Hitler and the Nazis
__________
“The reign of beasts has begun.”
Albert Camus (September 7, 1939)
__________
In discussing Hitler and the Nazis, I often started with this
quote from S.S. Lt. General Odilo Globonik. Discussing a proposal to liquidate six
million Jews, to implement the Final Solution, he told gathered officials: “I
am of the opinion that bronze plaques should be erected with inscriptions to
show that it was we who had the courage to carry out this great and necessary
task.”
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Neo-Nazis in 2017. |
*
The notes in the following section may be of use to social
studies teachers. If you’ve never read The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, first published in 1960, I highly
recommend it.
William Shirer, the author, was a journalist who had done reporting
from Germany during Hitler’s rise to power.
He quotes Hitler:
The broad masses
of the people can be moved only by the power of speech. All great movements are
popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotional
sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand
of the world hurled among the masses; they are not the lemonade-like
outpourings of the literary aesthetes and drawing-room heroes. (p. 25)
By the time I retired from teaching in 2008—seventh and eighth
graders—I was running into students who did not recognize Adolf Hitler in
pictures. Certainly, even older students today probably don’t realize Hitler was
a war hero in his youth. He saw heavy fighting during World War I. After the
war, he told a landlord that his regiment had been reduced from 3500 men to 600
in only four days of fighting, in the first Battle of Ypres. Only thirty
officers remained and four companies had to be dissolved. He was wounded in the
leg on October 7, 1916 and badly gassed on October 13, 1918. Hitler was twice
awarded the Iron Cross for bravery, including First Class on the second
occasion. One comrade said Hitler captured fifteen enemy soldiers,
single-handedly. Shirer says there is no doubt that Hitler won the medals he
later claimed. (30)
You might ask students if they thought God had a plan, or ask was it
just Fate, that while more than eight million soldiers died, Hitler survived.
One good bullet could have changed history.
Shirer says of Hitler, “What the masses needed, he thought, were
not only ideas—a few simple ideas, that is, that he could ceaselessly hammer
through their skulls—but symbols that would win their faith, pageantry and
color that would arouse them, and acts of violence and terror, which if
successful, would attract adherents…and give them a sense of power over the
weak.” (42)
It might be interesting to ask students if they think this
sounds like politics today.
The Nazi political platform promised: “The National Socialist
Movement will in the future ruthlessly prevent—if necessary by force—all
meetings or lectures that are likely to distract the minds of our fellow
countrymen.” (43)
Shirer quotes Joseph Goebbels, writing to Hitler: “You expressed
more than your own pain…You named the need of a whole generation, searching in
confused longing for men and task. What you said is the catechism of the new
political belief, born out of despair of a collapsing, Godless world.” (127)
Goebbels on Hitler: “He is the instrument of Divine Will that
shapes history with fresh, creative passion.” (129)
Shirer describes the situation Germany confronted in the 1920s:
The hard-pressed
people were demanding a way out of their sorry predicament. The millions of
unemployed wanted jobs. The shopkeepers wanted help. Some four million youths
who had come of voting age since the last election wanted some prospect of a
future that would at least give them a living.
Hitler promised, if elected, that he would “bring the money
barons to heel (especially if they were Jews) and see to it that every German
had a job and bread. To hopeless, hungry men seeking not only relief but new
faith and new gods, the appeal was not without effect.” (pp. 137-138)
Shirer says the Nazis had two advantages over opponents: “They
were led by a man who knew exactly what he wanted and they were ruthless
enough, and opportunistic enough, to go to any lengths to help him get it.”
(149)
In March 1932, Hitler ran for president. He lost by more than
seven million votes to Paul von Hindenburg, the old general. But Hindenburg
failed to get the required majority in a four-way race. A second election was
required. In April 1932 Hitler lost again to Hindenburg, 19.4 million to 13.4
million votes (53% to 37%); but Hindenburg was 85. Pitched political battles,
especially between Nazis and Communists, shocked the nation. Hundreds were killed or injured. Yet another
election in November saw the Nazis lose two million votes. It appeared Hitler’s
star might be setting. That election left the Nazis with 199 seats in the
Reichstag (down 34), the Communists with 100, the Socialists with 121. The
German National Party, often allied with Hitler, had 52 seats. Political
maneuvering led to an agreement to set up a cabinet government, ruling by
decree. Hindenburg, who was increasingly senile, nevertheless resisted asking Hitler
to become Chancellor, rightly warning in a letter to a friend, that “such a
cabinet is bound to develop into a party dictatorship….I cannot take the
responsibility for this before my oath and my conscience.”
