• * 





IL 


A HISTORY III DOCVMEMfS 











Hitler and 
the Nazis 


A History in Documents 






























Hitler and the Nazis 

A History in Documents 



David F. Crew 


OXFORD 

UNIVERSITY PRESS 




For Sara, Kate, Charlotte, and Gabriel 



OXFORD 

UNIVERSITY PRESS 

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further 
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Copyright © 2005 by David F. Crew 

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 

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Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, 
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, 
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, 
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
Crew, David F. 

Hitler and the Nazis : a history in documents / David F. Crew, 
p. cm. 

Includes index. 

ISBN-10: 0-19-515285-9 
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-515285-2 

1. National socialism—History—Sources. 2. Hitler, Adolf, 1889-1945— 
Sources. 3. Germany—History—1918-1933—Sources. 4. Germany— 
History—1933-1945—Sources. I. Title. 

DD253.C67 2005 
943.086—dc22 

2005017759 


Printed in the United States of America 
On acid-free paper 


General Editors 

Sarah Deutsch 
Professor of History 
University of Arizona 

Carol Karlsen 
Professor of History 
University of Michigan 

Robert G. Moeller 
Professor of History 
University of California, Irvine 

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom 
Professor of History 
Indiana University 


Board of Advisors 

Steven Goldberg 

Social Studies Supervisor 

New Rochelle, N.Y. Public Schools 

John Pyne 

Social Studies Supervisor 

West Milford, N.J. Public Schools 


Cover: Adolf Hitler, { 938 . 

Frontispiece. Adolf Hitler, { 935 . 

Title page. Hitler and Heinrich Himmler ; i935. 



Contents 


6 WHAT IS A DOCUMENT? 

8 HOW TO READ A DOCUMENT 

11 INTRODUCTION 

Chapter One 

17 WHAT MADE NAZISM POSSIBLE? 

WAR, REVOLUTION, AND THE 
WEIMAR REPUBLIC 
20 MEMORIES OF A BRUTAL WAR 
22 The Promise and Problems of Weimar 
Democracy 

29 The New Woman and the Movies 

34 Economic Crises 

Chapter Two 

39 ENTER HITLER 
41 From the War to the Failed Attempt to 
Seize Power in 1923 
46 Hitlers Rise to Power 

52 The Rise and Fall of Hitler's Storm 

Troopers 

Chapter Three: Picture Essay 

59 SELLING HITLER'S IMAGE: NAZI 

PROPAGANDA 

Chapter Four 

69 THE RACIAL STATE: NAZI 
GERMANY, 1933-1939 

70 Making German Jews and "Community 

Aliens" Socially Dead 
79 Kristallnacht 

87 Shaping the Aryan Race 
89 Training Aryans for the Future 
93 The SS and the Concentration 

Camp System 

Chapter Five 

99 HITLER'S WAR 

101 Racial War and War of Plunder 

102 The Battle of Britain 

104 The Invasion of the Soviet Union 

109 The End of Blitzkrieg 

110 The Tide Turns 

113 Slave Labor for the German War Effort 
115 Resistance and Invasion 

118 The Air War against Germany 


Chapter Six 

121 THE HOLOCAUST 

122 The First Steps toward Mass Murder 
125 The War against Eastern Jews 

129 Killing Centers 
135 Rescue, Escape, and Resistance 

Chapter Seven 

143 GERMANY AFTER THE 
HOLOCAUST 

156 TIMELINE 
159 FURTHER READING 
161 WEBSITES 
163 TEXT CREDITS 
169 INDEX 




6 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


What Is a Document? 

T o the historian, a document is, 
quite simply, any sort of histori¬ 
cal evidence. It is a primary 
source, the raw material of his¬ 
tory. A document may be more than the 
expected government paperwork, such as a 
treaty or passport. It is also a letter, diary, 
will, grocery list, newspaper article, recipe, 
memoir, oral history, school yearbook, map, 
chart, architectural plan, poster, musical 
score, play script, novel, political cartoon, 
painting, photograph—even an object. 

Using primary sources allows us not 
just to read about history, but to read his¬ 
tory itself. It allows us to immerse ourselves 
in the look and feel of an era gone by, to 
understand its people and their language, 
whether verbal or visual. And it allows us 
to take an active, hands-on role in (recon¬ 
structing history. 

Using primary sources requires us to 
use our powers of detection to ferret out 
the relevant facts and to draw conclusions 
from them,- just as Agatha Christie uses the 
scores in a bridge game to determine the 
identity of a murderer, the historian uses 
facts from a variety of sources—some, per¬ 
haps, seemingly inconsequential—to build 
a historical case. 

The poet W. H. Auden wrote that his¬ 
tory was the study of questions. Primary 
sources force us to ask questions—and 
then, by answering them, to construct a 
narrative or an argument that makes sense 
to us. Moreover, as we draw on the many 
sources from “the dust-bin of history/' we 
can endow that narrative with character, 
personality, and texture—all the elements 
that make history so endlessly intriguing. 



US, EMST 1 TUT 101 


Cartoon 

This political cartoon addresses the issue of church and 
state. It illustrates the Supreme Courts role in balancing 
the demands of the ist Amendment of the Constitution and 
the desires of the religious population. 


Illustration 

Illustrations from 
childrens books, 
such as this 
alphabet from the 
New England 
Primer, tell us 
how children were 
educated, and 
also what the 
religious and 
moral values of 
the time were. 



In jfdam’i FaK 
We biuncd 


Thy Lire to Mend 
Tl'ii Seek Attend. 


\ Ti c C el doth pUf 
Ai d a fiti flay. 

A Deg will bit* 
A Tiutf -t nigbe. 

An JEagles Right 
It Out oi light. 























f tttft* 


| PENIJJ?iL LA<.r INDIA, 

^ /"*** *i r 

kfcEhl 111N.\H * r*rt TCKHOHES 

■ UlMra Mxlrr.i |n - * J , _«v.'w., _, 

I A‘JLUM»£fc Dumiu F,f 

* Wwmr r±. M*f , IwTf.ui 


Map 

A 1788 British map of 
India shows the region prior 
to British colonization, an 
indication of the kingdoms 
and provinces whose ethnic 
divisions would resurface 
later in India's history. 


Treaty 

A government document such as this 
{805 treaty can reveal not only the 
details of government policy, hut 
information about the people who 
signed it. Here, the Indians' names 
were written in English translitera¬ 
tion by US. officials t the Indians 
added pictographs to the right of 
their names. 



Withal piut* piL^i i&xmititauk 
nut 

me jw "[frmW (itW 
uttolfi luijiki tipW tfiffi 

J’ 1 ' 5 * 1 ^ U1& ^ l i ,,UL iip L'. ln]\e 

W* 9" n ' mm jrdte Jf 

urire Vi’irjiL’e 

li r | j i- 1 J 1? 

btafqua jyWi Utii' hd 
3*»n U*ui. luj-pm 
SwKti? ftiitci 1 min 




Literature 

The first written version of the Old English epic Beowulf, 
from the late doth century, is physical evidence of the tran¬ 
sition from oral to written history. Charred by fire, it is 
also a physical record of the wear and tear of history. 







8 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


How to Read a Document 


O ur most extensive source of 
documentary evidence about 
Hitler and the Nazis is the 
Nazis themselves. The Nazis 
produced huge numbers of documents, 
including detailed records of their own 
horrific crimes. Primary sources include 
speeches, internal Nazi party documents, 
government records, letters, diaries, and 
memoirs. As with documents from any 
period of history, those that help tell the 
story of Hitler and the Nazis must be 
considered within their historical context. 
Factors include the document's author, 
the date it was written, and under what 
circumstances, why it was written and the 
intended audience. Dates, for example, 
can be particularly important. After World 
War II, many Germans wanted to clear 
themselves of any crimes that might have 
sent them to jail. Therefore, a description 
of a mass shooting by a participant or 
observer given as evidence in a post-1945 
war crimes trial, may display remorse 
and guilt that the author did not feel at 
the time of the event. 

However, even the documents pro¬ 
duced by the Nazis during their twelve- 
year dictatorship are often not totally 
transparent. The Nazis seldom described 
their attempt to annihilate millions of 
European Jews as what it was—mass 
murder. Instead, they used euphemisms 
such as "The Final Solution" to cover up 
their crimes. Because of the biases built 
into Nazi language, it is important to 
draw upon other sources, such as the 
reports filed by foreign embassies and 
news agencies or the diaries, memoirs, 
and oral histories of surviving victims. 


Political Posters 

In an era before television, when even radio was still in its infancy, 
political messages were often communicated to voters by arresting 
images printed on posters displayed in public spaces. 

Delivering the Message 

Although posters frequently included written messages, they 
relied heavily upon their visual impact. With just a few words of 
text: "Our Last Hope" and Hitlers name, this Nazi election poster 
from 1932 is a particularly good example. The poster delivers a 
message that is carried through the visual impact of the many 
somber faces of desperate unemployed voters. 

Audience 

Nazi election posters had to compete for the attention of voters 1 
with the posters of many other political parties. In this particular 
case, the Nazis were appealing to the hopelessness felt by the 
unemployed who would usually have voted for the radical left- 
wing Communist Party. 


Reasons for Talcing Photos 

Photographs taken by the Nazis recorded a version of reality, but 
also often attempted to convey a specific point of view or an official 
message. This photograph was taken by a Nazi photographer to 
celebrate the crushing of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in Poland in 
1943. The image was included in leather-bound albums presented 
as gifts to the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, and to two other 
SS leaders. After the war, the albums were used as evidence in the 
Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. 

The Contradictions of the Subject 

Some Nazis would have preferred that this photograph not exist 
at all. The uprising was an embarrassment, and according to Nazi 
ideology, Jews should not have had the courage to resist trained, 
well-armed Nazi troops. The photograph shows that the Jewish 
revolt has been crushed, but it might also raise questions about 
whether the Nazis would encounter other armed Jewish uprisings. 

A German looking at this picture might also ask why it had taken so 
many German soldiers to capture these three Jews. 

The Gender of the Figures 

Two of the Jews pictured here are women. It would have been 
difficult for the soldiers, both those at the uprising and those who 
saw the photograph later, to understand how such poorly armed 
women could fight off trained German soldiers for almost three 
weeks. The fact that the woman on the right has not raised her 
hands, in apparent defiance of her captor, may also have made any 
German who saw this image feel uncomfortable. 



HOW TO READ A DOCUMENT 
























Introduction 


A Nazi leader in Hamburg, 
Germany, stands in front of a 
huge swastika in i9 33. He tells 
the assembled citizens they must 
contribute to the Nazi charity 
Winter Help. 


W hy should we care about Adolf Hitler, Nazism, and 

the Holocaust? The fascination of the Nazi period is 
obvious. Even from the vantage point of the twenty- 
first century, the Nazi regime is still one of the most 
dramatic and destructive episodes in western European, indeed in 
world, history. Nazism is synonymous with terror, concentration 
camps, and mass murder. Hitlers war claimed tens of millions of lives 
and left Europe in complete ruins. Nazism has given us words and 
symbols that continue to strike fear in the hearts of people who oth¬ 
erwise know very little about Hitler or the Nazi regime. Think of the 
term for Hitlers secret police, "Gestapo," or the ultimate Nazi symbol, 
the swastika, which has become a twentieth-century shorthand for 
evil. In 1916, swastikas were prominently displayed on the uniforms 
of a Canadian girls' hockey team. At that time, well before Hitlers 
name had become a household word, this symbol could still be seen 
as a relatively innocent sun wheel. After Hitler, however, it could only 
mean death, destruction, and racial hatred. 

Nazism is therefore important to all of us because of the ways in 
which it continues to live on in our imaginations. When we reach for 
a historical comparison to condemn a present-day dictator, Hitlers 
name comes to mind,* politicians and reporters frequently compared 
Saddam Hussein, the former dictator of Iraq, to Hitler. When we look 
at pictures on television of genocide in Rwanda, images of the 
Holocaust may also play before our minds eye. Since the end of the 
Second World War, the ghost of Nazism has helped Americans to 
define who they are. Because the United States played an important 
role in the coalition that defeated Nazi Germany, Americans can iden¬ 
tify themselves as the very opposite of this ultimate evil, embodying 
all the best traits of democracy that Nazism had tried to destroy. 

What was Nazism? The answer to this question has two parts 
because from 1919 to 1933 Nazism was a political movement and 
from 1933 to 1945 it was a political regime or state. In the years 
between the two world wars, from 1918 to 1939, there were several 
fascist political movements that looked like Nazism. Fascist political 



HITLER AND THE HAZIS 


12 


ideas are extremely conservative, highly nationalistic, and antide¬ 
mocratic. Fascists favor a strong central government ruled by a 
single fascist party that does not allow free speech or the other 
basic liberties and human rights important to democratic soci¬ 
eties. Very few fascist parties have gained enough power to 
become governments or regimes. Italy was the only other major 
European country in which a fascist political party came to power 
under its own steam. 

It is hard to imagine fascist movements without World War I. 
Fascist political parties and ideologies burst on to the political 
scenes of many European countries after the end of the war in 
1918. Europeans turned to these conservative, rigid parties in 
response to the massive social disorder caused by this war that 
killed millions of soldiers in the trenches, threatened millions of 
civilians with starvation, and destroyed several European govern¬ 
ments, including those of Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and 
Italy. German Nazism and other forms of fascism were also intense 
reactions to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and to the creation of 
the Soviet Union, a communist dictatorship that threatened to 
spread its doctrines and influence west across Europe. Communism 
is an ideology that sees the world divided between two major 
social classes—capitalists, or owners, and workers—locked in a 
major struggle with each other that leads to a revolution. In the 
revolution, the workers seize control of the state and of all indus¬ 
try and agriculture, which is then owned and run collectively by 
the new 'workers' state." Fascist movements appealed to those 
Europeans who feared communism and who felt that the existing 
democracies were simply too weak to deal with this threat. 

Like Italian fascism, German Nazism was fueled by an intense 
popular and ethnic nationalism. Unlike Italian fascism (and many 
other European forms of fascism), German Nazism embraced an 
extreme racial anti-Semitism, a hatred of Jews based on the false 
assumption that Jews are a distinct and dangerous race or ethnic 
group. Although some of the characteristics that describe Nazism 
are true of the entire history of this movement, after 1933 there 
were significant breaks and differences. The key difference was 
that after 1933, when the Nazi Party had control of the state, it 
revealed its vicious, anti-Semitic and racist core beliefs more and 
more openly and also embarked on a genocidal plan involving the 
deliberate murder of an entire people. 

It is hard to conceive of Nazism without Hitler. Certainly his 
massive personal popularity gave the Nazi regime a legitimacy it 
would not have otherwise had. Certainly his program for a racial 



INTRODUCTION 



state and an aggressive war of conquest set the 
agenda for Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. But, 
it took many more Germans than just Hitler to 
fight a war that claimed more than 60 million lives 
before it was over, and it took many more 
Germans than the small, criminal band of Nazi 
leaders to plan, organize, and implement the mur¬ 
der of millions of Jews and other victims of the 
Nazis racial hatred. In understanding Nazism, we 
can only get so far by analyzing Hitler's biography 
and psychology. Hitler led the way, but he did not 
simply brainwash or coerce Germans into per¬ 
forming or supporting unspeakably brutal acts of 
violence and murder. For the nightmare of Nazi 
ideology and racial hatred to become a lived real¬ 
ity, tens of thousands of Germans (and also non- 
German accomplices) had to perform criminal 
deeds willingly, sometimes even quite eagerly, that 
in any normal world would have brought them at 
the very least a long prison sentence. In addition 
to the active perpetrators, many millions more had 
to be prepared to stand by and say nothing as 
other human beings were persecuted and killed. 

After 1933, Hitler set out his agenda, and 
defined in general terms the "problems" that need¬ 
ed to be solved—for example, the so-called Jewish 
problem. But, the particular "solution" to these 
problems that gained the upper hand at any point 
was the outcome of fierce competitions for power, 
and material advantage, among the other Nazi 
leaders, their subordinates, and the Nazi agencies 
they commanded. This competition generated ever more extreme 
answers to the problems Hitler had defined. Coming up with and 
then implementing the detailed plans eventually involved thou¬ 
sands, probably tens of thousands, of Germans, many of them 
technical experts and professionals in a variety of fields. These 
people were not just "following orders," they eagerly developed 
and implemented new and more efficient ways of, for example, 
murdering millions of Jews or administering mass sterilization to 
the "socially undesirable." By no means were all these participants 
in Hitlers racial program motivated solely by anti-Semitism or 
racial hatred—the chance to make a career in Nazi Germany 
could be just as compelling. 






Hitler lays the foundation stone for 
the new Volkswagen factory at 
Wolfsburg , Germany, in 1938. A 
storm trooper proudly guards the proto¬ 
type of the new " People's Car," the 
design for which eventually became 
known as the Beetle. 





A model of the enormous domed hall 
that was to he the centerpiece of Hitlers 
plan to transform Berlin into Germania, 
the new capital of his vast empire. Had 
the gigantic structure ever been con¬ 
structed, it would have been the largest 
building in the world. 


Take the example of Albert Speer, who enjoyed a meteoric rise 
to power and prominence as Hitlers favorite architect. In 1925 , 
Speer began to study architecture in Berlin. In 1931 , after hearing 
Hitler speak, he joined the Nazi Party. When the Nazis came to 
power, Speer was given the job of redesigning the ministerial res¬ 
idence of Joseph Goebbels, Hitlers chief of propaganda. The 
work Speer did on this job brought him to the attention of Hitler, 
who gave Speer the commission for the new Chancellery build¬ 
ing. Together Hitler and Speer then began work on monumental 
plans to reconstruct Berlin and make it the capital (now to be 
called Germania) of the new Nazi Empire, with enormous public 
buildings that would dwarf all existing structures. The Great Hall 
was intended to be several times the size of St. Peters Cathedral 
in Rome, which was then the largest single building in Europe. 



Speer managed to complete part of his plan before the war. 
Part of Berlin was torn down and to house the Aryan Berliners, the 
people the Nazis considered to be ethnically pure Germans, who 
had lived in this neighborhood, Speer forcibly evicted Jews from 
almost six thousand apartments. As armaments minister during the 
war, Speer worked slave laborers to death to keep the German war 
machine going. When Germany was defeated, Speer did not 
think the victorious Allies would prosecute him lor war crimes 
because he had, alter all, been only an architect for Hitler. The 
Allies disagreed. They put Speer on trial in 1945 and sentenced 
him to twenty years in prison 

It is the active involvement o( a large minority of the German 
population in the crimes of Nazism, combined with the passive 
acceptance of the great majority that pose the greatest moral 
problems when we look hack on this period of world history. 
It has often been tempting—not least lor the Germans them¬ 
selves—to see the crimes of Nazism as the work 
of a small band o( criminals who led Germany 
astray. It is far more troubling to realize, 
for example, that the dreaded Gestapo, 
Hitlers secret political police, could never 
have done els bloody work without 
the help of literally tens of thousands 
of ordinary Germans. Citizens eagerly 
denounced relatives, friends, and neigh¬ 
bors to the secret police for the slightest 
reason, often only to gain some small per¬ 
sonal advantage at the expense, perhaps, 
of another person's life. What can we 



INTRODUCTION 


15 


think of the German woman who 
denounced her husband, a former 
Communist, to the Gestapo simply to 
make room for her current boyfriend 
and who told her son that his father 
would go away and he would get a 
much better one. What can we say 
about the thousands of Germans who 
did not actively engage in the persecu¬ 
tion of the Jews but were nonetheless 
happy to buy Jewish businesses, furni¬ 
ture, and other household items at 
rock-bottom prices when Jews were 
forced to emigrate from Germany in 
the 1930s? 

The German people's widespread 
involvement in Nazi terror, their con¬ 
tribution to the construction of a 
regime of terror is one of the most dis¬ 
turbing features of the twelve years between 1933 and 1945. The 
Nazi leaders put on trial in Nuremberg, Germany, by the victori¬ 
ous Allies in 1945 were clearly only the tip of a much larger ice¬ 
berg of participation and complicity in Nazi crimes. But how can 
we determine which Germans were tainted by their participation 
in the Nazi regime and which were innocent of all involvement? 
This has been the key question ever since 1945. It is a moral, not 
just a legal, question. And, it is a question that has never been easy 
to answer when we know that even those Germans who just did 
their jobs properly (such as building tanks and planes) made it pos¬ 
sible for the Nazis to continue their war of annihilation until the 
bitter end. 

We can learn about Nazi Germany from an enormous number 
of sources from the period. These original records include Nazi 
Party and government documents, many of which were captured 
by the invading Allied armies when they occupied Germany and 
are now on deposit in archives in Washington, D.C., and Moscow. 
We also have the eyewitness reports and memoirs of the people 
who lived during this time. There is testimony given to the post¬ 
war courts established to investigate Nazi war crimes. Many 
Holocaust survivors have published accounts of their experiences 
in Nazi concentration camps. There is also a huge array of visual 
evidence including documentary films and newsreels, photographs, 
propaganda posters, Nazi art, and images of Nazi architecture. 


The Shocking Truth About Cola Drinks 


—- 



The cover oj a 4 962 issue oj the 
Police Gazette tabloid announces 
that Hitler is s till alive. Sensational 
and , of course, untrue stories in 
popular tabloid newspapers prove the 
public's continued fascination with 
Hitler and Nazism. 











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Chapter One 


What Made 

Nazism 

Possible? 

War, Revolution, and the 
Weimar Republic 


Packed into a train on their way to 
the western front, German soldiers 
display their enthusiasm for the war 
and their optimism about a cfuick 
victory. On the side of the boxcar, 
they have written “An Excursion 
to Paris " and “Good-bye to the 
boulevard [Berlin]." 


N azi Germany was not inevitable. It took Germany's defeat 
in World War I and the failure of Germany's first democ¬ 
racy to make Hitlers dictatorship possible. Prior to 1871 7 
there was no nation called Germany, rather there was a 
collection of small states. The recently formed German Empire 
entered the First World War severely divided by political, religious, 
and regional conflicts. Fighting bitter battles from a system of trench¬ 
es against Britain, France, and Russia for more than four years gave 
Germans a new sense of national unity. Because of the war, Germans 
felt they had become members of a national community locked in a 
life and death struggle against Germany's enemies. 

Victory would have made Germany a superpower. But, the 
Germans were defeated. After living through a bloody war and facing 
the threat of starvation at home, Germans rose up against their monar¬ 
chy and, in 1919, replaced it with the Weimar (pronounced "Viemar") 
Republic, Germany's first democracy. This new democracy started out 
its short life with several strikes against it. To begin with, there was the 
lost war. Thirteen million German men had been mobilized to serve 
in the German Army in World War 1. Of these, 1.6 million were killed 
and 4 million were wounded. By 1918, the British naval blockade had 
brought Germany to the verge of starvation. If Germany had won the 
war, Germans would have been rewarded for their suffering and sacri¬ 
fice by new territories and reparation payments from the defeated 
British and French. Instead, the Versailles Treaty, the agreement to end 
the war imposed by the victorious Allies and universally hated by 




SWEDEN 


DUNMARK 


• Maud 


Danzig 


■ Hamburg 


RUSSIA 


Bremen 


• Berlin 


NETHERLANDS 


* C ologne 


i BELGIUM 


* Frank flirt 


LUXEMBOURG 


Germans, stripped Germany of large areas of its territory. The 
treaty also made Germany demobilize its armed forces. Germany 
was now to be allowed only an army of 100,000 men, no air force, 
no submarines, and no weapons of mass destruction, such as poi¬ 
son gas. Germany was also required to pay enormous reparations 
(compensation for war damage, paid by a defeated enemy). 

Many Germans also feared that the revolution that produced 
the Weimar Republic had opened the door to communism. 
Inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917, the small but vocal 
German Communist Party wanted to ignite a second revolution 
that would make Germany more like the Soviet Union. Almost all 
the other political parties insisted that communism was a danger¬ 
ous threat and anticommunism quickly became a powerful force 
in Weimar politics, but many thought the Weimar Republic was 
too weak to stop the communist challenge. 

Weimar's dazzling cultural modernity was a third major weak¬ 
ness of the new democracy. This modernity involved cutting-edge 
experimentation with new styles and forms, in many areas of cul¬ 
tural activity ranging from painting and music to photography 
and architecture. Germans did not agree about the meaning and 


North Sea 


ENGLAND 


Munich * 


FRANC 


JOCml 


ISO itm 


SWITZERLAND 


• Dvtnsk 


AUSTRIA-HUNGARY 


milit ary Operations during World WarJ_ 

— Central Fbwers' offensives * * *** - Russan advances 

; Germany anc Aunr a-Hungary. — — ■ Stabilized Western front, December 19 M 

the Ottoman Empire, and Buljpra)-German advance 

- ^ -Western (rant a, the armies. 

France, FtussaHj* and the US.) Now-mber 1918 

■ Extent of German advances 











WHAT MADE NAZISM POSSIBLE? 


19 


the value of modern art, architecture, literature, music n r film. For 
every Weimar German who loved jazz, for example, there were just 
as many who saw it as an unwelcome import from America that 
threatened the morals of German young people. The increasing 
popularity of film, especially movies imported from Hollywood, 
was likewise seen as a dangerous symptom of the decline of 
German culture. Modern architects and designers proposed radi¬ 
cally new styles. Houses were to become simple 'machines for liv¬ 
ing' with no unnecessary decoration. Yet, to many Germans this 
type of architecture seemed cold, heartless, and, worst of all, "un- 
German." In their minds, the flat roofs typical of modern houses 
belonged in the sunny climate of North Africa. In Germany, only 
the pointed roof, or what the Nazis later called the German roof, 
was acceptable. 

As if all these problems were not enough, the Weimar 
Republic also had to deal with the effects of two massive eco¬ 
nomic crises. Up until 1924, hyperinflation (an extreme devalua¬ 
tion of a nation's currency produced by a massive state budget 
deficit) ravaged Germany, as no European country had experi¬ 
enced before. During the Great Inflation, as the period from 1918 
to 1923 is known, Germans lost faith in their currency, and they 
began to abandon hope for the future. People who had worked 
hard and saved money for their retirement found that what they 
had in the bank was now worthless. Unlike the depression, which 
began in 1929, the inflation of the early 1920s did not destroy the 
Weimar Republic. The main reason was that the Weimar govern¬ 
ment was able to reach an agreement with Germany's former ene¬ 
mies, who reduced the amount of reparations to be paid. The 
Weimar government was now able to replace the old inflated 
German currency with a new one that Germans could again trust. 

On the other hand, during the worldwide Great Depression, 
which hit Germany in 1929, no Weimar leader was able to solve the 
central economic problem, mass unemployment. By 1932, almost 
30 percent of the entire population was officially out of work. For 
many of those who lost their jobs, unemployment was long-term, a 
matter not of weeks or months but of years. Economic despair trans¬ 
lated into votes for the political extremes—the Communists, to 
whom many of the unemployed now turned, and the Nazis who 
benefited above all from the growing fear and anxiety among the 
lower middle classes that Germany was on the edge of the abyss. 
The increasingly extreme and revolutionary language of the 
Communist movement served to convince many Germans that 
there were now only two choices: Hitler or a communist dictator. 



Baubaus architects designed this flat- 
roofed bouse in Dessau, Germany f in 
the 1920 s. Critics called this style 
" un-German" because it looked as if it 
had come from the sunny south of 
Europe or even North Africa, and not 
from northern Europe, where a pointed 
roof was more appropriate for a rainy 
and snowy climate. 








20 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


Memories of a Brutal War 


The German war veteran and author Erich Maria Remarque's 
novel AH Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1929, pre¬ 
sented an uncensored description of the brutality of trench 
warfare. Machine guns made trench warfare deadly. Attack¬ 
ing forces took heavy casualties before they reached their 
opponents in the trenches. 

We see men living with their skulls blown open,- we see soldiers 
run with their two feet cut off, they stagger on their splintered 
stumps into the next shell-hole,- a lance-corporal crawls a mile and 
a half on his hands dragging his smashed knee after him,- another 
goes to the dressing station and over his clasped hands bulge his 
intestines,- we see men without mouths, without jaws, without 
faces,- we find one man who has held the artery of his arm in his 
teeth for two hours in order not to bleed to death. The sun goes 
down, night comes, the shells whine, life is at an end. 


Two German soldiers lie dead in a 
trench on the Western Front in \9i6 . 
Tta murderous fire power of machine 
guns forced soldiers on both sides of the 
war to seek refuge in trenches dug into 
the soil of northern and eastern France. 


Ernst Junger, another German writer of the 1920s, had also 
fought in the trenches. Unlike Remarque, Junger embraced 
the war in his 1922 essay, arguing that it had produced a new 
elite "soldier of steel" who had hardened himself against 
the psychological effects of massive violence and death. 



A human is incapable of anything greater 
than mastering oneself in death. Even the 
immortal gods must envy him that. We 
are well armed for our journey, loaded 
with weapons, explosives, and lighting 
and signaling instruments, a proper, 
fighting, shock troop, up to the supreme 
challenges of modern warfare... They 
are men forged of steel... They are the 
best of the modern battlefield, suffused 
with the reckless spirit of the warrior, 
whose iron will discharges in clenched, 
well-aimed bursts of energy... this is the 
new man, the storm pioneer, the elite of 
Central Europe. A whole new race, 
smart, strong, and filled with will... The 
glowing twilight of a declining age is at 
once a dawn in which one arms oneself 




WHAT MADE NAZISM POSSIBLE? 


21 


for new, for harder battles... This war is not the end but the pre¬ 
lude to violence.... The war is a great school, and the new man 
will bear our stamp.... If the advance troops fail to penetrate, if 
just one machine gun remains intact on the other side, these splen¬ 
did men will be cut down like a herd of deer. That is war. The best 
and most worthy, the highest embodiment of life, is just good 
enough to be cast into its insatiable maw. One machine gun, just 
a seconds gliding of the cartridge belt, and these twenty-five 
men—one could cultivate a sizeable island with them—will hang 
in tattered bundles from the wire, left slowly to decompose. They 
are students, cadets with proud old names, mechanics, heirs to fer¬ 
tile estates, saucy big city sorts, and high school students... In the 
neighboring regiment on the left there bursts a storm of fire. It is 
a feinting maneuver, to confuse and split enemy artillery. It is just 
about time. Now the task is to gather oneself. Yes, it is perhaps a 
pity. Perhaps as well we are sacrificing ourselves for something 
inessential. But no one can rob us of our value. Essential is not what 
we are fighting for, but how we fight. Onward toward the goal, 
until we triumph or are left behind. The warriors spirit, the expo¬ 
sure of oneself to risk, even for the tiniest idea, weighs more heav¬ 
ily in the scale than all the brooding about good and evil... We 
want to show what we have in us ; then, if we fall, we will truly 
have lived to the full. 


On the home front, women struggled to find food for their 
families. The British naval embargo prevented ships from 
reaching German harbors, depriving Germans of important 
foodstuffs. Between 1914 and 1918, more than 750,000 Ger¬ 
mans died of malnutrition and the diseases it produced. In 
the so-called 1916-1917 Turnip Winter millions had to survive 
on an estimated seven to nine hundred calories per day, calo¬ 
ries that often came primarily from turnips. As early as 1916, 
the anger of women who were waiting in the long lines to 
buy scarce food boiled over into food riots. In May 1916, a 
Berlin newspaper reported that women had to start waiting 
in line for food hours before the markets opened. 


Whoever, on these chilly spring nights does not shy away from a 
walk through the streets of the city, will, already before midnight, 
see figures, loaded down with household utensils, stealing back 
and forth in front of the covered markets. At first, there are only 
a few, but with the approach of midnight, the groups become real 
crowds. These are predominantly composed of women. In the 


22 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


Berliners cut meat from a dead horse 
in 19 IS. By the end of World War 
I, so many Germans faced starva¬ 
tion that they saw even rotting 
horse meat as a welcome addition to 
their meager diet. 



palliasse 

Thin mattress filled with straw 


beginning, they crouch down on the steps of the surrounding 
shops and on the iron park fences. Soon, however, one [woman] 
comes and lays a palliasse down near the entrance, on which she 
makes herself comfortable. That is the signal for general move¬ 
ment. Behind the happy owner of the palliasse, a second woman 
sets up a deck chair. Close to her, another, less demanding 
[woman] sits down on a simple wicker chair she transported from 
her apartment, which is God only knows how far away. A fourth 
only has a "stick''... The others stand there apathetically, some are 
sleeping as they stand, and the moonlight makes their pale faces 
appear even paler. Policemen appear and walk morosely up and 
down. Morning dawns. New throngs draw near. Women with 
strollers... Now the coffeepots and sandwiches are going to be 
brought out. Some of the women reach for their knitting in order 
to shorten the leaden hours. Finally, the selling begins. And the 
result: a paltry half a pound or, when one is especially lucky, a 
whole pound of meat, lard or butter for half of the shoppers, 
whereas the others have to go away empty-handed. 


The Promise and Problems of 
Weimar Democracy 


Although it was the product of defeat and revolution, the 
Weimar Republic might have eventually been able to win the 
loyalty of the great majority of Germans. This, after all, was 
the most democratic system of government Germany had 






ever known. The new constitution also promised social 
rights to its citizens. These became the foundation for a 
social welfare system that attempted to meet the needs of 
the hundreds of thousands of German men and women 
whose lives were damaged by the war, inflation, and, even¬ 
tually, the Great Depression that started in 1929. 


CHAPTER II: FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF 
THE GERMANS 
Section 1: The Individual 


Article 109. All Germans are equal before the law. Men and women 
have the same fundamental civil rights and duties. Public legal 
privileges or disadvantages of birth or of rank are abolished. Titles 
of nobility... may be bestowed no longer.... Orders and decora¬ 
tions shall not be conferred by the state. No German shall accept 

titles or orders from a foreign government_ 

Article H4. Personal liberty is inviolable. Curtailment or depriva¬ 
tion of personal liberty by a public authority is permissible only 
by authority of law. 

Persons who have been deprived of their liberty must be informed 
at the latest on the following day by whose authority and for what 
reasons they have been held. They shall receive the opportunity 
without delay of submitting objections to their deprivation of 
liberty. 

Article l is. The house of every German is his sanctuary and is invi¬ 
olable. Exceptions are permitted only by authority of law_ 

Article i i 7. The secrecy of letters and all postal, telegraph, and tele¬ 
phone communications is inviolable. Exceptions are inadmissible 


Young women workers pose outside 
the huge Krupp armament factory 
during World War I. So many 
German men were drafted to fight in 
the trenches during the war that 
women had to take their places in 
factories and mines to keep war pro¬ 
duction going. 


except by national law. 

Article i i 8. Every German has the right, within the 
limits of the general laws, to express his opinion 
freely by word, in writing, in print, in picture form, 
or in any other way... Censorship is forbidden... 

Section 2: The General Welfare 
Article 123 . All Germans have the right to assemble 
peacefully and unarmed without giving notice and 
without special permission... 

Article i24. All Germans have the right to form 
associations and societies for purposes not con¬ 
trary to the criminal law... 

Article 126. Every German has the right to peti¬ 
tion ... 





24 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


A 1930 election poster for the left-wing 
Social Democratic Party depicts the 
types of people forced into poverty by 
World War I and the postwar infla¬ 
tion: a soldier blinded in the trenches, a 
young mother who lost her husband in 
the war, an old man without a pension, 
and two children who lost their father 
in the war. Dye caption reads: " Don't 
abandon us! Defend social welfare! 
Vote List i Social Democrats." 



Section 3: Religion and Religious Societies 

Article 135. All inhabitants... enjoy full religious freedom and free¬ 
dom of conscience. The free exercise of religion is guaranteed by 
the Constitution and is under public protection... 

Article 137. There is no state church... 

Section 4: Education and the Schools 

Article 14 2. Art, science, and the teaching thereof are free... 

Article 14 3. The education of the young is to be provided for by 
means of public institutions.... 

Article 144. The entire school system is under the supervision of 
the state... 

Article 145. Attendance at school is compulsory... 

Section 5: Economic Life 

Article 151. The regulation of economic life must be compatible 
with the principles of justice, with the aim of attaining humane 
conditions of existence for all. Within these limits the economic 
liberty of the individual is assured... 

Article 159. Freedom of association for the preservation and pro¬ 
motion of labor and economic conditions is guaranteed to every¬ 
one and to all vocations. All agreements and measures attempting 
to restrict or restrain this freedom [are] unlawful... 

Article 161. The Reich shall organize a comprehensive system of 
[social] insurance... 

Article 165. Workers and employees are called upon to cooperate, 
on an equal footing, with employers in the regulation of wages 
and of the conditions of labor, as well as in the general develop¬ 
ment of the productive forces... 

The chances that Weimar democracy would succeed were 
severely limited by the Versailles Treaty. One of the key pro¬ 
visions of the treaty was Article 231, the so-called War Guilt 
Clause, which made Germany accept complete responsibility 
for starting World War I. The victorious Allies felt that this 
admission of guilt justified all the other requirements of the 
Versailles Treaty, such as the demand for financial repara¬ 
tions in Article 232. 

Article 231. The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and 
Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for 
causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and 
Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected 








WHAT MADE NAZISM POSSIBLE? 


25 


as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression 
of Germany and her allies. 

Article 232 — The Allied and Associated Governments... require, 
and Germany undertakes, that she will make compensation for all 
damage done to the civilian population of the Allied and 
Associated Powers and to their property during the period of the 
belligerency of each as an Allied or Associated Power against 
Germany by such aggression by land, by sea and from the air, and 
in general all damage as defined in Annex I hereto. 

The young Weimar democracy had to defend itself against 
widely circulated claims that the German Army had not actu¬ 
ally lost the war at the front. According to this myth, the 
defeat was really the fault of left-wing agitators who cut the 
ground out from under the German Army by starting the rev¬ 
olution that led to the founding of the republic. This "stab- 
in-the-back" legend branded as traitors the members of all 
left-wing political parties, including the Social Democratic 
Party, the largest and most moderate of the left-wing 
groups, which helped to govern the Weimar Republic in its 
early days. Figures in the army, such as field marshall Paul 
von Hindenburg, helped to sell the "stab-in-the-back" legend 
to the German public because it diverted attention from 
their own military failures. In 1919, von Hindenburg present¬ 
ed this myth to a parliamentary committee, which made a 
public record of his testimony. 

The concern as to whether the homeland would remain resolute 
until the war was won... never left us. We often raised a warning 
voice to the Reich government.... The obedient troops who 
remained immune to revolutionary attrition suffered greatly from 
the behavior, in violation of duty, of their revolutionary comrades,- 
they had to carry the battle the whole time. 

(Chairmans bell. Commotion and shouting.) 

Chairman: Please continue, General Field Marshal. 
von Hindenburg.- The intentions of the command could no longer be 
executed. Our repeated proposals for strict discipline and strict 
legislation were not adopted. Thus did our operations necessarily 
miscarry,- the collapse was inevitable,- the revolution only provided 
the keystone. 

An English general said with justice: J The German army was 
stabbed in the back." No guilt applies to the good core of the 
army. Its achievements are just as admirable as those of the officer 



26 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


During the German revolution at 
the end of World War I, representa¬ 
tives of the left-liberal Democratic 
Party march in a demonstration 
against the extreme left-wing 
Spartacist movement. Such parties 
as the German Democratic Party 
and the Social Democrats were 
more concerned about the threat of a 
Russian-style seizure of power by 
the Spartacists than about the dan¬ 
ger of a counter revolution led by 
right-wing forces. 



r- : >, 

L B 

\ *'■ 

■ 

, * 

J -mL ‘ |^ 


. ^_- 

„. * 




corps. Where the guilt lies has clearly been demonstrated. If it 
needed more proof, then it would be found in the quoted state¬ 
ment of the English general and in the boundless astonishment of 
our enemies at their victory. 

That is the general trajectory of the tragic development of the 
war for Germany, after a series of brilliant, unsurpassed successes 
on many fronts, following an accomplishment by the army and 
the people for which no praise is high enough. 


To many Germans, the German Revolution and the Weimar 
Republic appeared to have made their country vulnerable to 
communism. Impressed by the example of the 1917 Russian 
Revolution, extreme left-wing political radicals insisted that 
German workers must now make a similar communist revo¬ 
lution in Germany. In Russia, a small group of revolutionaries 
called Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin seized power in 
Moscow and St. Petersburg. The revolutionaries overthrew 
the provisional government that replaced the Czar (the royal 
ruler of the Russian Empire), who had been dethroned 
because the war was going so badly for Russia. In November 



WHAT MADE NAZISM POSSIBLE? 


27 


1918, the German Spartacist League—the predecessor to the 
German Communist Party that was named for an uprising of 
slaves in ancient Rome—issued a manifesto to German work¬ 
ers and their colleagues around the world. 



PROLETARIANS! MEN AND WOMEN OF LABOR! 
COMRADES! 

The revolution has made its entry into Germany. The masses of 
the soldiers, who for four years were driven to the slaughter¬ 
house for the sake of capitalistic profits, and the masses of work¬ 
ers, who for four years were exploited, crushed, and starved, 
have revolted. That fearful tool of oppression—Prussian [the 
German state that was the core of the German nation formed in 
1871] militarism, that scourge of humanity—lies broken on the 
ground. Its most noticeable representatives, and therewith the 
most noticeable of those guilty of this war, the Kaiser [emperor] 
and the Crown Prince, have fled from the country. Workers' and 
soldiers' councils have been formed everywhere.... the hour has 
struck for a settlement with capitalist class rule... The imperial¬ 
ism of all countries knows no ' understanding ,- it knows only one 
right—capitals profits; it knows only one language—the sword,- 
it knows only one method—violence. And if it is now talking in 
all countries, in yours as well as ours, about the Teague of 
Nations," "disarmament," "rights of small nations," "self-determi¬ 
nation of the peoples," it is merely using 
the customary lying phrases of the 
rulers for the purpose of lulling to sleep 
the watchfulness of the proletariat. 

