NAZI CULTURE: INTELLECTUAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL LIFE IN THE

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: NAZI CULTURE: INTELLECTUAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL LIFE IN

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The school is education from above; the HJ that from below. In the school it is the teaching staff which educates; in the HJ it is the youth leadership. Obviously, within the school the authority of the teacher must be the highest authority. Equally obvious is the fact that the authority of the HJ leader is the highest authority outside of the school. If both parties scrupulously observe this distinction there can be no friction, particularly if both are also clearly aware that youth education is a unified whole in which both have to integrate themselves meaningfully. Without intending any criticism of the teaching profession, it must be said that a teacher, as such, should not, at the same time, also be an HJ leader. The fact that we also have several hundred teachers in the ranks of the HJ does not contradict this requirement. The HJ leadership comes from all walks of life; hence it also includes members of the teaching profession. But the Reich youth leadership does not as a matter of course recognize in any given teacher a greater aptitude for the office of youth leader than it does in any other Volk comrade. A teacher with special aptitude for youth work has the same possibilities for advancement within the HJ that are open to every other Volk comrade. His profession, however, does not give him a claim to youth leadership. Teaching and leadership are two fundamentally different matters. Even the most experienced and successful schoolmaster may be a complete failure in the leadership of a youth group, just as, on the other hand, an able HJ leader may be incapable of giving regular school instruction. The prerequisites of teaching, in addition to a natural calling, include a definite, planned training routine supervised by the state. The youth leader also is subjected to a certain educational routine, which must, above all, include practical activity within the youth movement. Beyond that, he must possess an ability that no teacher's seminar, no university, and no ministry of public education can give him -- namely, the ability to lead, which is inborn. This innate gift of leadership is crucial for the calling of youth leader. Whoever possesses it, whether teacher, peasant, or factory worker, can be employed in youth work. Unfortunately, many a teacher is of the opinion, among other things, that the right to youth leadership was bestowed on him along with his teacher's certificate, as it were. A fateful error! If by some oversight such a teacher should take over the leadership of a youth group, he would unconsciously falsify the meaning of the youth movement, because he would conceive of the youth organization simply as a continuation of scholastic instruction by different means. What for the youngsters is intended as marching and a serious hike then becomes a school outing, etc. All too easily, an office that obligates him to work with youth seduces a teacher into an erroneous self-estimation. He is apt to confound the authority bestowed on him as a teacher by the government with the other, innate authority of the leader. The end result is that the teacher and the youth are both disappointed; the teacher loses faith in himself and the youth loses faith in the idea. Such mistakes are hard to overcome, especially in the field of youth leadership. Hence it is far better to prevent such failures from the outset. Moreover, many a teacher has confirmed to me that a teacher who has a serious conception of the teaching profession would seldom be able to cope simultaneously with the responsibilities of educator and youth leader, since the work load would be much too great.

Moreover, the sociological structure of the Hitler Youth, in which the overwhelming majority are working youths, would confront a teacher who is an HJ leader with a social group altogether different from that which he had imagined from his work at school. The pedagogical qualifications which enable him to deal successfully with his own students within the HJ have no validity as soon as he is surrounded by apprentices from a wide variety of trades who have dropped out of school. And if at first he had presumed that he had to deal only with a school class dressed in uniform, he now becomes fully aware of the fact that the HJ, down to its smallest cell, represents the whole people.

The line of demarcation between school and the HJ cannot be drawn clearly enough. To be sure, the cooperation between youth leaders and teachers must be based on mutual confidence and comradeship. The more frequently that teacher and youth leader discuss the problems of the youths entrusted to their care, the better it will be not only for the school but also for the youth organization. A lazy student (and there are lazy students even in the HJ!) may frequently be more strongly motivated to do better work if his youth leader, after a conference with the teacher, exhorts him to do better, than would be the case if a warning came directly from the teacher. In this connection the following must be given special consideration: with the rise of the National Socialist youth movement, all schools today have classes that include leaders of the JV [2] and the Hitler Youth as well as of the BDM among its students. The teacher must exercise a great deal of tact in order to find the right tone in dealing with them. Naturally they are pupils just as much as the others in the class. Nevertheless, it is a different thing to reprimand a student who leads a youth group outside of school than to reprimand one who is nothing but a student. Here the teacher must always strive not to reduce unnecessarily the authority of a youth leader in front of his comrades. He should tell him privately what must be said to him in the interest of his education. And if he is unsuccessful, he should get in touch with the superiors of the particular youth leader rather than engage in a disputation with him before the whole class, which frequently will lead only to the psychologically understandable consequence that the Hitler Youth will close ranks against the teacher, because they are unable to distinguish clearly between a reprimand to the pupil and one to their youth-group leader. And if in the excitement of the moment a word should be uttered against the HJ, the confidence of the student body in the teaching staff is destroyed, and it is not easily reestablished. But the more a teacher strives to enter into the spirit and structure of the HI. the more success will he have. In my opinion, a teacher today must be willing to make the truly small sacrifice of attending this or that affair of the HJ, to show that he takes an interest in what his pupils are doing outside of school. So many teachers in Germany have in this way known how to establish psychological bonds between themselves and their students! But how many have made the mistake of turning their backs on the youth! The latter simply forget that in a higher sense youth is always right because youth carries within itself the new life. The inflexible adherence of such teachers to the olden times will only place them outside the new times, and they no longer will have any contact with youth and life.