Briefly, General Kurt von Schleicher held the post; but the
Depression was worsening, and he quickly lost his grip. Shirer describes the
political intrigue wracking Germany at the time: “Soon the web of intrigue
became so enmised that by New Year’s, 1933, none of the cabalists was sure who
was double-crossing whom. But it would not take long for them to find out.”
Schleicher would later tell the French ambassador, “I stayed in
power only fifty-seven days and on each and every one of them I was betrayed
fifty-seven times.” (175)
Goebbels rightly predicted: “Once we have the power we will
never give it up. They will have to carry our dead bodies out of the
ministries.” (167)
Hermann Goering, as Minister of the Interior of Prussia (2/3rd’s
of Germany), placed Nazis in key posts, removing hundreds of republicans; he
ordered the police “at all costs” to avoid hostility to the S.A. and S.S. As
for the Nazis’ political rivals, he urged the police “to make use of firearms.”
Officers who failed to shoot protesters could be disciplined. Goering established
an auxiliary police force of 50,000, almost all recruited from the S.A. or S.S.
After the staged fire in the Reichstag, Goering warned: “This is
the beginning of the Communist revolution! We must not wait a minute. We will
show no mercy. Every Communist official must be shot, where he is found. Every
Communist deputy must this very night be strung up.” (192)
On February 28, 1933, the day after the fire, Hitler convinced
Hindenburg to sign a decree for the “Protection of the People and the State,”
setting aside seven sections of the constitution which guaranteed individual
and civil liberties. Supposedly, passed to guard against Communist violence,
the decree opened wide the door to dictatorship by Hitler. Shirer quotes the
decree. The following actions would now be allowed:
Restriction on
personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom
of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the
privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for
house searchers, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property,
are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.
As always, it was important to dehumanize the enemy. Nazis
described their foes as maggots, vermin, untermenschen; Hitler called French
and British leaders “little worms” (300); Goering spoke of “the Jew devil”
(383); Hans Frank: “I would not eliminate all lice and Jews in only one year.
But in the course of time, and if you help me, this end will be attained.”
(663) General Stroop called the Jews of Warsaw “this trash and subhumanity”
(976)
In yet another election, on March 5, 1933, the Nazis could only
pull in 44% of the vote. And this despite waves of “legalized” violence against
their foes
Otto Wells protests: “We German Social Democrats pledge
ourselves solemnly in this historic hour to the principals of humanity and
justice, of freedom and socialism. No enabling act can give you the power to
destroy ideas which are eternal and indestructible.”
Hitler, furious, responds: “You come late, but yet you come…You
are no longer needed… the star of Germany will rise and yours will sink. Your
death knell has sounded…I do not want your votes. Germany will be free, but not
through you!”
The Enabling Act, titled “Law for Removing the Distress of
People and Reich,” made Hitler a dictator. For a period of four years, power to
pass laws, control of the budget and approval of treaties were to reside in the
hands of the cabinet and not the Reichstag. Shirer writes, “The Germans had no
one to blame but themselves.” (199-200)
New Nazi officials in each state could now dismiss all judges. “On
May 2 the trade-union headquarters throughout the country were occupied, union
funds confiscated, the unions dissolved and the leaders arrested. Many were
beaten and lodged in concentration camps.” (202) A new law ended collective
bargaining. Henceforth, government “labor trustees” would maintain “labor
peace.” “Judges were intimidated; they were afraid for their lives if they
convicted and sentenced a storm trooper even for cold-blooded murder.” (203)
By July, Hitler had managed to destroy all other political
parties. A new law went into effect on the 14th:
The National Socialist German Workers’ Party constitutes the
only political party in Germany.
Whosoever undertakes to maintain the
organizational structure of another political party or to form a new political
party will be punished with penal servitude up to three years or with
imprisonment for six months to three years, if the deed is not subject to a
greater penalty according to other regulations. (201)
With Hindenburg’s approval, Franz von Papen prepared a speech,
warning against the Nazi dictatorship. In part, he said,
Open manly
discussions would be of more service to the German people than, for instance,
the present state of the German press. The government [must be] mindful of the
old maxim, “Only weaklings suffer no criticism”…Great men are not created by
propaganda…It is time to join together in fraternal friendship and respect for
all our fellow countrymen, to avoid disturbing the labors of serious men and to
silence fanatics.
The people, Papen said, when fed a steady diet of propaganda, were
being treated like “morons.”