Proletarians of all countries! This 
must be the last war! We owe that to the 
twelve million murdered victims,- we 
owe that to our children,- we owe that to 
humanity. 

Europe has been ruined through the 
infamous international murder. Twelve 
million bodies cover the gruesome 
scenes of the imperialistic crime. The 
flower of youth and the best men of the 
nations have been mowed down. 

Uncounted productive forces have been 
annihilated. Humanity is almost ready 
to bleed to death from the bloodletting. 

Victors and vanquished stand at the 


proletarian 

Term used mainly by socialists 
and communists to describe 
men and women who per¬ 
formed manual labor, usually in 
a factory, for an hourly wage 


Ajigure representing German commu¬ 
nism slays the many-headed monster 
oj militarism, capitalism, and the 
landed aristocracy. In this poster, the 
left-wing Spartacus group, which later 
became the German Communist Party, 
is the defender of the German working 
class against its reactionary enemies. 




28 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


edge of the abyss... Socialism alone is in a position to complete 
the great work of permanent peace, to heal the thousand wounds 
from which humanity is bleeding, to transform the plains of 
Europe, trampled down by the apocryphal horsemen of war, into 
blossoming gardens, to conjure up ten productive forces for every 
one destroyed, to awaken all the physical and moral energies of 
humanity, and to replace hatred and dissension with fraternal sol¬ 
idarity, harmony, and respect for every human being.... 

Proletarians of all countries... we now summon you to a com¬ 
mon struggle... If your ruling classes succeed in throttling the 
proletarian revolution in Germany, as well as in Russia, then they 
will turn against you with redoubled violence. Your capitalists 
hope that victory over us and over revolutionary Russia will give 
them the power to scourge you with a whip of scorpions and to 
erect the thousand-year empire of exploitation upon the grave of 
socialism. 


Workers and Soldiers Unite 

Local committees of workers and soldiers formed during 
the revolution took over many tasks normally performed 
by the regular government. Some radicals saw these bod¬ 
ies as revolutionary forms of direct democracy. They 
bore certain similarities to the Soviets or revolutionary 
councils formed during the Russian Revolution. 


Therefore the proletariat of Germany is looking toward you in 
this hour. Germany is pregnant with the social revolution, but 
socialism can be realized only by the proletariat of the world. 

And therefore we call to you: 'Arise for the struggle! Arise for 
action! The time for empty manifestoes... and high-sounding 
words has passed!..." We ask you to elect workers' and soldiers' 
councils everywhere that will seize political power and, together 
with us, will restore peace... Peace is to be concluded under the 
waving banner of the socialist world revolution. 


A skeletal figure of death, representing 
Russian communism, leaves behind the 
villages it burned and people it murdered 
as it moves west toward Germany. This 
poster encouraged Germans to support 
the associations formed to fight the 
spread of communism. The caption 
reads: Join the Anti-Bolshevist League 




WHAT MADE NAZISM POSSIBLE? 


29 


The New Woman and the Movies 

Weimar's modern culture was exciting and attractive to 
many Germans. Other Germans thought postwar cultural 
developments were dangerously immoral. Relations 
between men and women were an important arena for the 
culture wars that erupted between divided Germans. At 
least some of the younger generation of German women 
were no longer prepared to accept a traditionally subordi¬ 
nate role. This spirit of rebellion is reflected in a popular 
cabaret song, "Chuck Out the Men," written by Friedrich Hol- 
laender in 1926. 

The battle for emancipation 

's been raging since hist'ry began 

Yes, feminists of every nation 

want to throw off the chains made by man 

hear all our voices thunder in protest 
Anything that men do women can do too 
and more than that we women do it best 
Chuck all the men out of the Reichstag 
and chuck all the men out of the courthouse 
Men are the problem with humanity 
they're blinded by their vanity 
Women have passively embraced them 
when we could have easily outpaced them 
Yes we should have long ago replaced them 
or better yet erased them 

If we haven't made our feelings clear we women have had it up 
to here 

The men get their pick of the professions 

they're policemen or scholars or clerks 

They get rich and acquire possessions 

like we wives who keep houses for these jerks 

They're ruining the country while we mop the floor 

They're flushing this whole nation down 

the drain 

Sisters stand together, let's show 

these men the door before they drive us totally insane 
Chuck all the men out, etc. 


Reichstag 

Parliament 






30 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 



The German film actress Marlene 
Dietrich takes the image of the "New 
Woman" to extremes hy dressing in a 
man's tuxedo and top hat. There is an 
element of parody in the way Dietrich 
presents herself but conservative 
Germans did not like the joke. Dietrich 
left Berlin for Hollywood before Hitler 
came to power. 


The New Woman was one of the most visible symbols of 
Weimar's modern culture. Like her American counterpart, 
the flapper, the German New Woman displayed her emanci¬ 
pation from traditional gender roles by wearing short hair 
and trousers. She might smoke and she certainly acted in 
public as if she had all the same rights as men. Conservatives 
saw the New Woman as a dangerous threat to the family. In 
1929, Elsa Herrmann, an advocate of women's rights, pub¬ 
lished a book. This Is the New Woman, that offered a less 
threatening image of the New Woman but which nonethe¬ 
less demanded new roles for women and insisted upon 
equality between men and women. 

The woman of yesterday lived exclusively for and geared her 
actions toward the future. Already as a half-grown child, she 
toiled and stocked her hope chest for her future dowry. 

In the first years of marriage she did as much of the household 
work as possible herself to save on expenses, thereby laying the 
foundation for future prosperity, or at least worry-free old 
age... The woman of yesterday pursued the same goal of securing 
the future in all social spheres, varied only according to her spe¬ 
cific conditions... Her primary task, however, she naturally saw to 
be caring for the well-being of her children, the ultimate carriers 
of her thoughts on the future. Thus the purpose of her existence 
was in principle fulfilled once the existence of these children had 
been secured, that is, when she had settled the son in his work and 
gotten the daughter married. Then she collapsed completely, like 
a good racehorse collapses when it has maintained its exertions up 
to the very last minute..., 

In stark contrast, the woman of today is oriented exclusively 
toward the present... For the sake of her economic indepen¬ 
dence, the necessary precondition for the development of a self- 
reliant personality, she seeks to support herself through gainful 
employment. It is only too obvious that, in contrast to earlier 
times, this conception of life necessarily involves a fundamental 
change in the orientation of women toward men which acquires 
its basic tone from concerns of equality and comradeship. 

The new woman has set herself the goal of proving in her 
work and deeds that the representatives of the female sex are 
not second-class persons existing only in dependence and obedi- 
ence but are fully capable of satisfying the demands of their posi¬ 
tions in life. The proof of her personal value and the proof of the 
value of her sex are therefore the maxims ruling the life of every 





WHAT MADE NAZISM POSSIBLE? 


31 


single woman of our times, for the sake of herself and the sake of 
the whole.... 

The people of yesterday are strongly inclined to characterize 
the modern woman as unfeminine because she is no longer 
wrapped up in kitchen work and the chores that have to be done 
around the house... 

Despite the fact that every war from time immemorial has 
entailed the liberation of an intellectually, spiritually, or physical¬ 
ly fettered social group, the war and postwar period of our recent 
past has brought women nothing extraordinary in the slightest but 
only awakened them from their lethargy and laid upon them the 
responsibility for their own fate. Moreover, the activity of women 
in our recent time of need represented something new neither to 
themselves nor to the population as a whole, since people had 
long been theorizing the independence and equality of woman in 
her relationship to man. 

The new woman is therefore no artificially conjured phenom¬ 
enon, consciously conceived in opposition to an existing system,- 
rather, she is organically bound up with economic and cultural 
developments of the last few decades. Her task is to clear the way 
for equal rights for women in all areas of life. That does not mean 
that she stands for complete equality of the representatives of 
both sexes. Her goal is much more to achieve recognition for the 
complete legitimacy of women as human beings, according to 
each the right to have her particular physical constitution and her 
accomplishments respected and, where necessary, protected. 

The New Woman of Weimar Germany could often be found at 
the movies. German conservatives complained that each 
week in thousands of movie houses all across Germany, far 
too many Germans sought escape from reality in the movie 
dream worlds manufactured by Hollywood or its German 
equivalent, the massive UFA studios. Siegfried Kracauer was 
an astute observer of Weimar culture. Although he was cer¬ 
tainly no conservative, he harshly criticized the fantasies 
nourished by the movies of the time. In his 1927 essay, "The 
Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies," Kracauer argued that 
even a light-hearted romance film encouraged young women 
to accept a distorted view of the way society actually operated. 

In reality it may not often happen that a scullery maid marries the 
owner of a Rolls Royce. But doesn't every Rolls Royce owner 
dream that scullery maids dream of rising to his stature? Stupid 


A poster advertises the 4 927 movie 
Metropolis, a science-fiction film set 
in a futuristic urban society. Film was 
one of the most popular new forms 
of mass entertainment and millions of 
Germans escaped to the monies 
every week. 






52 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


What has been achieved in this 
German film leaves all the 
American accomplishments in 
cinematography in the dust, and 
is unic/ue in the history of cinema. 

—Screenwriter Willy Haas 
writing in a 1927 film maga¬ 
zine about the movie Metropolis 


and unreal film fantasies are the daydreams of society, in which its... 
otherwise repressed wishes take on form... In the endless 
sequence of films, a limited number of typical themes recur again 
and again,- they reveal how society wants to see itself... The series 
“The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies" is conceived as a small 
collection of samples... 

Kracauer then analyzes one recent romance film. 

The Golden Heart 

A young Berlin wholesaler, an industrious manager of a first-rate 
company visits a business friend of his fathers in Vienna,* the 
paternal friend's firm is going to pieces because of the disorder in 
Austria. The guest would leave, if it were not for the business 
friends daughter, a sweet Viennese gal who makes it clear to him 
that there are other things besides management: the waves of the 
Danube and the wine gardens specializing in new vintages. With 
delight, the young man from Berlin discovers his dormant feel¬ 
ings. He cleans up the company, which will soon be turning a 
profit again, and gets the gal... Even without close-ups, this 
course of events would be believable. Whether in the city of waltz 
dreams or on the beautiful beaches of the Neckar—someplace, 
but not here in the present, the rich are falling in love and dis¬ 
covering in the process that they have hearts. It is not true that 
they are heartless: films refute what life would make one 
believe.. .The little shopgirls learn to understand that their bril¬ 
liant boss is made of gold on the inside as well,- they await the day 
when they can revive a young Berliner with their silly little hearts. 


In 1930, the German Textile Workers Trade Union asked 
women textile workers to describe their normal working 
day. These working women would certainly not have been 
able to see their own lives reflected in the image of the New 
Woman, who was economically independent, sexually liber¬ 
ated, and an avid consumer of film and other forms of mod¬ 
ern mass culture. A Bavarian textile worker who responded 
to the survey described her daily tasks. 


As far as I'm concerned, the work at home would he enough .... The workday 
begins at 4:45. Make the beds, comb my hair, feed Mizzi and the 
rabbits, drink something warm, and the clock reads 5:30. It is time 
to go to the factory. Lunch box and coffee thermos in hand, and 
it's off to the work bench. 6:00 start, year in, year out. I do my 



WHAT MADE NAZISM POSSIBLE? 


53 


work standing. We work nine and a half hours a day. 8:30 to 9:00 
in the morning we have a break to eat. In this half hour I usually 
have a lot of socks with me to dam, because the time at home is 
short. Back to work at 9:00 until 12.00. From 12:00 to 1:00 in the 
afternoon is lunchtime. I usually have some mending to do ; some¬ 
times a letter to write as well. At 1:00 it starts up again until 5:00 
or 5:30 —after twelve hours away, back home! 

Without a rest it's off to the stove to prepare lunch for the 
coming day. Then washing, drying, a bit of dinner, finishing by 
9:00 in the evening at the latest. Then I'm finished too and want 
nothing but some peace. 

Thursday evenings the wash is usually put in to soak. Friday 
evening its washed, Saturday morning hung out to dry. After¬ 
wards it's off to the factory till 12:00. Sunday morning is for iron¬ 
ing, often for baking too, but always for cooking for Sunday and 
Monday. Sunday afternoon (usually in the winter) I mend the 
linen and clean up. At 4:00 I can rest a little. 

My view is that if a housewife and mother could be at home, 
then the household and children would be better served. In France, 



By i923, it made more sense to use 
German banknotes as fuel or as 
wallpaper, as this man does, than to 
try to buy anything with the worthless 
paper currency. 



HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


Alsace, and Saxony the women do not work in the factory and 
their life is easier than in Bavaria. In Bavaria the poor women live 
like slaves, so to speak. (Housewife, mother, factory worker.) 

Economic Crises 


Moritz Julius Bonn was a German economist who frequently 
served as an expert adviser for the German government and 
international commissions in the 1920s. In his 1948 autobi¬ 
ography, Wandering Scholar, he described his personal expe¬ 
rience of the final phase of the Great Inflation in Germany 
during the summer of 1923. 

One morning 1 arrived in Munich on my way to the country. 
While strolling outside the station, I ran into an acquaintance, a 
charming woman, who almost embraced me in public. "Do give 
me something to eat," she said, "I am famished. I went to the coun¬ 
try," she explained, "with a supply of five-dollar bills. Yesterday the 
mark broke so rapidly that nobody could change one for me. 1 had 
no dinner,-1 took the earliest train to town this morning; 1 am wait¬ 
ing for the banks to open, and hope that they have enough marks 
to change a five-dollar note. I would have had to go without 
breakfast, if I had not met you." During the late phases of the infla¬ 
tion such experiences were common. Anybody who had foreign 
exchange was rich, provided that his money was in sufficiently 
small denominations to make an exchange possible... 

We had rented a farmhouse in Bavaria, where my wife lived 
most of the year, and where I used to spend my vacations. We 
kept one or two cows and had a vegetable garden,- fields and pas¬ 
tures were leased. Our neighbors were farmers, owning isolated 
holdings on the top of hills similar to ours. They depended main¬ 
ly on dairy farming and the sale of young livestock... These farm¬ 
ers did not suffer badly... they would not sell anything against 
marks , though they did a lively trade by way of barter. For a pair 
of old flannel trousers or a few leather straps we could buy grain 
to feed our cows... They were more than eager to sell goods 
against foreign currency, the acceptance of which was forbid¬ 
den—but nobody cared any longer for the law.... Goods were 
becoming much more valuable than money. 

... Artisans and tradespeople in our village were very much 
worse off than farmers, since they could not get sufficient food 
from their small plots of land. Raw materials were scarce, and they 
had few opportunities for making goods... 






rjfirtS ^. ’■ 


• ";r-' 

"j| J '‘"^‘^t " ''■ V"M 

N : 


^Stirf-^V.W 4-.-. ■-■* - ■-. .- ■ - 

. ■: -•- 

Cv.c-v.vi 


; -"f '. ,V -- V ‘ ■ ■ 

twfllHi 


, ■ '" > ■ ’> ■ ' ■ . ■ | 5 i 

^ -_■■■ ■J^I.'t'S.j^, .r - , _- Hh 

<•'>;'■• . ■;••: M 

j _ p i lx, 

■ * ;«- 4 C ■• " -, “ «■ - ■ - 

t?' *■'* ■ v "'- A^-vf 

cspijjY ‘ ■ C'; _ v / 


v ■ " I ■ P' 1 . 

;"•+- i'.V-'u v 


■A , 

'•- .da 




■ “ ' * -V- ■• *. r , ar f . P ” ■ 

."V-V / “*§"’.» r’- ‘ji‘V- ± r> ■ • s' # - 1 ’ B # 

r P ! , t - r ^C^ ir r „.■■ ■'r 1 .*'^ 'f -m’ 1 


: ’-^ * :-, ^ V. ’ iKN! 5 ’ ■ ■ 


: ; n*A^WKUbic otct 

f-gv* - ;1JF — ^ ^ ; ; x?- v .£?. >• ■ 

^tOO 1 . i > v^ v ..T >:\I / . y 


Workers were not the chief ^ -. ' 

sufferers. Thanks to strong trade 1 iifjfjjO 
unions, their wages were regular- 
ly revised upward, though gener- i 
ally with a lag. In the earlier J' 
stages... unemployment was low, 

as it always is during the inflation JfJ 

upswing. For this reason labor 
had not strongly insisted upon 
stabilization. Accounting was 

ft y. '|f' flyJo^jPCtHTf ^T«H1I 1 

becoming a nightmare. Before the 
war a weekly wage of ten dollars 
was written in two numerals,- it 
now took seven or nine. An army 
of clerks had to be recruited, 
and as many of them were 

inexperienced, business became very involved—prices were being 
quoted in millions... Banking activities were feverish. Most 
banks added new floors to their buildings to house new employ¬ 
ees. Yet they were no longer keen on getting customers. The han¬ 
dling of an account of 100,000 marks was expensive when its gold 
value had shrunk to 25 dollars, so they asked depositors, fre¬ 
quently in rather peremptory language, to take away their 
accounts. Wages were adjusted at least twice a week according to 
dollar quotations,- so were salaries of civil servants. Most of them 
asked for cash and rushed immediately to the shops to buy such 
goods as were available. A few hours later the mark might have 
gone down 100 per cent, and the purchasing power of their 
salaries might have been halved.... 

When it was all over, the social structure of Germany had been 
profoundly altered. The steady middle class, closely connected, 
though not identical, with the professions, was proletarianized at 
a time when the rising working class ceased to consider itself pro¬ 
letarian and was ready for incorporation with the middle class. It 
was a genuine revolution, far more devastating than the political 
collapse in the autumn of 1918 had been. 




!L 






i l 32-3 \ >■ -i-j ^ 

nrie i n| 



jB ■ ejp 

fc 



r 

s 

£j 

h 





■ - a 


i 

0 


mt *; :|I&s 


■ r -A* l -1 - * ■ - 1 - ■ m 4 J.lT J ■ -m * r i ■ 


Sir ; A Wl 2 ^ 

I 4 ^5 _*±_ *' 




7*bis German banknote, issued during 
the inflation , was worth half a million 
marks. In January 4 924, one U.S. 
dollar was worth 64.9 German marks. 
By November i 923, one dollar could 
buy 4, 200 , 000 , 000,000 marks. 


proletarianized 

Pushed into a social position similar to that of 
the working class because the inflation robbed 
these middle-class Germans of their pensions 
and investments 


By 1924, the inflation was over. But from 1929 onward, 
Germany was ravaged by an even worse economic crisis 
than the Great Inflation, an unprecedented depression that 
bankrupted thousands of businesses, threw millions out of 
work and brought the country to the very edge of social 
chaos. In 1933, German writer Hans Fallada published Little 





36 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


Man , What Now?, a realistic novel about a sales clerk, 

Johannes Pinneberg, his wife. Bunny, and their infant child. 

It chronicles their progressive decline into unemployment 
and homelessness. Finding himself on the Friedrichstrasse, a 
major street in the center of Berlin, the once respectable Pin¬ 
neberg, who has been without a job for some time, realizes 
he has become a social outcast. 

For the fourth time Pinneberg was pacing that section of the 
Friedrichstrasse that lies between the Leipziger and the Linden. 
He could not go home, he simply revolted at the thought. When 
he got home, everything was again at a dead end, life flickered 
into a dim and hopeless distance. But here something still might 
happen. It was true that the girls did not look at him ; a man with 
so threadbare a coat, such dirty trousers and without a collar did 
not exist for the girls on the Friedrichstrasse. If he wanted any¬ 
thing of that kind, he had better go along to the Schlesischer,- 
there they did not mind appearances so long as the man could 
pay. But did he want a girl? 

Perhaps he did, he was not sure, he thought no more of the 
matter. He just wanted to tell some human being what his life had 
once been, the smart suits he had had, and talk about— 

He had entirely forgotten the boys butter and bananas, it was 
now nine o'clock and all the shops would be shut! Pinneberg was 
furious with himself, and even more sorry than angry ; he could 
not go home empty-handed, what would Bunny think of him? 
Perhaps he could get something at the side-door of a shop. There 
was a great grocers shop, radiantly illuminated. Pinneberg flat¬ 
tened his nose against the window. Perhaps there was still some¬ 
one about. He must get that butter and bananas! 

A voice behind him said in a low tone: "Move on please!" 

Pinneberg started—he was really quite frightened. A police¬ 
man stood beside him. 

Was the man speaking to him? 

"Move on there, do you hear?" said the policeman, loudly now. 

There were other people standing at the shop-window, well- 
dressed people, but to them the policeman had undoubtedly not 
addressed himself. He meant Pinneberg. 

"What? But why—? Can't 1?—" 

He stammered,* he simply did not understand. 

"Are you going?" asked the policeman. "Or shall I—?" 

The loop of his rubber club was slipped round his wrist, and 
he raised the weapon slightly. 



WHAT MADE NAZISM POSSIBLE? 


37 


Everyone stared at Pinneberg. Some 
passers-by had stopped, a little crowd began 
to collect. The people looked on expectant¬ 
ly, they took no sides in the matter,- on the 
previous day shop-windows had been broken 
on the Friedrich and the Leipziger. 

The policeman had dark eyebrows, 
bright resolute eyes, a straight nose, red 
cheeks, and an energetic moustache. 

“Well?" said the policeman calmly. 

Pinneberg tried to speak; Pinneberg 
looked at the policeman,- his lips quivered, 
and he looked at the bystanders. A little 
group was standing round the window, well- 
dressed people, respectable people, people 
who earned money. 

But in the mirror of the window still stood 
a lone figure, a pale phantom, collarless, clad 
in a shabby ulster and tar-smeared trousers. 

Suddenly Pinneberg understood every¬ 
thing,- in the presence of this policeman, 
these respectable persons, this gleaming win¬ 
dow, he understood that he was outside it all, 
that he no longer belonged here and that he 
was rightly chased away,- he had slipped into 
the abyss, and was engulfed. Order and 
cleanliness,- they were of the past. So too 
were work and safe subsistence. And past too 
were progress and hope. Poverty was not 
merely misery, poverty was an offence, 
poverty was evil, poverty meant that a man 
was suspect. 

'Do you want one on the bean?" asked the policeman. Pinne¬ 
berg obeyed,- he was aware of nothing but a longing to hurry to the 
Friedrichstrasse station and catch his train and get back to Bunny. 

Pinneberg was conscious of a blow on his shoulder, not a 
heavy blow, but just enough to land him in the gutter. 

"Beat it" said the policeman. "And be quick about it!" 

Pinneberg went; he shuffled along in the gutter close to the 
curb and thought of a great many things, of fires and bombs and 
street shooting and how Bunny and the baby were done for: it was 
all over... but really his mind was vacant. 



An unemployed young man stands 
at a street fair in 1930. His shoes have 
long since worn out, been pawned , or 
stolen and he is so poor that he cannot 
ajjord new ones. 





mm* 



7m tbis 192 8 photograph , Hitler 
wears a military uniform and the 
Iron Cross he earned as a soldier in 
World War I. 


W ho was the man to whom increasing numbers of 

German voters turned in the early 1930s? Adolf Hitler 
was born on April 20, 1889, in the small Austrian vil¬ 
lage of Braunau Am Inn just across the border from 
Bavaria in southern Germany. Hitlers father, an Austrian customs offi¬ 
cial, died in 1903. Two years later, at age sixteen, Hitler dropped out 
of school. When he was eighteen, dreaming of becoming an artist, 
Hitler went to Vienna and took the entrance exam for the school of 


painting at the Academy of Fine Arts. He failed. In December 1907, 
Hitler's mother, Klara, died of breast cancer. In October 1908, he 
again applied to the Vienna Academy, but this time his drawings were 
judged to be so poor that he was not even allowed to take the formal 
exam. Yet, he stayed on in Vienna, living in rented rooms and shelters 
for the homeless, earning some money by occasional day labor or by 
painting postcards that he sold to tourists. 

During his time in Vienna, Hitler became extremely interested in 
politics and spent long hours arguing about political ideas with the 
other men in the homeless shelter. Although he was a citizen of the 
Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hitler saw himself as an ethnic German 
who had been excluded by the mistakes of history from the new 
German Empire to the north. In Vienna, Hitler added racial anti- 
Semitism and a deep hatred of Marxism to his already intense German 
nationalism. 


In 1913, Hitler moved to Munich in Bavaria to avoid military ser¬ 
vice in the multiethnic Habsburg Empire, as the Austro-Hungarian 
Empire was also known, which he had grown to hate. But, when World 
War 1 broke out in the summer of 1914, Hitler eagerly volunteered to 
defend his adopted German fatherland. The war gave new meaning to 
his life. He served on the Western Front, won the Iron Cross, but never 
rose above the rank of corporal. In October 1918, he was temporarily 
blinded by a British chlorine gas attack. Hitler was devastated by the 
defeat of Germany and by the revolution that overthrew the monarchy 



HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


Hitler [first man on the left J poses 
with his fellow soldiers in 19 i6. In his 
life as a politician. Hitler emphasized 
that he had once been an ordinary 
soldier in the trenches, just like millions 
of other Germans . 


40 


in November 1918. He refused to believe that the German Army 
actually lost the war. Instead, he blamed Jews and Marxists for 
undermining the German war effort. In the summer of 1919, 
Hitler was still in the army, working as a political agent to combat 
the spread of Marxist ideas among the returning soldiers. 

In September 1919, he was told to investigate a small extrem¬ 
ist, anti-Semitic group in Munich known as the German Workers 
Party, one of many new volkisch (intensely nationalist and racist) 
splinter groups that formed at the end of the war. He was sup¬ 
posed to find out whether this small organizations propaganda 
could be useful in the army's attempts to fight the spread of left- 
wing ideas among the returning soldiers. Instead, Hitler joined the 
party. Here he found a calling as a rabble-rousing political speak¬ 
er. The insignificance of this small political fringe group allowed 
Hitler to make a political career that would never have been open 
to him in any of the major existing political parties. In February 
1920, Hitler changed the party's name to National Socialist 
German Workers Party, sometimes called the Nazi Party [in con¬ 
traction of the party's full title]. The new name signaled his desire 
to win German workers away from what he called the poisonous 
"Jewish Teachings of Marxism" and back to the cause of the 
German nation. Because Karl Marx was a Jew, Hitler insisted that 
Marxism was an alien set of ideas that could only have negative 
consequences for Germans. In his view, Marxism encouraged 
them to see themselves as a society of classes warring with each 
other rather than as a race in competition with other races. 



In early November 1923, the French 
and Belgians occupied the industrial 
Ruhr region in western Germany to force 
the Germans to pay reparations for 
World War I. At the same time, the post¬ 
war hyperinflation spiraled completely 
out of control. Hitler thought the time 
was ripe to overthrow the new democra¬ 
tic republic with force. His attempt to 
take control of the Munich government 
in early November 1923 failed because 
the army authorities refused to support 
him. Hitler was put on trial but received 
a light seven-month prison term. 

The failure of this attempt to seize 
power convinced Hitler that the Nazis 
would have to conquer the Weimar 







ENTER HITLER 


41 


Republic by legal, electoral means. Yet, when Hitler emerged from 
jail at the end of 1924, only 3 percent of the electorate took the 
Nazis seriously enough to vote for them. Germany was no longer 
in a state of crisis. The Nazis did not do much better at the polls 
until September 1930, when they increased their vote to 18.3 per¬ 
cent. By July 1932 they had become the single largest party in the 
German parliament with 230 seats and 37.4 percent of the popular 
vote. At least four factors produced this meteoric ascent: the weak¬ 
nesses of Weimar democracy,- the catastrophic Great Depression,- 
the Nazis ability to exploit the grievances of voters unhappy with 
the existing political options,- and the growing desire of leading fig¬ 
ures in industiy, agriculture, the army the government bureaucra¬ 
cy, as well as ordinary voters to replace Weimar democracy with 
some type of authoritarian rule by a strong leader. Despite his 
increasing popularity, Hitler never gained an absolute majority in 
elections. He could never simply demand to be made chancellor 
(prime minister, head of government in this parliamentary system), 
but had to be "lifted" into power by the president and other 
powerful government leaders. 

From the War to the Failed Attempt 
to Seize Power in 1923 


It makes no difference whether 
they laugh at us or revile us, 
whether they represent us as 
clowns or criminals,- the main 
thing is that they mention us, 
that they concern themselves with 
us again and again, and that we 
gradually in the eyes of the 
workers themselves appear to be 
the only power that anyone 
reckons with at the moment. 

—Adolf Hitler, 
Mein Kampf 1925 


Adolf Hitler claimed that Jews could never be assimilated 
into German society, that Jews would always be dangerously 
different because their biology (what we might call their 
genes) made them think, feel, and act differently than Aryan 
(racially pure) Germans. In September 1919, Hitler wrote his 
first statement about the "Jewish problem" in response to a 
letter from one of his fellow participants in a German Army 
indoctrination course. 

If the danger represented by the Jews today finds expression in the 
undeniable dislike of them felt by a larger section of our people, 
the cause of this dislike is on the whole not to be found in the clear 
recognition of the corrupting activity of the Jews generally among 
our people... it originates mainly through personal relationships, 
from the impression left behind him by the individual Jew and 
which is almost invariably unfavorable. Antisemitism thereby 
acquires only too easily the character of being a manifestation of 
emotion. But this is wrong. Antisemitism as a political movement 
must not be, cannot be, determined by emotional criteria, but 






42 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


The only stable emotion is hate. 
—Adolf Hitler in a speech 
to the Hamburg National 

Club, 1926 


Hitler's face glares out from the cover 
of his hook Mein Kampf [My 
Struggle), published in i925. This 
political manifesto set out the key 
features of Hitlers ideology .• intense 
nationalism, hatred of the Weimar 
Republic, the Versailles Treaty, and 
the Jewish and Marxist conspiracy 
that had imposed this shame upon the 
German nation. 


AfiolF 

JliElvr 


mein 

i^mnpjp 



only through the recognition of facts. The facts are as follows: 
First, the Jews are definitely a race and not a religious community. 
The Jew himself never calls himself a Jewish German, a Jewish 
Pole, a Jewish American, but only a German, a Polish, an 
American Jew... The feelings of the Jews are concerned with 
purely material things,- his thoughts and desires even more so. The 
dance round the golden calf becomes a ruthless struggle for all 
those goods which, according to our innermost feelings, should 
not be the highest and most desirable things on earth... His activ¬ 
ities produce a racial tuberculosis among nations.... antisemitism 
based on reason must lead to the systematic legal combating and 
removal of the rights of the Jew, which he alone of foreigners liv¬ 
ing among us possesses (legislation to make them aliens). Its final 
aim, however, must be the uncompromising removal of the Jews 
altogether. Both are possible only under a government of national 
strength, never under a government of national impotence. 

Hitler's insistence that Jews could never be Germans quickly 
found expression in the Nazi Party program presented by 
Hitler to a meeting on February 24,1920. 

4. None but members of the nation may be citizens of the state. 
None but those of German blood, whatever their creed, may 
be members of the nation. No Jew therefore may be a member of 
the nation. 

Most of the early recruits to the Nazi movement were less 
interested in the specifics of the party program than in Hitler 
himself. Hitler's abilities as a fiery speaker soon made him 
into a local sensation. People started to come to Nazi Party 
meetings just to hear Hitler. Hitler was convinced that the 
spoken word was much more powerful than any written 
statement of a political idea. In his 1925 political manifesto. 

Mein Kampf, meaning "my struggle," he explained why. 

While the speaker gets a continuous correction of his speech from 
the crowd he is addressing, since he can always see in the faces of 
his listeners to what extent they can follow his arguments with 
understanding and whether the impression and the effect of his 
words lead to the desired goal—the writer does not know his read¬ 
ers at all. Therefore, to begin with, he will not aim at a definite 
mass before his eyes, but will keep his arguments entirely general. 
By this to a certain degree he loses psychological subtlety and in 





ENTER HITLER 


45 



consequence suppleness. And so, by and large, a brilliant speaker 
will be able to write better than a brilliant writer can speak, unless 
he continuously practices this art. On top of this there is the fact 
that the mass of people as such is lazy,- that they remain inertly in 
the spirit of their old habits and, left to themselves, will take up a 
piece of written matter only reluctantly if it is not in agreement 
with what they themselves believe and does not bring them what 
they had hoped for. Therefore, an article with a definite tendency 
is for the most part read only by people who can already be reck¬ 
oned to this tendency... 

To my mind, the speaker can treat the same theme as the book,- 
he will, if he is a brilliant popular orator, not be likely to repeat the 
same reproach and the same substance twice in the same form. He 
will always let himself be borne by the great masses in such a way 
that instinctively the very words come to his lips that he needs to 
speak to the hearts of his audience. And if he errs, even in the 
slightest, he has the living correction before him... If—firstly— 
he sees that they do not understand him, he will become so prim¬ 
itive and clear in his explanations that even the last member of his 
audience has to understand him,- if he feels—secondly—that they 
cannot follow him, he will construct his ideas so cautiously and 
slowly that even the weakest member of the audience is not left 
behind, and he will—thirdly—if he suspects that they do not 
seem convinced of the soundness of his argument, repeat it over 
and over in constantly new examples. He himself will utter their 
objections, which he senses though unspoken, and go on confut¬ 
ing them and exploding them, until at length even the last group 
of an opposition, by its very bearing and facial expression, enables 
him to recognize its capitulation to his arguments. 


Hitler's main political asset was bis 
ability to captivate his audience as a 
public speaker. By i925 f he had 
already become a local political sensa¬ 
tion in Aiunich. 



44 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


Here again it is not seldom a question of overcoming preju¬ 
dices which are not based on reason, but, for the most part uncon¬ 
sciously, are supported only by sentiment. To overcome this bar¬ 
rier of instinctive aversion, of emotional hatred, of prejudiced 
rejection, is a thousand times harder than to correct a faulty or 
erroneous scientific opinion. False concepts and poor knowledge 
can be eliminated by instruction, the resistance of the emotions 
never. Here only an appeal to these mysterious powers themselves 
can be effective,- and the writer can hardly ever accomplish this, 
but almost exclusively the orator. 


Luther 

Martin Luther led the 
Protestant Reformation and 
founded Lutheranism in the 
sixteenth-century 


The listeners who found Hitler so compelling were not sim¬ 
ply hypnotized by his verbal fireworks. Germans who were 
drawn to Hitler were often looking for the kind of emotional 
experience he had to offer, as Kurt Ludecke, one of Hitler's 
early associates, admitted in his 1938 memoir. Ludecke first 
heard Hitler speak in 1922. 

My critical faculty was swept away. Leaning from the rostrum as 
if he were trying to impel his inner self into the consciousness 
of all these thousands, he was holding the masses, and me 
with them, under an hypnotic spell by the sheer force of his 
conviction... He seemed another Luther. 1 forgot everything but 
the man ; then glancing around, 1 saw that his magnetism was 
holding these thousands as one. Of course 1 was ripe for this 
experience. I was a man of thirty-two, weary with disgust and 
disillusionment, a wanderer seeking a cause, a patriot without a 
channel for his patriotism, a yearner after the heroic without 
a hero. 1 experienced an exaltation that could be likened only to 
religious conversion. 

Hitler's failed attempt to seize power in 1923 should have 
been the end of his political career. Instead, he was able to 
use his trial to reach a national audience for the first time. 

Reporters came from all over Germany to hear Hitler's 
defense. In his concluding statement at his trial. Hitler clev¬ 
erly presented himself not as an ordinary politician seeking 
power but as an unselfish crusader. 

I aimed from the first at something a thousand times higher than 
being a minister. 1 wanted to become the destroyer of Marxism. I 
am going to achieve this task, and, if 1 do, the title of minister will 
be an absurdity as far as I am concerned.... 






At one time I believed that perhaps this battle against Marxism 
could be carried on with the help of the government. In January 
1923 I learned that that was just not possible. The hypothesis for 
the victory of Marxism is not that Germany must be free, but 
rather Germany will only be free when Marxism is broken. At that 
time I did not dream that our movement would become great and 
cover Germany like a flood. 

The army that we are building grows from day to day, from 
hour to hour. Right at this moment 1 have the proud hope that 
once the hour strikes these wild troops will merge into battalions, 
battalions into regiments, regiments into divisions. I have hopes 
that the old cockade will be lifted from the dirt, that the old col¬ 
ors will be unfurled to flutter again, that expiation will come 
before the tribunal of God. Then from our bones and from our 
graves will speak the voice of the only tribunal which has the right 
to sit in justice over us. 

Then, gentlemen, not you will be the ones to deliver the ver¬ 
dict over us, but that verdict will be given by the eternal judgment 
of history, which will speak out against the accusation that has 
been made against us. I know what your judgment will be. But that 
other court will not ask us: 

Have you committed high treason or not? That court will 
judge us, the quartermaster-general of the old army, its officers 
and soldiers, who as Germans wanted only the best for their peo¬ 
ple and Fatherland, who fought and who were willing to die. You 
might just as well find us guilty a thousand times, but the goddess 


Hitler [fourth from right) poses with 
other participants in the November 
1923 attempt to overthrow the 
German government. Although the 
attempt to seize power failed miser¬ 
ably, the treason trial that followed 
gave Hitler national attention. 








46 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


of the eternal court of history will smile and tear up the motions 
of the states attorney and the judgment of this court: for she finds 
us not guilty. 

Hitler's Rise to Power 


Hitler had to create a distinctive image for the Nazi move¬ 
ment. He could rely upon two major assets—his own popu¬ 
larity as a speaker and the young, dynamic image that the 
Nazi movement was able to project. This was not to be a nor¬ 
mal political organization using old-fashioned methods, but 
a messianic crusade that could tap the energies and enthusi¬ 
asm of young German men who were disillusioned with the 
current political situation. In his memoirs, written in the 
1950s, Albeit Krebs, at one time the local Nazi Party leader in 
Hamburg, described the importance of these young activists 
to the early Nazi movement. 


This German Workers Party member¬ 
ship card reflects one of Hitler's first 
steps in pursuing a career in politics. 
However ; Hitler was not the seventh 
member of the party ; as this card 
suggests r and he joined the DAP in 
January 1920, not in September 1919. 
Hitler was actually member number 
555, but number seven made Hitler 
seem to be one of the very first to join 
the new movement. 


bettffae ftrbeiter*p<xrtei 

(Drtsgruppe tttimcfrtn 


Characteristic of this period was the rapid... disappearance of all 
those leaders and subleaders, except for a few parliamentary rep¬ 
resentatives, whose attitudes and political methods were still rooted 
in the prewar era. In their place now stood the young men of the 
so-called ' front line generation/' aged twenty-five to thirty-five. 

The significance of this changing of the guard can hardly be 
overestimated. The unquestioning quality of their feelings and judg¬ 
ments, the unweakened power of their belief, the purely physical 
energy and combativeness of these young men gave the Nazi party 
a striking power that had to be met sooner or later, especially by the 
middle-class parties. The assaults of youth are seldom bogged down 

in the barbed wire of gray experience or the 
mine fields of skepticism... The first to learn this 
were the racialist groups and parties whose lead¬ 
ership still represented the bypassed conserva¬ 


(0. *. W 

flMethmg: 



tive, or more properly, reactionary attitudes of 
the past. Within two short years, by about 1928, 
they were utterly insignificant in politics, even 
those which... had once had a few hundred 
thousand members and followers. Even in 
Hamburg, where the Nazi party developed 
rather slowly, the Racial Freedom party was in 
full dissolution within a year. "Without youth 
you can't organize," one of their representatives 
told me ; "you can't even distribute leaflets." 








ENTER HITLER 


47 


Between December 1924 and September 1930, the Nazis 
were never able to win more than 3 percent of the vote in 
national elections. Hitler's major achievement in these years 
was simply keeping the movement alive through his ability 
to convince the Nazi rank and file that they were engaged in 
a great crusade against Marxism. When the depression hit 
Germany in 1929, the Nazis had already built up a dedicated 
army of party activists who could exploit the new electoral 
opportunities created by the economic crisis. The Nazis 
invested great energy in their attempts to reach potential 
voters. In May 1930, a document drawn up by the Prussian 
Ministry of the Interior described some of the Nazis' tactics. 


Selected districts are veritably inundated and worked-over with 
propaganda operations consisting of methodically and skillfully 
prepared written and verbal appeals as well as a schedule of meet¬ 
ings, all of which in terms of sheer activity cannot in the least be 
matched by any other party or political movement. 

Hardly a day passes when there are not several meetings held 
in even very narrowly defined local areas. Carefully organized 
propaganda headquarters in the individual districts see to it that 
speakers and topics are in tune with local conditions and eco¬ 
nomic circumstances... Through systematic training courses, cor¬ 
respondence courses, and recently through the NSDAP [National 
Socialist German Worker's Party] speaker-training school estab¬ 
lished on July 1, 1929... agitators are trained for this task over a 
period of months and even years. If they prove to be qualified 
they receive official recognition from the party and are given a 
contract to give at least thirty speeches during an eight-month 
period, for which they are granted an incentive fee of 20 
Reichsmark per evening in addition to expenses. 

