The Third Reich

by Thomas Childers

  Publicly Hitler sought to reassure the Holy See and German Catholics by repeating that the regime’s goal was the extirpation of Marxism, and in that life-and-death struggle the unity of the German people was essential. In private, he was outraged. The encyclical came as a complete surprise to the regime. As disturbing to Hitler as the content of the document was the uncomfortable realization that the Church had been able to produce and distribute the encyclical without being detected by the regime’s security forces. It was an embarrassment for the SS and Gestapo, and it was a warning signal of what the Catholic Church was still capable of doing.

  Hardly intimidated by papal intervention, the Nazis struck back with their usual fury, sharply escalating their offensive against the Church and its organizations. The Nazi press did not report the story at all, but on the day after Palm Sunday the Gestapo descended on the companies that printed the encyclical and seized all remaining copies. They also closed and sealed the firms responsible. The Church, Goebbels yammered, was a sinkhole of fiscal and sexual corruption not to be trusted with Germany’s youth or money. Ordinary Catholics were being swindled by a corrupt Church and its organizations. Throughout the rest of 1937, a flood of alleged incidents of pederasty and financial misconduct rippled through the Nazi press. Priests, monks, and friars were arrested—over a thousand, it was said—and awaiting trial. “Houses of God Degraded into Brothels and Dens of Vice” was a typical headline, and the trials that occurred throughout the year were given maximum coverage. Nazi tabloids wallowed in every lurid detail provided by the Propaganda Ministry. Germany, Goebbels asserted in a national radio address in May, was confronting a systematic effort to undermine the morality of the German people. The Church, he warned, should remember, “it is not the law of the Vatican that rules here but the law of the German people.”

  Throughout 1938 and into 1939 the regime, having already eliminated religious instruction in public schools, moved decisively against church schools, converting them into “community schools.” It was for many Catholics the last battleground. Although the party had not managed to close all church schools by the outbreak of the war, they were making steady headway. Their sustained campaign against the Church had its effect, sobering the Catholic public and weakening any inclination toward opposition to the regime. Goebbels’s hope of driving a wedge between the Church and its flock seemed to be working. Despite the regime’s heathenism and its actions against the Church, Hitler remained popular with German Catholics, and opposition, both from ordinary Catholics and their leadership, remained focused narrowly on specific religious matters. There was little criticism of the Nazi racial policy or its totalitarian ambitions or its oppressive intervention in everyday life. In the last years of peace the “Church struggle,” as it came to be called, continued but at a lower pitch. By the outbreak of war in 1939, Catholic cultural organizations had been smashed, its Youth League disbanded, its publications banned, and yet, for all that, the Church remained a potential source of trouble to the regime, and Gestapo surveillance remained vigilant.

  The Protestant church also represented a potential problem for the Nazis, albeit of a different nature. Hitler’s attempt to build a united national church led by the German Christians ran into trouble almost immediately. Ludwig Müller, Hitler’s choice for bishop of the new Reich Church, failed to create the unified Protestant church the Führer wanted, and Hitler’s appointment of Hanns Kerrl as head of the newly founded Reich Ministry of Church Affairs in 1935 was no more successful. The eager subservience of the new, coordinated Reich Church to the Nazi state, its willingness to allow the regime to intervene and direct its affairs, and the ham-fisted efforts of Müller and Kerrl to impose the pagan, anti-Semitic doctrine of the German Christians provoked an immediate reaction in 1933 and grew progressively stronger in 1934.

  Adding to Müller’s difficulties was the Church Law, enacted on September 6, 1933, which required all pastors to take an oath of loyalty to Hitler and the National Socialist state. Among the clauses of that law was the introduction of the Aryan Paragraph of the Civil Service Law into the Church. Alarmed at the law and the direction of the new church, many pastors refused to take the oath. They also explicitly rejected the incorporation of the Aryan Paragraph into Church affairs. Among the most vocal opponents of the law was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a bright twenty-seven-year-old pastor and university lecturer. On September 27 he issued a declaration denouncing the Aryan Paragraph and Nazi racial policy more broadly, which found resonance with other dissident pastors. Especially disturbing to them was the Reich Church’s racial orientation, which, in their view, made race the key element of a new Nazified theology. These pastors, with Martin Niemöller’s leadership, began to organize in regional groups around the country to express their disaffection.