Goebbels forbid the scheduled broadcast of the speech, forbid
mention of it in the press, and ordered police to seize copies of the Frankfurter Zeitung which were on the
streets with a partial text. In the early days, the Nazi terror “affected the
lives of relatively few Germans… On the contrary, they supported it with
genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope and a new confidence
and an astonishing faith in the future of their country.” (231)
Still, in the summer of 1934, there was a chance to defang the
Nazi leader. Hindenburg and his allies in the military threatened to declare
martial law and turn over control of the State to the army.
Hitler also put down an internal rival that summer, Ernest
Roehm, who had long led the S.A. Roehm was arrested and soon shot dead in his
cell. In Berlin, Party leaders loyal to Hitler rounded up 150 S.A. leaders.
They were “stood against a wall of the Cadet School at Lichterfeld and shot by
firing squads of Himmler’s S.S. and Goering’s special police.” Other S.S. men
appeared at the door to Schleicher’s villa not far from Berlin. “When the
General opened the door he was shot dead in his tracks, and when his wife, whom
he had married but eighteen months before—he had been a bachelor until
then—stepped forward, she too was slain on the spot.” (222)
The randomness of the violence is well-illustrated by one story,
as Shirer tells it:
One murder
deserves mention. At seven-twenty on the evening of June 30, Dr. Willi Schmid,
the eminent music critic of the Muenchener
Neueste Nachrichten, a leading Munich daily newspaper, was playing the
cello in his study while his wife prepared supper and their three children,
aged nine, eight and two, played in the living room of their apartment in the
Schackstrasse in Munich. The doorbell rang, four S.S. men appeared and without
explanation took Dr. Schmid away. Four days later his body was returned in a
coffin with orders from the Gestapo not to open it under any circumstances. Dr.
Willi Schmid, who had never participated in politics, had been mistaken by the
S.S. thugs for Willi Schmidt, a local S.A. leader, who in the meantime had been
arrested by another S.S. detachment and shot. (pp. 223-224)
Anti-Semitism was not new to Germany. Shirer quotes Martin
Luther on the Jews: that they should be deprived of “all their cash and jewels
and silver and gold.” Also, Luther demanded that “their synagogues or schools
be set on fire, that their houses be broken up and destroyed…and they be put
under a roof or stable, like the gypsies…in misery and captivity as they
incessantly lament and complain to God about us.” (236)
Even church leaders who questioned the Nazi regime were not
safe. Hundreds of pastors who signed a protest were arrested. Dr. Weissler, one
of the signers was murdered in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
The Nazis set up the Reich Chamber of Culture, with seven
subchambers,
to guide and
control every sphere of cultural life: the Reich chambers of fine arts, music,
the theater, literature, the press, radio and the films. All persons engaged in
these fields were obliged to join their respective chambers, whose decisions
and directives had the validity of law. Among other powers, the chambers could
expel—or refuse to accept—members for “political unreliability,” which meant
that those who were even lukewarm about National Socialism could be, and
usually were, excluded from practicing their profession or art and thus
deprived of a livelihood. (243)
Shirer explained the death of the free press:
Every morning
the editors of the Berlin daily newspapers and the correspondents of those
published elsewhere in the Reich gathered at the Propaganda Ministry to be told
by Dr. Goebbels or by one of his aides what news to print and suppress, how to
write the news and headline it, what campaigns to call off or institute and
what editorials were desired for the day.
Section 14 of the Press Law ordered editors,
to keep out of
the newspapers anything which in any manner is misleading to the public, mixes
selfish aims with community aims, tends to weaken the strength of the German
Reich, outwardly or inwardly, the common will of the German people, the defense
of Germany, its culture and economy…or offends the honor and dignity of
Germany. (245)
Book burning soon commenced, with thousands of students marching
in one torchlight parade. Works by Freud and Margaret Sanger, by Helen Keller
and Einstein, and Erich Maria Remarque went up in flames. The view of war in
Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front,
as hopeless and misguided, did not fit well with Adolf Hitler’s ideology.
When movie audiences began hissing the crappy films the Nazis did
allow, Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior, warned against “treasonable
behavior on the part of cinema audiences.” (247)
Shirer wrote, “…the facts of life had become what Hitler and
Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for the truth, said they were.” (248)
Perhaps even more insidious were moves taken by the Nazis to
control the schools. All teachers took an oath to “be loyal and obedient to
Adolf Hitler.” Only the politically reliable were issued licenses to teach.
