The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Yet according to regional Gestapo reports, none of this convinced the town’s many former Social Democrats and Communists, who were still unreconciled to the regime at the end of 1935, and were continuing to spread negative propaganda by word of mouth. Hostility was also noted amongst local Catholics; people still shopped in Jewish stores; conservatives were disillusioned and forging contacts with the army; and Girmann’s attempt to crush the local Lutheran congregation and make the town the first town in Germany without Christians foundered on the passive resistance of both clergy and laity. In conformity with national policy, Girmann did manage to force the closure of the town’s Catholic school, achieved mainly through a series of personal interviews with its pupils’ parents in which an undertone of intimidation must have been clearly audible to them. But higher authority would not allow him to employ overt violence against the Lutherans, and getting the Hitler Youth to throw snowballs at the crucifix on the town church was not really very effective, and so his campaign failed. Girmann was not above threatening people he observed failing to conform. People who did not turn up to meetings or left them early were confronted and asked for an explanation, and in one case, Girmann personally wrote to a young woman who had neglected to raise her arm in the Nazi salute, telling her she would be in danger of physical assault if she did the same again. Faced with such threats, local people were generally careful to conform, at least outwardly. All the same, there was no denying a widespread loss of enthusiasm for the regime in the town after the first months of euphoria.173

  The local Party found it difficult to counter such disillusionment. By the end of 1935 it had lost its dynamism; its leaders, Mayor Girmann included, had become comfortable, well-off even, drawing high salaries and reaping the rewards of their earlier struggles. Even Girmann did little in the later 1930s except rebuild the town’s horse-riding facilities, which he proceeded to use himself on regular occasions. Nazi festivals and celebrations became empty rituals, with people participating more out of fear than commitment. The few open incidents of antisemitic violence in the town met with reactions from the townsfolk ranging from indifference to outright disapproval; this was, after all, the kind of disorder they had supposed the Third Reich had come into being in order to suppress. Former Social Democrats were grudgingly tolerated if they abstained from oppositional activities, which on the whole they did after 1935, when the last remaining resistance groups had been suppressed. Block Wardens visited the households in their charge on a regular basis, to extract Winter Aid payments and to check on their political reliability. They had to submit reports on anyone from their block who was applying for social welfare, seeking a position in any of the town’s numerous guilds and clubs, or looking for a government job. They had to fill in a form to this end, giving details of the applicant’s attendance at meetings, contributions to charity and so on. Yet of the thousands of such reports stored in the local archives, hardly a single one after 1935 classified the subject as politically unreliable; only for a brief while, at the height of the Church struggle, did the reports contain negative comments along these lines, usually concerning active Catholics. Many of the Block Wardens’ notes were vague or said little that was meaningful, but on one point, they were all specific, and that was whether or not their subjects contributed to Winter Aid and similar schemes. Failure to do so earned the person in question a black mark and a designation as ‘selfish’ or ‘unfriendly’. Such an individual had made the Block Warden’s job more difficult, and held the potential to get him into trouble if he did not deliver his designated quota of payments. Nothing much else mattered, except on occasion a rare failure of someone to hang out a flag on Hitler’s birthday or forgetting to give the Hitler greeting. Some kind of political stability had been achieved, and most Block Wardens now seemed to want little more than to carry out their regular duties unhindered and without trouble. They no longer cared very much about people’s political beliefs, so long as they conformed in outward appearance and kept their beliefs to themselves. No doubt they were somewhat more vigilant in former Communist strongholds in Berlin or the Ruhr than in a small provincial town like Northeim. Still, by 1939, a kind of modus vivendi had been reached: townspeople, whatever their views, participated in public rituals as required, though generally without much enthusiasm; the local Party was careful to leave it at that and not push people too far. Acquiescence and lip-service were all, in the end, that it had been able to achieve; but it was realistic enough to admit that this would have to do, and that was probably the situation elsewhere as well.174

