Chapter 6 Conformity

The Scope and Sequence and Consent in Individual Choosing to & Society Participate the National We & They

Judgment, Memory & Legacy The Holocaust Community FPG / Staff / Gey Images / Gey / Staff FPG

HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 280 3/7/17 4:35 PM Overview

By 1934, Hitler considered the National Socialist revolution in Germany complete. In control of the nation, the Nazis turned their attention to creating a racially pure “national community” in which Nazism was not revolutionary but normal. This chapter focuses on the methods the Nazis used to get individuals to conform, if not consent, to their vision for German society. It also focuses on the consequences faced by those who did not fit into the “national community” the Nazis envisioned.

HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 281 3/7/17 4:35 PM Chapter 6 Introduction

By 1934, Germany was firmly under Nazi control. After President von Essential Hindenberg’s death in August of that year, Adolf Hitler declared himself Questions not only the nation’s chancellor but also its Führer. The revolution was over, he told his closest associates. It was now time to consolidate power • In what ways did the and normalize life in the “new Germany” they had created. The Nazis Nazis use laws to create were determined to create a Volksgemeinschaft—a “national community” “in” groups and “out” groups in German society? or, literally, a “people’s community.” How did they also appeal The term had become popular during World War I as a way of rallying to people’s hearts and support for the conflict. At that time, it simply meant that all Germans, minds? regardless of class, religious, and social differences, would work together • What were some of the to achieve a national purpose—winning the war. But the Nazis interpreted reasons that the Na- its meaning differently. They used the word to advance the idea of a racial- zis’ idea of a “national ly pure and harmonious national community united in its devotion to the community” appealed German people, their nation, and their leader. In the words of a popular to many Germans? Why Nazi slogan, the goal was “Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Führer!” (“One People! did it appeal to particular One Empire! One Leader!”) groups, like young people? As the slogan suggests, the Nazis viewed National Socialism as more than • What did it mean to be a set of political ideas. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, an outsider or even a called it a “total and all-encompassing general perspective on all public dissenter in an otherwise matters.” It was an ideology—a system of closely related ideals and beliefs. “racially pure and harmo- Goebbels said of Nazi ideology: nious national communi- ty”? What did it mean to We hope that the day will come when nobody needs to talk about National So- be an insider? cialism any more, since it has become the air that we breathe! . . . People must get used inwardly to this way of behaving; they must make it into their own set of attitudes.1

Hitler described the foundation for the national community in his book Mein Kampf:

If one were to divide mankind into three species: the culture-creators, the cul- ture-bearers, and the culture-destroyers, the Aryan would fit the first definition. It is to him that we must trace the foundations and the walls of all that human beings have created.

. . . The most powerful [opposite] to the Aryan is the Jew . . . The Jew possesses no culture-creating ability whatever, since he does not, and never did have that quality without which man cannot truly develop toward a higher order: idealism. Therefore, his intellect will never act as a constructive force. . . . He is and remains the typical parasite, a sponger who, like a malign bacillus, spreads more and more as long as he will find some favorable feeding ground.2

1 Quoted in Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York: Penguin, 2005), 221. 2 Quoted in Joachim Remak, ed., The Nazi Years: A Documentary History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969), 34.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 282 2/28/17 7:57 PM While the Nazis were clear about their ultimate goal of creating a “racially pure” state, they were also conscious of public opinion. They worked to cultivate consensus in German society even as they suppressed dissent. They established organizations for workers, women, young people, and other groups to build a feeling of connection to the Nazi government. They produced all kinds of propaganda designed to create allegiance to Nazi ideas. In an effort to avoid the appearance of lawlessness to order- minded Germans, they wrote most of their policies into new laws. They encouraged Germans to police their own behavior, and that of their neighbors, in accordance with those laws. And through their policies and propaganda, they set out to prepare Germans for war to acquire the “living space” that the “Aryan” race needed in order to grow and expand. Chapter 6 examines the Nazis’ efforts to create a Volksgemeinschaft and the important questions those efforts raise about obedience and conformity, persuasion and dissent.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 283 2/28/17 7:57 PM Reading 1 The Common Interest before Self-Interest

Six years before Hitler took power in Germany, Joseph Goebbels, the National Socialist Party’s propaganda expert, published a pamphlet that would be reprinted many times during the Nazi years. It spelled out the goals of National Socialism:

What is the first commandment of every National Socialist? Love Germany more than anything and your fellow Germans more than yourself! What is the aim of the National Socialist idea of liberty? To create the national community of all honestly creative Germans! What is the content of that national community? Freedom and bread for every German! Who is a fellow German, a racial comrade? Every honestly creative German is, provided his blood, his customs, his culture are German and provided he speaks the German tongue! What is the basic economic principle with which National Socialism wishes to replace the present economic warfare of all against all? The Common Interest before Self-Interest!1

Connection Questions 1. How does this pamphlet define what it means to be German? What do you think Goebbels meant by the phrase “national community”? What might he have meant by “honestly creative German”?

2. What did National Socialism offer to these “honestly creative” Germans? What did it ask of them?

3. Why do you think this pamphlet was repeatedly reprinted? Why would a govern- ment want to encourage the values expressed in the pamphlet?

4. How does this pamphlet define the relationship between the individual and society?

1 Quoted in Joachim Remak, ed., The Nazi Years: A Documentary History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969), 39.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 284 2/28/17 7:57 PM Reading 2 Spying on Family and Friends

As the Nazis worked to consolidate their power and build a cohesive “national community,” suppression of dissent played a key role. In 1933, the Nazis issued a decree that required Germans to turn in anyone who spoke against the party, its leaders, or the government (see “Outlawing the Opposition” in Chapter 5). That decree, “For the Defense against Malicious Attacks against the Government,” stated:

1. Whoever purposely makes or circulates a statement of a factual nature which is untrue or grossly exaggerated or which may seriously harm the welfare of the Reich or of a state, or the reputation of the National government or of a state gov- ernment or of parties or organizations supporting these governments, is to be pun- ished, provided that no more severe punishment is decreed in other regulations, with imprisonment of up to two years and, if he makes or spreads the statement publicly, with imprisonment of not less than three months.

2. If serious damage to the Reich or a state has resulted from this deed, penal servi- tude may be imposed.

3. Whoever commits an act through negligence will be punished with imprisonment of up to three months, or by a fine.1

To enforce the decree, the Nazis set up special courts to try people who were accused of “malicious attacks.” In December 1934, the government replaced the decree with the “Law against Malicious Attacks on State and Party,” adding a clause that criminalized “malicious, rabble-rousing remarks or those indicating a base mentality” against the Nazi Party or high-ranking government or party officials.

Alfons Heck, then a member of the Hitler Youth, recalled the effects of the law. In 1938, he was living with his grandparents when his father came to visit.

In retrospect, I think it was the last time my father railed against the regime in front of me. . . . He wasn’t much of a drinker, but when he had a few too many, he had a tendency to shout down everyone else, not a small feat among the men of my family. “You mark my words, Mother,” he yelled, “that goddamned Austrian housepainter is going to kill us all before he’s through conquering the world.” And then his baleful eye fell on me. “They are going to bury you in this goddamned monkey suit [his Hitler Youth uniform], my boy,” he chuckled, but that was too much for my grandmother.

1 Quoted in Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1919–1945, vol. 1 (New York: Schocken, 1984), 478.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 285 2/28/17 7:57 PM “Why don’t you leave him alone, Du dummer Narr [you stupid fool],” she said sharply, “and watch your mouth; you want to end up in the KZ [the German abbre- viation for concentration camp]?”

He laughed bitterly and added: “So, it has come that far already, your own son turning you in?” My grandmother told me to leave the kitchen, but the last thing I heard was my father’s sarcastic voice. “Are you people all blind? This thing with the Jews is just the beginning.”

In thinking about the incident, Heck wrote:

My grandmother had every reason to warn him about talking loosely, for his classi- fication as “politically unreliable” surely would have sent him to a KZ had anyone reported his remarks, even within the family. But there were also two of our farm- hands at the table, and Hans, the younger of the two, had recently announced his decision to apply for party membership. He had ambitions to attend an agricultural school and knew full well [that] party membership would help him get in. Perhaps luckily for my father, Hans was getting pretty drunk himself, although I doubt he would have reported my father had he been stone sober. Despite the fact that I later attained a high rank in the Hitler Youth, which required me to be especially vigilant, I never considered my father to be dangerous to our new order. I merely thought him a fool who had long since been left behind. 2

Connection Questions 1. What kinds of actions did the “Malicious Attacks” law forbid? What policies did the government put in place to enforce the law? Why do you think the govern- ment made this law?

2. How does Alfons Heck describe the effect of the law on his family? To what extent did the law succeed in changing their behavior? To what extent did it fail?

3. What do you think the overall impact of the law might have been in German society as a whole?

4. What are some examples of political criticism or dissent that you have seen? What were the effects? What were the consequences?

2 Alfons Heck, A Child of Hitler: Germany in the Days When God Wore a Swastika (Renaissance House Publishers, 2001), 29–30.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 286 2/28/17 7:57 PM Reading 3 Speaking in Whispers

Victor Klemperer was a German professor who kept a diary for much of his life. He was born the son of a rabbi but later converted to Protestant Christianity and married a non-Jewish woman. In August 1933, he wrote: “Everyone cringes with fear. No letter, no telephone conversation, no word on the street is safe any more. Everyone fears the next person may be an informer.”1 After a visit to Germany three years later, W. E. B. Du Bois, an African American sociologist, reached a similar conclusion. He portrayed Germany as “silent, nervous, suppressed; it speaks in whispers; there is no public opinion, no opposition, no discussion of anything; there are waves of enthusiasm, but never any protest of the slightest degree.”2

Was there really an informer on every street corner and a tap on every phone? The Gestapo, Germany’s secret police, certainly gave that impres- sion with its talk of destroying Social Democrats, Communists, Jews, and other “undesirables.” And yet, the Gestapo was a relatively small organiza- tion. For example, in Berlin, then a city of 4.5 million people, the Gestapo never had more than 800 officers—one for approximately every 5,600 peo- ple. How, then, was the Gestapo able to keep a close watch on everyone?

Part of the answer lies in the fact that the Gestapo encouraged members of the Nazi Party to “turn in” anyone who spoke against the state. As a result, they received more tips and denunciations than they could respond to. The Gestapo particularly relied on a group of Nazi officials known as cell and block wardens. Every cell warden supervised four to eight block wardens. Each block warden, in turn, was responsible for keeping a close watch on approximately 40 to 60 households. An article published in 1935 in a Nazi journal for cell and block wardens explained how they gathered information about those households:

Occasionally one hears a block warden or a cell warden complain: “Our duties are too menial—selling tickets and badges and running errands, that’s all!” That’s all? No, those who say that have no proper understanding of their duties. Rightly understood, the duties of a cell or block warden are far more important and far broader. Their primary task is to anchor the party members of their cell or block ever more firmly to the party, and to win those who live in their cell or block more and more to National Socialist thinking.

After the last referendum, in which 38 million voted “yes” and only about 4 million voted “no,” the Führer himself said in his fiery speech that the task was now to win over that last 4 million to National Socialism. It would be wrong to sit around

1 Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–1941 (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 30–31. 2 W. E. B. Du Bois, “What of the Color-Line?” in Travels in the Reich, 1933–1945: Foreign Authors Report from Germany, ed. Oliver Lubrich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 146.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 287 2/28/17 7:57 PM and wait to see what the government would do to achieve that goal. No, each individual National Socialist has the duty to use all his strength to help. The cell and block wardens are called to the task, and are in an excellent position to do it.

Can there be better or more varied tasks? They offer opportunity for independent and extraordinarily varied activities that are gratifying and satisfying.

This requires that the cell warden, and even more so the block warden, knows very well all the party members and non-party members in his district. He must know about their families and jobs, as well as all other personal relationships. He must know their concerns, whether large or small. He must know their political and so- cial opinions. This all requires a good measure of tact and sensitivity, and cannot of course be learned overnight. The often underestimated activities of selling tickets and badges, as well as errand running, offer good opportunities for this. Showing friendliness and concern to both party members and non-party members, sharing and understanding their joys and sorrows, must and will help to win the confidence of our people’s comrades such that in time they come to see the cell or block leader as a kind of political pastor.3

Connection Questions 1. How do Victor Klemperer and W. E. B. Du Bois describe the mood in Germany in the mid-1930s? How do their descriptions compare to the impression of Germany offered in the pamphlet for cell and block wardens? How might Klemperer and Du Bois’s identities as outsiders have influenced their perspectives?