In these times, the teacher is more necessary than ever. Like the youth leader, he has a great and magnificent task to perform for the sake of the young generation. Less than ever before should he be satisfied to close his books with the final bell and call it a day.

To be sure, youth has no particular respect for knowledge. It respects only the man. Whoever is a real man among the teachers will be able to make an exciting experience even out of the musty classroom. He who is not is beyond help. We can only hope that the breed which looked upon teaching only as a comfortable berth, and saw in the pupil only an unpleasant material that had to be worked, will oon die out. We all know men of this type, called "kettle-drummers" in popular usage. There are fewer of them every day. They can't stand the fresh air of the Third Reich, and as they vanish, the stalwart figures of our young teachers take their places. They, however, stand with both feet in the present, march in rank and file with their comrades in SA and PO, [3] and, like them, are the older comrades of the Hitler Youth.

The liberalistic era invented the horrible title of Head Director of Studies (Oberstudiendirektor). National Socialism will show us what a schoolmaster is.

***

The HJ is a corporate component of the NSDAP. Its task is to see that new members of the National Socialist movement will grow up in the same spirit through which the Party achieved greatness. Every movement that finds itself in the possession of political power runs the danger of being corrupted by opportunists. Even the National Socialist movement has had its difficulties with these "knights of expediency." In popular usage they are known as the "hundred-and-ten-percenters." These are people who for years have joined whatever political party was dominant, only to leave it at once when the star of political expediency began to wane. They have no interest in a world view nor the slightest spiritual impulse for their political decisions. Their only interest is the possibility of personal profit and advantage. It is obvious that on January 30, 1933, such types also thought they saw opportunities for personal gain in National Socialism. Aware as they are of their own inferiority, these people are always examining the actions of National Socialist leaders to see whether they might not perhaps glimpse a betrayal of the National Socialist idea. Such "followers" of National Socialism are a greater danger to the movement than its real enemies. The NSDAP protects itself from these creatures primarily through its youth organizations. Whoever at the age of ten or twelve joined the JV and until his eighteenth year belonged to the HJ has served such a long probation period that the National Socialist party can be certain of him as an utterly reliable fighter. The party has no other way of safeguarding its inner strength. In the period of struggle, every NSDAP member, by the very fact of belonging to the party, was subjected to sacrifice and persecution; whoever came to us in those years was motivated by his faith. Today membership in the NSDAP carries with it a certain prestige. Rightfully this prestige is even greater the longer the membership has lasted. Today everyone knows that the insignia of the Old Guard of the party are symbols of willing sacrifice and loyal collaboration in the National Socialist movement.

It may well be that our movement, even after January 30, 1933, won hundreds of thousands of loyal and indefatigable members -- but none of them, however eager, could any longer subject themselves to the probation of the period of struggle. It would be unjust to doubt whether any of them could prove his mettle if put to the test. The fact remains, however, that the old members, as lonely men, aligned themselves with a lonely Leader, while the new ones, in a chorus of millions, hailed the legal Commander-in-Chief of a nation. And it remains true that there are still men who would like to exploit a great, selfless idea for their personal advantage and to misuse the German freedom movement for their selfish purposes.

Thus, the National Socialist party seeks to increase its ranks from, among our youth -- from the mass of those who, like the old fighters of National Socialism, have in their early years sworn themselves to follow the flag out of faith and enthusiasm. Membership over a period of years in the HJ provides an opportunity for rightly judging a youngster's inclination and his worth to the community. Not every Hitler Youth necessarily becomes a member of the National Socialist party; membership in the HJ constitutes no title to later membership in the higher "order" of the movement. But whoever in his youth has unfailingly fulfilled his duty to the movement can be sure that on the day of the solemn and ceremonial graduation of youth into the NSDAP, on the ninth of November, the portals of the party will be opened to him.

