Chapter 5 The National

The Scope and Sequence Socialist Individual Choosing to & Society Participate Revolution We & They

Judgment, Memory & Legacy The Holocaust Hulton Archive / Stringer / Gey Images / Gey / Stringer Archive Hulton

HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 220 3/7/17 4:34 PM Overview

On January 30, 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg named Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Within days of Hitler’s appointment, the Nazis began to target their political opposition and those they considered enemies of the state, especially Communists and Jews. Within months, they had transformed Germany into a dictatorship. This chapter chronicles the National Socialist revolution that swept through Germany in 1933, and it examines the choices individual Germans were forced to confront as a result.

HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 221 3/7/17 4:34 PM Chapter 5 Introduction

Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on January 30, 1933, thrilled some Ger- Essential mans and horrified others. Writing in 1939, journalist Sebastian Haffner said Questions that when he read the news that afternoon, his reaction was “icy horror”: • What made it possible for Certainly this had been a possibility for a long time. You had to reckon with it. the Nazis to transform Nevertheless it was so bizarre, so incredible, to read it now in black and white. Germany into a dicta- Hitler Reich Chancellor . . . for a moment I physically sensed the man’s odor of torship during their first blood and filth, the nauseating approach of a man-eating animal—its foul, sharp years in power? claws in my face.

• What choices do individ- Then I shook the sensation off, tried to smile, started to consider, and found many uals have in the face of reasons for reassurance. That evening I discussed the prospects of the new gov- an emerging dictatorship? ernment with my father. We agreed that it had a good chance of doing a lot of What can they do to nur- damage, but not much chance of surviving very long . . . ture democracy and help it survive? . . . How could things turn out so completely different? Perhaps it was just because • What roles do institu- we were all so certain that they could not do so—and relied on that with far too tions—such as the media, much confidence. So we neglected to consider that it might, if worse came to 1 law enforcement, schools, worst, be necessary to prevent the disaster from happening . . . churches, and indus- Few people expected the Nazi leader to remain in office for long. After all, try—play in sustaining in the 14 years since the creation of the Weimar Republic, Germany had had democracy or enabling its 14 chancellors, most of whom served for less than a year. Only two were in destruction? office longer, and not a single chancellor had held his post for three consec- utive years. Therefore, many Germans, like Haffner and his father, set about the task of adjusting to life under a regime they thought would soon pass. The readings in this chapter, which focus on the Nazis’ first two years in Watch Facing History power, have been chosen to help answer the question Haffner asked several Scholar Reflections: VIDEO years later: How could things turn out so completely different? The Nazi Rise to Power The Nazis’ swift actions in early 1933 began to establish a new order in hstry.is/more German society, taking advantage of the weakness of the Weimar Republic to create a dictatorship. Individuals and institutions across the country were forced both to navigate the dangers the Nazis posed to dissenters and to weigh the incentives they offered to encourage acceptance of the new government. Each person had to figure out how to live in a society under National Socialism, and even whether that would be possible at all.

How did they do it? Some were true believers in Nazism, some calculated that the benefits to them of Nazi government outweighed the parts they found unsettling, some who could do so left the country, some learned to stay quiet and retreat into “internal exile,” and some protested openly. All of these choices had consequences for the individuals who made them, for their neighbors, and for their nation.

1 Sebastian Haffner, “Street-Level Coercion,” in How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader, ed. Peter Hayes (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 118–19, excerpt from Defying Hitler: A Memoir, trans. Oliver Pretzel (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002), 106–08.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 222 2/28/17 7:58 PM This chapter deepens the investigation of democracy begun in Chapter 4 by examining how the Weimar Republic crumbled in Germany and how the Nazis created a dictatorship to replace it. By focusing on Germany during the Nazis’ first years in power, the readings in this chapter invite students to also think deeply about what it takes to sustain democracy in our own time. Teachers should select the readings and questions that seem most appropriate for their curricula and classrooms.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 223 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 1 The Night of Hitler’s Triumph

On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. That Watch The Democrat evening, members of the Nazi Party carried fiery torches as they paraded and the Dictator VIDEO through the streets of Berlin. They were joined by thousands who had hstry.is/more gathered to cheer for Paul von Hindenburg, the president of Germany, and Hitler. The two men responded to the crowd from separate windows— Hitler at the chancellery and Hindenburg at a hotel next door. Nearby was Watch From the French embassy, where Ambassador André François-Poncet watched VIDEO Democracy to Dictatorship from a window, later writing: hstry.is/more The torches . . . formed a river of fire . . . over the very heart of the city. From these brown-shirted, booted men, as they marched in perfect discipline and alignment, their well-pitched voices bawling war-like songs, there rose an enthusiasm and dynamism that were extraordinary.1

Melita Maschmann, then a 15-year-old Nazi supporter, watched the parade that evening. As an adult, she recalled, “Some of the uncanny feeling of that night remains with me even today. The crashing treads of [booted] feet, the somber pomp of the red and black flags, the flickering light from the torches on the faces and the songs with melodies that were at once aggressive and sentimental.”2

Many Germans followed the parade by listening to the radio. Bernt Engelmann was struck by the voice of a new announcer:

[His voice] was entirely different from the ones I was familiar with: no longer calm and objective, but full of fanatic fervor. . . . Many years later, when the Third Reich was a thing of the past, I dug around in the archives of the Cologne broadcasting station and found the very text read by the announcer that evening of January 30. As I perused it, I felt that same amazement and disgust that had filled me as a twelve-year-old boy.

There it was, in black and white, and the announcer had spoken the text as an overwhelmed eyewitness might describe the finish of the Monaco Grand Prix auto race. . . .

“And there, at his window, high above the cheering throngs and the sea of flaming torches stands Reich President von Hindenburg, the venerable field marshal. . . . He stands erect, stirred to the depths by the moment. And next door in the Reich Chancellery, the Führer—yes, it is the Führer! There he stands with his ministers,

1 André François-Poncet, The Fateful Years: Memoirs of a French Ambassador in Berlin, 1931–1938, trans. Jacques LeClercq (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), 48. 2 Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered: A Dossier on My Former Self, trans. Geoffrey Strachan (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1965), 9.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 224 2/28/17 7:58 PM Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-02985A Bild Bundesarchiv,

On the night of January 30, 1933, SA men paraded with torches through Berlin to celebrate Hitler’s appointment as chancellor.

Adolf Hitler . . . the unknown soldier of the World War, the unyielding warrior, the standard bearer of freedom . . . !”3

Max von der Grün also heard the news over the radio. Two days later, he and his family listened as Hitler spoke to the nation on his first day in office.

Hitler proclaimed his new government officially in power. He did not do so before the Reichstag, the elected Parliament, but over the radio. The meaning was clear enough. . . .

Were the people clearly aware of his contempt for the parliament? I doubt it. In any case, my family considered it quite proper that Hitler had ceased to address . . . the deputies of the Reichstag, and had turned directly to the people.4

Connection Questions 1. Many of the people quoted in this reading wrote many years later about the day Hitler took office. Why do you think these people, as well as many other Germans alive in 1933, never forgot the events of that day? What clues can you find in the way they express their memories that indicate how they felt about those events as they looked back on them?

2. In learning about the past, what might be the benefits and the drawbacks of using sources that were written many years after the events they describe?

3. How did the Nazi leadership communicate with ordinary Germans? What messages were the leaders trying to send?

4. What tools do today’s leaders use to communicate with citizens?

3 Bernt Engelmann, In Hitler’s Germany: Everyday Life in the Third Reich (New York: Schocken, 1988), 21–22. 4 Max von der Grün, Howl Like the Wolves: Growing Up in Nazi Germany (New York: William Morrow, 1980), 59.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 225 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 2 Hitler’s First Radio Address

On February 1, 1933, two days after he was appointed chancellor, Hitler Teach Examining spoke over the radio to the German people about his vision for the future Hitler’s First Radio of the country: Address LESSON hstry.is/more Over fourteen years have passed since that unhappy day when the German people, blinded by promises made by those at home and abroad, forgot the highest values of our past, of the Reich, of its honor and its freedom, and thereby lost everything. Since those days of treason, the Almighty has withdrawn his blessing from our na- tion. Discord and hatred have moved in. Filled with the deepest distress, millions of the best German men and women from all walks of life see the unity of the nation disintegrating in a welter of egotistical political opinions, economic interests, and ideological conflicts.

As so often in our history, Germany, since the day the revolution broke out, pres- ents a picture of heartbreaking disunity. We did not receive the equality and frater- nity which was promised us; instead we lost our freedom. The breakdown of the unity of mind and will of our nation at home was followed by the collapse of its political position abroad.

We have a burning conviction that the German people in 1914 went into the great battle without any thought of personal guilt [for the start of the war] and weighed down only by the burden of having to defend the Reich from attack, to defend the freedom and material existence of the German people. In the appalling fate that has dogged us since November 1918 we see only the consequence of our inward collapse. But the rest of the world is no less shaken by great crises. The historical balance of power, which at one time contributed not a little to the understanding of the necessity for solidarity among the nations, with all the economic advantages resulting therefrom, has been destroyed.

The delusion that some are the conquerors and others the conquered destroys the trust between nations and thereby also destroys the world economy. But the mis- ery of our people is terrible! The starving industrial proletariat [working class] have become unemployed in their millions, while the whole middle and artisan class have been made paupers. If the German farmer also is involved in this collapse we shall be faced with a catastrophe of vast proportions. For in that case, there will collapse not only a Reich, but also a 2000-year-old inheritance of the highest works of human culture and civilization.

All around us are symptoms portending this breakdown. With an unparalleled ef- fort of will and of brute force the Communist method of madness is trying as a last resort to poison and undermine an inwardly shaken and uprooted nation. They

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 226 2/28/17 7:58 PM seek to drive it towards an epoch which would correspond even less to the promis- es of the Communist speakers of today than did the epoch now drawing to a close to the promises of the same emissaries in November 1918.

Starting with the family, and including all notions of honor and loyalty, nation and fatherland, culture and economy, even the eternal foundations of our morals and our faith—nothing is spared by this negative, totally destructive ideology. .. . One year of Bolshevism would destroy Germany. The richest and most beautiful areas of world civilization would be transformed into chaos and a heap of ruins. Even the misery of the past decade and a half could not be compared with the affliction of a Europe in whose heart the red flag of destruction had been planted. The thousands of injured, the countless dead which this battle has already cost Germany may stand as a presage of the disaster.

In these hours of overwhelming concern for the existence and the future of the German nation, the venerable World War leader [President Paul von Hindenburg] appealed to us men of the nationalist parties and associations to fight under him again as once we did at the front, but now loyally united for the salvation of the Reich at home. The revered President of the Reich having with such generosity joined hands with us in a common pledge, we nationalist leaders would vow be- fore God, our conscience and our people that we shall doggedly and with determi- nation fulfill the mission entrusted to us as the National Government.

It is an appalling inheritance which we are taking over.

The task before us is the most difficult which has faced German statesmen in living memory. But we all have unbounded confidence, for we believe in our nation and in its eternal values. Farmers, workers, and the middle class must unite to contrib- ute the bricks wherewith to build the new Reich.

The National Government will therefore regard it as its first and supreme task to restore to the German people unity of mind and will. It will preserve and defend the foundations on which the strength of our nation rests. It will take under its firm protection Christianity as the basis of our morality, and the family as the nucleus of our nation and our state. Standing above estates [groups that make up society’s social hierarchy] and classes, it will bring back to our people the consciousness of its racial and political unity and the obligations arising therefrom. It wishes to base the education of German youth on respect for our great past and pride in our old traditions. . . . Germany must not and will not sink into Communist anarchy.

In place of our turbulent instincts, it will make national discipline govern our life. In the process it will take into account all the institutions which are the true safe- guards of the strength and power of our nation.

The National Government will carry out the great task of reorganizing our national economy with two big Four-Year Plans:

Saving the German farmer so that the nation’s food supply and thus the life of the nation shall be secured.

Saving the German worker by a massive and comprehensive attack on unemploy- ment.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 227 2/28/17 7:58 PM In fourteen years the November parties have ruined the German farmer. In fourteen years they created an army of millions of unemployed. The National Government will carry out the following plan with iron resolution and dogged perseverance. Within four years the German farmer must be saved from pauperism. Within four years unemployment must be completely overcome . . .

. . . Our concern to provide daily bread will be equally a concern for the fulfillment of the responsibilities of society to those who are old and sick. The best safeguard against any experiment which might endanger the currency lies in economical ad- ministration, the promotion of work, and the preservation of agriculture, as well as in the use of individual initiative.

In foreign policy, the National Government will see its highest mission in the pres- ervation of our people’s right to an independent life and in the regaining thereby of their freedom. The determination of this Government to put an end to the chaotic conditions in Germany is a step towards the integration into the community of nations of a state having equal status and therefore equal rights with the rest. In so doing, the Government is aware of its great obligation to support, as the Gov- ernment of a free and equal nation, that maintenance and consolidation of peace which the world needs today more than ever before. May all others understand our position and so help to ensure that this sincere desire for the welfare of Europe and of the whole world shall find fulfillment.

Despite our love for our Army as the bearer of our arms and the symbol of our great past, we should be happy if the world, by restricting its armaments, made unnecessary any increase in our own weapons.

