The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

  To Hitler, who considered himself a genuine artist despite his early failures as one in Vienna, all modern art was degenerate and senseless. In Mein Kampf he had delivered a long tirade on the subject, and one of his first acts after coming to power was to “cleanse” Germany of its “decadent” art and to attempt to substitute a new “Germanic” art. Some 6,500 modern paintings—not only the works of Germans such as Kokoschka and Grosz but those of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso and many others—were removed from German museums.

  What was to replace them was shown in the summer of 1937 when Hitler formally opened the “House of German Art” in Munich in a drab, pseudoclassic building which he had helped design and which he described as “unparalleled and inimitable” in its architecture. In this first exhibition of Nazi art were crammed some nine hundred works, selected from fifteen thousand submitted, of the worst junk this writer has ever seen in any country. Hitler himself made the final selection and, according to some of the party comrades who were with him at the time, had become so incensed at some of the paintings accepted by the Nazi jury presided over by Adolf Ziegler, a mediocre painter who was president of the Reich Chamber of Art,* that he had not only ordered them thrown out but had kicked holes with his jack boot through several of them. “I was always determined,” he said in a long speech inaugurating the exhibition, “if fate ever gave us power, not to discuss these matters [of artistic judgment] but to make decisions.” And he had made them.

  In his speech—it was delivered on July 18, 1937—he laid down the Nazi line for “German art”:

  Works of art that cannot be understood but need a swollen set of instructions to prove their right to exist and find their way to neurotics who are receptive to such stupid or insolent nonsense will no longer openly reach the German nation. Let no one have illusions! National Socialism has set out to purge the German Reich and our people of all those influences threatening its existence and character … With the opening of this exhibition has come the end of artistic lunacy and with it the artistic pollution of our people …

  And yet some Germans at least, especially in the art center of Germany which Munich was, preferred to be artistically polluted. In another part of the city in a ramshackle gallery that had to be reached through a narrow stairway was an exhibition of “degenerate art” which Dr. Goebbels had organized to show the people what Hitler was rescuing them from. It contained a splendid selection of modern paintings—Kokoschka, Chagall and expressionist and impressionist works. The day I visited it, after panting through the sprawling House of German Art, it was crammed, with a long line forming down the creaking stairs and out into the street. In fact, the crowds besieging it became so great that Dr. Goebbels, incensed and embarrassed, soon closed it.

  THE CONTROL OF PRESS, RADIO, FILMS

  Every morning the editors of the Berlin daily newspapers and the correspondents of those published elsewhere in the Reich gathered at the Propaganda Ministry to be told by Dr. Goebbels or by one of his aides what news to print and suppress, how to write the news and headline it, what campaigns to call off or institute and what editorials were desired for the day. In case of any misunderstanding a daily written directive was furnished along with the oral instructions. For the smaller out-of-town papers and the periodicals the directives were dispatched by telegram or by mail.

  To be an editor in the Third Reich one had to be, in the first place, politically and racially “clean.” The Reich Press Law of October 4, 1933, which made journalism a “public vocation,” regulated by law, stipulated that all editors must possess German citizenship, be of Aryan descent and not married to a Jew. Section 14 of the Press Law ordered editors “to keep out of the newspapers anything which in any manner is misleading to the public, mixes selfish aims with community aims, tends to weaken the strength of the German Reich, outwardly or inwardly, the common will of the German people, the defense of Germany, its culture and economy … or offends the honor and dignity of Germany”—an edict which, if it had been in effect before 1933, would have led to the suppression of every Nazi editor and publication in the country. It now led to the ousting of those journals and journalists who were not Nazi or who declined to become so.

  One of the first to be forced out of business was the Vossische Zeitung. Founded in 1704 and numbering among its contributors in the past such names as Frederick the Great, Lessing and Rathenau, it had become the leading newspaper of Germany, comparable to the Times of London and the New York Times. But it was liberal and it was owned by the House of Ullstein, a Jewish firm. It went out of business on April 1, 1934, after 230 years of continuous publication. The Berliner Tageblatt, another world-renowned liberal newspaper, lingered on a little longer, until 1937, though its owner, Hans Lackmann-Mosses a Jew, was forced to surrender his interest in the newspaper in the spring of 1933. Germany’s third great liberal newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, also continued to publish after divesting itself of its Jewish proprietor and editors. Rudolf Kircher, its London correspondent, an Anglophile and a liberal, became the editor and, like Karl Silex, editor of the conservative Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of Berlin, who had also been a London correspondent, a Rhodes scholar, a passionate admirer of the British and a liberal, served the Nazis well, often becoming, as Otto Dietrich, the Reich press chief, once said of the former “opposition papers,” “more papal than the Pope.” That the last three newspapers survived was due partly to the influence of the German Foreign Office, which wanted these internationally known journals as a kind of showpiece to impress the outside world. They gave a respectability to Nazi Germany and at the same time peddled its propaganda.