It is hardly necessary to point out that harmonious cooperation between the NSDAP and the HJ is especially indispensable. The relations between the top leadership of the youth organization and the Reich leadership, as well as those of the regional leadership to the respective provincial National Socialist administration (Gauleitung), are imbued by the common will to further and strengthen the movement. Wherever difficulties arise, they will be quickly overcome by joint discussions. The close connection between the HJ and the political organization is clearly expressed in a regulation enacted by Dr. Ley [4] making it compulsory for political leaders to appoint a suitable HJ leader as their aide. Through this measure the PO purposes to acquaint a greater circle of HJ leaders, while they are still active in the HJ, with the scope of duties of political leaders and thereby secure a pool of candidates for political leadership. Thus thousands of HJ members have been ordered to serve as aides to political leaders for a one-year period. Even if they should later on devote themselves exclusively to youth work, the knowledge that they will have acquired in the course of their political activity will be of great and essential value for the relationship between youth and the party. On the whole, the Reich youth leadership strives to bring the individual HJ leader into the closest possible contact with other branches of the movement.

From Baldur von Schirach, Die Hitler-Jugend: Idee und Gestalt (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1934), pp. 66-69, 150·151, 165-179.

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Notes:

1 The Jungvolk was the branch of the Hitler Youth for boys aged ten to fourteen.

2 Jungvolk.

3 The Political Organization, or PO, was a subgroup of the Central Party Office (Reichsleitung) and several organizational groups were attached to it, such as the Nazi party cells in factories, the Nazi party women's organization, and the group of artisans and apprentices.

4. Robert Ley (1890-1945), since 1933 director of the Nazi Political Organization in the Reich and leader of the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront).

The Development of the SS Man

The development of the SS man is as follows: Once his aptness and suitability for the SS have been determined, the Hitler Youth, at the age of eighteen, becomes an SS applicant. On the occasion of the Reich Party Congress of that year, he will receive his identification as an SS candidate and will be enrolled as such in the SS. After a short probation period he will take the oath to the Fuhrer on November 9.

As an SS candidate, during his first year of service he must earn the military sports insignia and the bronze Reich sports insignia. Thereupon, at the age of nineteen or nineteen and a half -- depending on when his age group is enrolled -- he enters the Labor Service and, following that, the army.

After two additional years, he returns from military service, unless he decides to become an NCO candidate. On his return to the SS, he still remains an applicant for the time being. Before his final acceptance, he will undergo additional specialized ideological training, during which he will be specially instructed in the basic laws of the SS, particularly on compulsory marriage and the honor code of the SS. On November 9, following his return from armed service, and if all other prerequisites have been fulfilled, the applicant will then definitely be admitted into the Elite Guard.

Simultaneously, on November 9, he is given the right to wear the SS dagger and on that occasion he takes an oath that he and all his kin will always obey the basic laws of the SS. From this day on he has not only the right but the duty -- according to the law of the Elite Guard -- to defend his honor in conformity with the honor code of the Black Corps.

From Die SS: Geschichte, Aufgabe und Organisation der Schutzstaffeln der NSDAP, edited by Gunter d'Alquen (Berlin: Junker und Dunnhaupt Verlag, 1939), pp. 18-19.

THE UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY

The Renovation of the Academic Community, by GERHARD KRUGER


The aim of the university during the period of classic liberalism was to develop as many all-round educated individuals as possible. The value of a man lay entirely within himself. The more complete and self-contained a personality was, the greater seemed its value for the further development and progress of all mankind. The widely held picture of the old Goethe represents the ideal of that time: to be poet, philosopher, natural scientist, and artist at the same time, to embrace all fields of human culture. In this connection, even his political activity had only one purpose, to lead this one valuable exemplar of man to an ever-increasing perfection and serenity. But it is worthy of notice that the Goethe who was thus idealized in the imagination of great numbers of people increasingly became a master of the joys of living and the pleasures of life.

Later this ideal found an entirely new formulation in the "higher man,." the superman of Friedrich Nietzsche -- even though this concept in many of its aspects, especially in its deliberate one-sidedness and exaggeration, already constituted the overcoming of the classic ideal of the human personality. Nietzsche also saw the value of mankind exclusively in its most rare and excellent examples, beside whom the rest appeared at best only as garbage or perhaps test material for a nature that was engaged in creating the Superman, and were no more than an abomination and nausea to the "higher man."

