The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  KdF also organized a wide variety of leisure activities—adult education classes, music lessons and recitals, traveling art exhibits, gymnastics, as well as instruction in tennis, sailing, and physical fitness. It operated more than three hundred adult education centers and thirty music schools. It bought blocks of tickets for the theater, for opera, for concerts, giving ordinary Germans who had never experienced a live stage performance the opportunity to attend. Most popular, and certainly the most highly publicized of the KdF’s activities, were the subsidized vacation trips. On offer were holidays on the North Sea, in the Black Forest, Berlin, the Bavarian Alps, and the Harz Mountains. The majority of the tours consisted of excursions of up to three days, but the real showpiece of the KdF’s vacation trips were excursions of two or even three weeks on one of the twelve cruise ships owned or leased by the program. These trips carried passengers in glittering white cruise ships to the fjords of Norway, to the Spanish coast, and to Italy. For many it was their first experience beyond the borders of the Reich. Between 1934 and 1939 approximately 43 million Germans—two thirds of the population—availed themselves of KdF trips.

  The regime presented the KdF and its popular programs as evidence of the National Socialist people’s community in operation, providing leisure opportunities for every German, regardless of class or income. “The worker sees that we are serious about raising his social position,” Robert Ley proudly declared. “It is not the so-called educated classes whom we send out as representatives of the new Germany, but himself, the German worker whom we show to the world.” Newspapers printed photographs of passengers waving happily from the decks; postcards and brochures featuring pictures of cruise destinations and testimonials of satisfied travelers could be found at every newsstand.

  Hitler, himself a car enthusiast, also believed that every German should have an automobile to travel the new Autobahns being built throughout the country, and the plans for a “people’s car,” a Volkswagen, were begun. The original draft design sprang from Hitler, and the manufacturer Porsche was to produce the automobile. The program was launched with great fanfare in 1938, its loudly trumpeted goal to produce a cheap people’s car for the common man. “For a large number of Germans,” Social Democratic agents reported, “the announcement of the KdF car came as a pleasant surprise. There developed a real KdF-Car psychosis,” becoming a big talking point among all classes of population. This obsession with the car, “which was cleverly stimulated by the Propaganda Ministry,” was proving an effective diversionary tactic keeping “the masses from becoming preoccupied with a depressing [economic] situation.” Citizens could place orders through the Labor Front, have payments deducted from wages and await delivery. They would have a long wait—no Volkswagen was produced for private use until after the Second World War, and the first delivery for those who had paid into the system during the Third Reich was made in 1960.

  The regime also called on all Germans to participate in a series of public rituals that were designed to intensify their participation in the people’s community and make an open display of their commitment to National Socialism. The German greeting—“Heil Hitler”—and Nazi salute became ubiquitous in everyday life. Postal clerks were required to give the Hitler greeting to patrons at the office; students at school to their teachers and one another, shopkeepers to their customers, and pedestrians on the street were expected to offer up a “Heil Hitler” instead of the traditional “guten Tag” (good day). The perpetual “Heils” inspired many jokes: An incredulous Göring arrives at Goebbels’s office and tells him that on his way there he had heard one “good day” after another. If no one was going to use “Heil Hitler,” maybe the regime should simply consider returning to “good day.” Out of the question, Goebbels snaps, “as long as our beloved Führer lives, there will be no more ‘good days’ in Germany.”

  Flags, banners, and standards were everywhere, as were uniforms, armbands, and insignia. Swastikas adorned stamps, walls, billboards, stationery, and jewelry. It was everywhere one looked; no object, no matter how inconsequential, was too small to bear one. Victor Klemperer recorded his dismay when he discovered “toothpaste with the swastika” in his local pharmacy and shock a few days later when he spied “a children’s ball with the swastika” in a toy shop. Seeing day in and day out these ubiquitous expressions of apparent support for the Nazis added to the more overt forms of pressure to conform, to accept the Nazi claim to have created a new people’s community supported by all.

