A solution will have to be found for migration – or we must assume that tens of thousands of refugees will drown in the Mediterranean or be halted with ever-greater brutality by some European fortress wall and abandoned to their misery. We must begin a discourse on how globalisation can be organised in such a way that the causes for flight can be eliminated, which can only in the end be done through forms of redistribution as well as help in overcoming the effects of climate change and a halt to the exploitation of resources in terms of both people and the environment, and through a peace movement that brings all conflicting parties to the negotiating table. For this to happen we would need something that has generally only existed in the event of world wars – a top-down redistribution, a kind of ‘New Deal’ for globalisation. The democratic elites must grasp that yet more inequality cannot be in their interests, and must be willing to provide a new impulse: an invitation to participate in democratic decision-making processes that set limits on the excesses of companies and the super-rich, and once again postulate the old maxim as a leitmotif of Western values: that the economy should serve people and not the few super-rich. On his farewell tour of Europe in 2016, the outgoing US President Barack Obama suggested just this change of direction – otherwise a deep-rooted feeling of injustice would continue to prevail.
There isn’t much time left to guide globalisation, currently derailed, back on to better and fairer tracks and to remedy the problems in our economic system: plummeting income, the dominance of the banks, the tax evasion of the super-rich and the major companies and the rapid digitisation of the economy, which goes hand in hand with a fear of the loss of jobs in industry as well as our attitude towards democracy and refugees. It is the responsibility of all groups in a society to let everyone participate and to help those who are afraid of an unpredictable future – the disadvantaged in Europe and the United States as well as refugees from further afield.
Drawing historical parallels is always difficult. Still, as I have outlined here, it is possible, and important to remember that the achievements of democracy, for which a lot of blood was shed in Europe, can disappear again. The bourgeoisie, which once watched the rise of Hitler, is also watching the rabble-rousers and radicals. Let us take Brunhilde Pomsel as an example and work to ensure that the right-wing populists do not speak for a silent majority.
We have the fascism of the 1930s as an undeniable blueprint for what Hannah Arendt called ‘the banality of evil’. Today we know how the collective mechanism of evil works. There are no more excuses: we know that one participates in evil deeds by the very fact of being unwilling, because of one’s own self-centredness, to see what is happening and step in on behalf of the rights and dignity of man. For that reason we are under particular pressure to do this, because we have the benefit of knowing history. Everything else is self-deception. Brunhilde Pomsel’s life story should stir us up; it is high time for the moderate middle class to come together and put pressure on the democratic elites to engage in reforms that lead to more justice and solidarity and thus cement the cohesion of Western societies, because the refugee crisis is only the symptom of a global economic order based on competition and disunity.
We can no longer afford to look away, because right-wing demagogues exploit everything they can to damage democracy. The neo-liberal policy of the West bears responsibility for this, and has ensured that the market has become excessively powerful. The social contract that promised social stability has been cancelled. That is why we are living in a time of chance, in which democratic values are being called into question. If the remaining democratic parties and the middle class do not start thinking about how that contract can be revived, we will see a wave of right-wing populism in Europe that will overwhelm democracy in the years to come. It is time for the middle class and the elite in all areas of society to prove that they have learned from history.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to the eyewitness Brunhilde Pomsel for her testimony. She made it possible to connect her unusual biography with the threats facing us today. Her memories and contradictions can teach us all a lesson, because freedom and democracy now need our commitment and our full attention.
I would like to thank the film-makers Christian Krönes, Olaf S. Müller, Roland Schrotthofer and Florian Weigensamer for allowing us access to the extensive interviews they had with Brunhilde Pomsel as well as for their close and friendly collaboration. I would also like to thank Gwendolin Hallhuber and Dorothee Boesser for their hard work.
Warm thanks also to the publisher Christian Strasser, who entrusted me with this project in August 2016.
Not least, I am particularly grateful to my editor Ilka Heinemann for her intense co-operation – it was the only way this exciting task could have been performed in such a short time.
Thore D. Hansen
January 2017
NOTES
‘WE WEREN’T INTERESTED IN POLITICS’
1During the First World War in the German Empire a nail was hammered into objects, usually made of wood, and a donation given. These were called ‘war nailings’. The money raised went to the victims of war and their families. ‘The iron Hindenburg’ in Berlin-Tiergarten was the largest nail figure and was erected in 1915.
2The Abitur was and is comparable to A-levels, and allowed the holder to move on to university. The Lyzeum was a high school comparable to today’s Gymnasium or grammar school. A Lyzeum was attended exclusively by girls.
‘HITLER WAS SIMPLY JUST A NEW MAN’
1Heinrich George (b. 9 October 1893 in Stettin; d. 25 September 1946 in Sachsenhausen Special Camp, Oranienburg) was a popular German actor even during the Weimar Republic. He was initially forbidden from working in the Nazi period, but he came to terms with the regime and acted in several propaganda films, including Hitlerjunge Quex (1933) and Kolberg (1945) as well as in the propaganda film Jud Süß (1940).
2Attila Hörbiger (b. 21 April 1896, Budapest, Austria-Hungary; d. 27 April 1987 in Vienna, Austria) was an Austrian actor. From 1935 until 1937 and from 1947 until 1951 he played Jedermann (Everyman) at the Salzburg Festival. With his wife, Gattin Paula Wessely, he played in Heimkehr, an anti-Semitic propaganda film.
3The ‘Zeitfunk’ department chiefly focused on events in Germany and Europe and at the fronts.
4Eduard Roderich Dietze (b. 1 March 1909; d. 25 May 1960) was a German table-tennis player with Scottish roots, and worked as a Rundfunk reporter. In the 1936 Olympic Games he was the chief announcer for English-speaking Rundfunk. After the Second World War he was very involved in the development of television, and was later head reporter with Südwestfunk.
5Rolf Waldemar Wernicke (b. 15 August 1903; d. 8 January 1953) was a German sports reporter. He reported in 1936 from the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games and the athletics competitions. But he also went on to report on central events such as Nazi rallies and, during the war, directly from the front.
6Johannes Karl Holzamer (b. 13 October 1906; d. 22 April 2007) was a German philosopher and educator, and later director of the broadcaster ZDF. At the beginning of the Second World War, Holzamer was initially recruited into the Luftwaffe as a gunner and later delegated as a radio war reporter.
7From 1934 many of the staff of the Reich Broadcasting Corporation in Berlin were arrested and banned from employment. These included prominent radio pioneers such as Julius Jänisch, Alfred Braun, Hans Bredow, Hans Flesch, Hermann Kasack, Friedrich Georg Knöpfke, Kurt Magnus, Franz Mariaux and Gerhart Pohl.
8Ludwig Lesser (b. 1869 in Berlin; d. 1957 in Vallentuna/Sweden) was a Berlin landscape architect. After he was forbidden from working in the Nazi era he emigrated to Sweden in 1939 and was posthumously appointed honorary president of the German Gardening Association.
9Heinrich Glasmeier (b. 1892 in Dorsten; presumed died in 1945) was a German broadcasting director, and after 1933 was the director of Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne. In 1937 he became Reich Director of the whole German Rundfunk (Broadcasting Corporation),
and from 1943 was employed as authorised representative of the Reich Propaganda Minister in occupied France.
‘IT WAS A BIT OF AN ELITE’
1The Berghof was Hitler’s home near Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, Germany.
2The economist Werner Naumann (b. 16 June 1909 in Guhrau, Silesia; d. 25 October 1982 in Lüdenscheid) was Secretary of State in the Reich Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda and personal aide to Joseph Goebbels. In 1953 Naumann was involved in a conspiracy in which a group of former Nazis attempted to infiltrate the FDP (Free Democratic Party) in North Rhine Westphalia.
3Kurt Frowein (b. 1914 in Wuppertal) became Joseph Goebbels’s press attaché in 1940. In June 1943 he was promoted to Reich film producer (Reichsfilmdramaturg) and had considerable influence in the central control room of the media power of the Propaganda Ministry.
4The White Rose was a resistance group led by students and a professor at the University of Munich. The core group was arrested by the Gestapo on 18 February 1943 and many of them, along with other members and supporters, were sentenced to death or imprisonment. The 20 July plot was an attempt by Claus von Stauffenberg and other conspirators to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944.
5Between October 1941 and late March 1945, 50,000 Jews were deported from Berlin. When the Reich Propaganda Minister killed himself in May 1945, of the 160,000 Jews at the start of the Nazi dictatorship, only 8,000 still lived in Berlin. The last deportation train left Berlin on 27 March 1945 for Theresienstadt concentration camp – only six weeks before the end of the Third Reich.
6Eva Löwenthal was deported from Berlin to Auschwitz on 8 November 1943, on transport number 46, and murdered there early in 1945.
7Werner Paul Walther Finck (b. 2 May 1902 in Görlitz; d. 31 July 1978 in Munich) was a German cabaret performer, actor and author. In 1935 he was arrested and banned from employment for a year. To avoid being arrested again he volunteered for military service and later won the Iron Cross 2nd Class and the Winter Battle in the East Medal 1941–2.
8Lída Baarová (b. 7 September 1914 as Ludmila Babková in Prague; d. 27 October 2000 in Salzburg). The Czech actress was the lover of Joseph Goebbels. The relationship was openly discussed early on, and the Propaganda Minister was prepared to divorce for the relationship. It was only when Hitler put his foot down that the relationship came to an end, as he found the public debate undesirable at the time of the annexation of the Sudetenland – and besides, Goebbels’s family was known as the Reich’s model Nazi family.
9In the Second World War, Südende in Berlin was almost entirely destroyed by Allied air raids. The crucial one came on the night of 23–24 August 1943 in a raid by a British bomber unit.
10The lost battle for Stalingrad and the resulting destruction of the German 6th Army in early 1943 is considered the psychological turning point of the German–Soviet war that began in June 1941.
11Konstantin von Schirmeister (b. 12 August 1901 in Mülhausen, Alsace; d. presumably after 1946) was a journalist, and from 1933 until 1945 as a state official was a high-ranking colleague of Joseph Goebbels in the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda.
12On 18 February 1943, Joseph Goebbels delivered a speech in the Sportpalast in Berlin, in which he called for ‘total war’. The speech, which lasted around 109 minutes, is seen as a textbook example of Nazi propaganda.
13The law on the Hitler oath for officials introduced on 20 August 1934 demanded the following oath of service: ‘I swear: I will be loyal and obedient to the Führer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, respect the laws and conscientiously fulfil my official duties, so help me God.’ Brunhilde Pomsel can’t remember whether she had to deliver this oath verbatim as a member of the Ministry staff.
14Richard Otte was a councillor and Joseph Goebbels’s personal stenographer. He was involved in producing Joseph Goebbels’s extensive diaries.
15Jud Süß is an anti-Semitic National Socialist film by Veit Harlan, made in 1940.
16Ferdinand Marian (b. 14 August 1902 in Vienna; d. 7 August 1946 in Pulling, Germany) was a popular Austrian actor in the 1930s. Joseph Goebbels personally demanded that Marian take the main role of the famous anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß, which he had originally turned down.
17Here Brunhilde Pomsel is referring to the film Kolberg. It was produced in 1943 under the auspices of Joseph Goebbels and was intended to boost the perseverance of the Germans during the last phase of the Second World War.
18Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft, a major German film company that produced and distributed from 1917 to the end of the Second World War.
‘LOYAL TO THE END’
1Hans Georg Fritzsche (b. 21 April 1900 in Bochum; d. 27 September 1953 in Cologne) was a German journalist and held various offices in the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. After the battle for Berlin, on 2 May 1945, presumably as the most senior-ranking government official still in the city, Fritzsche signed the unconditional declaration of surrender for Berlin.
2Günther Schwägermann (b. 24 July 1915 in Uelzen) served as adjutant to Joseph Goebbels from 1941. He attained the rank of an SS Hauptsturmführer. On 1 May 1945, during the last days of the battle for Berlin, he burned the corpses of Joseph and Magda Goebbels. Schwägermann successfully escaped from Berlin to West Germany. On 25 June 1945 he was imprisoned by the Americans, and released on 24 April 1947.
3This refers to the army formed in April 1945 under Walther Wenck, the senior commander, in order to fight the battle of Berlin. It was the army with the youngest soldiers in the Wehrmacht, and very badly armed.
4Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau am Inn in Austria-Hungary.
5Dr Herbert Collatz (b. 13 April 1899; d. 1945) was a senior councillor in the Reich Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. He shot himself and his family when the Russians invaded Berlin.
6Johannes ‘Hanne’ Sobek (b. 18 March 1900 in Mirow; d. 17 February 1989 in Berlin) was a German footballer and trainer. He came to fame as a player with Hertha BSC, with whom he reached the finals of the German Championship six times in a row. At the end of his career as an active player, Sobek worked for Berliner Rundfunk as a reporter (1938–1945).
7Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov (b. 12 February 1900 in Serebranye Prudy; d. 18 March 1982 in Moscow) was a much decorated Russian general, commanding the 62nd Army from the battle of Stalingrad to the battle for Berlin in April–May 1945. After the war he was awarded the decoration of ‘hero of the Soviet Union’, and in 1955 he was made ‘Marshall of the Soviet Union’.
‘WE KNEW NOTHING’
1Hanna Reitsch (b. 29 March 1912 in Hirschberg, Silesia; d. 24 August 1979 in Frankfurt am Main) was a very popular female test pilot. After Hermann Göring was relieved of all his offices by Hitler on 23 April 1945, on 26 April 1945 she flew his successor Robert Ritter von Greim to Berlin, arriving as the centre of the city was already occupied by the Red Army.
2Martin Bormann (b. 17 June 1900 in Halberstadt; d. 2 May 1945 in Berlin) held important Party offices, finally becoming Director of the NSDAP Chancellery as Reich Minister, and a major confidant of Hitler. After escaping from the Führer’s bunker early in May 1945 he was believed missing. It was only discovered in 1973 that he had killed himself on 2 May 1945. His skeleton was found when cables were being laid near the Lehrter Bahnhof station and subsequently identified.
‘WHAT THE STORY OF GOEBBELS’S SECRETARY TEACHES US FOR THE FUTURE’
1Paul Garbulski: ‘Gib acht vor der Nazi-Sekretärin in dir’ (‘Watch out for the Nazi secretary in you’), VICE Magazin, 17 August 2016, at: http://www.vice.com/de/read/sind-wir-nicht-alle-ein-bisschen-pomsel, retrieved 28 December 2016.
2Sven Felix Kellerhoff: ‘Goebbels-Sekretärin will »nichts gewusst« haben’ (‘Goebbels’s secretary claims “to have known nothing”’), Welt24, 30 June 2016, at: https://www.welt.de/geschichte/zweiter-weltkrieg/article156710123/Goebbels-Sekretaerin-will-nichts-gewusst-haben.html, retrieved 28 De
cember 2016.
3Amnesty International: ‘Hunderttausende Kurden im Süden der Türkei vertrieben’ (‘Hundreds of thousands of Kurds driven out of southern Turkey’), Amnesty International, 6 December 2016, at: https://www.amnesty.de/2016/12/6/hunderttausende-kurden-im-suedosten-der-tuerkei-vertrieben, retrieved 28 December 2016.
4Sylke Gruhnwald and Alice Kohl: ‘Die Toten vor Europas Toren’ (‘The dead at Europe’s gates’), Neue Züricher Zeitung Online, 2 April 2014, at: http://www.nzz.ch/die-toten-vor-europas-tueren-1.18272891, retrieved 28 December 2016.
5Jean-Marc Manach: ‘Ces gens-là sont morts, ce ne sont plus des migrants’ (‘Those people are dead, they are no longer migrants’), in: Le Monde diplomatique Online, 31 March 2014, at: http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/carnet/2014-03-31-morts-aux-frontieres, retrieved 28 December 2016.
6Lutz Haverkamp, Markus Grabitz: ‘10 000 Tote seit 2014 im Mittelmeer’ (‘10,000 deaths in the Mediterranean since 2014’), in: Der Tagespiegel Online, 7 June 2016, at: http://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/europaeische-union-und-die-fluechtlinge-10-000-tote-seit-2014-im-mittelmeer/13701608.html, retrieved 28 December 2016.
7John Woodrow Cox: ‘Let’s party like it’s 1933: Inside the alt-right world of Richard Spencer’, in: Washington Post Online, 22 November 2016, at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/lets-party-like-its-1933-inside-the-disturbing-alt-right-world-of-richard-spencer/2016/11/22/cf81dc74-aff7-11e6-840f-e3ebab6bcdd3_story.html, retrieved 28 December 2016.
8Richard Herzinger: ‘Trump weiter zu unterschätzen ist selbstmörderisch’ (‘Continuing to underestimate Trump is suicide’), in: Welt24 Online, 10 November 2016, at: https://www.welt.de/debatte/kommentare/article159392876/Trump-weiter-zu-unterschaetzen-ist-selbstmoerderisch.html, retrieved 28 December 2016.
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