Rhetorical skills are combined with lecture topics carefully 
selected to suit the particular audience, which in the rural areas 
and in small towns is mainly interested in economic matters... 
Meetings with an audience of between one thousand and five 
thousand people are a daily occurrence in the bigger cities.... At 
these events the government's entire internal and foreign policy is 
attacked in a demagogical style that does not shy away even from 
falsification, distortion, and slander. They are abusive and con¬ 
temptuous of the government and blame it for the economic 
crisis.... This propaganda is backed up almost everywhere by 
the simultaneous appearance of SA people, who, on bicycles or 
on trucks—some belonging to the party—go to the individual 


Reichsmark 

German unit of currency 


SA 

Short for Sturmabteilung, 
meaning storm troopers, the 
political soldiers of the Nazi 
movement. 



48 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


A black day for Germany. The 
Nazis have increased the number 
of their seats almost tenfold, from 
12 to 107, and have become the 
second strongest party in the 
Reichstag. 

—Count Harry Kessler, 
diary entry for Monday, 
September 15, 1930 


meetings in an area and merely through being there give a speak¬ 
er considerable support, help fill the hall itself, act as a protective 
force for the meeting, and in the end also act as a coercive force 
in that they allow no one to interject or contradict the speaker, 
which more or less makes it impossible for anyone to make coun¬ 
terarguments. By their public appearance they directly and indi¬ 
rectly help advertise the meeting, and thereby support the speak¬ 
ers propaganda, entice sympathizers and the curious, and ulti¬ 
mately through their organization of parades in uniform they win 
supporters locally, primarily from among the younger generation. 

In the mid-1920s r the Nazis had concentrated on winning the 
urban working-class vote, but with very little success. Then, 
at the end of the 1920s, the Nazis discovered a new potential 
constituency—rural Protestant farmers who felt threatened 
by the power of big industry and organized labor. A 1927 
Nazi election leaflet depicts the farmers' economic problems 
as being the result of a wider, concerted Jewish campaign to 
take over German wealth and resources. 


Farmers, it is a matter of your house and home! 

We told you years ago but you didn't listen, just like the rest of the 
German people. The middle classes should have listened during 
the years of the insane inflation. Now they have been annihilated: 
their possessions and savings have been stolen—expropriated! 
The German worker expected the revolution to bring honor and 
beauty into his life. Now he is (to the extent that he can find 
work) the starving wage-slave of the Bank-Jews. 

AND NOW IT'S YOUR TURN GERMAN FARMERS! 

Factories, forests, railways, taxes and the states finances have 
all been robbed by the Jew. Now he's stretching his greedy fingers 
towards the last German possession—the German countryside. 

You farmer, will be chased from your plot of earth, which you 
have inherited from your forefathers since time immemorial. 
Insatiable Jewish race-lust and fanaticism are the driving forces 
behind this devilish attempt to break Germany's backbone 
through the annihilation of the German farming community.... 

Don't you see the vile plan?! The same Jews who control the 
monopoly on sales of nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus, thereby 
dictating to you the high price of essential fertilizers, never give 
you a just price for your produce on the Stock Exchange. 

Huge imports of frozen meat and foreign grain, at lowest 
prices, undercut you and push down your earnings... 






ENTER HITLER 


49 


And one thing more which is ruining you. You cannot obtain 
credit to tide you over these hard times. If you want money the 
usurous interest rates will wring your neck. Under the protection 
of the state it won't be long before the greater part of the land¬ 
owning farmers will be driven from their farms and homes by 
Jewish money lenders. 

The plight of the German farmer is desperate. 

Think it all over in your last few hours, and remember—we 
have been telling you the same thing for years! 

Once again were coming to you. This time you wont laugh 
at us! 

BUT ITS NEVER TOO LATE! 

A people that has the will to live and struggle will survive. Don't 
stand on the sidelines. Join our struggle against the Jews and loan 
capital! Help us build a new Germany that will be 
NATIONALIST AND SOCIALIST 

Nationalist because it is free and held in respect. Socialist because 
any German who works and creates, will be guaranteed not just a 
slave's ration of bread, but an honorable life, decent earnings and 
the sanctity of his hard-earned property. Farmers, it is a matter of 
the most holy possession of a people, 

THE LAND AND THE FIELDS WHICH GOD HAS 
GIVEN US 

Farmers, it is a matter of house and home, 

Of life and death, 

Of our people and our fatherland! 

THEREFORE FARMER—WAKE UP! 

Join the ranks of our defence force. Fight with us in the 

NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS PARTY 


Nazi Economic Anti-Semitism 


T he Nazis played on traditional stereotypes 
of the Jewish moneylender who cheated 
debtors by demanding exorbitant interest 
rates. More generally, the Nazis presented 
Jews as parasites who unfairly extracted money 
from commercial exchanges without actually 


doing any work themselves. 


Although rural areas initially proved to be the richest source 
of new Nazi voters, the Nazis did not limit their propaganda 
efforts to the countryside. In the cities and small towns of 
Germany many economically distressed artisans, or crafts¬ 
people, and small shopkeepers also believed that the 
Weimar Republic had no answers to their problems. In this 
leaflet from the late 1920s, the Nazis tried to exploit this 
alienation from the Weimar "system." 

Traders! Small Producers! Artisans! 

For a long time you have kept out of sight and let corruption, 
favouritism and the nepotism of others run all over you. You believed 
that obeying law and order was the first duty of the citizen. 




50 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


helots 

A class of serfs, or slaves, 
in the ancient Greek state 
of Sparta 


But what has this led to? Ever more exploitation by those in 
power. The tax-screw being turned ever tighter. You are the helots 
of this system. Your only job is to work and pay taxes which go 
into the salaries and pensions of ministers. 

What have your parties done for you? They promised the 
world but did nothing. They made coalitions, prattled away before 
the elections then disappeared into parliament until the next. 

They didn't unite against the treacherous leaders of Marxism. 
They horse dealt over ministerial posts and never gave you a 
thought. 

They have ruled with Social Democrats and forgotten the aim 
of that party—Death to the Middle Class! 

Have you forgotten the inflation? How you were robbed of 
your savings and commercial capital? 


German First 


In their attacks on Jews, the Nazis were targeting a very 
small and quite vulnerable minority in German society. In 
1933, when Hitler came to power there were only 505,000 
Jews in a total population of 67 million Germans, including 
those living in the Saar province, on the western border with 
France, which was still administered by the League of 
Nations. German Jews made up only 0.75 percent of the total 
population. More than half of the small number of Jews lived 
in the ten largest German cities. Berlin was the largest center 
of Jewish population, with about 160,000 Jews in 1925 or 
less than 4 percent of the total. 

Henry Buxbaum was a German Jew born in 1900 in Assen- 
heim, in the central German province of Hesse. In 1908, his 
family moved to the city of Friedberg in Upper Hesse. In His 


T he great majority of German Jews consid¬ 
ered themselves to be fully German. More 
than 80 percent of all the Jews in Germany 
had German citizenship. Many had ceased to 
practice any form of Jewish religious obser¬ 
vance and had become either secular, or non¬ 
religious, or had converted to German 
Protestantism. Some Jewish families had been 
in Germany for generations. There was a good 
deal of intermarriage between Jews and non- 
Jews. In Weimar Germany, Jews played impor¬ 
tant roles in the German economy and made 
major contributions to German culture as doc¬ 
tors, lawyers, scientists, businessmen, writers, 
artists, filmmakers, and actors. More recent 
and much poorer Jewish immigrants from 
Poland and Russia found employment at the 
lower end of the socioeconomic scale, as small 
traders or manual workers. 


memoir, completed in 1979, Buxbaum described life in Ger¬ 
many before and after the First World War. 

The native Friedberger Jews, whose ancestors had been residents 
in the Jewish quarter of the city for many generations, considered 
themselves nobility and looked down with contempt and derision 
at the "yokels," the peasant Jews, who only lately had arrived from 
the surrounding villages. These old families never fully accepted 
the newcomers... [who] had not lived there for three hundred 
years or longer as had some of the older families... 

But the real division, and the one which counted most in the 
daily life of the community, was the difference between rich and 
poor, between people of wealth and the others of little means, the 
group to which we belonged. I never was able to overcome my 



ENTER HITLER 


51 


feelings of inferior status within the social life of the community. 
Not that it mattered with my friends, some of whom belonged to 
the rich families in town, but it certainly affected me as soon as 1 
entered their houses. As a boy during our earlier years in 
Friedberg, each time I was invited to a birthday party... I remem¬ 
ber with what awe and discomfort 1 entered such a house... 

The time when antisemitic agitation became more than an 
after-hours entertainment started at the moment of Germany's 
defeat [in World War I] and the so-called November Revolution. 
Each segment of German society was severely affected by the two 
events. But the group which felt the changes more than any other 
was the German-Jewish community. Suddenly the whole atmos¬ 
phere of Jewish life inside Germany changed for the worse. You 
could taste antisemitism everywhere,- the air of Germany was per¬ 
meated by it. All the unavoidable consequences of military defeat, 
revolution, a ruinous inflation, the Versailles Treaty, the loss of the 
territories in the east and west, the unsettling social changes fol¬ 
lowing in their wake—each and everything was blamed on the 
Jews and/or the Communists, who for the convinced Jew-hater 
were interchangeable... 

I was on a train one night on my way home from Frankfurt. The 
train was pitch-dark. The lights were out, nothing uncommon after 
the war when the German railroads were in utter disrepair and very 
few things functioned orderly. It was in either 1919 or 1920, dur¬ 
ing one of the early periods of violent antisemitic attacks which 
might occur anywhere, and when a Jew who had the guts to fight 
could become embroiled in a vicious brawl. It happened often 
enough on a train and it was difficult not to react to the slander and 
the smears poured over you. That night, we were seven or eight 
people in the dark, fourth-class compartment, sitting in utter 
silence till one of the men started the usual refrain: "Those God¬ 
damned Jews, they are at the root of all our troubles." Quickly, 
some of the others joined in. 1 couldn't see them and had no idea 
who they were, but from their voices they sounded like younger 
men. They sang the same litany over and over again, blaming the 
Jews for everything that had gone wrong with Germany and for 
anything else wrong in this world. It went on and on, a cacopho¬ 
ny of obscenities, becoming more vicious and at the same time 
more unbearable with each new sentence echoing in my ears. 
Finally, 1 couldn't stand it any longer. I knew very well that to start 
up with them would get me into trouble, and that to answer them 
wasn't exactly the height of wisdom, but I couldn't help it. As hap¬ 
pened so often during those years when l was confronted with this 



Two women confidently declare that 
“We women are voting for List 
2/National Socialist” on this 1932 
election poster. The Nazis knew that 
they could not hope to come to power 
by winning elections unless they had 
the support of women voters. 





HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


52 


sort of thing, I had to respond to it. I was burning with rage and 
told them exactly what I thought of them and their vicious talk. I 
began naturally with the announcement: 'Well, 1 am a Jew and etc., 
etc/' That was the signal they needed. Now they really went after 
me, threatening me physically. I didn't hold my tongue as the argu¬ 
ment went back and forth. They began jostling me till one of them 
next to me and near the door, probably more encouraged by the 
darkness than by his own valor, suggested: "Lets throw the Jew out 
of the train." Now, I didn't dare ignore this signal, and from then 
on kept quiet. I knew that silence for the moment was better than 
falling under the wheels of a moving train. 

The Rise and Fall of Hitler's 
Storm Troopers 


Without the SA (Sturmabteilung, meaning “storm troopers”) 

Hitler would not have made a significant impact on Weimar 
politics. The SA was an organization within the Nazi Party 
made up of paramilitary squads of brownshirts, as they were 
called because of their brown uniforms. During elections, 
the SA did most of the grassroots work of campaigning for 
the Nazi Party. Between elections, the SA kept the Nazi 
movement in the public eye by marching in formation and 
engaging in physical fights with Communists. A Nazi Party 
report, dated February 1927, describes one such battle 
between Communists and Nazis in a working-class neighbor¬ 
hood of Berlin. 

On the 11th of this month the Party held a public mass meeting 
in the Pharus [Beer] Halls in Wedding, the real working class 
quarter, with the subject: 'The Collapse of the Bourgeois Class 
State." Comrade Dr. Goebbels was the speaker. It was quite clear 
to us what that meant. It had to be visibly shown that National 
Socialism is determined to reach the workers. We succeeded once 
before in getting a foothold in Wedding. There were huge crowds 
at the meeting. More than 1,000 people filled the hall whose 
political composition was four-fifths SA to one-fifth KPD 
[German Communists]. But the latter had gathered their main 
forces in the street. 

When the meeting was opened by Comrade Daluege, the SA 
leader, there were, as was expected, provocative shouts of "On a 
point of order!". After the KPD members had been told that we, 




ENTER HITLER 


53 



Nazi storm troopers fSAJ beat up their 
political enemies in the street. In the 
early {93 os, political violence between 
communists and Nazis escalated in the 
streets of Berlin and other German cities. 


not they, decided points of order, and 
that they would have the right to ask 
questions after the talk by Comrade Dr. 

Goebbels, the first scuffling broke out. 

Peace seemed to be restored until there 
was renewed heckling. When the chair¬ 
man announced that the hecklers would 
be sent out if the interruptions contin¬ 
ued, the KPD worked themselves into a 
frenzy. Meanwhile, the SA had gradual¬ 
ly surrounded the center of the distur¬ 
bance, and the Communists, sensing the 
danger, suddenly became aggressive. 

What followed all happened within 
three or four minutes. Within seconds 
both sides had picked up chairs, beer 
mugs, even tables, and a savage fight 
began. The Communists were gradually 
pushed under the gallery which we had 
taken care to occupy and soon chairs 
and glasses came hurtling down from 
there also. The fight was quickly decid¬ 
ed- the KPD left with 85 wounded, 
more or less: that is to say, they could 
not get down the stairs as fast as they 
had calmly and 'innocently" climbed 
them. On our side we counted 3 badly 
wounded and about 10-12 slightly. 

When the police appeared the fight was 
already over. Marxist terrorism had been bloodily suppressed. 


In early 1933, the aged president of Germany, Paul von 
Hindenburg, appointed Hitler as chancellor. In his first 


months in office. Hitler tried to present himself as Hinden- 


burg's responsible partner in promoting a national (not a 
Nazi) revolution that would make Germany strong again 
and crush her internal enemies. The first victims of Hitler's 


revolution were the Communists and the Socialists. (Commu¬ 
nists believed in a Russ tan-style revolution, socialists sup¬ 
ported parliamentary democracy and a peaceful evolution 
toward socialism.) In February, a Dutch anarchist with con¬ 
nections to German communism set fire to the Reichstag 
(the Parliament building). 



54 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


The general desire of businessmen 
was to see a strong man come to 
power in Germany who would 
form a government that would 
stay in power for a long time. 

—Report from a meeting at 
the house of the banker Kurt 
von Schroeder, Cologne, 
Germany, January 4,1933 


A starkly simple Nazi election poster 
reads "Our Last Hope.- Hitler." It 
appealed to the unemployed during the 
depression, but more unemployed 
Germans voted for the Communists than 
for the Nazi party. 



The Nazis claimed that the Reichstag fire was the first 
step in a Communist uprising. Many Communists and Social¬ 
ists were thrown into concentration camps that had been 
hastily set up by Hitler's storm troopers. These concentration 
camps were prisons usually consisting of a set of fenced-in 
buildings, where political prisoners were kept under armed 
guard in bad conditions and with no legal rights. In his testi¬ 
mony at the postwar Nuremberg trials, Rudolf Diels, the first 
head of the Gestapo (Hitler's secret state police), described 
how these political prisoners were mistreated and some¬ 
times murdered. 

The perfectly primitive Nazi conception of the conduct of a state 
was, that one had to annihilate or render harmless all adversaries 
or suspected adversaries. The inferiority complex of the Nazis 
towards everything they did not know, e.g. legal institutions, 
experts and so on has much to do with that. 

As for that, it was a natural matter for the new Nazi Govern¬ 
ment and the party, which had come into power, to annihilate 
their adversaries by all possible means. These actions started after 
the Reichstag fire. They were executed by various party groups, 
especially by the SA ; for such criminal purposes the government 
also tried to make the most of certain official government agen¬ 
cies. The methods applied were as follows: Human beings... 
deprived of their freedom [were] subjected to severe bodily mis¬ 
treatment or killed. These illegal detentions... took place in 
camps, often old military barracks, storm-troop quarters or 
fortresses. Later on these places became known as concentration 
camps, such as Oranienburg, near Berlin, Lichtenberg, Papenburg, 
Dachau in Bavaria, Columbiahouse Berlin, etc. 

During this period of time, numerous politicians, deputies, 
writers, doctors, lawyers and other personalities of leading circles 
were arrested illegally, tortured and killed.... These murders were 
camouflaged by the expression: "shot while trying to escape" or 
"resisting arrest" or similar things... 

There was no legal possibility left any more, to undertake any¬ 
thing in order to stop these illegal arrests, because the Reich 
Cabinet had suspended Civil Rights by decree of February 28th 
1933. On account of this fact, it was also impossible for the 
inmates of the concentration camps to appeal to any court. Such 
a state of affairs had never existed before, not even during 
extraordinary times. The word "protective custody" as used at that 
time for concentration camps etc. was an irony. There were a few 






cases of real protective custody, in which I put people behind safe 
walls, in order to protect them against terrible excesses. 


The SA rounds up political opponents 
to be sent to the concentration camps in 
1933 . After Hitler came to power, the 
first victims of Nazi terror were commu¬ 
nists, socialists, and other political ene¬ 
mies of the Nazis. 


The SA saw Hitler as the prophet of the New Germany, but his 
new role as chancellor and partner with Hindenburg made 
some party members question his dedication to this vision. If 
the SA men began to suspect that Hitler had only used them 
to get into power they might revolt. As early as June 1933, 
the leader of the SA, Ernst Rohm, suggested in a newspaper 
article that the radical Nazi Revolution the SA expected after 
Hitler came to power was in danger of being betrayed. 

The course of events between 30 January and 21 March 1933 does 
not represent the sense and meaning of the German National 
Socialist revolution. 

Anyone who wanted to be a fellow-traveler only during shin¬ 
ing torchlight processions and impressive parades with rumbling 
drums and booming kettledrums, with blaring trumpets and under 
waving flags, and now believes he has '"taken part" in the German 
revolution—can go home! He has confused the "national uprising" 
with the German revolution! He has intoxicated himself with out¬ 
ward appearances,-... perhaps he was delighted to see millions and Festival of German Labor 

millions of workers march for Germany at the Festival of German A Nazi celebration of the 

Labor, and for a few hours felt a breath of our spirit—but he is not importance of manual labor, 

' ^ which was supposed to replace 

one of us!! For the coming years of struggle he can creep back to the existing socialist May Day 



56 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


ss 

Schutzstajfel, meaning "protec- 
tive escort/' Established in 
1925, the original members of 
the SS were Hitlers personal 
bodyguards 


Asia 

Meaning Soviet Communism, 
which was seen by the Nazis 
as non-Western, or Asian, and 
hence extremely dangerous 


the hearth or the desk or the pub from whence he came. The 
fighters in the simple brown service shirt of the SA and SS will not 
miss him on their path forwards to the German revolution, just as 
they did not meet him when, in long years marked by sacrifices 
and blood, they fought their passionate fight for a new 
Germany.... 

The SA and SS will not tolerate the German revolution going 
to sleep or being betrayed at the half-way stage by non-combat¬ 
ants. Not for their own sake, but for Germany's sake. For the 
brown army is the last levy of the nation, the last bastion against 
Communism. 

If the German revolution is wrecked by reactionary opposi¬ 
tion, incompetence, or indolence, the German people will fall into 
despair and will be an easy prey for the bloodstained frenzy com¬ 
ing from the depths of Asia. 

By the beginning of 1934, the SA had 2.4 million members. 

The army feared that Rohm wanted to make the SA into a mil¬ 
itary force. The message to Hitler from the military leaders 
and other influential figures who had helped him become 
chancellor was clear: tame the SA or risk losing power. This 
was not a difficult choice for Hitler. The "Night of the Long 
Knives" (a typical Nazi euphemism, in this case for the mur¬ 
der of almost two hundred people) was carried out on June 
30,1934, by Heinrich Himmler's black-shirted SS. The SS, orig¬ 
inally made up of Hitler's personal bodyguards, was under 
the organizational control of the SA, until this bloody chang¬ 
ing of the guard. To justify this violent purge. Hitler claimed 
that the SA was planning an uprising. In his 1969 memoir. 

Hitler's favorite architect, Albert Speer, described his reac¬ 
tions to the news that the SA leadership had been executed. 


I was in Berlin.. .Tension hung over the city. Soldiers in battle 
array were encamped in the Tiergarten [an area of Berlin]. Trucks 
full of police holding rifles cruised the streets. There was clearly 
an air of 'something cooking/'... 

Late on the morning of July 1, Hitler returned after making a 
series of arrests in Munich, and I received a telephone call from his 
adjutant; "Have you any new designs? If so, bring them here!" 
That suggested that Hitlers entourage was trying to distract him 
by turning his mind to his architectural interests... 

His entourage tried to deepen his distaste for the executed SA 
leaders by assiduously reporting as many details as possible about 



ENTER HITLER 


57 


the intimate life of Roehm [Rohm] and his following. Bruckner 
showed Hitler the menus of banquets held by the Roehm clique, 
which had purportedly been found in the Berlin SA headquarters. 
The menus listed a fantastic variety of courses, including foreign 
delicacies such as frogs' legs, birds' tongues, shark fins, seagulls' 
eggs, along with vintage French wines and the best champagnes. 
Hitler commented sarcastically: "So, here we have those revolu¬ 
tionaries! And our revolution was too tame for them."... 

The leadership became frenziedly busy justifying the opera¬ 
tion. A day of great activity ended with a speech by Hitler to a 
special session of the Reichstag. His feelings of guilt were audible 
in his protestations of innocence. A Hitler defending himself was 
something we would not encounter again in the future, not even 
in 1939, at the beginning of the war... what most impressed me, 
as well as many of my unpolitical acquaintances, was the attitude 
of Hindenburg. The field marshal of the First World War was held 
in reverence by people of middle-class origins. Even in my school 
days he epitomized the strong, steadfast hero of modern history, 
and as such seemed to belong to a somewhat legendary realm... 
That Hitlers action was approved by this supreme judge was 
highly reassuring. 

It was no accident that after the Roehm putsch the Right, rep¬ 
resented by the President, the Minister of Justice, and the generals, 
lined up behind Hitler.. .Their conservatism had nothing in com¬ 
mon with racist delusions. Their open display of sympathy for 
Hitlers intervention sprang from quite different causes: in the 
Blood Purge of June 30, 1934, the strong left wing of the party, rep¬ 
resented chiefly by the SA, was eliminated. That wing had felt 
cheated of the fruits of the revolution. And not without reason. For 
the majority of the members of the SA, raised in the spirit of revo¬ 
lution before 1933, had taken Hitlers supposedly socialist program 
seriously. During my brief period of activity in Wannsee 1 had been 
able to observe, on the lowest plane, how the ordinary SA man sac¬ 
rificed himself for the movement, giving up time and personal safe¬ 
ty in the expectation that he would some day receive tangible com¬ 
pensation. When nothing came of that, anger and discontent built 
up. It could easily have reached the explosive point. Possibly 
Hitler's action did indeed avert that "second revolution" Roehm 
was supposed to have been plotting. 

With such arguments we soothed our consciences. I myself and 
many others snatched avidly at excuses,- the things that would 
have offended us two years before we now accepted as the standard 
of our new environment. Any troublesome doubts were repressed. 



Captain Ernst Rohm, head of the SA 
and one of Hitler's oldest and closest 
political colleagues. Hitler had him and 
other SA leaders murdered in 1934. 


Wannsee 

An upper-middle-class residen¬ 
tial neighborhood of Berlin. 







59 


Chapter Three: Picture Essay 

Selling Hitlers 

Image 

Nazi Propaganda 


Adolf Hitler's picture hangs on the 
wall oj a classroom while German 
hoys learn about geography. After 
1933 f portraits of Hitler were placed 
in all public buildings to promote the 
idea that the Fuhrer was not just the 
head of the German state, but the 
embodiment of the German nation. 


I n the 1920s, for the first time, modem visual media began to exert a 
powerful influence on the way millions of Germans understood their 
world. Advertising, magazines, and movies engulfed Germans in a 
flood of pictures. The Nazis recognized the value of this new world 
of images and they quickly learned how to use visual propaganda in their 
fights to win elections. After 1933, the Nazis monopolized the produc- 
tion of images, at least within Germany, and, after 1939, in German- 
occupied territories. A well-known German film director insisted after 
the war that few of the images produced under Nazism could be trusted, 
that all were in some way propaganda. What he meant is quite clear if we 
look at graphic art, posters, or many of the paintings of the Third Reich. 
Even photographs could be staged to present a specific point of view. 

Hitler was at the center of Nazi visual propaganda. Pictures of Hitler 
appeared on stamps, postcards, and in booklets. Hitler was on bill¬ 
boards. Hitler was in the newsreels. Framed photos of Hitler were given 
as Christmas gifts. In 1936, Hitlers image was projected every evening 
onto the facade of Munich's city hall. This visual assault was part of a 
larger attempt to create a public image of Hitler, a Hitler myth, which 
was often the very opposite of his real self. This Hitler myth raised him 
out of the ranks of ordinary politicians and gave him a special authority 
and popularity unlike any other German leader before him. 

After 1933, more and more Germans, even those who had never 
voted for Hitler, came to regard the Fuhrer as the embodiment of the 
nation and the guardian of the unity of the "national community" 
above all selfish sectional interest. Millions of Germans credited him 
with pulling Germany out of the Great Depression. He was also seen 
as the representative of popular justice, a great statesman, a military 
genius, and as a bulwark against the nations political and racial ene¬ 
mies—the Marxists and the Jews. In constructing this Hitler myth, 
pictures proved to be every bit as powerful as words. 



HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


60 



Hitler's portrait is displayed in a Mercedes automo¬ 
bile showroom in Munich in 1935. From the early 
days of the Nazi movement, Hitler traveled in a 
large, open Mercedes. After Hitler came to power, 
Mercedes hoped to cash in on the long-standing 
association in the public mind between Hitler and 
the car company. The message is: Buy a Mercedes 
and you will be driving the Fuhrer's car. 


























Hitler appears in uniform on this postage 
stamp, which was produced for the 1939 
Nuremberg Party rally. Hitler regarded his 
Nazi movement as a sort of religious cru¬ 
sade against Germany's enemies. Many in 
the audience would have seen the Hitler 
who appears here as a prophet delivering a 
sermon rather than merely a politician. 


In the dark days after Germany had been defeated and 
forced to accept a humiliating peace, the Nazis tried 
to show that their movement was Germany's only chance 
to return to greatness. And only an ordinary person, a 
man like Hitler, could unite Germany. When Heinrich 
Hoffmann learned from Hitler that he had been in the 
crowd gathered in a Munich public square to celebrate the 
start of World War I, the photographer spent hours going 
over his picture of the event with a magnifying glass until 
he found Hitler's face. Hoffmann then enlarged this part 
of the photo and pasted it onto the original to demon¬ 
strate that Hitler had been part of the "August experience" 
of national unity and pride in Germany. 


















. - .v. .: a 






Hitler and his personal photographer, Heinrich 
Hoffmann, worked together ro present exactly 
the right image of Hitler to the German public 
In 1925-26 Hitler tried the same pose in two dib 
ferent types of clothing. On the left, Hitler is 
dressed in a traditional Bavarian costume, com¬ 
plete with leather shorts. 


Though the image above might have pleased con¬ 
servative Bavarians, it was rejected in favor of the 
one on right, which perhaps had a broader appeal 















Hitler preferred to be photographed in militaristic uniforms, which he had 
himself designed. In this carefully staged photograph taken in February 1933, 
Hitler leads strong and determined young German males, who are also dressed 
in military uniform, to a better future. 









Party members often saw the Nazi movement as a religious crusade to save 
Germany from communism. Hitler was presented as a Christ-like prophet. 
Some of the party faithful even made direct comparisons between Jesus Christ 
and Hitler, drawing intense criticism from Christian leaders in Germany. This 
poster, produced sometime after 1936, is one of the more extreme uses of 
Christian imagery by Nazi propagandists. When John the Baptist baptized 
Christ, a dove descended from the sky. Here, instead, an eagle appears to be 
flying toward Hitler. The caption reads: Tong Live Germany." 














SELLING HITLER'S IMAGE 



In September 1933, Hitler breaks ground for the 
construction of the new German freeway (auto* 
bahn) system in Frankfurt am Main, reminding 
Germans that he was personally responsible for this 
great new national project, and for putting Germany 
back to work after the massive unemployment 
and despair of the Great Depression. The picture 
also presents Hitler as a man of the people, 
unafraid to dirty his hands with manual labor. 


The technique of photomontage (literally mount¬ 
ing or pasting together different parts of separate 
photographs) allowed Hitler's supporters to make 
strong visual arguments that could not be pre¬ 
sented with just one original photograph. The 
picture of Hitler digging w as pasted together with 
two other photographs of the new armies of 
German workers set in motion by Hitlers new 
Nazi regime, suggesting that these newly 
employed men w r ould work with the Fuhrer to 
rebuild Germany and make it strong. The poster's 
caption reads The army of labor and of peace 
responds to the Fuhrer w ith a [resounding] Yes!' 


bit Uniter tl rrUrbrtt uiulilfa 
fnrite antroortrt btraTBpr 











AND THE NAZIS 



This German postcard was issued "On the occa¬ 
sion of a historic meeting, 29 September !93y in 
Munich/' It celebrates Hitler's triumph at the com 
feretice where, in order to prevent a war, England 
and France gave Germany the Sudeten land, the 
ethnic-Cerman western border area of Czecho¬ 
slovakia. Images of Hitler and Mussolini, the dic¬ 
tator oi Italy and Hitler's ally, face representatives 
of the great powers: England's Neville Chamber¬ 
lain (left) and France's Edouard Daladier (center). 
Hitler's association with these powerful men sug¬ 
gests he is a formidable statesman who has enabled 
Germany to regain us status as a great power. 


By the early 1930s, Hoffmann had realized that 
he needed to soften Hitler's image or at least to 
present another more human side of the Nazi 
Party leader. He did this by presenting Hitler 
in homely and informal poses. In a typically sen* 
timental image of the private Hitler, the man 
eventually responsible for the deaths of millions 
of European children, takes a moment to pose 
w ith some young ' friends 













Burning wooden barracks in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on which 
the Nazis had draped a portrait of Hitler. The end of the war also meant the 
end of the Holocaust. When British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 
15 ; 1945, they found 60,000 prisoners, most of them very ill. After evacuating 
the camp, the British burned the barracks to prevent the spread of disease. 

































69 


Chapter Four 

The Racial 
State 

Nazi Germany , 1933-1939 


An SA man stands guard outside 
a store to scare away customers dur¬ 
ing the April 1933 Nazi-sponsored 
boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. 
The sign reads-. “Germans defend 
yourselves! Don't buy from Jewsi" 


Race was at the center of the Nazi worldview. The Nazis believed that 
the biological makeup of a country determined its destiny, and 
Germany would have to be purified of all non-Aryan elements in order 
to survive and to become powerful. Hitler insisted that Germany's 
main racial enemy—the Jews—had already begun to take over and 
seriously weaken the country. According to the Nazis, an internation¬ 
al Jewish conspiracy was responsible for Germany's defeat in World 
War I, for the German revolution of 1918-1919, and for the threat of 
communism. The Nazis believed that Jews were a different race than 
Aryan Germans, and that the economic, cultural, and political lives 
and values of Jews and Aryan Germans were determined by their very 
different and quite incompatible biological natures. In Hitlers eyes, 
Jews could never become Aryan Germans because each of the two 
races had different and opposed "blood," or what we might call genet¬ 
ic makeup. 

Hitler felt that a long list of other biologically defined groups also 
posed important threats to the future health and strength of the Aryan 
German race. This list included even other Aryan Germans if they 
were thought to be biologically deficient. The Nazis believed that 
Germans suffering from a wide range of mental and physical disabili¬ 
ties imposed an intolerable burden on the healthy majority of the pop¬ 
ulation. The deficient genes that were assumed to be responsible for 
these physical or mental handicaps would no longer be allowed to cir¬ 
culate in the larger German gene pool. At the very least, these "ballast 
existences" and "useless eaters"—common Nazi descriptions of Aryan 
Germans considered to have mental or physical disabilities—should 
not be allowed to reproduce. 

The Nazis realized that if they wanted to construct a racial state 
they would have to do more than discriminate against, exclude, and 




70 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


The "Eternal Jew Exhibition ," which 
opened in Munich in {937, tried to 
convince Germans that Jews were the 
number-one racial enemy. The exhibit 
promoted Nazi stereotypes of Jews, 
such as the figure in this postcard, who 
holds gold coins in his right hand, anti- 
Semites believed Jews controlled banks 
and stock markets. In his left hand, the 
man has a whip, and in the crook of his 
arm rests a map of the Soviet Union f 
two symbols representing the anti- 
Semitic belief that Jews had enslaved the 
Russian people by starting the Russian 
Revolution, which brought the commu¬ 
nists to power in that country. 



GROSSE roilTISCHE SCHAU IN DER 
NORDWESTBAHNHALLE IN WIEN. 

AB 2.AUG.1938.TAGLICH GE0FFMET VON 10-20 UHR 


jif*. . 


persecute minorities they considered to be racially dangerous or 
biologically unfit. The millions of Germans whom the Nazis 
regarded as biologically valuable would have to be convinced that 
they were members of a single racial community, not merely 
workers or industrialists, Protestants or Catholics. Hitler wanted 
to recreate the intense sense of national unity that the Germans 
had experienced during the First World War, but he wanted Aryan 
Germans to realize that they were now fighting in a different kind 
of war, a life and death racial struggle against their biological ene¬ 
mies. The Aryan German race would either defeat its enemies and 
become the racial master of Europe or it would be destroyed. 
Hitler believed that this racial struggle would inevitably lead to a 
new world war. To achieve victory, Germans would have to be 
united as never before. 

Making German Jews and 
''Community Aliens" Socially Dead 


When Hitler came to power, he could not simply kill all the 
German Jews right away. Anti-Semitism was widespread in 
German society, but most ordinary Germans were not pre¬ 
pared, in 1933, to accept mass murder. So, the Nazis had to 
see just how far they could go without creating significant 
resistance. They began by making German Jews socially 
dead. This meant stripping them of their legal rights as citi¬ 
zens and forcing them out of the professions in which they 
worked. It also involved reaching into private lives by, for 
example, forbidding any future marriages between Jewish 
and non-Jewish Germans. In 1935, the Nazis issued the 
Nuremberg Laws (The Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for 
the Protection of German Blood and Honor), which officially 
segregated Jews from non-Jews. 

The Reich Citizenship Law of September 15, 1935 
... ARTICLE 2. (1) A citizen of the Reich may be only one who is 
of German or kindred blood, and who, through his behavior, 
shows that he is both desirous and personally fit to serve loyally 
the German people and the Reich... 

First Supplementary Decree of November 14, 1935 
.. .ARTICLE 4. (l) A Jew cannot be a citizen of the Reich. He 
cannot exercise the right to vote ; he cannot occupy public office. 
(2) Jewish officials will be retired as of December 31, 1935... 





71 


THE RACIAL STATE 



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A Nazi poster lays out the prohibited 
decrees of marriage between Aryans and 
non-Aryans f according to the i935 
Nuremberg Race Laws. The German 
text reads "Maintaining the purity of 
blood insures the survival of the 
German people ." 


ARTICLE 5. (1) A Jew is an individual who is descended from at 
least three grandparents who were, racially, full Jews... 

(2) A Jew is also an individual who is descended from two full - 
Jewish grandparents if: 

(a) he was a member of the Jewish religious community when this 
law was issued, or joined the community later,* 

(b) when the law was issued, he was married to a person who was 
a Jew, or was subsequently married to a Jew,* 

(c) he is the issue from a marriage with a Jew, in the sense of 
Section I, which was contracted after the coming into effect of the 
Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor of September 
15, 1935,. 

(d) he is the issue of an extramarital relationship with a Jew, 
according to Section I, and born out of wedlock after July 
31,1936... 

The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, 
September 15, 1935 

.. .ARTICLE 1.(1) Any marriages between Jews and citizens of 
German or kindred blood are herewith forbidden. Marriages 
entered into despite this law are invalid, even if they are arranged 
abroad as a means of circumventing this law... 

ARTICLE 2. Extramarital relations between Jews and citizens of 
German or kindred blood are herewith forbidden. 


"k /I a Y Monday [i^38] Frau Lehmann 
IVlappeared on Thursday evening. She had 
been summoned to an official: It was known 
that she was a cleaner for a Jewish professor 
and a Jewish lawyer.—She was over 46, there¬ 
fore permitted.—'Certainly, but your son will 
not get his promotion in the Labor Service, 
and your daughter... will lose her post, if you 
do not give up this work/—So the woman 
was rid of two of her three jobs, and we are 
alone. On Friday we washed dishes for almost 
three hours, and our travel plans were aban¬ 
doned, since house and tomcat cannot be left 
alone. Frau Lehmann was in our service for 
eleven years." 

—Victor Klemperer, a Jewish protestor 
who survived the Nazi period because he was 
married to an Aryan-German woman, in his 
memoir, I Will Bear Witness, 193 3-44. 





72 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


An advertisement for the anti-Semitic 
tabloid Der Sturmer (the hotspur] 
presents a crude caricature of a Jew 
arriving in Germany from eastern 
Europe. The caption at the bottom 
insists that "Without a solution to the 
Jewish Question, there can be no 
redemption of humanity." 




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ohtit CilfHHt, Bcr Jtliift&nt htlht lkli|Bitg Str 111cit|Ait■ II r 


ARTICLE 3. Jews are forbidden to employ as servants in their 
households female subjects of German or kindred blood who are 
under the age of forty-five years. 

ARTICLE 4.(1) Jews are prohibited from displaying the Reich and 
national flag and from showing the national colors. 

(2) However, they may display the Jewish colors. The exercise of 
this right is under state protection. 

ARTICLE 5. (1) Anyone who acts contrary to the prohibition 
noted in Article 1 renders himself liable to penal servitude. 

(2) The man who acts contrary to the prohibition of Article 2 will 
be punished by sentence to either a jail or penitentiary. 

(3) Anyone who acts contrary to the provisions of Articles 3 and 
4 will be punished with a jail sentence up to a year and with a fine, 
or with one of these penalties. 

Because racism was now the law of the land, Aryan Germans 
could discriminate against Jews without fear of being held 
to account by the justice system. In August 1935, the town 
council of the Bernkastel district, in the Rhineland, passed a 
resolution making it clear that Jews were not welcome in 
this municipality. 

Judaism, which has brought such misfortune on our German 
Fatherland, is today once again rearing its head more boldly than 
ever. These parasites on the German body politic underestimate 
our sense of decency and are again making themselves at home 
within National Socialist Germany, which they hate so much, and 
are again pouring out their Jewish impudence and vulgarity. 

In recognizing this situation, we have resolved to act accord¬ 
ingly: 

• All city exits will be fitted with signs bearing the inscription: 

JEWS NOT WANTED HERE. 

• The journal Der Stunner [the hotspur], on display in the news¬ 
paper display box in the town center, will be recommended 
to all citizens. 

• No craftsman, businessman, or any other countryman will 
receive work contracts from the community and will imme¬ 
diately forfeit entitlement to the use and enjoyment of com¬ 
munal property if he or members of his family continue to 
traffic with Jews,- that is, if he supports their businesses. 

• Making purchases from Jews, employing Jewish physicians 
or lawyers is tantamount to committing a traitorous act 
against the German people and nation. 









THE RACIAL STATE 


73 



• Given the fact that the race question holds the key to our 
freedom, those who break these fundamental principles are 
to be scorned and outlawed. 


A Jewish woman sitting on a park 
bench designated for Jews hides her face 
front the camera. By the end of the 
i930s , the Nazis had created a kind of 
racial apartheid system, which reserved 
some public spaces only for Aryans 
and others only for Jews. 


The Nazis believed that during the Weimar Republic Jewish 
influence had poisoned art music, and literature. In 1937 r 
the Nazis opened an exhibition in Munich that displayed 650 
works of art that they considered "degenerate." After sever¬ 
al hundred thousand visitors had attended this Exhibition of 
Degenerate Art, all these art works and many more that 
were considered similarly corrupt were removed from Ger¬ 
man museums and either sold abroad or destroyed. Directly 
across the street from the Exhibition, Hitler constructed a 
new House of German Art for work that Hitler and the Nazis 
thought represented the new spirit of an Aryan Germany. In 
his speech made at the opening of the House of German Art 
in July 1937, Hitler made it quite clear what kind of art would 
no longer be tolerated in Germany. 


People have attempted to recommend modern art by saying that 
it is the expression of a new age: but art does not create a new age f 
it is the general life of peoples which fashions itself anew and 
therefore often seeks after a new expression.... It is... impudent 
effrontery... to exhibit to the folk of to-day works which perhaps 
ten or twenty thousand years ago might have been made by a man 

of the Stone Age_The new age of today is at work on a new 

human type. Men and women are to be more healthy, stronger: 
there is a new feeling of life, a new joy in life.... This, my good 





HITLER AND THE NAZIS 




m 


gAJ 


A painting by the Jewish artist Marc 
Chagall depicts the Jewish festival of 
Puritn in a Russian town. The Nazis 
removed from German museums this and 
many other paintings they considered to 
be"degeneratesimply because of their 
style and subjects. 


( 



. - yl prehistoric art-stutterers, is the type of the age: and 

what do you manufacture? Misformed cripples and 
cretins, women who inspire only disgust, men who 
are more like wild beasts, children who, were they 
alive, must be regarded as cursed of God. And let no 
one say to me that this is how these artists see things 
... it is clear that the eye of some men shows them 
things otherwise than as they are—that there really 

r w 

are men who on principle feel meadows to be blue, 
the heaven green, clouds sulphur-yellow—or as they 
perhaps prefer to say "experience'' them thus. 