  With all newspapers in Germany being told what to publish and how to write the news and editorials, it was inevitable that a deadly conformity would come over the nation’s press. Even a people so regimented and so given to accepting authority became bored by the daily newspapers. Circulation declined even for the leading Nazi daily newspapers such as the morning Voelkischer Beobachter and the evening Der Angriff. And the total circulation of all journals fell off steeply as one paper after another went under or was taken over by Nazi publishers. In the first four years of the Third Reich the number of daily newspapers declined from 3,607 to 2,671.

  But the country’s loss of a free and varied press was the party’s gain—at least financially. Max Amann, Hitler’s top sergeant during the First World War and head of the Eher Verlag, the party’s publishing firm, became the financial dictator of the German press. As Reich Leader for the Press and president of the Press Chamber, he had the legal right to suppress any publication he pleased and the consequent power to buy it up for a song. In a short time the Eher Verlag became a gigantic publishing empire, probably the largest and most lucrative in the world.*Despite the drop in sales of many Nazi publications, the daily newspapers owned or controlled by the party or individual Nazis had two thirds of the total daily circulation of twenty-five million by the time of the outbreak of the second war. In an affidavit made at Nuremberg, Amann described how he operated:

  After the party came to power in 1933 … many of these concerns, such as the Ullstein House, which were owned or controlled by Jewish interests, or by political or religious interests hostile to the Nazi Party, found it expedient to sell their newspapers or assets to the Eher concern. There was no free market for the sale of such properties and the Eher Verlag was generally the only bidder. In this matter the Eher Verlag, together with publishing concerns owned or controlled by it, expanded into a monopoly of the newspaper publishing business in Germany … The party investment in these publishing enterprises became financially very successful. It is a true statement to say that the basic purpose of the Nazi press program was to eliminate all the press which was in opposition to the party.6

  At one period in 1934 both Amann and Goebbels appealed to the obsequious editors to make their papers less monotonous. Amann said he deplored “the present far-reaching uniformity of the press, which is not a product of government mea
sures and does not conform to the will of the government.” One rash editor, Ehm Welke of the weekly Gruene Post, made the mistake of taking Amann and Goebbels seriously. He chided the Propaganda Ministry for its red tape and for the heavy hand with which it held down the press and made it so dull. His publication was promptly suspended for three months and he himself dismissed by Goebbels and carted off to a concentration camp.

  The radio and the motion pictures were also quickly harnessed to serve the propaganda of the Nazi State. Goebbels had always seen in radio (television had not yet come in) the chief instrument of propaganda in modern society and through the Radio Department of his ministry and the Chamber of Radio he gained complete control of broadcasting and shaped it to his own ends. His task was made easier because in Germany, as in the other countries of Europe, broadcasting was a monopoly owned and operated by the State. In 1933 the Nazi government automatically found itself in possession of the Reich Broadcasting Corporation.

  The films remained in the hands of private firms but the Propaganda Ministry and the Chamber of Films controlled every aspect of the industry, their task being—in the words of an official commentary—“to lift the film industry out of the sphere of liberal economic thoughts … and thus enable it to receive those tasks which it has to fulfill in the National Socialist State.”

  The result in both cases was to afflict the German people with radio programs and motion pictures as inane and boring as were the contents of their daily newspapers and periodicals. Even a public which usually submitted without protest to being told what was good for it revolted. The customers stayed away in droves from the Nazi films and jammed the houses which showed the few foreign pictures (mostly B-grade Hollywood) which Goebbels permitted to be exhibited on German screens. At one period in the mid-Thirties the hissing of German films became so common that Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior, issued a stern warning against “treasonable behavior on the part of cinema audiences.” Likewise the radio programs were so roundly criticized that the president of the Radio Chamber, one Horst Dressler-Andress, declared that such carping was “an insult to German culture” and would not be tolerated. In those days, in the Thirties, a German listener could still turn his dial to a score of foreign radio stations without, as happened later when the war began, risking having his head chopped off. And perhaps quite a few did, though it was this observer’s impression that as the years went by, Dr. Goebbels proved himself right, in that the radio became by far the regime’s most effective means of propaganda, doing more than any other single instrument of communication to shape the German people to Hitler’s ends.