During the nineteenth century, the ideal of the harmonious man, as classic liberalism viewed it, gradually degenerated into the one-sidedness of specialists who no longer had any true connection with the community. Specialized education and the overrating of the intellect bred that "spiritualized" human whom nobody has characterized as trenchantly and as ironically as has Nietzsche, who countered him with the demand for a sound, healthy lust for life. The university bred the "brain man," the "instructor." The university itself, and with it its teachers and partly even its students, lost all relationship to the people and the state.

To this bourgeois ideal Marxism counterposed yet another, that of the proletarian, who likewise had no relationship to blood and soil. The class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat necessarily had to arise from the confrontation between these two ideals.

The liberal university cannot be absolved of the grievous political guilt of having sown the seed of this struggle through its scientific and educational ideal. And the student of the prewar period cannot be absolved of the guilt of never having instinctively rejected this education.

The student of that period was a privileged being by virtue of his education. He needed to serve only one year in the army. He had his special academic rights and his special attitudes. The feudalistic principles of a few corps [1] spread to all other student fraternities. According to the tradition of those corps the fraternity has only one task, to help its members develop their talents in keeping with classic liberalism. And here, too, as this ideal became all-embracing, the result was one-sidedness and progressive shallowness. Education became ever more external, increasingly and exclusively directed toward empty form and social manners.

It is the fault of the German student fraternities, despite their other merits, not to have perceived in time the danger of these developments for the totality of the life of our people. The result of this development was that German youth no longer found the way to German youth, nor the student to the worker, even though it is normally one of the most striking characteristics of youth to disregard entirely the disputes of the older generation.

Only National Socialism, which grew out of the life at the front during the war, could bring a change. How deep liberalism had impregnated our people, how deep the cleavage it had opened between bourgeois and proletarian, is best illustrated by the fact that National Socialism, despite the shattering experience of the war, needed nearly one and a half decades to prevail. But we must not believe that the enemy has been definitely defeated. If the Volk community is to become a reality, every generation must wrestle anew for the soul of the rest of the people.

To lay the foundation for this is the socialist task of education and of the educators, last but not least at the university level. The liberal university has not yet been entirely overcome; the majority of university teachers intellectually still represent the educational ideal of classic liberalism. The opposition between youth and university cannot be -- nor should it be -- overcome until the university has recognized its great political and socialist mission and is actively engaged in achieving it.

Our aim is to gather the student body into unified and serried ranks. The student body itself can fulfill its task only if this reconstruction is carried out in its own ranks with all severity and consistency. Even today anyone who in some way has obtained his qualification diploma can attend a university. The intellect is still the only yardstick for admission.

To be able to devote many years exclusively to the training of one's intellect and thereby to attain a higher position in life is a privilege which is granted to an individual by the state and which he must repeatedly strive for by special service to the people as a whole. Intellectual abilities are not the only standard for admission to university studies; rather, above all, the value of an individual for the people as a whole -- for the state. In the future we must no longer look upon it as merely a right, but also as a duty, to determine at frequent intervals to what extent the individual student fulfills these requirements. And in time our criteria will have to become ever more strict.

The fraternities and corps, as the educational communities in the universities, must recognize their specific task in this respect. Only in this way can they justify their existence. The prewar fraternity with its feudalistic principles has to be overcome. Belonging to a fraternity or corps must become a testimony to a new form and content of student life that is sharply disciplined and is carried on with the virile austerity of the soldier. The experience of the SA must have a continuous effect here. Only thus can the student fraternities -- freed from the stale romanticism of old Heidelberg -- become politically valuable and truly Volkish in character.

It is the task of the student body to participate in this renovation of the scholastic community. In some fraternities the first steps toward this development have already been taken. A new type of fraternity house must be created to serve as a center for the new community life. Perhaps the experiment that was tried in Freiberg, where students active in the leadership of the student movement were lodged in the same home with workers, can be carried further. It is an idea that originated in the students' Labor Service.

In the days since the National Socialist revolution, a great deal has been said about a Volk community and socialism, much of it by people who in their innermost being never understood the meaning and spirit of Adolf Hitler's National Socialism. These are mostly the same people who tried to have others believe that the revolution had come to an end with the Day of Potsdam? These are the same men who demanded of us students that we now should return from the political battle to the university and our studies. But the SA student, the political student, can and will never become apolitical, because the battle for the shaping of our people will never end. The SA student can and will never return to classrooms in which are taught subjects that are the product of liberalism, which, through this spirit and its exponents, stand in opposition to the will of the youth.