I need not ask whether they really do see or feel 
things in this way, but in the name of the German 
people I have only to prevent these pitiable unfortu¬ 
nates who clearly suffer from defects of vision from attempting 
with violence to persuade contemporaries by their chatter that 
these faults of observation are indeed realities or from presenting 
them as "Art." Here only two possibilities are open: either these 
"artists" do really see things in this way and believe in that which 
they represent—then one has but to ask how the defect in vision 
arose, and if it is hereditary the Minister for the Interior will have 
to see to it that so ghastly a defect of vision shall not be allowed 
to perpetuate itself—or if they do not believe in the reality of such 
impressions but seek on other grounds to impose upon the nation 
by this humbug, then it is a matter for a criminal court. 




Jews were not the only victims of Nazi racial persecution. 
Although there were very few Afro-Germans in Hitler's Third 
Reich, they too were subjected to discrimination. Hans Mas- 
saquoi was the son of a German mother and an African 
father from a diplomatic family. In his memoir, published in 
1999, he describes an encounter with Nazi racism in a park 
in Hamburg. 


As I had done many times before, I had gone to the playground 
after school for an afternoon of innocent play. My favorite attrac¬ 
tion, like everybody else's, was the seesaw, which meant that there 
was always a waiting line. After patiently awaiting our turn, a boy 
and I were about to mount when a mother with her young son in 
tow blocked my way. "Where do you think you are going?" she 
inquired, her voice shrill with aggravation... 

"It's my turn," I said in feeble protest. 

"What do you mean 'my turn'?"... You aren't even supposed to 





THE RACIAL STATE 


75 


be in this playground. Can't you read?" With that, she pointed to 
a painted sign near the playground's entrance that I had never 
noticed before... 

Thoroughly embarrassed and crushed, I walked away Before 
leaving the playground, 1 studied the sign with eyes blurred with 
suppressed tears. The sign read: 

NICHTARIERN 1ST DAS BETRETEN DIESES 
SPIELPLATZES STRENGSTENS VERBOTEN 

(Non-Aryans are sternly prohibited from 
entering this playground) 

Although 1 had heard the term non-Aryan before, I never felt 
that it had anything to do with me... 

That evening after my mother had returned from work, I 
pointedly asked her, "Am 1 a non-Aryan?" 

Taken totally by surprise, Mutti [mother] demanded to know 
what prompted my question. When 1 told her what had happened 
on the playground, she conceded that Africans were among sev¬ 
eral racial groups that had been classified non-Aryans by the Nazi 
government. 

"Since your father is African and you are his son," she 
explained, "you, too, are classified non-Aryan." 

"Are you a non-Aryan, too?" I kept pressing. 

"No, I'm not." 

"Why not?" 

"Because I'm not African,- I am European." 

"Then why am I a non-Aryan because I'm Dad's son and not 
an Aryan like you when I'm your son also?" I tried to reason 
with her... 

"I agree that it doesn't make any sense," Mutti conceded. 
"Tomorrow I'll speak to the park warden. I'm sure he'll make an 
exception and let you play in the park." 

"I don't want you to talk to the warden," I told her. "I don't ever 
want to play in that park again." 

Despite my protest, my mother did have a talk with the war¬ 
den and he told her that I shouldn't pay any attention to the sign. 
But nothing Mutti said could make me break my vow never to set 
foot in that park again. 

The Nazis also considered Sinti and Roma, who were com¬ 
monly referred to as "Gypsies," to be "racially inferior." The 
Roma had come to Europe from the Punjab region of north¬ 
ern India as nomads between the eighth and tenth centuries. 

They were called Gypsies because Europeans mistakenly 


A propaganda slide , which may have 
been part of a lecture given by the SS, 
criticizes a friendship between an 
Aryan woman and a black woman. 
The caption reads : “The Result! Racial 
pride wanes. " 





76 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


The Gypsy is and remains a 
parasite on the people who sup¬ 
ports himself almost exclusively 
by begging and stealing... The 
Gypsy can never be educated 
to become a useful person. For 
this reason it is necessary that 
the Gypsy tribe be exterminated 
.. .by way of sterilization or 
castration. 

—Chief of police in the rural 
district of Esslingen, South 
Germany, in a letter to the chief 
administrative officer, 1937 


believed they had come from Egypt. Most of the Roma in 
Germany belonged to the Sinti and Roma family groupings 
and spoke dialects of a common language called Romani, 
based on the classical language of India, Sanskrit. Many Ger¬ 
mans believed that Roma were by nature dirty, dangerous, 
and criminal. In December 1938, Heinrich Himmler, head of 
the much-feared SS, issued a memorandum on the "Fight 
against the Gypsy Nuisance." 

Experience gained in the fight against the Gypsy nuisance, and 
knowledge derived from race-biological research, have shown 
that the proper method of attacking the Gypsy problem seems to 
be to treat it as a matter of race. Experience shows that part- 
Gypsies play the greatest role in Gypsy criminality. On the other 
hand, it has been shown that efforts to make the Gypsies settle 
have been unsuccessful, especially in the case of pure Gypsies, on 
account of their strong compulsion to wander. It has therefore 
become necessary to distinguish between pure and part-Gypsies 
in the final solution of the Gypsy question. 

To this end, it is necessary to establish the racial affinity of 
every Gypsy living in Germany and of every vagrant living a 
Gypsy-like existence... 

The police authorities will report (via the responsible Criminal 
Police offices and local offices) to the Reich Criminal Police 
Office-Reich Central Office for the Fight against the Gypsy 
Nuisance all persons who by virtue of their looks and appearance, 
customs or habits, are to be regarded as Gypsies or part-Gypsies. 

Because a person considered to be a Gypsy or part-Gypsy, or 
a person living like a Gypsy, as a rule confirms the suspicion that 
marriage (in accordance with clause 6 of the first decree on the 
implementation of the Law for the Protection of German Blood 
and Honour... or on the basis of stipulations in the law on Fitness 
to Marry) must not be contracted, in all cases the public registry 
officials must demand a testimony of fitness to marry from those 
who make such an application [to be married]. 

The Nazis also persecuted gay men on racial grounds. The 
Nazis believed that healthy Aryan males were committing a 
crime against the Aryan race by not having children, particu¬ 
larly because the heavy casualties of World War I had created 
a "shortage" of men. Lesbians usually had to hide their 
homosexuality but were generally not persecuted in the 
same ways as gay men, because the Nazis saw them as less 



THE RACIAL STATE 



of a direct threat to the reproduction of the Aryan race. In 
February 1937, Himmler gave a speech to SS leaders on the 
dangers of male homosexuality. 


If you... take into account the facts I have not yet mentioned/ 
namely that with a static number of women, we have two million 
men too few on account of those who fell in the war, then you can 
well imagine how this imbalance of two million homosexuals and 
two million war dead, or in other words a lack of about four mil¬ 
lion men capable of having sex, has upset the sexual balance sheet 
of Germany, and will result in a catastrophe. 

... There are those homosexuals who take the view: what I do 
is my business, a purely private matter. However, all things which 
take place in the sexual sphere are not the private affair of the indi¬ 
vidual, but signify the life and death of the nation.. .The people 
which has many children has the candidature for world power and 
world domination. A people of good race which has too few chil¬ 
dren has a one-way ticket to the grave, for insignificance in fifty 
or a hundred years, for burial in two hundred and fifty years... 

Therefore we must be absolutely clear that if we continue to 
have this burden in Germany, without being able to fight it, then 
that is the end of Germany, and the end of the Germanic world... 
In the SS, today, we still have about one case of homosexuality a 
month. In a whole year, about eight to ten cases occur in the entire 
SS. I have now decided upon the following: in each case, these 
people will naturally be publicly degraded, expelled, and handed 
over to the courts. Following completion 

—■—. 

of the punishment imposed by the courts, 

they will be sent, by my order, to a con- po bo do~ 

centration camp, and they will be shot in 

he - —f- 

the concentration camp, while attempting ‘ £ oo 

to escape. I will make that known by order £ * 

to the unit to which the person so affected 

belonged. Thereby, I hope finally to have S' 3 5 

done with persons of this type in the SS, 

so that at least the good blood, which we 

have in the SS, and the increasingly o D momuv 

healthy blood which we are cultivating for 

y b es ~ ftrosiak: Doa< 

Germany, will be kept pure. 

However this does not represent a Stattlttlba 

solution to the problem for the whole of (□ ^ minttlid), Q m 
Germany. One must not have any illusions " tdui 

about the following. When I bring a 


A Nazi chart claims to document 
hereditary? criminality and alcoholism 
in a so-called "criminal family." 

The Nazis believed that a wide range 
of social problems were caused by 
"bad genes." 


lj Had kemmnrdisft 


10© 0 



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78 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


homosexual before the courts and have him locked up, the matter 
is not settled, because the homosexual comes out of prison just as 
homosexual as before he went in. Therefore the whole question is 
not clarified. It is clarified in the sense that this burden has been 
identified, in contrast to the years before the seizure of power. 


In 1938 , police took this photograph 
of a Berlin bar that they suspected was 
a meeting place for gay men. After 
Hitler came to power, gay men who 
continued to meet in public were often 
placed under surveillance by the special 
section of the Gestapo that dealt with 
homosexuals. The police wrote notes 
around the edges of the photograph that 
describe the bar's location. 


After 1933, men who were openly gay found themselves vul¬ 
nerable to Nazi persecution. In a postwar interview, Harry 
Pauly, an apprentice hairdresser involved in the theater 
world, described his experience in Berlin. 

When the Nazis came to power, they closed the gay bars. Some 
homosexuals, especially those who were Jewish, were killed by 
Nazi hooligans,- my friend "Susi," a drag queen, was stabbed to 




TsrtUr 

iUt 

Cd>£jdc 



Gtiidst s ’Beit 


Ataxia# 

Zur 




LLBanicJit dc r Cascade Bar 

undde* fruldSch -'fidsjt 

bdi dbandiccker Teucktu nd 

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THE RACIAL STATE 


79 




death. In 1936 I was arrested under the Nazi-revised paragraph 
175 of the criminal code, which outlawed homosexuality. I was 
imprisoned in a camp at Neusustrum, where I worked in the 
marshes 12 hours a day. After 15 months I was released. 

Kristallnacht 


In November 1938, the Nazis unleashed a massive wave of 
violence against German Jews. SA men smashed the shop 
windows of some 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses across Ger¬ 
many, Austria (recently annexed by Hitler), and the Nazi- 
occupied western Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. 

The shards of broken glass from these windows gave the 
event its name, Kristallnacht, or "The night of broken glass." 

Jewish businesses and homes were looted and syna¬ 
gogues burned. Kristallnacht erupted shortly after Herschel 
Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew, shot Ernst vom 
Rath, a low-ranking German embassy official, in Paris, on 
November 7. The Nazis had deported Grynszpan's parents 
and sister to Poland. In retaliation for the mistreatment of 
his family, Grynszpan shot vom Rath. On November 12, Reich 
propaganda minister Goebbels claimed in a newspaper arti¬ 
cle that the shooting was the work of a "World Jewish Con¬ 
spiracy" that wanted to destroy Germany. 

The questions arise: Where was Grynszpan during the last three 
months? Who took care of his living expenses? Who gave him the 
false passport? Who trained him in pistol-shooting? There can be 
no doubt that he was given sanctuary by a Jewish organization, nor 
that he was systematically prepared for this cynical assassination... 

For some weeks and months now a veritable war has been waged 
against Germany as a nation by the Jewish world press... The rea¬ 
sons... are obvious. World Jewry, after its feverish incitement to 
war during the summer months of this year, has undergone a terri¬ 
ble reversal. The Munich Agreement reduced to a shambles its plan 
to destroy Germany. It had hoped through its infamous incitement 
to world war to bring Germany to her knees and to bring about the 
fall of the hated Nazi regime. After its plan was shattered at 
Munich, it wanted to take drastic and indecent action to halt the 
efforts for peace between the Great Powers of Europe in order to 
set the scene for a renewed hate campaign against Germany. 

The murder of Legation Secretary vom Rath was to be a bea¬ 
con for all Jewry in its battle against Germany. The murderer him- 



Eln neuer Fall Gustloff 


flior&anfc ftt ag in parte 


mitlitb btr Orutiftra HrS ©Afiffr tefrttiflfefftrlft Wfl*# 

m ttwEllHitt tift iimmtf » "... Verbrtdifr 



The Nazi newspaper The People s 
Observer tries to convince its readers 
that Herschel Grynszpan's shooting oj 
a German embassy official in Paris is 
part of a larger Jewish conspiracy. The 
first part of the headline , which reads 
"A New Gustloff case/' connects the 
shooting in Paris to an earlier incident 
in which a Jewish student shot Wilhelm 
Gustloff, a leader of the foreign organi¬ 
zation of the Nazi movement in 
Switzerland. The rest of the headline 
reads; "Murderous Jewish Attack in 
Paris. Member of the German Embassy 
mortally wounded by shots/' 


Munich Agreement 

September 1938 agreement between Germany 
Italy, Britain, and France, which gave Nazi 
Germany the German-speaking Sudetenland 
region of Czechoslovakia. 







80 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


self confessed that he wanted to give a warning signal by his act. 
However, this shot went astray. The world was not warned so 
much as the German people themselves. 

Nazi propaganda depicted Kristalinacht as a spontaneous 
explosion of public outrage. In reality, most of the violence 
was the work of SA men and Nazi Party officials, sometimes 
dressed in civilian clothes. According to reports in the Nov* 
ember 11, 1938, New York Times, ordinary Germans dis¬ 
played mixed reactions to the destruction of Jewish property. 



A man sweeps up the broken glass 
from a Jewish shop window after the 
event that came to be known as 
Kristallnacht. TJje attacks on Jews 
that swept across Germany in early 
November i938 caused many German 
Jews to realize that it was time to leave 
their homeland. 


• : : 






















A '' t 














Crowds Mostly Silent 

Generally the crowds were silent and the majority seemed grave¬ 
ly disturbed by the proceedings. Only members of the wrecking 
squads shouted occasionally, “Perish Jewry!" and “Kill the Jews!" 
and in one case a person in the crowd shouted, “Why not hang the 

owner in the window?" 

In one case on the Kurfuerstendamm [a 
major shopping street in Berlin] actual violence 
was observed by an American girl who saw one 
Jew with his face bandaged dragged from a 
shop, beaten and chased by a crowd while a 
second Jew was dragged from the same shop 
by a single man who beat him as the crowd 
looked on. 

One Jewish shopowner, arriving at his 
wrecked store, exclaimed, “Terrible," and was 
arrested on the spot. 

In some cases on the other hand crowds 
were observed making passages for Jews to 
leave their stores unmolested. 

Some persons in the crowds—peculiarly 
enough, mostly women—expressed the view 
that it was only right that the Jews should suf¬ 
fer what the Germans suffered in 1918. But 
there were also men and women who 
expressed protests... One man—obviously a 
worker—watching the burning of a synagogue 
in the Fasanenstrasse [a street in Berlin], 
exclaimed, “Arson remains arson." The protes¬ 
tors, however, were quickly silenced by the 
wrecking crews with threats of violence. 







THE RACIAL STATE 


81 



A crowd watches a synagogue ham in 
Essen , Germany, during the nationwide 
attacks on Jews in November 4 938. 
Across the country, fire departments were 
given orders not to take action unless 
the fires threatened Aryan property, 


Warned against Looting 

To some extent—at least during the day—efforts were made to 
prevent looting. Crowds were warned they might destroy but not 
plunder, and in individual cases looters were either beaten up on 
the spot by uniformed Nazis or arrested. But for the most part, 
looting was general, particularly during the night and in the poor¬ 
er quarters. And at least in one case the wreckers themselves 
tossed goods out to the crowd with the shout "Here are some 
cheap Christmas presents." 

Children were observed with their mouths smeared with 
candy from wrecked candy shops or flaunting toys from wrecked 
toy shops until one elderly woman watching the spectacle 
exclaimed, "So that is how they teach our children to steal."... 

Children "Fish" for Loot 

... Before one Friedrichstrasse shop devoted to the sale of magic 
apparatus children lined up with brass poles that had hooks at the 
ends. With these they fished magicians boxes of tricks for them¬ 
selves out of the interior of the shop through a broken store window. 

Older boys unconcernedly threw tables, chairs and other fur¬ 
niture out of smashed windows. One group moved a piano from a 







HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


shop into the street and played popular tunes for onlookers. 
Before synagogues, demonstrators stood with Jewish prayer books 
from which they tore leaves as souvenirs for the crowds.... 


In connection with Kristallnacht, the Nazis sent more than 
twenty-five thousand Jewish men to Dachau, Buchenwald, 
and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. Most were released 
only after they began the process of emigrating from Ger¬ 
many and selling off their property at bargain rates to Aryan 
Germans, a process that was called Aryanization. Hans Berger 
was a German Jew who grew up in Wiesbaden, a central 
German city on the Rhine River. On November 11, he was 
arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, near 
the city of Weimar. After he was allowed to leave the camp, 
Berger fled to Belgium where he wrote a memoir in which he 
described his experience of Kristallnacht and its aftermath. 



Jews arrested during Kristallnacht 
assemble for roll call at Buchenwald 
concentration camp. Kristallnacht 
marked the first time that the Nazis 
sent large numbers of Jews to concen¬ 
tration camps. 






THE RACIAL STATE 


33 


When on the morning of the 10th of November 1 was driving my 
car to work, as I did every day, my route took me past the syna¬ 
gogue, whose dome was ablaze. Fear went right through me. A big 
crowd of people stood around it silently and the fire department 
was content with protecting the surrounding houses from catch¬ 
ing fire.... The next morning 1 began my work early and took care 
of the most urgent business matters...Toward 12:30 two officials 
of the Gestapo appeared... after a short house search in my office 
Karl Seibel Jr. drove us together with the two men from the Stapo 
[state police]... to my residence... There 1 was given time to 
change clothes and to take along a few necessary items of cloth¬ 
ing... then the men drove me in my own car, with my wife 
accompanying me, to the court prison... In the evening we were 
transferred to the police prison... On the next day, Saturday, 
November 11th, there followed, among other things, an interro¬ 
gation ... about our emigration plans, and Ernst Springer, who in 
his pocket had his completed ship documents for emigration to 
America for the 7th of December, was released immediately... 

Still on the same evening, in severe cold, we were taken in 
trucks to Frankfurt to the Festhalle [festival hall], where we arrived 
at eleven at night. A howling mob received us at the entrance to 
the Festhalle—abusive shouts, stone-throwing, in short the atmos¬ 
phere of a pogrom. On the double we went into the hall... Right 
opposite the entrance a dead man lay on the floor. F^ seemed to 
have succumbed to a heart attack... When we arrived the sentry 
squad was apparently already tired of tormenting people... Only 
now and then did they pull out one or the other who appeared to 
them suited as object of their sadistic pleasure... in groups we 
were driven in busses to the South Station in Frankfurt and there, 
all the while on the double, we had to run the gauntlet through a 
howling, stone-throwing crowd.. .We were put on an unheated 
special train there... and after the train was filled, it started mov¬ 
ing into the night toward an unknown goal under the guard of the 
gendarmerie. On the way the order was given: "Remove your 
coats!"—so that we would be better exposed to the cold.... Soon 
we realized the direction, when, without stopping, we passed 
Erfurt and Eisenach at express-train speed. We were terrified, and 
the concentration camp of Weimar-Buchenwald, the most notori¬ 
ous of all, appeared before us... 

We had not eaten anything for a long time now, and thirst was 
one of the worst torments that befell us, and this torment would 
stay with us until our release from the camp. First, all of our hair 
was cropped. When I looked around while this was being done, 1 


I would not wish to he a Jew 
in Germany. 

—Hermann Goring, 
a top-ranking Nazi leader, 
November 12, 1938, 
right after Kristallnacht 





84 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


discovered that at one spot of the square there was not one dead 
person, as in the Festhalle, but no less than four, lying one next to 
another... After hours of waiting, each one of us got a piece of 
fresh bread, and each group of ten men a container of so-called 
coffee. Each got a swallow, a mere drop for our parching thirst... 

This report would never come to an end if 1 wanted to convey 
the many lesser and greater tortures to which we were subjected, 
for example, that as punishment for badly made beds we had to 
stand all night in front of the beds without sleep.... 

Many of the German Jews who escaped the Holocaust by emi¬ 
grating left Germany during the very small window of time 
between November 1938 and the outbreak of war in Septem¬ 
ber 1939. Kristallnacht convinced some foreign governments 
to ease their tight immigration restrictions for certain types 
of Jewish refugees. The British government agreed, for exam¬ 
ple, to allow some Jewish children under age seventeen 
to enter Great Britain from Germany and German-occupied 
territories, including Austria and the Czech lands. These 
Kindertransporte ("transports of children") saved the lives of 
a significant number of young Jewish boys and girls. But 
many of these children never saw their parents again. Olga 
Levy Ducker was put on a Kindertransport in 1939. In her 1992 
memoir, Ducker describes the trip from Berlin to England. 

This time there was no Papa to take care of passports. I was 
one of about a hundred children, from about four years old to 
seventeen. We were supervised by a few adults from the Jewish 
Refugee Committee, who carried our papers. German officers 
came strutting through our compartments. They checked us off 
on their lists. In their black uniforms,- red, white, and black swasti¬ 
ka armbands,- high-peaked caps,- and especially tall, polished 
boots, they looked menacing. One or two stopped to ask some of 
the children a question... As they passed me, one man looked at 
me and was about to speak. But his comrade pushed him from 
behind, pointing at his watch. They kept going. 

With a shudder the train moved forward a few yards and 
stopped again... Now it was the turn of the Dutch customs offi¬ 
cials. These men had smiles on their faces, and although we could¬ 
n't understand a word they said, we knew they were saying 
"Welcome to Holland." We all relaxed... Every now and then my 
fingers touched Omas [grandmas] last-minute present, still stuffed 
into my pocket. Soon, I promised myself, 1 would open it. 






THE RACIAL STATE 


85 



After a little while longer, we were allowed off the train. Down 
we spilled onto the platform, where the Dutch women were wait¬ 
ing for us. They gave us hot cocoa and cookies. They, too, had 
smiles on their faces. 

But all too soon we were herded into a large room to wait for 
the ship. The Dutch harbor, Hoek van Holland, lies on the 
English Channel, directly across from a town in England called 
Harwich. The sea in the Channel is famous for its stormy winds 
and swelling waves. This night was typical. 

With the cocoa and cookies swishing about in my stomach, I 
bravely boarded the ship. 1 was shown my cabin, which 1 was to 
share with another girl. She was older than I—maybe sixteen or 
seventeen. Up to now 1 had kept my feelings bottled up inside... 
But now, when I heard my cabin mate cry in her bed, I too began 
to feel a lump in my throat. 1 buried my head into my pillow, 
clenched my fists in fear and anger, and wept... 

By daybreak we steamed into the harbor of Harwich. All was 
calm. Most of the people of that small fishing town were still 
asleep... But a few were there to greet us. 

They spoke yet another language, which we did not understand. 

1 soon realized that my newly acquired phrase, 'The dog is under 
the table," would be of no use to me in this situation. By chance, my 
fingers touched something in my pocket. It was Omas present. I 


Austrian Jewish children arrive in 
London as part of the Kinder- 
transport. These child transports 
saved several thousand young Jews 
before European borders closed at the 
start of the war. Most of these children 
never saw their parents again. 







HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


86 


pulled out the little package and tore the paper off. Here were two 
tiny books, one blue, the other red. Each was so little, it could easi¬ 
ly fit into the palm of my hand. These books were to prove my most 
valuable possessions in the next few months to come. They were dic¬ 
tionaries: one German to English, the other English to German. 

In the beginning, these little friends were with me always. If I 
didn't understand what was being said to me which was most of the 
time—out would come my little red companion: English to 
German. 1 would simply hand it over to the speaker, who would 
show me the word. Then I would fish in my pocket for the blue one 
and find the reply in German. I would try to pronounce its English 
equivalent, which sometimes convulsed us both into laughter. 


Jewish refugee Oskar Blechner stands 
with two other passengers on hoard the 
St. Louis. The ship eventually had to 
return to Europe, but Blechner survived 
the war in England. Other passengers 
given asylum in continental Europe 
were later murdered by the Nazis when 
the German army occupied the countries 
that had taken them in. 



In April 1939, the German-owned Hamburg-America steam¬ 
ship line announced that the luxury liner St Louis would 
soon leave on a special trip to Havana, Cuba. More than nine 
hundred Jews bought tickets, hoping that once they were in 
Cuba, they could wait in safety until their quota number 
came up in the United States. (Since the 1920s,only limited 
numbers, called a quota, of immigrants were allowed to 
enter the United States from each foreign country each year.) 

When the ship arrived at the Caribbean island, Cuban offi¬ 
cials refused to let them get off the boat. The St Louis was 
eventually forced to return to Europe. Max Korman was on 
board the St Louis. His memoir describes the frustration and 
despair that began to spread among the passengers when 
they learned that they would not be allowed to enter Cuba. 

Each of us became more and more tense and as our nerves began 
to fray we asked ourselves this question: with legal entry permits 
in hand, why had we journeyed for fourteen days across the 
ocean? to sit for three days in the port of Havana and to observe 
from a ships railings the customs of the natives? One passenger, 
whose wife and two children were also on the ship, answered by 
slashing his wrists and jumping overboard. (A sailor leaped after 
him and saved his life )... 

In that mood we left the port, seeing Havana in all its glorious 
panorama: the dome of the capitol, the skyscrapers, the attractive 
landscaping, the palms.... The next morning, seemingly moving 
toward Cuba, we found ourselves looking at the coast of Florida: 
Miami's skyscrapers, beaches, the bridge to Key West. All these 
wonderful facilities seemed within a swimmer's reach. As the yachts 
and other luxury boats greeted us, you can well imagine the feeling 



THE RACIAL STATE 


87 


that dominated me. Here lived our uncle ; this was the land to which 
I was supposed to come. And here I was so near, but oh so far. 

... What rotten merchandise we must be if no one is prepared 
to accept us. The slaves must have been better: at least people paid 
for them, but here and now, when many wanted to pay for each 
of us, we are still rejected. Are we really so bad and so rotten? Are 
we really humanity's vermin and thus to be treated as lepers?... 

To remind the world again of our fate, we decided to telegraph 
Roosevelt, the King of England (who was then visiting 
Washington), the American press and radio, and Jewish agencies 
in New York and Paris. We begged them to transfer us to another 
ship, which could be rented and which could await a favorable set¬ 
tlement of our fate... 

Finally, on Saturday afternoon, as cables came to the St. Louis 
from European capitals and institutions, we realized that the crit¬ 
ical stage of the negotiations had moved from the New World 
back to the Old World, from which we had come. Within thirty- 
six hours (we heard from Paris) we would have news of our fate... 
The thirty-six hours passed slowly, and with their passage the St. 
Louis came closer and closer to Hamburg, Germany, its home port. 
The thirty-sixth hour came and went without word from Paris. 
This we had expected. We were beyond despair. 

The cable finally arrived: England, Holland, Belgium, and 
France had declared themselves ready to accept us all.. * We would 
land in Antwerp and from there be distributed to the host nations. 

Shaping the Aryan Race 


Erast G. Heppner was a Geman-Jew born in Breslau in 
i92i. His father and sister, who had stayed behind in 
Germany, were murdered in the Holocaust; a brother 
managed to flee to England. He describes his arrival in 
Shanghai , China, with his mother in February 1939 . 

S o we were received by a committee, but we 
walked ashore then... again, no passport, 
no papers, nothing. And... there were many, 
many members of the Jewish community there 
looking for relatives perhaps that they expect¬ 
ed. And we were loaded on trucks that nor¬ 
mally carry pigs and moved to a reception 
center that had been furnished by one of the 
local residents where we were housed and 
received food. 


The project of a racial state also required the purification of 
the Aryan race itself. The Nazi plan to achieve this goal 
involved the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of Ger¬ 
mans whom the Nazis believed were the carriers of danger¬ 
ous genes. The Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased 
Offspring, decreed on July 14,1933, and signed by Hitler, the 
minister of interior, and the minister of justice, listed the con¬ 
ditions that could require a person to be sterilized. 


PAR. 1 

1. Anyone who is suffering from a hereditary disease can be ster¬ 
ilized by a surgical operation if, according to the experiences of 
medical science, it is to be expected with great probability that 
his offspring will suffer from serious hereditary physical or 
mental defects. 






88 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


St. Vitus' Dance 
(Sydenham chorea) 

A nervous disorder marked by 
spasmodic movements of the 
limbs and face 


2. Those who suffer from any of the following diseases are con¬ 
sidered to be suffering from a hereditary disease within the 
meaning of this law: 

(1) Mental deficiency from birth 

(2) Schizophrenia 

(3) Circular (manic-depressive) illness 

(4) Hereditary epilepsy 

(5) Hereditary St. Vitus' Dance... 

(6) Hereditary blindness 

(7) Hereditary deafness 

(8) Serious hereditary physical deformation. 

3. Furthermore, persons suffering severely from alcoholism can 
be sterilized. 

PAR. 2 

1. The person to be sterilized has the right to make an applica¬ 
tion. .. 

PAR. 3 

Sterilization can also be applied for by the following: 

1. The civil service physician 

2. For the inmates of a sanatorium, hospital, nursing home, or 
prison, by the head thereof. 

PAR. 4 

The application is to be made to the office of the Genetic Health 
Court.... 

PAR. 12 

1. Once the Court has made its final decision for sterilization it 
must be carried out even against the will of the person to be 
sterilized. The civil service physician has to request the neces¬ 
sary measures from the police authorities. Where other mea¬ 
sures are insufficient, direct force may be used. 


The "biologically unworthy" were to be prevented from 
reproducing but healthy Aryan men and women were 
encouraged to produce as many children as possible. The 
Nazis believed that men and women had different, yet com¬ 
plementary natures, which were determined by their biolo¬ 
gy. Men were destined to be soldiers, statesmen, and 
workers. Women were supposed to produce and raise 
healthy Aryan children. In a speech given on September 8, 
1934, to the National Socialist Women's Section of the Nazi 
party. Hitler insisted that "women's emancipation" was a 
Jewish lie, designed to weaken the Aryan race. 





THE RACIAL STATE 


89 


If the man's world is said to be the State, his struggle, his readiness 
to devote his powers to the service of the community, then it may 
perhaps be said that the womans is a smaller world. For her world 
is her husband, her family her children, and her home. But what 
would become of the greater world if there were no one to tend 
and care for the smaller one? How could the greater world survive 
if there were no one to make the cares of the smaller world the 
content of their lives?...The two worlds are not antagonistic. 
They complement each other, they belong together just as man 
and woman belong together... 

The sacrifices which the man makes in the struggle of his 
nation, the woman makes in the preservation of that nation in 
individual cases. What the man gives in courage on the battlefield, 
the woman gives in eternal self-sacrifice, in eternal pain and suf¬ 
fering. Every child that a woman brings into the world is a battle, 
a battle waged for the existence of her people... 

It is not true, as Jewish intellectuals assert, that respect depends 
on the overlapping of the spheres of activity of the sexes,- this 
respect demands that neither sex should try to do that which 
belongs to the sphere of the other. It lies in the last resort in the 
fact that each knows that the other is doing everything necessary 
to maintain the whole community... 

Whereas previously the programs of the liberal, intellectualist 
women's movements contained many points, the program of our 
National Socialist Women's movement has in reality but one sin¬ 
gle point, and that point is the child, that tiny creature which must 
be born and grow strong and which alone gives meaning to the 
whole life-struggle. 



A Nazi poster praises a "healthy family, 
healthy children," Nazi propaganda 
promoted the importance of Aryan 
Germans marrying those with geneti¬ 
cally "sound" family backgrounds. 


Training Aryans for the Future 


The Hitler Youth organization was one of the Nazis' most 
important instruments for indoctrinating the next genera¬ 
tion of Aryan Germans in the values of the new racial com¬ 
munity. Alfons Heck joined a Hitler Youth organization in 
1938 at age ten. In his 1988 memoir he describes the effects 
the Hitler Youth activities had on the young recruits. 


All these [physical] activities were designed to make us fit accord¬ 
ing to our motto: swift as greyhounds, tough as leather and hard 
as the steel of Krupp. In that, the Hitler Youth succeeded... Our 
prewar activities resembled those of the Boy Scouts, but with 
much more emphasis on discipline and political indoctrination. 


Krupp 

A major German armaments 
manufacturer 







90 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


An ideal Aryan mother displays her 
eight children. For this service to the 
"racial communityshe was awarded 
the Mothers Cross , which she wears 
around her neck. Women received a 
bronze cross for four children, silver for 
six, and gold for eight or more. 



The paraphernalia, the parades, the flags and symbols, the soul- 
stirring music and the pomp and mysticism were very close in feel¬ 
ing to religious rituals. At the induction ceremony, my spine tin¬ 
gled in the conviction that I now belonged to something both 
majestic and threatened by bitter enemies. It was Deutschland 
[Germany].... As the final act of the induction ceremony, we 
were handed the dagger with the Swastika inlaid in the handle 
and the inscription "Blood and Honor" on its blade.... I accepted 
the two basic tenets of the Nazi creed: belief in the innate superi¬ 
ority of the Germanic-Nordic race, and the conviction that total 
submission to Germany and to the Fiihrer was our first duty. 


Melita Maschmann became an important leader in the Nazi 
girls' youth organization. The publication of her memoir in 
Germany in the early 1960s represented one of the first 
attempts by a German woman to come to terms publicly 
with her involvement in the Nazi regime. 


Whenever 1 probe the reasons which drew me to join the Hitler 
Youth, I always come up against this one: I wanted to escape from 






THE RACIAL STATE 


91 


my childish, narrow life and I wanted to attach myself to some¬ 
thing that was great and fundamental. This longing I shared with 
countless others of my contemporaries... 

1 believed the National Socialists when they promised to do 
away with unemployment and with it the poverty of six million 
people. I believed them when they said they would reunite the 
German nation, which had split into more than forty political par¬ 
ties, and overcome the consequences of the dictated peace of 
Versailles. And if my faith could only be based on hope in January 
1933, it seemed soon enough to have deeds to point to. 

... as my parents would not allow me to become a member of 
the Hitler Youth I joined secretly... I made up for what my new 
comrades had achieved before 1933, when it had cost personal 
sacrifices to belong to the National Socialist Youth. But.. .what 
now awaited me was a bitter disappointment, the extent of which 
1 dared not admit to myself. The evening meetings for which we 
met in a dark and grimy cellar were fatally lacking in interest. 

The time was passed in paying subscriptions, drawing up 
countless lists and swotting up [learning] the words of songs, the 
linguistic poverty of which 1 was unable to ignore, although 1 
made a great effort to do so. Discussions on political texts from, 
say, Mein Kampj quickly ended in general silence...! remember 
with more pleasure the weekend outings, with hikes, sports, 
campfires and youth hostelling. Occasionally there would be 
'field exercises'' with neighbouring groups. If there was any rival¬ 
ry between them the game often degenerated into a first class 
brawl. What kind of a picture these girls fighting over a flag would 
have presented to an outsider I prefer not to imagine. 

But for me, not even the outings made up for the tedium of the 
remaining "duties." In my group I was the only girl attending a sec¬ 
ondary school. The others were shop girls, office workers, dress¬ 
makers and servant girls. So my desire to be accepted into the 
community of "working youth" had been fulfilled. The fact that 
this fulfilment was a bitter disappointment I explained to myself 
thus: these girls came from the lower middle class and regarded 
the "wellborn daughters" I was trying to escape from with envy... 

My secret entry into the Hitler Youth dated from March 1, 
1933, and all the leading positions were occupied by the so called 
"Old Guard."... They were sometimes painfully coarse and primi¬ 
tive... It was then that I first consciously said to myself: Party 
leaders can make mistakes like everyone else,- perhaps there are 
also rogues and charlatans amongst them who have wormed their 
way into office because they are hungry for power... If they 


A typical Hitler Youth poster encourages 
hoys to join the organization • "Youth 
serves the Fiihrer—All ten-year-olds 
should go into the Hitler Youth." Hitler 
Youth membership became obligatory 
for boys in i936. 





92 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


dream up such shameless lies, the people who are not well enough 
educated to be able to judge for themselves will fall for their non¬ 
sense. Anyone who observes this should not be silent about it. But 
one also has no right to turn ones back on the Party on account 
of such disillusionments. Gradually the spirit of truth will prevail 
over the lies... I always returned to the hope that within a few 
generations we should succeed in educating every German to be 
a decent National Socialist. I wanted to share in the task of this 
educational work. For this reason 1 stayed in the Hitler Youth. I 
wanted to help create the Volksgemeinscbaft [racial community] in 
which people would live together as in one big family. 

The indoctrination of young Germans did not take place only 
in the Hitler Youth. Nazi ideology also permeated the regular 
school curriculum, as these test questions in mathematics 
textbooks demonstrate. 

Question 95: The construction of a lunatic asylum costs 6 million 
RM [Reichsmarks]. How many houses at 15,000 Rivl each could 
have been built for that amount? 

Question 97: To keep a mentally ill person costs approx. 4 RM per 
day, a cripple 5.50 RM, a criminal 3.50 RM. Many civil servants 
receive only 4 RM per day, white collar employees barely 3.50 
RM, unskilled workers not even 2 RM per head for their fami- 



A teacher gives her class the Hitler 
salute. Her students have learned early 
in life to return this Hitler greeting. 





THE RACIAL STATE 


95 


lies,... Illustrate these figures with a diagram. —According to 
conservative estimates, there are 300,000 mentally ill, epileptics 
etc, in care... How much do these people cost to keep in total, at 
a cost of 4 RM per head?... How many marriage loans at 1000 
RM each... could be granted from this money? 

...A modern night bomber can carry 1,800 incendiaries. How 
long (in kilometres) is the path along which it can distribute these 
bombs if it drops a bomb every second at a speed of 250 km per 
hour? How far apart are the craters from one another... ? How 
many kilometres can 10 such planes set alight if they fly 50 metres 
apart from one another? How many fires are caused if 1/3 of the 
bombs hit their targets and of these 1/3 ignite? 

The SS and the Concentration 
Camp System _ 

For those who could not fit, or did not want to fit into Hitler's 
new racial state there were the concentration camps. Hein¬ 
rich Himmler made the concentration camp system into the 
foundation of an SS empire by tirelessly persecuting and 
incarcerating an ever growing list of Nazi Germany's racial, 
biological, and political enemies including Socialists and 
Communists, Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, gay men, 
prostitutes, the homeless, beggars, and other "antisocial ele¬ 
ments." Himmler constructed a terrifying police state con¬ 
sisting of the Gestapo, the SD ( Sicherheitsdienst , meaning 
"security service," originally the internal party security 
force), and concentration camps into which tens of thou¬ 
sands of victims were thrown and from which many never 
emerged alive. In a speech given to army soldiers in January 
1937, Himmler explained the role of concentration camps. 

It would be extremely instructive for everyone... to inspect such 
a concentration camp. Once they have seen it, they are con¬ 
vinced of the fact that no one had been sent there unjustly,- that 
it is the offal [garbage] of criminals and freaks. No better demon¬ 
stration of the laws of inheritance and race... exists than such a 
concentration camp. There you can find people with hydro¬ 
cephalus, people who are cross-eyed, deformed, half-Jewish, and 
a number of racially inferior subjects. All that is assembled there. 
Of course we distinguish between those inmates who are only 
there for a few months for the purpose of education, and those 
who are to stay for a very long time. On the whole, education 


Marriage Loans 

T o encourage racially valuable” German 
couples to marry and have children, the 
Nazis introduced marriage loans to help new¬ 
lyweds acquire the basic items they needed to 
set up a new household. In 1939, 42 percent 
of all couples who married received a marriage 
loan. But there is little evidence that the mar¬ 
riage loan scheme significantly raised the mar¬ 
riage rate or the birth rate. 


hydrocephalus 

A condition in which fluid 
accumulates in the brain cavity 
resulting in atrophy of the 
brain 



A i945 map of Germany shows the 
prisons , concentration camps , and work 
camps that spread across the German 
landscape after the Nazis came to power. 



HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


consists of discipline, never of any kind of instruction on an ide¬ 
ological basis, for the prisoners have, for the most part, slave-like 
souls,' and only very few people of real character can be found 
there... The discipline thus squeezes order out of them. The 
order begins with these people living in clean barracks. Such a 
thing can really only be accomplished by us Germans,- hardly 
another nation would be as humane as we are.... The people are 
taught to wash themselves twice daily, and to use a toothbrush 
with which most of them have been unfamiliar,.. It is... neces¬ 
sary to keep the number of such guards for concentration 
camps—there are 3,500 men currently in Germany—at a rela¬ 
tively high level, for no form of service is as exacting and strenu¬ 
ous for troops as the guarding of crooks and criminals.. 

In case of war, it must become clear to us that a considerable 
number of unreliable persons will have to be put here if we are to 





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THE RACIAL STATE 


95 


assure ourselves of the absence of highly disagreeable develop¬ 
ments in case of war. 

The prisoner guards were formerly members of the general SS. 
We gradually collected them into the so-called Deaths Head 
Units... In such camps there are two or three control towers, 
manned day and night with fully loaded machine guns, so that any 
attempt at a general uprising—a possibility for which we must 
always be prepared—can be immediately suppressed. The entire 
camp can be strafed from three towers... 