  The Nazis filled the calendar with an endless series of charity drives, parades, rallies of different groups—the wounded veterans, teachers, women, youth. There was always a cause to mobilize the emotions of the public—the Winter Relief for the unemployed, homeless, and hungry, for disabled war veterans, for German minorities abroad. The Hitler Youth or SA man with cup in hand became a ubiquitous feature of daily life in the Third Reich. They collected not only on the streets, buses, and trolleys but went door-to-door in apartment blocks and in the countryside. Records were kept of who gave and who did not, with more than a little hint of retribution. One couldn’t afford not to give. In some communities the names of those who were stingy or contributed nothing were posted in the newspaper; in some small villages the party erected “Boards of Shame,” listing those who “despite financial ability refuse to make donations.” In one village a banner was strung across the main street with the message “Take Note. In this village reside thirty-three traitors to their country. Anyone interested in their names need only inquire at the local party office.”

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  While these activities put pressure on the individual to conform, the regime staged a succession of meticulously orchestrated mass spectacles that were intended to demonstrate the power and popularity of the regime. The calendar year began with festivities marking the anniversary of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on January 30, followed by a celebration of the party’s founding on February 24. In March the National Hero’s Day dedicated to the fallen heroes of Germany’s wars was expanded to include the “martyrs of the National Socialist movement,” a fusion of the nationalist past with the Nazi present. On the last Sunday in March the new members of the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls were sworn in, kicking off a day of speeches and parades as young Germans officially took up their duties in the Volksgemeinschaft. April 20, the Führer’s birthday, was celebrated across the country in euphoric, quasi-religious displays of devotion to Germany’s savior, and on May Day the Nazis observed a national holiday to celebrate not only the working class—the “Day of National Labor”—but all productive Germans. No longer a day devoted to a particular segment of the population, it was transformed into the “National Festival of the German People,” transcending the now irrelevant boundaries of class.

  Fall brought the three most hallowed events on the Nazi calendar: the party rally in Nuremberg, the Harvest Festival at the Bückeburg outside Hameln, and the reenactment of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. Of these, the Nuremberg rally in early September was by far the most awe-inspiring and the most theatrical in its staging. The Nazis had held their first national rally in Munich in 1923, a smallish affair that lasted barely three days; the second, in 1926, made hardly a blip on the radar screen of Weimar politics. It was poorly attended and lasted but two days. In the following year, the party gathered for the first time in Nuremberg but no national rally was held again until 1933 when Hitler declared that the annual Reich Party Rally would be held there in perpetuity.

  The city recommended itself for a variety of reasons. Nuremberg, where Julius Streicher was in command, had been a hotbed of Nazi support throughout “the years of the struggle,” and it was, in addition, the historic site where for centuries the diet of the Holy Roman Empire had convened. With its timbered houses, winding canals, medieval turrets, towering church spires, and cobblestone byways, the city offered the very essence of the Nazi vision of a romantic, mythical German past. And now, all through the narrow city streets, bro
wn-shirted troops marched; Nazi flags fluttered from the mullioned windows; giant banners, three stories high, streamed down the facades of ancient buildings. Beginning in 1933, these weeklong rallies took on colossal proportions, attracting hundreds of thousands of participants—SA and SS troops; HJ and BdM; uniformed workers of the Labor Front; the Nazi Motor Corps; and the NS League of German Women—all in their distinctive uniforms and carrying different flags and standards. Alternating with the march of Storm Troopers and black-shirted SS came a parade of peasants from the different regions of the Reich, all dressed in colorful, traditional costume, fusing the traditional with the revolutionary.