Socialism has not yet become a reality simply because a socialist-dominated government has been formed. Nor will the demands of socialism be fulfilled when all economic organizations have become "coordinated." True socialism shakes the fundamental concepts of life as it has been lived up to now. It must renew the entire life of our nation down to its last and tiniest units. There can be no limits. There are no autonomous institutions and concepts. Even the universities and learning must in their being be imbued and renovated by the revolution. And here is the great task of the student body -- to keep things in a state of restlessness -- to be the storm troop.

This is the battle that the student now has to wage for learning and education: not to fall into a negative stance outside the university, not to permit himself to be seduced or to be taken in by a learning that is at bottom liberal, even if it assumes a national costume. But to win learning and the university, in their very being, for National Socialism.

From Gerhard Kruger, "Verpflichtung der Studentenschaft zum Sozialismus," Der Deutsche Student, Aug. 1933, pp. 26-30.

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Notes:

1. Color-bearing fraternities.

2. On March 22, 1933, the Reichstag met in the historic town of Potsdam and here Hitler received the blessing of President Hindenburg, himself a symbol of the German past. The former sergeant major had arrived.

Work Is Future, by WERNER BEUMELBURG

They speak of German youth, of a sacred will to assume obligations, of sacrifices and skills. The lofty concept of duty comes alive: everyone in his place, even the apprentice. And now the Reich youth leadership and Labor Front call German working youth to a fresh and joyful battle. This will be no boring school hour, no scrambling for high marks, but a struggle as if fought on the battlefield -- except that here it will be in the vocational sphere. Everyone should simply show what he can do. He is to become conscious of his shortcomings, and new ways to perfection are to be pointed out to him. Our economy needs good workers and employees. For this reason, the Labor Front also calls upon employers, firms, superiors, parents, and teachers. They should participate spiritually and actively because the way of youth is the way of our people. It should be a matter of honor for every employer to require every youngster in his charge to participate.

From Werner Beumelburg, Arbeit ist Zukunft: Ziele des deutschen Arbeitsdienstes (Oldenburg i. D.: Gerhard Stalling, 1933), p. 66.

Admission to the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin

Native Germans (subjects of the German Reich) upon their full matriculation must present the following:

1. The leaving certificate of an institute of higher learning or an equivalent attestation.

Remarks:

a) Leaving certificates obtained abroad are admissible for the matriculation of native Germans only if they have been recognized by the Reich Minister for Science, Education, and Popular Instruction.

b) Temporary or substitute teachers who intend to study at the university must be separated from service in the public school system for the duration of their studies
.

2. Duty prepared leaving certificates (ex-matrical) of universities already attended. (Simultaneous matriculation at two separate institutions of higher learning is not permissible. )

3. An attestation of the permissibility of the premature separation from the original university. Enrollment of students in the second or third semester or trimester, respectively, can take place only when the student concerned has also been previously matriculated at the University of Berlin, or if a certificate of approval from the rector of the previous university is available, Or if the Reich Students' Leadership had permitted studies abroad. (Regulations concerning the original university and the limitation set on enrollment in the second or third semester have been suspended for the time being.)

4. Students enrolled from the fourth semester on must submit proof of successful participation in basic physical education. (According to a decree of the Reich Minister of Education, every German student is obliged to participate in basic physical education during his first, second, and third semester. Report to Berlin NW 7, Luisenstrasse 56.)

5. Certification of all academic grades achieved.

6. A police certificate concerning the students' civic behavior. This is not necessary, however, if the student has left another school or university no longer than three months prior to his matriculation.

7. Three unmounted photographs for the student identification card, 4 X 4 cm. in size. (The applicant must not be shown with any party insignia or in uniform in these photographs.)

8. Proof of ancestry: German subjects and ethnic Germans must furnish proof of the type of their ancestry. For this purpose a printed form called "Proof of Ancestry" must be filled out and handed in to the Student Directorate for checking on the basis of documents that must be submitted. Statements in the "Proof of Ancestry" form must be substantiated by the applicant's own birth certificate, the marriage certificate of his parents, and the baptismal certificates of his grandparents. In doubtful cases, documents concerning the great- grandparents likewise may have to be submitted. All submitted documents must be either originals or certified copies. Entries in family Bibles or passports issued to ancestors will be admitted as substantiating evidence. Proof is to be submitted in such a manner that date of birth, name, profession, residence, and religion of the applicant as well as those of his parents and grandparents are clearly discernible.