2. What were cell and block wardens encouraged to do to “win over” Germans to National Socialism? What is stated directly in the pamphlet? What can you infer about the impact the cell and block wardens might have had?

3. What does the term “political pastor” imply about the relationship between the block warden and the people who live in that block?

3 Oscar Schweichler, “Duties of the Cell and Block Warden” (1935), trans. Randall Bytwerk, German Propaganda Archive, 2004, http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/blockleiter.htm.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 288 2/28/17 7:57 PM Reading 4 Political Prisoners

Throughout the 1930s, the German people witnessed the arrest of Communists, Social Democrats, Jews, and others considered “politically unreliable.” They were herded from their homes and workplaces onto trucks and taken to makeshift prisons and concentration camps, often without a trial or even a hearing. Some were imprisoned for a few months and then released without explanation; others were murdered. By 1935, the makeshift prisons were being replaced or remodeled according to new rules and regulations: the Nazis hoped this would “prove” to foreign critics that detainees were being treated “humanely.”

Lina Haag and her husband, Alfred, belonged to the German Communist Party; the couple was among those arrested in the large roundups after the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933 (see “Outlawing the Opposition” in Chapter 5). Alfred spent the next seven years in a concentration camp. Lina was released in December 1933 but then rearrested in 1935 after refusing to give the names of other Communists to the Gestapo. She spent the next four years in various prisons, including Lichtenburg, a camp for women. When she was finally released, she wrote about her experiences in a series of unmailed letters to her husband. One letter contains a description of her incarceration in Lichtenburg, a name that literally means “bright castle”:

The Lichtenburg is . . . a massive medieval castle with many towers, wide court- yards, dark dungeons, and endless halls, a daunting gigantic structure with mighty walls. Not a bright castle, it is the ideal concentration camp.

We are lined up in one of the courtyards. About thirty women: political prisoners, Jews, criminals, prostitutes, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Female guards from the SS circle us like gray wolves. I see this new ideal type of German woman for the first time. Some have blank faces and some have brutal looks, but they all have the same mean expression around their mouths. They pace back and forth with long strides and fluttering gray capes, their commanding voices ring shrilly across the court, and the large wolfhounds with them strain threateningly at their leashes. They are preposterous and terrifying, reminiscent of old sagas, merciless and probably even more dangerous than the brutal SS henchmen because they are women. Are they women? I doubt it. They could only be unhuman creatures, creatures with gray dogs and with all the instincts, viciousness, and savagery of their dogs. Monsters. . . .

The inspections are the worst, or rather the days preceding them. Washing, brush- ing, scrubbing goes on for hours. Punishment rains down at the slightest infraction. We are bellowed at if there is a wrinkle in the bed sheet, or if a tablespoon is not lying straight in the locker. It’s always the same show, no matter who comes. The door is shoved open; we jump up from our seats; the visitor comes in and shouts a cheerful greeting; enthusiasm glows in the eyes of the female warders; the visitor

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 289 2/28/17 7:57 PM looks benevolently over at us; then he turns to Commandant Kögel with a silly remark, such as “A very nice room” or “They seem to be in good health.” Of course Kögel happily agrees and repeatedly gives assurance that no one is subjected to hardships, which the visitor has never doubted. Then with ebullient “Heil Hitler” he turns to go. The entourage respectfully makes way, eager hands throw open the door, and the visitor leaves.

Once even [Heinrich] Himmler [the chief of the German police] appears, in order to see his German reeducation project. He looks insignificant; we had visualized this Satan personified differently, but he is in good spirits and friendly, he laughs a lot and grants several early releases. Acts of mercy by a despot in a good mood. Even the so-called Women’s Leader [Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the head of the main Nazi association for women] manages an inspection visit. She too is cheerful, friendly, enthusiastic, and happy that we are doing so well. She says she has a very special, a womanly understanding for us and for our situation, and to hear her talk, she almost envies us. She most likely will not visit the dark isolation cells nor will she observe a flogging. That probably would not interest her so much, although both are essential educational methods in this New German institution. The camp com- mandant assures her, too, that there are no hardships—we stand there and listen with fixed expressions. No one steps forward and says: No, that’s not true; the truth is that we are beaten on the slightest pretext. For the beating we are tied naked to a wooden post, and Warder Mandel flogs us with a dog whip as long as she can keep it up. No one steps forward to say this. Because everyone wants to live. . . .1

Connection Questions 1. According to Lina Haag, a stated purpose of Lichtenburg was “reeducation.” What did prisoners like Haag learn in that camp? How did they learn it?

2. Why did Nazi officials visit the camp? What did they see there? Why might the visiting Nazi officials want to seem benevolent during their visits? What effect did their visits have on Lina Haag and other prisoners?

3. What picture do Haag’s words paint of her time in Lichtenburg? How is this different from what the visiting Nazi officials likely witnessed? Why do you think she wrote these letters even though she never mailed them?

4. How does Haag describe the female guards at the prison? Why does she “doubt” that they are women? Why might she think that they are more dangerous than male guards?

1 Lina Haag, “A Handful of Dust,” in The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts, ed. Roderick Stackelberg and Sally A. Winkle (London: Routledge, 2002), 146–47.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 290 2/28/17 7:57 PM Reading 5 The Nuremberg Laws

Violence was a crucial tool of the Nazi government, but its leaders were also eager to show that they were acting within the framework of the law. As they worked to consolidate power and reshape Germany according to their racial ideals, Nazi leaders passed a number of new laws that rede- fined citizenship and laid the groundwork for a “racial state.”

On September 15, 1935, at a party rally in Nuremberg, the Nazis announced two new laws that changed who could be a German citizen. The Reich Citizenship Law required that all citizens have German “blood.” As a result, Jews and others lost their rights to citizenship, which not only stripped them of the right to vote but also made them stateless. This meant that they could not get a valid passport for travel between countries or acquire a visa to leave Germany. akg-images / Pictures From History From / Pictures akg-images

In 1933, Jewish businessman Oskar Danker and his girlfriend, a Christian woman, were forced to carry signs discouraging Jewish-German integration. Intimate relationships between “true Germans” and Jews were outlawed by 1935.

The second law was called the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, which stated the following:

Moved by the understanding that purity of German blood is the essential condition for the continued existence of the German people, and inspired by the inflexible

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 291 2/28/17 7:57 PM determination to ensure the existence of the German nation for all time, the Reich- stag has unanimously adopted the following law, which is promulgated herewith:

ARTICLE 1 1. Marriages between Jews and subjects of the state of German or related blood are forbidden. Marriages nevertheless concluded are invalid, even if concluded abroad to circumvent this law. 2. Annulment proceedings can be initiated only by the state prosecutor.

ARTICLE 2 Extramarital relations between Jews and subjects of the state of German or related blood are forbidden.

ARTICLE 3 Jews may not employ in their households female subjects of the state of German or related blood who are under 45 years old.

ARTICLE 4 1. Jews are forbidden to fly the Reich or national flag or display Reich colors. 2. They are, on the other hand, permitted to display the Jewish colors. The exercise of this right is protected by the state.

ARTICLE 5 1. Any person who violates the prohibition under Article 1 will be punished with a prison sentence. 2. A male who violates the prohibition under Article 2 will be punished with a jail term or a prison sentence. 3. Any person violating the provisions under Articles 3 or 4 will be punished with a jail term of up to one year and a fine, or with one or the other of these penal- ties.

ARTICLE 6 The Reich Minister of the Interior, in coordination with the Deputy of the Führer and the Reich Minister of Justice, will issue the legal and administrative regulations required to implement and complete this law.1

The two new laws announced at Nuremberg made sharp distinctions be- tween the rights and privileges of Germans and Jews. They also raised an important question: What determined who was and who was not a Jew? According to most Jewish teachings, an individual was defined as a Jew if he or she was born to a Jewish mother or formally converted to Judaism. If a Jew converted to Christianity, he or she was no longer considered Jew- ish by most Jews. The Nazis did not accept that definition. They regarded Jews as members of neither a religious group nor an ethnic group (defined by their cultural heritage). Instead, they regarded Jews as members of a separate and inferior “race.” Since, according to Nazi logic, “race” was not altered by conversion, people who were born Jewish would always be Jews regardless of their religious beliefs or practices.

1 “Reich Citizenship Law of September 15, 1935,” trans. by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, last updated January 26, 2016, https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007903.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 292 2/28/17 7:57 PM Though the Nazis believed that identity was biological, something “carried in the blood,” this idea had no scientific reality. Whether someone was German or Jewish could not be determined by medical or scientific tests. The question of defining German and Jewish identity was further complicated by the fact that there had been a great deal of intermarriage between the two groups, and there were thousands of people of mixed Jewish and non-Jewish ancestry, known to the Nazis as Mischlinge (“half- breeds” or “mixed-blood”).

On November 14, 1935, the Nazi government officially defined who was a German and who was a Jew through an additional decree called the First Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law. (Debates about how to classify Mischlinge went on for years and were never completely resolved.) It stated:

ARTICLE 1 1. Until further regulations regarding citizenship papers are issued, all subjects of German or kindred blood, who possessed the right to vote in the Reichstag elections at the time the [Nuremberg] Citizenship Law came into effect, shall for the time being possess the rights of Reich citizens. The same shall be true of those to whom the Reich Minister of the Interior, in conjunction with the Deputy of the Führer, has given preliminary citizenship. 2. The Reich Minister of the Interior, in conjunction with the Deputy of the Führer, can withdraw the preliminary citizenship.

ARTICLE 2 1. The regulations in Article 1 are also valid for Reich subjects of mixed Jewish blood. 2. An individual of mixed Jewish blood is one who is descended from one or two grandparents who were racially full Jews in so far as he or she does not count as a Jew according to Article 5, paragraph 2. One grandparent shall be considered as full-blooded if he or she belonged to the Jewish religious community.

ARTICLE 3 Only the Reich citizen, as bearer of full political rights, exercises the right to vote in political affairs or can hold public office. The Reich Minister of the Interior, or any agency empowered by him, can make exceptions during the transition period, with regard to occupation of public office. The affairs of religious organizations will not be affected.

ARTICLE 4 1. A Jew cannot be a citizen of the Reich. He has no right to vote in political affairs and he cannot occupy public office. 2. Jewish [government] officials will retire as of December 31, 1935. If these offi- cials served at the front in the world war, either for Germany or her allies, they will receive in full, until they reach the age limit, the pension to which they were entitled according to the salary they last received; they will, however, not ad- vance in seniority. After reaching the age limit, their pensions will be calculated anew, according to the salary last received, on the basis of which their pension was computed.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 293 2/28/17 7:57 PM 3. The affairs of religious organizations will not be affected.

4. The conditions of service of teachers in Jewish public schools remain unchanged until new regulations for the Jewish school systems are issued.

ARTICLE 5 1. A Jew is anyone who is descended from at least three grandparents who are racially full Jews. Article 2, para. 2, second sentence will apply. 2. A Jew is also one who is descended from two full Jewish parents, if (a) he be- longed to the Jewish religious community at the time this law was issued, or joined the community later, (b) he was married to a Jewish person, at the time the law was issued, or married one subsequently, (c) he is the offspring of a mar- riage with a Jew, in the sense of Section I, which was contracted after the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor became effective, (d) he is the offspring of an extramarital relationship with a Jew, according to Section I, and will be born out of wedlock after July 31, 1936.

ARTICLE 6 1. Requirements for the pureness of blood as laid down in Reich Law or in orders of the NSDAP [the Nazi Party] and its echelons—not covered in Article 5—will not be affected. 2. Any other requirements for the pureness of blood, not covered in Article 5, can be made only by permission of the Reich Minister of the Interior and the Deputy Führer. If any such demands have been made, they will be void as of January 1, 1936, if they have not been requested by the Reich Minister of the Interior in agreement with the Deputy Führer. These requests must be made by the Reich Minister of the Interior.