But if Germany is to experience this political and economic revival and conscien- tiously to fulfill its duties towards other nations, a decisive act is required: We must overcome the demoralization of Germany by the Communists.

We, men of this Government, feel responsible to German history for the reconsti- tution of a proper national body so that we may finally overcome the insanity of class and class warfare. We do not recognize classes, but only the German people, its millions of farmers, citizens and workers who together will either overcome this time of distress or succumb to it.

With resolution and fidelity to our oath, seeing the powerlessness of the present Reichstag to shoulder the task we advocate, we wish to commit it to the whole German people.

We therefore appeal now to the German people to sign this act of mutual reconcil- iation. The Government of the National Uprising [the Nazi-led government] wishes to set to work, and it will work. It has not for fourteen years brought ruin to the German nation; it wants to lead it to the summit. It is determined to make amends in four years for the liabilities of fourteen years. But it cannot subject the work of reconstruction to the will of those who were responsible for the breakdown.

The Marxist parties [political parties including the Social Democrats] and their fol- lowers had fourteen years to prove their abilities. The result is a heap of ruins. Now, German people, give us four years and then judge us.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 228 2/28/17 7:58 PM Let us begin, loyal to the command of the Field-Marshal. May Almighty God favor our work, shape our will in the right way, bless our vision and bless us with the trust of our people. We have no desire to fight for ourselves; only for Germany.1

Connection Questions 1. What picture does Hitler paint of Germany? What words does he use to describe the country?

2. What does he say about the past? How does he describe the future?

3. How does Hitler describe the work that must be done? What words or phrases does he use to describe it?

4. Why might people in Germany in 1933 have found his message attractive?

5. Based on this speech, who does Hitler place inside and outside of Germany’s universe of obligation? Why do you think Hitler chose not to mention Jews in this speech?

1 Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader, vol. 1: The Rise to Power 1919–1934 (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1998), 131–34.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 229 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 3 “The Ba‡le for Work”

The Nazi Party’s popularity increased in the early 1930s partly because of its pledge to do what no other political party had been able to accomplish: pull Germany out of the Great Depression and put Germans back to work. In his first radio address as chancellor, Hitler promised to overcome unem- ployment in Germany within four years. This would be no small task. From mid-1929 to January 1933, the number of Germans who had full-time jobs fell from 20 million to 11.5 million; by the start of 1933, at least 6 million Germans were unemployed.1 Could Hitler make good on his promise?

According to historian Richard Evans, “Hitler’s government was lucky in its timing,” because a variety of economic programs begun under previous chancellors were finally starting to put more Germans back to work by the time of Hitler’s appointment.2 In addition, the Nazis manipulated the official statistics about unemployment in order to convince the public of their progress.3

Hitler’s government also put in place several new plans that would put Germans back to work. In 1933, the government announced two Laws for the Reduction of Unemployment, devoting millions of marks to encourag- ing the creation of new businesses and funding public-works construction projects, such as the highway system. Another policy encouraged working women to leave their jobs and stay home, lessening competition for jobs and improving unemployment statistics (see Reading 18, “Breeding the New German ‘Race’”). The Nazis also encouraged, and often coerced, un- employed workers to join the nation’s Volunteer Labor Service, where they were put to work on public land and construction projects.

But, as Evans explains, the Nazi job creation program was about more than economic recovery; it focused on rebuilding and rearming the nation’s military arsenal. By explaining rearmament as “job creation,” the Nazis attempted to conceal this violation of the Treaty of Versailles:

In 1933 Germany was more or less without an air force, without capital ships, without tanks, without the most basic items of military equipment, and restricted to an army of no more than 100,000 men. Already in February 1933 Hitler set a programme of rearmament in motion, where possible disguised as job creation . . .

The army drew up a register of 2,800 firms to which arms orders could be sent; in 1934 these accounted for over half of all iron and steel, engineering and motor vehicle inspection. . . . By 1935 there were 72,000 workers employed in aircraft construction, compared to fewer than 4,000 at the beginning of 1933. Similarly,

1 Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York: Penguin, 2005), 328. 2 Ibid., 329. 3 Ibid., 334–35.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 230 2/28/17 7:58 PM Krupps embarked on the large-scale production of what were coyly described as “agricultural tractors” in July 1933; in reality they were tanks. In 1934, the Auto Union company launched another military vehicle production department. .. . In November 1933 the navy ordered over 41 million Reichsmarks’ worth of military equipment and another 70 million Reichsmarks’ worth of ships. Major firms such as Borsig, in Berlin, and the Bochumer Association, in Hanover, started up produc- tion of rifles and guns. All this had an immediate effect on employment. Already in January 1933 the Mauser rifle factory increased its workforce from 800 to 1,300; in the first four months of 1933, the Rhine Metal Company, which made howitzers and machine guns, took on 500 new workers too. Similar developments could be observed in hundreds of companies across Germany. All this feverish activity inevitably had a knock-on [secondary] effect on industry more broadly, as iron and steel, engineering, coal and mining companies stepped up production and hired additional labour to cope with the new and rapidly rising demand from the arms and arms-related sector.4

By the end of 1934, the government was touting its own statistics that claimed that the unemployment level was less than half of what it had been when Hitler was appointed chancellor. While rearmament certainly did create thousands of jobs, it also advanced the Nazis’ longer-term goal to re-establish Germany as a European military power. All in all, the pro- gram helped to increase public support for the Nazis, as Evans explains:

Hitler’s boast that he would solve the unemployment problem within four years of taking office seemed to have been triumphantly justified. Incessant Nazi propaganda boasting that the “battle for work” was being won gained widespread credence. It helped win over many doubters and sceptics to the government’s side from May 1933 onwards, and pumped new euphoria into the Third Reich’s supporters.5

Connection Questions 1. Why do you think Hitler focused on unemployment in the beginning of his time as chancellor? What factors do you think helped make the economy a priority? Base your answer on evidence from both this reading and previous ones.

2. Summarize the strategies Hitler used to improve employment in Germany. Which actions seem most justified, given the hardship caused by the Great Depression? Which actions are most troubling?

3. How might difficult economic times affect a person’s universe of obligation? How might a bad economy affect a person’s priorities when deciding which political leaders and parties to support?

4. Why do you think the Nazi “battle for work” might have convinced some who previously opposed the Nazis to change their minds?

4 Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 338–41. 5 Ibid., 333.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 231 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 4 Outlawing the Opposition

While the Nazis were focusing on putting Germans back to work in the Watch Hitler’s Rise to midst of the Great Depression, they also unleashed attacks on their political Power: 1933–1934 VIDEO opposition as soon as Hitler became chancellor. On the evening of February hstry.is/more 27, 1933, alarms suddenly rang out in the Reichstag as fire destroyed the building’s main chamber. Within 20 minutes, Hitler was on the scene to declare: “This is a God-given signal! If this fire, as I believe, turns out to be Watch Hitler’s First the handiwork of Communists, then there is nothing that shall stop us now VIDEO Victims hstry.is/more from crushing out this murderous pest with an iron fist.”1 Marinus van der Lubbe was the man the Nazis captured that night. He confessed to setting the building ablaze but repeatedly insisted that he had acted alone. Adolf Hitler paid no attention to the confession. He saw a chance to get rid of what he considered the Nazis’ most immediate ri- val—the Communists—so he ordered the arrest of anyone with ties to the Communist Party. Within days, the Nazis had thrown 4,000 Communists and their leaders into hastily created prisons and concentration camps. By the end of March, 20,000 Commu- nists had been arrested, and by the end of that summer more than 100,000 Communists, Social Democrats, union offi- cials, and other “radicals” were Granger, NYC — All rights reserved. — All rights NYC Granger, imprisoned.2 Were any of them responsible for the fire? The question was irrelevant to the Nazis. They had been given an opportunity to get rid of their enemies, and they took it.

The day after the fire, February 28, 1933, President Hindenburg, at Hitler’s urging, issued two emergency decrees designed to make such arrests legal, even Germans look on as the those that had already taken place. Their titles—“For the Defense of Nation Reichstag building burns on February 27, 1933. and State” and “To Combat Treason against the German Nation and Treason- able Activities”—reveal how Hitler used the fire to further his own goals. The

1 D. Sefton Delmer, London Daily Express, February 28, 1933. 2 Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York: Penguin, 2005), 11.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 232 2/28/17 7:58 PM two decrees suspended, until further notice, every part of the constitution that protected personal freedoms. The Nazis claimed that the decrees were necessary to protect the nation from the “Communist menace.”

On March 5, 1933, the govern- ment held an election for con- trol of the Reichstag. The Nazis won 288 seats (43.9% of the vote). The Communists won ©Topfoto/ The Image Works The Image ©Topfoto/ 81 seats (12.3%), even though their representatives were unable to claim those seats—if they appeared in public, they faced immediate arrest. Other opposition parties also won significant numbers of seats. The Social Democrats captured 119 seats (18.3%), and the Catholic Center Party won 73 seats (11.2%). A‘er the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933, Hitler ordered the arrest of Together, the Communist, Social Democratic, and Catholic Center Parties anyone with ties to the Communist won nearly as many seats as the Nazis. But their members distrusted one Party. By the end of March, approximately 20,000 people had another almost as much as they feared the Nazis. As a result, these parties been arrested. were unable to mount a unified opposition to the Nazi Party.

Still under Nazi control, the Reichstag passed a new law on March 21, 1933, that made it a crime to speak out against the new government or criticize its leaders. Known as the Malicious Practices Act, the law made even the smallest expression of dissent a crime. Those who were accused of “gossiping” or “making fun” of government officials could be arrested and sent to prison or a concentration camp.

Then, on March 24, 1933, the Reichstag passed what became known as the Enabling Act by a vote of 141 to 94. It “enabled” the chancellor of Germany to punish anyone he considered an “enemy of the state.” The act allowed “laws passed by the government” to override the constitu- tion. Only the 94 Social Democrats voted against the law. Most of the other deputies who opposed it were in hiding, in prison, or in exile.

That same day, Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler, then police commissioner for the city of Munich, held a news conference to announce the opening of the first concentration camp near Dachau, Germany. According to Himmler, the camp would have the capacity to hold 5,000 people, including Commu- nist Party members and Social Democrats “who threaten the security of the state.” Himmler continued, according to a newspaper report:

On Wednesday, 22 March, the concentration camp at the former gunpowder fac- tory received its first allocation of 200 inmates. .. . The occupancy of the camp will gradually increase to 2,500 men and will possibly be expanded to 5,000 men later. A labor service detachment recently prepared the barrack for the first 200 men and secured it for the time being with a barrier of triple barbed-wire. The first job of the camp inmates will be to restore the other stone buildings, which are very run-down. .. . The guard unit will initially consist of a contingent of 100 state

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 233 2/28/17 7:58 PM police, which are to be further reinforced by SA [storm trooper] auxiliary police guards. . . . No visits are allowed at the Concentration Camp in Dachau.3

Throughout the spring and early summer of 1933, the Nazis used the new laws to frighten and intimidate Germans. By May, they forced all trade labor unions to dissolve. Instead, workers could only belong to a Nazi- approved union called the German Labor Front.

Then, in June, Hitler outlawed the Social Democratic Party. The German Nationalist Party, which was part of Hitler’s coalition government, dissolved after its deputies were told to resign or become the next target. By the end of the month, German concentration camps held 27,000 people. By mid-July, the Nazi Party was the only political party allowed in the country. Other organizations were also brought into line. As historian William Sheridan Allen has put it, “Whenever two or three were gathered, the Führer would also be present.”4

Not everyone accepted the changes. Amid uncertainty about the future of the country under Nazi rule, thousands of Germans, including 63,000 Jews, fled the country. Most who left ended up in neighboring countries. The rest of the nation’s 60 million people stayed, by choice or necessity, and adapted to life in the “new Germany.”

Connection Questions 1. Make a timeline of the important steps described in this reading that show Ger- many’s change from a democracy to a dictatorship. Which action by the Nazis do you think was most damaging to democracy in Germany? Why?

2. What would ordinary Germans have witnessed in the days after the Reichstag fire? What range of responses might have been possible for them?

3. Rumors spread among some Germans in 1933 that the Nazis had set the Re- ichstag fire themselves. While this is difficult to confirm, some historians today believe that the evidence supports those rumors. If the Nazis set the fire, how would it change your interpretation of the Reichstag fire and the events that followed?

4. What were the results of the national election on March 5, 1933? What opportu- nities seemed to exist after the election for other political parties to counter the Nazis? Why were the Nazis’ opponents unable to seize those opportunities?

5. How do people act in times of fear and crisis? What sorts of choices are they likely to make?

3 “The Former Gunpowder Factory in Dachau a Concentration Camp for Political Prisoners,” trans. Sally Winkle, in The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts, ed. Roderick Stackelberg and Sally A. Winkle (London: Routledge, 2002), 145. 4 William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1930–1935 (New York: Franklin Watts, 1973), 214.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 234 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 5 Enabling Dictatorship

In response to the fire in its building, within a month the Reichstag passed a series of laws, including the one below, which historians refer to as the Enabling Act.

March 24, 1933

Law to Remove the Distress of the People and the State

The Reichstag has passed the following law, which is, with the approval of the Reichsrat [a legislative body whose members were appointed by German states], herewith pro- mulgated, after it has been established that it meets the requirements for legislation altering the Constitution.