We must clearly recognize that an opponent in war is an oppo¬ 
nent not only in a military but also in an ideological sense. When 
1 speak here of opponents, I obviously mean our natural opponent, 
international Bolshevism [communism]... This Bolshevism, of 
course, has its supreme citadel in Russia. But this does not mean 
that there is danger of Bolshevist attack from Russia only One 
must always reckon with this danger from wherever this Jewish 
Bolshevism has gained decisive influence for itself... 

Let us all clearly realize that the next decades... signify a fight 
of extermination of the above-mentioned subhuman opponents 
in the whole world who fight Germany, as the nuclear people of 
the Northern race,* Germany, as nucleus of the German people,- 
Germany, as bearer of the culture of mankind. They signify the 
existence or nonexistence of the white race of which we are 
the leading people. 

Lina Haag and her husband were members of the German 
Communist Party who were arrested by the Nazis in 1933. 

She was sent to a series of prisons and then, finally, to the 
Lichtenberg concentration camp for women. In 1947, she 
published a memoir describing her experiences. 

We are lined up in one of the courtyards. About thirty women: 
political prisoners, Jews, criminals, prostitutes, and Jehovah's 
Witnesses. Female guards from the SS circle us like gray wolves. I 
see this new ideal type of German woman for the first time. Some 
have blank faces and some have brutal looks, but they all have the 
same mean expression around their mouths. They pace back and 
forth with long strides and fluttering gray capes, their command¬ 
ing voices ring shrilly across the court, and the large wolfhounds 
with them strain threateningly at their leashes... 

1 always thought that after two years of solitary confinement 
nothing more in this world could frighten me, but I was wrong. 1 
am terribly afraid of the beatings, of the dark cells in which 


Concentration Camp Badges 


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T he badges that inmates were forced to 
wear made it easy for the SS guards, and 
also for the other inmates, to see where a par¬ 
ticular person fit into the (increasingly racial) 
hierarchy of the concentration camps. For 
example, criminals w 1 green inverted trian¬ 
gles, political prisoners wore red ones, "aso- 
cials" (a broad category including gypsies, 
homeless people, and prostitutes) wore black 
triangles. Gay men were identified by pink tri¬ 
angles and Jehovah's Witnesses (persecuted 
because their religion prevented them from 
serving in the army or taking an oath to 
Hitler) by purple ones. Jews wore the yellow 
Jewish star. How high a prisoner stood in the 
camp hierarchy might mean the difference 
between life and death. In the absurd racial 
worldview of the SS, serious criminals, such as 
murderers, who were nonetheless "racially 
German" ranked higher than Jews or Gypsies. 
Aryan criminals were given positions of 
responsibility in the camps as the bosses of 
other inmates. 




96 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


An aerial view of Dachau 
concentration camp taken 
during the war shows how 
large this installation had 
become, The Nazis increased 
the numbers of orderly rows 
oj barracks to accommodate 
the ever-expanding number of 
their real and imagined polit¬ 
ical and racial enemies. 



women die so quickly, and of the dreaded chambers in which pris¬ 
oners are interrogated by Gestapo officials... What cannot be 
found in this hellish place! Fear is torment enough/ torment 
enough is the certainty that these things will happen to us one 
day. It is absolutely impossible to be here for years without disas¬ 
ter striking one day.,. One day it will come. Either through the 
denunciation of a 'comrade/' or because of the guard, or because 
a shoe string was not properly tied, or because the work wasn't 
adequate, or because of fishing a potato or bread crust out of the 
pigsty... Anyone who gets out of here is granted the gift of life... 

Not that we have no laws here. These are the moods of the 
camp commandant, the orders that he shouts across the prison 
yard. He has the revolver and the power over life and death. 
When he screams, everyone has to scramble, even the guards and 
all the she-wolves too, the dogs and us. When he strides across 
the courtyard, when he marches by the lines of fear and misery, 
hundreds of pairs of hate-filled eyes stare after him. A veritable 
cloud of hate envelops him. It almost seems to me as if he needs 
this hate as much as the air he breathes... 


THE RACIAL STATE 


97 


It is incomprehensible to us that there are so many sadists. Are 
they really sadists, criminals by nature, murderers? 1 don't think 
so... They are just respectable petty bourgeois conformists. Only 
they happen to be employed not in the tax office, but in the police 
office. They happen not to be municipal clerks, or meat packers, 
or office assistants, or construction workers, or accountants, but 
are instead Gestapo employees and SS men. They do not distin¬ 
guish between good and evil, they simply do what they are 
ordered to do. They are not ordered to distinguish between good 
and evil, or between right and wrong, but to rid the state of ene¬ 
mies and destroy them. They do this with the same stubborn 
pedantry, the same German industriousness, and the same German 
thoroughness with which they would otherwise check tax returns 
or write minutes or butcher pigs. They whip a defenseless woman 
tied to a post with matter-of-fact earnestness and conscientious¬ 
ness, fully convinced that in so doing they are serving the state or 
their Ftihrer, which is the same to them... They are not born 
sadists, nor professional criminals, nor impassioned murderers, but 
just small-minded middle-class conformists. Like everyone else. 
The same talent for organization that works on the outside to 
improve the people's physical fitness with goose-stepping and vit¬ 
amin drops drives the mortality rates here in the concentration 
camps ever higher. 


If a prisoner attempts to escape, he 
is to he shot without warning.... 
If a unit of prisoners mutinies or 
revolts, it is to he shot at by all 
supervising guards. Warning 
shots are forbidden on principle. 

—SS Service Regulations 
for Prisoner Escorts and 

Guards, 1933 






Frightened prisoners line up in 
Sacbsenbausen concentration 
camp , north of Berlin, in 
1938 . The Nazis built 
Sachsenhausen as a model for 
other concentration camps. 
Here they trained such men as 
Rudolf Hoss, commandant of 
the notorious Nazi death 
camp Auschwitz. 



















99 


Chapter Five 

Hitler's War 


A woman in the Sudeteniand, the 
western border region oj 
Czechoslovakia, weeps while she 
gives the Hitler salute to the German 
troops marching into her country in 
1938. British and French leaders 
hoped that giving Hitler this ethnic 
German region would ensure peace. 
Instead, Hitler saw this concession 
as a sign of weakness, and in spring 
of 1939 he invaded the rest of 
Czechoslovakia. 


A fter he came to power, Hitler tore up the Versailles Treaty 
and made it clear to the world that the Third Reich had no 
intention of remaining a second-rate power. In 1935, he 
reintroduced universal military service to build up a new, 
large conscript army. In 1936, he sent troops into the Rhineland, even 
though this western border region was to remain a demilitarized zone, 
according to the settlement reached following World War I. In 1938, 
Hitler annexed Austria. The British and the French did nothing. 
Haunted by memories of the carnage of the First World War, they 
were not willing to risk a second. To avoid war, the British and the 
French were even prepared to make Czechoslovakia give Hitler the 
western border zone called the Sudeteniand when he claimed in 1938 
that the Czechs were oppressing ethnic Germans who lived there. In 
the spring of 1939, Hitlers new army occupied the rest of 
Czechoslovakia. This was Hitler's last bloodless victory. 

Germans were impressed by Hitler's foreign policy successes. But, 
like the British and the French, they, too, were terrified by the idea of 
repeating World War I. In Poland, Hitlers army showed, however, that 
there was an alternative to the enormously destructive and futile trench 
warfare of 1914 to 1918. Hitlers new type of highly mobile, mecha¬ 
nized "lightning warfare" (blitzkrieg) defeated Poland in a matter of 
weeks. Leading the assault, Hitler's modern airforce (luftwaffe) attacked 
Polish planes while they were still on the ground, crippled communi¬ 
cations, and bombed troop formations and civilian targets, such as 
the capital city of Warsaw. Armored divisions of tanks (Panzers) led the 
ground attack, providing a moving shield of steel behind which motor¬ 
ized infantry in trucks could follow and secure the areas overrun by the 
tanks. This new formula gave the Germans quick, cheap victories. The 
Nazis attacked Poland on September 4, 1939, and were able to declare 
victory on October 6. Some 200,000 Poles were reported as killed, 
wounded, or missing and the Germans took 900,000 prisoners but 
German casualties were just 45,000 killed, wounded, or missing. 



100 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


A map of German military action 
between 1939 and 194 2 illustrates 
the success of Hitler s Blitzkrieg in 
the early years of the war. However, 
success quickly turned to failure as 
German military power was fatally 
overextended in the invasion oj the 
Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. 


The campaign against France in the spring and summer of 1940 
was the real test of blitzkrieg. It passed with flying colors. After 
successfully invading Denmark and Norway in April, Hitlers army 
(Wehrmacht) turned west against France, Britain, Holland, and 
Belgium in May of 1940. The Western Allies had more tanks and 
men but the Germans were more experienced in the new type of 
lightning warfare. By the end of June 1940, the German armies had 
overrun northern France and the French were forced to sign a 
humiliating armistice. The British Army, though escaping across 
the Ghannel back to England with 338,000 men, was forced to 
abandon virtually all of its equipment on the beaches of Dunkirk, 
France. The Germans were ecstatic. In less than two months, Hitler 
had achieved what the imperial kaisers army had never managed 
despite more than four years of bitter, costly trench warfare—the 
defeat and humiliation of France and the occupation of Paris. 

Yet, Britain was still in the war. In July 1940, Hitler gave the 
order to prepare an invasion, Operation Sea Lion. Yet, he was not 
prepared to risk his ships, men, and military equipment in a treach¬ 
erous crossing of the English Channel, which separates Britain 
from France, without first gaining air superiority. Hitler therefore 
gave the order to Hermann Goering, chief of the German 






HITLER'S WAR 


101 


Luftwaffe, to destroy Britain's air power by bombing Royal Air 
Force (RAF) airfields in the south of England as well as British war 
industries. In September 1940, German air raids began to target 
London and other British cities. This German air offensive killed 
forty thousand civilians but it also took the lives of some two thou¬ 
sand German airmen. The Germans lost more than 2,200 aircraft. 
Hitlers air force was unable to destroy British air defenses so that a 
German cross-Channel invasion of the British Isles had to be put 
on hold indefinitely. Hitler then turned to the Soviet Union. 

Racial War and War of Plunder 


The German war against Poland quickly revealed the brutal 
racism of the Nazi regime. In a memorandum to Hitler dated 
May 25, 1940, Heinrich Himmler explained what the Nazi 
racial empire in the East would mean for the subject peoples. 

For the non-German population of the East there must be no high¬ 
er school than the four-grade elementary school. The sole goal of 
this school is to be simple arithmetic—[being able to count] up to 
five hundred at the most; writing of ones name,- the doctrine that 
it is a divine law to obey the Germans and to be honest, industri¬ 
ous, and good. I don't think that reading is necessary. Apart from 
this school there are to be no schools at all in the East.... 

The population will, as a people of laborers without leaders, be 
at our disposal and will furnish Germany annually with migrant 
workers and with workers for special tasks (roads, quarries, build¬ 
ings) . . . They will, under the strict, consistent, and just leadership 
of the German people, be called upon to help work on its ever¬ 
lasting cultural tasks and its buildings and perhaps, as far as the 
amount of heavy work is concerned, will be the ones who make 
the realization of these tasks possible. 



The Stuka dive bombers were an 
essential element of the new Blitzkrieg. 
To make these attacks even more 
frightening, the Stukas were eguipped 
with air-activated sirens that emitted 
a shrill sound as the plane dropped 
down on its target. 


In Western Europe, the occupying German forces presented a 
quite different face. In France, the Germans were even pre¬ 
pared to "collaborate" with a new French government set up 
in the southern unoccupied zone in the resort town of Vichy 
under the leadership of the First World War military leader 
and national hero Marshal Petain. Still, the Nazis did force 
the French to deliver massive amounts of food and war 
materiel. A report published after the war listed the percent¬ 
ages of annual industrial and agricultural production that 
France was required to deliver to Germany. 


Divided and Conquered 

T he General Government was one of two 
parts of the western half of Poland that 
the Germans conquered and occupied between 
1939 and 1941 under the terms of their non- 
aggression agreement with the Soviet Union. 
The General Government was ruled directly 
by the Germans but not annexed into the 
Reich. The westernmost region, the Warthegau, 
on Germany's eastern border, was incorporated 
directly into the new expanded Germany. 






102 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


A German poster tells French citizens 
to trust German soldiers. It presents a 
picture oj a smiling German caring for 
children "abandoned” by their parents 
in the rush to escape the invading 
German armies. 



abandonn^es. 



All SOLDAT ALLEMANDl 


Coal, 29 per cent,- electric power, 22 per cent,- petroleum and 
motor fuel, 80 per cent,- iron ore, 74 per cent; steel products, 
crude and half-finished, 51 per cent; copper, 75 per cent,- lead, 43 
per cent; zinc, 38 per cent,- tin, 67 per cent,- nickel 64 per cent,- 
mercury, 50 per cent; platinum, 76 per cent; bauxite, 40 per cent,- 
aluminium, 75 per cent,- magnesium, 100 per cent; sulphur car¬ 
bonate, 80 per cent; industrial soap, 67 per cent; vegetable oil, 40 
per cent; carbosol [a chemical used for degreasing and cleaning], 
100 per cent; rubber, 38 per cent; paper and cardboard, 16 per 
cent,- wool, 59 per cent,- cotton, 53 per cent,- flax, 65 per cent; 
leather 67 per cent; cement 55 per cent,- lime, 20 per cent,- ace¬ 
tone, 2 1 per cent. 

Levies of manufactured goods and the products of the mining 
industry: 

Automobile construction, 70 per cent; electrical and radio con¬ 
struction, 45 per cent; industrial precision parts, 100 per cent; heavy 
castings, 100 per cent; foundries, 46 per cent,* chemical industries, 
34 per cent,* rubber industry, 60 per cent,* paint and varnish, 60 per 
cent; perfume, 33 percent,- wool industry, 28 per cent; cotton weav¬ 
ing, 15 per cent,* flax and cotton weaving, 12 per cent; industrial 
hides, 20 per cent,- buildings and public works, 75 per cent; wood 
work and furniture, 50 per cent,- lime and cement, 68 per cent; naval 
construction, 79 per cent; aeronautic construction, 90 per cent. 

The Battle of Britain 


By the summer of 1940, Hitler's only unconquered opponent 
was Britain. He hoped to pave the way for an attack by weak¬ 
ening British air power. A British illustrated chronicle of the 
Battle of Britain published in 1940 offered its explanation of 
why Hermann Goering's bombing strategy failed. 

The air offensive against Britain started in full force on 8 August. 
From then until the 19th when there was a temporary lull, 
bombers came over almost continuously, attacking aerodromes, 
dockyards, and munition works. High explosive and incendiary 
bombs were released over military and non-military objectives, 
but the damage done by the raiders, hopelessly outclassed by the 
British fighters and harried by a death-dealing barrage of anti-air¬ 
craft fire, was out of all proportion to the losses they suf¬ 
fered. . .The phenomenal successes of the British fighter pilots in 
their combats with the Nazi raiders were due in large measure to 




their unbounded faith in their 
machines. Both the "Hurricane" and 
the "Spitfire" fighters proved them¬ 
selves time and time again to be 
faster and more manoeuvrable than 
their German counterparts, besides 
possessing a more powerful and 
more devastating armament in their 
eight machine guns. In spite of their 
best efforts the Messerschmidts 
escorting the German bombers 
failed to keep their more nimble 
opponents at bay or to prevent 
them from taking a terrible toll of 
their bomber formations... The 
accumulation of scrap material from 



planes shot down in Britain became 

almost embarrassing to the authorities, and a central dump . . . was 
established where the useful material was sorted out for conver¬ 
sion in due course into new British planes. 

Goering argued that air raids on population centers would 
disrupt British war industry and destroy the British will to 
fight. The attacks on London and other British cities did 
neither. The American journalist Edward R. Murrow, who 
was stationed in London, described the reaction of London¬ 
ers to the German air attacks in a radio broadcast on Septem¬ 
ber 10,1940. 

We are told today that the Germans believe that Londoners... will 
rise up and demand a new government, one that will make peace 
with Germany. Its more probable that they 11 rise up and murder a 
few German pilots who come down by parachute... 

The politicians who called this a "peoples war" were right... IVe 
seen some horrible sights in this city during these days and nights, 
but not once have I heard man, woman or child suggest that 
Britain should throw in her hand. These people are angry. How 
much they can stand, I dorit know. The strain is very great... After 
four days and nights of this air blitzkrieg, I think the people here 
are rapidly becoming veterans... 

Many people have already got over the panicky feeling that hit 
everyone in the nerve centers when they realized they were being 
bombed. Those people 1 talked to in long queues in front of the big 


Hitler examines a battle map with his 
generals at a planning session in 1940. 
Hitler insisted on taking complete control 
of military strategy and claiming the 
credit for the German army's successes. 





104 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


London civilians spend the night in the 
Elephant & Castle underground train 
station during a German bombing raid 
on the British capital in November 
4 940. Between 4 939 and 4 945, about 
40,000 British civilians were killed by 
German air raids. 



public shelters tonight were cheerful and somewhat resigned. They d 
been waiting in line for an hour or more, waiting for the shelters to 
open at the first wail of the sirens... they carried blankets to throw 
over the chairs in this public underground shelter... 

Of course, they don't like the situation, but most of them feel 
that even this underground existence is preferable to what they'd 
get under German domination. 

The Invasion of the Soviet Union 


Frustrated with his failure to knock Britain out of the war 
before he turned against the Soviet Union, Hitler was 
nonetheless impatient to begin his great "crusade" against 
Nazism's major ideological enemy, Russian Communism. He 
also needed the Soviet Union's enormous resources to con¬ 
tinue fighting against Britain. In the longer view. Hitler envi¬ 
sioned a vast new empire in the East that would make 







HITLER'S WAR 


Germany a dominant world power. Hitler described his plans 
for the occupied eastern territories to his inner circle during 
late 1941 and early 1942 at his East Prussian headquarters. 

Hitler's remarks were recorded by a member of his entourage. 

The essential thing, for the moment, is to conquer... Our role in 
Russia will be analogous to that of England in India... The Russian 
space is our India. Like the English, we shall rule this empire with 
a handful of men. It would be a mistake to claim to educate the 
native. All that we could give him would be a half-knowledge— 
just what's needed to conduct a revolution!... 

Our guiding principle must be that these people have but one 
justification for existence—to be of use to us economically. We 
must concentrate on extracting from these territories everything 
that it is possible to extract. As an incentive to them to deliver 
their agricultural produce to us, and to work in our mines and 
armament factories, we will open shops all over the country at 
which they will be able to purchase such manufactured articles as 
they want... In the field of public health there is no need whatso¬ 
ever to extend to the subject races the benefits of our own knowl¬ 
edge. This would result only in an enormous increase in local pop¬ 
ulations, and I absolutely forbid the organisation of any sort of 
hygiene or cleanliness crusades in these territories. Compulsory 
vaccination will be confined to Germans alone, and the doctors in 
the German colonies will be there solely for the purpose of look¬ 
ing after the German colonists. It is stupid to thrust happiness 
upon people against their wishes. 

Dentistry, too, should remain a closed 


A German tank move s deeper into the 
Soviet Union in October i94i. Hitler's 
Blitzkrieg (lightning war) used tanks , 
planes, and infantry in motorized units 
in coordinated and rapid strikes that 
Quickly defeated Poland and France. 


book to them... 

The most foolish mistake we could 
possibly make would be to allow the 
subject races to possess arms. History 
shows that all conquerors who have 
allowed their subject races to carry 
arms have prepared their own down¬ 
fall by so doing... So lets not have 
any native militia or police. German 
troops alone will bear the sole respon¬ 
sibility for the maintenance of law and 
order throughout the occupied Russian 
territories, and a system of military 
strong-points must be evolved to cover 
the entire occupied countiy. 




HITLER AND THE NAZIS 



DENMAJOtv 

!-l^y 


Seer _ 

5 


netrerland: 

G'HL(iJu\u-^ 


FRANCE 


ITALY 


OMANI A 


CROATIA 


B/acA Sea 


Mediterranean Sea 


400 mi 


600 km 


IORWAY 


FINLAND 

x 


,A Sweden, 


tarrb 

Sea 


Leningrad 


U.S.S.R. 


Moscow 


Berlin^ 


GERMANY 


Vienna* SLOVAKIA 


Sty! in grad 


SWITZERLAND 


BULGARIA 


Allied Military Offensive, 
1941-45 


■ Allied advances 


All Germans living in territories must remain in personal con¬ 
tact with these strong-points. The whole must be most carefully 
organised to conform with the long-term policy of German 
colonisation, and our colonising penetration must be constantly 
progressive, until it reaches the stage where our own colonists far 
outnumber the local inhabitants. 


The Nazis viewed people of Slavic ethnicity, including Poles 
and Russians, as inferior. Hitler's brutal, racist plan for occu¬ 
pying the Soviet Union was supported by some of his top 
military commanders as well as by many ordinary German 
soldiers. In October 1941, for example. Field Marshal Walther 
von Reichenau issued the following order to his troops. 


The most essential aim of war against the Jewish-Bolshevistic [the 
Nazis believed communism was a Jewish idea and that the Soviet 
Union was run by Jews.] system is a complete destruction of their 
means of power and the elimination of Asiatic influence from the 
European culture. In this connection the troops are facing tasks 
which exceed the one-sided routine of soldiering. The soldier in 
the eastern territories is not merely a fighter according to the rules 







of the art of war but also a bearer of ruthless national ideology and 
the avenger of bestialities which have been inflicted upon German 
and racially related nations... 

The combatting of the enemy behind the front line is still not 
being taken seriously enough. Treacherous, cruel partisans [irregu¬ 
lar fighters operating behind German lines] are still being made 
prisoners of war and guerilla fighters dressed partly in uniforms or 
plain clothes and vagabonds are still being treated as proper sol¬ 
diers, and sent to prisoner-of-war camps... The feeding of the 
natives and of prisoners of war who are not working for the Armed 
Forces from Army kitchens is an equally misunderstood humanitar¬ 
ian act as is the giving of cigarettes and bread... When retreating, 
the Soviets have often set buildings on fire. The troops should be 
interested in extinguishing of fires only as far as it is necessary to 
secure sufficient numbers of billets. Otherwise the disappearance of 
symbols of the former bolshevistic rule even in the form of build¬ 
ings is part of the struggle of destruction. Neither historic nor artistic 
considerations are of any importance in the eastern territories. 

Karl X. was a member of the SS who had served in France and 
was then sent to Russia where he was killed in action in 1943. 

He wrote a letter home in the fall of 1941. 

The East, September 9th, '41 
My Dear Ones, 

After a long delay, I am finally able to write you again... It was a 
joyful trip from Wednesday to Sunday. To me it felt like a holiday, 
the trip went like a fever chart, from the capital to the cornfields 
of Prussia, from there up once more to the capital of Litauen 
[Lithuania] and then southeast, to the capital of White Russia, 
which is now German territory. A beautiful 


German soldiers advance into Russia 
in i94if the soldier on the right is 
about to throw a granade. To crush 
the Soviet Union , Hitler assembled a 
massive force of 3.2 million German 
troops Germany's allies contributed 
about 800,000 additional men. By 
4 945 , millions of Germans had been 
killed or wounded on this bloody 
Eastern Front or had disappeared into 
Soviet prisoner-of-war camps. 


environment, in the middle of woods in a 
former tank camp. But the roads over 
here—well 1 can't describe them, but the 
field paths back home are made of gold by 
comparison. I saw one good road, and 
drove on it for a while, a motorway, the 
only one in the Soviet Union from Minsk 
to Moscow. And then the Russian econo¬ 
my—1 have had a peek into a few of the 
houses. 1 can only say, I would feel better in 
one of our chicken coops. Up to now it is a 
good-natured group here, three of us sleep 



German soldiers photograph two 
Soviet citizens executed by the Germans 
for alleged partisan activity, such as 
sabotaging German supplies. Germans 
committed a great number of atrocities 
and war crimes in the Soviet Union. 



together in one room. We have closets and a bed, a furnace, even 
electric lights. And, lastly, 1 want to congratulate father on his 
birthday. I couldn't do it before, because it was not decided yet if 
we could keep our old field post numbers. 

And now for today, best wishes from Karl 
Warm greetings to little Hans. 

The German military authorities in the East were not particu¬ 
larly concerned about the fate of the millions of Soviet pris¬ 
oners of war (POWs) captured as the German Army rolled 
toward Moscow. Between June 1941 and February 1942 
alone, some two million captured Russian soldiers died of 
starvation, disease, and mistreatment in German POW camps 
in Poland or concentration camps in Germany. An unidenti¬ 
fied eyewitness described conditions in a prisoners' camp in 
Poland. This testimony was published in a 1946 Polish report 
on German crimes in Poland. 

The camp consists of four huts, situated in the fields near the vil¬ 
lage, so that everything that happens there can be observed by the 
neighbours. Train-loads of prisoners which arrived here had taken 
over a fortnight to reach the new camp and were without food or 
water. Each wagon when opened contained scores of dead bodies. 
The sick who could not move were thrown out. They were 





HITLER'S WAR 


109 


ordered to sit down on the ground near the camp and were shot 
by the S.S.-men before the eyes of the rest. The camp contains 
about 2,500 prisoners. The average daily death-rate is about 50. 
The dead bodies are thrown out on to the fields and sprinkled 
with lime, often lying some days after that unburied.... The pris¬ 
oners received 1/4 kg of bread made of horse-chestnut flour and 
potato-skins, and soup made of rotten cabbage. 

The End of Blitzkrieg _ 


During the first few weeks of the Russian campaign, the Ger¬ 
mans made incredible gains. By the end of July 1941, the 
Wehrmacht had captured more than one million prisoners, 
occupied thousands of square miles of territory, and 
destroyed 1,500 Soviet tanks. Yet the Germans were not able 
to annihilate the Soviet Army and achieve a decisive victory. 

In a diary entry written in August, the German general Franz 
Haider explained why. 

The whole situation makes it increasingly plain that we have 
underestimated the Russian colossus, who consistently prepared 
for war with that utterly ruthless determination so characteristic of 
totalitarian States.. .At the outset of the war we reckoned with 
about 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360. 
These divisions indeed are not armed and equipped according to 
our standards, and their tactical leadership is often poor. But there 
they are, and if we smash a dozen of them, the Russians simply put 
up another dozen. The time factor favors them, as they are near 
their own resources, whereas we are moving farther and farther 
away from ours. And so our troops, sprawled over an immense 
front line, without any depth, are subjected to the enemy's inces¬ 
sant attacks. Sometimes these are successful, because in these 
enormous spaces too many gaps have to be left open. 


The deeper the Germans went into Russia, the greater their 
problems of supply and reinforcement. Soon, the weather 
also became an enemy. On December 5, 1941, as German 
front-line soldiers advanced into the northern Moscow sub¬ 
urbs, the Russians launched a massive counteroffensive. Two 
days later, the commander-in-chief of Army Group Center 
(there were two other Army Groups: North and South), Fedor 
von Bock made a report that summarized the obstacles fac¬ 
ing the German Army. 


Invading German soldiers in white 
winter uniforms move through a snow¬ 
laden Russian forest. German soldiers 
discovered that the bitter Russian winter 
could be as deadly an enemy as the 
Soviet Army. 








110 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


The anxiety of the German 
people about the Eastern Front is 
increasing. Deaths owing to 
freezing are an especially impor¬ 
tant factor in this connection. 

The number of cases of freezing 
revealed by transports from the 
Eastern Front back home is so 
enormous as to cause great indig¬ 
nation here and there.... Soldiers' 
mail, too, has a devastating 
effect. Words cannot describe 
what our soldiers are writing 
back home from the front. 

—Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's 
propaganda minister, 
in his diary, January 22, 1942 


Three things have led to the present crisis: 

1. The setting in of the autumn mud season. Troop movements 
and supplies were almost completely paralyzed by the mud- 
covered road... 

2. The failure of the railways. 

Weaknesses in the organization, a shortage of wagons, of loco¬ 
motives and of trained personnel—the inability of the locomo¬ 
tives and the equipment to withstand the Russian winter. 

3. The underestimation of the enemy's resistance and of his 
reserves of men and material. 

The Russians have understood how to increase our transport dif¬ 
ficulties by destroying almost all the bridges on the main lines and 
roads to such an extent that the front lacks the basic necessities of 
life and of fighting equipment. Ammunition, fuel, food, and win¬ 
ter clothing do not reach the front line... 

The Russians have managed in a surprisingly short time to 
reconstitute divisions which have been smashed, to bring new 
ones from Siberia, Iran, and the Caucasus up to the threatened 
front, and to replace the artillery which has been lost by numer¬ 
ous rocket launchers... By contrast, the strength of the German 
divisions has sunk to less than half as a result of the unbroken 
fighting and of the winter, which has arrived with full force,- the 
fighting strength of the tanks is even less. 

The Tide Turns 


On December 8, 1941, the United States declared war on 
Japan, a day after the Japanese had launched a surprise air 
and submarine attack on the U.S. Navy in its main Pacific 
base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Hitler already had made an 
alliance with Japan but this agreement did not require him 
to join the Japanese in their war against America. Neverthe¬ 
less, on December 11, Hitler declared war on the United 
States. In an official statement, the Nazis blamed the U.S. 
government for provoking the war. 


The Government of the United States having violated in the most 
flagrant manner and in ever-increasing measure all rules of neu¬ 
trality in favor of the adversaries of Germany and having contin¬ 
ually been guilty of the most severe provocations toward 
Germany ever since the outbreak of the European war, provoked 
by the British declaration of war against Germany on September 
3, 1939, has finally resorted to open military acts of aggression. 





HITLER'S WAR 


111 



On September 11, 1941, the President of the 
United States publicly declared that he had 
ordered the American Navy and Air Force to 
shoot on sight at any German war vessel. In his 
speech of October 27, 1941, he once more 
expressly affirmed that this order was in force. 

Acting under this order, vessels of the American 
Navy, since early September 1941, have system¬ 
atically attacked German naval forces. Thus, 

American destroyers... have opened fire on 
German submarines according to plan. The 
Secretary of the American Navy, Mr. Knox, him¬ 
self confirmed that American destroyers attacked 
German submarines... Although Germany on 
her part has strictly adhered to the rules of international law in her 
relations with the United States during every period of the present 
war, the Government of the United States from initial violations 
of neutrality has finally proceeded to open acts of war against 
Germany. The Government of the United States has thereby vir¬ 
tually created a state of war. 


A solemn Hitler announces the German 
declaration of war against the United 
States to the German Parliament on 
December it, t94i. US. entry into 
the European war, combined with 
Hitlers failure to defeat the Soviet 
Union, eventually led to the utter defeat 
of Nazi Germany. 


Hitler hoped that the Japanese would keep the United States 
occupied in the Pacific until he had defeated the Soviet Union. 
Direct U.S. military participation in the European war was 
indeed limited for some time to come. Nevertheless, Ameri¬ 
can involvement in the European conflict was vital. America 
sent large amounts of military equipment to both Britain 
and the Soviet Union. And with the joint U.S and British inva¬ 
sion of North Africa in November 1942, the Americans also 
began to participate in a series of military campaigns against 
the Nazis. These campaigns moved from North Africa to Italy, 
opening up a Southern Front that drained off significant 
German supplies of men and materiel. In a speech delivered 
in Berlin on September 10, 1943, Hitler insisted that Italy's 
recent surrender to the Allies would have no important 
effect on Germany's ability to win the war. 


The collapse of Italy... was not really due to Italy's inability to 
defend herself adequately or to the fact that the necessary German 
help was not forthcoming. Rather it was due to those Italians who 
caused the capitulation by their systematic sabotage... The Italian 
leaders have deserted their ally, the German Reich, and gone over 
to our common enemy. 




112 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 



An American war poster lists all of 
the places that American troops are 
fighting by 1942. The last three sites 
are in North Africa. Although 
American military efforts were at this 
time concentrated in the Pacific against 
the Japanese , the United States had 
begun to make an important contribu¬ 
tion to the fight against Hitler. 


... Italy's withdrawal [from the war]means little in a military 
sense because in reality the struggle in that country has really been 
carried on for months mainly by German forces. 

Now we can continue the struggle freed of all encumbrances... 
I believe unconditionally in success, a belief grounded in my own 
life and in the destiny of our people. 

In 1939 we were alone and isolated when we had to face the 
declarations of war. We acted in the belief that teaches us that 
heroic resistance is much better than any cowardly submission. 1 
declared as early as September t, 1939, in my speech to the 
Reichstag that the German people would be brought to their 
knees by neither time nor force of arms... 

We expect in just these times that the nation will fulfill its duty 
defiantly and with dogged determination in all spheres. It has 
every reason to have confidence in itself. The home front can look 
with pride upon its soldiers, who, with heroic sacrifice of their 
blood, perform their duties under the most difficult circumstances. 
The men at the front, too, who have endured under superhuman 
burdens through many weeks and months, must also remember 
the homeland, which today has also become a fighting front. 
Here old men, boys, mothers, women, and girls do their duty... 

Our future generations will one day express their gratitude in 
the knowledge that here a free and socially secure life has been won 
through the greatest sacrifice. I take pride that I am the leader of this 
nation and I am grateful to God for every hour he grants me so that 
through my work I can win the greatest struggle of our times. 

The measures we have taken for the protection of German 
interests in Italy are very hard indeed. Insofar as they affect Italy, 
they are being applied according to a preconceived plan and the 
results already have been good. 

... The fate of Italy is a lesson to us never, in the hour of 
gravest crisis and deep distress, to forsake the commandment of 
national honor but to stand steadfastly by our allies, and to do 
what duty commands. 

To a people which passes successfully through these trials 
ordained by Providence, the Almighty will in the end bestow the 
laurel wreath of victory. 

No matter what happens, this people must and will be German. 


The decisive military turning point on the Eastern Front 
came with the battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in his¬ 
tory, in the summer of 1943. Yet, the German defeat at the 
southern Russian city Stalingrad in the winter of 1943 was a 






HITLER'S WAR 


113 


crucial psychological rupture, as some of the following let¬ 
ters from German soldiers, flown out on the last plane from 
the besieged city reveal. In Stalingrad, 150,000 German sol¬ 
diers died, and the remaining 91,000 were taken prisoner by 
the Soviet Army. One soldier described the dead. 

You were supposed to die heroically, inspiringly, movingly, from 
inner conviction and for a great cause. But what is death in reality 
here? Here they croak, starve to death, freeze to death—-it's nothing 
but a biological fact like eating and drinking. They drop like flies,- 
nobody cares and nobody buries them. Without arms or legs and 
without eyes, with bellies torn open, they lie around everywhere. 

An officer wrote to his wife about the useless and unneces¬ 
sary suffering caused by Hitler's refusal to allow the German 
troops in Stalingrad to withdraw. 

I love you very much and you love me, so you will know the 
truth.... The truth is the knowledge that this is the grimmest of 
struggles in a hopeless situation. Misery, hunger, cold, renuncia¬ 
tion, doubt, despair and horrible death... what I wrote above is no 
complaint or lament but a statement of objective fact. 

1 cannot deny my share of personal guilt in all this.... I am not 
cowardly, only sad that 1 cannot give greater proof of courage 
than to die for this useless, not to say criminal, cause. 

Another soldier who had been a member of the Hitler Youth 
complained to his sister that the disaster of Stalingrad had 
made most of his comrades doubt Hitler's leadership. 

The Fiihrer made a firm promise to bail us out of here.,. and we 
believed it... all my life, at least eight years of it, I believed in the 
Fiihrer and his word. It is terrible how they doubt here, and 
shameful to listen to what they say... because they have the facts 
on their side. If what we were promised is not true, then Germany 
will be lost, for in that case no more promises can be kept. 

Slave Labor for the German 
War Effort 


After Stalingrad, German military and civilian authorities 
could no longer deny that the war on the Eastern Front was 
going to last much longer than they had originally expected. 





114 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


r 



A young man from occupied Russia 
works in a German war plant in 4 943. 
By the end of the war, the Nazis had 
broue/bt to Germany more than 7 mil¬ 
lion foreign laborers, most against their 
will. Without these men and women r 
Germany would have been compelled to 
end the war much earlier than t945. 


A "total war" effort would be required to beat the Russians 
and millions of workers would be needed to build tanks and 
planes. A report from a German mail censorship office in 
November 1942 describes how Soviet citizens were forcibly 
rounded up and deported to Germany as slave laborers. 

Men and women, including teenagers aged 15 and above, [are 
being] picked up on the street, at open-air markets and village cel¬ 
ebrations and then speeded away. The inhabitants, for that reason, 
are frightened, stay hidden inside, and avoid going out into pub¬ 
lic. According to the letters perused, the application of flogging as 
a punishment has been supplemented since about the beginning 
of October by the burning down of farmsteads or entire villages 
as a reprisal for failure to heed the orders given to the local town¬ 
ships for making manpower available. Implementation of this lat¬ 
ter measure has been reported from a whole series of localities. 

The racist attitudes of the German authorities and the belief 
that there was an endless supply of labor in the East from 
which to draw new recruits meant that forced laborers were 
treated very badly. A report filed in September 1944 by the 
Army Supreme Command, the leading military authority, 
after Hitler, described the conditions of Russian prisoner-of- 
war (POW) work gangs in German coal mines. 

1) POWs are flogged. 

2) POWs were forced to work standing in water without rubber 
boots. 

3) POWs were lacking a second blanket, even at the end of 
October 1943. 

4) Their quarters are frequently overcrowded, infested with ver¬ 
min, and a quiet nights sleep is by no means certain. 

5) POWs come with wet clothes from the pits and return to the 
pits with wet clothing, since there is no opportunity for dry¬ 
ing of clothing in their quarters. 

6) Hie examination to determine whether they are fit for work 
in the mines is very superficial. A civilian doctor, for example, 
examines up to 200 prisoners an hour as to their fitness for 
work. 

7) Extremely high incidence of accidents. Shifts frequently go 
down into the shaft without a German skilled workman pre¬ 
sent among the POWs. Regulations on accident prevention 
are posted only in the German language. 








8) Food is available in sufficient quantity but is frequently 
mediocre in quality. 

9) Sick persons are often not brought to the doctor promptly. 

10) Sick POWs still in need of care and treatment are released and 

sent back into the pits prematurely. 

Resistance and Invasion 


fn several of the countries occupied by the German Army, 
armed resistance to Hitler's war began to develop even 
before Stalingrad signaled the possibility of a German 
defeat. In Germany itself, the most significant resistance to 
Nazism during the war came not from Germans but the Russ¬ 
ian POWs inside the Reich. But even in the heartland of 
Nazism some Germans began to see that continuation of 
Hitler's war spelled disaster. A month after the Allied inva¬ 
sion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, a group of high-ranking 
officers and other members of the German elite actually 
tried, but failed, to assassinate Hitler. In 1943, a group of 
young students in Munich, known as the White Rose resis¬ 
tance circle, distributed illegal pamphlets, including this 
appeal to the German people. The circle was a non-violent 
resistance group whose main aim was to convince ordinary 
Germans to stop supporting the Nazi regime. 

A Call to All Germans! 

The war is approaching its destined end... in the East the 
armies are constantly in retreat and invasion is imminent in the 


Leading figures of the White Rose 
group, a student-run movement that 
advocated non-violent resistance to the 
Nazi regime. The members of this group 
paid with their lives after they were 
betrayed to the Gestapo. 




116 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


When you ride ALONE 
you ride with Hitler! 



An America rt poster appeals to civilians 
to economize on gasoline because it was 
urgently needed for the war effort. Allied 
victory in the Second World War 
depended heavily on the massive amounts 
of raw materials and manufactured 
goods supplied by the United States. 


West. Mobilization in the United States has not yet reached its 
climax, but already it exceeds anything that the world has ever 
seen. It has become a mathematical certainty that Hitler is leading 
the German people into the abyss. Hitler cannot win the war,- he 
can only prolong it. The guilt of Hitler and his minions has gone 
beyond all measure. Retribution comes closer and closer! But what 
are the German people doing? They will not see and will not lis¬ 
ten. Blindly they follow their seducers into ruin. Victory at any 
price! is inscribed on their banner. "I will fight to the last man/' 
says Hitler but in the meantime the war has already been lost. 

Germans! Do you and your children want to suffer the same 
fate that befell the Jews? Do you want to be judged by the same 
standards as your traducers? Are we to be forever the nation which 
is hated and rejected by all mankind? No. Dissociate yourselves 
from the National Socialist gangsterism. Prove by your deeds that 
you think otherwise.... Make the decision before it is too late! Do 
not believe the National Socialist propaganda which has driven the 
fear of Bolshevism into your bones. Do not believe that Germany s 
welfare is linked to the victory of National Socialism for good or 
ill. A criminal regime cannot achieve a German victory. Separate 
yourselves in time from everything connected with National Social¬ 
ism. In the aftermath a terrible but just judgment will be meted out 
to those who stayed in hiding, who were cowardly and hesitant. 

What can we learn from the outcome of this war-this war that 
never was a national war? 

The imperialist ideology of force, from whatever side it comes, 
must be shattered for all time. A one-sided Prussian militarism 
must never again be allowed to assume power. Only in large-scale 
cooperation among the nations of Europe can the ground be pre¬ 
pared for reconstruction.... The Germany of the future must be a 
federal state. At this juncture only a sound federal system can 
imbue a weakened Europe with a new life. The workers must be 
liberated from their condition of downtrodden slavery under 
National Socialism.... Every nation and each man have a right to 
the goods of the whole world! 

Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the protection of indi¬ 
vidual citizens from the arbitrary will of criminal regimes of vio¬ 
lence—these will be the bases of the New Europe. 