Married applicants must enter the same proof of ancestry for their marriage partners.

Anyone who presents valid proof of membership in the NSDAP, SA, SS, NSKK, [1] NSFK, [2] Hitler Youth, or BDM, or who by his army identification can prove any promotion (at least to the rank of corporal), is not required to fill out the "Proof of Ancestry" form. In such cases it suffices for the applicant to give written assurance that he knows of no circumstances that would lead to the conclusion that either he or his spouse, if he is married, is of non-Aryan origin.

If the "Proof of Ancestry" form has already been checked against available documents at another university, it must again be presented at the new matriculation at the University of Berlin.

9. Proof of completed Labor Service or service with the Students' Social Service, or valid proof of exemption from these services.

Reich Germans of German or related blood species who were born in 1915 or thereafter must serve their time in the Reich Labor Service before admission to studies. Enrollment as a volunteer of the Reich Labor Service must take place in due time at the proper recruitment office of the Labor Service. By regulation of the Reich Labor Leader, candidates for university study may commit themselves to a half-year Labor Service immediately upon leaving school, provided they are at least 16-1/2 years of age and are found physically fit for the Labor Service. They must register in person for the Labor Service prior to their final school examination in December, or January at the latest. Anyone who, despite timely registration, could not be enrolled in the Reich Labor Service upon his matriculation must submit a notice from his local Labor Service office.

Candidates who on the basis of their routine physical examination were found unfit or only partially fit for the Labor Service, must instead serve in the Social Service before they can be admitted to university studies. Applications for enrollment are obtainable at the Reich Students' Leadership Social-Political Office, Division of Labor, Army and Social Services, Berlin W 35, Freidrich-Wilhelm-Strasse 22. Applications must be accompanied by a curriculum vitae, two photographs, and a certified excerpt from the army service record.

Those temporarily incapacitated must likewise send their army service record. Or if they have volunteered, the rejection of their application by the Reich Labor Service to the above-mentioned office of the Reich Students' Leadership. On this basis they will receive an acknowledgment of their temporary rejection, which must also be submitted upon their matriculation.

Female candidates who intend to study must likewise have served their time in the Labor Service, or in case of incapacity in the Social Service, before admission to courses. Applications for the Social Service are accepted by the Reich Students' Leadership Social-Political Office, Department for the Care and Fostering of Female Students, Berlin W 35, Friedrich-Wilhelm-Strasse 22. They will be assigned to service in the NSV in the framework of the Mother and Child Welfare Organization.

Remarks: All Reich Germans upon their matriculation must produce either their Labor Service record or the duty book of the German Students' Organization or their army service record, with a certification of the time served in the Labor Service or proof of service in the Social Service or a certificate from the Reich Students' Leadership stating that they have temporarily been exempt from such service. New Courses for a New Reich

From Personal- und Vorlesungsverzeichnis, Trimester 1941, Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat zu Berlin (Berlin: Preussische Druckerei- und Verlags-Aktiengesellschaft, 1941), pp. 10-11.

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Notes:

1 National Socialist Motor Corps.

2 National Socialist Pilots' Association.

New Courses for a New Reich

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From Personal- und Vorlesungsverzeichnis, Trimester 1941, Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat zu Berlin, pp. 148, 180.

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Notes:

1. See page 323.

2. See page 65.

The Nature of Academic Freedom, by WALTER SCHULTZE

In our times learning is called to participate in the National Socialist regeneration of our people's spiritual unity and community. It is in that sense that National Socialism -- represented on the university level by the NSD Association of University Lecturers -- also understands its educational task.

Scientific knowledge must not be carried forward by technical skill alone -- it must be inspired to its very depths by its German mission, in the sense of a Platonic universitas of a purely Nordic character, which must find its ultimate significance in the state, that is, in the Volk. This idea does not endanger the German universities themselves, as some people have been impelled to point out. For them the problem is simply the finding of men capable of leadership, and of their transformation in accordance with the National Socialist world view.

The National Socialist movement seized power in Germany on January 30, 1933. By means of a few highly effective measures, the movement removed what was useless and created what was necessary to exercise this power. It would have been easy also to transform the external and formal elements of the universities. This was not done, not so much because the external form of the university appeared inaccessible or even useless, but because the movement discerned that before anything else the men who lived and worked under these forms had to undergo a transformation. In fact, neither governmental or other administrative regulations nor other organizational measures and decrees can bring forth a National Socialist university. This can be achieved only by molding the living forces that are the heart of a university. Hence the reorganization of the entire university system must not begin with exterior measures; it must begin precisely where the university heretofore has failed: with the human being. The reformation of men, however (or, with respect to our field, perhaps better expressed as the development of a truly National Socialist body of teachers and the creation of a truly German scholar), has been left by the Fuhrer for all time to the party, which must imbue all sectors of public life, including the universities, with its ideology. To make the German universities truly National Socialist -- not just to coordinate them here or there, or to "paint them brown" -- is therefore the principal task of the NSD Association of University Lecturers.