Article 1. National laws can be enacted by the Reich Cabinet as well as in accordance with the procedure established in the Constitution. This also applies to the laws referred to in Article 85, Paragraph 2, and in Article 87 of the Constitution.

Article 2. The national laws enacted by the Reich Cabinet may deviate from the Consti- tution as long as they do not affect the position of the Reichstag and the Reichsrat. The powers of the President remain undisturbed.

Article 3. The national laws enacted by the Reich Cabinet shall be prepared by the Chancellor and published in the Reichsgesetzblatt [Reich Legal Gazette]. They come into effect, unless otherwise specified, the day after their publication. Articles 68–77 of the Constitution do not apply to the laws enacted by the Reich Cabinet.

Article 4. Treaties of the Reich with foreign states which concern matters of national legislation do not require the consent of the bodies participating in legislation. The Reich Cabinet is empowered to issue the necessary provisions for the implementation of these treaties.

Article 5. This law becomes effective on the day of its publication. It becomes invalid on April 1, 1937; it also becomes invalid if the present Reich Cabinet is replaced by another.

Reich President von Hindenburg Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler Reich Minister of the Interior Frick Reich Minister for Foreign Affairs Baron von Neurath Reich Minister of Finances Count Schwerin von Krosigk1

1 “Law to Remove the Distress of the People and the State (The Enabling Act),” available from German History in Documents and Images (German Historical Institute), from translation reprinted in US Department of State, Division of European Affairs, National Socialism (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943), 217–18.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 235 2/28/17 7:58 PM Connection Questions 1. What is the relationship of the title of this law to its contents? Why do you think historians choose to refer to this law as the “Enabling Act” rather than by its official title?

2. How does this law change how future laws would be enacted in Germany? Who does this text say can enact new laws? What relationship would those future laws have with Germany’s constitution?

3. Many historians argue that this law established the legal basis for dictatorship in Nazi Germany. What parts of this law do you think undermine democracy and help to establish a dictatorship?

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 236 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 6 Storm Troopers, Elite Guards, and Secret Police

Nazi politician Wilhelm Murr expressed the Nazis’ attitude toward their opponents: “We do not say an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. No, he who knocks out one of our eyes will get his head chopped off, and he who knocks out one of our teeth will get his jaw bashed in.”1 According to Ru- dolf Diels, the chief of the political department of the Berlin police, that atti- tude could clearly be seen on city streets: “Not only Communists but anyone who had ever expressed himself against Hitler’s movement was in danger.”2

In order to intimidate, attack, or arrest their opponents, the Nazis em- ployed their own paramilitary groups and secret police. A paramilitary group is an organized military-style force that is loyal to a political party or private organization instead of a government. Chief among these organi- zations were the SA (Sturmabteilung, which translates to “storm detach- ment”), the SS (Schutzstaffel, which translates to “protection squadron”), and the Gestapo (an acronym of the first letters of Geheime Staatspolizei, or “secret state police”).

The SA had been around almost as long as the Nazi Party itself. SA mem- bers were known as “storm troopers” or “Brown Shirts” (because of their brown uniforms). They marched and brawled in the streets, intimidating opponents of the Nazis, during the years of the Weimar Republic (see “Violence in the Streets” in Chapter 4). Now that the Nazis were in charge, the SA continued to operate outside the law, and it encountered very little opposition in early 1933. Indeed, many people openly supported its efforts. In a short story, Christopher Isherwood, a British writer living in Berlin around this time, describes some Germans’ response to the storm troopers:

They smiled approvingly at these youngsters in their big, swaggering boots who were going to upset the Treaty of Versailles. They were pleased because it would soon be summer, because Hitler had promised to protect the small tradesmen, because their newspapers told them that the good times were coming. They were suddenly proud of being blond. And they thrilled with a furtive, sensual pleasure, like schoolboys, because the Jews, their business rivals, and the Marxists, a vaguely defined minority of people who didn’t concern them, had been satisfactorily found guilty of the defeat and the inflation and were going to catch it.3

1 Quoted in Joachim C. Fest, Hitler (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 400. 2 Ingo Müller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 50. 3 Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories (New York: New Directions, 1945), 179.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 237 2/28/17 7:58 PM The SS, too, had been created by the Nazis during the years of the Weimar Republic. At first, its members were Hitler’s personal bodyguards. Because he believed they were especially loyal to him, Hitler expanded the SS into the Nazi Party’s elite guard. Heinrich Himmler, as head of the SS, believed that its members ought to represent not only Germany’s military elite but also the nation’s “racial elite.” Each recruit was carefully screened, and each had to prove his family was “Aryan” dating back to at least 1750. Not only did every member of the SS have to pass the test but so did his prospective bride. The SS would grow to become one of the chief agents of terror and mass murder under the Nazi regime. The SS operated the concentration camp at Dachau that was opened in 1933, as well as the camps the Nazis built over the next 12 years. The SS also established an intelligence unit that spied on Germans and arrested, interrogated, and often imprisoned those they considered enemies of the nation.

Like the SS intelligence unit, the Gestapo spied on Germans to identify political opponents and dissenters and to arrest and question them. This secret police force was created on April 26, 1933, under the leadership of Hermann Göring. The Gestapo was authorized to “protect public safety and order” by using methods that ranged from interrogation to sending people to “private prisons” and later to concentration camps. Historian Richard Evans writes that the Gestapo became a symbol of Nazi terror, known for brutal interrogation techniques: “From the very beginning of the Third Reich, interrogations by the police and the Gestapo often result- ed in prisoners being returned to their prison cells beaten, bruised, and badly injured to a degree that could not escape the attention of defending lawyers, relatives and friends.”4

Connection Questions 1. How does Christopher Isherwood’s account help to explain the enthusiasm some Germans felt for the Nazis when they came to power? How do you explain this enthusiasm?

2. How important were the SA, the SS, and the Gestapo in Germany’s transfor- mation from democracy to dictatorship? In what ways did the actions of each organization contribute to the transformation?

4 Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York: Penguin, 2005), 75.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 238 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 7 Shaping Public Opinion

As the Nazis eliminated civil liberties in Germany and opened the first concentration camps to imprison “enemies of the state,” they were also trying to win public approval for their government. According to historian Robert Gellately,

Hitler and his henchmen did not want to cower the German people as a whole into submission, but to win them over by building on popular images, cherished ideals, and long held phobias in the country. . . . [The Nazis] aimed to create and maintain the broadest possible level of popular backing. They expended an enormous amount of energy and resources to track public opinion and to win over people.1

The Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda played a key role in the Nazis’ efforts to cultivate favorable public opinion. Propaganda is biased or misleading information that is used to influence public opin- ion (see the visual essay in Chapter 6, “The Impact of Propaganda”). Hitler created the new ministry on March 13, 1933, and put Joseph Goebbels in charge. It was his job “not just to present the regime and its policies in a positive light, but to generate the impression that the entire German peo- ple enthusiastically endorsed everything it did.”2

To generate excitement and enthusiasm for the Nazi Party and for Hitler himself, Goebbels and his ministry created new festivals and holidays, such as the celebration of Hitler’s birthday on April 20. They changed street names and other public signage to erase reminders of the Weimar Republic. They organized party rallies and dramatic torch-lit parades to demonstrate public support.

Writing in 1939, journalist Sebastian Haffner described these demonstrations and recalled the effect they had on many Germans.

[O]ne was permanently occupied and distracted by an unending sequence of celebrations, ceremonies, and national festivities. It started with a huge victory celebration before the elections on March 4 [see Reading 4, “Outlawing the Op- position”] . . . There were mass parades, fireworks, drums, bands, and flags all over Germany, Hitler’s voice over thousands of loudspeakers, oaths and vows— all before it was even certain that the elections might not be a setback for the Nazis, which indeed they were. These elections, the last that were ever held in prewar Germany, brought the Nazis only 44 percent of the votes (in the previous elections they had achieved 37 percent). The majority was still against the Nazis.

1 Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), vii. 2 Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York: Penguin, 2005), 121.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 239 2/28/17 7:58 PM A week later, Hindenberg abolished the Weimar national flag, which was replaced by the swastika banner and a black, white, and red “temporary national flag.” There were daily parades, mass meetings, declarations of gratitude for the lib- eration of the nation, military music from dawn to dusk, awards ceremonies for heroes, the dedication of flags. .. . Hitler swearing loyalty to something or other for the nth time, bells tolling, a solemn procession to church by the members of the Reichstag, a military parade, swords lowered in salute, children waving flags, and a torchlight parade.

The colossal emptiness and lack of meaning of these never-ending events was by no means unintentional. The population should become used to cheering and jubi- lation, even when there was no visible reason for it. .. . Better to celebrate, howl with the wolves, “Heil, Heil!” Besides, people began to enjoy doing so. The weather in March 1933 was glorious. Was it not wonderful to celebrate in the spring sun- shine, in squares decked with flags? To merge with the festive crowds and listen to high-sounding patriotic speeches, about freedom and fatherland, exaltation and holy vows?3

Goebbels and his ministry also set out to coordinate every form of expres- sion in Germany—from music to radio programs to textbooks, artwork, newspapers, and even sermons—crafting language and imagery carefully to praise Nazi policies and Hitler himself, and to demonize those the Nazis considered enemies. While the ministry’s work included censoring much German art and media, the Nazis also created an environment in which many artists, newspaper editors, and filmmakers censored themselves in order to gain favor with the regime, avoid punishment, or escape the Nazis’ attention altogether.4

Victor Klemperer, a college professor who was born to Jewish parents and converted to Christianity, kept a diary of life in Nazi Germany that describes the way the Nazis gave new meanings to hundreds of words and phrases, as in this set of entries from 1933:

27 March. New words keep turning up, or old ones acquire new specialist meanings, or new combinations are formed which rapidly [harden] into stereotypes.... Foreign Jews, particularly those from France, England, and America, are today referred to as “global Jews” ... Equally prevalent is the term “international Jewry” . . . with the global Jew and global Jewry . . . presumably constituting the German version. This is an ominous translation into German: does this mean that Jews are to be found everywhere on earth, except, that is, in Germany? And where are they within Germany itself? The global Jews disseminate “atrocity propaganda” and spread “horror stories,” and if we report so much as a scrap of what happens here every day then we too are guilty of disseminating atrocity propaganda and are punished accordingly. Meanwhile the boycott of Jewish shops and doctors is in the offing. The distinction between “Aryan” and “non-Aryan” governs everything. One could draw up a dictionary of the new language. . . .

3 Sebastian Haffner, “Street-Level Coercion,” in How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader, ed. Peter Hayes (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 122, excerpt from Defying Hitler: A Memoir, trans. Oliver Pretzel (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002), 128–29. 4 Doris Bergen to Facing History and Ourselves, comment on draft manuscript, December 23, 2015.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 240 2/28/17 7:58 PM 10 April. You are [“alien”] if you have 25 percent non-Aryan blood. “In borderline cases a ruling will be made by an expert in racial research. . . .”

20 April. Yet again a new opportunity for celebration, a new national holiday for the people: Hitler’s birthday. The term “Volk (people)” is now as customary in spoken and written language as salt at table, everything is spiced with a [touch] of Volk: Volkfest (festival of the people), Volksgenosse (comrade of the people), Volksgemeinschaft (community of the people), volksnah (one of the people), volksfremd (alien to the people), volksenstammt (descended from the people). ...5

Connection Questions 1. Why do you think that public opinion was important to the Nazis? How did they go about winning support from the German public?

2. Historian Doris Bergen writes, “It must have been a lonely and terrifying experi- ence to be on the outside of a torchlight march looking in. What chance would one feel one had against that monolith of power?”6 Compare and contrast Ber- gen’s statement with Sebastian Haffner’s description of how Nazi demonstrations affected Germans. What emotions did the Nazis’ public demonstrations generate in members of the German public? Which emotions were useful to the Nazis in building acceptance and support for their regime?

3. How did the Nazis use language to shape public opinion? How did they try to influence what Germans thought about, remembered, or forgot through their choice of words? What part did the truth play in these efforts?

4. What do the results of the March 5, 1933, elections tell you about the Nazis’ popularity in the first weeks of Hitler’s chancellorship? According to Haffner, how did the Nazis attempt to influence the outcome of the elections?

5. How do the actions and opinions of your peer group influence your own actions and opinions? How can you tell the difference between when people are “going along with the crowd” and when they really believe in what they do and say?

5 Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, trans. Martin Brady (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 29–31. 6 Doris L. Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 67.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 241 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 8 Working Toward the Führer

Beginning in the 1920s, Hitler used the title Führer to refer to his position within the Nazi Party. Führer means “leader,” but to Hitler the Führer was not an ordinary leader of a political party or nation. He modeled his idea of the Führer on the leadership of Benito Mussolini, who led the Fascist movement in Italy and became that country’s dictator in the 1920s. Fascists were extreme nationalists who believed in the necessity for the absolute unity of the population behind a single charismatic leader and the suprem- acy of the good of the nation over the rights of individuals. Fascism origi- nated in Italy but influenced political movements and governments around the world in the first half of the twentieth century.1

Hitler believed that, as with all dictators, the Führer’s word was law; when he changed his mind, public policy changed. But the Führer’s charismatic leadership, his ability to express the will of the nation and to satisfy the desires of the masses, gave him a special ability to win followers and a duty to solve the nation’s problems and lead it to greatness. In the 1920s, Hitler described to one of his opponents within the Nazi Party the relationship he expected to have with party members: “For us the Idea is the Führer, and each party member has only to obey the Führer.”2 In the 1930s, the Nazis tried to establish the same relationship between the Führer and the German people.