  The rally engulfed the entire city, but the main events were staged on the sprawling rally grounds situated on the outskirts of town. In early 1934 Hitler commissioned Albert Speer with the task of creating a vast party complex for the rallies, which would ultimately include several large arenas and parade grounds, a congress hall, a stadium, a war memorial, and, most impressive, a monumental stone structure on the Zeppelin Field. The Zeppelin Field arena was built to hold 90,000 participants on the field proper, 60,000 on the grand tribunal, and another 64,000 on the earthen embankments that formed the semicircular periphery of the arena. The tribunal and review stand made of white stone rose eighty feet high and consisted of a massive central block containing the speaker’s rostrum and on either side a long colonnade that stretched 1,300 feet. Speer modeled the tribunal on the Pergamon Altar, an ancient Greek structure that was housed in a Berlin museum, but with a monumental coldness that lacked any semblance of elegance or humanity. Its message was power. Like a guiding star hovering above the tribunal, a giant swastika looked down on the assembled masses. The Luitpold Arena, built as a park and war memorial during the Weimar Republic, was expanded to hold 200,000. Its speaker’s tribunal and grandstand were flanked by two gargantuan golden eagles with wings spread, fierce birds of prey perched upon giant swastikas. The sheer magnitude of these sites, especially when filled with hundreds of thousands of Storm Troopers, Hitler Youth, and SS, was awe-inspiring, just as intended.

  Dozens of special trains and chartered buses delivered the multitudes to the grounds of the rally, where they were settled in vast tent encampments—acres of tents aligned in perfect military order that held field kitchens, hygienic facilities, and recreation areas. Speer created a variety of spectacular effects, the most striking of which was “the dome of light,” produced by 130 giant spotlights spaced at ten-meter intervals around the periphery of the Zeppelin Field, where the main nighttime events were held. Each spotlight beamed a shaft of brilliant white light 25,000 feet into the night sky, encasing the Zeppelin Field in what British ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson called a “cathedral of ice.” A mixture of awe-inspiring pageantry, mysticism, and color dominated the scene as hundreds of brilliant red swastika banners, their gold trim glittering in the dazzling light, rose over a sea of Storm Troopers and Hitler Youth.

  The annual Nuremberg rally lasted five days to a week, with speeches, parades, mass gymnastics exhibitions, and, beginning in 1935, military demonstrations. Every party dignitary attended and spoke; every Nazi organization had its special role to play, its own event—the day of German youth, the day of the Labor Front, and so on. Beginning in 1933 each rally was filmed to be shown around the country—and the world—and each was given a theme reflecting momentous events of the past year. Nineteen thirty-three brought the “Victory of Faith”; the 1934 rally, captured in an extraordinary film by Leni Riefenstahl, proclaimed the “Triumph of the Will” and was held in the nervous aftermath of the Röhm purge. It emphasized the unbroken unity of the party and the loyalty of the SA to Hitler. In 1935 the “Party Rally of Freedom” marked the return of the Saar region to Germany and the emancipation of the Reich from the armaments clauses of Versailles. The last of the rallies—the “Rally of Greater Germany”—was held in 1938 after the German absorption of Austria in the spring and in the midst of the international crisis over the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.

  The daily events unfolded with military precision and virtually operatic theatricality, each providing the assembled multitude a visual spectacle—hundreds of thousands of SA men and Hitler Youth with their standards, more thousands of white-clad young women performing synchronized gymnastics, uniformed workers of the Labor Front performing the manual of arms with glistening spades, and Wehrmacht (the new name of the Reichswehr after 1933) troops parading before the grand tribunal on the Zeppelin Field. Peering majestically down from a raised speaker’s platform of white stone, Hitler presided over it all, a solitary, heroic, all-mighty figure. He was omnipresent in every assembly, on every parade ground, his position—his pedestal—raised architecturally, the visual focal point of the proceedings. After all the awesome pageantry of the marches, assemblies, the torchlight parades, the climax of each rally was Hitler’s address on the final day, delivered to a packed house in the old Congress Hall.

  In the fall the Nazis mounted a harvest festival outside the village of Bückeburg in Hanover. Unlike the Nuremberg rallies, Bückeburg was not strictly a party event but a Volksfest, a people’s festival to give thanks for the harvest. Exuberant peasants in traditional costume lined a broad stone pathway that split the massive crowd; ordinary Germans stood and sat in the fields; many brought picnics and sat on blankets.

  The atmosphere at Bückeburg was different, more informal, more populist than other Nazi events. Crowds covered the hillside and the surrounding fields—a “living mountain,” as Goebbels described it. Eight temporary railway stations were constructed to handle the fleet of special trains that carried hundreds of thousands to the area. In 1934, five hundred thousand spectators filled the festival grounds; three years later the crowd was estimated at more than a million. The people were not there to be propagandized—assembled en masse in their hundreds of thousands, they were the propaganda.