  The situation in Northeim reflected that of many other parts of Germany. Germans had not all become fanatical Nazis by 1939, but the basic desire of the vast majority for order, security, jobs, the possibility of improved living standards and career advancement, all things which had seemed impossible under the Weimar Republic, had largely been met, and this was enough to secure their acquiescence. Propaganda may not have had as much effect in this regard as the actual, obvious fact of social, economic and political stability. The violence and illegality of the Röhm purge had been widely accepted, for example, not because people supported Hitler’s use of murder as a political tool, but because it appeared to restore the order that had been threatened by Röhm’s stormtroopers over the preceding months. There was a broad consensus on the primacy of orderliness that the Nazis recognized, accepted and exploited. In the long run, of course, it was to prove illusory. But for the moment, it was enough to take the wind out of the sails of any oppositional movements that tried to convert rumblings of dissatisfaction with one or the other aspect of daily life under the Third Reich into a broader form of opposition.175

  IV

  The social promises made by the Third Reich’s leaders were far-reaching indeed. Nazism had won support at the polls in the early 1930s not least because of its incessantly reiterated promise to overcome the divisions of the Weimar Republic and unite the German people in a new national, racial community based on co-operation not conflict, mutual support not mutual antagonism. Class differences would disappear; the interests of the Germanic race would be paramount. The two great symbolic propaganda demonstrations choreographed by Goebbels and the Nazi leadership in the opening months of the Third Reich, the ‘Day of Potsdam’ and the ‘Day of National Labour’, had both been intended to demonstrate how the new Germany would unite the old traditions of the Prussian Establishment on the one hand and the labour movement on the other. Interviewed by the Nazi playwright Hanns Johst on 27 January 1934, Hitler declared that Nazism ‘conceives of Germany as a corporate body, as a single organism’. ‘From the camp of bourgeois tradition’, he told Johst, National Socialism ‘takes national resolve, and from the materialism of the Marxist dogma living, creative socialism.’ He went on:People’s Community: that means a community of all productive labour, that means the oneness of all vital interests, that means overcoming bourgeois privatism and the unionized, mechanically organized masses, that means unconditionally equating the individual fate and the nation, the individual and the people . . . The bourgeois must become a citizen of the state; the red comrade must become a racial comrade. Both must, with their good intentions, ennoble the sociological concept of the worker and raise the status of an honorary title for labour. This patent of nobility alone puts the soldier and the peasant, the merchant and the academician, the worker and the capitalist under oath to take the only possible direction in which all purposeful German striving must be headed: towards the nation . . . The bourgeois man should stop feeling like some sort of pensioner of tradition or capital and separated from the worker by the Marxist concept of property; rather, he should strive, with an open mind, to become integrated in the whole as a worker.176

  Hitler underlined these points by projecting himself as a worker by origin, a humble man of the people who had risen through the ranks without ever losing touch with his lowly origins.

  Hitler frequently reminded his audiences that, as he told an audience of over a million people asse
mbled in Berlin’s Pleasure Gardens on Mayday 1937, he ‘did not issue from some palace: I came from the worksite. Neither was I a general: I was a soldier like millions of others.’ The camaraderie of the front line in 1914-18, when social barriers were wiped away in the heat of commitment to the national cause, was to live again in the spirit of the Third Reich:It is a miraculous thing that, here in our country, an unknown man was able to step forth from the army of millions of German people, German workers and soldiers, to stand at the fore of the Reich and the nation! Next to me stand German people from every class of life who are today Regional Leaders etc. Though, mind you, former members of the bourgeoisie and former aristocrats also have their place in this movement. To us it makes no difference where they come from; what counts is that they are able to work for the benefit of our people.177