The Nazis carefully and relentlessly constructed Hitler’s public image. They spread pictures of Hitler in heroic poses in posters and in newspapers throughout the country. Hitler rehearsed his speeches, including his pos- ture and gestures, to project strength and determination. As a result of these and other efforts, the Nazis were able to create “the adulation of Hitler by millions of Germans who may otherwise have been only margin- ally committed to the Nazi ideology.”3 As historian Ian Kershaw explains,

For the thirteen million Germans who voted Nazi in 1932, Hitler symbolized— chameleon-like—the various facets of Nazism which they found appealing. In his public portrayal, he was a man of the people, his humble origins emphasising the rejection of privilege and the sterile old order in favour of a new, vigorous, upwardly-mobile society built upon strength, merit, and achievement. He was seen as strong, uncompromising, ruthless. He embodied the triumph of true Germanic

1 Robert Soucy, “Fascism,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed June 22, 2016, http://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism. 2 Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader, vol. 1: The Rise to Power 1919–1934 (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1998), 66. 3 Ian Kershaw, “The Hitler Myth,” History Today 35, no. 11 (November 1985), accessed March 15, 2016.

242 HOLOCAUST AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR

HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 242 2/28/17 7:58 PM virtues—courage, manliness, integrity, loyalty, devotion to the cause—over the effete decadence, corruption, and effeminate weakness of Weimar society. Above all, he represented “struggle”—as the title of his book Mein Kampf advertised: struggle of the “little man” against society’s “big battalions”, and mortal struggle against Germany’s powerful internal and external enemies to assure the nation’s future.4

Once Hitler was in power, his public persona as the Führer of the German people encouraged both government officials and other Germans to take initiative on their own to help the nation realize the goals he expressed. In fact, he left it to others to figure out how to carry out policies and govern Germany. In a 1934 speech, a government official from the ministry of food explained:

Everyone who has the opportunity to observe it knows that the Führer can hardly dictate from above everything which he intends to realise sooner or later. On the contrary, up till now everyone with a post in the new Germany has worked best when he has, so to speak, worked towards the Führer. Very often and in many spheres it has been the case—in previous years as well—that individuals have simply waited for orders and instructions. Unfortunately, the same will be true in the future; but in fact it is the duty of everybody to try to work towards the Führer along the lines he would wish. Anyone who makes mistakes will notice it soon enough. But anyone who really works towards the Führer along his lines and towards his goal will certainly both now and in the future one day have the finest reward in the form of the sudden legal confirmation of his work.5

The dynamic this government official described occurred throughout the German government. Hitler stated goals and provided guidelines, and then he either appointed specific individuals to ensure that his goals were realized, or he let government bureaucrats and Nazi Party officials figure it out themselves. According to Kershaw, this process of “working toward the Führer” played out not just within the government but also across German society:

Individuals seeking material gain through career advancement in party or state bureaucracy, the small businessman aiming to destroy a competitor through a slur on his “aryan” credentials, or ordinary citizens settling scores with neighbors by denouncing them to the Gestapo were all, in a way, “working towards the Führer”. . . . Time after time, Hitler set the barbaric tone, whether in hate-filled public speeches giving a green light to discriminatory action against Jews and other “enemies of the state”, or in closed addresses to Nazi functionaries or mil- itary leaders. .. . There was never any shortage of willing helpers, far from being confined to party activists, ready to “work towards the Führer” to put the mandate into operation.6

4 Kershaw, “The Hitler Myth.” 5 Speech by Werner Willikens, State Secretary in the Ministry of Food, February 21, 1934, in Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader, vol. 2: State, Economy and Society 1933–1939 (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 207. 6 Ian Kershaw, “‘Working Towards the Führer’: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship,” Contemporary European History 2, no. 2 (July 1993): 117.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 243 2/28/17 7:58 PM Connection Questions 1. How did the Nazis create a public image of Hitler that won the support of so many Germans? What qualities did they emphasize? Why do you think those qualities were so appealing to Germans?

2. What does the phrase “working toward the Führer” mean? How does it explain the relationship between Hitler and his associates and followers? Who made choices and took specific actions to bring about the transformation of Germany, according to Nazi ideology?

3. What is obedience? Is obedience possible in the absence of a direct order to follow?

4. According to Ian Kershaw, Hitler was the “linchpin” of the Nazi regime, and Na- zism could not survive without him.7 What evidence from this reading supports this view?

5. Who spells out the goals for a community to which you belong? What opportuni- ties do you and others have to help shape those goals or disagree with them? What roles do you and other members of the community play in achieving those goals?

7 Kershaw, “ ‘Working Towards the Führer,’” 110.

244 HOLOCAUST AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR

HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 244 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 9 Targeting Jews

From the start, Adolf Hitler and his fellow Nazis were determined to resolve the so-called “Jewish question.” In Hitler’s words, Nazi leaders were to bring it up “again and again and again, unceasingly. Every emotional aversion, however slight, must be exploited ruthlessly.” Julius Streicher, the publisher of an antisemitic newspaper known as Der Stürmer (the word means “attacker”), led the way in creating that kind of propaganda, claiming:

The same Jew who plunged the German people into the bloodletting of the World War, and who committed on it the crime of the November Revolution [Weimar Republic] is now engaged in stabbing Germany, recovering from its shame and misery, in the back. . . . The Jew is again engaged in poisoning public opinion.1

Propaganda was not the only weapon the Nazis used against the Jews. They also relied on terror. On March 9, 1933, just a few days after the elec- tions, Nazi SA storm troopers in Berlin imprisoned dozens of Jewish immi- grants from eastern Europe. In Breslau, they attacked Jewish lawyers akg-images

SA members in 1933 stand in front of a barricaded Jewish shop, holding signs in both German and English that urge the boyco‡ of Jewish businesses.

1 Quoted in Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry 1933–1945 (New York: Schocken, 1973), 46.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 245 2/28/17 7:58 PM and judges. On March 13 in Mannheim, they forced Jewish shopkeepers to close their doors. In other towns, they broke into Jewish homes and beat up the people living there.

Although these events were rarely reported in the German press, the foreign press wrote about them regularly. In the United States, many Jews and non-Jews were outraged by the violence. Some called for a boycott of German goods. Their outburst gave the Nazis an excuse for a “defensive action against the Jewish world criminal” on April 1, 1933.

That action—a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses—was the first major public event that specifically targeted Jews not as Communists or Social Democrats but as Jews. It was not a huge success. In some places, Germans showed their disapproval of the boycott by making a point of shopping at Jewish-owned stores on April 1.

Even in places where the boycott took place as planned, the Nazis quickly discovered that it was not always easy to decide if a business was Jewish-owned. There was no legal definition of who was a Jew and who was not. Also, many Jews had non-Jewish business partners, and nearly all had non-Jewish employees. Were those businesses to be closed as well? For example, Tietz, a chain of department stores in Berlin owned by Jews, had more than 14,000 employees, almost all of whom were non-Jews. At a time when unemployment was high and the economy fragile, did the Nazis re- ally want to put those workers out of a job? In the end, the Nazis allowed Tietz to remain open—at least for the time being. A few years later, the owners were forced to turn over their stores to “Aryan” businessmen.

The boycott did succeed, however, in one of its goals: it terrorized Jews throughout Germany. Edwin Landau described what it was like in his hometown in West Prussia. On the Friday before the boycott, he recalled, “one saw the SA [storm troopers] marching through the city with its banners: ‘The Jews are our misfortune.’ ‘Against the Jewish atrocity propaganda abroad.’” He wrote about the day of the boycott:

In the morning hours the Nazi guards began to place themselves in front of the Jewish shops and factories, and every shopper was warned not to buy from the Jews. In front of our business, also, two young Nazis posted themselves and pre- vented customers from entering. To me the whole thing seemed inconceivable. It would not sink in that something like that could even be possible in the twentieth century, for such things had happened, at most, in the Middle Ages. And yet it was the bitter truth that outside, in front of the door, there stood two boys in brown shirts, Hitler’s executives.

And for this nation we young Jews had once stood in the trenches in cold and rain, and spilled our blood to protect the land from the enemy. Was there no comrade any more from those days who was sickened by these goings-on? One saw them pass by on the street, among them quite a few for whom one had done a good turn. They had a smile on their face that betrayed their malicious pleasure. . . .

246 HOLOCAUST AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR

HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 246 2/28/17 7:58 PM I took my war decorations, put them on, went into the street, and visited Jewish shops, where at first I was also stopped. But I was seething inside, and most of all I would have liked to shout my hatred into the faces of the barbarians. Hatred, hatred—when had it become a part of me? — It was only a few hours ago that a change had occurred within me. This land and this people that until now I had loved and treasured had suddenly become my enemy. So I was not a German anymore, or I was no longer supposed to be one. That, of course, cannot be settled in a few hours. But one thing I felt immediately: I was ashamed that I had once belonged to this people. I was ashamed about the trust that I had given to so many who now revealed themselves as my enemies. Suddenly the street, too, seemed alien to me; indeed, the whole town had become alien to me. Words do not exist to describe the feelings that I experienced in those hours. Having arrived at home, I approached the one guard whom I knew and who also knew me, and I said to him: “When you were still in your diapers I was already fighting out there for this country.” He answered: “You should not reproach me for my youth, sir ... I’ve been ordered to stand here.” I looked at his young face and thought, he’s right. Poor, misguided young people!2

Connection Questions 1. What was the Nazis’ goal in calling for the boycott? Did it succeed? Why or why not?

2. Make a list of choices you think ordinary Germans could have made in response to the boycott. What might have been the consequences of ignoring the boycott? What might have influenced people to go along with the boycott?

3. What do you think the Nazis learned from the boycott about the attitudes of the German public toward Jews? What do you think they learned about the willing- ness of the public to obey Nazi policies?

4. When might a boycott be used to express disapproval or to resist a particular policy or practice? In what ways was the boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany different?

5. How did the boycott affect the way Edwin Landau thought about his identity?

2 Edwin Landau, “My Life before and after Hitler,” in Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries, ed. Monika Richarz, trans. Stella P. Rosenfeld and Sidney Rosenfeld (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 310–12.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 247 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 10 “Restoring” Germany’s Civil Service

The boycott of Jewish-owned businesses set the stage for another step in carrying out Adolf Hitler’s “racial” policies. People were whispering about the new plans for some time before they were made public on April 7, 1933. On April 4, soon after the rumors reached President Paul von Hindenburg, he wrote a letter to Hitler:

Dear Mr. Chancellor!

Recently, a whole series of cases has been reported to me in which judges, lawyers, and officials of the Judiciary who are disabled war veterans and whose record in office is flawless, have been forcibly sent on leave, and are later to be dismissed for the sole reason that they are of Jewish descent.

It is quite intolerable for me personally . . . that Jewish officials who were disabled in the war should suffer such treatment, [especially] as, with the express approval of the government, I addressed a Proclamation to the German people on the day of the national uprising, March 21, in which I bowed in reverence before the dead of the war and remembered in gratitude the bereaved families of the war dead, the disabled, and my old comrades at the front.

I am certain, Mr. Chancellor, that you share this human feeling, and request you, most cordially and urgently, to look into this matter yourself, and to see to it that there is some uniform arrangement for all branches of the public service in Ger- many.

As far as my own feelings are concerned, officials, judges, teachers and lawyers who are war invalids, fought at the front, are sons of war dead, or themselves lost sons in the war should remain in their positions unless an individual case gives reason for different treatment. If they were worthy of fighting for Germany and bleeding for Germany, then they must also be considered worthy of continuing to serve the Fatherland. . . .

On April 5, Hitler replied to Hindenburg.

Dear Mr. President!

In a most generous and humane manner you, Mr. Field Marshal, plead the cause of those members of the Jewish people who were once compelled, by the require- ments of universal military service, to serve in the war. . . .

But, with the greatest respect, may I point out that members and supporters of my movement, who are Germans, for years were driven from all Government positions,

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 248 2/28/17 7:58 PM without consideration for their wives and children or their war service. .. . Those responsible for this cruelty were the same Jewish parties which today complain when their supporters are denied the right to official positions, with a thousand times more justification, because they are of little use in these positions but can do limitless harm . . .

Nevertheless, . . . the law in question . . . will provide consideration for those Jews who either served in the war themselves, were disabled in the war, have other mer- its, or never gave occasion for complaint in the course of a long period of service.

In general, the primary aim of this cleansing process is only to restore a certain sound and natural balance, and, secondly, to remove from official positions of national significance those elements to which one cannot entrust Germany’s survival. . . .

I beg you, Mr. President, to believe that I will try to do justice to your noble feelings as far as is possible. I understand your inner motivations and myself, by the way, frequently suffer under the harshness of a fate which forces us to make decisions which, from a human point of view, one would a thousand times rather avoid.

Work on the law in question will proceed as quickly as possible, and I am convinced that this matter, too, will then find the best possible solution.1

On April 7, the new law, known as the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, went into effect. The only Jews to keep their po- sitions were veterans, their fathers, and their sons. Similar laws dismissed all Jewish prosecuting attorneys and Jewish doctors who worked in the national health system.

