The power of this populist imagery was reinforced by a number of developments that the regime could point to as triumphs of Nazi policy. From the earliest days of Nazi rule, the regime threw itself into highly publicized public works projects that signaled a single-minded determination to put the country back to work. Using uniformed men of the Labor Front, a National Socialist organization that conscripted the unemployed off the streets, the regime constructed bridges and roads, drained swamps and constructed dams—the highlight of which was the construction of the great Autobahn network, a project that was actually conceived under the last Weimar governments. Unemployment in 1932 stood at six million; in 1934 at 2.6 million; by 1937, spurred by the massive rearmament program begun in 1935, the figure had plunged to 500,000.
The regime also pointed to the new sense of social harmony, the absence of political strife, and the restoration of law and order as signs of the new national solidarity. With the Nazis entrenched in power, there were no more clashes in the streets, no bloody class conflict. For all the brutality of the SA and the looming menace of the SS, after the first months of the Nazi rule, peace and public order seemed to have been established. Gestapo arrests usually occurred at night, out of sight. People simply disappeared. Whispered rumors abounded, but it was not prudent to ask questions. Yet if Germans didn’t see the brutality, it is because they didn’t want to or were afraid to. After the first great wave of arrests, murders, and beatings in 1933, when more than 100,000 Social Democrats and Communists, recalcitrant clergy, obstreperous conservatives, and other suspected opponents were rounded up, public violence was rare. After years of political and social turmoil, stability and apparent social solidarity had been achieved—or, perhaps more accurately, imposed. Still, there could be no denying that the economic recovery that had eluded the star-crossed Weimar Republic had, thanks largely to rearmament, been achieved by the mid-1930s, and the dramatic successes of Hitler’s foreign policy had expunged the humiliation of Versailles and rekindled a sense of national pride and purpose.
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But behind the elaborately constructed facade of social solidarity and enthusiastic support for the regime there lurked a more complicated—and uglier—reality. With each passing year, the sinister reach of the Gestapo extended deeper and deeper into the private lives of the population. The Gestapo seemed to be everywhere, always listening, always watching. One might be arrested for “subjective crime,” what one thought, in addition to “objective crime,” public actions, or for being “anti-community-minded.” A prisoner might be released after an hour or so, but the effect was chilling. Since arrests often occurred in the dark early-morning hours when, the Gestapo understood, people were at their most psychologically vulnerable, rumor and fear mounted. It didn’t take many of these nighttime arrests to convince the public that the Gestapo had eyes and ears in every house, every apartment, in every bar and public place.
One didn’t dare ask too many questions or express disappointment, not to mention disapproval, too openly. Neighbors and family members were prodded to inform on one another; each building, each city block had its Blockwart (monitor) who made sure that residents of his assigned area put out the flag on the Führer’s birthday, contributed to the Nazi charities, and listened to the Führer’s speeches on the radio. Children were encouraged to report on their parents—had they heard anything subversive at home, anything disrespectful of the regime, its policies or its leaders? A torrent of anonymous denunciations flooded Gestapo offices, as people quickly learned how to instrumentalize the system, settling old grudges by denouncing a rival in love or at work or a troublesome neighbor. The Gestapo, in fact, was quite small—much smaller than the East German Stasi of postwar years—and relied heavily on such denunciations.
For those who were not intimidated or were simply incautious, there were the camps. During the early years of the Third Reich, there was no concentration camp system. Camps sprang up across the country, some run by the SA, some by local Nazi governments, some by the regional police, some by the Gestapo. Each camp operated according to its own procedures, its own administration. These camps were not intended to be permanent installations. No long-range plans were made; no thought given as to whether they would continue to operate once the wave of mass arrests of Socialists, Communists, and other outright opponents had passed in 1933. Their purpose was to incarcerate political prisoners; they were not intended to hold Jews unless they were engaged in resistance or anti-Nazi activities.
Göring, as head of the Gestapo in 1933, began closing many of the smaller, unregulated camps, and Himmler continued the process in 1934. While expanding his control of the Gestapo to all of Germany, Himmler sought to bring all the camps under SS direction. Backed by Hitler, he established a Concentration Camp Inspectorate in the summer of 1934 and named Theodor Eicke, the brutal commandant of Dachau, to lead the organization. Eicke was an old Nazi, fanatically loyal to Himmler, and he was renowned for the iron discipline and ruthless cruelty with which he ran Dachau. Eicke’s task was to bring order to the camps, which effectively meant to bring them firmly under SS control. Only installations organized by the Inspectorate were henceforth to be granted the official designation Konzentrationslager (KZ), concentration camp.
Armed with Himmler’s authority and Hitler’s support, Eicke worked assiduously to accomplish that mission. He closed some camps, expanded others, and created new ones. Using his harsh regime at Dachau as his model, he imposed uniform regulations on the operation of the camps, and he trained special units to run them. He introduced a standard uniform for the prisoners, who were no longer to wear their own clothes but were issued the coarse blue and white striped pajamas that would become symbols of Nazi slavery and oppression throughout Europe. The camps acquired paved roads, electrified wire fences, guard towers, row upon row of barracks. These were permanent facilities intended to operate in a formal concentration camp system.