Hitler had once explained in a speech, “When an opponent declares, ‘I will not
come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already…What
are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new
camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.’” On
May 1, 1937, he explained, “This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but
will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own
upbringing.” According to one newspaper, Mein
Kampf was to become “our infallible pedagogical guiding star.” (249)
The purpose of the Hitler Youth movement was also clear: “The
German youth, besides being reared within the family and schools, shall be
educated physically, intellectually and morally in the spirit of National
Socialism…through the Hitler Youth.” Children ages 6-18 were organized; parents
who tried to dissuade their sons or daughters from joining were subject to
heavy prison sentences. At age 10, boys who had progressed satisfactorily in
the program, graduated into the “Young Folk,” taking this oath: “In the
presence of this blood banner, which represents our Fuhrer, I swear to devote
all my energies and my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler. I
am willing and ready to give up my life for him, so help me God.”
At fourteen boys entered the Hitler Youth.
Shirer describes the program for young German “maidens,” ages
10-14:
…they too had a
uniform, made up of a white blouse, full blue skirt, socks and heavy—and most
unfeminine—marching shoes. Their training was much like that of the boys of the
same age and included long marches on weekends with heavy packs and the usual
indoctrination in the Nazi philosophy. But emphasis was put on the role of
women in the Third Reich—to be, above all, healthy mothers of healthy children.
This was stressed even more when the girls reached age 14 and
became members of the League of German Maidens.
In 1939, all children were enrolled in the Hitler Youth under a
new law. Parents who refused to let their children take part were warned that
their sons or daughters would be taken and put in orphanages or other homes.
Shirer admits the effectiveness of this training program:
No one who
traveled up and down Germany in those days and talked with the young in their
camps and watched them work and play and sing could fail to see that, however
sinister the teaching, here was an incredibly dynamic youth movement.
The young in the Third Reich were growing
up to have strong and healthy bodies, faith in the future of their country and
in themselves and a sense of fellowship and camaraderie that shattered all
class and economic and social barriers.” (pp. 253-256)
With the government so firmly in control, businessmen soon found
that to get anything done, they had to pay graft to Nazi bureaucrats. Workers
were reduced, Shirer says, to “industrial serfs.” Plans for a “People’s Car,”
the Volkswagen, were put in place. Workers were encouraged to pay into the
program by installments. “When 750 marks had been paid in, the buyer received
an order number entitling him to a car as soon as it could be turned out. Alas
for the worker, not a single car was ever turned out for any customer during
the Third Reich.” (267)
Goering could correctly say by July 1934, that “the law and the
will of the Fuehrer are one.” (268)
Dr. Hans Frank would say in 1936: “There is in Germany today
only one authority, and that is the authority of the Fuehrer.” (276)
Fifty concentration camps were set up during Hitler’s first year
in power. They were mainly set up by the S.A., says Shirer, “to give its victims
a good beating, and then ransom them to their relatives or friends for as much
as the traffic would bear. It was largely a crude form of blackmail.” (271)
The brutality increased. The Security Service, or S.D., allied
with the Gestapo, employed 100,000 part-time informers. One job of the S.D. was
to find out who voted against Nazi positions during elections.
Resistance usually proved futile. The Gestapo threatened the
life of one witness, insisting he implicate a German general in a case of
“prostitution.” The witness broke down in
court and “confessed that the Gestapo had threatened his life unless he
implicated General von Fritsch—a threat, incidentally, which was carried out
anyway a few days later…” (354)
Shirer paints a scene of “humorous” anti-Semitism, in the wake
of Kristillnacht, during which 119 synagogues were destroyed:
Goering was
upset with all the destruction: “I wish you had killed two hundred Jews,
instead of destroying so many valuables.”
“Thirty five were killed,” Heydrich
answered in self-defense.
Not all the conversation, of which the
partial stenographic record runs to ten thousand words, was so deadly serious.
Goering and Goebbels had a lot of fun arguing about subjecting the Jews to
further indignities. The Propaganda Minister said the Jews would be made to
clean up and level off the debris of the synagogues; the sites would then be
turned into parking lots. He insisted that the Jews be excluded from
everything: schools, theaters, movies, resorts, public beaches, parks, even
from the German forests. He proposed that there be special railway coaches and
compartments for Jews, but that they be made available only after all Aryans
were seated.
“Well, if the train is overcrowded,”
Goering laughed, “we’ll kick the Jew out and make him sit all alone all the way
in the toilet.”