  Niemöller was pastor of the Lutheran church in the posh Dahlem section of Berlin. He was no liberal. He had served as a submarine captain during the war, and like many Protestant pastors was a nationalist conservative. He fought in the Free Corps in the immediate postwar years and was an opponent of the Weimar Republic, which he considered too weak to represent Germany’s interests abroad and too fractured and disorganized to meet the Communist threat at home. For a time he was attracted to Hitler for his staunch anti-Communism and his promise of a revivified Germany, but in the course of 1933 he became disillusioned by the regime’s naked attempt to coordinate and control all the churches, Protestant as well as Catholic.

  In September 1933 he joined with other recalcitrant pastors to create the Pastors’ Emergency League. In the following months they met in various cities, and in May 1934 at a meeting in Barmen, attended by some three thousand pastors, they issued a declaration of principles that formally rejected the Aryan Paragraph and the attempt of the German Christians to merge Nazism with Protestant Christianity. It was an unequivocal declaration of independence from the Reich Church and delivered a strong rebuke to the German Christians and to Reich Bishop Müller for their attempts to Nazify the Church. The text of the Barmen Declaration was written by Karl Barth, a Swiss theologian who was residing in Germany. It was, in effect, the founding document of a new, anti-regime Protestant Church, the Bekennende Kirche, or Confessing Church.

  The Confessing Church viewed itself as the legitimate Protestant church in Germany and was especially vocal in its rejection of “Nazi theology.” As a consequence, its pastors were under perpetual Gestapo surveillance and were frequently arrested. By 1937, some seven hundred pastors of the Confessing Church had been imprisoned, including particularly prominent figures—Bishop Theophil Wurm of Württemberg in 1935 and in 1937 Niemöller himself. Niemöller had continued to give sermons highly critical of the regime and had become the national voice of the disaffected, attracting a diverse following from former Social Democrats, Communists, and Catholics. In 1937, he was tried and convicted of actions embarrassing to the state, but was released the following year since he had already served his sentence of seven months while awaiting trial. Immediately upon his release he was rearrested—a not uncommon practice in the Third Reich. He disappeared into the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. He would spend seven years in the camps, much of it in solitary confinement, before he was liberated by the Americans in the spring of 1945.

  Although they occasionally ruffled the smooth surface of the Third Reich and hundreds of clergy disappeared into the concentration camps in the prewar years, the churches posed no imminent danger to the dominance of the regime. Their criticism was mostly confined to Nazi intervention in church matters, and they remained largely silent about other criminal policies of the regime. Some smaller sects, especially the Jehovah’s Witnesses, courageously refused to swear any allegiance to Hitler’s new order and distributed pamphlets condemning the idolatry of Hitler and the Nazi attempts to undermine Christian beliefs. They also refused to serve in the military. They were rounded up and dispatched to the camps, most without a trial, where they constituted a major element of those arrested for religious opposition.
They were an irritant but little more. And yet for the Nazis, whose goal was to leave no group outside their control, the churches were more than a nuisance: with their relative independence and their organizational networks spread across the country, their very existence represented a threat to the regime’s totalitarian aspirations.

  Hitler was reluctant to attack the churches directly and left the rabid anti-Christian rhetoric to Goebbels, Rosenberg, and Himmler. But in private conversations he left no doubt about his intentions. “In the long run,” he explained to luncheon guests in 1941, “National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together. . . . The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jews.” Later he confided to Speer and Himmler that he had been patient, but “we shan’t be able to go on evading the religious problem. . . . The evil that is gnawing our vitals is our priests, of both creeds. . . . The time will come when I’ll settle my account with them, and I’ll go straight to the point. . . . They’ve only got to keep at it, they’ll hear from me, all right. I shan’t let myself be hampered by juridical scruples. . . . In less than ten years from now, things will have quite another look, I can promise them.”

  Terror and political indoctrination were central pillars of the Third Reich, but what the regime counted on was not just fear and not ideological commitment but apathy—each atomized individual looking for his or her own interests. Opportunists, especially among the more educated, rushed to join the party in such numbers that by the end of 1933 over half the membership of the NSDAP had joined since Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. And, of course, if one had misgivings, if one disagreed, one found little or no reinforcement in public. One didn’t dare confide in friends or colleagues or talk openly to strangers. Organized discussion outside National Socialist supervision became virtually impossible. Would someone inform? Werner Finck, the popular comedian at the Catacombs cabaret in Berlin, performed a routine in which a patient sitting in a dentist’s chair refuses to open his mouth. When the puzzled dentist asks why, Finck responds, “I don’t know you.” The skit routinely brought down the house—until, inevitably, the Nazis closed the Catacombs.