But the future existence of camps was still uncertain. With camps closing and the number of prisoners falling, the SS system was a rather small-scale operation. Only five camps were still operating in the summer of 1935, and the number of their prisoners had dropped to 4,000. They were dwarfed by the official prison system, which held more than 100,000 inmates, 23,000 of them political prisoners. At this time Hitler even considered closing the camps. Were they really still necessary? Himmler talked him out of it. In 1936 Hitler appointed Himmler Reichsführer-SS and head of all German police forces, merging both state and party positions and vastly extending Himmler’s power. In November 1937 Himmler told SS officers that he wanted a total of at least 20,000 prisoners for the camps. Using these powers, Himmler initiated a series of sweeps, ordering police and SS to round up beggars, pimps, prostitutes, drunks, the “work shy,” and “social misfits,” individuals who did not conform to the National Socialist conception of a meaningful contributor to the Volksgemeinschaft. The concentration camp population began to rise, and new camps were established at Sachsenhausen near Berlin in 1936, Buchenwald near Weimar in 1937, Flossenbürg on the Czech border, and Mauthausen in just annexed Austria, in 1938. Ravensbrück, a camp for women, was established in 1939. These were permanent installations, the foundation of the Nazi system of terror.
The existence of the camps cast a dark shadow over the Reich, a sinister reflection of a regime that harped incessantly on its overwhelming popularity with the German people. The American novelist Thomas Wolfe, who had traveled widely in Germany during the Weimar years, was shocked on a return trip in the mid-1930s by the dramatic changes that Hitler had wrought. He could hardly recognize the country he thought he knew. “Here was an entire nation,” he wrote, “. . . infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It was a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations.” Yet, thinking back on day-to-day life in the Third Reich, most Germans did not recall being consciously afraid. Instead they lived with a subliminal fear; developing a sixth sense for survival; learning what to say, wh
en, and to whom was essential in daily life. A quick, almost reflexive glance over the shoulder to see who might be watching or listening nearby was dubbed the “deutscher Blick,” the German glance. Martha Dodd, the daughter of the American ambassador, recalled that “whenever we wanted to talk, we had to look around corners and behind doors, watch for the telephone and speak in whispers.” Many were convinced that their telephone receivers were rigged to act as transmitters so that private conservations at home could be listened to by the authorities. One defense was to place a tea cozy over the telephone to muffle conversations. Berlin merchants couldn’t keep them on the shelves.
Behind the elaborately constructed facade of social solidarity and support for the regime, pockets of dissent or nonconformity persisted. By the late 1930s, the Gestapo was registering increasing incidents of young people, especially but not exclusively working-class teens and young adults, who were involved in informal underground “bands, cliques, and gangs.” Groups such as the Edelweiss Pirates and the Kittelsbach Pirates in the Rhineland, the Navajos from Cologne, the Pack in Leipzig, the Swing Kids in Hamburg, and others sprang up in reaction to the authoritarian character of the Hitler Youth and the stultifying conformity imposed by the Third Reich. At gatherings in pubs, amusement parks, pool halls, and private homes, they wore eccentric, nonconformist clothing and long hair; they were sexually promiscuous, and danced to American jazz, all strictly forbidden as decadent by the Nazis. They also occasionally clashed with members of the Hitler Youth, who were their sworn enemies. “Beat the HJ wherever you come across them!” was the slogan of one group.
Some were involved in petty crimes—theft, assault, breaking and entering, particularly during the war. Most of their activities were apolitical in any larger sense. Their dissent was not so much against Nazi ideology as such—its racism, anti-Semitism, and aggressive xenophobia—as an expression of rebellious nonconformity and opposition to the oppressiveness of the Nazi regime. Their opposition hardened during the war years. “Hitler’s Power may lay us low,” went one song, “and keep us locked in chains, But we will smash the chains one day, We’ll be free again. We’ve got the fists and we can fight, We’ve got knives, and we’ll get them out. We want freedom, don’t we, boys? We’re the fighting Navajos.”
These groups, which were located primarily in urban areas, were not a direct threat to the regime; yet, in a context where the state’s claim to the individual was total, their very existence, outside Nazi control, was viewed by the regime as a serious provocation. And, for these discontented youths, many of whom were fourteen to seventeen years of age, their involvement was an act of courage. HJ patrols tracked them and reported them to the authorities; the Gestapo made arrests. Ignored by the Nazi press but captured in the secret Gestapo reports, a current of juvenile delinquency flowed beneath the smooth surface of the Third Reich, escalating dramatically during the war. As the alarmed Reich Youth Leadership declared in 1942, “the forming of cliques . . . of young people outside the HJ before the war, but especially during the war, has increased to such a degree that one can now speak of a serious danger of a political, moral, and criminal disintegration of the youth.”
More troublesome for the Nazis were the regime’s relations with the Christian churches. Both Protestant and Catholic churches had proven remarkably pliable in the first stages of the dictatorship. The Concordat with the papacy and the takeover of the Protestant leadership by the radical German Christians in 1933 seemed to indicate smooth sailing for the regime. But the honeymoon was short lived. The Nazis had pledged that the Catholic Church and its lay organizations would remain untouched by the regime so long as the Church did not engage in politics. But almost immediately Himmler’s SS began surveillance and harassment of Catholic lay organizations, which intensified as the year progressed. Mounting pressure was applied to Catholic youth organizations, when HJ leader Baldur von Schirach accused them of encouraging divisions within the Volk. By 1934 Catholic publications were compelled to drop “Catholic” from their mastheads, replacing it with “German.” The following year, the regime began banning Catholic magazines and newspapers until by 1939 all were “brought into line.”
Himmler also moved against the Church itself. Gestapo agents monitored sermons and infiltrated Catholic organizations. Priests were arrested, charged with engaging in political activity for reading from the Old Testament, for reminding their parishioners that Jesus was a Jew, and other acts of blasphemy against Nazi ideology. The party outlawed Nativity plays and other Catholic theatricals, claiming that they were ideological and hence political statements that were against the law. Some monasteries and convents were closed; some churches were shuttered, Catholic teachers furloughed, priests harassed. In 1935 the Nazi minister of education in Oldenburg decreed that all religious statuary, including crucifixes, were to be removed from all schools, parishes, and other public buildings. Not only did the local clergy protest, but the largely rural population reacted with outrage. They staged protests, circulated petitions, and created such a disruptive atmosphere that the Nazi regional governor felt compelled to retract the order. A similar incident, with the same results, occurred in Bavaria in 1937 when a local Nazi official ordered the crucifixes removed from public schools. Such civil disobedience was unheard of in the Third Reich, and it reminded the regime of the need for caution when dealing with the Church.
Alfred Rosenberg, the self-proclaimed interpreter of Nazi philosophy and author of the pagan, anti-Christian The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), could always be counted on to inflame relations between the party and the Church. An implacable enemy of Christianity, Rosenberg was at his most venomous when dealing with the Catholic Church. It had snuffed out the “Nordic Christianity” of the Early Middle Ages and allowed Jewish influence to permeate Christianity, leading to its degeneration over the centuries. He advocated a “positive Christianity” liberated from the Judaized Christianity of the Church. Despite widespread denunciations from the Catholic clergy, Rosenberg doggedly pressed his idea of merging Nazi racial ideology with a “renewed Christianity,” calling for a revival of the Nordic “blood soul.”
In 1935 Cardinal Clemens von Galen responded to Rosenberg in a pamphlet entitled “Studies on The Myth of the Twentieth Century,” eviscerating Rosenberg’s ideas. In a pastoral letter of the Catholic Bishops Conference at Fulda, he continued his assault, writing that “Religion cannot be based on blood, race or other dogmas of human creation, but only on divine revelation.” Following his lead, parish priests then read out a stern condemnation of Rosenberg’s work and the actions of the German Faith Movement. The Gestapo threatened Galen and banned the pastoral letter, but it was widely circulated nonetheless.
In this poisoned atmosphere, Goebbels launched a major propaganda offensive against Catholic institutions, charging them with financial corruption and rampant sexual abuse of children by predatory priests. Coverage of alleged sex scandals within the Church became a staple of the Nazi press. Anti-Catholic incidents multiplied; Hitler Youth disrupted church services, priests were taunted in the streets, Catholic youth groups assaulted. Himmler was relentless, applying ever-increasing pressure on Church organizations, restricting public meetings, censoring then banning Catholic publications, and arresting recalcitrant priests. Anticlericalism moved into elementary and middle schools, with Hitler Youth singing songs that ridiculed the Church and its teachings. “Their time has passed,” went one such song, “but the priests remain to rob the people of their soul, and whether it is Rome or Luther they are peddling, it’s all Jewish thinking. The time for the cross is now over.” Finally, the Catholic hierarchy in Germany had had enough. In January 1937 a delegation of senior German bishops and cardinals, including Cardinals Michael von Faulhaber of Munich and Clemens Galen of Münster, traveled to Rome. Their mission was to deliver a scathing indictment of the Third Reich and its war against the Church. After meeting with the pope, Faulhaber was asked to draft a papal encyclical enumerating the many Nazi breaches of
the Concordat and condemning its escalating persecution of the Church. Pius XI approved the draft, and the document, written in German and entitled “With Burning Concern,” was smuggled into Germany. Some 300,000 copies were printed clandestinely in shops around the country and then surreptitiously passed to parish priests, who read it from pulpits all across Germany on Palm Sunday, March 21, 1937.
The papal encyclical’s open condemnation of the Third Reich hit like a bombshell. “With Burning Concern” blasted the regime for its “aggressive paganism,” its “secret and open measures of intimidation, the threat of economic and civic consequences, its campaign against the Church.” It denounced the regime’s closing of confessional schools, in flagrant disregard of the Concordat of 1933. “Catholics have a right to their children’s Catholic education,” as promised in the Concordat. On a more fundamental level, the document took aim at Nazi ideology. “None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race.” Catholics could be certain that “the enemies of the Church who think that their time has come, will see that their joy was premature, and they may close the grave they had dug. The day will come when the Te Deum of liberation will succeed to the premature hymns of the enemies of Christ.”
The Third Reich Page 41