  Finally, every November 8–9, veterans of the Beer Hall Putsch gathered at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich to reenact the ill-fated but “heroic” march of 1923. Led by Julius Streicher, the procession followed the route of the Putschists across the Ludwig Bridge, to the Marienplatz, and finally to the Feldherrnhalle. Throngs lined the flag-draped streets; giant red pylons marked their path, one spaced every ten meters or so. Each was topped by an enormous cauldron from which an eternal flame flickered. On the side of each was inscribed in gold letters the name of a party martyr. At the Feldherrnhalle, where the fatal shots had been fired, the procession halted, and Hitler, standing on the top step of the monument’s arcade, addressed the uniformed legions gathered below on the Odeonsplatz. Behind him, lined against the back wall of the monument, stood the iron sarcophagi of the sixteen Nazi martyrs killed on that day in 1923. In later years the sarcophagi were moved to two open “Temples of Honor” constructed on the Königsplatz, built adjacent to the Führer Building, which held Hitler’s Munich office. There an even larger ceremony was staged on the broad square. The nation was invited to listen to the live broadcast of these proceedings and watch them in newsreels shown at theaters across the country. November 9 was a solemn party ritual, an integral component of the Nazi myth, and was reenacted every year down to the outbreak of the war.

  These public spectacles were intended to demonstrate the irresistible psychological pull of National Socialism and to overwhelm any onlookers who still harbored reservations about the regime. They also contributed to the ever-deepening cult of the Führer and the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft. Historians have often been quick to dismiss this National Socialist “people’s community” as mere public relations, a cover for the Nazi coordination of all social, economic, and political relations in the new dictatorship. That it served that purpose is indisputable, but the power of its appeal should not be underestimated. To a country humiliated by defeat, torn by class antagonisms, and divided by religious affiliation and regional loyalties, the Nazi motifs of racial strength and internal harmony in the face of a hostile world were enormously appealing. The
relentless drumbeat of social solidarity, unity in a people’s community where coal miners, peasants, shopkeepers, clerks, engineers, corporate executives, Protestants, and Catholics would stand on equal footing as Germans found considerable popular resonance. The Nazis were promoting social equality, and Hitler rarely let an opportunity pass to invoke his humble origins, his lack of formal education, his struggle up from want, and praise for the solidarity and national idealism he found in the trenches, where Germans of all backgrounds were thrown together to fight for the common cause of German survival. Re-creating and perpetuating that solidarity of the trenches constituted the basic social imperative of the Volksgemeinschaft.

  Traditionally, German politicians and statesmen were distant, formal figures—one only had to glance at the austere Brüning or aristocratic Papen or Hindenburg’s towering aloofness to get the picture; they did not plunge into crowds to shake hands with their countrymen. They could not play politics in a populist key. Hitler was different. A peripatetic Hitler was photographed with laboring men on factory floors, cutting ribbons for the launch of ships, shoveling the first—and second and third—spade of earth for Autobahn construction, walking amongst the peasants at the Bückeburg harvest festival. These were elaborate photo ops, carefully staged for the cameras, and played an important role in shaping both the “Führer cult” and the Volksgemeinschaft. Goebbels’s propaganda machine trumpeted Hitler as a tribune of the people, the embodiment of the egalitarian spirit of the new Germany. Although he was at the same time portrayed as a sophisticated man of the world, at home in top hat and tails at the opera, greeting foreign heads of state, assessing trends in the art world, he was still at heart the common soldier of the Great War, a folksy south German who loved the Alps and relaxed in lederhosen, a man with common tastes. He was pictured in the Reich Chancellery with top party officials eating from a large steaming pot of stew—Eintopfessen, a simple one-pot peasant’s meal. The image caught on, and every German family was encouraged to have a one-pot meal on the first Sunday of every month. The money saved was to be contributed to the Winter Relief. Even restaurants participated. All people’s comrades were doing their part for the Volksgemeinschaft, where the distinctions of class and region had disappeared.