When Goebbels, in all seriousness, demanded
that the Jews be forbidden to enter the forests, Goering replied, “We shall
give the Jews a certain part of the forests and see to it that various animals
that look damned much like Jews—the elk has a crooked nose like theirs—get
there also and become acclimated.” (432)
Hitler called reports he intended to attack Poland “mere
inventions of the international press.”
In response to criticism by FDR, Hitler said:
I have conquered
chaos in Germany, re-established order and enormously increased
production…developed rail traffic, caused mighty roads to be built and canals
to be dug, called into being gigantic new factories and at the same time
endeavored to further the education and culture of our people.
I have succeeded in finding useful work
once more for the whole of seven million unemployed…Not only have I united the
German people politically, but I have also rearmed them. (474)
Like many megalomaniacs, Adolf Hitler loved to talk,
particularly about himself. Frau Goebbels privately complained that Hitler kept
guests up all night: “It is always Hitler who talks! He repeats himself and
bores his guests.” (483)
“How completely isolated
a world the German people live in,” Shirer noted in his diary on August 10.
Shirer explained:
In Berlin too a
foreign observer could watch the way the press, under Goebbels’ expert
direction, was swindling the gullible German people. For six years, since the
Nazi ‘co-ordination’ of the daily newspapers, which had meant the destruction
of a free press, the citizens had been cut off from the truth of what was going
on in the world. (563)
“I shall shrink at
nothing and shall annihilate everyone who is opposed to me.” (Hitler quoted; 658)
The Nazi plan for conquered Poland takes shape. “Polish
intelligentsia must be prevented from establishing itself as a governing class.
Low standard of living must be conserved. Cheap slaves…” (a Nazi official in
his diary; 660)
The plan to destroy Polish intelligentsia was code named
“Extraordinary Pacification Action.” Dr. Hans Frank: “The men capable of
leadership in Poland must be liquidated.” (662)
Shirer cites at least one American lawmaker who was willing to
work with the Germans. On June 12, 1940, Hans Thomsen, the German charge
d’affaires cabled in top secret, news that a “well-known Republican
Congressman” was offering,
…for $3,000, to
invite fifty isolationist Republican Congressmen to the Republican convention “so
that they may work on the delegates in favor of an isolationist foreign policy.”
That same individual, Thomsen reported, wanted $30,000 to help pay for
full-page advertisements in the American newspapers, to be headed “Keep America
Out of War!”
On June 25 such an advertisement did appear in The New York Times. In July, Thomsen
wired Berlin, asking permission to destroy any records of this matter,
receipts, and all. (748)
Hitler’s early success in war led to overconfidence. “Egomania,
that fatal disease of all conquerors, was taking hold,” Shirer noted. (812)
In Russia: “Persons suspected of criminal action will be brought
at once before an officer. This officer will decide whether they are to be
shot. (831)
General Heinz Guderian, a top tank commander, meets with Hitler
about the push on Moscow in 1941. He warns that German forces are badly
extended. “I here saw for the first time a spectacle with which I was later to
become very familiar: all those present—Keitel, Jodl [top military aides to the
Fuehrer] and others—nodded in agreement with every sentence that Hitler
uttered, while I was left alone with my point of view…” (858)
As the Nazi army was driven back from Moscow that winter, new
powers were granted to the dictator: “the Fuehrer must be in a position to
force with all means at his disposal every German, if necessary, whether he be
common soldier or officer, low or high official or judge, leading or
subordinate official of the party, worker or employer—to fulfill his duties.”
(867)
When the war began to go badly, Hitler became more and more
likely to explode when presented with bad news. When the Russian threatened to
cut off the entire German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, Hitler refused to allow a retreat.
One eyewitness watched as bad news was reported to the Fuehrer. It was said the
Russians could put more than a million fresh troops into line around Stalingrad,
that they were building 1,200 new tanks per month. “Hitler flew at the man who
was reading [the report] with clenched fists and foam in the corners of his
mouth and forbade him to read any more of such idiotic twaddle.” (917)
One German officer described Hitler around this time: “There is
something weird and batty…” “A change in the man, a corrosion, a deterioration
has set in…” (922)
Hitler on Polish priests: “they will preach what we want them to
preach. If any priest acts differently, we shall make short work of him. The
task of the priest is to keep the Poles quiet, stupid and dull-witted.”
