870/71. C.H. Beck, München 2020, ISBN 978-3-406-75032-8, S. 88–91. Bismarck declared in a speech in the Prussian House of Lords on 24 April 1873, that the state was "threatened in its very foundation" and thus "forced to self-defence", as two parties were "undertaking their activities against national development in an international manner":
Kulturkampf The first "internal battlefield"Hans-Ulrich Wehler: Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, Bd. 3: Von der „Deutschen Doppelrevolution" bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges 1849–1914. C.H. Beck, München 1995, ISBN 3-406-32263-8, S. 902. of this conflict was the Kulturkampf. It constituted a confrontation between the Catholic Church and the secular state, which was observable in several European countries in the 19th century. The church claimed a monopoly on truth in its battle against rationalisation, secularisation and other aspects of modernisation: The First Vatican Council in 1870 had declared the doctrine of Papal infallibility, according to which the pope, as long as he spoke ex cathedra, was infallible. Liberals strongly protested this declaration. Bismarck was particularly worried that Catholic priests would support the Polish national movement in the Prussian provinces of Posen and West Prussia. The Prussian and later the Reich governments passed a series of laws and decrees, starting in 1872, which placed schools under state supervision and introduced civil marriage. Furthermore, political messages by priests "from the pulpit" were forbidden (Kanzelparagraf), evictions of priests from the country were made possible, and the Jesuit Order was banned.Ernst Engelberg: Bismarck. Das Reich in der Mitte Europas. Siedler, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-88680-385-6, S. 119–146; Bastian Scholz: Die Kirchen und der deutsche Nationalstaat. Konfessionelle Beiträge zum Systembestand und Systemwechsel. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2016, ISBN 978-3-658-11508-1, S. 183–190.
The Kulturkampf started in the summer of 1871 with a media campaign initiated by Bismarck in different newspapers, starting with the Kreuzzeitung. A Catholic priest complained that Catholics had to read daily about being "an enemy of the fatherland, a Roman [Römling, pejorative] and an idiot, and that his clergy was the scum of humanity."Jonathan Steinberg: Bismarck. Magier der Macht. Ullstein, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-548-37584-7, S. 440. Bismarck first accused the Catholics of being Reichsfeinde on 30 January 1872 in a debate in the Prussian House of Representatives about the introduction of state supervision over the schooling system: Here, he first attacked the Centre Party directly. He accused the party of "mobilising against the state", since it also took in Protestants that "had nothing in common with the party, except being hostile to the German Empire and Prussia". The party had "found acceptance and respect from all parties, be they national or revolutionary, that were hostile to the state." The Centre Party newspaper Germania expressed solidarity with the clerical newspapers of Southern Germany, which Bismarck denounced as "the anti-German French press", as "the old press of the Confederation of the Rhine in Catholic clothing".Zitiert bei Ernst Engelberg: Bismarck. Das Reich in der Mitte Europas. Siedler, Berlin 1990, S. 128 f. The Liberal press agreed on many of these statements and joined in denouncing the Catholic press.Armin Meinen: Umstrittene Moderne. Die Liberalen und der preußisch-deutsche Kulturkampf. In: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 29, Heft 1 (2003), S. 138–156. The weekly newspaper Das Neue Reich applauded the banning of the Jesuits in 1875: According to them, it was "high time to intervene against these parasites, just as one would against Grape phylloxera, Colorado beetles and other Reichsfeinde."Zitiert bei David Blackbourn: Das Kaiserreich transnational. Eine Skizze. In: Sebastian Conrad, Jürgen Osterhammel (Hrsg.): Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2004, S. 302–324, hier S. 316.
In the mid-1870s, all Catholic bishops in Germany were either in exile or under arrest, but the power of political Catholicism remained unbroken: In the 1874 German federal election, the Centre Party doubled its votes relative to the 1871 German federal election. From 1880 onwards, Bismarck was supported by the party, leading to the laws passed during the Kulturkampf being rescinded or made less severe. The conflict ended fully in 1886/1887 with several "peace laws". However, the cultural split between the Protestant majority and the Catholic minority remained. The historian Heinrich August Winkler summarised: "They were [...] no longer marked as Reichsfeinde, but they could have held no illusions about the fact that prejudice survived much longer than paragraphs."Heinrich August Winkler: Der lange Weg nach Westen, Bd. 1: Deutsche Geschichte vom Ende des Alten Reiches bis zum Untergang der Weimarer Republik. C.H. Beck, München 2000, S. 222–226 (hier das Zitat).
Anti-Socialist Laws Towards the end of the 1870s, Bismarck started attacks against the Social Democrats, whom he distrusted due to their open demand of proletarian revolution: After several attempts failed to limit the freedom of speech of the "red Reichsfeinde" through new press laws and the introduction of the criminal offense of "incitement of class hatred" in 1874 and 1875, two assassination attempts on Wilhelm I in 1878 gave a pretext for a snap election and the passage of the (Anti-)Socialist Laws. All Social Democratic, Socialist and Communist organisations, assemblies and publications were banned, agitators were liable to be deported, and "endangered districts" could be placed under a state of siege. A total of 330 Social Democratic associations were banned, around a 1000 pamphlets seized, and a total of 1500 years of jail time meted out. Only the Social Democratic deputies in the Reichstag were left mostly unharmed and could continue to be elected, as they enjoyed the privilege of parliamentary immunity. Bismarck justified these measures as "self-defence". The official aim was to "save society from murderers and arsonists, from the experience of the Paris Commune."Ralph Jessen: Kommune, Attentat, Massenstreik. Arbeiterbewegung, Revolutionsangst und politische Polizei im deutschen Kaiserreich. In: Oliver Auge, Knut-Hinrik Kollex (Hrsg.): Die große Furcht. Revolution in Kiel – Revolutionsangst in der Geschichte. Wachholtz, Kiel/Hamburg 2021, ISBN 978-3-529-09456-9, S. 41–54, hier S. 49. In fact, August Bebel had described that uprising as a "prelude battle" in 1871, which would cause an eruption of the entire European proletariat.Michael Epkenhans: Die Reichsgründung 1870/71. C.H. Beck, München 2020, S. 91. The Centre Party agreed with Bismarck's anti-Socialist tendencies, but was reserved about the law, as its subject matter appeared to them as too ill-defined. The Reichstag deputy Peter Reichensperger compared it to the Carlsbad Decrees on 16 September 1878: