The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  The role of active Nazis in denouncing critical or nonconformist statements was particularly prominent in 1933, 1934 and 1935. Not surprisingly, 54 per cent of those denounced in Augsburg were former Communists or Social Democrats, though as many as 22 per cent were actually Nazis, showing that the regime was not immune from criticism from within its own ranks at this time. As in other parts of Germany, many statements picked up by denouncers were made in the town’s pubs and bars, reflecting the long tradition of political discourse that existed in these social institutions. Most strikingly, however, while three-quarters of all critical remarks prosecuted by the courts were overheard in Augsburg’s pubs and bars in 1933, the proportion sank to two-thirds in 1934 and little more than a half in 1935. A few years later it was only one in ten. Clearly, fear of being overheard rapidly inhibited free conversation in pubs, destroying yet another aspect of social life that had hitherto existed free from Nazi control.206 Knowledge of the ever-present danger of denunciation for an incautious word or expression spoken in a public place was important in spreading general fear and anxiety among the population. ‘Everyone cringes with fear,’ wrote the Jewish professor Victor Klemperer in his diary on 19 August 1933: ‘No letter, no telephone conversation, no word on the street is safe any more. Everyone fears the next person may be an informer.’207 What counted was not whether or not there really were informers everywhere, but the fact that people thought there were. The disillusioned writer and journalist Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen recorded his friends’ and his own hatred of Hitler in the privacy of his diary and wondered on 9 September 1937 if anyone outside Germany had ‘any idea of how completely without legal status we are, of what it is to be threatened with denunciation at any time by the next hysteric who comes along’. How, he asked rhetorically, could foreigners comprehend the ‘deathlike loneliness’ of those who did not support the Nazis?208

  People could, of course, try to relieve their fear by joking about the situation, preferably in private. ‘In future’, so one joke went, ‘teeth in Germany will be extracted through the nose, since nobody is allowed to open their mouth any more.’ Some began to speak of ‘the German glance’, a counterpart to ‘the German greeting’ when two friends happened on one another in public: it meant looking round to make sure nobody was within earshot. On ending a possibly subversive conversation, one might say to one’s companion instead of ‘Hail, Hitler!’, ‘You’ve said some things as well!’209 Humour could be anecdotal too, of course:

  In Switzerland a Nazi bigwig asks the purpose of a public building. ‘That’s our Ministry of Marine,’ says the Swiss man. The Nazi laughs and mocks him. ‘You with your two or three ships, what do you need a Ministry of Marine for?’ The Swiss man: ‘Yes, - so what do you still need a Ministry of Justice in Germany for then?’210

  Political jokes themselves might have been irresistible as a release from tension, but everyone knew they could also be dangerous. ‘In the winter-time, two men are standing in the tram making strange movements with their hands under their coats,’ began another one. ‘ “Look at those two”, says one passenger to his fellow, “what are they up to?” “Ah, I know those two, they’re deaf-mutes, they’re telling political jokes to each other!” ’211 Of course, in practice people often told each other political jokes in the open, in pubs, on trams, or when meeting on the street, as the files of the Gestapo agents who arrested them reveal. The authorities themselves realized that humour was usually a way people found to live with the regime; it seldom indicated real opposition to it. As one local police official noted in March 1937:

  For some time the devising and telling of political jokes has grown to become a real nuisance. So long as these jokes are the expression of a sound spirit and are harmless in character, there will be, as has been repeatedly underlined at the top level of government, nothing to object to in them. But if they are slanderous in content, then for security reasons we can and must not tolerate their being spread around.212

  The journalist Jochen Klepper agreed with this assessment: ‘For all their political jokes and private disappointments, the people are still living in the illusion of the “Third Reich”,’ he concluded resignedly in the summer of 1934.213 Those arrested for disrespectful humour were often released without charge if they had no previous convictions. Only where they had an oppositional record were matters taken further, often ending in a short spell in prison. What mattered in the end was the identity of the joker rather than the nature of the joke, and it is not surprising that the vast majority of those imprisoned under the relevant law (for ‘malicious gossip’) were working-class former Communists or Social Democrats.214 Yet it was the arbitrariness of the police and the defencelessness of those whom they arrested that struck people most. As another joke had it: ‘At the Belgian border crossing, huge numbers of rabbits appear one day and declare that they are political refugees. “The Gestapo wants to arrest all giraffes as enemies of the state.” - “But you’re not giraffes!” - “We know that, but try explaining that to the Gestapo!” ’215

  Fear of being denounced, overheard or arrested extended even to private conversations, letters and telephone calls. As early as March and April 1933, Victor Klemperer was complaining in his diary: ‘Nobody dares to say anything any more, everyone’s afraid.’216 The Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February 1933 allowed the Gestapo to open people’s letters and tap their telephones, so, reported Klemperer: ‘People don’t dare write letters, people don’t dare to phone each other, they visit each other and calculate their chances.’217 In Berlin, the journalist Charlotte Beradt heard a Social Democratic friend confide to her early in February 1933 a dream he had had, in which Goebbels had visited his workplace, but the dreamer had found it almost impossible to raise his arm in the Nazi salute, and when he finally managed it after half an hour, Goebbels said coldly: ‘I don’t want your salute.’ Alienation from himself, loss of identity, isolation, fear, doubt, all the feelings expressed here were so striking that Beradt decided to make a collection of people’s dreams. By the time she finally left for England in 1939, her unobtrusive inquiries among friends and acquaintances, particularly doctors, who were unlikely to arouse their patients’ suspicions by asking about their dreams, had amassed a collection large enough to fill a book even after all the dreams with no discernible political significance had been weeded out.218

  Many of the dreams Beradt collected bore witness to people’s fear of surveillance. One doctor dreamed in 1934 that the walls of his consulting-room and of all the houses and flats in the neighbourhood suddenly vanished, while a loudspeaker blared forth the announcement that it was ‘according to the Decree for the Abolition of Walls, passed on the 17th of this month’. A woman dreamed that when she was at the opera, watching a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, a troop of policemen marched into her box immediately after the line ‘That’s surely the Devil’ had been sung, because they had noted that she had thought of Hitler in connection with the word Devil. As she looked around for help, the old gentleman in the next box spat on her. A girl reported that in a dream she had seen the two pictures of angels that hung over her bed move their eyes downwards from their accustomed heavenward gaze so that they could keep her under observation. A number of people dreamed of being imprisoned behind barbed wire, or having their telephone conversations interrupted, like one man who, after telling his brother over the telephone ‘I can’t enjoy anything any more’, dreamed the same night that his phone had rung and an expressionless voice had announced itself as ‘Office for the Surveillance of Telephone Conversations’: the dreamer immediately realized that being depressed in the Third Reich was a crime, and had asked for forgiveness, but met with nothing but silence. A few dreamed of carrying out small acts of resistance that always turned out to be futile, like the woman who dreamed that she removed the swastika from the Nazi flag every night, but it reappeared every morning all the same.219 In recounting and analysing all these dreams, Charlotte Beradt recalled a claim by the Labour Front leader Rob
ert Ley: ‘The only person in Germany who still has a private life is a person who’s sleeping.’ The dreams she collected showed, she concluded gloomily, that even this was not true.220