Hitler on controlling the conquered people of Poland: “There
should be one master only for the Poles, the Germans. Therefore, all
representatives of the Polish intelligentsia are to be exterminated. This
sounds cruel, but such is the law of life.” (938)
Martin Bormann: “Every educated person is a future enemy.” (939)
The Germans often took hostages in an effort to force conquered
peoples to accept Nazi rule; if they refused, hostages were shot: 29,600 French
hostages were executed during the war, 8,000 in Poland, 2,000 in Holland. Said
one German commander, “the better known the hostages to be shot the greater
will be the deterrent effect on the perpetrators [those who resisted].” The
“Night and Fog Decree” of December 1941 was intended to spread terror—to have
foes of the regime “vanish without a trace into the night and fog of the
unknown in Germany.” No information was given to the families—not even victims’
places of burial. (957)
I. A. Topf and Sons, manufacturers of heating equipment, won out
in a bid to build the crematoria at Auschwitz. In correspondence found after
the war, company representatives wrote to government officials: “We acknowledge
receipt of your order for five triple furnaces, including two electric
elevators for raising the corpses and one emergency elevator. A practical
installation for stoking coal was also ordered and one for transporting ashes.”
A second company sent designs to an S.S. camp near Belgrade.
Their proposal read:
“For putting the
bodies into the furnace, we suggest simply a metal fork moving on cylinders.
“Each furnace will have an oven measuring
only 24 by 18 inches, as coffins will not be used. For transporting the corpses
from the storage points to the furnaces we suggest using light carts on wheels,
and we enclose diagrams of these drawn to scale.” C. H. Kori, another firm,
sought the same business, touting company experience, noting it had already
constructed furnaces at Dachau and Lublin, which had given “full satisfaction
in practice…We guarantee the effectiveness of the cremation ovens as well as
their durability, the use of the best material and our faultless workmanship.”
(972)
A Danzig company posited a soap-making operation to make money,
involving a recipe of “12 pounds of human fat, 10 quarts of water, and 8 ounces
to a pound of caustic soda…all boiled for two or three hours and then cooled.”
(971)
Shirer discussed at length the assassination of Reinhard
Heydrich, who he describes as, “this long-nosed, icy-eyed thirty-eight-year-old
policeman of diabolical cast, the genius of the ‘final solution,’ Hangman
Heydrich, as he became known.” Heydrich was wounded in ambush on May 29 and
died on June 4, 1942. His killers were two Czech partisans, Jan Kubis and Josef
Gabiek.
The Nazi response was savage: 1,331 Czechs, including 201 women
were immediately executed. The two assassins and 120 other resistance fighters
were surrounded in a church and wiped out; but the Gestapo did not realize the two
assassins were already among the dead. Goebbels had 500 of the last Jews in
Berlin arrested on the day of the assassination attempt; when Heydrich died,
152 were executed. Another 3,000 Jews in Theresienstadt, a privileged ghetto,
were shipped off to death camps to be exterminated.
In the way of retribution for Heydrich’s death, the village of Lidice,
not far from where the attack occurred, was chosen for destruction. Shirer says
Lidice was selected as an example. The town was surrounded on June 9; a 12-year-old
boy who tried to flee was shot. A peasant woman took off and was also shot and
killed. The entire male population was locked up in the barns and buildings of
the mayor. The next morning, they were led out in batches of ten and executed,
172 men and boys, 16 and older. Nineteen others, working in nearby mines, were
soon picked up and executed.
Seven women were shot. All the others, 195, were transported to
concentration camps, where seven were gassed, three “disappeared,” and 42 died
of ill treatment. Four who were pregnant had their babies forcibly aborted. Ninety
young children were sent to a separate concentration camp. Seven, considered
racially valuable, were sent to Germany for adoption. The rest were eliminated.
The town was burned, the ruins dynamited, the site leveled.
Since the story of the death camps is already well known, I kept
my notes to a minimum on that topic. I had not heard of the example below
before. So I mention it:
Two years later, S.S. troops surrounded Oradour-sur-Glane, a
French town near Limoges. Their commandant ordered inhabitants to gather in the
central square and notified them that explosives were reportedly hidden in the
village. The entire population was locked in barns and the local church. The
entire village was set on fire. S.S. forces machine-gunned many of the people
who tried to escape. A French court in 1953 found that 245 women, 207 children
and 190 men had been massacred. Ten survivors, badly burned, feigned death and
survived. Oradour was never rebuilt.
(993)
I thought it was odd to find that Hitler refused to visit the
bombed out German cities during the last years of the war. It was too hard to
face the reality.