The Association takes into its ranks all the forces at a university whose character and ideology attest to their unconditional loyalty and readiness to serve, but who beyond that also can point to considerable professional accomplishments. To an increasing extent these forces form a comradeship and a committed community which is in a position to call a halt to the liberalistic philosophy sketched above and to give the mission of the German scholar, researcher, and teacher the prestige that is expected by National Socialism in the Party and in the state and, last but not least, by the people united by National Socialism. The strongest bond connects us not with a vague humanity but above all with our own people, from whom we come, to whom we owe everything, and to whom, therefore, we belong entirely. Today this insight, as was the case in the past, does not stand apart from scholarship: it is not an alien element that enters scholarship from the outside. Rather, it is the origin of our existence and thus the purpose and the point of departure of all our scientific knowledge.

Hence we do not view the Universitas literarum as an isolated community of scholarship. Rather, we regard it as an idea living in the totality and community of our people, from whom scholarship flows and to whom it will return. For scholarship, however, the university is the embodiment of this common intellectual task which has meaning and purpose only if all its fields of endeavor are rooted in a common ground, namely, in a world view common to all. Knowledge of this nourishing soil from which every academic discipline must grow, knowledge of a binding ideology, this is the living principle of our German universities. Only the acknowledgment of this principle safeguards the existence of the German university.

Finally, we find that unconditional "academic freedom" is also based on this concept. We proceed here from a notion of freedom that is specifically our own, since we know that freedom must have its limits in the actual existence of the Volk. Freedom is conceivable only as a bond to something that has universal validity, a law of which the whole nation is the bearer. Today, what the great thinkers of German idealism dreamed of, and what was ultimately the kernel of their yearning for liberty, finally comes alive, assumes reality. It fills the gap which in the past repeatedly divided spirit from life, and what is from what ought to be. Never has the German idea of freedom been conceived with greater life and vigor than in our day. This idea of freedom, which at the same time is an idea of personality, in its deepest sense is being lived and thought through today at the university. And we must also understand the freedom of scholarship, the freedom of inquiry and teaching, on this basis. Ultimately freedom is nothing else but responsible service on behalf of the basic values of our being as a Volk.

The task of the National Socialist Association of University Lecturers, acting as a trustee for the party, is to maintain this historically developed academic freedom, the results of whose activity ultimately flow directly to the Volk.

The NSD Association of University Lecturers has taken possession of the great tradition that was founded by the most important men in German intellectual life and will carry it forward in the spirit of our ideology. It is the nucleus of the new "university" and will attract in time the best available forces to shape it in accordance with the demands of our time into a truly Volkish university. Above all else we know one thing, that organization for its own sake is a lifeless structure: only the people within it can make the organization live. This insight came to us after a long struggle for the political freedom of our people. Applied to the universities, it means that the university and the Association of University Lecturers stand or fall with the type of combat-ready political, National Socialist fighter who regards his Volk as the supreme good.

From Erste Reichstagung der Wissenschaftlichen Akademien des NSD-Dozentenbundes, Munich, June 8-10, 1939 (Munich and Berlin: J. F, Lehmanns Verlag, 1939), pp. 16-17.

Jewish Graduates Are Numbers, Not Persons

1915.

387. Ahl, Paul, 2.11.1896, Dr. phil., Elektro-Ingenieur, Ffm.
388. Stamm, Georg, 7.1.1895, Chemiker,?
389. Stiefel, Hermann, 10.4.1896, Amtsger.-Rat, Limburg a. L.
390. Weber, Alfred, 7.3.1896,?
391. Bernhardt, Karl, 13.9.1896, Pfarrer,?
392. Busch, Fritz, 25.5.1897,?.
393. Cullmann, Fritz, 3.8.1896, Kaufmann, Frankfurt a. M.
394. Gabriel, Hans, 7.5.1897, gefallen 26.2.1916.
395. Giesenregen, Rudolf, 9.3.1898, Dr. rer. pol., Dipl.-Kaufmann, Frankfurt a. M.
396. Lummer, Alfred, 9.5.1897, Reichsbankrat, Berlin, Reichswirtschaftsministerium.
397. Muller, Wilhelm, 8.4.1897, Dr. med., Stabsarzt, Sanatorium Sobernheim/Nahe.
398. Schutz, Heinrich, 22.8.1897, Kaufmann, Frankfurt a. M.
399. Vogel, Theodor, 7.5.1896, selbst. Wirtschaftsprufer, Ffm.
400. Zimmerschied, Karl, 13.5.1895, Dr. jur., Kaufmann, Berlin,?
401.-404. jud. Abiturienten [Jewish graduates].