  V

  The Gestapo, the Nazi Party and the stormtroopers turned their attention not just to opponents, dissenters and malcontents, but also to those who failed to show sufficient enthusiasm for the Third Reich and its policies. Every group of houses had a ‘Block Warden’, the popular name for a variety of officials on the lowest rung of the Nazi hierarchy, whose task it was to ensure that everybody hung out bunting and Nazi flags on special occasions and went along to Nazi rallies and parades. Every local branch of the Nazi Party had an average of eight cells, each organized into roughly fifty blocks containing around fifty households each. The Political Leaders of the Nazi Party, as these low-ranking local officials were generally known, looked after one block each and in turn appointed helpers to cover each block of flats or small group of houses. Already by 1935 there were perhaps 200,000 of these Political Leaders; including their helpers there were almost two million ‘Block Wardens’ by the beginning of the war. Over two-thirds of the Political Leaders were of middle-class origin according to the 1935 Party statistics, and they were particularly hated in working-class districts with a strong Communist or Social Democratic past. They were often the first port of call for denouncers, and they exercised close surveillance over known dissenters, Jews and those who maintained contact with them, and ‘politically unreliable’ people, usually former opponents of the Nazis. Known derisively as ‘golden pheasants’ from their brown-gold uniforms with red collar epaulettes, they were required to report ‘rumour-mongers’ and anyone who failed to conform to the district Party organization, which would pass on their names and their misdemeanours to the Gestapo. Those who fell foul of the Block Wardens could also be denied state benefits and welfare payments. Other branches of the huge Nazi Party apparatus had similar local officials, ranging from the welfare service to the Labour Front and the women’s organization, and all of them carried out similar functions of surveillance and control. 221 In factories and workplaces, officials of the Labour Front, the employers, the foremen and the Nazi Security Service took over the functions of the Block Warden. Those workers who did not toe the line were singled out for discriminatory treatment, denial of promotion, transfer to less congenial duties, or even dismissal.222 ‘You couldn’t say anything,’ recalled one worker in the Krupp engineering factory later: ‘the foreman was always standing behind you, nobody could risk it.’223 The Nazi terror machine reached down even to the smallest units of everyday life and daily work.

  Intimidation was particularly evident during the national plebiscites and elections that Hitler held from time to time to provide the appearance of legitimacy to his actions, especially in foreign policy. The tightening of the regime’s grip can be read from the growing proportion of votes it secured at these propaganda events, which were legitimized by a law of 14 July 1933, passed at the same time as the law turning Germany into a one-party state. The new law allowed the government ‘to consult the people’ on particular policies on its own initiative, a stark difference from the situation under the Weimar Republic, when the power to initiate plebiscites lay with the people. Under the Third Reich, plebiscites and elections became propaganda exercises in which the regime mobilized the electorate, by all the means at its disposal, to provide the appearance of popular legitimacy for controversial measures.224 The first opportunity for using these methods came with the Reichstag election of 12 November 1933. The decree dissolving the Reichstag also permanently abolished the regional state parliaments, whose collective assembly, the Reichsrat, the upper house of the national legislature, was abolished early in 1934. In the Reichstag election, voters were presented with a single party list against which they could record a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. To placate middle-class electors, the list included a number of non-Nazi conservatives such as Papen and Hugenberg, and even a few former representatives of the Centre Party and the People’s Party. A massive propaganda campaign, including a radio broadcast by Hindenburg, was backed up by confidential instructions from the Reich Interior Ministry allowing returning officers wide latitude to interpret spoiled ballot papers as ‘yes’ votes. Some critical spirits suspected that this was what would happen anyway. Victor Klemperer for example noted in his diary on 23 October that ‘no one will dare not to vote, and no one will respond with a No in the vote of confidence. Because 1) Nobody believes in the secrecy of the ballot and 2) a No will be taken as a Yes anyway.’225 Few people dared to complain openly of manipulation, but those who did revealed malpractices such as the violation of ballot secrecy through the numbering of ballot papers, the filling-in of blank papers by returning officers, the removal of opponents of the regime from the electoral register and much more besides. Those who demonstratively refused to vote were arrested; and the presence of Nazis and brownshirts in the polling stations put pressure on people to show their loyalty to the regime by voting openly instead of in the secrecy of the polling booths. With the help of such methods, the regime obtained a ‘yes’ vote of 88 per cent, although almost three and a half million spoiled ballots were cast. Nearly 5 per cent of the voters put a cross against the ‘no’ in the accompanying plebiscite.226