ARTICLE 7 The Führer and Reich Chancellor can grant exemptions from the regulations laid down in the law.2

In time, the Nazis extended the Nuremberg Laws, as these laws institution- alizing Nazi racial theory came to be known, to include marriages between “Aryans” and other “racially inferior” groups. Nazi officials interpreted the wording to mean that relations between “those of German or related blood” and “Gypsies,” Afro-Germans, or their offspring were also forbidden. Some people within the Nazi government considered requiring “Aryans” to divorce their Jewish spouses, but they did not go through with this plan.

2 Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Documents on Nazism 1919–1945 (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 463–67.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 294 2/28/17 7:57 PM Connection Questions 1. How do the Nuremberg Laws define what makes someone a “German”? How do they define Germany’s universe of obligation?

2. How do the Nuremberg Laws reflect earlier ideas about racial difference and hier- archies (see Chapter 2)? How do they reflect what you have already learned about Nazi ideology?

3. Why do you think Article 3 was included in the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor? What idea might the law be implying?

4. How did the Nuremberg Laws make it necessary for the Nazis to issue the First Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law two months later? Why might it have been so complicated to figure out who was “Jewish” without these laws?

5. The Nuremberg Laws meant that Jews could no longer define their identities for themselves. What does it mean to lose the right to define yourself? How was the problem confronting Germans of Jewish descent in 1935 similar to that faced by the Bear in The Bear That Wasn’t in Chapter 1? How do the two differ?

6. What happens when a government says that one part of your identity is more important than other parts?

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 295 2/28/17 7:57 PM Reading 6 Discovering Jewish Blood

The Nuremberg Laws turned Jews from German citizens into “residents of Germany.” Technically, the law made intermarriage between Jews and German citizens a criminal offense, but existing marriages were not dissolved or criminalized, perhaps in order to maintain public support.

The laws transformed the lives of Jews all over Germany, including thousands of people who had not previously known their families had Jewish heritage. Among them were Marianne Schweitzer and her siblings.

Although we were not a churchgoing family, we observed Christ- mas and Easter in the traditional ways and belonged to the Luther- an church. My parents, my three siblings and I were all baptized

Stadtarchiv Bielefeld Stadtarchiv and I took confirmation classes with Martin Niemöller, the former U-boat commander and his brother who substituted when Martin was in prison for anti-Nazi activities.

It was in 1932 that my [older] sister Rele provoked my father to reveal our Jewish ancestry for the first time. She played the violin and rejected a violin teacher because he “looked too Jewish.” Our father had responded in a rather convoluted way by saying, “Don’t you know that your grandmother came from the same people as Jesus . . . ?”

Our mother’s side, the Körtes, were “Aryan” by Hitler’s standards. But our father’s parents, Eugen Schweitzer and Algunde Hollaender were Jews born in Poland who had been baptized as adults. My father and his two brothers were considered Jews by Hitler’s laws. Though all were married to non-Jewish wives, our lives were dra- matically changed. The whole family was devastated and worried about our future. My mother’s “Aryan” side stood by my father. My Körte grandmother said, “If Hitler is against Ernst [my father], I am against Hitler.”

We heard no anti-Jewish remarks at home, but the antisemitism of that time was so pervasive and the images in periodicals such as Der Stürmer so ugly, that Rele later wrote of her shock at learn- ing her relation to “monsters.” She considered herself “the typical German girl with blond, curly hair.” I took the news more in stride. This chart was designed to help I was happy to be able to stay in school and glad not to be eligible to join Hitler Germans determine their racial status as outlined by the 1935 Youth. . . . Nuremberg Laws.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 296 2/28/17 7:57 PM In September of 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were introduced. My “Jewish” father was barred from treating “Aryan” patients, employing “Aryans,” attending con- certs or the theater, or using public transportation. Rele had passed her Abitur, the certification of completing a high school degree, but as a Mischling, was ineligible to attend university. She couldn’t marry her “Aryan” boyfriend Hans, a medical student.1

The Schweitzers were certainly not the only Germans to be penalized for having “Jewish blood.” By 1935, explains historian Martin Gilbert,

The search for Jews, and for converted Jews, to be driven out of their jobs was continuous. On 5 September 1935 the SS newspaper published the names of eight half-Jews and converted Jews, all of the Evangelical Lutheran faith, who had been “dismissed without notice and deprived of any further opportunity of acting as organists in Christian churches.” From these dismissals, the newspaper comment- ed, “It can be seen that the Reich Chamber of Music is taking steps to protect the church from pernicious influence.”2

Connection Questions 1. How did the passage of the Nuremberg Laws affect the lives of Marianne Sch- weitzer and her family?

2. The Nuremberg Laws meant that Jews could no longer define their identities for themselves. What does it mean to lose the right to define yourself?

3. How was the problem confronting Germans of Jewish descent in 1935 similar to that faced by the Bear in The Bear That Wasn’t? How do the two differ? How is the dilemma similar to that faced by Susie Phipps (see “Defining Race” in Chap- ter 1)? How does it differ?

4. What did it mean in Germany in 1935 to be told that you were no longer a citizen? What rights and protections would you have lost? What would it mean to be told such a thing where you live today?

1 Marianne Schweitzer, afterword to Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered: A Dossier on My Former Self, trans. Geoffrey Strachan (Cambridge, MA: Plunkett Lake Press, 2013). 2 Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War (New York: Holt, 1985), 47.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 297 2/28/17 7:57 PM Reading 7 Can a National Socialist Have Jewish Friends?

The Nuremberg Laws and other anti-Jewish measures placed Jews out- side Germany’s “universe of obligation”—those people who a society believes deserve respect and whose rights are worthy of protection. What does it mean to place an entire group of people outside that “circle”? Melita Maschmann, a classmate of Marianne Schweitzer (see Reading 6, “Discovering Jewish Blood”), explained her behavior toward Jews in letters she wrote to Schweitzer after the war. In one letter, she wrote:

Rosel Cohn was a Jewish classmate of ours, but I did not really connect her with “the Jews.” Those Jews were and remained something mysteriously menacing and anonymous. They were not the sum of all Jewish individuals, who included yourself or old Herr Lewy [a Jewish neighbor]; they were an evil power, something with the attributes of a spook. One could not see it, but it was there, an active force for evil.

As children we had been told fairy stories which sought to make us believe in witches and wizards. Now we were too grown up to take this witchcraft seriously, but we still went on believing in the “wicked Jews.” . . . This wickedness was direct- ed against the prosperity, unity, and prestige of the German nation, which we had learned to love at an early age. The antisemitism of my parents was a part of their outlook which was taken for granted. . . .

My parents certainly grumbled about the Jews, but this did not stop them from having a genuine liking for the Lewys and having social relations with my father’s Jewish colleagues.

For as long as we could remember, the adults had lived in this contradictory way with complete unconcern. One was friendly with individual Jews whom one liked, just as one was friendly as a Protestant with individual Catholics. But while it occurred to nobody to be ideologically hostile to the Catholics, one was, utterly, to the Jews. In all this no one seemed to worry about the fact that they had no clear idea of who “the Jews” were. They included the baptized and the Orthodox, Yiddish-speaking, second-hand dealers and professors of German literature, Com- munist agents, and First World War officers decorated with high orders, enthusiasts for Zionism and . . . German nationalists. . . .

In preaching that all the misery of the nations was due to the Jews or that the Jewish spirit was [disloyal] and Jewish blood was corrupting, I was not compelled to think of you or old Herr Lewy or Rosel Cohn: I thought only of the bogey-man, “the Jew.” And when I heard that Jews were being driven from their professions and homes and imprisoned in ghettos, the points switched automatically in my

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 298 2/28/17 7:57 PM mind to steer me around the thought that such a fate could also overtake you or old Lewy. It was only the Jew who was being persecuted and “made harmless.”1

After joining the Nazi League of German Girls, Maschmann cut off her friendships with Jewish classmates. She saw it as her “duty” to do so “because one could only do one of two things: either have Jewish friends or be a National Socialist.” Historian Richard J. Evans has observed that although Maschmann did not actually take part in the many violent acts committed against Jews or the boycotts in Berlin, she considered those acts “justified”:

[She] told herself: “The Jews are the enemies of the new Germany ... If the Jews sow hatred against us all over the world they must learn that we have hostages for them in our hands.” Later on, she suppressed the memory of the violence she had seen on the streets, and “as the years went by ... grew better and better at switching off quickly in this manner on similar occasions. It was the only way.”2

Evans notes, “A similar process of rationalization and moral editing must have taken place with many others too.”

Connection Questions 1. Why do you think Melita Maschmann didn’t see Rosel Cohn, who was a Jew, as one of “the Jews”? What ideas or feelings influenced Maschmann to later choose National Socialism over her relationship with her friend?

2. Maschmann describes the “contradictory way” she and her parents viewed Jews. How was it possible for them to maintain this attitude? How did this “contradictory” attitude shape her reactions when laws were passed to target German Jews?

3. What does historian Richard Evans mean by “moral editing”? Why does Maschmann say it was “the only way”? What kinds of circumstances might make someone use this kind of “moral editing”?

1 Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered: A Dossier on My Former Self, trans. Geoffrey Strachan (Cambridge, MA: Plunkett Lake Press, 2013). 2 Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York: Penguin, 2005), 549–50.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 299 2/28/17 7:57 PM Visual Essay The Impact of Propaganda

The readings in this chapter describe the Nazis’ efforts to consolidate their Teach Analyzing Nazi power and create a German “national community” in the mid-1930s. Pro- Propaganda paganda—information that is intended to persuade an audience to accept hstry.is/more LESSON a particular idea or cause, often by using biased material or by stirring up emotions—was one of the most powerful tools the Nazis used to accom- plish these goals.

Hitler and Goebbels did not invent propaganda. The word itself was coined by the Catholic Church to describe its efforts to discredit Protestant teach- ings in the 1600s. Over the years, almost every nation has used propaganda to unite its people in wartime. Both sides spread propaganda during World War I, for example. But the Nazis were notable for making propaganda a key element of government even before Germany went to war again. One of Hitler’s first acts as chancellor was to establish the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, demonstrating his belief that con- trolling information was as important as controlling the military and the economy. He appointed Joseph Goebbels as director. Through the ministry, Goebbels was able to penetrate virtually every form of German media, from newspapers, film, radio, posters, and rallies to museum exhibits and school textbooks, with Nazi propaganda.

Whether or not propaganda was truthful or tasteful was irrelevant to the Nazis. Goebbels wrote in his diary, “no one can say your propaganda is too rough, too mean; these are not criteria by which it may be characterized. It ought not be decent nor ought it be gentle or soft or humble; it ought to lead to success.”1 Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that to achieve its purpose, propaganda must “be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away.”

Some Nazi propaganda used positive images to glorify the government’s leaders and its various activities, projecting a glowing vision of the “nation- al community.” Nazi propaganda could also be ugly and negative, creating fear and loathing by portraying the regime’s “enemies” as dangerous and even sub-human. The Nazis’ distribution of antisemitic films, newspaper cartoons, and even children’s books aroused centuries-old prejudices against

1 Quoted in Joachim C. Fest, The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999), 90.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 300 2/28/17 7:57 PM Jews and also presented new ideas about the racial impurity of Jews. The newspaper Der Stürmer (The Attacker), published by Nazi Party member Julius Streicher, was a key outlet for antisemitic propaganda.

This visual essay includes a selection of Nazi propaganda images, both “positive” and “negative.” It focuses on posters that Germans would have seen in newspapers like Der Stürmer and passed in the streets, in workplaces, and in schools. Some of these posters were advertisements for traveling exhibits—on topics like “The Eternal Jew” or the evils of communism—that were themselves examples of propaganda.

Connection Questions 1. As you explore the images in this visual essay, consider what each image is trying to communicate to the viewer. Who is the audience for this message? How is the message conveyed?

2. Do you notice any themes or patterns in this group of propaganda images? How do the ideas in these images connect to what you have already learned about Nazi ideology? How do they extend your thinking about Nazi ideas?

3. Based on the images you analyze, how do you think the Nazis used propaganda to define the identities of individuals and groups? What groups and individuals did Nazi propaganda glorify? What stereotypes did it promote?

4. Why was propaganda so important to Nazi leadership? How do you think Nazi propaganda influenced the attitudes and actions of Germans in the 1930s?