  I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.

  EDUCATION IN THE THIRD REICH

  On April 30, 1934, Bernhard Rust, an Obergruppenfuehrer in the S.A., onetime Gauleiter of Hanover, a Nazi Party member and friend of Hitler since the early Twenties, was named Reich Minister of Science, Education and Popular Culture. In the bizarre, topsy-turvy world of National Socialism, Rust was eminently fitted for his task. Since 1930 he had been an unemployed provincial schoolmaster, having been dismissed in that year by the local republican authorities at Hanover for certain manifestations of instability of mind, though his fanatical Nazism may have been partly responsible for his ouster. For Dr. Rust preached the Nazi gospel with the zeal of a Goebbels and the fuzziness of a Rosenberg. Named Prussian Minister of Science, Art and Education in February 1933, he boasted that he had succeeded overnight in “liquidating the school as an institution of intellectual acrobatics.”

  To such a mindless man was now entrusted dictatorial control over German science, the public schools, the institutions of higher learning and the youth organizations. For education in the Third Reich, as Hitler envisaged it, was not to be confined to stuffy classrooms but to be furthered by a Spartan, political and martial training in the successive youth groups and to reach its climax not so much in the universities and engineering colleges, which absorbed but a small minority, but first, at the age of eighteen, in compulsory labor service and then in service, as conscripts, in the armed forces.

  Hitler’s contempt for “professors” and the intellectual academic life had peppered the pages of Mein Kampf, in which he had set down some of his ideas on education. “The whole education by a national state,” he had written, “must aim primarily not at the stuffing with mere knowledge but at building bodies which are physically healthy to the core.” But, even more important, he had stressed in his book the importance of winning over and then training the youth in the service “of a new national state”—a subject he returned to often after he became the German dictator. “When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’” he said in a speech on November 6, 1933, “I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already … What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.’” And on May 1, 1937, he declared, “This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.” It was not an idle boast; that was precisely what was happening.

  The German schools, from first grade through the universities, were quickly Nazified. Textbooks were hastily rewritten, curricula were changed, Mein Kampf was made—in the words of Der Deutsche Erzieher, official organ of the educators—“our infallible pedagogical guiding star” and teachers who failed to see the new light were cast out. Most instructors had been more or less Nazi in sentiment when not outright party members. To strengthen their ideology they were dispatched to special schools for intensive training in National Socialist principles, emphasis being put on Hitler’s racial doctrines.

  Every person in the teaching profession, from kindergarten through the universities, was compelled to join the National Socialist Teachers’ League which, by law, was held “responsible for the execution of the ideological and political co-ordination of all teachers in accordance with the National Socialist doctrine.” The Civil Service Act of 1937 required teachers to be “the executors of the will of the party-supported State” and to be ready “at any time to defend without reservation the National Socialist State.” An earlier decree had classified them as civil servants and thus subject to the racial laws. Jews, of course, were forbidden to teach. All teachers took an oath to “be loyal and obedient to Adolf Hitler.” Later, no man could teach who had not first served in the S.A., the Labor Service or the Hitler Youth. Candidates f
or instructorships in the universities had to attend for six weeks an observation camp where their views and character were studied by Nazi experts and reported to the Ministry of Education, which issued licenses to teach based on the candidates’ political “reliability.”

  Prior to 1933, the German public schools had been under the jurisdiction of the local authorities and the universities under that of the individual states. Now all were brought under the iron rule of the Reich Minister of Education. It was he who also appointed the rectors and the deans of the universities, who formerly had been elected by the full professors of the faculty. He also appointed the leaders of the university students’ union, to which all students had to belong, and of the lecturers union, comprising all instructors. The N.S. Association of University Lecturers, under the tight leadership of old Nazi hands, was given a decisive role in selecting who was to teach and to see that what they taught was in accordance with Nazi theories.

  The result of so much Nazification was catastrophic for German education and for German learning. History was so falsified in the new textbooks and by the teachers in their lectures that it became ludicrous. The teaching of the “racial sciences,” exalting the Germans as the master race and the Jews as breeders of almost all the evil there was in the world, was even more so. In the University of Berlin alone, where so many great scholars had taught in the past, the new rector, a storm trooper and by profession a veterinarian, instituted twenty-five new courses in Rassenkunde—racial science—and by the time he had really taken the university apart he had eighty-six courses connected with his own profession.