Support the resistance. Distribute the leaflets! 


The massive Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, 
put an end to Hitler's control of Western Europe. Less than a 
year later, on May 8, 1945, the war in Europe was over. As 








HITLER'S WAR 


117 


early as July 15,1944, slightly more than a month after the 
Allied invasion, one of Hitler's top generals. Field Marshal 
Erwin Rommel, wrote to Hitler that the German military 
position in France was desperate. 


The situation on the Normandy Front is becoming more difficult 
every day. 

As a result of the fierceness of the fighting, the extremely large 
amounts of materiel used by the enemy, particularly in terms of 
artillery and tanks, and the impact of the enemy air force which is 
in absolute control of the combat area, our own losses are so high 
that they seriously reduce the operational effectiveness of our 
divisions. Replacements from the homeland are few and, owing to 
the difficult transport situation, only reach the front after several 
weeks. Compared with the loss of approximately 97,000 men, 
including 2,160 officers and among them 28 generals and 354 
commanding officers, i.e. on average 2,500-3,000 men per day, we 
have so far received only 6,000 men. The losses of materiel by the 
troops in action are also extremely high and only a small amount 
can be replaced, e.g. out of 225 tanks only 17. 

The new divisions which have been sent are inexperienced in 
combat and, in view of the small amount of artillery and anti-tank 
weapons at their disposal, are in the long run incapable of success¬ 
fully repulsing major offensives which are preceded by several hours 
of artillery bombardment and heavy air attacks. As has been demon¬ 
strated by the battles so far, even the bravest troops are destroyed 
piecemeal by the amount of materiel employed by the enemy. 

The supply situation is so difficult, because of the destruction 
of the railway network and the vulnerability of the roads to air 



Allied troops wade ashore in 
Normandy, France, on June 6, i944. 
The invasion of northern France, com¬ 
bined with the advance of the Soviet 
army into Poland and then into 
Germany itself, finally destroyed the 
Nazi war machine. 
















118 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


attack up to 150 kilometres behind the front, that only the most 
necessary supplies can be brought up and we have to economize 
carefully, especially on artillery and mortar ammunition. We can 
no longer send significant numbers of new troops to the 
Normandy front. The enemy front line units, on the other hand, 
receive new forces and supplies of war material every day. Our Air 
Force has no effect on the enemy supply lines. The pressure of the 
enemy is becoming greater and greater. 

In these circumstances, we must assume that the enemy will 
succeed in the foreseeable future—a fortnight to three weeks—in 
breaking through our own front line, above all, that held by the 
7th Army, and will go forward deep into France. The conse¬ 
quences will be incalculable. 

The Air War against Germany 


During the Second World War, the British and American air 
forces dropped some 2.7 million tons of bombs on German 
territory, mainly on German cities. Between July 25 and 
August 3,1943, three thousand British and American planes 
launched seven different attacks against just one city, the 
northern port city Hamburg, creating a massive firestorm. At 
least forty-two thousand people were killed. The police chief 
of Hamburg reported on these raids. 

Overall, the destruction is so devastating that, in the case of many 
people, there is literally nothing left of them. On the basis of a 
layer of ashes in a large air raid shelter, doctors could only provide 
a rough estimate of the number of people who died there, a figure 
of 250-300.. .The horrific scenes which occurred in the area of 
the firestorm are indescribable. Children were torn from the 
hands of their parents by the tornado and whirled into the flames. 
People who thought they had saved themselves collapsed in a few 
minutes in the overwhelmingly destructive force of the heat. 


A German who was a teenage boy when the 1943 Hamburg 
air raid took place described the injured and the dead in an 
oral history interview he gave in 1989. 


phosphorous canisters 

Incendiary devices containing 
a chemical element that catches 
fire easily 


When the phosphorous canisters hit the houses, this phosphorous 
stuff ran down the stairs and out into the street.... The people ran 
out of these houses like living torches, and the flames on their 
bodies were put out by whoever could help them. The badly 






119 


HITLER'S WAR 



burned had to be taken away in trucks or 
ambulances... the drivers had to be 
careful that the phosphorous didn't get 
under their tires—the rubber burned 
immediately... The local hospitals, were 
of course, quickly filled with burn vic¬ 
tims ... Most of the people died; it was 
impossible for so many injured to get 
the proper treatment. There was no 
option but to bury them in mass graves. 

We had to see to it that the corpses 
were removed as quickly as possible to 
prevent epidemics from spreading. The 
bodies were often so badly mutilated 
that it was impossible to identify them. 

Many of them had died under collapsed 
buildings. We dug out the ones we knew 
or suspected were still trapped in their 
cellars... Although we did all we could, 
many people suffocated from smoke inhalation, carbon monoxide 
poisoning. At one point I found a basement shelter that was full 
of smoke. The people sat totally still against the wall, no one 
made a peep. I thought my eyes were deceiving me, but they were 
all dead. 


German women dear rubble from 
bombed-out buildings in Berlin. By the 
end of the war, American and British 
bombs had destroyed large areas of 
every major German city. 


In a letter to her children who were not in Hamburg at the 
time, a middle-class woman living in the city described the 
results of the 1943 raids. 

All women and children had to be evacuated from the city within 
six hours. There was no gas, no electricity, not a drop of water... 
It is hard to imagine the panic and chaos. Each one for himself, 

only one idea: flight_No trains could leave from Hamburg 

because all the stations had been gutted, and so Harburg was the 
nearest. There were no trams, no underground, no rail-traffic to 
the suburbs. Most people loaded some belongings on carts, bicy¬ 
cles, prams or carried things on their backs and started on foot just 
to get away, to escape... During the night, the suburbs of Hamm, 
Hammerbrock, Rothenburgsort and Barmbeck had been almost 
razed to the ground. People who had fled from collapsing bunkers 
and had got stuck in huge crowds in the streets had burning phos¬ 
phorus poured over them, rushed into the next air raid shelter and 
were shot in order not to spread the flames. 












Chapter Six 


The 

Holocaust 


Two starved inmates in the 
Nordhausen concentration camp 
liberated by American troops. 

When advancing American soldiers 
overran German concentration 
camps in the spring oj i945, they 
were shocked by the piles oj bodies 
they found and by the deplorable 
physical conditions oj the inmates 
who were still alive. American news¬ 
papers quickly published pictures 
such as this one, exposing millions 
oj American civilians to horrific 
images oj the Holocaust. 


W hen Soviet troops entered Poland and the British and 

Americans crossed the western German border, they 
encountered horrific scenes of mass death in German 
concentration camps. The piles of corpses that the 
Germans had not been able to burn made it very clear that during the 
war the Nazis had conducted an enormous campaign of mass murder 
claiming the lives of millions of Jews, Gypsies (Sinti and Roma), Poles, 
Russians, and other victims. 

By the time Germany went to war in 1939, German Jews were 
already socially dead. But the Nazis did not yet dare to annihilate 
physically all the Jews under their control. World War 11 allowed the 
Nazis to move to the final stage of their anti-Semitic policy—physi¬ 
cal extermination. Poland and the occupied areas of the Soviet Union 
now became bloody killing fields. When the German Army invaded 
the Soviet Union in 1941, death squads called Einsatzgruppen followed 
close behind the advancing troops, rounding up entire villages of Jews 
and shooting thousands of men, women, and children in cold blood. 
Although the Einsatzgruppen eventually murdered more than two mil¬ 
lion Jews, the Nazis began to search for more efficient ways of sys¬ 
tematically implementing their plan for mass murder. 

In September 1941, Zyklon B poison gas was tested on prisoners at 
the concentration camp Auschwitz. On December 8, 1941, the Nazis 
began the first mass gassings at the Chelmno extermination camp, in 
western Poland, where Jews were placed in mobile gas vans and dri¬ 
ven to a burial place while carbon monoxide from the engine exhaust 
was fed into the sealed rear compartment. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka 
II, and Lublin-Majdanek in Poland were also developed as extermina¬ 
tion centers. Jews were murdered by immediate gassing upon arrival 
or by 'extermination through work." Through a combination of mass 







122 

HITLER AND THE NAZIS 



FINLAND 

1,800 


NORWAY 

1,500 


SWEDEN 

6,500 


North 

Sea 


DENMARK 


IRELAND 

3,400 


Baltic 

Sea 


NETHERLANDS T A'. 

■4 160,000 C\d/ 

GF8EAT BRITAIN V^r - “ 
3 . 00,000 f> : ■ 

BELGIUM GERMANY 
™ 60,t>00 565,000 

LI XEMBOLROi -2- 

"■ 2,200 X_ 

FRANCE 
225,000 

SWITZERLAND 

i8,oo<£JX _ 

x - ITALY 

M 48,000 


357,0 00" 
AUSTRIA 

X^0,000 nungar 

44 5 .CKKI 


PORI i U \L 


BULGARIA 

50,000 


SPAIN 

4,000 


ALBANIA 


| 329,200 

Southern Europe 

766,600 

Northern & Western Europe 

1 , 644,200 

Central Europe 

6 , 760,000 

i Extern Ejxds 



Population in Millions. 

0 1 2 3 

4 S 6 7 e 9 


4M itij 


600 km 


At/anOt 

Ocean 




3. 
















TLRKFY 

io3!oo$T 56 Jj^ 0 


Mediterranean Sea 


F 


EUROPEAN JEWISH POPULATION 
DISTRIBUTION ABOUT 1933 


r /ith 


i ci ,n 




In 1933 most of Europe's Jewish popu¬ 
lation lived in Eastern Europe, and 
Poland had the largest number of 
Jewish citizens. The entire Jewish popu¬ 
lation of Europe was about 9.5 million, 
more than 60 percent of the world's 
Jewish population at the time. It has 
been estimated that by the time the war 
ended in May 4 945, the Nazis had 
murdered as many as 68 percent of all 
the Jews in Western and Eastern 
Europe, including the Soviet Union. 


shootings, gassings, and working Jews to death, the Nazis mur¬ 
dered between 4,194,200 and 5,721,00 Jewish citizens of some 
nineteen different European nations before they were stopped by 
defeat in the spring of 1945. 

The Nazis also deported Sinti and Roma families to camps in 
the East. Of the twenty-three thousand Roma sent to Auschwitz, 
at least nineteen thousand died as a result of disease, starvation, or 
execution. Before the war approximately one million Roma lived 
in Europe. The Nazis killed at least 220,000 of them. Thousands 
of homosexual men convicted under Paragraph 175 of the Nazi 
criminal code were imprisoned in concentration camps. Overwork, 
starvation, physical brutality, and murder ensured high death rates 
for gays in the camps. 


The First Steps toward Mass Murder 


As the German Army conquered large areas of Western and 
Eastern Europe, millions of European Jews came under Ger¬ 
man control. In Hitler's perverted view of the world, these 














THE HOLOCAUST 


123 


Jews were a deadly threat and had to be eliminated. In a 
speech to the German Reichstag in January 1939, Hitler fore¬ 
shadowed the coming genocide, the deliberate murder of an 
entire race of people or nation. 


In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have 
usually been ridiculed for it. During the time of my struggle for 
power it was in the first instance only the Jewish race that received 
my prophecies with laughter when I said that 1 would one day take 
over the leadership of the State, and with it that of the whole 
nation, and that I would then among other things settle the Jewish 
problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some 
time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. 

Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international 
Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plung¬ 
ing the nations once more into a world war, then the result will 
not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus 
the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the 
Jewish race in Europe! 

ADA-* 

"Aryan Germans," not Jews, were the first victims of 
the Nazis' wartime campaign to murder innocent 
civilians. Hitler ordered the killing of large numbers 


A letter signed by Hitler in September 
i939 authorizes the T4 program to 
murder Germans suffering from incurable 
physical and mental diseases or other 
conditions the Nazis considered to be 
hereditary. The Nazis hid their inten¬ 
tions behind the innocent-sounding label 
T4, the initials of the building in Berlin 
(Tiergartenstrasse 4) where Nazi officials 
administered the euthanasia program. 


of "biologically unworthy" Aryan Germans, starting 
with infants then moving on to adults. The Nazis 
called these murders euthanasia, which means mercy 


B 0 u b 1 « r unJ 
Dr. M*. B r * b d t 


killing, suggesting that they were putting the men¬ 
tally or physically disabled out of their misery. In 
reality, this was the cruel and cynical murder of peo¬ 
ple whom the Nazis considered a burden to the war 
effort. In testimony given after the war, a man who 
worked at the Hartheim killing center in Austria 
described how the patients were gassed. 

1 began work at Hartheim on 2 April 1940... 

About six weeks after the 2 April 1940, the 
preparations and the buildings were ready and 
the plant began to operate. The mentally ill 
were, as far as I know, brought from the vari¬ 
ous asylums by train and bus to Hartheim at 
very different times of the day... The numbers 
arriving varied between 40 and 150. First, they 
were taken to the undressing room. There 


find untsr Ttruitvortung b#auftr*ift* dit * 
nii*»e iwwfltlich ra besti-rsfader InU tu *r - 
jaitvra, da« n*eh ■*a*cblUh** It***™* uatwlltar 
irauken b*i tritiMb*f#r BturUilun,; Ihras JLrank - 
uplands* 4«r Gnadentod fiathrt **ftl*n kanr.. 



124 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


In Germany ; the requirement that Jews 
wear the yellow Jewish star labeled 
with the German word lor Jew marked 
\hej\nal pjtase oj their isolation from 
the rest of the society. The next step 
u?t?s deportation and annihilation. 



they—men and women in different sections—had to undress or 
were undressed. Their clothes and luggage were put in a pile, 
labelled, registered and numbered. The people who had 
undressed then went along a passage into the so-called reception 
room. In this room there was a large table. A doctor was there 
together with a staff of 3—4 assistants.... As far as I can judge as a 
layman, the doctors did not examine these people but only 
checked their files. Someone then stamped them. An orderly had 
to stamp them individually on the shoulder or the chest with a 
consecutive number. The number was approximately 3-4 cm in 
size. Those people who had gold teeth or a gold bridge were 
marked with a cross on their backs. After this procedure, the peo¬ 
ple were led into a nearby room and photographed. Then the 
people were led out of the photography room through a second 
exit back into the reception room and from there through a steel 
door into the gas chamber. 

The gas chamber had a very bare interior. It had a wooden 
floor and there were wooden benches in the chamber. Later, the 
floor was concreted and finally it and the walls were tiled. The 
ceiling and the other parts of the walls were painted with oil. The 
whole room was designed to give the impression that it was a 
bathroom. Three showers were fixed in the ceiling. The room was 
aired by ventilators. A window in the gas chamber was covered 
with a grill. A second steel door led into the room where the 
gassing apparatus was installed. 

When the whole transport had been dealt with, i.e when the 
registration had been carried out, the photographs taken, people's 
numbers stamped on them, and those with gold teeth marked, 
they all went into the bath-gas room. The steel doors were shut 
and the doctor on duty fed gas into the gas chamber. After a short 
time the people in the gas chamber were dead. After around an 
hour and a half, the gas chamber was ventilated. At this point, we 
burners had to start work. 

To complete the process of separating Jews from non-Jews 
and to make it easier for the authorities to deport Jews to 
the extermination camps in the East, the Nazis made ail Jews 
wear the so-called Jewish star. In his secret diary, Victor 
Klemperer described the humiliating experience of wearing 
the star. He does not go out during the day because he is 
worried about how he will be treated now that he is forced 
to wear the star. His wife, Eva, does not have to wear the star 
because she is an Aryan German. 


THE HOIOCAUST 


125 


September 18, Thursday evening 
The Jewish star/ 7 black on yellow 
cloth, at the center in Hebrew-like 
lettering "Jew/ 7 to be worn on the 
left breast, large as the palm of a 
hand, issued to us yesterday for 10 
pfennigs [pennies], to be worn from 
tomorrow. The omnibus [a vehicle 
for transporting large numbers of 
people] may no longer be used, only 
the front platform of the tram.— 

For the time being at least Eva will 
take over all the shopping, I shall 
breathe in a little fresh air only 
under shelter of darkness... 

September 20, Saturday 
Yesterday, as Eva was sewing on the 
Jews star, 1 had a raving fit of 
despair. Eva's nerves [are] finished 
too. She is pale, her cheeks are 
hollow. (The day before yesterday, 
for the first time in years, we had 
ourselves weighed. Eva was 123 pounds, six and a half pounds 
lighter than in the turnip winter of 1917—her normal weight was 
154 pounds. I am still 148 pounds—it was 165 pounds 
before.)... Yesterday after the evening meal a few steps outside 
with Eva only when it was completely dark. Today at midday I real¬ 
ly did go to Olsners grocery shop... and fetched soda water It 
cost me a great effort to do so. Meanwhile Eva is constantly going 
on errands and cooking. Our whole life has been turned upside 
down, and everything weighs on Eva. How long will her feet hold 
out?—She visited Frau Kronheim. The latter took the tram yester¬ 
day—front platform. The driver: Why was she not sitting in the 
car? Frau Kronheim is small, slight, stooped, her hair completely 
white. As a Jewess she was forbidden to do so. The driver struck 
the panel with his fist: "What a mean thing!" Poor comfort. 



Two Belgian Jewish children pose for 
a photograph in {942, At six years 
old, the girl was either too young to 
he required to wear the Jewish star 
that is sewn onto her brothers sweater 
or it is hidden under her apron. 


The War against Eastern Jews 


By the time the decree requiring German Jews to wear the 
star went into effect, mobile killing squads (j Einsatzgruppen ) 
were already beginning to murder Jews in eastern Poland 




126 


A member of a Nazi killing scfuad 
stands ready to shoot a Ukranian Jew 
who has been forced to kneel at the edge 
of a mass grave. The German who took 
this picture probably believed that his 
camera was recording not a horrific 
crime but a great event. 



and the parts of the Soviet Union conquered by the German 
Army. Between September 29 and 30,1941, SS Einsatzgrup- 
pen murdered 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar ravine, near Kiev 
(captial of the Soviet Ukraine). Dina Pronicheva, a Jewish 
resident of the area, described how she managed to survive 
the Babi Yar mass executions. 

It was dark already... They lined us up on a ledge which was so 
small that we couldn't get much of a footing on it. 

They began shooting us. I shut my eyes, clenched my fists, 
tensed all my muscles and took a plunge down before the bullets 
hit me. It seemed I was flying forever. But I landed safely on the 
bodies. After a while, when the shooting stopped, I heard the 






THE HOLOCAUST 


127 


Germans climbing into the ravine. They started finishing off all 
those who were not dead yet, those who were moani ng, hiccup - 
ing, tossing, writhing in agony. They ran their flashlights over the 
bodies and finished off all who moved. 1 was lying so still without 
stirring, terrified of giving myself away. 1 felt I was done for. I 
decided to keep quiet. They started covering the corpses over 
with earth. They must have put quite a lot over me because 1 felt 
1 was beginning to suffocate. But I was afraid to move. 1 was gasp¬ 
ing for breath. I knew I would suffocate. Then 1 decided it was bet¬ 
ter to be shot than buried alive. I stirred but 1 didn't know that it 
was quite dark already. Using my left arm 1 managed to move a lit¬ 
tle way up. Then I took a deep breath, summoned up my waning 
strength and crawled out from under the cover of earth. It was 
dark. But all the same it was dangerous to crawl because of the 
searching beams of flashlight and they continued shooting at 
those who moaned. They might hit me. So I had to be careful. I 
was lucky enough to crawl up one of the high walls of the ravine, 
and straining every nerve and muscle, got out of it. 

Those Jews not immediately murdered by the Einsatz- 
gruppen were forced into ghettos until the Nazis decided 
that they no longer needed any of them to perform forced 
labor for the Nazi war effort. The Nazis established the 
biggest ghetto in occupied Europe in Warsaw, the capital of 
Poland. More than 350,000 Jews lived in Warsaw—30 per¬ 
cent of the city's entire population—making this the largest 
single Jewish community in Europe. On October 12, 1940, 
the Germans announced that all Jews in Warsaw would 
have to move into an area of the capital surrounded by a 
closely guarded wall more than ten-feet high, topped with 
barbed wire. Crammed into massively overcrowded, unhy¬ 
gienic dwellings and officially allowed far less than starva¬ 
tion rations, Jews died in large numbers from malnutrition 
and disease. The diary of a visitor, Stanislav Rozycki, 
describes the conditions in the ghetto. 

The majority are nightmare figures, ghosts of former human 
beings, miserable destitutes, pathetic remnants of former humani¬ 
ty. One is most affected by the characteristic change which one 
sees in their faces: as a result of misery, poor nourishment, the lack 
of vitamins, fresh air and exercise, the numerous cares, worries, 
anticipated misfortunes, suffering and sickness, their faces have 
taken on a skeletal appearance. The prominent bones around their 


In the Jewish residential district 
there are around 27,000 apart¬ 
ments with an average of 2 V 2 
rooms each. This produces an 
occupation density of 15. i per¬ 
sons per apartment and 6—7 
persons per room. 

—Waldemar Schon, 
director of the Resettlement 
Department attached to 
the Nazi governor of the 
Warsaw district, reporting in 
January 1941, about the cre¬ 
ation of the Warsaw ghetto. 



128 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


eye sockets, the yellow facial colour, the slack pendulous skin, the 
alarming emaciation and sickliness. And, in addition, this miser¬ 
able, frightened, restless, apathetic and resigned expression like 
that of a hunted animal. I pass my closest friends without recog¬ 
nising them and guessing their fate... 

On the streets children are crying in vain, children who are 
dying of hunger. They howl, beg, sing, moan, shiver with cold, 
without underwear, without clothing, without shoes, in rags, 
sacks, flannel which are bound in strips round the emaciated 
skeletons, children swollen with hunger, disfigured, half con¬ 
scious, already completely grown-up at the age of five, gloomy 
and weary of life. They are like old people and are only conscious 
of one thing: Tm cold/' "I'm hungry"... Ten per cent of the new 
generation have already perished: every day and every night hun¬ 
dreds of these children die and there is no hope that anybody will 
put a stop to it... 

For various reasons standards of hygiene are terribly poor. 
Above all, the fearful population density in the streets with which 
nowhere in Europe can be remotely compared The fatal over-pop- 


in Poland s Warsaw ghetto, 
people walk past the bodies of 
those who have died from star¬ 
vation or disease. The residents 
of the Warsaw ghetto had to 
survive on an official food allo¬ 
cation of 300 calories per day. 




THE HOLOCAUST 


129 


ulation is particularly apparent in the streets: people literally rub 
against each other, it is impossible to pass unhindered through the 
streets. And then the lack of light, gas, and heating materials. 
Water consumption is also much reduced; people wash themselves 
much less and do not have baths or hot water. There are no green 
spaces, gardens, parks: no clumps of trees and no lawns to be seen. 
For a year no one has seen a village, a wood, a field, a river or a 
mountain: no one has breathed slightly better air for even a few 
days this year. Bedding and clothing are changed very rarely 
because of the lack of soap. To speak of food hygiene would be a 
provocation and would be regarded as mockery. People eat what is 
available, however much is available and when it is available. Other 
principles of nutrition are unknown here. Having said all this, one 
can easily draw ones own conclusions as to the consequences: 
stomach typhus and typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis, pneumonia, 
influenza, metabolic disturbances, the most common digestive ill¬ 
nesses, lack of vitamins and all other illnesses associated with the 
lack of bread, fresh air, clothing, and heating materials. Typhus is 
systematically and continually destroying the population. There 
are victims in every family. On average up to a thousand people are 
dying each month. In the early morning the corpses of beggars, 
children, old people, young people and women are lying in every 
street—the victims of the hunger and the cold. 

Killing Centers 


Even if Jews managed to survive the horrific conditions of 
the ghettos, they were unlikely to escape the periodic mass 
deportations from the ghettos to extermination centers 
such as Auschwitz. In the fall of 1942, for example, the Nazis 
deported about 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to 
the Treblinka II death camp. And as the Nazi grip tightened 
over all of occupied Europe, Jews were also deported from 
every corner of the continent directly to the death camps in 
Poland. These deportations to the East were themselves 
instruments of murder. Bart Stern was born in Hungary in 
1926. In 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz. In a 1992 inter¬ 
view, Stern described the conditions he had to endure 
during this three-day trip. 


We were pushed up on railroad cars, actually cattle cars. But the 
amazing thing, what I still remember is, that on the way, being 
driven, or herded, by the Hungarian gendarmes, we were singing 






Hungarian Jews arrive in Auschwitz- 
Birkenau concentration camp in Poland 
the spring oj i944. Nearly 44 0,000 
Jews were deported from Hungary to 
Auschwitz in the spring and summer of 
that year. Most of them were murdered 
in the gas chambers immediately after 
their arrival. 


so... songs of hope. I do not remember exactly how to translate 
the song but I know where, which part of the Psalms it is in. And 
we thought that we are already enough in it [the cattle car]. We 
were about 50 people or 60. Twenty more, 30 more, so we must 
have been in that little cattle car, which is about a third of the size 
of an American railroad car, about 120, 140. And before we knew, 
whoever didn't make it of the family in the same car was cut off 
and they, they just slammed the doors, and those who were out¬ 
side, they still had to put barbed wire on the little bit of opening 
which was on the outside on the top of the railroad car. 

These car[s] were usually used for cattle transports or for grain. 
In the car the situation got by the minute worse and worse. People 
were looking to find a spot for the older... elder people to sit 
down. There was no space to sit down, because if you sat down 
you couldn't get up, because we were herded in, squeezed like in 
a sardine box. The journey actually lasted—Tuesday, Wednesday, 
Thursday—three nights and about three days. If anybody had 
something to eat—because in the ghettos we already used up 






THE HOLOCAUST 


131 


most of the stuff what we have been successful taking out of our 
homes when we were taken out into the ghetto—had to share it 
with others. But we realized that it is not a simple journey of just 
a few hours. People were holding back, or they couldn't as gener¬ 
ously pass it out to others. Then suddenly we start seeing that 
people are taking care of their needs in the cars, and the stench 
got worse every minute. 

The SS normally gassed women with young children, old 
people, and people with physical infirmities upon arrival 
at Auschwitz. Only healthy boys, relatively young men 
and some women judged capable of work were spared, 
though temporarily. The Nazis intended to kill these Jews 
by giving them too little food and making them perform 
hard physical labor that would wear them out within a 
few months. Periodic selections also condemned to death 
those inmates judged no longer fit to work. In a 1990 inter¬ 
view, Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall, a Jewish woman born in 1929 
in Klucarky, Czechoslovakia, described the selection process 
in Auschwitz. 

We needed to show that we still had strength left, to, whether it 
was to work or to live another day ! recall some women, um, were 
beginning as their hair grows back, they were beginning to get 
gray hair, and they would go and take a little piece of coal from 
one of the pot-bellied stoves that was in a barrack. And they 
would use this coal to color their hair with so that they w ould look 
a, a little younger. I mean one grayed at the age of maybe eigh¬ 



teen or nineteen under those conditions. And they 
would run... we would run in front of whoever it 
was that w'as doing the selections to show ^ 
that we could survive one other day If jif I 
one had a scar, a pimple, if one Mml a a I 
didn't run fast enough, if one /MMM Mai 
didn't look right for whatever M m m M 4 III 

reason to the particular a m m Mr I I I I 
person that was doing the igass Mata 

would t it If fill 


selection—they 
stand there with a IMWWf 
stick, to the right or to 4m a 
the left, as you ran by 
them. One never knew if 
they were in the good line or the bad 


A prisoner's jacket worn by 
Abraham Lcwenl, ujJju was 
Reported from the Warsaw ghetto 
to the Majdanek camp mar 
Iwfciitt, Poland Lewent was later 
sent to sftjertif other concen (ration 
m Germany and was issued 
this jacket when he arrived in 
Buchenwatd concentration camp 
in 1 944. 


132 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


An invoice jor Zyklon B, the pesticide 
used in some concentration camp gas 
chambers , submitted to Kurt Gerstein. 
Gerstein was an SS officer who secretly 
collected evidence of the Nazi extermi¬ 
nation of the Jews in the Auschwitz 
and Belzec concentration camps. 
Although he wanted to act as a witness 
against Nazi war criminals , Gerstein 
himself came under suspicion after the 
end of World War II and committed 
suicide in July i945. 




OEGESCH 

DEUTSCHE GE5EUSCHAFT FOB 
SCHADLfNGSSFKAMfFUNG M.B.H. 

FRANKFURT/M. 

w£j^ f tAUENST» 9 i FEfiNSWCKRt OffHuF 30331 / FE1WWF. / naCHTCuJc w*\ f SKAkTWQtT MGfSCH 
NlCHlirt: BF4ElCHtlAHU«KT;MAIH KMtnsSfACM fOMiCn t C f *ttt* Nani F yfT X UL rftwuj+uf meic&hs 



Herm 

C b e r atur ir. f life re r 
jfurt Gerstein 

Berlin 

Leivsi£?rs«:rasee 51/32 


*; RECHNUNG 


Frartfurt a. M, den 16*Pebruar 1944 
£ 


fc0C53^ 


D. G, S. 


Sfir aandten heute a’b Ipeejs&u mit aineci 
rtekrHachtfracbtbrief der Heeresetsi^dort- 
ver* 0 l tur.g liessEu fin dex Eonient rations - 
le^er Qrajiieribiirs, Afet* Entweauag und 
intsfenefeur.j, Station: 

0 r a n i e n b u r als Bilgut 
fol£*r.de Sendujig: 

S T E L C N h Blausaure 

ohne SelEBtofx 


15 iligteE, erjtfeaixenc je: 

% = 390 Bfucli sStTL '$gc ~g * 195 CK 




E»iehjVitjrj 


5.— 


Bretts: £32*^ kg 
Sara: 27Z,25 « 

Ketto; 'jbh,75 " 


Ijie Etiketten tra^en den Veraferk; 
* Vorsicfet 3hr,a JJtUL Warns to tt* 


£r75 


48375 


line. One line would go to the gas chambers, the other line would 
go back to the camp and to the barracks to live another day. 


Kurt Gerstein claimed to have joined the SS to gather evi¬ 
dence on the mass murders in the extermination centers. As 
a trained engineer, he was responsible for distributing and 
supervising the use of chemicals in the camps. In 1942, he 
was sent to deliver prussic acid (one of the poisons used in 
the gas chambers) to the commandants of Belzec, Treblinka, 
and Sobibor. At the end of the war, he was captured by the 
Allies. In a deposition to Allied military officers in May 1945, 
Gerstein described a gassing he had observed in Belzec. He 
committed suicide shortly afterward. 








THE HOLOCAUST 


153 


We left for Bel zee two days later.... 

Next morning, a few minutes before seven, I was told: ''In ten 
minutes the first train will arrive!" Indeed, a few minutes later a 
train arrived from Lemberg [a city in western Ukraine], with 45 
cars holding 6,700 people, of whom 1,450 were already dead on 
arrival. Behind the small barbed-wired window, children, young 
ones, frightened to death, women, men. The train pulled in: 200 
Ukrainians detailed for the task wrenched open the doors and 
with their leather whips drove the Jews out of the cars. A loud¬ 
speaker issued instructions: to remove all clothing, even artificial 
limbs and eyeglasses,- to tie their shoes together with small pieces 
of string handed out by a little Jewish boy ; to turn in all valuables, 
all money at the ticket window "Valuables," without voucher, 
without receipt. Women and girls were to have their hair cut off 
in the "Barbers" barrack. (An SS sergeant on duty told me: "Thats 
to make something special for submarine crews, for packaging or 
something like that.") 

Then the march began. To the left and right, barbed wire, 
behind, two dozen Ukrainians, guns in hand. They approached. 
[Captain] Wirth and I, we were standing on the ramp in front of the 
death chambers. Completely nude, men, women, young girls, chil¬ 
dren, babies, cripples, filed by. At the corner stood a heavy SS man, 
who told the poor people, in a pastoral voice: "No harm will come 
to you! You just have to breathe very deeply, that strengthens the 
lungs, inhaling is a means of preventing contagious diseases. Its a 
good disinfection!" They asked what was going to happen to them. 
He told them: "The men will have to work, building roads and 
houses. But the women won't be obliged to do so ; they'll do 
housework, cooking." For some of these poor creatures, this was a 
last small hope, enough to carry them, unresisting, as far as the 
death chambers. Most of them knew all, the odor confirmed it! 
They walked up the small wooden flight of stairs and entered the 
death chambers, most without a word, pushed forward by those 
behind them. One Jewish woman of about forty, her eyes flaming 
torches, cursed the murderers,- after several whiplashes by Captain 
Wirth in person, she disappeared into the gas chamber. 

Polio R., a young Roma boy deported to Auschwitz, described 
his feelings upon arriving at the death camp. 

Longingly I looked at the gate which barred my way out of the 
compound filled with screaming humanity. Near me on several 
trucks were hundreds of nude men, women, and children. 


In less than ten minutes all the fit 
men had been collected together 
in a group. What happened to 
the others, to the women, to the 
children, to the old men, we could 
establish neither then nor later-, 
the night swallowed them up, 
purely and simply. 

—Author Primo Levi 
describing his arrival at an 
extermination camp in his 1958 
book, Survival in Auschwitz 





154 


1 

HITLER AND THE NAZIS 




Silesia 

A central European region, 
most of which is now within 
the borders of Poland 


Roma , or Gypsy, prisoners stt outdoors 
awaiting instructions in Belzec, a 
Polish concentration camp , in i 940. 
The Germans and their allies killed 
between 25 and 50 percent of the 
approximately one million Roma living 
in Europe before the war. 


Although they had not been on my transport, like me they were 
Gypsies, only they were from Silesia. I could hear and understand 
their prayers in Romany. They implored God (but in vain) to 
spare at least their children's lives. I was only fourteen at the time, 
and now realize that I had no real understanding of the situation I 
was witnessing. But instinctively I knew that something unimag¬ 
inable was going to happen. 

We were told to line up quickly. Those that lagged a bit were 
hit with batons. One SS guard barked at us as he pointed toward 
the chimney stacks which seemed to reach for the sky like long 
threatening fingers, 'This will be your way out of Auschwitz!" 

Born in the north German city of Lubeck, Friedrich-Paul von 
Groszheim had trained to be a merchant. He describes the 
Nazis persecution of him as a gay man. 

In January 1937 the SS arrested 230 men in Luebeck [a city in 
northern Germany] under the Nazi-revised criminal codes para¬ 
graph 175, which outlawed homosexuality, and I was imprisoned 
for 10 months. The Nazis had been using paragraph 175 as 



THE HOLOCAUST 


135 


grounds for making mass arrests of homosexuals. In 1938 I was re¬ 
arrested, humiliated, and tortured. The Nazis finally released me, 
but only on the condition that I agree to be castrated. I submitted 
to the operation... Because of the nature of my operation, 1 was 
rejected as 'physically unfit" when I came up for military service in 
1940. In 1943 1 was arrested again, this time for being a monar¬ 
chist, a supporter of the former Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Nazis 
imprisoned me as a political prisoner in an annex of the 
Neuengamme concentration camp at Luebeck. 

Rescue, Escape, and Resistance 


After the Nazis had occupied most of continental Western 
Europe, it was still possible for Jews to escape Hitler's grasp 
if they could get help from a rescue committee or from a rep¬ 
resentative of a foreign government who was willing to 
issue them an entry visa. Varian Fry, an American who went 
to France in 1940 as a representative of a private agency, the 
Emergency Rescue Committee, was one of the people who 
worked to rescue European Jews. Fry managed to save or 
help thousands of refugees who were being hunted by the 
Gestapo, including many prominent Jewish intellectuals and 
artists, including the Russian painter Marc Chagall and the 
German political scientist Hannah Arendt. In his memoir. Fry 
describes some of the work he did in the thirteen months 
before he was deported by the Vichy French authorities. 

At the end of January [1941 ] many of the refugees discovered they 
could get exit visas... the immediate result for us was that from 
having been ostensibly a modest relief organization, paying small 
weekly allowances to keep men, women and children from starving 
to death, ours now quickly became a kind of travel bureau... For 
we could now openly engage in what had all along been our rai¬ 
son d'etre—emigration. 

It took us a little while to get used to the change, but by the end 
of the first week we had already adjusted to it, and for the first 
time since we began work, more than five months before, we were 
soon sending refugees down to the Spanish frontier to leave 
France legally... 

It was the ships to Martinique which really kept us busy. We 
couldn't have thought up anything better if we had had the power 
to arrange the route ourselves. They not only eliminated the trou¬ 
ble with the transit visas—they also removed the danger of the 




HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


December 17, I>±0 


Walter tfeyerhof 


MP, F, Freeman iTatthews, 
Aff.erlo*n Subaasy, 

Vichy, Alliei*, 


Hr nr l*r. Kp. 1 thews, 

I woncer If you will Le ^Ood enough to 
lend your special support to Tr* Walter Meyerhof *b m maud 
for a “sortie 11 viso. 

falter is the son of Professor 
Otto Meyerhof, biologist, irbo is now on the Faculty of 
tra University of Pennsylvania* Professor and '?rs t Meyerhof 
left France soiue months a&o, but Walter was not able to 
^cca&p&ny them as at the time he did not have hie American 
Visa* He made his demand for a “sortie 1 * visa and “litre 
de voyr ge* at the Prefecture of Perpignan on December 5th,At 
the prefecture tfcty told him th.*t his demand had been 
accepted with an vavls favorabla M and th^t. his dossier 
would be at Vichy by December 10th* 

Walter passed the ICundt conaiiealon at 
Lc Cheylard and he is eo£ er to leave Frruce as soon as 
possible to join bis parents* 

I should be very grateful indeed to do 
whatever you can to help him onbtain Ms n sortie" visa 
without a long delay, 

yours very truly, 


Varian tf* Fry 
Dire;tor. 


WF/&g. 


trip through Spain. For they went 
directly from Marseille to Martinique, 
and from there it was possible to go 
straight to New York. They were 
almost as good as the much-advertised 
but never-realized 'rescue ship/' which 
was to have come to Marseille to take 
refugees to New York, but wouldn't 
have been able to take a single refugee 
on board at the time it was proposed, 
for at that time literally no one was able 
to get an exit visa... 

At the end of May, when we came 
to tally our work, we found that in less 
than eight months over 15,000 people 
had come to us or written to us. We 
had had to consider every one of their 
cases and take a decision on it. We 
had decided that 1,800 of the cases 
fell within the scope of our activities. 
In other words, that they were genuine 
cases of intellectual or political refugees 
with a good chance of emigrating 
soon. Of these 1,800 cases, represent¬ 
ing, in all, some 4,000 human beings, 
we had paid weekly living allowances 
to 560 and had sent more than 1,000 
out of France. For the rest we had made 


every kind of effort, from getting them 


In a i940 letter to the American consul 
in Vichy France, American journalist 
Varian Fry asks for help in obtaining 
an exit visa for Walter Meyerhof, the 
son of a Jewish Nobel Prize winner. 
Frys efforts helped hundreds of Jewish 
artists, scientists, and intellectuals 
escape Europe and almost certain death 
in a Nazi extermination camp. 


liberated from concentration camps 
to finding them a dentist... 

But it was not everyone who could get an exit visa and leave 
France legally, even then. As usual, the regulations were shrouded 
in mystery, but we were told that every prefecture in the unoccu¬ 
pied zone had been provided with lists of persons to whom the 
visas were to be refused. 

Elisabeth Freund came from an educated German Jewish 
family. Her uncle was a Nobel Prize winner. She studied eco¬ 
nomics in Breslau, a city which at that time was in eastern 
Germany, and Berlin. Like other Jews in Berlin she was forced 
by the Nazis to work in an armaments factory. In her 1941 
memoir, she describes how she narrowly missed being 


THE HOLOCAUST 


137 


deported to a death camp by being allowed to leave for Cuba 
with her husband just before Himmler suspended all emigra¬ 
tion from Germany in October 1941. 




4 

V 




/ 


\tl 


* 


/ 


RftPUBULjTJS f'E.lNCAlHE 


SVUP-CONDLIT PR0VIS01RE 


The Gestapo has permitted me to leave Germany, in spite of 
the prohibition. We do not even dare to believe it yet. It came 
about like this.- My husband met an old acquaintance quite by 
chance on the street, an executive in one of the major banks 
of Berlin, with whom he had worked together a great deal, espe¬ 
cially at the time of the uprisings in Upper Silesia after the First 
World War... This gentleman, then, asked quite innocently, in a 
friendly manner, how we were doing, and was absolutely flabber¬ 
gasted when he heard what difficulties we were having. "But real¬ 
ly, that just can't be! These measures are not meant for someone 
like you!” How often have we and a thousand other Jews heard 
these words already... 

Well, at any rate, this gentle¬ 
man was very sympathetic. He 
asked for exact details and was 
going to discuss the matter with 
the management of his company. 

There they had the necessary con¬ 
nections to the Gestapo and 
would somehow fix things up for 
us. When my husband told me 
about this meeting 1 was so pes¬ 
simistic and so tired from work 
that I scarcely listened. After all, 
we had experienced so many dis¬ 
appointments already,- why should 
it turn out otherwise this time? We 
were also very afraid and not at all 
so pleased by the well-meaning 
offer, for after all, one does not 
know what could happen if some¬ 
thing like that were passed on to 
the wrong place. 

But the miracle happened. 

Things turned out well... The 
Gestapo man who negotiated the 
matter, to be sure, would like to 
have a bed from us when we 
leave—that's all. And we will leave 


MODELE N 1 B tMr 


Catt**. 4 


Sauf-conduit 


Gendarmerie d^- 

adi 


it N- 

Valable pour^^v* 
Pour slier d-fi. 