  As Hitler’s use of the word ‘former’ on this occasion suggested, the Third Reich sedulously propagated the notion that all class distinctions had been abolished in the new Germany. ‘We are’, declared Robert Ley in 1935, ‘the first country in Europe to overcome the class struggle.’178 In token of this, many institutions of the Nazi Party made a point of elevating members of the lower classes into positions of authority over members of the bourgeoisie, as in the Hitler Youth, or of subjecting the scions of the elites to the authority of their supposedly former social inferiors, as when university students were sent to labour camps, or schoolteachers were disciplined by ‘old fighters’ from humble backgrounds in their compulsory training sessions. The Nazi students’ attack on the traditional student duelling corps was only one instance of a widespread assault on Germany’s most publicly prominent bastions of social privilege, and - to the disgust of traditionalists like Reck-Malleczewen - it was accompanied by a good deal of egalitarian rhetoric and verbal assaults on the reactionary nature of the class discrimination that the duelling corps so openly practised.179

  Crucially, the rhetoric was accompanied by actual deeds. The decline in status, autonomy and power of the academically trained professions in the first six years of the Third Reich was real. Traditional institutions like the universities had been downgraded as part of the life-experience of young Germans, and far fewer went to them in 1939 than had done six years before. Small businessmen and white-collar workers saw the social divisions between them and the working class eroded by more than just Nazi speechifying. Aristocrats found themselves elbowed aside in the corridors of power by brash young Nazis from social classes far below theirs. Old-established figures of authority, from doctors to pastors, large landowners to village elders, found themselves under attack. Everywhere, the young, or at least a significant minority among them, seized their chance and asserted themselves against their elders: in the aristocracy, in the village, in the schoolroom, in the university. A new political elite had undeniably taken over. From the top rank of Nazis such as Goebbels and Goring, Schirach and Ley, down through the Regional Leaders to the bottom level of the Block Wardens and Hitler Youth commanders, new men, mostly young, often from unorthodox social backgrounds, sometimes, like Rosenberg for example, even from outside Germany itself, took over the reins of power. Moreover, a whole range of traditional social values had been downgraded: the professor’s prioritization of learning for its own sake, the doctor’s Hippocratic ethic of putting the patient’s interests before everything else, even the businessman’s enshrinement of profit as the ultimate measure of success - all these were swept aside by the Third Reich’s prioritization of war, race and the national community.

  Yet the equality of status so loudly and so insistently proclaimed by the Nazis did not imply equality of social position, income or wealth. The Nazis did not radically revise the taxation system so as to even up people’s net incomes, for example, or control the economy in the way that was done in the Soviet Union, or later on in the German Democratic Republic, so as to minimize the differences between rich and poor. Rich and poor remained in the Third Reich, as much as they ever had. In the end, the aristocracy’s power over the land remained undisturbed, and younger nobles even found a new leadership role in the SS, Germany’s future political elite. Peasant families that had run their village communities for decades or even centuries managed for the most part to retain their position by reaching a limited accommodation with the new regime. Businessmen, big and small, continued to run their businesses for the usual capitalist profit motive. Professors shunted the most obviously unscientific and unscholarly excrescences of Nazi ideology into little institutes on their own, where they could be isolated from the mainstream of teaching and research, and continued much as before. Judges and lawyers still judged and pleaded, still fought cases, still sent people to prison. Doctors had more power over their patients, employers over their workers. The Churches undeniably lost ground in areas such as education, but all reports agree that the priest and the pastor by and large retained the loyalty of their flock despite all the efforts of the regime to undermine it. The rhetoric of the national community convinced many, perhaps even most Germans on the political level: party rivalries had gone, everyone seemed to be pulling together under Hitler’s leadership. ‘No more class struggle’, as Luise Solmitz noted in her diary on 27 April 1933, ‘or Marxism, religious antagonisms, - only Germany, - in Hitler.’180 But far fewer were convinced that the social utopia promised by the Nazis in 1933 ever really arrived.