5. Some scholars caution that there are limits to the power of propaganda; they think it succeeds not because it persuades the public to believe an entirely new set of ideas but because it expresses beliefs people already hold. Scholar Daniel Goldhagen writes: “No man, [no] Hitler, no matter how powerful he is, can move people against their hopes and desires. Hitler, as powerful a figure as he was, as charismatic as he was, could never have accomplished this [the Holocaust] had there not been tens of thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands of ordinary Germans who were willing to help him.”2 Do you agree? Would people have re- jected Nazi propaganda if they did not already share, to some extent, the beliefs it communicated?

6. Can you think of examples of propaganda in society today? How do you think this propaganda influences the attitudes and actions of people today? Is there a difference between the impact of propaganda in a democracy that has a free press and an open marketplace of ideas and the impact of propaganda in a dicta- torship with fewer non-governmental sources of information?

2 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, interview with Richard Heffner, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Part I,” The Open Mind (TV program), PBS, July 9, 1996, http://www.pbs.org/video/1512022073/.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 301 2/28/17 7:57 PM akg-images

Nazi National Welfare Program This 1934 propaganda poster in support of the national welfare program reads: “National health, national community, child protection, protection of mothers, care for travelers, are the tasks of the NS-Welfare Service. Join now!”

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 302 2/28/17 7:57 PM Glasshouse Images / Alamy Images Glasshouse

Nazi Recruitment Propaganda This mid-1930s poster says, “The NSDAP [Nazi Party] protects the people. Your fellow comrades need your advice and help, so join the local party organization.”

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 303 2/28/17 7:57 PM akg-images

Nazi Youth Propaganda This 1935 poster promotes the Hitler Youth by stating: “Youth serves the Führer! All ten-year-olds into the Hitler Youth.”

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 304 2/28/17 7:57 PM Bundesarchiv, Bild 133-075 Bild Bundesarchiv,

Nazi Propaganda Newspaper An issue of the antisemitic propaganda newspaper Der Stürmer (The Attacker) is posted on the sidewalk in Worms, Germany, in 1935. The headline above the case says, “The Jews Are Our Misfortune.”

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 305 2/28/17 7:57 PM Roger Viollet / Contributor / Gey Images / Gey / Contributor Viollet Roger

Triumph of the Will Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary-style film Triumph of the Will glorified Hitler and the Nazi Party. It was shot at the 1934 Nazi Party congress and rally in Nuremberg.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 306 2/28/17 7:57 PM Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Alamy Photo Zeitung Sueddeutsche

Propaganda Portrait of Hitler This portrait, The Standard Bearer, was painted by artist Hubert Lanzinger and displayed in the Great German Art Exhibition in Munich in 1937.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 307 2/28/17 7:57 PM akg-images

The Eternal Jew This 1938 poster advertises a popular antisemitic traveling exhibit called Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew).

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 308 2/28/17 7:57 PM Ullstein Bilderdienst / Yad Vashem / Yad Bilderdienst Ullstein

Antisemitic Display at Der Ewige Jude Women examining a display at the Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) exhibition in the Reichstag building in November 1938.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 309 2/28/17 7:57 PM United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Memorial Holocaust States United

Antisemitic Children’s Book From the 1938 antisemitic children’s book The Poisonous Mushroom. The boy is drawing a nose on the chalkboard, and the caption reads: “The Jewish nose is crooked at its tip. It looks like a 6.”

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 310 2/28/17 7:57 PM Reading 9 Art and Politics

Nazi leaders used all kinds of propaganda—in newspapers and posters, on the radio and in films—to win support for their ideology and policies. The Watch Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) arts, too, became a tool for expressing Nazi ideas about national identity VIDEO hstry.is/more and racial purity, about who belonged in the “national community” and who was a dangerous enemy. In the worlds of music, painting, and sculp- ture, Nazis celebrated what they perceived as “authentic” German culture Watch Complicity and and tried to eliminate what Joseph Goebbels and others referred to as VIDEO Cultural Figures in “degenerate” art. the Third Reich hstry.is/more A letter to a painter in 1937 from the president of the National Chamber of Fine Arts revealed the consequences for an artist of being labeled “de- generate”:

In connection with the task, entrusted to me by the Führer, of eradicating the works of degenerate art from our museums, no fewer than 608 paintings of yours had to be seized. A number of these paintings were displayed at the exhibits of Degenerate Art in Munich, Dortmund, and Berlin.

This fact could leave no doubt in your mind that your paintings did not contribute to the advancement of German culture in its respon- sibility toward people and nation.

Although you must also have been aware of NY / Artbpk, Berlin Resource, the policy-setting speech of the Führer at the opening of the Great German Art Exhibit in Munich, the recent paintings of yours, which you have now submitted to us, indicate that even at this date, you are still far removed from the cultural foundations of the National Socialist state.

On the basis of these facts, I am unable to grant that you possess the necessary reli- ability for belonging to my Chamber. On the basis of Paragraph 10 of the first Executive Order implementing the Law Concerning the National Chambers of Culture of November 1, 1933 (Official Gazette, I, 797) This painting, Working Maidens by Leopold Schmutzler, was showcased I hereby expel you from the National Chamber of Fine Arts and forbid you, effective by the Nazis at the 1940 Great immediately, any activity—professional or amateur—in the field of graphic arts. German Art Exhibition in Munich.

Membership Book No. M 756 issued in your name is no longer valid, and you are requested to send it back to me by return mail.1

1 Quoted in Joachim Remak, ed., The Nazi Years: A Documentary History (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1969), 66–67.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 311 2/28/17 7:57 PM bpk, Berlin / Staatliche Museen / Art Resource, NY / Art Resource, Museen / Staatliche bpk, Berlin

This display from a 1937 “degenerate art” exhibit is entitled “German Peasants—From a Jewish Perspective.” It includes paintings by German Expressionist artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmidt-RoŸluff.

The two art exhibitions referred to in the letter were sponsored by the Nazis in 1937. The first featured works labeled as “degenerate.” The second showed “true German art.” The more popular of the two was the exhibit of “degenerate art.” It traveled from Berlin to 12 other cities between 1937 and 1941 and attracted more than 3 million visitors. The exhibition carefully arranged art the Nazis considered “degenerate” alongside drawings done by people described as “insane” or deranged” and photographs of men and women who were physically deformed. In doing so, the exhibition claimed it was merely highlighting the “diseased, Jewish-Bolshevist, inferior” character of the artwork. In a building nearby, the public could see the opposite of this art in the Great German Art Exhibition. Much of it featured idyllic land- scapes and happy blonde “Aryan peasants.”

In 1938, the Nazis arranged a similar exhibition showing Entartete Musik—“degenerate music.” It targeted popular music, including jazz and swing, as well as works by Jewish composers. The show included photo- graphs, caricatures, musical scores, negative reviews of performances, and quotations from Hitler as well as special booths that allowed visitors to actually hear the music of such “degenerate composers” as Igor Stravinsky, Kurt Weill, and Ernst Toch. To the Nazis’ dismay, so many visitors mobbed the booth that played music from Weill’s The Threepenny Opera that it had to be closed.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 312 2/28/17 7:57 PM The Nazis eventually destroyed many of the works of “degenerate” art. Some were sold to foreign museums.

Connection Questions 1. What does the term “degenerate” mean? What did Nazi officials mean by “degenerate art”? What kind of art was given this label? Why was such art thought to be threatening?

2. Many Germans attended the “degenerate art” exhibits. Why do you think they went? Do you think that everyone who attended agreed with the Nazis’ opinion of the art that was displayed?

3. What is the role of art in forming a community? Is art ever dangerous?

4. What criteria are used to decide what kinds of art and music are “acceptable” for the public today? Who decides? How does art play a role in opening up or shutting down discourse in a society?

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 313 2/28/17 7:57 PM Reading 10 Propaganda at the Movies

During World War I, the British discovered the power of films to shape Watch Triumph of public opinion (see “The Western Front at the Cinema” in Chapter 3). The the Will VIDEO Soviets made a similar discovery in the 1920s. Joseph Goebbels learned hstry.is/more from both. He began with the newsreels, short film-based news reports that in those days were played before feature films. In Germany, those newsreels showed the nation as the Nazis wanted it to be seen—rich and powerful in comparison to its neighbors. But propaganda was not limited to newsreels; other kinds of movies made in Nazi Germany also expressed the government’s political and social views.

Some films, like Triumph of the Will by director Leni Riefenstahl, glorified Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. The documentary-style film was shot at the 1934 Nazi Party congress and rally in Nuremberg. American Journalist Wil- liam L. Shirer was new to Germany at the time, and that rally was his first. He describes it this way:

Like a Roman emperor Hitler rode into this medieval town [Nuremberg] at sun- down, past solid phalanxes of wildly cheering Germans who packed the narrow streets. . . . Tens of thousands of Swastika flags blot out the Gothic beauties of the place, the facades of the old houses, the gabled roofs. The streets, hardly wider than alleys, are a sea of brown and black uniforms. . . .

About ten o’clock tonight I got caught in a mob of ten thousand hysterics who jammed the moat in front of Hitler’s hotel, shouting: “We want our Führer.” I was a little shocked at the faces, especially those of the women, when Hitler finally appeared on the balcony for a moment. . . . They looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman.1

That was the scene that Leni Riefenstahl captured on film, and her movie became an immediate sensation. It was popular not only in Germany but also in France, where it received an award for “artistry” at the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris.

Other films were not designed to glorify the Nazis but to dehuman- ize, criminalize, and demonize vulnerable minorities—particularly Jews. Goebbels even issued special instructions on how such movies were to be described. Following these instructions, a brochure that announced the release of the antisemitic film Jud Süss (“Süss, the Jew”) claimed it was “historically accurate” and summarized the plot:

1 William Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941 (New York: Knopf, 1940), 17–18.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 314 2/28/17 7:57 PM Clean-shaven and dressed like a gentleman, the Jew Süss Oppenheimer contrives to be appointed Finance Minister to the Duke of Wurttemberg ... Matching one another in treachery, the court Jew and Minister Süss Oppenheimer and his secretary outbid one another in tricks and intrigue to bleed the people of Wurttemberg. .. . The Jew Süss Oppenheimer violates the beautiful Dorothea Sturm, an outrageous act which confirms the extent of his guilt. . . . Jew, hands off German women!

Another antisemitic film, Der ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew”), was praised as a documentary but contained such blatant lies that parts of it had to be omitted from the version shown in other countries. Officials feared the hostile tone might damage the film’s “credibility.” Marion Pritchard, then a graduate student in the Netherlands, recalled seeing the film:

We went to see this movie and sat and made smart remarks all the way through and laughed at it because it was so outrageous. And yet when we came out of the movie, one of my Gentile friends said to me, “I wish I hadn’t seen it. I know that it was all ridiculous and propaganda, but for the first time in my life I have a sense of them and us—Jews and Gentiles. I’m going to do everything I can to help them, but I wish I didn’t have this feeling.”2

Connection Questions 1. How did the Nazis use film to create an image of their ideal “national communi- ty”? How did they use film to create an image of who would be excluded from this community?

2. What did Marion Pritchard’s friend mean when she said, “I know that it was all ridiculous propaganda, but for the first time in my life I have a sense of them and us—Jews and Gentiles”? How do you explain her statement?

3. Why does film have the power to engage our emotions? How do television shows or films today help to shape an ideal image of ourselves and our society? Give examples.

4. What is a documentary film? How is a documentary film different from a propagan- da film? If possible, watch a clip from Triumph of the Will. Based on the description in this reading, or on the clip you viewed, do you think that Triumph of the Will should be considered a documentary film?

5. While this reading highlights films with a direct connection to propaganda, the German film industry was very active during the Nazi years, also creating “enter- tainment” movies like romances and comedies. In what ways might those also have had a role as propaganda? What purpose can entertainment in the media serve for a government?

2 Carol Rittner and Sondra Myers, eds., The Courage to Care (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 28.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 315 2/28/17 7:57 PM Reading 11 Women and the National Community

As they worked to create the “national community,” Nazi leaders envi- sioned a special role for women. During World War I and in the Weimar years, women’s traditional roles had been transformed by the wartime economy and by an expansion of women’s rights in the Weimar Consti- tution (see “Women in the Weimar Republic” in Chapter 4). In the Nazi worldview, which rejected these changes, women had a special status and responsibility for the Volksgemeinschaft, or “national community,” but their importance would be demonstrated through their traditional roles as wives and mothers. The National Socialist Women’s League was created in 1931. After the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, it issued a list of “Princi- ples and Organizational Guidelines” for the league. The guidelines began with these three points:

1 . We want an awakening, a renewal, and a reeducation of women to equip them for the task as guardians of the nation’s source of life: sexual life, marriage, motherhood and family, blood and race, and youth and nationhood. A woman’s entire education, development, vocational pursuit, and position within Volk and state must be directed toward the physical and spiritual task of motherhood.