Nom’et pr6n0ms ; 


Nationality ; 

Domicile: 

Profession: 

Motif du deplacement; 





Mo yen do locomotion (1): 


Le Com 



'orphan. 


•, i } i h uur vehk> 
Voir du du*, Jb 
i!a) Seaiors ou brj^adu 



ec Je nuLneru 

"Ti-iLl li.ui da qouduir*- 


Local police in Perpignan, 
France, issued this safe con¬ 
duct pass to Walter 
Meyerhof allowing him to 
travel hy train to Marseilles 
in i 94 i. Meyerhof was able 
to escape to Lisbon and from 
there to the United States in 
April i94 i, 



158 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


My uncle got this passeur [a 
guide who helped Jews escape 
occupied Europe] for us, and... 
he was going to take us to Nice, 
in the southern part of France. 
My mother paid him.. .the 
equivalent of sixty thousand 
dollars... hut when we... left 
with the passeur to go hack to go 
to the southern part of France, 
we went through Brussels. In the 
middle of the street, he left us. 

He had received his money and 
he left us. And we knew nobody 
in Brussels. 

—Liny Pajgin Yollick 
describes fleeing to France 
from Antwerp in 1942 
in a 1990 interview 


him this bed with the greatest pleasure. All these things are so 
scarce and cannot be bought in the normal way. 

But we have nothing in writing on this decision. In principle, 
the Gestapo does not provide anything written in such cases. My 
husband immediately went to the emigration office of the Jewish 
Aid Society. He was congratulated there, but no one wants to take 
the responsibility for placing our names on a departure list. One 
cannot blame them for that,- after all, everything is punishable by 
immediate deportation to a concentration camp. 

The best thing is to let the business of emigration simply hap¬ 
pen, as if it did not concern us at all, as if we were acting in a film. 
Otherwise the tension is too difficult to bear... 

For the last time we are sitting at our own table for a meal. 
Then we put on our coats, each one of us takes a knapsack and a 
small handbag, and we leave the house without looking back. 

By city train we go to the Potsdam station. There, in the cel¬ 
lar of the station, the Jewish groups are assembled. After the 
examination of our papers we are let into the cellar. The door clos¬ 
es behind us. Thank God! The group is leaving today after all. 
Until the last moment we had been afraid that the journey would 
not be allowed. There are still many formalities with luggage and 
passports. We find out that last night the first groups also left 
Frankfurt am Main. Three hours pass until we are finally led in 
complete darkness through the unlit station to the train to Paris. 
A sealed car is designated for our group. We get in, the doors are 
closed, the train begins to move. We are riding to freedom. 

Four days later the German government forbids departure for 
all Jews, and the army command discontinues the release of 
freight cars for the journey through France. 

But the deportation of Jews to Poland goes on. 

By September 1942 it was clear that the Germans intended to 
liquidate the Warsaw ghetto. More than 300,000 Jews had 
been deported to the death camps since July of that year. 

When the Germans tried to finish the removal of the remain¬ 
ing sixty thousand ghetto residents to the death camps on 
April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover, Jewish underground 
groups started an armed uprising. The fighting continued 
until May 16, 1943. The Germans completely destroyed 
the ghetto and killed or deported to the camps most of 
the remaining inhabitants. Despite its ultimate failure, 
the Warsaw uprising sent a signal to the world that some 
Jews in occupied Europe were not prepared to go to their 






THE HOLOCAUST 


deaths without fighting back. On April 23, 1943, Mordecai 
Anielewicz, one of the leaders of the uprising, wrote a last 
letter from the ghetto to one of his friends. 

It is impossible to put into words what we have been through. 
One thing is clear, what happened exceeded our boldest dreams. 
The Germans ran twice from the ghetto. One of our companies 
held out for 40 minutes and another—for more than 6 hours. 
The mine set in the "brushmakers" [a district inside the Warsaw 
ghetto] area exploded. Several of our companies attacked the dis¬ 
persing Germans. Our losses in manpower are minimal. That is also 
an achievement. Y [Yechiel] fell. He fell a hero, at the machine- 
gun. I feel that great things are happening and what we dared do is of great, 
enormous importance .... 

Beginning from today we shall shift over to the partisan tactic. 
Three battle companies will move out tonight, with two tasks: 
reconnaissance and obtaining arms. Do you remember, short- 
range weapons are of no use to us. We use such weapons only 
rarely. What we need urgently: grenades, rifles, machine-guns 
and explosives. 



Afield hospital belonging to a par¬ 
tisan unit in Belarus treats a 
wounded fighter in a forest. The 
woman on the left , bending over the 
patient, is a Jewish photographer 
and field nurse who escaped the 
Nazis to join this unit. 




140 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


Shavit 

Hebrew word for comet. 
Presumably an illegal Jewish 
radio broadcast 


Monty issued by the Jewish 
Council of Elders in the 
Theresienstadt ghetto in western 
Czechoslovakia bears an 
image of Moses and the Ten 
Commandments. 


It is impossible to describe the conditions under which the 
Jews of the ghetto are now living. Only a few will be able to hold 
out. The remainder will die sooner or later. Their fate is decided. 
In almost all the hiding places in which thousands are concealing 
themselves it is not possible to light a candle for lack of air. 

With the aid of our transmitter we heard a marvelous report on 
our fighting by the "Shavit" radio station. The fact that we are 
remembered beyond the ghetto walls encourages us in our strug¬ 
gle. Peace go with you, my friend! Perhaps we may still meet 
again! The dream of my life has risen to become fact. Self-defense in the ghetto 
trill have been a reality. Jewish armed resistance and revenge are facts. I have 
been a witness to the magnificent , heroic fighting of Jewish men of battle. 




FtNFZIG KRONEN 


0-C45 CUFTTkJHfr ViftfALSCHT 3D£R 
ODER QJ ’H JN3C* <h vUxfhi F|*|NGT. 

WHP ffTRe«'3iT£Jt5 StSTftAFT 







QUITTUNG CBER 
ZWANZ1G KRONEN 


Wt* OlfSf VE H F4it£ ?r«T KJLtMMAehT 

DMTfl WtfAtSCHTf !IH' VtRKfRH BP'HuT 

WRD iTfliNaSTEMS fltSTRAi'T 




The Nazis murdered between 4,194,200 and 5,721,00 Euro¬ 
pean Jews and destroyed Jewish ways of life with centuries- 
old traditions. In central and eastern Europe, the cultural, 
religious, and ethnic terrain had been changed forever. For 
those who survived, the trauma of the Holocaust could never 
be forgotten. And the effects of the wound might even be 
transmitted to the next generation. In her novel Fugitive 
Pieces , Canadian author Anne Michaels describes an 
exchange between a Holocaust survivor who had faced star¬ 
vation in one of the death camps and his son. 





The memories we elude catch up to us, overtake us like a shadow... 

My father found the apple in the garbage. It was rotten and I'd 
thrown it out—I was eight or nine. He fished it from the bin, 
sought me in my room, grabbed me tight by the shoulder, and 
pushed the apple to my face. 

"What is this? What is it?" "An apple—" 

My mother kept food in her purse. My father ate frequently to 
avoid the first twists of hunger because, once they gripped him, 
he'd eat until he was sick. Then he ate dutifully, methodically, 
tears streaming down his face, animal and spirit in such raw evi¬ 
dence, knowing he was degrading both. If one needs proof of the 
soul, its easily found. The spirit is most evident at the point of 
extreme bodily humiliation. There was no pleasure, for my father, 
associated with food. It was years before I realized this wasn't 
merely a psychological difficulty, but also a moral one, for who 
could answer my fathers question: Knowing what he knew, should 
he stuff himself, or starve? 

"An apple! Well, my smart son, is an apple food?" 


SS troops round up participants in the 
Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943. 
Rather than allow themselves to he 
shipped oJJ to the death camps without 
a fight, these Jewish men and women 
resisted the SS troops with guns and 
other weapons smuggled into the ghetto. 






DiiJjr HtWipzptf pf U.i. Arm«4 Forces 


in the tump rAn rhtAltr at OpcntifllK 


German ratlin, Reuter ftftitl, declared that “Hitler ha* fallen at his command post,” 
is to save the German people from destruction by Bolshevism, If only for this task, 

; the struggle will 

n |||||||if The uuiiouticeiitent preceding the proclama- 

lion by Doeiiitz said; **lt is reported from the 
Fuehrer's headquarters that our Fuehrer, Adolf 
gj|;Vi| Hitler, has fallen this afternoon at his command 
BgT J post in the Keteh Chancellery, lighting to the lust 
breath against Bolshevism and for his country, 
rv^r -s-' ’^aBr dii April 30, tlic Fuehrer appointed Grand Adm. 
^ lhn‘»iit/ as his successor. The ticw Fuehrer will 


■ : -j .iLj'i L<y plane 

: j':'l 

1 '■ ''-i-Ul' h?.':3 rc- 

•- ntaeriiary through 
r > Page &) 

+ Swir Aide 

'N. Mny\j (AP>.“ 
i |, -l. | .y 'r^J Pint get 
.’ili'Km, an 
'■>; .'N L.LVf. Lo LhtKhii 
r ive asSwUuiE, 


Adolf Hiller al his lieight 

^GTV n/ Hitteff TAfe o-n Ftt (,re , 














Chapter Seven 


Germany 
after the 
Holocaust 


The headline of the U.S. armed 
forces newspaper, The Stars and 
Stripes, announces the death of 
Adolf Hitler. Hitler avoided prosecu¬ 
tion for his many crimes by commit¬ 
ting suicide on April 30, i945, in 
his bunker in the center of Berlin. 


T he war ended for Germany in complete defeat. The Allies 
insisted that the Germans sign an unconditional surrender, 
which they did in two separate ceremonies in May 1945, 
one in Reims, France, and the second in Berlin. In a series 
of wartime agreements, the Allies declared that they would occupy 
Germany for an unspecified period of time. Germany was divided into 
four zones of occupation, Soviet, American, British, and French. The 
Allies intended to destroy all remnants of Nazism in the country and 
make sure that Germany would never again start another war. In 
November 1945, the Allies began the Nuremberg trials, an interna¬ 
tional tribunal held in the city where the Nazis had staged their party 
rallies. Twenty-one defendants were indicted for conspiring to wage 
aggressive war and for war crimes. Ten received the death penalty, 
three were acquitted, and the rest got prison sentences. With the 
exception of Hermann Goering, none of the topmost Nazi leaders 
could be put on trial because they had all committed suicide—Hitler 
and Goebbels in a bunker in Berlin as the Russians advanced into the 
city, Himmler just after he was captured by the British. 

By the late 1940s, the division of Germany into four separate 
zones of Allied occupation (Russian in the East, American, British and 
French in the West) had hardened into a permanent split between two 
new German states—West and East Germany, both founded in 1949. 
(Germany would remain divided until the fall of the Berlin wall in 
1989.) America and its Western European allies needed West 
Germany to help them in their Cold War fight against the Soviet 
Union and Communism. Allied programs to de-Nazify Germany and 




LER AND THE NAZIS 


American soldiers forced German 
civilians to look at the dead bodies 
of concentration camp inmates 
tortured by the Nazis. To make 
sure that ordinary Germans could 
not deny knowledge of what had 
happened in the camps, the 
American military authorities often 
insisted that local citizens be forced 
to see what had been found in the 
liberated camps. 



hold Nazis accountable for the atrocities of the Holocaust increas¬ 
ingly gave way to the priorities of the Cold War and reconstruc¬ 
tion. Many Nazis who were guilty of war crimes went unpunished 
or were released from prison. 

In 1945, Jewish life in Germany lay in ruins. Of the half mil¬ 
lion Jews who had lived in Germany in 1933, only about fifteen 
thousand had managed to survive within Germany itself. About 
3,500 German Jewish exiles, many of whom were convinced com¬ 
munists, returned to the Soviet Zone of occupation to help build 
what they believed would be a new and much better socialist 
Germany. A much larger number of Jews—some 200,000 in all— 
-fled from Eastern Europe to so-called displaced persons camps in 
the western zones of occupied Germany. Ironically, Germany 
under the control of the Allied military authorities had become a 
much safer place for Jews than other European countries, for 
example, Poland. Polish Jews who had survived the death camps 
were often greeted with hatred and even violence when they 
returned to their towns or villages and attempted to reclaim their 
homes and property now in the possession of their former neigh¬ 
bors. In July 1946, a Polish mob killed forty-two Jews in the town 
of Kielce. By the early 1950s, large numbers of European Jewish 
survivors had emigrated to the United States or to the state of 








GERMANY AFTER THE HOLOCAUST 


U5 


Israel, which was founded in 1948 after the British withdrawal 
from Palestine. Great Britain had administered Palestine since the 
end of World War One. 

After the war, the Allies implemented programs designed to 
eliminate from public office all Nazi officials or other Ger¬ 
mans tainted by their direct involvement in the regime. A 
directive issued by the State Department to the commander 
in chief of the United States Forces of Occupation on May 10, 

1945, describes the original priorities of the Allied military 
government that ran Germany. 


DENAZIFICATION 

(a) A Proclamation dissolving the Nazi Party, its formations, affil¬ 
iated associations and supervised organizations, and all Nazi pub¬ 
lic institutions which were set up as instruments of Party domina¬ 
tion, and prohibiting their revival in any form, should be promul¬ 
gated by the Control Council. You will assure the prompt effectu¬ 
ation of that policy in your zone and will make every effort to pre¬ 
vent the reconstitution of any such organization in underground, 
disguised or secret form... 

(b) The laws purporting to establish the political structure of 
National Socialism and the basis of the Hitler regime and all laws, 


Control Council 

The military occupation governing body of 
Germany. Members were the United States, 
United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and France 



A postwar cartoon suggests that 
Displaced Persons (D.P.s), many 
oj whom were Holocaust survivors , 
did not find it easy to leave war- 
ravaged Europe for a new life in the 
United States. 





decrees and regulations which establish discriminations on 
grounds of race, nationality, creed or political opinions should be 
abrogated by the Control Council. You will render them inopera¬ 
tive in your zone. 

(c) All members of the Nazi Party who have been more than nom¬ 
inal participants in its activities, all active supporters of Nazism or 
militarism and all other persons hostile to Allied purposes will be 
removed and excluded from public office and from positions of 
importance in quasi-public and private enterprises such as 1) civic, 
economic, and labor organizations, 2) corporations and other orga¬ 
nizations in which the German government or subdivisions have a 
major financial interest, 3) industry, commerce, agriculture, and 
finance, 4) education, and 5) the press, publishing houses, and other 
agencies disseminating news and propaganda. Persons are to be 
treated as more than nominal participants in Party activities and as 
active supporters of Nazism or militarism when they have 1) held 
office or otherwise been active at any level from local to national in 
the party and its subordinate organizations, or in organizations 
which further militaristic doctrines, 2) authorized or participated 
affirmatively in any Nazi crimes, racial persecutions or discrimina¬ 
tions, 3) been avowed believers in Nazism or racial and militaristic 
creeds, or 4) voluntarily given substantial moral or material support 
or political assistance of any kind to the Nazi Party or Nazi officials 
and leaders. No such persons shall be retained in any of the cate¬ 
gories of employment listed above because of administrative neces¬ 
sity, convenience or expediency... 


German military leaders sign the 
formal unconditional surrender of all 
German troops to the Allied powers. 
The Allies ruled out any possibility 
of a negotiated peace with Hitlers 
regime and decided to occupy and 
govern Germany for an unspecified 
period of time. 


SUSPECTED WAR CRIMINALS AND SECURITY ARRESTS 

(a) You will search out, arrest, and hold, pending receipt by you 






GERMANY AFTER THE HOLOCAUST 


147 


of further instructions as to their disposition, Adolf Hitler, his 
chief Nazi associates, other war criminals and all persons who 
have participated in planning or carrying out Nazi enterprises 
involving or resulting in atrocities or war crimes. 

(b) All persons who, if permitted to remain at large would endan¬ 
ger the accomplishment of your objectives will also be arrested 
and held in custody until trial by an appropriate semi-judicial 
body to be established by you... 

In no event shall any differentiation be made between or spe¬ 
cial consideration be accorded to persons arrested... upon the 
basis of wealth or political, industrial, or other rank or position. In 
your discretion you may make such exceptions as you deem advis¬ 
able for intelligence or other military reasons... 

EDUCATION 

...(b) A coordinated system of control over German education 
and an affirmative program of reorientation will be established 
designed completely to eliminate Nazi and militaristic doctrines 
and to encourage the development of democratic ideas. 

(c) You will permit the reopening of elementary (Volksschulen), 
middle (Mittelschulen), and vocational (Berufsschulen) schools at 
the earliest possible date after Nazi personnel have been eliminat¬ 
ed. Textbooks and curricula which are not free of Nazi and mili¬ 
taristic doctrine shall not be used. The Control Council should 
devise programs looking toward the reopening of secondary 
schools, universities, and other institutions of higher learning.... 

(d) It is not intended that the military government will intervene in 
questions concerning denominational control of German schools, 
or in religious instruction in German schools, except insofar as may 
be necessary to insure that religious instruction and administration 
of such schools conform to such Allied regulations as are or may be 
established pertaining to purging of personnel and curricula. 

The Nuremberg trials of the major Nazi leaders made a pow¬ 
erful statement that these men would have to answer for the 
crimes they committed. Yet, Nuremberg also made it easy for 
many ordinary Germans to see only these top leaders as the 
guilty parties and not to ask difficult questions about their 
own role in supporting and promoting the criminal Nazi 
regime. The Nuremberg trials continued into the late 1940s 
and resulted in the indictments of lower-level Nazi officials. 

Francis Biddle was one of the American judges at the Nurem¬ 
berg trial. In his 1962 memoir, he describes the responses of 
the defendants to the charges against them. 


A lot of unhappiness and damage 
has been caused by denazifica¬ 
tion _ Those who are truly 

guilty of crimes committed in the 
National Socialist period and in 
the war should be most severely 
punished.... But as for the rest 
we must no longer distinguish 
between two classes of people in 
Germany... those who are politi¬ 
cally beyond reproach and those 
who are reproachable. 

—Konrad Adenauer, 
first elected leader of West 
Germany, in his inaugural 
speech before the new parlia¬ 
ment, September 20, 1949 




HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


American and Russian chiefs 
of staff gathered at a confer¬ 
ence in Potsdam, near Berlin, 
between July i7 and August 
2, i945, to discuss the fate of 
occupied Germany. 



We watched the defendants day after day, these drab men once 
great, most of them now turning on the Ftihrer who had led them 
to their brief spasm of violent triumph. A few were still 'loyal." 
Some felt that it was not "correct" to attack a dead man who had 
been head of the State. Others transferred their guilt to the man 
who, they said, was alone responsible, from whom, they pleaded, 
orders came to them that had to be obeyed: theirs but to do or die, 
they argued,- how could there be a conspiracy, a meeting of the 
minds, when one mans mind commanded all the others?... 

Day after day the horrors accumulated—tortures by the 
Gestapo in France, scientific "experiments" on prisoners who died 
in agony, the gas chambers, the carefully planned liquidation of 
the Jews. Hour on hour the twenty-one men in the dock listened, 
and the shame spread, and steadily washed to the rocks of their 
loyalty to the man who was responsible for it all. After one day's 
evidence Hans Fritzsche was physically ill in his cell. And when 
Hans Frank, the notorious Governor General of Poland, made his 
cheap, dramatic confession—"a thousand years will pass and still 
this guilt of Germany will not have been erased"—Schacht 
observed to [court psychologist Gustav] Gilbert that Gorings 
united front of loyalty and defiance seemed to have collapsed. 
After Gisevius had testified, the legend was warped and tarnished. 









149 


GERMANY AFTER THE HOLOCAUST 


Speer tried in his testimony to destroy it forever. The Ftxhrer prin¬ 
ciple, he had at last realized, the authoritarian system, was funda¬ 
mentally wrong. In 1945 when the situation had become hopeless 
Hitler "attributed the outcome of the war in an increasing degree 
to the failure of the German people, but he never blamed himself. 
... The German people remained faithful to Adolf Hitler to the 
end. He knowingly betrayed them." 


The new West German state founded in 1949 (the Federal 
Republic of Germany) realized that it must make some kind 
of amends to the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust if it want¬ 


ed to be rehabilitated in the eyes of Western Europe and the 
United States. In September 1952, the West German chancel¬ 
lor (prime minister) Konrad Adenauer explained in a speech 
to his political party, the Christian Democratic Union, why 


Germany should make restitution payments 


to Israel. 

Now I would like to say this to you 
about the agreement with Israel: It is 
absolutely true that Germany, the 
Federal Republic, does not have any 
legal obligations with regard to the 
Republic of Israel, but the Federal 
Republic does have great moral obliga¬ 
tions. Even though we, and I am refer¬ 
ring here to our circle, did not partici¬ 
pate in the atrocities of National 
Socialism against the Jews, a consider¬ 
able number of the German people did 
participate in them, and they not only 
actively participated, a certain percent¬ 
age also got rich afterwards from their 
participation. We cannot ignore this 
fact. I consider it one of the most noble 
moral obligations of the German people 
to do, within their ability, whatever 
must be done to at least show that they 
do not agree with what was done to the 
Jews in the years of National Socialism, 
even if only by symbolic action. In 
unanimous resolutions the Bundestag 
[West German parliament] has repeat- 



Jewish Holocaust survivors 
sailing to Palestine in the late 
1940s raise the Zionist flag. 
The great majority of the 
eastern European Jews fled to 
occupied Germany after the 
war, hut they soon moved on, 
emigrating mainly to Israel 
or to the United States. By 
the early 1950s, there were 
fewer than 45,000 Jews in 
all of Germany 



150 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


The peoples who know that 
the members of their people are in 
mass graves remember them, 
particularly the Jews who were 
practically forced by Hitler into 
a consciousness of their own 
ethnicity. They will never, they 
can never forget what was done 
to them,- the Germans must never 
forget what was done by people 
of their nationality in these 
shameful years. 

—Theodor Heuss, first 
President of the Federal 
Republic of Germany, 
speaking at the dedication of 
the memorial for the victims 
of Bergen-Belsen concentration 
camp, November 1952 


edly expressed regret concerning the heinous crimes of the past 
against the Jews. Whoever speaks must also act. Words are cheap. 
But words must be followed by actions. 

There is also a certain legal basis to the demands of the state 
of Israel, since it was after all due to measures taken by Germany 
that Israel had to accommodate so many refugees, especially old 
people from Germany and from countries that were occupied by 
Germany at the time; this resulted in serious financial burdens for 
Israel. It has been proposed that, following a cabinet meeting on 
Monday morning, I will go to Luxembourg, and in Luxembourg a 
kind of symbolic declaration will take place between me and the 
Minister of Foreign Affairs of Israel. This declaration is to express 
that from now on the past shall be past between the Jews and 
Germany The representatives of the large Jewish world organiza¬ 
tion will also take part in this declaration. 

1 hope that the cabinet will not make things difficult for me. 
If the cabinet did cause problems, it would be a foreign policy 
disaster of the first order. It would not only be a political disaster, 
it would also strongly impede all our efforts to acquire foreign 
credit again. Let us be clear that now as before the power of the 
Jews in the economic sphere is extraordinarily strong, so that 
this—the term is perhaps a bit overstated—this reconciliation 
with the Jews is an absolute requirement for the Federal Republic 
from a moral standpoint and a political standpoint as well as an 
economic standpoint. 

I have intentionally dwelled on this topic in somewhat more 
detail because I fear that afterwards all kinds of things will be said 
about this issue in Germany, and there will be difficulties. What 
I am telling you now does not have to be an absolute truth, but 
at one time I was told by a leading American authority: If the 
Federal Government succeeds in reaching this settlement with 
Israel and with the Jewish world organizations, it will be a politi¬ 
cal event for the Federal Republic of Germany comparable to the 
Germany treaty and the agreement on the European Defense 
Community. Therefore I ask you, if the matter turns out as I hope, 
and if opposition also arises in our own ranks, nonetheless to 
reflect on my words and to help people really appreciate that the 
settlement with the Jews is morally, politically, and economically 
an absolute necessity. 

In the other Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or 
communist East Germany), the Communist leaders refused to 
accept any responsibility for the consequences of the Nazis' 




GERMANY AFTER THE HOLOCAUST 


151 


crimes, claiming that Communists had always fought against 
Nazism and had paid a heavy price for their resistance by long 
years of exile or imprisonment in concentration camps. The 
Nazis had murdered many Communists, so Communist East 
Germany felt it had no reason to make amends for Germany's 
Nazi past. In September 1958, the prime minister of East Ger¬ 
many Otto Grotewohl spelled out the official Communist 
regime's view at dedication ceremonies for the memorial con¬ 
structed by the East German government at the site of the 
Buchenwald concentration camp. 

THE IDEA OF THE FALLEN ANTI-FASCISTS LIVES ON 

... Today for the first time the bells ring from the tower of the 
National Memorial, resonating far into the countryside and pro¬ 
claiming the heroism of the European resistance fighters. They 
defied the dark, terrible night of Hitler-fascism,- they gave their 
blood and their lives, their joy and their happiness in order to end 
the cruel fascist slavery. The voices of the dead and the living 
unite in the sound of the bells to utter a warning cry: Never again 
fascism and war!... 

The anti-fascist fighters who died gave us that mission. Their 
idea lives,- it is risen out of war, misery, and ruins... 


THE ANTI-FASCIST RESISTANCE STRUGGLE IS A 
PEOPLE'S STRUGGLE 
... The anti-fascist resistance strug¬ 
gle was and is a peoples struggle. 

It can only lead to success where 
the peoples rise up resolutely under 
the leadership of their working 
class to fight against fascist reac¬ 
tion. The resistance struggle 
against Hitler-fascism was also 
organized and led by the working 
class and their parties. 

... Nazi rule in Germany was 
a fascist dictatorship of the most 
reactionary circles of German 
imperialism. Its goal was the estab¬ 
lishment of fascist world rule under 
German leadership. Its method was 
unrestrained terror and bloody 
mass murder... 



When the German forces surren¬ 
dered, Heinrich Himmler, leader of 
the SS and major architect of the 
Holocaust, tried to evade capture 
by assuming a false identity. 

British troops still managed to arrest 
him, but he committed suicide with 
a poison capsule before he could be 
put on trial for his many crimes. 



HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


52 


More than 18 million people were deported to the extermina¬ 
tion factories, the concentration camps. More than 11 million of 
them were murdered in the most brutal way. Here on this site, in 
the Buchenwald concentration camp, more than 56,000 people 
lost their lives... 

We thank first of all the heroic Soviet Union, the courageous 
sons and daughters of socialism, and the millions of nameless 
heroes of the anti-fascist resistance movement from many coun¬ 
tries in Europe for the victory over this abominable system. They 
shed their blood and gave their lives to crush Hitler-fascism. 

WARNING FOR ALL TIMES 

... This memorial shall be a place of friendship with the great 
Soviet people, who liberated our people and Europe from Hitler- 
fascism ... We call the living to action,- we admonish them not 
to grow weary in the fight against fascism and to continue to lead 
the people to success for world peace. With the cry: ' People of 
all lands—defend the greatest good of humankind, peace!" this 
ceremony can become a protest demonstration against the 
preparation for an imperialistic atomic war, which, especially 
coming from West Germany today, threatens the German people 
and humankind. 

Hitler-fascism was crushed militarily in 1945, but it was only 
destroyed at the roots in one part of Germany, in the German 
Democratic Republic... 

Today two German states stand before the world. One has 
learned from the mistakes of German history. It has learned good 
and right lessons. It is the German Democratic Republic—a state 
of peace and socialism. 

But the West German state is a refuge of reactionaries in which 
militarists and fascists have attained power once again,- the state's 
aggressive character is revealed in its reactionary actions... 

Fatefully involved in the politics of the NATO alliance, the 
forces of yesterday stand ready in West Germany to seek revenge 
for the defeat they suffered and to plunge the people into a new 
horrible war. Once again they rule the state and the economy,- 
they are raising the youth for a new war, and they control the 
entire reactionary propaganda industry... 

Thus the old fascist system in West Germany is currently 
becoming "socially acceptable" once again. It is high time to change 
the situation in West Germany. Threatening clouds darken the light 
of peace and freedom... We must not allow the world to be 
plunged again into blood and misery and the people to be forced to 





GERMANY AFTER THE HOLOCAUST 


the edge of catastrophe. The decision whether the nations follow 
the path toward peace or whether they steer toward the abyss of a 
third world war lies in the hands of peace-loving people. 

In a secret wartime memo, a German official wrote to Adolf 
Eichmann's SS department about the deportation of six 
thousand French Jews to Auschwitz. After Germany's defeat, 

Eichmann was arrested and placed in an American intern¬ 
ment camp, but he managed to escape. In 1950, he fled to 
Argentina and lived there under an assumed name until May 
1960, when Israeli secret service agents arrested him and 
took him to Israel. This document was later used as evidence 
in Eichmann's 1961 trial in Jerusalem. 


Berlin,. d*n 


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154 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


An Israeli court sentences Adolf 
Eicbmann to death in \96i as he 
stands behind bulletproof glass. As a 
high-ranking officer in the SS, 
Eicbmann had organized the deporta¬ 
tions of Jews from all over Europe to 
the extermination camps in Poland. His 
trial sixteen years after the end of the 
war reminded Germany and the world 
that many major Nazi war criminals 
had still not been brought to justice. 



The "negative inheritance" of the Holocaust has become a 
permanent component of German national identity. Today, 
the history of the Holocaust is taught in the German school 
system, and the Nazi era is a common theme in German 
fiction, films, and television shows. It is difficult for contem¬ 
porary Germans to think about what it means to be German 
without at the same time confronting the fact that the 
Holocaust is an undeniable chapter of German history. In 
October 2001, Rob Broomby, a British Broadcasting Corpora¬ 
tion reporter in Berlin, wrote an article describing the new 
national Holocaust memorial, designed by the American 
architect Peter Eisenman, that today covers a large site in the 
very center of re-united Berlin. 


Work has begun in central Berlin on a massive Holocaust memo¬ 
rial, almost 2,000 square metres in size. A large digger has started 
the process of turning this huge plot of land into a monument to 
the six million Jews of Europe killed by the Nazis. 

The $22m scheme, located just a few hundred metres from the 
Brandenburg Gate—the symbol of German nationhood—is an 









GERMANY AFTER THE HOLOCAUST 



enormous gesture of national remorse. The location between the 
symbolic gate and the bunker where Adolph Hitler died is as 
important as the design itself.... 

The idea for a monument predates the fall of the Berlin Wall, 
though the plot of land was not set aside until 1993. Initial plans 
for a huge iron plate, measuring 100 metres by 100 metres, and 
bearing the names of some four-and-a-half million Jews, was 
vetoed by the then chancellor, Helmut Kohl. 

The present design, with its 2,700 concrete pillars of differing 
heights, was described by the architect, Peter Eisenman, as a wav¬ 
ing cornfield. It.. .is set just below street level. The Bundestag 
president, Wolfgang Thierse, said the beginning of construction 
work showed an assertion of Germany's historical responsibility. 
The memorial is expected to be completed by 27 January 2004— 
the 59th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz [the monu¬ 
ment was opened in May 2005]. 


The Memorial to the Murdered 
Jews ojEurope displays 2,7 id 
concrete slabs in a grid pattern on 
a huge site in the center oj Berlin. 
Visitors can walk through the 
monument, along pathways between 
the markers. The changing depth of 
the pathways and different heights 
of the concrete slabs are meant to 
produce unease and confusion. 











enne 



HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


F 


1889 

Adolf Hitler is born 
in Braunau am Inn, 
Austria 

1908-1913 

Hitler lives in Vienna 

1914-1918 

World War I is fought 
in Europe; Hitler 
serves on the Western 
Front 

1918 

Germans revolt 
against Kaiser 
Wilhelm II and pro¬ 
claim German 
Republic in Berlin,- 
the kaiser abdicates 


1919 

Germany signs 
Versailles Treaty,- 
Hitler joins German 
Workers' Party in 
Munich 

1920 

German Workers' 
Party issues its pro¬ 
gram and changes its 
name to National 
Socialist German 
Workers' Party 

1921 

Nazis found their 
paramilitary organiza¬ 
tion, the SA (storm 
troopers) 

1923 

French and Belgian 
troops occupy Ruhr, 
in western Germany; 
Hitler attempts to 
seize power in Bavaria 


1924 

Hitler is tried for 
high treason and is 
sentenced to five 
years in prison but 
released before the 
end of the year 

1925 

Paul von Hindenburg 
elected as president 
of the republic,- 
Hitler's Mein Kampj 
published 

1932 

Nazis increase their 
percent of the vote in 
national elections to 
37.3 and become 
largest single party in 
the Reichstag (nation¬ 
al parliament) with 
230 seats 


1933 

Hitler appointed 
chancellor,- Heinrich 
Himmler establishes 
first concentration 
camp at Dachau, 
nationwide boycott 
of Jewish stores,- trade 
unions dissolved,- 
books by "un-German" 
authors burned in 
cities across Germany,- 
Germany becomes a 
one-party state 

1934 

On the "Night of 
Long Knives" SS 
officers murder the 
SA leadership,- Reich 
President von 
Hindenburg dies 









1935 

The League of 
Nations returns the 
Saar province to 
Germany/ Nazis intro¬ 
duce conscription and 
expand the army,- 
Nuremberg Racial 
Laws ban marriage 
and sexual relations 
between Jews and 
non-Jews 

1936 

Hitler reoccupies 

demilitarized 

Rhineland 

1938 

Germany annexes 
Austria,- Munich con¬ 
ference results in eth- 
nic-German Sudeten 
border region of west¬ 
ern Czechoslovakia 
being given to 
Germany,- Kristall- 
nacht takes place 


1939 

Hitler's army occupies 
rest of 

Czechoslovakia; 

Hitler defeats Poland,- 
euthanasia campaign 
begins,- Polish Jews 
forced to wear yellow 
Star of David 

1940 

German Army invades 
Denmark and Norway 
and defeats 
Netherlands, Belgium, 
and France,- Battle of 
Britain begins 

1941 

Germany attacks 
Yugoslavia and 
Greece,- Hitler invades 
Soviet Union, but 
German Army halted 
before it reaches 
Moscow,- mass shoot¬ 
ings of Jews by 
Einsatzgruppen 


1942 

Systematic mass 
gassings of Jews begin 
in Auschwitz- 
Birkenau; German 
Sixth Army encircled 
at Stalingrad 

1943 

German Sixth Army 
surrenders at 
Stalingrad; Jews in 
Warsaw ghetto stage 
uprising,- Allies land in 
Sicily,- major tank bat¬ 
tles fought at Kursk; 
Soviets recapture Kiev 

1944 

Germany occupies 
Hungary, Allies 
invade France on the 
Normandy coast,- 
German officers' 
attempt to kill Hitler 
and overthrow Nazi 
regime fails,- Soviet 


Army liberates 
Majdanek concentra¬ 
tion camp; American 
and French troops 
enter Paris 

1945 

Red Army liberates 
Auschwitz,- American 
troops enter 
Buchenwald concen¬ 
tration camp, British 
troops liberate Bergen- 
Belsen concentration 
camp; American and 
Soviet troops meet at 
Elbe River,- Hitler 
commits suicide in 
Berlin bunker, Red 
Army occupies Berlin,- 
Germany capitulates 
to Allies 









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FURTHER READING 


159 


Further Reading 


World War I, Weimar, and 
Hitlers Rise to Power 

Allen, William Sheridan. The Nazi Seizure 
of Power: The Experience of a Single German 
Town: 1 9 2 2— i 9 4 5. New York: Franklin 
Watts, 1984. 

Bessel, Richard. Germany after the First 
World War. Oxford, England: 
Clarendon Press, 1993. 

Bridenthal, Renate, Atina Grossmann, 
and Marion Kaplan, eds. When Biology 
Became Destiny. Women in Weimar and 
Nazi Germany. New York: Monthly 
Review Press, 1984. 

Coetzee, Frans and Marilyn Shevin- 
Coetzee. World War L A History in 
Documents. New York: Oxford 
University Press, 2002. 

Daniel, Ute. The War from Within-. German 
Working-Class Women in the First World 
War. New York: Berg, 1997. 

Davis, Belinda J. Home Fires Burning: Food, 
Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I 
Berlin. Chapel Hill: University of 
North Carolina Press, 2000. 

Fallada, Hans. Little Man, What Now? New 
York: Simon and Schuster, 1933. 

Fritzsche, Peter. Germans into Nazi’s. 
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard 
University Press, 1998. 

Kaes, Anton, Martin Jay, and Edward 
Dimendberg, eds. The Weimar Republic 
Sourcebook. Berkeley: University of 
California Press, 1994. 


Kershaw, Ian. Hitler ; 1889 - 1936 .- Hubris. 
New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. 

Kessler, Charles, ed. Berlin in Lights: The 
Diaries of Count Harry Kessler 
(i9i8—i937f New York: Grove, 1999. 

Peukert, Detlev J. K. The Weimar Republic: 
The Crisis of Classical Modernity. New 
York: Hill and Wang, 1992. 

Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the 
Western Front. New York: Ballantine, 
1987. 


Nazi Dictatorship 

Aygoberry, Pierre. The Social History of the 
Third Reich, 193 3 - 1945 . New York: 
New Press, 1998. 

Bessel, Richard, ed. Life in the Third Reich. 
New York: Oxford University Press, 
1987. 

Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New 
History. New York: Hill and Wang, 
2000 . 

Crew, David F., ed. Nazism and German 
Society, i933-t945. New York: 
Routledge, 1994. 

Gellately, Robert. Backing Hitler: Consent 
and Coercion in Nazi Germany. New 
York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 

Gilbert, Martin. The Dent Atlas of the 
Holocaust. London: J.M. Dent, 1993. 

Kershaw, Ian. Hitler, 1936 - 1945 : Nemesis. 
New York: W.W. Norton, 2000. 


Kershaw, Ian. Popular Opinion and Political 
Dissent in the Third Reich. Bavaria 
1933 - 4945 . Oxford: Clarendon, 1983. 

Klemperer, Victor. The Language of the 
Third Reich, LTI-Lingua Tertii Imperii: A 
Philologists Notebook New York: 
Continuum, 2000. 

Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland: 
Women, the Family and Nazi Politics. New 
York: St. Martins, 1987. 

Petropoulos, Jonathan. Art as Politics in the 
Third Reich. Chapel Hill: University of 
North Carolina Press, 1996. 

Peukert, Detlev J. K. Inside Nazi Germany.- 
Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in 
Everyday Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale 
University Press, 1987. 

Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich: 

Memoirs. London: Weidenfeld and 
Nicolson, 1970. 

Stackelberg, Roderick. Hitlers Germany-. 
Origins , Interpretations, Legacies. New 
York: Routledge, 1999. 

Taylor, Fred, ed. The Goebbels Diaries, 

i939-i94i. New York : Putnam, 1983. 

Taylor, James, and Warren Shaw. The 
Third Reich Almanac. New York: World 
Almanac, 1987. 

Wistrich, Robert S. Who's Who in Nazi 
Germany New York: Routledge, 1995. 




160 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


The Racial State 

Aly, Gotz, Peter Chroust, and Christian 
Pross, eds. Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi 
Medicine and Racial Hygiene. Baltimore r 
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 
1994. 

Bajohr, Frank. " Aryanisation" in Hamburg.- 
The Economic Exclusion of Jews and the 
Confiscation of Their Property in Nazi 
Germany. New York: Berghahn, 2001. 

Burleigh, Michael, and Wolfgang 

Wippermann. The Racial State: Germany 
{933-1945. Cambridge, England: 
Cambridge University Press, 1991, 

Friedlander, Saul. Nazi Germany and the 
Jews: The Years of Persecution 193 3 — 1939 . 
New York: HarperCollins, 1997. 

Kater, Michael. The Twisted Muse. Musicians 
and their Music in the Third Reich. New 
York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 

Klemperer, Victor, I Will Bear Witness.- A 
Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941. New 
York: Random House, 1998. 

Proctor, Robert N. Racial Hygiene: Medicine 
under the Nazis. Cambridge, Mass.: 
Harvard University Press, 1988. 


Hitlers War 

Bartov, Omer. Hitlers Amy : Soldiers , Nazis, 
and War in the Third Reich. New York: 
Oxford University Press, 1991. 

Beck, Earl R. Under the Bombs: The German 
home Front.- 1942-1945. Lexington: 
University of Kentucky Press, 1986. 

Overy, R. J. Why the Allies Won. New 
York: W.W. Norton, 1997. 

Steinert, Marl is G. Hitler 's War and the 
Germans-. Public Mood and Attitude During 
the Second World War. Athers: Ohio 
University Press, 1977. 

Rossino, Alexander B. Hitler Strikes Poland: 
Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity. 
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 
2003. 

Wall, Donald W. Nazi Germany and World 
War II. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 
2003. 


The Holocaust 

Bartov, Omer, ed. The Holocaust: Origins , 
Implementation, Aftermath. New York: 
Routledge, 2000. 


Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must 
Know.- The History of the Holocaust As Told 
in the United States Holocaust Memorial 
Museum. New York: Little, Brown, 

1993. 

Browning, Christopher R. The Path to 
Genocide. Essays on Launching the Final 
Solution. Cambridge, England: 
Cambridge University Press, 1992. 

Dwork, Deborah. Children with a Star: 
Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe. New Haven, 
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991. 

Dwork, Deborah, and Robert Jan van 
Pelt. Holocaust: A History. New York: 
W.W. Norton, 2002. 

Hoess, Rudolf. Commandant of Auschwitz: 
The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess. 
London: Phoenix, 2000. 

Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi 
Assault on Humanity. New York: 
Touchstone, 1996. 

Marrus, Michael R. The Nuremberg War 
Crimes Trial , 1945—46: A Documentary 
History. Boston: Bedford, 1997. 

Roseman, Mark. A Past in Hiding.- Memory 
and Survival in Nazi Germany. New York: 
Henry Holt, 2000. 





WEBSITES 


161 


Websites 


Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial 
and Museum 

www.auschwitz.org .pi 

The official website of the Auschwitz- 
Birkenau memorial provides detailed 
information on the history of this major 
Nazi concentration and extermination 
camp, from its establishment in 1940 to 
its liberation in January 1945. 

Documentation and Cultural 
Centre of German Sinti and 
Roma (Gypies) 

www. sintiundroma . del english. html 

This permanent exhibition, much of 
which is available online, documents the 
treatment of Gypsies at the hands of the 
Third Reich. 

German Propaganda Archive 

www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa 

Maintained by a professor at Calvin 
College in Michigan, this archive pre¬ 
serves propaganda speeches, posters, 
photographs, and other original material 
covering pre-1933 Germany, the Nazi 
era (1933*n*45), and the post-1945 East 
German dictatorship. 

The History Place 

www.historyplace.com 

This website presents detailed chronolo¬ 
gies of Hitler's rise to power, World War 
II, and the Holocaust, as well as concise 
biographies of major Nazi figures, excerpts 
from original Nazi documents, and a 
large number of historical photographs. 


Imperial War Museum 

www.iwm.org.uk 

Covering all aspects of twentieth-century 
conflict, this British museum's website 
has a huge digitized collection of images 
as well as online exhibits. 


The Museum of the Great War 

www.historial.org/us/home.htm 

This museum shows how the Germans, 
British, French, and Americans perceived 
and experienced World War I from 
different vantage points. The website 
presents a selection of the museums 
collection of posters, lithographs, press 
clippings, objects, uniforms, postcards, 
books and periodicals, photographs, 
scrapbooks, and other documents. 


The National D-Day Museum 

www. ddaym useum. o rg 

The website of America's World War II 
museum details U.S. involvement in the 
war with a rich array of photographs, 
artifacts, and online exhibits. 


Nazi Crimes on Trial 

www i .jur.uva.nl/junsv 

This website provides a detailed listing 
and description of post-1945 trials for 
Nazi war crimes compiled by professors 
at the Institute of Criminal Law of the 
University of Amsterdam. 


Survivors of the Shoah Visual 
History Foundation 

www.vhj.org 

Started by movie director Steven 
Spielberg, this foundation preserves the 
testimonies of Holocaust survivors and 
other witnesses, many of which are 
available online. 


The United States Holocaust 
Memorial Museum 

www.ushmm.org 

This comprehensive website of this 
Washington, D.C., museum includes 
online exhibits, a multimedia archive, 
video clips of survivors' testimony, and 
detailed articles about all aspects of the 
Holocaust. 

Yad Vashem: The Holocaust 
Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance 
Authority 

www.yadvashem. org 

The website of the official Israeli 
Holocaust memorial and museum 
includes access to a database which Yad 
Vashem and its partners have recorded 
the names of half of the six million Jews 
murdered by the Nazis during the 
Holocaust. 





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TEXT CREDITS 



Text Credits 


Main Text 

p. 20: Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the 
Western Front (London.- Granada, 1977), p. 91. 

p. 20-21: Ernst JUnger, "Fire," in The Weimar 
Republic Sourcebook ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, 
and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University 
of California Press, 1994), pp.18-19. © 1994 
The Regents of the University of California. 

p. 21—22: Berliner Tageblatt, May 19,1916, quoted 
in Ute Daniel, The War from Within: German 
Working-Class Women in the First World War (New 
York: Berg, 1997), p. 191. 

p. 22-24: Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, eds., The 
Weimar Republic Sourcebook, p. 46. © 1994 The 
Regents of the University of California. 

p. 24-25: The Treaty of Versailles: The 
Reparations Clauses, first published in The Treaty 
of Peace between the Allied and Associated Powers and 
Germany (London: His Majesty's Stationery 
Office, 1919), 

p. 25-26: Paul von Hindenburg, 'The Stab in 
the Back," Stenographischer Bericht iiber die offenthchen 
Verhandlungen des 75. Untersuchungsausschusses der ver- 
fassungsgebenden Nationalversammlung, testimony 
delivered on November 18, 1919, trans., vol. 2 
(Berlin, 1920), pp.700-1. Reproduced in Kaes, 
Jay, and Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic 
Sourcebook pp. 15—16. © 1994 The Regents of 
the University of California. 

p. 26—28: Spartacus Manifesto, November 26, 
1918, reproduced in Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, 
eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, PP- 37—8. 

© 1994 The Regents of the University of 
California. 

p. 29: Friedrich Hollaender, lyrics in translation 
in the liner notes for the CD Ute Lemper. Berlin 
Cabaret Songs, Matrix Ensemble Robert Ziegler, 
Decca Music Group. 

p, 30-31: Elsa Herrmann, So ist die neue Frau (This 
is the New Woman, Hellerau.- Avalon Verlag, 
1929), pp. 32-43 in Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, 
eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, Don Reneau, 
trans., pp. 206—8. © 1994 The Regents of the 
University of California. 

p. 31-32: Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: 
Weimar Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard 
University Press, 1995), pp. 292, 299-300. 
Reprinted by permission of the publisher from, 
THE MASS ORNAMENT: WEIMAR ESSAYS 


by Siegfried Kracauer, translated and edited by 
Thomas Y. Levin, pp. 292, 299-300, Cambridge, 
Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright 
© 1995 by the President and Fellows of Harvard 
College. 

p. 32-33: "Textile Workers: My Workday, My 
Weekend," in Mein Arbeitstag. Mein Wochenende. 150 
Berichte von Textilarbeitermenn, ed. Deutscher 
Textilarbeiterverband (Berlin: Textilpraxis Verlag, 
1930), in Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, eds., The 
Weimar Republic Sourcebook, p. 208. 

p 34—35: Moritz Julius Bonn, Wandering Scholar 
(New York: John Day, 1948), pp. 286-90. In 
Fritz K. Ringer, ed., The German Inflation of 192 3 
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 
99-103. 

p. 35—37: Hans Fallada, Little Man, What Now? 
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1933), pp. 
368-69. Reproduced with the permission of 
Aufbau-Verlag GmbH, Berlin. 

p. 41-42: J. Noakes and G. Pridham, eds., 

Nazism. A History in Documents and Eyewitness 
Accounts 1919 - 1945 , vol. 1 (New York: Schocken, 
1983), pp. 12-14. 

p. 42: "Document 3. The 25 Points of the Nazi 
Party Programme," in Frank McDonough, Hitler 
and the Rise of the Nazi Party (London: Pearson, 
2003), p. 104. 

p. 42—44: Adolf Hitler, Mem Kampf trans. Ralph 
Mannkeim (London.- Hutchinson, 1984), pp. 
426-28. From Mem Kampf by Adolf Hitler, pub¬ 
lished by Pimlico. Reprinted by permission of 
The Random House Group Ltd. 

p. 44: Kurt Ludecke, 7 Knew Hitler . The Story of a 
Nazi Who Escaped the Blood Purge (London: Jarrolds, 
1938), pp. 699-702. 

p. 44-46: Louis L. Snyder, ed., Hiller's Third Reich 
A Documentary History (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 
1991), p. 41. 

p. 46: William Sheridan Allen, ed., The Infancy of 
Nazism.- The Memoirs of Ex-Gauleiter Albert Krebs, 
1923-1933 (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976), 
p. 42. 

p. 47-48; Benjamin C. Sax and Dieter Kunz, 
eds., Inside Hitler's Germany. A Documentary History' of 
Life in the Third Reich (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. 
Heath, 1992), pp. 98-100. © 1992 by 
Houghton Mifflin Company. 


p. 48—49: Simon Taylor, Germany 1918 — 1933 : 
Revolution, Counter-Revolution, and the Rise of Hitler 
(London: Duckworth, 1983), pp. 83—84. 

p. 49-50: Taylor, Germany 1918 - 1933 , p. 85. 

p. 50—52: Monika Richarz, ed., Jewish Life in 
Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries (Bloomington: 
Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 302-3. 

p. 52—53: Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, vol. 1, 
pp. 53-54. 

p. 53-55: "A Violent Complement to the Legal 
Revolution," in Sax and Kuntz, eds., Inside Hitlers 
Germany, pp. 138-39. © 1992 by Houghton 
Mifflin Company. 

p. 55—56: Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, vol. 1, 
pp. 167-68. 

p. 56—57: Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: 
Memoirs (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 
1970), pp. 51-53. 

p. 70—72: Louis L. Snyder, ed., Hitler's Third Reich: 
A Documentary History (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 
1991), pp. 211-14. 

p. 72-73: "Resolution of a Municipal Council in 
the Bernkastel District, August 13, 1935/' in 
Benjamin Sax and Dieter Kunz, eds., Inside Hitler's 
Germany. A Documentary History of Life in the Third 
Reich (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1992), 
p. 409. 

p. 73-74: J. Noakes and G. Pridham, Nazism 
1919 — 1945 . Volume 2 . State, Economy and Society: 
1933 - 1939 . A Documentary Reader (Exeter: 
University of Exeter Press, 2000), p. 589-91. 

p. 74-75: Hans Massaquoi, Destined to Witness: 
Growing up Black in Nazi Germany (New York: 
William Morrow, 1999), p. 46-8. COPYRIGHT 
© 2000 BY HANS J. MASSAQUOI. Reprinted 
by permission of Harper Collins Publishers. 

p. 75—76: Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang 
Wippermann, The Racial State. Germany 1933—1945 
(New York,- Cambridge University Press, 1991), 

pp. 120-21 

p. 76-78; Burleigh and Wippermann, The Racial 
State, pp. 192-93. 

p. 78-79: United States Holocaust Memorial 
and Museum, www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/ 
index.php?Module!d= 10005261. 




164 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


p. 79-80: Louis L.Snyder, ed., Hitler's Third Reich: 
A Documentary Historyr (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 
1991), pp. 305-7. 

p. 80—82: The New York Times, November 11,1938, 
in Snyder, Hitler's Third Reich, pp. 299—301. 

p. 82-84: Hans Berger, "Remembrances of 
Kristallnacht and My Experiences in the 
Concentration Camp Buchenwald, manuscript 
dated Brussels, January 15, 1939" in Monika 
Richarz, ed. r Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from 
Three Centuries (Bloomington: Indiana University 
Press, 1991), pp. 386-96. 

p. 84-86: Olga Levy Drucker, Kindertransport 
(New York: Henry Holt, 1992), pp. 37-40. 
Excerpt from KINDERTRANSPORT by Olga 
Levy Drucker, © 1992 by Olga Levy Drucker. 
Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and 
Company, LLC. 

p. 86-87: Max O. Korman, 'The Ill-Fated 
Steamship St. Louis," in Hitler’s Exiles.- Personal Stories 
of the Flie/bt from Nazi Germany to America ed. Mark. 
M. Anderson (New York: New Press, 1998), pp. 

187—91. Reprinted by permission of The New 
Press, www.thenewpress.com. 

p. 87—88: Reichsgesetzblatt, 1933, vol. 1, p. 529, in 
The Nazi Germany Sourcebook An Anthology of Texts, 
ed. Roderick Stackelberg and Sally A. Winkle 
(New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 154-55. 
Copyright © 2002. Reproduced by permission 
of RoutledgeTaylor & Francis Group, LLC. 

p. 88-89: Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, vol. 2, p. 
255. 

p. 89-90: Alfons Heck, The Burden of Hitler's Legacy 
(Frederick, Colo.: Renaissance House, 1988), pp. 
57-58. 

p. 90-92: Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered: A 
Dossier on My Former Self, trans. Geoffrey Strachan 
(London: Abelard-Schumann, 1964), pp. 12, 16, 
18-19, 20, 22-23. 

p. 92-93: Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, vol. 2, p. 
439. 

p. 93-95: Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel 
for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi 
Conspiracy and Aggression, vol. 4 (Washington, 
D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1946), pp. 
624-34. In Stackelberg and Winkle, eds., Tin 
Nazi Germany Sourcebook p. 205-7. Copyright © 
2002. Reproduced by permission of 
RoutledgeTaylor & Francis Group, LLC. 


p. 95—97: Lina Haag, Eine Handvoll Staub: 

Widerstand einer Frau 1933-1945 (1947). Reprint 
(Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995), 
pp. 107, 111-13, 117-19. Sally Winkle, trans., in 
Stackelberg and Winkle, The Nazi Germany 
Sourcebook pp. 146-49. Copyright © 2002. 
Reproduced by permission of RoutledgeTaylor & 
Francis Group, LLC. 

p. 101: "Reflections on the Treatment of the 
Peoples of Alien Races in the East," in Witness to 
the Holocaust, ed. Michael Berenbaum (New York: 
HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 75-76. 

p. 102: J. Noakes and G. Pridham, Nazism: 

1919 — 1945 , Volume 3 : Foreign Policy, War and Racial 
Extermination: A Documentary Reader Exeter: 
University of Exeter Press, p. 904. 

p. 102—103: The War in Pictures (London: Odhams 
Press, 1940), pp. 296, 298, 300. 

p. 103-104: Stephen E. Ambrose, American 
Heritage New History of World War II (New York, 
Viking, 1997), p. 94. 

p. 104-106: Norman Cameron and R. H. 

Stevens, trans., Hillers Secret Conversations, 

1941—1944 (New York: Octagon, 1976), pp. 
28-30, 56-57, 343-45. 

p. 106-107: Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel 
for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi 
Conspiracy and Aggression, vol. 8 (Washington, 
D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1946), pp. 
585-87. In Roderick Stackelberg and Sally A. 
Winkle, eds., The Nazi Germany Sourcebook An 
Anthology of Texts (New York: Routledge, 2002). 
Copyright © 2002. Reproduced by permission 
of RoutledgeTaylor & Francis Group, LLC. 

p. 107-108: War letters of the second World 
War, www.medienberatung.tu-berlin.de/cls/ 
Feldpost/ english/index.html 

p. 108-109: German Crimes in Poland, Volumes 1-2 
(Warsaw, 1946), pp. 268-69, 292. In D. G. 
Williamson, The Third Reich (Harlow, England: 
Longman, 1982), p. 92. 

p. 109: Charles Burdick and Hans-Adolf 
Jacobsen, eds., The Haider War Diary, i 939—194 2 
(Novato, Calif.: Presidio, 1988), p. 506. 

p. 109-110: Noakes and Pridham Nazism, vol. 3, 
p. 827. 

p. 110-111: www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/ 
time line/germ a ny-declares.htm 


p. 11 l-l 12: Louis L.Snyder, ed., Hitler's Third 
Reich: A Documentary History (Chicago: Nelson- 
Hall, 1991), pp. 456-59. 

p. 112-113: Franz Schneider and Charles 
Cubans, trans., Last Letters from Stalingrad, (New 
York: New American Library, 1961), pp. 46-47, 
37-38, 50-51. 

p. 113-114: Ulrich Herbert, A History of Foreign 
Labor in Germany, 1880-1980: Seasonal Workers/Eorced 
Laborers/Guest Workers, (Ann Arbor: University of 
Michigan Press, 1990), p. 149. 

p. 114-115: Herbert, A History of Foreign Labor in 
Germany, 1880-1980, p. 157. 

p. 1 15—1 16: Inge Scholl, Students against Tyranny: 
The Resistance of the White Rose, Munich, 1942-1943, 
trans. Arthur R. Schultz (Middletown, Conn.: 
Wesleyan University Press, 1970), pp. 89-90. © 
1970 by Inge Scholl. Reprinted with permission 
of Wesleyan University Press 

p. 116-118: Noakes & Pridham, Nazism, vol. 3, 
pp. 870-71. 

p. 118: Jeremy Noakes, ed. Nazism .- 1919 - 1945 , 
Volume 4: The German Home Front in World War IF A 
Documentary Reader (Exeter: University of Exeter 
Press, 1998). 

p. 118-119: Johannes Steinhoff, Peter Pechel, 
and Dennis Showalter, Voices jrom the Third Reich: 
An Oral History (Washington, D.C.: Regnery 
Gateway, 1989), pp. 215—16. 

p. 119: Noakes & Pridham, Nazism , vol. 4, pp. 
557-58. 

p. 122—123: Adolf Hitler, speech to the Reichstag, 
January 30, 1939, www.historyplace.com/ 
worldwar2/holocaust/h-threat.htm. 

p. 123-124: J. Noakes and G. Pridham, Nazism, 
vol. 3 (New York: Schocken, 1983), pp. 1,024—25. 

p. 124—125: Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, 
193 3-1941: A Diary of the Nazi Years (New York: 
Modern Library, 1999), pp. 433-4. 

p. 125-127; Dina Pronicheva, "A Survivors 
Eyewitness Account," www.historyplace.com/ 
worldwar2/holocaust/h - b-yar. htm. 

p. 127-129: Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, vol. 3, 
pp. 460-62. 

p. 129-131:Weiss Fritzshallm, Fritzie, interview, 
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 
Collections, 1990. 




TEXT CREDITS 


165 


p. 131-132: Stern, Bart, interview, United States 
Holocaust Memorial Museum Collections, 1992. 

p. 132-134: "Deathwatch at Belzec: Kurt 
Gersteins Deposition 1 ' English translation in 
Lucy S. Dawidowicz, ed., A Holocaust Reader 
(West Orange, N.J.: Behrman House, 1976), pp. 
106-8. © Behrman House, Inc., reprinted with 
permission www.behrmanhouse.com. 

p. 134-135: Joann a Bourke, The Second World War-. 
A Peoples History (New York: Oxford University 
Press, 2001), p. 147. 

p. 135: United States Holocaust Memorial and 
Museum, Washington, D.C., www.ushmm.org/ 
wlc/en/index.php?Module!d= 10005261. 

p. 135-137: Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand 
(Boulder, Colo.: Johnson Books, 1997), pp. 
186-89. 

p. 137-138: Elisabeth Freund, "Waiting," in 
Hitlers Exiles.- Personal Stories of the Flight from Nazi 
Germany to America, ed. Mark M. Anderson 
(New York: New Press, 1998), pp. 120—28. 
Reprinted by permission of The New Press. 
www.thenewpress.com. 

p. 139-140: 'The Last Letter from Mordecai 
Anielewicz, Warsaw Ghetto Revolt Commander, 
April 23, 1943" in A Holocaust Reader: From Ideology 
to Annihilation, ed. Rita Botwinick (Upper Saddle 
River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1998), pp. 191-92. 

p. 140—141: Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (New 
York: Vintage, 1996), pp. 213-14. 

p. 145-147: U S. Department of State 
Publication 9446, Documents on Germany 1944—1985 
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing 
Office, 1985), pp. 15-23. 

p. 147-149: Francis Biddle, In Brief Authority 
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), pp. 
424—46, in The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial 
1945-1946. A Documentary History, ed. Michael R. 


Marrus (New York: Bedford, 1997), pp. 77-78. 
From IN BRIEF AUTHORITY by Francis Biddle, 
copyright © 1962 by Francis Biddle. Used by 
permission of Doubleday, a division of Random 
House, Inc. 

p. 149-150: Konrad Adenauer, Reden 1917-1967-. 
Eine Auswabl , ed. Hans-Peter Schwarz (Stuttgart: 
Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1975), pp. 266-67. 
Sally Winkle, trans., in The Nazi Germany 
Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts , ed. Roderick 
Stackelberg and Sally A. Winkle (New York: 
Routledge, 2002), pp. 400-1. Copyright © 

2002. Reproduced by permission of 
Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. 

p 150—151: Otto Grotewohl, Kampf um die etnige 
Deutsche Demokratische Republik . Redoi und Aufsatze, 
vol. 6 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1964), pp. 7-14. 
Sally Winkle, trans., in Stackelberg and Winkle, 
The Nazi Germany Sourcebook , pp. 404—8. 

Copyright © 2002. Reproduced by permission 
of RoutledgeTaylor & Francis Group, LLC. 

p. 154-155: BBC News, Wednesday, 31 October, 
2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2lhi/europe/i629856.stm. 

Sidebars 

p. 32: Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, eds., The 
Weimar Republic Sourcebook, p. 623. 

p. 41: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf trans. Ralph 
Mannkeim (London: Hutchinson, 1969), p. 442. 

p. 42: lan Kershaw, Hitler, (New York: Longman, 
1991), p. 51. 

p. 48: Charles Kessler, ed. and trans., Berlin in 
Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler (i9l 8—1937] 
(New York; Grove, 1999), p. 396. 

p. 52: J. Noakes and G. Pridham, Nazism: A 
History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts 
1919-1945, vol. 1 (New York: Schocken, 1983), 
pp. 66-7. 


p. 54: Noakes and Pridham, vol. 1, Document 
46, p. 116. 

p. 71: Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, 
4933-1944: A Diary of the Nazi Years (New York: 
Modern Library, 1999), p. 258. 

p. 76: Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the 
Gypsies (New York: Oxford University Press, 
2000), p. 50. 

p. 83: Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know-. 
The History of the Holocaust As Told in the United States 
Holocaust Memorial Museum (New York: Little, 
Brown, 1993), p. 54. 

p. 87: United States Holocaust Memorial 
Museum, 1999 Oral History Interview with 
Ernst G.Heppner, www.ushmm.org/lcmedia/ 
viewer/ wlc/testimony.php?Refld=EHF 1001M. 

p. 97; Noakes and Pridham, vol. 2, Document 
373, p. 310. 

p. 1 10: Louis P. Lochner, ed. and trans. The 
Goebhels Diartes (New York: Eagle Books 1948), p. 
50.p. 127: Noakes and Pridham, vol. 3, 
Document 784, p. 1066. 

p. 132: Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz. The Nazi 
Assault on Humanity (New York: Collier Books, 
1961), p. 117. 

p. 137: United States Holocaust Memorial 
Museum, 1990 Oral History Interview with Liny 
Pajgin Yollick, www.ushmm.org/lcmedia/viewer/ 
wlc/testimony.php?RefId=LYE0276F 

p. 147: Stackelberg and Winkle, eds, The Nazi 
Germany Sourcebook Document 7.5, p. 397. 

p. 150: Stackelberg and Winkle, eds, The Nazi 
Germany Sourcebook Document 7.7, p. 402. 






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PICTURE CREDITS 



Picture Credits 


Author's Collection: 35,- Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin / 
Lucia Moholy, Photographer: 19, Bavarian State 
Library, Munich: 45, 57, 62 (top and bottom), 65 
(top),- © Berlin Tourism www.berlin-tourism- 
information-de: 155 ; Courtesy of the Blechner 
family, London: 86 ; BPK Berlin: 22 , 55 ; BPK 
Berlin. Photo: Joseph Schorer; 10, Bundesarchiv 
Bild 1011-287-0872-28A: 108 ; Bundesarchiv Bild 
102-00104: 33,- Deutsches Historisches Museum: 
27, 37, 53, 54, 66 (top), 70, 79, 81, 89, 90, 114,- 
Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library 
Digital Archives: 117, 146 ; Image provided by 
the German Propaganda Archive 
(http://www.calvin.edu/cas/gpa/): 61 (top), 64; 
Historical Archives Krupp, Essen: 23 ; GE 758, 
Poster Collection, Hoover Institution Archives: 
24; GE 899, Poster Collection, Hoover 
Institution Archives: 51,- © 1MAGNO: 105; © 
IMAGNO / Austrian Archives: 92,- © IMAGNO 
/ Thomas Sessler Verlag; 40, 43, 46,- By 
Permission of the Trustees of the Imperial War 
Museum, London: IWM BU 6738: 151, IWM 
BU 8684: 119, IWM COL 119: 13, IWM D 
1568: 104, IWM GER 18: 101, IWM HU 39714: 
111, IWM HU 75533: 103, IWM MH 4919: 38, 
IWM Q 110886: 26, IWM Q 126: 20, IWM Q 
65860: 61 (bottom), IWM Q 81763: 16; 
Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 115898, 
BI. 44, picture L 78; © Landeshauptatadt 
Munchen Stadtarchiv: 60; Library of Congress, 


Humanities and Social Sciences Division: 142 ; 
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs 
Division: 91; "Devoir de Memoire" Donated by: 
Musee de la Poche Royan, 1940-1945 Le Gua, 
France: 102 ; Museum fur Kunst Gewerbe 
Hamburg: 28, 65(bottom); NARA NWDNS 242 
HLB 3609 25: 97,- NARA 208-AA-328-HH-13: 
109; NARA 208-PP-10A-2: 98, NARA 242-GAP - 
286B-4; 107,- NARA NWDNS-111-SC-203416: 
120; NARA NWDNS-11 l-SC-207193: 144,- 
NARA NWDNS-44-PA-2415: 116,- NARA 
NWDNS-44-PA-85: 112; General Research 
Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, 
Lenox and Tilden Foundations: 42; Netherlands 
Institute for War Documentation: 80,- March 
Chagall, Purim, Philadelphia Museum of Art: 

The Louis E Stern Collection, 1963 / © 2005 
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / 
ADAGP, Paris: 74 ; Photofestnyc.com: 31 ; U. S. 
Army, courtesy Harry S. Truman Library: 148; 
USHMM: 63, 131; USHMM, courtesy of 
Bezirkskrankenhaus Kaufbeurem 77; USHMM, 
courtesy of Alex Knobler: 149: USHMM, cour¬ 
tesy of American Jewish Joint Distribution 
Committee: 82; USHMM, courtesy of 
Archiwum Dokumentacji Mechanicznej: 134,- 
USHMM, courtesy of Charles Rennie: 67 
(bottom),- USHMM, courtesy of Daniel Wellner: 
125,- USHMM, courtesy of Estelle Bechoefer: 
Cover,- USHMM, courtesy of Fritz Gluckstein: 


124; USHMM, courtesy George J. Wittenstein, 
M.D. (photographer): 115; USHMM, courtesy 
of Hans Pauli: 71 ; USHMM, courtesy of Israel 
Government Press Office: 154; USHMM, cour¬ 
tesy of Jack J. Silverstein: 72,- USHMM, courtesy 
of James Blevins: 67 (top); USHMM, courtesy of 
KZ Gedenkstaette Dachau: 95 ; USHMM, cour¬ 
tesy of Library of Congress: 94, 126, USHMM, 
Courtesy of Marion Davy. 75 ; USHMM, cour¬ 
tesy of Michael O'Hara: 58 ; USHMM, courtesy 
of Museum of the Great Patriotic War: 139; 
USHMM, courtesy of National Archives: 68, 96, 
123, 132, 141, 153; USHMM, courtesy of 
Norbert Wollheim: 145 ; USHMM, courtesy of 
Oesterreichisches Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte 
Bildarchiv: 85; USHMM, courtesy of Richard 
Freimark: 2, 3 ; USHMM, courtesy of Sharon 
Muller.- 140, USHMM, courtesy of Walter 
Meyerhof: 136, 137,- USHMM, courtesy of Yad 
Vashem: 130 ; USHMM, courtesy of Zydowski 
Instytut Historyczny Instytut Naukowo- 
Badawczy: 128; The views or opinions expressed 
in this book and the context in which the images 
are used, do not necessarily reflect the views or 
policy of, nor imply approval or endorsement 
by, The United States Holocaust Memorial 
Museum,- Photo: The Wiener Library; 66 (bot¬ 
tom), 73 




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169 


Index 


References to illustrations and their captions 
are indicated by page numbers in italics. 

Adenauer, Konrad, 147, 149-50 
Afro-Germans, 74-75 
Allies, 100-104, 111-12, 143-48 
All Quid on the Western Front (Remarque), 20 
Anielewicz, Mordecai, 139-40 
Anti-Bolshevist League, 28 
Anti-Semitism, 12, 13, 39-42, 48-52, 
<58-74, 79-84 
Architecture, 14, 19 
Armistice Line, too 
Art, 18-19, 73-74 
Aryans, 41-42, 69-97 
Auschwitz concentration camp, 97, 

121-22, 130- 34, 153, 155 
Austria, 39, 79, 99, 123 
Autobahn (freeway), 65 

Babi Yar executions (Russia), 126-27 
Battle of Britain, 102-4 
Battle of Kursk, 112 
Bauhaus architects, 19 
Belzec concentration camp, 121, 132-34 
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, 67, 150 
Berger, Hans, 82-84 
Berlin, Germany, 14, 36-37, 50, 52-53, 
56-57, 78, 80-82, ti9, 154-55 
Biddle, Francis, 147-49 
Blechner, Oskar, 86 
Blitzkrieg (lightning warfare), 99-105 
Bock, Fedor von, 109—10 
Bolsheviks, 26, 28 , 95, 106-7 
Bonn, Moritz Julius, 34—35 
Britain, 66, 67, 79, 143-47- Battle of, 

102-4,- military, 99-104 
Broomby, Rob, 154-55 
Brownshirts, 52 

Buchenwald concentration camp, 82 , 
i3i, 151 

Buxbaum, Henry, 50-52 
Chagall, Marc, 74, 135 


Chamberlain, Neville, 66 
Chelmno extermination camp, 121 
Children, 58-59, 66, 81, 84-86, 89-93, 124 
Christian Democratic Union, 149 
"Chuck Out the Men" (song), 29 
Cold War, 143-44 

Communism, 12 , 18, 19, 2 6-28, 52-54, 70, 
93, 95, 104, 151-53 
Concentration camps, 54-55, 67, 82, 
93-97, 108-9, *20-2 5, 129-38, 144, 

150-51, 153-54. See also camps by name 
Control Council, 145-47 
Czechoslovakia, 66, 79, 98-99, 140 

Dachau concentration camp, 54, 82, 96 
Daladier, Edouard, 66 
"Degenerate" art, 73-74 
Denazification, 143-55 
Denmark, 100 

Deportations, 129-3 1 , 153-54 
Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei. See German Workers 
Party 

Diels, Rudolf, 54 
Dietrich, Marlene, 30 
Displaced persons, 144 -45 
Ducker, Olga Levy, 84-86 
Dunkirk, France, 100 

Eichmann, Adolf, 153—54 
Einsatzgruppen (death squads), 121, 125-27 
Eisenman, Peter, 154-55 
Emergency Rescue Committee, 1 35 
England. See Britain 
Essen, Germany, 81 
"Eternal Jew Exhibition," 70 
Euthanasia, 123— 24 

Fallada, Hans, 35-37 
Farmers, 34, 48-49 
Festival of German Labor, 55 
Film, 19, 30, 31, 32 

France, 66, 79, 115-18, 143, 145 ; occupa¬ 
tion, 100-1O2, 105, 135-37 
Frank, Hans, 148 


Freund, Elisabeth, 136-37 
Fritzsche, Hans, 148 
Fritzshall, Fritzie Weiss, 131-32 
Fry, Varian, 135— 36 
Fugitive Pieces (Michaels), 140—41 

Genes, "bad," 77, 87-88, 93, 123-24 
Genocide, 121-41 
German Communist Party, 18, 27 
German Democratic Party, 26 
Germania, 14 

German Workers Party (DAP), 40, 46. See 
also Nazi Party 

Germany: bombing of, 118-19,- Federal 
Republic of Germany, 149 ; German 
Democratic Republic, 150-53; occupa¬ 
tion, 143-48; Weimar Republic, 17-19, 
22-37, 40-41, 49-50, 73 
Gerstein, Kurt, 13 2-33 
Gestapo, 14—15, 54, 93, 96-97, 137-38 
Ghettos, Jewish, 127-29, 131, 138-41 
Goebbels, Joseph, 14, 52-53, 79, 110, 143 
Goering, Hermann, 83, 100, 102-3, 

143, 148 

Golden Heart (film), 32 

Great Britain. See Britain 

Great Depression, 19, 23, 35—37, 41, 47 

Great Inflation, 19, 33—35, 40, 51 

Groszheim, Friedrich-Paul von, 134-35 

Grotewohl, Otto, 151 

Grynszpan, Herschel, 79 

Gustloff, Wilhelm, 7 9 

Gypsies, 75-76, 93, 95, 121-22, 133-34 

Haag, Lina, 95-97 

Haas, Willy, 32 

Habsburg Empire, 39 

Haider, Franz, 109 

Hamburg, Germany, 118-19 

Hamburg-America steamship line, 86 

Hartheim killing center, 123-24 

Heck, Alfons, 89—90 

Helots, 50 

Heppner, Ernst G., 87 


170 


HITLER AND THE NAZIS 


Herrmann, Elsa, 30-31 
Heuss, Theodor, 150 

Himmler, Heinrich, 56, 76-78, 93-95, 101, 
137, 143, i5i 

Hindenburg, Paul von, 25-26, 53, 57 
Hitler, Adolf: anti-Semitism, 39-42; death, 

142-43; early life, 39 ; myths of, 45, 58-67,- 
rise to power, 46-57; as soldier, 38-40; as 
speaker, 42-46; in World War 11, 99-145 
Hitler salute, 92, 98-99, m 
Hitler Youth, 89-92, 113 
Hoffmann, Heinrich, 6i, 62 
Hollaender, Friedrich, 29 
Holocaust, 67, 84, 87, 120-41, i44-49, 
153-55. See also Anti-Semitism; 
Concentration camps, Jews,- Racism 
Holocaust memorial, 154-55 
Homosexuals, 76-79, 93, 95, 122, 134-35 
Hoss, Rudolf, 97 
House of German Art, 73 
Hungarians, 130 
Hurricane fighter planes, 103 

Immigration, 84-87, 4 49 
Inflation, 19, 23-24 , 33-35, 40, 51 
Israel, 145, 449 
Italy, 12, 66, 79, 111-12 
I Will Bear Witness (Klemperer), 71 

Japan, 110-11 
Jehovah’s Witnesses, 93 , 95 
Jewish Council of Elders, 140 
Jewish star, 95, 125 

Jews, 50-52, 70-74, 79-87, 95, 121-33, 
135—41, 144—50. See also Anti-Semitism; 
Concentration camps, Holocaust, Racism 
Junger, Ernst, 20-21 

Kessler, Harry, 48 

Kindertransporte ("transports of children"), 
84-86 

Klemperer, Victor, 71, 125 
Knox, Frank, 111 
Kohl, Helmut, 155 


Korman, Max, 86-87 
Kracauer, Siegfried, 31-32 
Krebs, Albert, 46 

Kristallnacbt ("night of broken glass"), 79—84 
Krupp armament factory, 22 , 89 
Kursk, Russia, 112 

Labor unions, 32, 34 
Law for the Prevention of Genetically 
Diseased Offspring, 87-88 
League of Nations, 27, 50 
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 26 
Levi, Primo, 133 
Lewent, Abraham, 43i 
Lichtenberg concentration camp, 54, 95 
Literature, 19—20, 73 
Little Man, What Now? (Fallada), 35-37 
"Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies" 
(Kracauer), 31-32 
Lubeck, Germany, 134-35 
Lublin-Majdanek extermination camp, 

121, 434 

Ludecke, Kurt, 44 
Luftwaffe (airforce), 99 
Luther, Martin, 44 

Machine guns, 20-21, 103 
Maginot Line, 100 

Majdanek extermination camp, 121, 43 4 
Marriage, 70-74 , 93 
Marx, Karl, 40 
Marxism, 39-40, 42, 45, 47 
Maschmann, Melita, 90—92 
Massaquoi, Hans, 74-75 
Mein Kampf (Hitler), 41-44 
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of 
Europe, 154-55 
Mercedes automobiles, 60 
Messerschmidt fighter planes, 103 
Metropolis (film), 31—32 
Meyerhof, Walter, 136—37 
Michaels, Anne, 140-41 
Modernity, 18-19, 29-32, 73-74 
Munich Agreement (1938), 66, 79 


Murrow, Edward R., 103-4 
Music, 18-19, 29, 73 
Mussolini, Benito, 66 

Nazi Party (National Socialist German 
Workers Party): origins, 40—42, 46-67; 
propaganda, 54, 58-67, 89, 94, 402 ; 
racism, 69-97, 101, 106, 114; resistance 
to, 115-16, 13 5-4i. See also Nuremberg 
trials 

"Negative inheritance" of the Holocaust, 154 
"Night of the Long Knives," 56-57 
Nordhausen concentration camp, 120—21 
Normandy, invasion of, 115-18 
Norway, 100 
NSDAP. See Nazi Party 
Nuremberg Laws, 70-72 
Nuremberg trials, 54, 143, 147-49 

Operation Sea Lion, 100 

Palestine, 145, 449 
Panzer tanks, 99 
Pauly, Harry, 78-79 
Pearl Harbor, bombing of, 110 
Peoples Observer ; 79 
Petain, Philippe, 101 
Poland, 99, 101, 105, 108-9, 121-22, 
125-34, 138-41, 144 
Political prisoners, 54-55, 93, 95 
Potsdam Conference, 4 48 
Prisoners of war (POWs), 107-9, 114-15 
Prisons, 94, 95 
Proletarians, 27-28, 35 
Pronicheva, Dina, 126-27 
Propaganda, 54 , 58-67, 89, 94, 402, 4 46 

Racism, 41-42, 69-97, 101, 106, 114, 
123-24. See also Concentration camps, 
Holocaust 
Rath, Ernst vom, 79 
Refugees, 84-87, 135-38, 144-45 
Reichenau, Walther von, 106-7 
Reichstag, 29, 53-54 






INDEX 


171 


Remarque, Erich Maria, 20 

Rohm, Ernst, 55-57 

Roma. See Gypsies 

Rommel, Erwin, 117-18 

Rozycki, Stanislav, 127-29 

Russian Revolution (1917), 12, 18, 26-28, 70 

SA. See Storm troopers 
Sachsenhausen concentration camp, 82, 97 
St. Louts (ship), 86-87 
Schon, Waldemar, 127 
Schroeder, Kurt von, 54 
Schutzstaffel (SS) ('"bodyguards"), 56, 75, 77, 
93-97, 107, 132-35, 4 4 4 , 454 , 153-54 
SD. See Sicherbeitsdienst 
Sicherbeitsdienst (SD) ("security service"), 93 
Sinti. See Gypsies 
Slave laborers, 113-15 
Slavic peoples, 106 

Sobibor extermination camp, 121, 132 
Social Democratic Party, 24-26 
Socialism, 28, 53, 93, 152 
Soviet Union, 12, 18, 26—28, 70, 104—10, 
112-13, 121, 126- 27, 143, 145, 152 
Spartacist League, 26-28 
Speer, Albert, 14, 56—57 
Spitfire fighter planes, 103 
SS. See Schutzstaffel 


"Stab-in-the-back" legend, 25—26 
Stalingrad, Russia, 112-13, 115 
Stars and Stripes (newspaper), 142-43 
Starvation, 21-22, 4 20-2 4, 127-29, 131, 

140-41 

Sterilization, 87-88 
Stern, Bart, 129-31 
Storm troopers (SA), 47-48, 52-57, 
68-69, 79-80 
Stuka dive bombers, i04 
Sturmer, Der (tabloid, "hotspur" f )i 72 
Sudetenland, 66 , 79, 98-99 
Survival in Auscbivitz (Levi), 133 
Swastika, to-11 

Textile Workers Trade Union, 32 

Theresienstadt ghetto, 140 

Thierse, Wolfgang, 155 

This Is the New Woman (Herrmann), 30-31 

"Total war/' 114 

Treblinka extermination camp, 121, 129, 
132 

Trench warfare, 20 
Turnip Winter, 21 

UFA studios, 31 

Unconditional surrender, 143, 146 
Unemployment, 19, 35-37, 54 


United Kingdom. See Britain 
United States, 110-42, 116, 143-47 

Versailles Treaty, 17-18, 24-25, 42, 51, 99 
Vichy, France, 101, 135-36 
Volkisch groups, 40 
Volkswagen automobiles, 13 

Wandering Scholar (Bonn), 34—35 
"War Guilt Clause," 24-25 
Warsaw ghetto, 127-29, 131 , 138-44 
Weimar Republic, 17-19, 22-37, 40-41, 
49-50, 52, 73 

White Rose resistance group, 4 45-1 6 
Women, German: during war, 21-23,- Nazi, 
54, 88-90; "New," 29-32; rights of, 

29—32, 88-89; working, 32-33 
World War I, 12, 4 6-28, 39-40, 67, 69 ; 

reparations, 40 ; soldiers, 4 6, 20 , 40 
World War 11, 99-145,- Eastern Front, 
104-10, 112-15; Pacific Front, 110-11; 
Southern Front, 111-12,- Western Front, 
99-104, 115-18 

Yollick, Liny Pajgin, 138 

Zionists, 149 
Zyklon B, 121, 132 




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Acknowledgments 


I owe a special debt of gratitude to Bob Moeller. At every stage of 
the books development, Bob has been extremely generous with his 
time and insight, providing detailed, perceptive, and invaluable com¬ 
ments and suggestions. I want also to thank my editors at Oxford 
University Press, Nancy Toff and Nancy Hirsch, who have shepherded 
this book from the first step of its original conception through to the 
final production with admirable efficiency. I am, finally, very grateful 
to my wife, Sara, whose perspective and experience as an eighth-grade 
social studies teacher has deeply influenced the way this book is 
organized and written. 



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About the Author 


David F. Crew is professor of history at the University of Texas at 
Austin. He has also taught at Columbia University and at Cambridge 
University in England. At the University of Texas, he has been a 
faculty member of the Normandy Scholar Program—an honors 
program on the history of World War II—since 1993 . In 2002 - 2003 , 
he was president of the Conference Group on Central European 
History of the American Historical Association. He is the author of 
books on nineteenth-century Germany and on the Weimar Republic. 
He also edited the reader Nazism and German Society, 4933-4945.