  A society cannot be totally transformed in a mere six years without huge, murderous violence of the kind that occurred in Russia, from the ‘red terror’ of the civil war years (1918-21) to the massive purges carried out by Stalin in the 1930s. The leadership of the Third Reich did, as we have seen, carry out a limited killing action against dissidents, or supposed dissidents, within its own ranks at the end of June 1934, and it also killed some thousands of its own real or supposed opponents within Germany, but its major violence was reserved for people outside the country and was carried out in wartime. There was no parallel to the Soviet regime’s killing of some three million of its own citizens, mostly in time of peace, nor to its imprisonment of many more millions in labour camps, nor to the violent upheavals that brought about the state ownership of industry and the collectivization of agriculture in Stalin’s Russia. Similarly, while the Third Reich restricted wages and consumption, this was not as part of a deliberate attempt to narrow the gap between rich and poor, as with the far more drastic restrictions imposed in Soviet society, but simply as a means of saving money to pay for rearmament. Nazism did not try to turn the clock back, for all its talk of reinstating the hierarchies and values of a mythical Germanic past. As we have seen, the groups who hoped for a restoration of old social barriers and hierarchies were as disappointed as were those who looked to the Third Reich to carry out a radical redistribution of land and wealth.181

  The problem was that any programme of social change that the Nazis might have desired was in the end ruthlessly subordinated to the overriding determinant of preparation for war. Whatever helped get Germany ready for the conquest of Eastern Europe was good; whatever got in the way was bad. The realization of any social or racial utopia was postponed until Germany had acquired its much-vaunted living-space in the East, just as economic prosperity for the masses was ultimately made dependent on the same thing. Yet any assessment of what might have been then becomes increasingly speculative, the more so since there is every indication that Hitler would not have stopped with the conquest of the East but would have transformed the war from one waged for European supremacy to one fought for world domination. Still, something of the nature of the utopian character of the future Third Reich imagined by its leaders and ideologues could already be discerned by 1939. Nazism’s romance with technology, though driven by rearmament, went beyond the merely military. Here was a regime that wanted the latest machinery, the latest gadgets, the latest means of communication. All these things implied big factories, large businesses, modern cities, elaborate organizations. The principles on which the Nazi future would be based were scientific: the applia
nce of racial hygiene and Darwinist selectionism to human society without regard for any traditional morality or religious scruples, directed by an elaborate, hierarchical state apparatus that would brook no dissent. At times, Nazi rhetoric might seem to envision a Europe of peasant farmers, of Germans united by ties of ‘blood and soil’, enslaving and exploiting members of inferior races in a pseudo-feudal world shorn of the complexities and ambiguities of industrial society; de-industrialization and de-urbanization would be the essentials of the final incarnation of the Third Reich on a European scale.182 But the fiercest proponents of this view, such as Darré, were outflanked by those who believed that the new European racial order had to combine the most advanced industry, technology and communications with the reordering of agriculture and the countryside in a new balance between the two.183

  In the real world of twentieth-century Germany, Nazism’s modernizing effects impacted on a context where rapid social and economic change had already been going on since the industrial revolution of the mid-nineteenth century. Here too there were ultimately fatal contradictions. Preparation for war, for example, undoubtedly speeded up already existing processes of concentration and rationalization in industry, and accelerated technological developments of many kinds. Military and medical technology and research, as we have seen, forged ahead in government-funded institutes and company research and development departments. On the other hand, the educational policies of the Third Reich moved rapidly towards reducing the professional, scientific and intellectual competence of Germany’s future professional elites, which were already beginning to decline in strength and numbers by 1939. If a future elite was beginning to emerge from the SS and from the new elite schools and Order Castles, then it was a dumbed-down elite that would find difficulty in managing a complex, modern industrial and technological social and economic system of a kind that would be capable of waging and sustaining a complex, modern, industrial and technological war. Traditional social institutions such as the trade unions were cleared away to make room for a total identification of the individual with state and race; yet the result was the exact opposite, a retreat of ordinary people into their private worlds of the home and family, a prioritization of consumer needs that the Third Reich was neither willing nor able wholly to satisfy. The destruction of the traditional institutions of the labour movement can plausibly be seen as a blow for modernity, paving the way for a very different, less antagonistic structure of labour relations after 1945. In the longer run, however, the decline of the traditional industrial working class and the rise of the service sector in a post-industrial society would have achieved this result by other means.