  And besides, official reality in the Third Reich was so relentlessly positive, so upbeat. The newspapers carried no dissenting opinions, no outraged letters to the editor; the newsreels portrayed a happy people, proud of having overcome the lost war, the Great Depression, and international oppression. Why be a troublemaker? So many seemed happy in the new Volksgemeinschaft. They went dancing, went to the movies, went on excursions, attended the opera. On the surface everything seemed familiar, normal. But, of course, it wasn’t. Trying to describe life in the Third Reich and the insidious process by which society was diverted, seduced, tricked, threatened, and implicated, a German schoolteacher, hardly a Nazi himself, explained to a Jewish friend from America after the war:

  To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, “regretted,” that unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these “little measures” that no “patriotic German” could resent must someday lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

  And one day, too late, your principles, if you were sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. . . . You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). . . . You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

  By mid-1934 it was obvious to all that this was no ordinary authoritarian dictatorship but a regime with totalitarian aspirations, a regime that sought to dominate not only the individual’s public behavior, but his private life, his thoughts. Hitler and the National Socialists had embarked on a course of action that would seek to efface the distinction between public and private life. “The revolution that we have made is a total revolution,” Goebbels stated in November 1933. “It encompasses every aspect of public life from the bottom up. . . . It has completely altered relations between individuals and utterly transformed the relationship between the individual and the state.” The Nazi goal was to “replace individuality with collective racial consciousness and the individual with the community.” In the Third Reich, Goebbels bluntly proclaimed, there would “no longer [be] any free realms in which the individual belongs to himself . . . the time for personal happiness is over.” Or as Robert Ley, minister of Labor, succinctly expressed it, “the individual in Germany who leads a private life is asleep.”

  11

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  A RACIAL REVOLUTION

  The Nazis had unleashed a revolution in Germany, but not an economic one. Hitler was not interested in economics and certainly did not intend to turn the rabid social revolutionary rhetoric of the party into reality. For all the insistent talk about Volksgemeinschaft, his view of the economy was strictly instrumentalist: he needed a strong industrial base and a powerful army to realize his dreams of expansion, of Lebensraum in the East. The fate of the small shopkeeper, farmer, or artisan, stalwart elements of the party’s national support before 1933, held little interest for him. As if to drive that point home, the party leadership announced on July 7, 1933, that “active measures” to nationalize the department stores—one of the party’s most strident promises before 1933—“were not indicated for the present.” No action against the department stores was undertaken, then or later, and the big chains continued to operate as before, although under different—“Aryan”—management.

  Property relations in the Third Reich remained largely untouched, except for the expropriation of Jewish property. Instead, the Nazis undertook a fundamental reordering of status, the most obvious expression of which was their effort to elevate the social standing of peasants and workers, two groups traditionally considered to inhabit the lower reaches of German society. National Socialism, Hitler and Goebbels were at pains to emphasize, was not defined by wealth or property, by possessions, bank accounts, stock portfolios, and income, mere material things. Nazi socialism was much deeper, more profound than Marxism, they claimed. It did not change the external order of things, but sought to fundamentally transform the relationship of man to the state. They were going to create a new man, a new people, strong and vigorous and untainted by the weaknesses of the past. The Nazis did not need to socialize the banks and factories; they were socializing the people.

  Creating a united Germany liberated from the traditional divisions of class, religion, and region was merely one dimension of Hitler’s agenda to establish a fundamentally new German nation. The National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft was to be a society bound together by blood, a nation built on a utopian vision of racial purity, cleansed of hereditary weakness and freed from the taint of foreign, especially Jewish, blood. The Third Reich would build national, by which the Nazis meant racial, solidarity by expunging the biological contaminants infecting the German people. They would cultivate a healthy, vigorous, racial community that would unchain the vast energies of a proud, revivified people.

  History, Hitler believed, was driven by remorseless struggle, nation against nation, culture against culture, and ultimately race against race. In his thinking, a hierarchy of races existed, and Aryans, which he never defined in any serious anthropological way, were the most valuable race. They alone possessed the capacity “for creating and building culture.” In
fact, “all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan.” But if the Aryans bred with people of inferior racial stock, their blood would be hopelessly polluted, and the Aryan race would gradually descend into extinction. History offered overwhelming evidence “that in every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples, the result was the end of the cultured people.” Indeed, “all great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative [people] died out from blood poisoning.”

  The situation had now reached the tipping point. A sense of urgency prevailed. Germany stood on the brink of irreversible racial degeneration. Drastic measures had to be taken immediately to halt this defilement of Aryan blood and to improve the health of the race. This was the historic mission of the National Socialist movement. Struggle, Hitler declared, “is always a means for improving a species’ health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development.” And in this struggle between the superior and inferior, there could be no half measures, no compromises; there could be no pity. “The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker.”