2. We recognize that the great transformational process of women’s lives over the last fifty years, due to the machine age, has brought about a certain necessity, and we accept the education and official integration of the female workforce in the interest of the nation, unless this prohibits them from performing their duty within the Volk, in terms of marriage, family and motherhood.

3. We reject the misguided direction of the democratic-liberalistic-international women’s movement because they have not discovered new paths based on God and nationhood, and which are rooted in women’s souls; instead they represent the point of view that women are competitive with [or equal to] men, and in the demands they have raised they have elevated temporary stopgap measures to the position of a fundamental principle. This has resulted in the creation of a womanhood that has misplaced its energies and that has not understood its task in Germany’s time of need . . .1

1 “The National Socialist Women’s League,” in Benjamin Sax and Dieter Kuntz, eds., Inside Hitler’s Germany: A Documentary History of Life in the Third Reich (Toronto: D. C. Heath, 1992), 264–65.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 316 2/28/17 7:57 PM Many women welcomed the Nazis’ ideas. In 1936, Emilie Müller-Zadow, a member of the National Socialist Women’s League, wrote:

There is a growing recognition that mothers carry the destiny of their people in their hands and that the success or ruin of the nation depends on their attitude toward the vocation of motherhood.

Nation and race are facts of creation, which we, too, are called upon to share in forming and preserving. Therefore a national leadership that respects and honors its mothers is on a sound and healthy path . . .

... The place that Adolf Hitler assigns to woman in the Third Reich corresponds to her natural and divine destiny. Limits are being set for her, which earlier she had frequently violated in a barren desire to adopt masculine traits. The value and sanc- tity of goals now being set for her have been unrecognized and forgotten for a long time; and due respect is now being offered to her vocation as mother of the people, in which she can and should develop her rich emotions and spiritual strengths according to eternal laws. This wake-up call of National Socialism to women is one more indication that in Germany today it is not arbitrary laws that are being issued, but rather a nation is returning to essential, eternal rules of order.

It is therefore not at all surprising that the state and party claim the education of mothers as exclusively their task and insist that all training be carried out only by National Socialists and according to the principles of National Socialism. For the way a mother sees her child, how she cares for, teaches, and forms him, the principles that she instills in him, the attitude that she demands of him, all of this is crucial for the national health, for a German morality, and for the unified overall mind-set of the future nation.2

While many women did continue to work outside the home and the birthrate never rose as high as Hitler hoped it would, the Nazis contin- ued to promote their ideas about the national and racial significance of women. In 1938, they created the German Mother’s Cross, a prize annually bestowed on mothers who had had four or more children. Those with four children received a bronze cross, those with six received a silver cross, and those with eight or more received a gold cross. These prizes were awarded in local ceremonies on the second Sunday in May, which became a national Mother’s Day holiday in 1934. One newspaper printed the speech given at such a ceremony in Eutin, a German city:

Our mothers will always be our guiding stars. Just as a man risks his life in battle, so too does the mother bravely and faithfully offer her life for the nation when she fulfills her sacred duty. .. . The mother is ready to give children to the Führer in the numbers our people need for survival. To offer herself for the sake of the nation so that the nation might have eternity, that is the life purpose of the German mother, and that is why we must return to the eternal laws of blood and race.3

2 Emilie Müller-Zadow, “Mothers Who Give Us the Future” (1936), trans. Sally Winkle, in Roderick Stackelberg and Sally A. Winkle, eds., The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts (New York: Routledge, 2002), 185. 3 “Mothering Sunday,” in Sax and Kuntz, eds., Inside Hitler’s Germany, 265–67.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 317 2/28/17 7:57 PM Connection Questions 1. How did the Nazi government define the ideal role of women? How was their vision different from the roles some women had played before the Nazis came to power?

2. What does this vision of women ask women to do and to be? What does it offer them in return?

3. Why was increasing the population so important to the Nazis?

4. What words and phrases from the primary sources in this reading stand out to you? How did this language help to gain women’s attention and build support for the “national community” the Nazis were trying to create?

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 318 2/28/17 7:57 PM Reading 12 Joining the Hitler Youth

In his book Mein Kampf, written in the 1920s, Hitler said, “Whoever has the youth has the future.” Even before they came to power in 1933, Nazi leaders had begun to organize groups that would train young people according to Nazi principles. By 1936, all “Aryan” children in Germany over the age of six were required to join a Nazi youth group. At ten, boys were initiated into the Jungvolk (Young People), and at 14 they were promoted to the Hitler Youth. Their sisters joined the Jungmädel (Young Girls) and were later promoted to the League of German Girls. Hitler hoped that “These young people will learn nothing else but how to think German and act German. . . . And they will never be free again, not in their whole lives.”1

Although membership in the Hitler Youth organizations was compulsory, many young people did not have to be forced to join. In fact, they were eager to do so, drawn by the sense of belonging and importance they felt as members of these groups. In 1938, a boy named Hans Wolf wrote a story about his experiences in the Hitler Youth that was published in a school textbook. The story was called “Comradeship.” It begins:

It was a hot day and we had far to march. The sun was burning down on the heath, which was bereft of trees. The sand was glistening, I was tired. My feet were hurt- ing in those new walking shoes, every step was hurting and all I could think about was rest, water, and shade. I clenched my teeth to keep walking. I was the young- est, and this was my first outing. In front of me strode Rudolf, the leader. He was tall and strong. His backpack was heavy and pressed down on his shoulders. Rudolf Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1973-060-72 Bild Bundesarchiv, carried the bread for us six boys, the cooking pot, and a pile of books, from which he would read us wonderful- ly thrilling stories, at night in the hostel. My backpack only contained a shirt, a couple of sneakers, washing utensils, and some cooking gear, apart from a tarpau- lin for rainy days and straw beds. And yet I thought I could not lug this backpack any longer. My comrades all were somewhat older and had camping experience. They hardly felt the heat and hardship of the march. Ev- ery now and then they would sigh and drink lukewarm coffee from their canteens. Hitler Youth groups educated young people according to Nazi principles More and more, I remained behind, even though I tried to make up for my slack and encouraged comradeship and by running. Suddenly Rudolf turned around. He stopped and watched me crawling physical fitness through outdoor activities. up to him from a distance, while our comrades continued in the direction of a few trees on the horizon. “Tired?” Rudolf asked me, kindly. Ashamed, I had to say yes. Slowly, we walked side by side. I was limping. But I did not want to let on to Rudolf.

1 Max von der Grün, Howl Like the Wolves: Growing Up in Nazi Germany (New York: W. Morrow, 1980), 118–19.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 319 2/28/17 7:57 PM Hoover Institution Archives Institution Hoover

The League of German Girls was the girls’ wing of the Nazi Party youth movement. A typical activity for members was to go on walks while their mothers were working.

:

When we got to a juniper bush, the leader sat down and said: “For a little rest!” Relieved, I threw myself down. I did not want to talk, for I was shy. Rudolf gave me something to drink. I thanked him and leaned back comfortably, glad to be able to stretch my aching feet, and before I knew it I was sleeping. . . . When we resumed our march, my feet hurt much less and my backpack did not press down on me so. I was very glad about that.2

Like Hans Wolf, Alfons Heck was an enthusiastic participant in the Nazi Youth organizations. In a memoir written many years after World War II, Heck reflected on what made him want to join:

Far from being forced to enter the ranks of the Jungvolk, I could barely contain my impatience and was, in fact, accepted before I was quite 10. It seemed like an exciting life, free from parental supervision, filled with “duties” that seemed sheer pleasure. Precision marching was something one could endure for hiking, camping, war games in the field, and a constant emphasis on sports. . . . To a degree, our pre- war activities resembled those of the Boy Scouts, with much more emphasis on dis- cipline and political indoctrination. There were the paraphernalia and the symbols, the pomp and the mysticism, very close in feeling to religious rituals. One of the first significant demands was the so-called . . . “test of courage,” which was usu- ally administered after a six-month period of probation. The members of my Schar,

2 Hans Wolf, “Comradeship,” trans. Michael H. Kater, in Michael H. Kater, Hitler Youth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 13–14.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 320 2/28/17 7:57 PM a platoon-like unit of about 40–50 boys, were required to dive off the three-meter board—about 10 feet high—head first in the town’s swimming pool. There were some stinging belly flops, but the pain was worth it when our Fahnleinführer, the 15-year-old leader of Fahnlein (literally “little flag”), a company-like unit of about 160 boys, handed us the coveted dagger with its inscription Blood and Honor. From that moment on we were fully accepted.3

Connection Questions 1. Why you do you think the Nazi leadership wanted all young people to belong to a Nazi youth group? What were the young boys in this reading being prepared for through their participation?

2. Why would the authorities want to include Hans Wolf’s story in a school textbook? What values does the story communicate?

3. How are the two excerpts (by Hans Wolf and Alfons Heck) different? Looking back, what does Heck see that he might not have been aware of at the time?

4. How do the Nazi youth organizations and their symbols connect with the idea of a “national community”? How do they connect with the vision of a nation ready for battle?

5. When is it appealing to join a group? Why might some young people have joined even if they didn’t fully agree with Nazi policies?

3 Alfons Heck, A Child of Hitler: Germany in the Days When God Wore a Swastika (Phoenix, AZ: Renaissance House, 1985), 9.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 321 2/28/17 7:57 PM Reading 13 The Birthday Party

In 1938, writer Erika Mann published a book called School for Barbarians: Education Under the Nazis. The daughter of Nobel Prize–winning novelist Thomas Mann, she had emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1937. Her book was written as an indictment of the Nazis’ efforts to shape young people. Here, she tells what happened when the parents of a 12-year-old boy celebrated his birthday.

They gave him a birthday party, with ordinary, normal, “civilian” presents: a paint- box, a picture puzzle, a shining new bicycle—and lit twelve candles on his birthday cake. How they looked forward to that party! And it went off like a political confer- ence. Six boys had been invited, and five of them came right on time.

“Who’s missing?” the mother asked.

“Can’t you see?” said the boy, “HE’s missing—Fritzekarl!”

“What a pity!” she answered. That it should be just Fritzekarl. Two years older than her son, he was the leader in the Jungvolk, and his presence at the party was of great importance. If he did not appear, it was a sign of disfavor; the whole thing would be spoiled.

The boys, in their Hitler Youth uniforms, stood around the birthday table, not know- ing quite what to do with the toys. The bicycle pleased all of them, with its bell (which they took turns ringing) and its rubber tires, which were so hard to get nowadays, and which the father had finally been able to obtain after using all of his contacts in the Party, paying a high cash price, and emphasizing the fact that this was a wheel for a boy, a Jungvolk boy, and not for a girl who would never go to war! Now it stood there, complete with instructions and a copy of the German Cyclist, saying, “Boys on bicycles must try to remember the names of towns, rivers, mountains, and lakes as well as the material and type of architecture of bridges, etc. They may be able to make use of this knowledge for good of the Fatherland.”

The bell rang, and the son dashed to the front door. A sharp voice came through, crying “Heil Hitler!” and the five boys at the table turned on their heels as the answer came in a voice already breaking, “Heil Hitler!” Their superior officer was received with the “German salute,” five hands raised, great composure, solemn faces. Solemnly, Fritzekarl gave the host his birthday present—a framed photo- graph of the Leader of the Reich Youth, Baldur von Schirach, with a facsimile auto- graph. The son clicked his heels as he received it.

“I wish to speak to your father,” Fritzekarl said curtly.

The mother answered in her friendly voice, “My husband is not free just now—he’s upstairs working.”

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 322 2/28/17 7:57 PM Fritzekarl attempted to keep the note of military command in his shrill young voice. “Just the same, madam, I should prefer to speak to your husband for a mo- ment . . . in the interest of your son.”

His manner was correct, in spite of his tone. He bowed slightly to the mother as he finished his masterful little speech.

“Fourteen years old!” she thought, “but the mechanism of power backs him up and he knows it.”

The son was blushing violently. “For goodness’ sake call him!” he said, stepping toward his mother.