  The methods used to obtain such results were made clear in the plebiscite held on 19 August 1934 to set the seal of popular approval on Hitler’s self-appointment as Head of State after Hindenburg’s death. Clandestine reports from Social Democratic agents to their party headquarters in exile noted that the polling stations were surrounded by brownshirts, creating a ‘terror-atmosphere, which did not fail to have an effect even where terror was not directly employed’. In many places, the polling booths had been removed, or access to them was barred by brownshirts, or they were labelled ‘Only traitors enter here’. Clubs and societies were marched en masse by groups of stormtroopers to the polling stations and forced to cast their votes in public. In some polling stations all the ballot papers were already marked ‘yes’, while in others spoiled papers were counted as ‘yes’ votes. So many ‘no’ votes were replaced with one or more forged ‘yes’ votes that the number of votes cast actually exceeded the number of electors in some constituencies. The degree of terror varied from area to area, so that in the Palatinate, where the Social Democratic agents reported record levels of intimidation and falsification, the ‘yes’ votes were well above average, at 94.8 per cent of the electorate, while in a few less heavily policed Rhenish constituencies, by contrast, up to half the votes were recorded as ‘no’ votes or spoiled ballots. In Hamburg only 73 per cent of the electorate voted yes, in Berlin only 74 per cent, and in some former Communist strongholds like Wilmersdorf and Charlottenburg the vote was below 70 per cent. Remarkably, under such circumstances, the regime only managed to secure the votes of 85 per cent of the electors. Five million electors refused to endorse the law, either by voting ‘no’ or by spoiling their ballot papers.227 Despite the massive pressure to vote ‘yes’, many Germans still thought the vote had been free: Luise Solmitz called it on polling day ‘a plebiscite of which one cannot predict the result, at least I could not’.228 Victor Klemperer was less sanguine. ‘One-third said yes out of fear,’ he wrote, ‘one-third out of intoxication, one-third out of fear and intoxication. ’229

  Four years later, the regime had perfected its techniques of electoral terror and manipulation to the extent that it achieved a ‘yes’ vote of more than 99 per cent in the April 1938 plebiscite on the union with Austria, which was coupled with a personal vote of confidence in Hitler and his actions to date. The conflation of these two issues alone muddied the waters by making it clear that anyone who voted against the union was also voting against Hitler and could thus fall under the provisions of the treason laws. Gangs of brownshirts toured every street at regular intervals, forcing people out of their homes and carting them off to the polling stations. The sick and bedridden were made to cast their votes at mobile pollin
g stations that visited them at home. People who refused to vote, or threatened to vote ‘no’, were beaten up, forced to parade through the streets with a placard round their neck with words such as ‘I am a traitor to the people’, dragged round pubs to be shouted at and spat upon, or consigned unceremoniously to lunatic asylums. In many places, known opponents of the regime were arrested in advance and kept in custody until polling day had passed. In others, they were given specially marked ballot papers, with a number typed on them by a typewriter without a ribbon and the same number placed by the name on the list of electors. On 7 May 1938, the Koblenz branch of the SS Security Service reported that in this way it had been able ‘to discover the persons who had voted “no” or spoiled their papers. Skimmed milk’, it reported in pedantic and humourless detail, ‘was used to bring out the numbers.’ In many towns, the overwhelming majority of electors were forced to cast their votes in public, at long tables manned by groups of brownshirts; in some, they were simply handed ballot papers already marked ‘yes’ by the officiating brownshirts. Even where the appearance of a secret ballot was maintained, rumours were deliberately circulated in advance that the ballot papers would be marked so that all voters if necessary could be identified during the count, and in some places indeed they were. Where, despite all these precautions, a substantial number of spoiled ballot papers or ‘no’ votes appeared at the count, they were simply discounted. And when a voter took the unusual step of publicly announcing his abstention, as the Catholic bishop Joannes Sproll did in protest against the inclusion of Alfred Rosenberg and Robert Ley on the Nazi Party list, the reaction was severe; Bishop Sproll’s action called forth raucous demonstrations by brownshirts outside his church, and led to his expulsion from his diocese, though the regime regarded him as too prominent to be arrested.230 Despite such incidents, many Germans who supported the Nazis in such plebiscites glowed with pride at the results. ‘99 per cent for the Leader,’ noted Luise Solmitz triumphantly, ‘that must make an overwhelming impression on foreign countries.’231