Connection Questions 1. What was Hindenburg’s specific objection to the proposed civil service law? What does Hindenburg’s letter indicate about who he believed should be pro- tected as part of Germany’s universe of obligation?

2. Many Germans hoped that Hindenburg would be able to stop Hitler from carry- ing out his most extreme and discriminatory policies. What does the exchange between the two leaders reveal about whether or not these hopes were realistic?

3. What effect does granting specific exceptions to a discriminatory policy like the new civil service law have on public support for the law? Do you think excep- tions strengthen or weaken opposition?

1 Yitzhak Arad, Yisrael Gutman, and Abraham Margaliot, eds., Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1987), 37–39.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 249 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 11 A Test of Loyalty

Jews were not the only people in Germany affected by the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. The government could now dismiss any civil servant who would not “support the national state at all times and without reservation.” Indeed, the government no longer needed a reason to dismiss a worker. It could now do so without cause.

Civil servants had to accept the new rules or lose their jobs. Joachim Fest described how his father—a devout Catholic and the headmaster of an elementary school—responded to the law:

On April 20, 1933, my father was summoned to Lichtenberg Town Hall . . . and informed by Volz, the state commissar responsible for the exercise of the business of the borough mayor, that he was suspended from public service, effective im- mediately. When my father asked what he was accused of, the official responded in a sergeant-majorish manner: “You will be informed of that in due course!” But he was a civil servant, objected my father, to which Volz replied, “You can tell our Führer that. He’ll be very impressed.” . . .

As he was on his way to the exit, all at once the building he knew so well seemed unfamiliar. It was the same with the staff, some of whom he had known for years; suddenly, one after the other, their eyes were avoiding his. At his school, to which he went immediately, it was no different, even in his office; everything from the cupboards to the stationery already seemed to have been replaced. The first per- son he bumped into was his colleague Markwitz who had clearly already been informed. “Fest, old man!” he said, after my father had spoken a few explanatory words. “Did it have to be like this?” And when my father replied, “Yes, it had to be!,” Markwitz objected: “No, don’t tell me that! It’s something I learned early: there’s no ‘must’ when it comes to stupidity!”

On April 22, a good two weeks after the passage of the Law for the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service, my father was summoned again. Remaining seated and without offering my father a chair, the temporary mayor, reading from a pre- pared text, formally notified him that he was relieved of his duties as headmaster of the Twentieth Elementary School and was suspended until further notice. Given as grounds for the suspension were his senior positions in the [Catholic Center] party and in the Reichsbanner [a pro-democracy group founded during the Weimar years], as well as his “public speeches disparaging the Führer and other high-rank- ing National Socialists” . . . Under the circumstances there was no longer any guarantee that he would “at all times support without reservation the national state,” as the law put it. “Is the authority aware that this is a breach of the law?” asked my father, but Volz retorted that he couldn’t discuss legal matters with every man who came in off the street. “Because from now on you are not much more than that, Herr Fest, and no longer any colleague of mine!” As he spoke these

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 250 2/28/17 7:58 PM curt words, he continued leafing through my father’s file and one of the pages fell to the floor—no doubt intentionally, thought my father. Volz clearly expected my father to pick it up. My father, however, remained motionless, as he later reported; not for one moment did he consider going down on his knees in front of the mayor.

Volz then continued in a noticeably sharper tone. As well as being summarily sus- pended, my father was required within two days to formally transfer charge of the school to his successor, Markwitz. He would be informed in writing of the details. With a gesture that was part dismissal, part shooing away to the door, the provi- sional mayor added that for the time being my father was not allowed to take up any employment. Everything proceeded as if according to a plan, said my father, when he came to talk about what happened.1

Joachim Fest’s father was one of the few civil servants to challenge the new rules. Most government employees chose not to do so. Journalist Horst Krüger, then a schoolboy, recalled how his father protected his job in the government:

All his life he left home for the ministry at 8:23 A.M., traveling second class. At home, he read the old-line newspaper and the local daily, never joined the par- ty, ... never subscribed to the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party organ—but for twenty minutes, until the train pulled into Friedrichstrasse Station, he held it up before his face so that others might recognize his loyalty to the new people’s state. At Friedrichstrasse he left the paper behind. . . .

All his life, he came home at 4:21 P.M., always on the same train, always in the same second-class compartment, if possible always at the same corner window, always holding a briefcase full of work in his right hand, with his left showing his monthly commutation ticket—he never jumped off the moving train. He had achieved his goal; he was a German civil servant. And no matter whether the gov- ernment was headed by Noske or Ebert, Scheidemann or Brüning, Papen or Hitler, he was obligated to faith and loyalty. His office was his world.2

Connection Questions 1. Create identity charts for Joachim Fest’s father and Horst Krüger’s father. What do the stories of these two men reveal about why many people supported the Nazi Party, or at least chose not to dissent?

2. How was each man similar to or different from the bureaucrats in The Bear That Wasn’t (Chapter 1)? How do bureaucrats help a government function? To what extent is it their responsibility to follow the rules established by the govern- ment’s leaders? What options do they have when they believe the rules are unjust?

3. Can you think of a time when you were part of a larger organization? How did the goals or rules of the organization influence your choices?

1 Joachim Fest, Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Other Press, 2006), 46–48. 2 Horst Krüger, A Crack in the Wall: Growing Up Under Hitler (New York: Fromm International Publishing Corp., 1982), 19–20.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 251 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 12 Controlling the Universities

Germany’s 1933 civil service law applied to university professors as well as elementary and secondary-school teachers. It was not difficult for the Nazis to win the support of many university professors, administrators, and stu- dents. At the time, a majority of them backed conservative political parties that were hostile to the Weimar Republic. Many university professors imme- diately welcomed the Nazi-led government in 1933. Many student fraterni- ties and other student groups already banned Jews and regularly protest- ed against professors they believed did not support supposed traditional German values.1 Scholars who were Jewish or supported left-leaning parties struggled to find research and teaching positions in public, government-sup- ported German universities and often worked in private ones instead. With the passage of the new law, the Nazis attempted to root out any dissent to their policies and ideology that remained in German higher education.

Peter Drucker, an Austrian economist, was then a lecturer at Frankfurt University. Fearful of Hitler’s plans for Germany, he was prepared to leave the country but hoped that it would not be necessary to do so. The first Nazi-led faculty meeting at the university convinced him otherwise.

Frankfurt was the first university the Nazis tackled, precisely because it was the most self-confidently liberal of major German universities, with a faculty that prided itself on its allegiance to scholarship, freedom of conscience, and democracy. The Nazis knew that control of Frankfurt University would mean control of German academia. And so did everyone at the university.

Above all, Frankfurt had a science faculty distinguished both by its scholarship and by its liberal convictions; and outstanding among the Frankfurt scientists was a biochemist-physiologist of Nobel-Prize caliber and impeccable liberal credentials. When the appointment of a Nazi commissar was announced . . . and every teacher and graduate assistant at the university was summoned to a faculty meeting to hear this new master, everybody knew that a trial of strength was at hand. I had never before attended a faculty meeting, but I did attend this one.

The new Nazi commissar wasted no time on the amenities. He immediately an- nounced that Jews would be forbidden to enter university premises and would be dismissed without salary on March 15; this was something that no one had thought possible despite the Nazis’ loud antisemitism. Then he launched into a tirade of abuse, filth, and four-letter words such as had been heard rarely even in the bar- racks and never before in academia. . . . [He] pointed his finger at one department

1 Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2003), 422–28.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 252 2/28/17 7:58 PM chairman after another and said, “You either do what I tell you or we’ll put you into a concentration camp.” There was silence when he finished; everybody waited for the distinguished biochemist-physiologist. The great liberal got up, cleared his throat, and said, “Very interesting, Mr. Commissar, and in some respects very illuminating: but one point I didn’t get too clearly. Will there be more money for research in physiology?”

The meeting broke up shortly thereafter with the commissar assuring the scholars that in- deed there would be plenty of money for “racially pure science.” A few of the professors had the courage to walk out with their Jewish colleagues, but most kept a safe distance from these who only a few hours earlier had been their close friends. I went out sick unto death—and I knew that I was going to leave Germany within forty-eight hours.2

Other professors chose a different course. Martin Heidegger, an influential philosopher, told his students and colleagues that Germany’s soul needed fresh air to breathe and National Socialism would provide it. As the Nazis came to power, he argued that freedom of inquiry and free expression were negative and selfish ideas. Instead, he encouraged his students to live up to their obligations to the national community in both “thought and deed.” Heidegger’s fellow professors at Freiburg University voted him head of the university in April 1933. In May, he officially joined the Nazi Party, and he told his students: “The Führer himself and he alone is the German reality, present and future, and its law. Study to know; from now on, all things demand decision, and all action responsibility. Hail Hitler!”3

According to historian Richard Evans, 15% of university teachers had lost their jobs by fall 1933. Most were fired because of their political beliefs, while a third of those fired were dismissed because they were Jewish. Several world-famous German scientists were fired or left their positions at universi- ties and research institutions across the country. Most notable among them was Albert Einstein. He had revolutionized modern physics while working in Berlin for 20 years, but he left Germany in 1933 and spent the rest of his career at Princeton University in the United States.4

Connection Questions 1. What choices were available to the non-Jewish members of the Frankfurt Univer- sity faculty who disapproved of the new civil service law? How did they choose to respond? How do you explain their choice?

2. When is it risky to intervene on behalf of others? Under what conditions might you be willing to take that risk?

3. What are freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression? Why do you think Martin Heidegger and the Nazis would call them negative and selfish ideas? How do you think eliminating freedom of inquiry and expression would change education?

2 Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 161–62. 3 Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 421. 4 Ibid., 422–23.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 253 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 13 A Wave of Discrimination

In addition to the April boycott (see Reading 9, “Targeting Jews”) and the civil service law (see Reading 10, “‘Restoring’ Germany’s Civil Service”), a wave of discriminatory actions were taken across Germany in order to “purify Germany of the Jewish spirit” after the Nazis took power.1 According to historian Alon Confino, the Nazis and other Germans made 1,448 laws, policies, and decrees designed to remove Jews from the country’s political, economic, and cultural life between January 31, 1933, and August 31, 1939. In 1933 alone, 316 anti-Jewish measures were taken in Germany by the national, state, regional, and local governments as well as by civic associations throughout the country. The following is a partial list of the anti-Jewish laws, policies, and decrees made in 1933.

• Berlin: Jewish physicians are excluded from the list of doctors approved to receive patients under welfare and health insurance plans. • Prussia: Jewish judges and lawyers working at courts are immediately removed from of- fice; the percentage of licensed Jewish lawyers should be equal to the percentage of Jews in the population; Jewish lawyers cannot represent the state. • Cologne: Jews cannot use the city’s sports facilities. • Frankfurt: Jews must submit their passports for verification. • Cologne: Jews cannot be employed in the city public administration. • The German Boxing Association expels its Jewish members and will not work with Jewish entrepreneurs to organize events. • The Law for the Reestablishment of the Professional Civil Service removes Jews from government service. • The Law on the Admission to the Legal Profession forbids the admission of Jews to the bar. • The Law Against Overcrowding in Schools and Universities limits the number of Jewish students in public schools. • Bavaria: Jews cannot be admitted to medical school. • Palatinate: Jews who are arrested for political reasons can be released from jail only when one of their guarantors or a physician who attests to their poor health will replace them. • Baden: Yiddish cannot be spoken in the cattle markets. • The Law on Editors bans Jews from editorial posts. • When sending a telegram by phone, it is prohibited to use Jewish names for spelling.

1 Alon Confino, A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 50–51.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 254 2/28/17 7:58 PM • Zweibrücken: Jewish businesses are forbidden to participate in the next annual market. • Jews cannot own land sold by peasants. • District of Bütow: Peasants are prohibited from selling their products to Jewish merchants. • The following organizations expel their Jewish members: German teachers’ associations, gymnastic and sports associations, the Association of German Blind Academics, the German Chess League, the Reich League of German Authors, and singing associations. • Jewish newspapers from abroad are prohibited. • Jewish students must have a yellow card instead of the regular brown student card. • Jews are prohibited from practicing pharmaceutics. • Jews are prohibited from visiting the following beaches: Berlin-Wannsee, Fulda, Beuthen, Speyer, and others. • Jews cannot be part of the lottery sector. • Jews cannot be jockeys. • The mentioning of Jewish holidays in official and business calendars is prohibited. • Jewish businesses are prohibited from displaying Christian symbols at Christmas.2

Connection Questions 1. In what ways do these laws and policies exclude Jews from German society? Which laws in this list are most troubling to you? Which ones are most puzzling?

2. What does this list suggest about the ways in which Nazi goals and objectives were carried out throughout German society? How does this list provide evidence of Germans “working toward the Führer” (see Reading 8, “Working Toward the Führer”)?

3. What do you think might have been the cumulative effect on Germans of the hundreds of discriminatory measures against Jews being enacted in a single year? How might this onslaught of laws, policies, and decrees have changed how individual Germans thought about Jews? How might it have changed individuals’ universes of obligation?