The father came down at once.

“Heil Hitler!” cried Fritzekarl.

“Heil Hitler!” repeated the man. “What can I do for you, Lieutenant?”

“Pardon me,” says Fritzekarl, who doesn’t get the joke, and retains his martial stare, “but your son was absent from our last practice exercises. . . .”

“Yes I know,” the father interrupts at this point, “he had a cold.”

“It was at your suggestion that he absented himself,” Fritzekarl continues, his voice breaking and going hoarse over the phrase. “You wrote me some sort of excuse, to say that he was staying home at your wish.”

The father put his weight first on one foot and then on the other. “As a matter of fact, it is my wish that he stay home when he has such a severe cold.”

“Oh, I didn’t have such a bad cold at all,” the son breaks in. He is leaning on the handlebars of the bicycle that his father had to fight for. “I could have gone, per- fectly well.”

The man looks at his son, a long look of surprise and pain and the resignation he has learned. “Well,” he says, and moves toward the door.

But Fritzekarl stops him. “A moment, please,” he insists, but politely. “Your son was in school on that day and the following day. So he cannot have been really ill. Let me call your attention to the fact that he should have been present at practice and that it is my duty to report the absence!”

“Oh, please—” the boy was speaking for his father, quickly, bargaining, “don’t do that, please? It won’t ever happen again—will it, father?—really, never again!”

The father wanted to protest; he felt the despairing look of his wife, the outrage and embarrassment of the scene. “How dare you speak to me like that!” was what he was repeating in his mind. But he knew the consequences of such an argument, for himself, and for his son. Even if he could convince the Nazi authorities of his own part, and Fritzekarl’s rudeness, his son would still have to face the Jungvolk, paying for his father’s moment of “courage.” And so he only said, hesitatingly and stiffly, “No—it certainly will never happen again!”

“I thank you,” replied the fourteen-year-old superior of the treasonable son. The father was dismissed.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 323 2/28/17 7:57 PM He cannot air his resentment; he has to expect eavesdroppers and spies every- where. His wife tells their son everything—not out of malice, but in the mistaken hope of reclaiming him this way. And the new maid is a person to be feared. She listens at doors, reads everything that’s lying around the house, and she happens to be having an affair with a Blockwart [block warden]; he could destroy a family single-handed. The boy would hardly denounce his own father, the man reflects, but if he repeats some remark to the maid, she will run to her Blockwart, the Ge- stapo (Secret State Police) will have it right away, and the doom will begin to move on them. Or, if they decide to dismiss the maid, her vengeance hanging over their heads may even be worse.1

Connection Questions 1. What does this reading add to your thinking about why young people may have been enthusiastic about belonging to the Jungvolk, Hitler Youth, or other Nazi youth organizations?

2. After reading this story, a boy said, “This is like a world upside down—the chil- dren have the power.” Do you agree? Did the children really have power? If so, what was the source of their power?

3. The boy’s mother hoped to “reclaim” her son. How was he lost? The father wanted to protest but feared the consequences. What might have been those consequences? What did he mean when he thought that his son would have to pay for the father’s “courage”?

4. Why does the son contradict his father and insist that he could have gone to the Jungvolk meeting? What is the role of the particular historical context in his choice? What role do peer pressure and the desire to fit in play?

1 Erika Mann, School for Barbarians: Education Under the Nazis (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2014), 32–35.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 324 2/28/17 7:57 PM Reading 14 Models of Obedience

For many young people in Nazi Germany, membership in groups like the Hitler Youth offered a feeling of excitement, belonging, and even power, and they participated with enthusiasm. Obedience, conformity, and the desire to please parents, teachers, and group leaders also influenced young people’s choices. Hede von Nagel grew up in Nazi Germany. She wrote of her childhood:

As my parents’ second daughter, I was a great disappointment to my father, who wanted to produce sons for the Führer and the nation—and, because he was of the nobility, to carry on the family name.

He was furious that, unlike my fair-haired older sister, who looked so Nordic, I had been cursed with auburn hair and dark brown eyes. Then came a third child, this time a male, but he was a dark-eyed redhead—another let down for my patriotic father. Only when another son was born and proved to be the very model of a tow-headed, blue-eyed Aryan was my father satisfied. “At last,” he said, “the child I wanted.”

Our parents taught us to raise our arms and say “Heil Hitler” before we said “Mama.” This type of indoctrination was universal. Children experienced it in kindergarten, at home—everywhere. We grew up believing that Hitler was a su- per-god, and Germany an anointed nation. . . .

At the same time, our parents and teachers trained my sister and me to be the un- questioning helpmates of men; as individuals, we had no right to our own opinion, no right to speak up.1

A former member of the Hitler Youth had similar memories:

[It’s] especially easy to manipulate children at that age. . . . If you can drill the notion into their heads, you are from a tribe, a race that is especially valuable. And then you tell them something about the Germanic tribes, their loyalty, their battles, how Germanic women let themselves be hitched up to carts to fight against the Romans. . . . Then there were the songs . . . “Before the foreigner robs you of your crown, O Germany, we would prefer to fall side by side.” Or “The flag is dearer than death.” . . . The flag, the people—they were everything. You are nothing, your people everything. Yes, that’s how children were brought up, that’s how you can manipulate a child.2

1 Hede von Nagel, “The Nazi Legacy—Fearful Silence for Their Children,” Boston Globe, October 23, 1977. 2 Quoted in Dan Bar-On, Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 216.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 325 2/28/17 7:57 PM Alfons Heck believed there was more to it than propaganda:

Traditionally, the German people were subservient to authority and respected their rulers as exalted father figures who could be relied on to look after them. A major reason why the Weimar Republic, despite its liberal constitution, did not catch on with many Germans was the widespread impression that no one seemed to be firmly in charge. Hitler used that yearning for a leader brilliantly. From our very first day in the Jungvolk, we accepted it as a natural law—especially since it was mere- ly an extension of what we had learned in school—that a leader’s orders must be obeyed unconditionally, even if they appeared harsh, punitive, or unsound. It was the only way to avoid chaos. This chain of command started at the very bottom and ended with Hitler.

I still recall with wonder that [our leader] once marched all 160 of us in his Fahnlein [unit] into an ice-cold river in November because our singing had displeased him. We cursed him bitterly under our breath, but not one of us refused. That would have been the unthinkable crime of disobeying a “direct order.” During the war, such a refusal could be used—and frequently was—to put the offender before a firing squad.3

Connection Questions 1. How did each of the Germans quoted in this reading believe they acquired their attitudes and values? How do you think you acquired yours?

2. How did each of these Germans explain what the role was of obedience and conformity in Nazi Germany?

3. Why is it important that a child be taught to obey? At what point does obedience become dangerous? What is the difference between obedience and conformity?

4. All three sources are written by adults looking back on their youth in Nazi Ger- many. How might hindsight affect their feelings about their participation?

5. According to Alfons Heck, why might a strong leader have been attractive to Germans in the 1930s? What evidence have you found while studying this history that some Germans either tolerated or welcomed a strong governmental authori- ty figure?

3 Alfons Heck, A Child of Hitler: Germany in the Days When God Wore a Swastika (Phoenix, AZ: Renaissance House, 1985), 33–34.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 326 2/28/17 7:57 PM Reading 15 Disillusionment in the Hitler Youth

Hitler hoped that by conditioning young people in groups like the Hitler Youth, they would “never be free again, not in their whole lives.”1 Many young people were deeply influenced by these groups, but support for the Hitler Youth was never as widespread and strong as Nazi leaders would have liked. Young people skipped some meetings and activities, even though attendance was compulsory, and their loyalty could be inconsis- tent. Their reasons for losing enthusiasm for Hitler Youth activities were not always political or moral; sometimes young people grew tired of the many requirements or just got bored. In 1939, the Social Democratic Party, which had been outlawed by the Nazis and was operating in secrecy, pub- lished a report on German youth that described some of this discontent. It said that “young people are starting to feel particularly burdened by the lack of freedom and the mindless drills practiced by National Socialist or- ganizations. So it is no wonder that signs of fatigue would be particularly prominent in their ranks.”2

Contrary to Hitler’s hopes, membership in the Hitler Youth did not make all boys and girls ardent Nazis for life. Hans Scholl, who later founded the White Rose resistance movement with his sister Sophie and was executed by the Nazis, was at one point a member of the Hitler Youth (see “Protests in Germany” in Chapter 9). His sister Inge Scholl describes how Hans slowly became disillusioned with the group:

Hans had assembled a collection of folk songs, and his young charges loved to listen to him singing, accompanying himself on his guitar. He knew not only the songs of Hitler Youth but also the folk songs of many peoples and many lands. How magically a Russian or Norwegian song sounded with its dark and dragging melancholy. What did it not tell us of the soul of those people and their homeland!

But some time later a peculiar change took place in Hans; he was no longer the same. Something disturbing had entered his life. . . . His songs were forbidden, the leader had told him. And when he had laughed at this, they threatened him with disciplinary action. Why should he not be permitted to sing these beautiful songs? Only because they had been created by other peoples? He could not understand it, and this depressed him, and his usual carefree spirit began to wane.

At this particular time he was given a very special assignment.

1 Max von der Grün, Howl Like the Wolves: Growing Up in Nazi Germany (New York: W. Morrow, 1980), 118–19. 2 “Sopade: Reports on German Youth” (1938), in The Third Reich Sourcebook, ed. Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 252.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 327 2/28/17 7:57 PM He was to carry the flag of his troop to the party’s national rally at Nuremberg. He was overjoyed. But when he returned we hardly dared trust our eyes. He looked tired, and on his face lay a great disappointment. We did not expect an explana- tion, but gradually we learned that the youth movement which had been held up to him as an ideal image was in reality something totally different from what he had imagined the Hitler Youth to be. Their drill and uniformity had been extended into every sphere of personal life. But he had always believed that every boy should develop his own special talents. Thus through his imagination, his ingenuity, his unique personality, each member could have enriched the group. But in Nuremberg everything had been done according to the same mold. There had been talk, day and night, about loyalty. But what was the keystone of all loyalty if not to be true to oneself? My God! There was a mighty upheaval taking place in Hans.

One day he came home with another prohibition. One of the leaders had taken away a book by his most beloved writer, Stellar Hours of Mankind by Stefan Zweig. It was forbidden, he was told. Why? There had been no answer. He heard something similar about another German writer whom he liked very much. This one had been forced to escape from Germany because he had been engaged in spreading pacifist ideas. Ultimately it came to an open break.

Some time before, Hans had been promoted to standard-bearer. He and his boys had sewn themselves a magnificent flag with a mythical beast in the center. The flag was something very special. It had been dedicated to the Führer himself. The boys had taken an oath on the flag because it was the symbol of their fellowship. But one evening, as they stood with their flag in formation for inspection by a high- er leader, something unheard-of happened. The visiting leader suddenly ordered the tiny standard-bearer, a frolicsome twelve-year-old lad, to give up the flag. “You don’t need a special flag. Just keep the one that has been prescribed for all.” Hans was deeply disturbed. Since when? Didn’t the troop leader know what this special flag meant to its standard-bearer? Wasn’t it more than just a piece of cloth that could be changed at one’s pleasure?

Once more the leader ordered the boy to give up the flag. He stood quiet and motionless. Hans knew what was going on in the little fellow’s mind and that he would not obey. When the high leader in a threatening voice ordered the little fel- low for the third time, Hans saw the flag waver slightly. He could no longer control himself. He stepped out of line and slapped the visiting leader’s face. From then on he was no longer the standard-bearer.3

3 Inge Scholl, Students Against Tyranny: The Resistance of the White Rose, Munich, 1942–1943, trans. Arthur R. Schultz (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1970), 7–10.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 328 2/28/17 7:57 PM Connection Questions 1. What do you think appealed to Hans Scholl about the Hitler Youth? What was the “mighty upheaval” that later took place in him? What caused it? What choices did he make?

2. Why did other young people begin to drop out of the Hitler Youth? How do you account for their feelings?

3. How did Hans define “loyalty”? How did other young Germans whose stories you read in this chapter define “loyalty”?

4. Were Hans’s actions acts of resistance? If so, resistance against what? What difference did his actions make?

5. Can we be inspired when people and groups resist or speak out, and also be disappointed or angry when they don’t go far enough? What can we learn from the actions those groups take, and from those they don’t?