Several assassination attempts against Hitler failed. In one, an
officer agreed to put grenades in his coat—a new style that Hitler had wanted
to see. At their meeting, he would pull the pins in his pockets, hug the
Fuehrer, and blow himself and his leader to bits. Hitler canceled the meeting.
In another plot, a bomb inside a package was smuggled aboard
Hitler’s plane, purportedly a gift of champagne to one of his top officers. A
rap of the device beforehand released acid from a glass vial, which was
supposed to eat slowly through a trip wire, and 30 minutes later, the bomb
would explode. For some reason the device failed. The man who had given the
officer the “present” had to meet him after the plane touched down in perfect
safety, and reclaim the present on the grounds that he had mixed it up with a
present meant for another officer. He did substitute the first present,
however, with another for the lucky officer who had not been blown to bits with
everyone aboard the plane.
After the July 20, 1944 assassination plot failed, but only
barely, Hitler was a raging maniac. Of those arrested, he shouted, “We’ll hail
them before the People’s Court. No long speeches from them. The court will act
with lightning speed. And two hours after the sentence it will be carried out.
By hanging—without mercy.” (1070)
Eight ringleaders were quickly brought to the place of execution:
One by one,
after being stripped to the waist, they were strung up, a noose of piano wire
being placed around their necks and attached to the meathooks. A movie camera
whirled as the men dangled and strangled, their beltless trousers finally
dropping off as they struggled, leaving them naked in their death agony. The
developed film, as ordered, was rushed to Hitler so that he could view it…
As a result of this one failed plot, as many as 4,980 people
were executed, including the families of many suspected plotters. (1071)
General Henning von Tresckow, one of the leaders sentenced to
death, told an aide, “The worth of a man is certain only if he is prepared to
sacrifice his life for his convictions.” (1074)
By the fall of 1944, the German military was clearly beginning to
buckle. Heinrich Himmler decreed: “Every deserter…will find his just
punishment. Furthermore, his ignominious behavior will entail the most severe
consequences for his family…They will be summarily shot.” (1088)
*
The following notes are from the book, The Nazis, a volume in a Time-Life
series on World War II. I can tell you, several series of books by Time-Life,
for example, on settling the West, and individual volumes on the Wright
Brothers, in a series on aviation, are filled with interesting stories to use
in class.
The authors explain Hitler’s rise to power:
To a desperate
Germany, Hitler offered crude solutions: He would unilaterally end reparations
and refuse to repay the debts incurred by Schacht; he would crush the Jew,
whose greed was the cause of all economic evil; he would provide every German
with food and a job. He promised nonpartisan politics, a Germany where people
worked together, a Germany to be proud of. (p. 24)
Joseph Goebbels said Hitler gave him a chance to “unleash
volcanic passions, outbreaks of rage, to set masses of people on the march, to
organize hatred and despair with ice-cold calculation.” Goebbels was a great
propagandist because he was “utterly uninhibited by considerations of truth.
The truly great man, he said ‘contents himself with saying: It is so. And it is
so.’” (27)
Martin Bormann convinced the head of the postal service that
Hitler deserved rights to a royalty on every stamp that bore his likeness. In
this manner, the Nazi dictator made millions of reichsmarks. (52)
Hitler’s guests at the Berghof often ate with solid gold
utensils. (80)
In February 1933 Hitler decreed that “in the interests of public
security and order” anyone could be taken into “protective custody” and
detained indefinitely, on mere “suspicion of activities inimical to the
state.” (88)
Faced with a growing French resistance, German commanders began
killing fifty hostages for every German soldier partisans killed. “The horror
overwhelms us,” remembered one Frenchman. Night and Fog: persons “endangering
German security” were to be dragged off in the dark, never to be seen again.
One German general complained, “I can no longer commit mass shootings with a
clear conscience nor can I justify them to posterity.” Hitler called for his
forces to “spread such terror as to crush every will among the population.” (pp.
114-115)
The destruction of Lidice is described again: 84,000 square
yards of rubble removed; area planted in grain. (115)
One family had helped the two assassins in their plans. The
family was arrested; the mother committed suicide lest she talk. “The Son, who
knew the whereabouts of the two assassins, was tortured unmercifully but did
not break down—until he was presented with the severed head of his mother. He
revealed the hideout of the Czech agents.”
Goebbels was blunt in describing Hitler’s most loyal followers:
“The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda
must therefore be essentially simple and repetitious.” (124)
NOTE TO TEACHERS: Again, this might make for a good discussion topic for your
classes.
It’s not as if the campaign commercials we see are usually meant
to be thought-provoking.