2 Confino, A World without Jews, 50–51.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 255 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 14 Learning to Be a Good German

Ellen Switzer was nine years old when Hitler became chancellor in Watch Friendship Germany. Here, she recalls a classmate during the first years of Nazi rule and Betrayal VIDEO who seemed to embody the qualities the Nazis valued most. hstry.is/more [Ruth’s] most appealing qualities were her total sincerity and her willingness to share whatever she had with a classmate in need. If the school was cold . . . Ruth would always lend you her sweater; she insisted that the cold air made her feel more alive. If you forgot your lunch, Ruth shared hers; she was not very hungry that day. Out of the same generosity that prompted her to share her clothing and her food, she also shared her ideas. Ruth was a totally dedicated Nazi.

She always had a large number of pamphlets, booklets, newsletters, and other materials in her book bag, along with her school supplies. If one wanted to discuss clothes or one’s problems with a teacher or a parent with Ruth, she was always willing to do so. But somehow, the discussion tended to turn political. . . . “Here, take this booklet, it will explain what I’m talking about,” she would often say, pressing into our hands yet another piece of literature, which often seemed surpris- ingly relevant to the problem we had been discussing. . . .

Some of us, especially those of us who were called “non-Aryan” (and therefore, thoroughly evil) in Ruth’s booklets, often asked her how she could possibly have friends who were Jews or who had a Jewish background, when everything she read and distributed seemed to breathe hate against us and our ancestors. “Of course, they don’t mean you,” she would explain earnestly. “You are a good Ger- man. It’s those other Jews, pacifists, socialists, and liberals who betrayed Germany that Hitler wants to remove from influence.” . . .

When Hitler actually came to power and the word went out that students of Jewish background were to be isolated, that “Aryan” Germans were no longer to associ- ate with “non-Aryans” (i.e., those who were either Jewish or who had one Jew- ish ancestor, even though they themselves were Christians), Ruth actually came around and apologized to those of us to whom she was no longer able to talk. “The whole thing may be a misunderstanding,” she explained, “Maybe it will be straightened out later. But meanwhile, Hitler must know what he is doing, and I’ll follow orders.” Not only did she no longer speak to the suddenly ostracized group of classmates, she carefully noted down anybody who did, and reported them.1

1 Ellen Eichenwald Switzer, How Democracy Failed (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 89–91.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 256 2/28/17 7:58 PM Connection Questions 1. In what ways was Ruth a good friend? How did she reconcile her kindness to her friends with her Nazi beliefs?

2. How did Ruth’s universe of obligation change when the Nazis came to power? What factors do you think caused her universe of obligation to change?

3. After World War II, in talking to a headmistress of her school about Ruth, Ellen Switzer learned that Ruth had served as a nurse in a concentration camp where “so-called experiments were carried out on helpless inmates.” The headmistress said of Ruth: “She was not really a bad person, she was what I call an ideologue. Once she had come to believe in an idea—no matter how perverted, illogical and evil—she couldn’t let go. She’s now in prison and she’s probably still sure that what she believed was right.”2 Do you agree with that assessment of Ruth?

2 Switzer, How Democracy Failed, 89–91.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 257 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 15 Where They Burn Books . . .

“Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.” So wrote Heinrich Heine, one of Germany’s greatest poets, who was of Jewish origin. He lived in the early 1800s, at a time when nationalistic students displayed their “patriotism” by tossing “un-German” books into huge bonfires (see “Creating the German Nation” in Chapter 2). Few believed it could happen in the twentieth century until May 6, 1933. That day, the German Student Association announced a nationwide “Action against the Un-German Spirit.” Keystone / Stringer / Gey Images / Gey / Stringer Keystone

Students contribute anti-German books to be destroyed at a Berlin book-burning on May 10, 1933. About 40,000 people a‡ended the event.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 258 2/28/17 7:58 PM At one gathering, Joseph Goebbels told a cheering crowd, “The soul of the German people can again express itself. Those flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era; they light up the new!”1 Lilian T. Mowrer, an American journalist in Germany, describes what happened next:

I held my breath while he hurled the first volume into the flames: it was like burn- ing something alive. Then students followed with whole armfuls of books, while schoolboys screamed into the microphone their condemnations of this and that author, and as each name was mentioned the crowd booed and hissed. You felt Goebbels’s venom behind their denunciations. Children of fourteen mouthing abuse of Heine! Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front received the greatest condemnation ... it would never do for such an unheroic description of war to dishearten soldiers of the Third Reich.2

The mobs also burned the books of Helen Keller, an American author who was a socialist, a pacifist, and the first deaf-blind person to graduate from college. Keller responded: “History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. . . . You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds.”3

Connection Questions 1. What was “un-German” about the various books burned by the Nazis?

2. What message did the Nazis convey by publicly burning books? Who did they hope would receive that message?

3. Have you heard of books being restricted or destroyed where you live? In what ways is that similar to or different from publicly burning books?

4. Was Helen Keller right, or can education, law, or policy destroy an idea?

1 William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 241. 2 Quoted in Witness to the Holocaust, ed. Azriel Eisenberg (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1981), 79. 3 Quoted in Rebecca Onion, “‘God Sleepeth Not’: Helen Keller’s Blistering Letter to Book-Burning German Students,” The Vault (blog), Slate.com, May 16, 2013, accessed March 16, 2016, http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/05/16/helen_keller_her_scath- ing_letter_to_german_students_planning_to_burn_her.html.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 259 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 16 An Agreement with the Catholic Church

In 1933, almost 40% of Germany’s population was Roman Catholic. As a minority in a country with a Protestant majority, Catholics had always felt vulnerable to accusations that they were not “true Germans” because of suspicions that they “took orders from Rome.” Over the years, they had protected their rights by organizing and supporting the Catholic Center Party. Now, as the Nazis were outlawing opposing political parties (see Reading 4, “Outlawing the Opposition”), Catholics had to decide whether to continue to support the party.

Church leaders and clergy held a range of opinions about National So- cialism. Some Catholic leaders welcomed Hitler’s call to “overcome the un-Germanic spirit” and feared that “atheistic communism” was more of a threat to the Catholic Church than the Nazis were. Others opposed the Nazis. According to historian Doris Bergen, “Many German Catholic clergy were initially suspicious of Nazism. They saw Nazi ideas as anti-Christian, especially the emphasis on race and blood and the obvious disrespect for human life . . . some priests had refused to administer the sacrament of communion to church members in Stormtrooper or SS uniforms.”1 Some who opposed the Nazis also urged great caution; they were fearful of attacks on priests and nuns. That concern prompted officials of the Vatican to discuss with Hitler the possibility of an agreement: the Church would pledge to abstain from political activity in Germany in exchange for the Reich’s promise not to persecute the Catholic Church and its members.

As word of these talks spread, Edith Stein wrote an urgent letter to the pope. Stein, born a Jew, had converted to Catholicism in 1922 and had become a nun and a respected Catholic educator. In her letter, she argued:

Everything that happened [in Germany] and continues to happen on a daily basis originates with a government that calls itself “Christian.” For weeks not only Jews but also thousands of fearful Catholics in Germany, and, I believe, all over the world have been waiting and hoping for the Church of Christ [the Roman Catholic Church] to raise its voice to put a stop to this abuse of Christ’s name. Is not this idolization of race and governmental power which is being pounded into the public consciousness by the radio open heresy? . . . Is not all this diametrically opposed to the conduct of our Lord and Savior, who, even on the cross, still prayed for his persecutors?2

Pope Pius XI did not respond to Edith Stein, nor did his successor, Cardinal Pacelli, who became Pope Pius XII in 1939. As for the Nazis, they consid-

1 Doris L. Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 68. 2 “Letter of Saint Edith Stein to Pope Pius XI in 1933,” Carmelite Nuns of Baltimore, February 23, 2003, accessed March 24, 2016.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 260 2/28/17 7:58 PM ered her a Jew despite her conversion to Christianity; she was eventually murdered in a death camp as part of the Holocaust.

In July 1933, Hitler and Pope Pius XI signed a concordat, or treaty. Historian Fritz Stern explains:

On the face of it, the Vatican had scored a great triumph. No government under Weimar had been willing to sign such a concordat, which would recognize the principal rights of the church—rights that presumably would render it immune from the kind of perse- cution it had suffered [in the past]. By the terms of the concordat the church renounced all political activities and in turn the state guaranteed the right to free worship, to circulate pastoral epistles, to maintain Catholic schools and property. The Vatican had reason to be satisfied: Catholic rights had been put on a new basis and at the same time a regime had been strengthened that seemed to correspond to the Vatican’s sense that Mussolini and Hitler were indispensable bulwarks against Bolshevism.

Hitler had even more reason to be satisfied. The concordat was his first international agreement, and it vastly enhanced his respectability in Germany and abroad. A great moral authority had trusted his word. But did the Vatican ... really believe that Na- tional Socialism would abide by the concordat, was there really much likelihood that the regime would leave untouched a rival organization with its own dogmas and with such sweeping power over education?3

In the months and years after the concordat was signed, the Nazis regularly violated the agreement by shutting down some Catholic organizations, confiscating church property, interfering with Catholic newspapers, and imprisoning or murdering clergy and other Church leaders. But the pope did not openly criticize the Nazis until 1937. By then it was too late. Roman Catholic opposition at this point was limited to isolated individuals who could easily be removed from their positions and lacked the support of their Church. According to Bergen: “The Concordat pulled the rug out from under potential Catholic opposition in Germany. How could parish priests criticize a chancellor who had been recognized by their pope?”4

Connection Questions 1. A concordat is a formal agreement or pact. It comes from the Latin word mean- ing “harmony.” What did the Catholic Church hope to gain from the concordat it signed with Germany? What compromises did the pope make?

2. What did Hitler hope to gain? What compromises did he make? What effect did the concordat have on opposition to the Nazis within Germany? What effect did it have on the way other nations perceived the Nazi government?

3. The Catholic Church kept its side of the bargain. What did the Church do when Hit- ler broke his promises? What other options did it have? What were the short-term consequences of those options? What were the long-term consequences?

3 Fritz Stern, Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 169. 4 Doris L. Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 68.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 261 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 17 Protestant Churches and the Nazi State

Catholics in Germany were united in one church. Germany’s 45 million Watch The Confessing Protestants were not. Most were members of the Lutheran, Reformed, or Church VIDEO United Churches. In each German state, the members of these denomina- hstry.is/more tions joined together to form a regional Protestant church. Protestants in Germany differed not only in their religious practices but also in their polit- ical views. A few openly opposed the Nazis, while others saw themselves as Watch Awakening neutral. Still others actively supported Nazism, calling themselves “storm VIDEO Conscience: The Pastor troopers of Jesus Christ.” As a result, as Protestant churches responded to Niemoller Story National Socialism, some struggled to preserve the independence of their hstry.is/more churches from politics and government, while others sought to claim a central place for Christianity in Nazi Germany.

Watch Acting on Faith The Nazi government ushered in key changes to the Protestant churches

VIDEO hstry.is/more in Germany. First, the Nazi leadership supported the German Christian movement, a group of Protestants who wanted to combine Christianity and National Socialism into a movement “that would exclude all those deemed impure and embrace all ‘true Germans’ in a spiritual homeland for the Third Reich.”1 Second, the Nazi leadership urged Protestants to unite all regional churches into a national church under the centralized leader- ship of Ludwig Müller, a well-known pastor and Nazi Party member, who was appointed as Reich bishop. Many German Protestants embraced these changes. By supporting the German Christian movement and Müller, they could continue to practice their faith and at the same time show support for Hitler. In a national vote by Protestants taken in July 1933, the German Christians were supported by two-thirds of voters, and Müller won the national election to lead them.

The German Christian movement made significant changes to German Protestantism to bring it in line with Nazi racial ideology. Instead of classifying people as Christians or Jews based on their faith, as the Prot- estants had always done, German Christians began to classify people by racial heritage, as the Nazis did. Therefore, church leaders whose parents or grandparents had converted from Judaism to Christianity were consid- ered Jewish and, according to the 1933 civil service law, no longer officially permitted to serve in those positions. Although the state never enforced this law in the churches, some German Christians forced out non-Aryan clergy to show their commitment to the regime. By January of 1934, Müller was vowing to purge Protestant churches of all “Jewish influence,” includ-

1 Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 4.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 262 2/28/17 7:58 PM ing removing the Old Testament from their bible because it is based on the Hebrew bible. A public appeal released by German Christian leaders claimed that “the eternal God created for our nation a law that is peculiar to its own kind. It took shape in the Leader Adolf Hitler, and in the Nation- al Socialist state created by him. This law speaks to us from the history of our people. . . . It is loyalty to this law which demands of us the battle for honor and freedom . . . One Nation! One God! One Reich! One Church!”2

Not all Protestants in Germany agreed with the German Christian move- ment and the changes it instituted. In response to the growing power of the German Christians, another Protestant faction was formed called the Confessing Church. Its slogan was “Church must remain church,”3 and its members sought to protect their religion from the grasp of politics and the Nazi gov- ernment. For instance, the Confessing Church considered

that anyone baptized in the faith was a Christian, regardless / Alamy Archive History World of his or her racial descent. Also, the members of the Con- fessing Church opposed the German Christian movement’s changes to the bible.