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 329 2/28/17 7:57 PM Reading 16 Rejecting Nazism

Not all young people willingly participated in Nazi youth groups. Some, like Hans Scholl (see Reading 15, “Disillusionment in the Hitler Youth”), became disillusioned and dropped out. In the late 1930s, as Hitler Youth activities began to focus less on leisure activities and more on military drills and preparation for war, other young people formed their own groups in which they could more freely express their own interests and ideas. One of these groups was the Edelweiss Pirates. Members of the group, both boys and girls, would gather from time to time for weekend camping trips. They would pitch tents in the forest, sing, talk, and fight Hitler Youth patrols. The group’s slogan was “Eternal War on

Universal History Archive / Contributor / Gey Images / Gey / Contributor Archive History Universal the Hitler youth.” One Edelweiss Pirate explained his choice to join the group by saying, “It’s the Hitler Youth’s own fault . . . every order I was given con- tained a threat.” The group’s resistance to the Nazis continued throughout World War II.1

A 1938 photo of a group of Other young people who refused to join Nazi youth organizations defined Edelweiss Pirates, an unofficial youth group that emerged themselves through their favorite music. They called themselves the in response to the strict Swing-Jugend (“swing kids”). The swing kids didn’t make open political regimentation of the Hitler Youth. statements, but their love of foreign music, their wild style of dancing, and their acceptance of Jews and other outsiders were a strong contrast to the disciplined, formal culture encouraged by the Nazi Party. Historian Richard Bessel describes the “swing kids”:

The swing youth were not anti-fascist in a political sense—their behavior was indeed emphatically anti-political—both Nazi slogans and traditional nationalism were of profound indifference to them. They sought their counter-identity in what they saw as the “slovenly” culture of . . . England and America. They accepted Jews and “half- Jews” into their groups . . . and gave ovations to visiting bands from Belgium and Holland.

The very disgust shown by the authors of the Nazi reports . . . indicate that Nazi officialdom felt attacked at the heart of its concept of itself and the state. This is the only way, too, to explain the reaction of Heinrich Himmler, who wanted to put the

1 Richard Bessel, Life in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 30–31.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 330 2/28/17 7:57 PM “ringleaders” of the swing movement into concentration camps for at least two or three years of beatings, punitive drill and forced labor.2

The kind of behavior that so upset Himmler is described in a Hitler Youth re- port on a 1940 swing festival attended by 500 to 600 teenagers in Hamburg.

The dancers made an appalling sight. None of the couples danced normally; there was only swing of the worst sort. Sometimes two boys danced with one girl; some- times several formed a circle, linking arms and jumping, slapping hands, even rub- bing the backs of their heads together; and then, bent double, with the top half of the body hanging loosely down, long hair flopping into the face, they dragged them- selves round practically to their knees. When the band played a rumba, the dancers went into wild ecstasy. They all leaped around and mumbled the chorus in English. The band played wilder and wilder numbers; none of the players was sitting any longer, they all “jitterbugged” on the stage like wild animals. Frequently boys could be observed dancing together, without exception with two cigarettes in the mouth, one in each corner . . .3

Connection Questions 1. Why do you think the young people who questioned Nazism formed their own groups? Why did Nazi officials believe these groups were dangerous?

2. To what extent were the activities of these alternative youth groups motivated by political opposition to the Nazis? To what extent were they motivated by teenage rebellion?

3. What do the two groups suggest about the successes and failures of Nazi ambi- tions to control the youth of Germany?

4. What do the descriptions of these groups suggest about the power of art and music? How can listening to or performing music be a form of rebellion? How can dancing be a form of rebellion?

2 Bessel, Life in the Third Reich, 39. 3 Ibid., 37.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 331 2/28/17 7:57 PM Reading 17 “Heil Hitler!”: Lessons of Daily Life

In 1938, writer Erika Mann published a book called School for Barbarians: Education Under the Nazis. (See Reading 13, “The Birthday Party,” for another excerpt from Mann’s book.) Mann had emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1937. Her book criticized the Nazis’ efforts to shape young people’s ideas and feelings. In it, she describes how daily life in Germany was a kind of “school” that educated children in accordance with Nazi ideals:

Every child says “Heil Hitler!” from 50 to 150 times a day, immeasurably more often than the old neutral greetings. The formula is required by law; if you meet a friend on the way to school, you say it; study periods are opened and closed with “Heil Hitler!”; “Heil Hitler!” says the postman, the street-car conductor, the girl who sells you notebooks at the stationery store; and if your parents’ first words when you come home for lunch are not “Heil Hitler!” they have been guilty of a punish- able offense and can be denounced. “Heil Hitler!” they shout in the Jungvolk and Hitler Youth. “Heil Hitler!” cry the girls in the League of German Girls. Your evening prayers must close with “Heil Hitler!” if you take your devotions seriously.

Officially—when you say hello to your superiors in school or in a group—the words are accompanied by the act of throwing the right arm high; but an unofficial greet- ing among equals requires only a comparatively lax lifting of the forearm, with the fingers closed and pointing forward. This Hitler greeting, this “German” greeting, repeated countless times from morning to bedtime, stamps the whole day.

Heil really means salvation, and used to be applied to relations between man and his God; one would speak of ewiges Heil (eternal salvation), and the adjective “holy” derives from the noun. But now there is the new usage. . . .

You leave the house in the morning, “Heil Hitler” on your lips; and on the stairs of your apartment house you meet the Blockwart [block warden]. A person of great importance and some danger, the Blockwart has been installed by the government as a Nazi guardian. He controls the block, reporting on it regularly, checking up on the behavior of its residents. It’s worth it to face right about, military style, and to give him the “big” Hitler salute, with the right arm as high as it will go. All the way down the street, the flags are waving, every window colored with red banners, and the black swastika in the middle of each. You don’t stop to ask why; it’s bound to be some national event. Not a week passes without an occasion on which families are given one reason or another to hang out the swastika. Only the Jews are ex- empted under the strict regulation. Jews are not Germans; they do not belong to the “Nation,” they can have no “national events.”

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 332 2/28/17 7:57 PM You meet the uniforms on the way to school, the black [uniformed] S.S. men, the men of the Volunteer Labor Service, and the Reichswehr soldiers [German army]. And if some of the streets are closed, you know that an official is driving through town. Nobody has ever told you the high officials of other countries pass without the precautions of closed streets.

And here, where a building is going up, the workmen are gone—probably because of the “national event.” But the sign is on the scaffolding. “We have our Führer to thank that we are working here today. Heil Hitler!” The familiar sign, seen every- where with men at work, on roads, barracks, sports fields. What does it mean to you? Do you think of a world outside with workers who need not thank a Führer for their jobs? Certainly not—what you have imprinted on your mind is the sentence, deep and accepted as an old melody.

There are more placards as you continue past hotels, restaurants, indoor swimming pools, to school. They read “No Jews allowed”—“Jews not desired here”—“Not for Jews.” And what do you feel? Agreement? Pleasure? Disgust? Opposition? You don’t feel any of these. You don’t feel anything, you’ve seen these placards for almost five years. This is a habit, it is all perfectly natural, of course Jews aren’t allowed here. Five years in the life of a child of nine—that’s his life, after four years of infancy, his whole personal, conscious existence.

Through the Nazi street walks the Nazi child. There is nothing to disturb him, noth- ing to attract his attention or criticism. The stands sell Nazi newspapers almost exclusively; all German papers are Nazi; foreign newspapers are forbidden, if they do not please the men at the top. The child won’t be surprised at their huge head- lines: “UNHEARD-OF ACTS OF VIOLENCE AGAINST GERMANY IN CZECHOSLO- VAKIA!” “JEWISH GANGSTERS RULE AMERICA!” “THE COMMUNIST TERROR IN SPAIN SUPPORTED BY THE POPE!” “150 MORE PRIESTS UNMASKED AS SEXUAL CRIMINALS!”

“That’s how it is in the world,” the child thinks. “What luck we’re in, to have a Führer. He’ll tell the whole bunch—Czechs, Jews, Americans, Communists, and priests—where to get off!”

There are no doubts, no suspicion at the coarse and hysterical tone of the dis- patches, no hint that they may be inexact or false. No, these things are part of the everyday world of the Nazis, like the Blockwart, the swastika, the signs reading “No Jews allowed.” They add up to an atmosphere that is torture, a fuming poison for a free-born human being.

The German child breathes this air. There is no other condition wherever Nazis are in power; and here in Germany they do rule everywhere, and their supremacy over the German child, as he learns and eats, marches, grows up, breathes, is complete.1

1 Erika Mann, School for Barbarians: Education Under the Nazis (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1938), 21–24.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 333 2/28/17 7:57 PM Connection Questions 1. What does this reading reveal about children’s daily life in Nazi Germany? What might children have learned even before they arrived at school? How were the streets themselves a kind of “school” for Nazi ideas?

2. Why would the Nazis focus on controlling the lives of young people?

3. Are there messages about ourselves and others that we hear so often today in our daily lives that we don’t even think about them?

4. Erika Mann concludes: “The German child breathes this air.” What is in the “air” we breathe? How do we figure out what messages in our society are coming from a place of authority? How do we figure out what they mean?

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 334 2/28/17 7:57 PM Reading 18 Youth on the Margins

In her book School for Barbarians, Erika Mann describes how greeting others with the Nazi salute and the words “Heil Hitler” became a common, Watch Changes at School under constant practice in Germany, infusing daily life and social interactions VIDEO the Nazis with an expression of political loyalty (see Reading 17, “’Heil Hitler!’: Les- hstry.is/more sons of Daily Life”). The “Heil Hitler” greeting was also an important part of the school day, posing difficult and even dangerous dilemmas for some students.

When Elizabeth Dopazo and her brother were very young, their parents were sent to concentration camps because of their religious beliefs; they were Jehovah’s Witnesses whose faith required that they pledge allegiance only to God. Jehovah’s Witnesses therefore refused to say “Heil Hitler” as a matter of religious conviction. After their parents were arrested, sev- en-year-old Elizabeth and her six-year-old brother went to live with their grandparents. Elizabeth later recalled:

We had to quickly change our way of speaking so maybe we wouldn’t be so notice- able. In school right away it started, you see. We had to raise our right arm and say “Heil Hitler” and all that sort of thing and then we didn’t do it a few times. A few times was all right. You can drop a handkerchief, you can do a little something, but quickly they look and they say, “Ah, you’re different and you’re new in the school.” So you’re watched a little more closely. You might get one or two children who’d tell on you but it was rare. The teacher would bring you to the front of the class and say “Why don’t you say Heil Hitler?” and you were shaking already because you knew, unlike other children, if you told them the real reason there’d be trouble. For us to say “Heil Hitler” and praise a person would be against our belief. We shouldn’t because we had already pledged our allegiance to God and that’s it. So we could stand and be respectful to the government, but we were not to partici- pate in adulation for political figures. . . .

My brother and I talked about all these things at home after school. We had a little attic we used to go in and discuss what would be best. We grew up very fast. We never really had a childhood. . . .

Later, around age twelve or thirteen, we joined the Hitler Youth, which we actually didn’t want to do, but the Gestapo came to my grandparents’ house, just like you’ve seen in the movies with the long leather coats on and they stood at the front door and they were saying, “Your grandchildren have to join the Hitler Youth and if they don’t by Thursday we will take stronger measures.” After they’d left we told our grandparents we’ll join tomorrow, even if we hate all that stuff. They agreed we’d better do it and we very quickly donned those uniforms. . . .

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 335 2/28/17 7:57 PM As time went on, my brother, when he was thirteen or fourteen, sort of was swayed. You know, you have to believe in something. He wanted to be a German officer and said our father had been wrong all along and that we went to the dogs for our father’s beliefs. He [our father] died for his ideals and where are we? [My brother] was very angry. I was too, but not as much. I was torn between what would be the good thing to do and what would not. . . .

We were not allowed to go to higher education because we were a detriment to others. So you can image how he felt when the war was finished. He was all disil- lusioned and shattered.1

Daily life in school was even more difficult for a boy named Frank, one of two Jewish students in a school in Breslau in the mid-1930s. He recalled:

People started to pick on me, “a dirty Jew,” and all this kind of thing. And we started to fight. .. . There was my friend, and he was one class above me, he fought in every break. .. . I started to fight, too, because they insulted too much or they started to fight, whatever it was.