I always tried to explain to my students that Hitler was a true
hater. That is, he was able to dehumanize enemies and believe his own rhetoric.
“If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess [that is: some social ill],”
he said in Mein Kampf, “you found,
like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light—a kike!”
(30)
The Slav “is only a rough copy of a human being, displaying
human-liked facial traits but nonetheless ranking lower in morality and
mentality than any animal.” (German propaganda pamphlet, p.110)
Campaign of hate: less than 1% of Germans were Jews; but they
were painted as the root of all of Germany’s problems. They were said to be
“obscenely oversexed.” Jewish men were said to have every intention of seducing
poor German maidens. The state-run broadcasting network engineered “a fantastic
wave of political manipulation, agitation and propaganda in every form,”
admitted one Nazi official. (131) The Jews were described as rats, “they carry
disease.”
As for the Jews being described as rats, in 1942, the Governor
of Idaho said of Japanese-Americans, “The Japs live like rats, breed like rats,
and act like rats.”
In the same way, General John Chivington justified wiping out an
entire Native-American village at Sand Creek in 1864, including women and
children. “Nits make lice,” he said.
In the cause of “race purity,” sterilization was recommended for
those who had one Jewish parent or grandparent.
In England, Houston Stewart Chamberlain agreed that the Jews
were an evil race. Henry Ford, here in America, concurred.
The Nuremberg Laws banned Jews from schools, libraries, theaters
and public transportation. (138)
Racism against African Americans in our country was much the
same as anti-Semitism in Germany. Students often note the similarity.
Handicapped people and the mentally ill, 90,000 Germans in 1941 alone, labeled “useless
eaters,” were gassed.
Soon the mass killings began, with children sometimes shot first.
“Not before these mothers had been exposed to this worst of all tortures did
they receive the bullet that released them from this sight.” (142) At Babi Yar,
by actual count, 33,771 Jews were put to death. “The air resounded with the
cries of children and the tortured,” one German remembered. Even the S.S. men
had a hard time dealing with human slaughter on such a massive scale. When one
commander complained, saying his men were “finished for the rest of their
lives,” Himmler agreed.
Perhaps, Nazi officials decided, death camps would be a more
efficient method of disposing of all the inferior populations. (142) Adolf
Eichmann, a Nazi bureaucrat, would later explain why he helped implement such crimes.
The “Popes of the Third Reich” had spoken, he explained at his trial, long
after the war. “Who am I to have my own thoughts in this matter?” (143)
Himmler himself was squeamish, fainting once after watching a
mass execution.
(S.S. Lt. General Odilo Globonik, quoted at the start, is
mentioned on page 147, of The Nazis)
At camps like Auschwitz and Belzec, so many bodies were burned
that periodically up to a foot of human fat had to be scraped from the
chimneys.
Said one Auschwitz guard to prisoners: “You are only numbers. A
shot, and the number is gone.” (151)
Students rarely know how widespread anti-Semitism once was,
including in the United States. (Many U.S. country clubs banned Jewish members;
and Harvard had a “gentlemen’s agreement to limit the number of Jews enrolled.)
Often, local populations helped the Germans destroy their own Jewish neighbors.
In occupied Ukraine a mob tied a Jewish woman’s hair to the tail of a horse and
whipped the animal away. The woman was dragged until, said one Jew, “her whole
face was completely disfigured….Most of the crowd was hysterical with
laughter.” (160)
Like Shirer, authors of The
Nazis focus on the punishment of those involved in the July 20
assassination plot. As for the officer who had planted the bomb, in a briefcase
which he place beneath a table during a meeting with Hitler, Himmler promised:
“The family of Count Stauffenberg will be wiped out root and branch.”
The authors write:
Throughout
Germany, everyone bearing the name of Stauffenberg—men, women, and children—was
arrested. Some died in prison. The children were taken from their parents,
given false names and put into concentration camps. Executions numbered 5,000,
including many who had no part in the plot. (193; 198)
Feel free to use anything that you can.
You might also find my notes from Mein Kampf, posted as “I Read Mein Kampf So You Don’t Have Too,” of value.
You might also find my notes from Mein Kampf, posted as “I Read Mein Kampf So You Don’t Have Too,” of value.
Comparing Hitler’s beliefs with the core beliefs in the
Declaration of Independence always worked well in my classes.
I did prepare a fairly lengthy reading (a little more than 4,200
words) on the Holocaust for my classes.
The only problem was that, at times, it made students weep. You
can purchase it from my store at TpT.