Despite their opposition to the German Christian movement, the Confessing Church did not object to most elements of Nazism, and some people within the movement were Nazi Party members. The disagreement between the two groups was focused on how much influence the Nazi government should have over how they practiced their faith. Early on, Confessing Church member Martin Niemöller and two Prot- estant bishops met with Hitler and his top aides. The reli- gious leaders reaffirmed their support for Hitler’s domestic and foreign policies and asked only for the right to disagree on religious matters. Hitler did not compromise, and after the meeting both bishops signed a statement of unconditional loyalty to This propaganda poster from 1933 reads, “Hitler’s fight and Luther’s Hitler; Niemöller did not. As a result, Niemöller was increasingly targeted teaching are the best defense for the by the Nazis and was eventually imprisoned for seven years in concentra- German people.” tion camps.4

Although about 7,000 of the nation’s 16,500 Protestant clergymen openly supported the Confessing Church, they limited their opposition to defend- ing church teachings against Nazi influence. One member of the Confess- ing Church, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, did resist the actions of the Nazis more broadly. In April 1933, he professed sympathy for Jewish victims of Nazism and argued that National Socialism and Christianity were incompatible. He later became an important symbol of resistance to Nazi Germany and was executed for his role in a plot to assassinate Hitler in 1945.

2 “Directives of the Church Movement German Christians (Movement for a National Church) in Thuringia, 1933,” in The Nazi Years: A Documentary History, ed. Joachim Remak (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1990), 95–96. 3 Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 12. 4 “Martin Niemöller: Biography,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website, last modified January 9, 2016, accessed May 9, 2016.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 263 2/28/17 7:58 PM In general, Protestants in Germany found a way to be both believers in Christianity and supporters of Nazism. In contrast, Jehovah’s Witnesses struggled under the new regime. Initially, some leaders of this small reli- gious group (which numbered about 20,000 in Germany in the 1930s) tried to make peace with the Reich. But their faith often prevented them from serving in the army, swearing allegiance to the state, or uttering the words “Heil Hitler,” by this time a common way of saying hello and goodbye. Hitler was not interested in this unpopular minority, and the Nazis tar- geted the Jehovah’s Witnesses for persecution. The Nazis destroyed their national headquarters, outlawed their church, and sent many thousands to concentration camps or prisons, where more than 1,000 were killed.

Connection Questions 1. What was the difference between the German Christian and the Confessing Church movements? What did each believe should be the relationship between Protestant churches and the Nazi government?

2. According to historian Paul Bookbinder, While it is clear that many in the Confessing Church acted bravely, and some ended up in concentration camps, it is important to note what they didn’t do. Martin Niemöller later said that he deeply regretted not standing up for Jews as Jews. He spoke out only for Jews who had converted to Christianity.5

What does this suggest about the complexity of the groups that resisted the Nazis? Based on the information in this reading, how would you describe the universe of obligation of both the German Christian and the Confessing Church movements in 1933 Germany?

3. Why did the Nazis target Jehovah’s Witnesses?

4. What message would most German Protestants have received from the leaders of their churches about the legitimacy of the Nazi-led government? Did the re- sponses of their churches make them more likely or less likely to accept Nazi rule of Germany?

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

5 Paul Bookbinder to Facing History and Ourselves, comment on draft manuscript, December 7, 2015.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 264 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 18 Breeding the New German “Race”

In 1925, Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “Everything we admire on this earth today—science and art, technology and inventions—is only the cre- ative product of a few peoples and originally perhaps one race [the “Ary- ans”]. On them depends the existence of this whole culture. If they perish, the beauty of this earth will sink into the grave with them.” From the start, the Nazis were determined to ensure the strength and purity of the “Aryan” race. They believed, according to historian Richard Evans, that “the strong and the racially pure had to be encouraged to have more children, the weak and the racially impure had to be neutralized by one means or another.”1

One way the Nazis encouraged “strong and pure” Aryans to have more children was through the “marriage loan” program. Beginning in June 1933, the government made interest-free loans of up to 1,000 marks available to young couples who intended to get married, provided that they met certain criteria. One criterion was that both the man and woman could prove their “Aryan” heritage. Another criterion was that the bride had to have been employed for six months in the two years preceding the marriage, and she had to promise to leave her job and stay home until the loan was paid off. This requirement was intended to encourage working women to leave the job market and make more jobs available to men. Finally, for each child born to the couple, a quarter of the loan amount was forgiven. Therefore, if the couple had four children, they would not have to repay any of the original loan amount. In this way, the program encouraged healthy “Aryan” couples to have more children and reinforced what the Nazis believed was the proper role of women in society.2

The Nazis regarded the breeding of a superior race, encouraged by policies such as the marriage loan program, as “positive eugenics” (see “Breeding Society’s ‘Fittest’” in Chapter 2). They also practiced “negative eugenics” by preventing people they considered genetically inferior from reproduc- ing. A new law announced in July 1933 was the first step in that process. It permitted the government to sterilize anyone who suffered from so-called “hereditary” illnesses such as “feeble-mindedness,” schizophrenia, man- ic-depressive illness, genetic epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea, genetic blind- ness, deafness, and some forms of alcoholism.

The idea was not a new one. Sterilization laws existed in several other countries at the time, including the United States. Between 1907 and 1930,

1 Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York: Penguin, 2005), 506. 2 Ibid., 330–31.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 265 2/28/17 7:58 PM 29 US states passed compulsory sterilization laws, and about 11,000 women were sterilized. Many states also had laws that banned marriages between white people and people of color—including African Americans, Native Americans, and Asians. Both sets of laws were prompted by a desire to eliminate “strains that are a burden to the nation or to themselves, and to raise the standard of human- ity by the suppression of the progeny of the defective classes.”3 (See Calvin College, German Propaganda Archive German Propaganda College, Calvin “Attitudes toward Life and Death” in Chapter 4.) The Nazis took that goal much further than Americans ever did.

This poster from a eugenics Gregor Ziemer, an American educator, observed the results of the law exhibition in the 1930s reads, “Sterilization is Liberation, Not a when he toured a German hospital where sterilizations took place. A guide Punishment.” Three handicapped informed him that the patients were “the mentally sick, women with low children are also pictured with the caption, “Who would want to be resistance, women who had proven through other births that their off- responsible for this?” spring were not strong. They were women suffering from defects . . . some were sterilized because they were political enemies of the State.” He was told, “We are even eradicating color-blindness in the Third Reich. . . .” When Ziemer asked who made the decisions, the guide boasted, “We have courts. It is all done very legally, rest assured. We have law and order.”4

To enforce the law, the Nazis created health office departments for “gene and race care” and set up “genetic health courts.” There, doctors and lawyers worked together to decide who would be sterilized. The individual had no say in the decision. In the first four years after the law was passed, the Germans sterilized over 50,000 people. By the end of the Nazi regime in 1945, they had sterilized nearly 360,000.5

Connection Questions 1. After studying government-sanctioned violence, sociologist Irving Horowitz concludes, “The precondition for mass extermination was engineered dehu- manization: the conversion of citizens into aliens.”6 What is dehumanization? What evidence of the intentional process of dehumanization can you find in this reading?

2. How do you think old prejudices about the disabled and “less worthy races” affected the way people responded to the new sterilization law? How do you think the fact that the law was the work of doctors and professors affected the way people responded to it? How might the language used to describe such laws have influenced the way people responded to them?

3. What was the purpose of the sterilization law? What is the danger in giving the government the power to control who can have children?

3 Franz Boas, “Eugenics,” Scientific Monthly 3, no. 5 (1916): 476–77. 4 Gregor Ziemer, Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1941), 19. 5 Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 508. 6 Irving Louis Horowitz, Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power, 3rd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1980), 302.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 266 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 19 No Time to Think

Milton Mayer, an American journalist and educator, wanted to find out how a variety of people had reacted to Hitler’s policies and philosophy. Seven years after the end of World War II, he interviewed German men from a cross-section of society. One of them, a college professor, had this to say about his experience of that period:

[The study of] Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was “expected to” participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time.

. . . The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your “little men,” your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and “crises” and so fascinated, yes, fasci- nated, by the machinations of the “national enemies,” without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose we were grateful. Who wants to think?

One doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Ger- many, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 267 2/28/17 7:58 PM And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your col- leagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organi- zations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a trouble- maker. So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was com- pelled to go all the way.

You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 268 2/28/17 7:58 PM Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.1

Connection Questions 1. Why did the professor accept the Nazis’ policies? How did he evaluate, years later, the choices he made or did not make? How do you evaluate them? Why does he emphasize the small steps in the transformation of Germany?

2. Draw an identity chart for the professor. What aspects of his identity may have influenced the decisions he made in 1933?

3. Is it important that the interview with this professor took place seven years after the end of World War II? How might this affect the way you interpret and analyze his account?

4. What elements in the professor’s choices not to act were based on particular circumstances of his time and place? What elements in his choices may reflect more universal human tendencies?

5. Can you think of a time when you didn’t speak out or act against what you thought was wrong? What kept you from acting?

1 From Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933–45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 167, 169, 171.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 269 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 20 The Night of the Long Knives

Adolf Hitler was determined to put down all opposition—including op- Watch Night of position within his own party. By June 1934, he was convinced that the the Long Knives VIDEO SA—the Nazis’ own storm troopers, often called Brown Shirts—and Ernst hstry.is/more Röhm, their leader, had outlived their usefulness. Known as intimidating street brawlers, the Brown Shirts were regarded as “a bunch of thugs” by a growing number of Germans. The nation’s military leaders were also crit- ical of the SA. Many of them resented the fact that the Treaty of Versailles had limited the army to 100,000 men while the SA, as the Nazis’ main paramilitary force, numbered more than 2 million. They also feared Röhm’s ambition to take charge of the military. As Hitler planned to soon increase the size of the German armed forces, he needed to solidify the support of these military leaders. Rich industrialists also did not approve of the violence they associated with the storm troopers. Some were also bothered by the fact that Röhm was homosexual. Homosexuality was illegal and widely considered immoral in German society. The widespread awareness of Röhm’s sexual orientation made it harder for the Nazis to build ties to conservatives and church leaders.

On June 30, Hitler ordered the SS (the Nazis’ elite guard) and the regular army to murder more than 200 SA leaders, including Röhm. They also killed Kurt von Schleicher and his wife. Schleicher, a friend of President Paul von Hindenburg, had been chancellor of Germany just before Hitler took over in 1933, and he had no connections to Röhm or the SA.

Most people did not know about the events of June 30 until days later. The news came out only when Hitler’s cabinet declared the killings “legal” after the fact. The newspapers reported that Hindenburg had congratu- lated Hitler on his “courageous personal intervention.” Two weeks later, Hitler justified the murders in a speech broadcast on the radio: “If anyone approaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice then all I can say to him is this: in this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme Justiciar [judicial officer] of the German people. . . . And everyone must know for all future time that if he raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot.”1

According to historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the massacre was misunder- stood within Germany as well as outside the nation. She explains that in- stead of realizing that the country was being run by “a gang of criminals,”

1 Quoted in Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 37–38.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 270 2/28/17 7:58 PM “many Germans believed that the purge of the SA represented Hitler’s wish to halt the arbitrary terror of the SA in the streets and to restore a measure of legality to the country.”2

Christabel Bielenberg, a British woman who had become a German citizen after her marriage to a German, was among those interpreting the events this way. She was out of the country on June 30. When she returned, she found growing support for Hitler:

It was considered that ... with the murder of Röhm and the eclipse of his storm troopers (although the manner in which it had been carried out had not been ex- actly savory), the Revolution had to all intents and purposes become respectable. Once everything distasteful had been neatly swept under the carpet, there was something almost touching about the anxious childlike pleasure with which so many tried to share in what they seemed to hope was a newly discovered respect- ability. Unpleasantnesses, of course there were unpleasantnesses; but such things, if talked about at all, must be seen in perspective. There were so many more posi- tive aspects of the regime to chat about.3

Many army officers celebrated with bottles of champagne. One general told his fellow officers that he wished he had been there to see Röhm shot. A retired captain named Erwin Planck was among the few who thought the rejoicing was out of place. He told an officer, “If you look on without lifting a finger, you will meet the same fate sooner or later.”4

Connection Questions 1. What happened on the “Night of the Long Knives”? How did Hitler justify the actions taken that night?

2. Why did some people feel the massacre turned Hitler’s regime from “a gang of criminals running the country” to one with “a newly discovered respectability”?

3. Would the Night of the Long Knives have been possible in February 1933? What earlier events prepared the nation to accept Hitler’s version of what happened that night? How did the Night of the Long Knives help to create a dictatorship out of a democracy?