We were very isolated, and one order came after another. . . . [One] order says all Jews must greet with the German greeting. The German greeting was “Heil Hitler” and raising your hand. Then the next order came out, and it says the Jews ©TopFoto / The Image Works / The Image ©TopFoto are not allowed to greet people with the “Heil Hitler” signal. Okay, so, in Germany you had to greet every teacher. When you see a teacher on the street, you had to respect them and you had to greet him—you had to bow down. . . .

Now we were in an impossible situation, be- cause when we went up the stairs and we saw one teacher, and we said “Heil Hitler.” And he turned around. “Aren’t you a Jew? You’re not allowed to greet me with ‘Heil Hitler.’” But if I didn’t greet him at all, then the next teacher would say “Aren’t you supposed to greet [me with] ‘Heil Hitler’?” And this was always accom- While this classroom studied “race panied with a punishment. .. . Not all of them but some of them, the teachers that science,” Jewish students were forced to stand at the front of the knew me and would pick on me—they’d punish me, put me in a corner, or humili- room. The blackboard says, “The Jew ate me in one way or another. . . . is our greatest enemy.” You had to raise your hand and salute when the flag passed and Jews weren’t allowed to do it. .. . If you don’t salute, you immediately were recognized as a Jew, and you really were left to the mercy of the people who saw you, what they would do with you. They could perfectly well kill you on the street and, you know, nobody really said anything because there was no such thing as a court and after all, it was only a Jew. . . . We were at the mercy of people.2

1 Elizabeth Dopazo, “Reminiscences,” unpublished interview, 1981, Facing History and Ourselves Foundation. 2 Childhood Experiences of German Jews (New Haven, CT: Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, ca. 1987), VHS, https://www.facinghistory.org/books-borrowing/childhood-experiences-german-jews?destination=node/4022.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 336 2/28/17 7:57 PM Connection Questions 1. What dilemmas did Elizabeth Dopazo, her brother, and Frank face? How did they respond to those dilemmas? What choices were available to Elizabeth that were not available to Frank?

2. Compare and contrast the experiences of Hans Wolf and Alfons Heck (see Reading 12, “Joining the Hitler Youth”) with those of Elizabeth and Frank described in this reading. Were there any similarities? What are some of the key differences? How were these children affected by growing up in Nazi Germany in the 1930s? Do these readings express experiences and emotions that might also be typical of children everywhere?

3. Do you think it is more important for teens to feel as if they belong than for people of other ages to feel that way? Why or why not? Why might the experi- ence of being an outsider be more painful for a teenager than for others?

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 337 2/28/17 7:57 PM Reading 19 Schooling for the National Community

Nazi leaders worked to influence young people in youth groups, in their families, and on the streets. Schools also had a key role to play. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, they quickly passed new laws to make public education reflect and teach their nationalist and racial ideologies. Jewish teachers were fired from their posts, and other teachers were encouraged to join the National Socialist Teachers League; by 1936, over 97% of teach- ers were members. Nazi leaders also created new curricula and textbooks to be used throughout the country.

Gregor Ziemer was a teacher and headmaster at the American School in Berlin (a school for the children of American citizens living in Germany) for most of the 1930s. During this time, Ziemer toured German schools and eventually wrote a book called Education for Death, which was first published in 1941. In it, Ziemer describes the schools he visited:

A teacher is not spoken of as a teacher (Lehrer) but an Erzieher. The word suggests an iron disciplinarian who does not instruct but commands, and whose orders are backed up with force if necessary.

Matters of the spirit are frankly and energetically belittled. Physical education, education for action, is alone worthy of the Nazi teacher’s attention. All else can be dismissed as non-essential . . .

The Nazi schools are no place for weaklings. All children must, of course, finish the primary school before they are ten; but after that the schools are proving-grounds for the Party. Those who betray any weakness of body or have not the capacities for absolute obedience and submission must be expelled. . . .

The regime draws a sharp distinction between girls, inherently weak, and boys, natural exponents of strength. Boys and girls have nothing in common. Their aims, their purposes in life, are fundamentally different. Boys will become soldiers; girls will become breeders. Co-educational schools are manifestations of decadent de- mocracies and hence are taboo.

[Dr. Bernhard Rust, the Nazi Minister of Education] decrees that in Nazi schools the norm is physical education. After that, German, biology, science, mathematics, and history are for the boys; eugenics and home economics for the girls. Other subjects are permissible if they are taught to promote Nazi ideas. Spiritual education is definitely unimportant.1

1 Gregor Ziemer, Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), 15–16.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 338 2/28/17 7:57 PM History and science were the subjects most influenced by Nazi ideology. Soon after Hitler took power, a new course in “race science” was added to the curriculum in every German school. The Nazi minister of education outlined the objectives of the course:

1. Give pupils an insight into the relationship, causes and effects of all basic facts having to do with the science of heredity and race.

2. Impress the pupils with the importance of the science of heredity and race for the future of the nation and the purposes of the government.

3. Awaken in the pupils a sense of responsibility toward the nation, as represented by both its ancestry and its posterity; imbue the pupils with pride in the fact that the German people are the most important exponent of the Nordic race. . . .2

Racial instruction was not limited to a single course. It was included in all classes, even arithmetic. One book, titled Germany’s Fall and Rise— Illustrations Taken from Arithmetic Instruction in the Higher Grades of Elementary School, asks, “The Jews are aliens in Germany—in 1933 there were 66,060,000 inhabitants of the German Reich, of whom 499,682 were Jews. What is the percentage of aliens?”3

Connection Questions 1. According to Gregor Ziemer, what were the most important subjects in Nazi schools? What does that suggest about the values of society at the time?

2. What was the role of girls and women in the Nazis’ ideology? What was the role of boys and men? Today, many people would strongly disagree with the Nazis’ decision to make gender the basis for extreme differences in schooling. What stereotypes about girls and boys did the Nazi program rely on?

3. Why do you think the Nazis added the new course on race science to the school curriculum? How did this new course, based on “science,” reflect the ideas about “science” and race that you learned about in Chapter 2?

4. To what extent should school be designed to meet the needs of the individual? To what extent should it be designed to meet the needs of the community or the state?

2 Quoted in Erika Mann, School for Barbarians: Education Under the Nazis (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2014), 77–78. 3 Ziemer, Education for Death, 16.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 339 2/28/17 7:57 PM Reading 20 Even If All Others Do— I Do Not!

Only a few parents dared to challenge the education their children received. Among them was Johannes Fest (see “A Test of Loyalty” in Chapter 5). Near the end of 1936, he called his sons Joachim and Wolfgang into his study. Joachim, who was ten years old at the time, later recalled:

He wanted to talk to us about a subject, he began, that had been giving him a headache for some months now. He had been prompted by one or two differences of opinion with our mother, who was terribly worried and hardly able to sleep anymore. . . . He knew what his responsibilities were. But he also had principles, which he wasn’t going to let anyone call into question. Least of all the “band of criminals” in power.

He repeated the words “band of criminals,” and if we had been a little older we would no doubt have noticed how torn he was. He had discussed what he was about to say with my mother and they had with some effort reached an agreement. From now on there would be a double evening meal: an early one for the three younger children and another one as soon as the little ones were in bed. We belonged to the later sitting. The reason for this division was very simple; he had to have a place in the world where he could talk openly and get his disgust off his chest. Otherwise life would be worth nothing. At least not for him. With the little ones he would have to keep himself in check, as he had done for two years now whenever entering a shop, in front of the lowliest counter clerk, and—by force of law—every time he picked up his children from school. He was incapable of doing that, he said, and concluded with the words, more or less, “A state that turns everything into a lie shall not cross our threshold as well. I shall not submit to the reigning mendacity [lies], at least within the family circle.” That, of course, sounded a little grand, he said. As it was, he only wanted to keep the enforced hypocrisy at bay.

He took a deep breath, as if he had got rid of a burden, and walked back and forth between the window and the smoking table a few times. In doing this, he began again, he was turning us into adults, so to speak. With that came a duty to be ex- tremely cautious. Tight lips were the symbol of this state: “Always remember that!” Nothing political that we discussed was for others to hear. Anyone with whom we exchanged a few words could be a Nazi, a traitor, or simply thoughtless. In a dicta- torship, distrust was not only a commandment, it was a virtue.

And it was just as important, he continued, never to suffer from the isolation which inevitably accompanied opposition to the opinion on the street. He would give us a Latin maxim for that, which we should never forget; it would be best to write it down, then brand it in our memory and throw away the note. . . . He put a piece

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 340 2/28/17 7:57 PM of paper in front of each of us and dictated: Etiam si omnes—ego non! [Even if all others do—I do not!] “It’s from the Gospel According to St. Matthew,” he explained, “the scene on the Mount of Olives.” He laughed when he saw what was on my piece of paper. If I remember rightly, I had written something like Essi omniss, ergo no. My father stroked my head and said, consolingly, “Don’t worry! There’s time enough for you to learn it!” My brother, who was already at Gymna- sium [secondary school], had written the sentence correctly.

That, more or less, was how the hour in the study passed. .. . After we returned to our room, Wolfgang repeated, with all the superiority of an older brother, that we were adults now. He hoped I knew what that meant. I nodded solemnly, although I didn’t have a clue. Then he added that all of us together now formed a group of conspirators. He proudly pushed against my chest: “Us against the world!” I nodded once again without having the faintest idea what it meant to be against the world. I simply felt myself to be favored in some indefinable way by my fa- ther, with whom in the recent past I had increasingly got into arguments because of some piece of cheek or other. The way he sometimes acknowledged me from then on with a passing nod, I also interpreted as approval. That evening after the parental “Good night,” my mother came into our room once more, sat down for a few minutes on Wolfgang’s bed, and later on mine. “I only say cheerful things—or prefer to say nothing,” she had once declared. .. . She stuck to that now. But she looked depressed.

It was an adventure, as I often, in the weeks that followed, happily persuaded my- self before falling asleep. Who had opportunity of entering upon such an enterprise with his father? I was determined not to disappoint him. . . .

Only when I was older did I understand the horror of the situation, in which con- stant watchfulness was required as a kind of law for parents as for children, mis- trust was a rule of survival and isolation a necessity—where the mere clumsiness of a child could lead literally to death and ruin. Fifteen years later, when I asked my father about the dark side of his afternoon talk, his expression again immediately revealed just how worried he had been then. He recovered himself and replied that at the time he had been very conscious of the risk to which he exposed himself and his family. Perhaps he had gone too far. But he had hoped to God it would turn out well. And, indeed, the gamble had paid off. At any rate, neither we nor Winfried [a younger brother], who had been allowed to join the second sitting of the evening meal later on, had ever caused him any embarrassment. And, just as he had wished, none of us had ever forgotten the maxim which, he remembered, he had bequeathed us. Indeed, the fine Latin maxim “Even if all others do—I do not!” belonged to every truly free life.1

1 Joachim Fest, Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Other Press, 2012), 71–75.

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 341 2/28/17 7:57 PM Connection Questions 1. What was Johannes Fest’s dilemma? Why did he insist on having a “double evening meal”?

2. Why did the talk with his father have such an impact on Joachim? How did he understand it at the time it happened, and what did he come to see many years later? What did Johannes Fest teach his sons?

3. Were Johannes Fest’s choices courageous? Could they be seen as resistance? Why or why not?

4. What does the line “Even if all others do—I do not!” mean to you? When might that quote help to explain a decision you’ve made in your own life?

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HaHB_chapter6_v1_PPS.indd 342 2/28/17 7:57 PM Chapter 6 Analysis and Reflection

1. How did the Nazis attempt to build a “racially pure and harmonious national commu- nity”? What were the roles of law, propaganda, the media, arts, education, and family? How do the readings in this chapter illustrate the power and the limits of each of these influences?

2. What difficult choices were young people faced with—at home, in school, and in their communities—during this period? How did these choices challenge the way these young people saw themselves and understood their identities?

3. What kinds of resistance to the Nazi government between 1933 and 1938 are described in this chapter? Which of these examples seemed most successful?

4. How do the readings in this chapter help you understand what the Nazis meant by a Volksgemeinschaft, or “national community”? How do these readings help you under- stand what it was like to live in such a state?

5. How did Germany’s universe of obligation change from 1933 to 1938? What factors were most important in bringing about this change?

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