2 Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews, 1933–1945 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), 82. 3 Christabel Bielenberg, Christabel (New York: Penguin, 1989), 27–28. 4 Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 508, 41.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 271 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 21 Isolating Homosexuals

After the Night of the Long Knives, the Nazis increased their attacks on homosexual men. Many Germans applauded the move. Homophobia was not uncommon in German society; homosexuals had long been the target of bigotry and discrimination. In 1871, Germany had enacted a provision in the criminal code, known as Paragraph 175, that made homosexual acts a crime. (Several other nations had similar laws at the time.) That law was still on the books, and many homosexual men were harassed or arrested by police throughout the years of the Weimar Republic. Nevertheless, in Ber- lin and a few larger German cities, tolerance of homosexuality increased in the 1920s and 1930s, and homosexual culture flourished. Many were able to live their lives openly without hiding their sexual orientation. The Reichstag was even considering abolishing Paragraph 175 before the Nazis came to power.1

The Nazis believed that homosexual men were “defective” and an obsta- cle to the goal of creating a master “Aryan” race. They did not embody, in the Nazis’ view, the masculinity of the ideal German man. The Nazis also feared that if homosexuals held leadership positions in the Nazi Party or government (like Ernst Röhm; see Reading 20, “The Night of the Long Knives”), they would be vulnerable to manipulation or blackmail by any- one who threatened to expose their sexual orientation. The Nazis were not nearly as concerned about lesbians, who, as women, they presumed would be passive and could be forced to have children.2

When Hitler took over in 1933, enforcement of Paragraph 175 was stepped up. A man who lived near Hamburg recalled:

With one blow a wave of arrests of homosexuals began in our town. One of the first to be arrested was my friend, with whom I had had a relationship since I was 23. One day people from the Gestapo came to his house and took him away. It was pointless to inquire where he might be. If anyone did that, they ran the risk of being similarly detained, because he knew them, and therefore they were also suspect. Following his arrest, his home was searched by Gestapo agents. Books were taken away, note- and address books were confiscated, questions were asked among the neighbors. . . . The address books were the worst. All those who figured in them, or had anything to do with him were arrested and summoned by the Gestapo. Me, too. I was summoned by the Gestapo and interrogated at least once every fourteen days or three weeks. . . . After four weeks my friend was released from investigative custody. The [Nazis] could not prove anything against him either. However, the

1 Geoffrey J. Giles, “Why Bother About Homosexuals? Homophobia and Sexual Politics in Nazi Germany,” lecture, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Washington, DC, May 30, 2001, accessed March 18, 2016. 2 Doris L. Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 57.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 272 2/28/17 7:58 PM effects of his arrest were terrifying. Hair shorn off, totally confused, he was no longer what he was before. ... We had to be very careful with all contacts. I had to break off all relations with my friend. We passed each other by on the street, because we did not want to put ourselves in danger. ... We lived like animals in a wild game park, always sensing the hunters.3

In June 1935, the Nazis strengthened the law to make it easier to arrest any man presumed to be homosexual.

Connection Questions 1. What beliefs and circumstances motivated the Nazis to target homosexual men? How did their attitudes toward homosexual men differ from their attitudes toward lesbians?

2. How did the Nazis’ arrests change relationships between partners, friends, and neighbors?

3. How did the Nazis use fear to maintain some control over individuals’ decisions?

3 Quoted in Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 194.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 273 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 22 Pledging Allegiance

When German president Paul von Hindenburg died on Au- gust 2, 1934, Hitler combined the positions of chancellor and president. He was now the Führer and Reich chancellor, the head of state, and the chief of the armed forces. In the past, German soldiers had taken this oath:

Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Alamy Photo Zeitung Sueddeutsche I swear loyalty to the Constitution and vow that I will protect the Ger- man nation and its lawful establishments as a brave soldier at any time and will be obedient to the President and my superiors.

Now Hitler created a new oath.

I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obe- dience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, German military recruits swear Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to allegiance to Adolf Hitler. risk my life at any time for this oath.

In his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer, an Ameri- can journalist, writes that the new oath “enabled an even greater number of officers to excuse themselves from any personal responsibility for the unspeakable crimes which they carried out on the orders of the Supreme Commander whose true nature they had seen for themselves. . . . One of the appalling aberrations of the German officer corps from this point on rose out of this conflict of ‘honor’—a word . . . often on their lips. . . . Later and often, by honoring their oath they dishonored themselves as human beings and trod in the mud the moral code of their corps.”1

Connection Questions 1. Summarize the two oaths. What is the main difference between the two? How important is that difference? What are the implications of swearing an oath to an individual leader rather than to a nation?

2. How might taking an oath affect the choices a person makes? How does an oath affect the level of responsibility a person has for his or her actions? Is follow- ing an oath an acceptable explanation for making a choice that a person later regrets?

3. What oaths do people take today? For what reasons? How do such oaths affect people’s choices? How should they?

1 William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), 227.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 274 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 23 Do You Take the Oath?

Soldiers were not the only ones required to take the new oath that pledged allegiance to Hitler. One German recalled the day he was asked to pledge loyalty to the regime:

I was employed in a defense plant (a war plant, of course, but they were always called defense plants). That was the year of the National Defense Law, the law of “total conscription.” Under the law I was required to take the oath of fidelity. I said I would not; I opposed it in conscience. I was given twenty-four hours to “think it over.” In those twenty-four hours I lost the world. . . .

You see, refusal would have meant the loss of my job, of course, not prison or anything like that. (Later on, the penalty was worse, but this was only 1935.) But losing my job would have meant that I could not get another. Wherever I went I should be asked why I left the job I had, and when I said why, I should certainly have been refused employment. Nobody would hire a “Bolshevik.” Of course, I was not a Bolshevik, but you understand what I mean.

I tried not to think of myself or my family. We might have got out of the country in any case, and I could have got a job in industry or education somewhere else.

What I tried to think of was the people to whom I might be of some help later on, if things got worse (as I believed they would). I had a wide friendship in scientific and academic circles, including many Jews, and “Aryans,” too, who might be in trouble. If I took the oath and held my job, I might be of help, somehow, as things went on. If I refused to take the oath, I would certainly be useless to my friends, even if I remained in the country. I myself would be in their situation.

The next day, after “thinking it over,” I said I would take the oath with the mental reservation, that, by the words with which the oath began, “Ich schwöre bei Gott,” “I swear by God,” I understood that no human being and no government had the right to override my conscience. My mental reservations did not interest the official who administered the oath. He said, “Do you take the oath?” and I took it. That day the world was lost, and it was I who lost it.

First of all, there is the problem of the lesser evil. Taking the oath was not so evil as being unable to help my friends later on would have been. But the evil of the oath was certain and immediate, and the helping of my friends was in the future and therefore uncertain. I had to commit a positive evil there and then, in the hope of a possible good later on. The good outweighed the evil; but the good was only a hope, the evil a fact. . . . The hope might not have been realized—either for reasons beyond my control or because I became afraid later on or even because I was afraid all the time and was simply fooling myself when I took the oath in the first place.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 275 2/28/17 7:58 PM But that is not the important point. The problem of the lesser evil we all know about; in Germany we took Hindenburg as less evil than Hitler, and in the end, we got them both. But that is not why I say that Americans cannot understand. No, the important point is—how many innocent people were killed by the Nazis, would you say? .. . Shall we say, just to be safe, that three million innocent people were killed all together? .. . And how many innocent lives would you like to say I saved? . . . Perhaps five, or ten, one doesn’t know. But shall we say a hundred, or a thousand, just to be safe? .. . And it would be better to have saved all three million, instead of only a hundred, or a thousand? There, then, is my point. If I had refused to take the oath of fidelity, I would have saved all three million. . . .

There I was in 1935, a perfect example of the kind of person who, with all his advantages in birth, in education, and in position, rules (or might easily rule) in any country. If I had refused to take the oath in 1935, it would have meant that thousands and thousands like me, all over Germany, were refusing to take it. Their refusal would have heartened millions. Thus the regime would have been over- thrown, or indeed, would never have come to power in the first place. The fact that I was not prepared to resist in 1935 meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands, like me in Germany were also unprepared, and each one of these hundreds of thousands was, like me, a man of great influence or of great potential influence. Thus the world was lost. . . .

These hundred lives I saved—or a thousand or ten as you will—what do they rep- resent? A little something out of the whole terrible evil, when, if my faith had been strong enough in 1935, I could have prevented the whole evil. .. . I did not believe that I could “move mountains.” The day I said, “No,” I had faith. In the process of “thinking it over,” in the next twenty-four hours, my faith failed me. So, in the next ten years, I was able to remove only anthills, not mountains.

My education did not help me, and I had a broader and better education than most have had or ever will have. All it did, in the end, was to enable me to rationalize my failure of faith more easily than I might have done if I had been ignorant. And so it was, I think, among educated men generally, in that time in Germany. Their resistance was no greater than other men’s.1

Not everyone was willing to take the oath and pledge allegiance to Hitler. Among those who refused was Ricarda Huch, a 70-year-old poet and writ- er. She resigned from the prestigious Prussian Academy of Arts with this letter:

Heidelberg, April 9, 1933

Dear President von Schillings:

Let me first thank you for the warm interest you have taken in having me remain in the Academy. I would very much like you to understand why I cannot follow your wish. That a German’s feelings are German, I would consider to be just about self-evident, but the definition of what is German, and what acting in a German manner means—those are things where opinions differ. What the present govern- ment prescribes by way of patriotic convictions is not my kind of Germanism. The

1 From Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933–45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 177–81.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 276 2/28/17 7:58 PM centralization, the use of compulsion, the brutal methods, the defamation of those who hold different convictions, the boastful self-praise—these are matters which I consider un-German and disastrous. As I consider the divergence between this opinion of mine and that being ordered by the state, I find it impossible to remain in an Academy that is a part of the state. You say that the declaration submitted to me by the Academy would not prevent me from the free expression of my opinions. But “loyal cooperation, in the spirit of the changed historical situation, on matters affecting national and cultural tasks that fall within the jurisdiction of the Acad- emy” requires an agreement with the government’s program which in my case does not exist. Besides, I would find no newspaper or magazine that would print an opposition opinion. Thus the right to free expression of opinion would remain quite theoretical. . . .

I hereby resign from the Academy.

S. Ricarda Huch2

The Nazis would not allow Huch to publish her letter. Few knew that it existed until after the war. So she and other dissenters lived in Germany throughout the Nazi era as silent dissenters in “internal exile.”

Connection Questions 1. What were the factors that the defense plant worker considered when deciding whether or not to take the oath?

2. What do you think the defense plant worker meant by the words, “That day the world was lost, and it was I who lost it”? Find evidence in his narrative to explain why he feels “the world was lost” and “it was I who lost it.”

3. What does the term “lesser evil” mean? What did this man think about the advantages and the costs of choosing the “lesser evil” in his situation?

4. Is it an understandable choice, as this man argues, to “commit a positive evil there and then, in the hope of a possible good later on”? When do we today face similar dilemmas in our own lives?

5. Why did Ricarda Huch refuse to take the oath? How is Huch’s definition of what it means to be German different from the Nazis’ definition?

6. What does it mean to go into exile? How is it different from “internal exile”? Can dissent be silent?

2 Ricarda Huch, “‘Not My Kind of Germanism’: A Resignation from the Academy,” in The Nazi Years: A Documentary History, ed. Joachim Remak (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1969), 162.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 277 2/28/17 7:58 PM Reading 24 The Empty Table

For years, Marta Appel had been getting together at a restaurant once a month with a group of friends she had known since high school. In 1933, she stopped coming to the lunches, mainly because she did not want to embarrass her non-Jewish friends. She recalls:

One day on the street, I met one of my old teachers, and with tears in her eyes she begged me: “Come again to us; we miss you; we feel ashamed that you must think we do not want you anymore. Not one of us has changed in her feeling toward you.” She tried to convince me that they were still my friends, and tried to take away my doubts. I decided to go to the next meeting. It was a hard decision and I had not slept the night before. I was afraid for my gentile friends. For nothing in the world did I wish to bring them trouble by my attendance, and I was also afraid for myself. I knew I would watch them, noticing the slightest expression of embar- rassment in their eyes when I came. I knew they could not deceive me; I would be aware of every change in their voices. Would they be afraid to talk to me?

It was not necessary for me to read their eyes or listen to the changes in their voic- es. The empty table in the little alcove that had always been reserved for us spoke the clearest language. It was even unnecessary for the waiter to come and say that a lady phoned that morning not to reserve the table thereafter. I could not blame them. Why should they risk losing a position only to prove to me that we still had friends in Germany?1

Connection Questions 1. What influenced Marta Appel’s choice to re-join her friends for lunch? Do you think her decision was courageous or a mistake?

2. What influenced Appel’s friends to choose to cancel the lunch? Do you think their choice was an act of cowardice or a sensible decision? How does Appel explain their action? Was she right to not blame them for making that choice?

1 Marta Appel, “Memoirs,” in Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries, ed. Monika Richarz, trans. Stella P. Rosenfeld and Sidney Rosenfeld (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 351.

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HaHB_chapter5_v1_PPS.indd 278 2/28/17 7:58 PM Chapter 5 Analysis and Reflection

1. What attracted some people to Nazism? What did some people regard as problematic or unacceptable? What influenced so many to accept the Nazi regime despite ideas and actions they found objectionable? Use the readings in this chapter to make a list of the different ways in which Germans responded to the Nazi-led government in 1933 and 1934. What factors influenced each of the responses in your list?

2. Make a timeline of important events from this chapter. What events seem most important or most pivotal to the experiences of individual Germans? Were there choices available in 1933 that were no longer available in 1935?

3. Many writers quoted in this chapter speak of feeling suddenly alienated and unfamiliar in places where they had once been at home. What factors contributed to this sense that their world had been transformed around them? What does it take to transform a society?

4. This chapter describes Germany’s transformation from a struggling democracy to a dictatorship. What factors seem most important in bringing about that change? What opportunities for resistance were missed? How do the readings in this chapter help you understand not only what undermines democracy but also what it might take to protect and strengthen it?

5. How did the actions taken by the Nazis in their first year in power change Germany’s universe of obligation? What effect did the Nazis’ actions have on the universes of obligation of the individual Germans you read about in this chapter? How do you explain these changes?

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