1916.

405. Radtke, Adolf, 25.2.1898, Kapellmeister, Saarbrucken.

1916. JUNI, KRIEGSREIFEPRUFUNG
[Wartime Final Examination].

406. Dienstbach, Hermann, 25. 7. 1897, Dr. rer. pol., Syndikus bei der Handelskammer in Solingen.
407. V. Laer, Ernst, 17. I. 1898, Kaufmann, Aue i. Erzgebirge.
408. Gravenkamp, Erich, 28. 2. 1899, gefallen 10. 3. 1917.
409. Gruber, Karl, 22. 9. 1897, Dr. phil., Stud.-Rat, Kaiser-WilhelmSchule, Frankfurt a. M.
410.-411. jud. Abiturienten [Jewish graduates].

1916. NOVEMBER, KRIEGSREIFEPRUFUNG
[Wartime Final Examination].

412. Bornemann, Gottfried, 14.11.1898, Dr. jur., Landger.-Rat, Frankfurt a. M.
413. Jansen, Werner, 15.11.1898, Postinspektor, Ffm.-Griesheim.
414. Staat, Bernhard, 27.11.1898, Pfarrer, Camberg (Taunus).
415. Rady, Nikolaus, 27.5.1898,?

1917.

416. Schmidt, Richard, 24.3.1899, stud. rer. nat., Grenzschutz Ost 23.6.1919.
417. Feser, Curt, 6.3.1899, Dr. med., prakt. Arzt, Ffm.
418.-419. jud. Abiturienten [Jewish graduates].

From Verzeichnis der Abiturienten des staatlichen Kaiser-Friedrich-Gymnasiums zu Frankfurt am Main, zur 50 Jahrfeier der Schule (1939), pp. 26-27.
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Re: NAZI CULTURE: INTELLECTUAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL LIFE IN

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9. What Is the State and Who Are Its Citizens?

Editor's Introduction


THE NAZI REDEFINITION of politics as a "total way of life" also meant a redefinition of the state and citizenship. The state was merely an agent of the race, and thus the Nazi world view, which was based upon race, would determine the actions of the state. Law had one purpose only: to help cement together the community of the people as a Volk. It was the leader who in his person united state and the Volk: he was the living embodiment of the ideology and, through the state, the executor of actions necessary to safeguard the innermost purpose of the race. He was, therefore, both lawmaker and judge. As in all areas of culture, law and justice, state and citizenship, were subjected to a body of thought which desired a total unity.

Carl Schmitt (b. 1888), a legal theoretician, was successively professor of law at the universities of Greifswald (1921), Bonn (1922. 1933), and finally Koln and Berlin (1933·1945). During the Republic he had been the most noteworthy opponent of the democratic, parliamentary concept of law, which he repudiated in favor of a dynamic interplay between leadership and people, both united in a common race and Volk. Parliamentary democracy was, for him, an antiquated bourgeois method of government. His ideas found acceptance in the Third Reich, and his book Staat, Bewegung, Volk (State, Movement, Volk) (1933) gives a good summary of them. Schmitt begins by de fining the legal theory of the Nazi seizure of power. To be sure, that seizure took place within the legal framework of the Weimar Constitution, but the context is new. Power now springs from the people, and the Nazi party is the people united in one aim and one world view. The emphasis is on the immediacy of power as against a normative or impartial law: it is a part of politics, of the actions of leadership and people united in the will of the race to realize its aims.

The rejection of government "by laws and not by men" and with it the repudiation of representative government did indeed put the old legal forms into a new context. For Hitler, who prided himself upon having seized power legally, kept most of the old framework intact: the system of courts and judicial officials which he had inherited from the hated Republic. But he changed its spirit by changing the theory of law. Schmitt can serve as an authority on how this was done. The people kept the "external" legal system to which they were accustomed, but in reality they lived under a system of law which was an instrument of power in the hands of the Nazi leadership.

Schmitt's ideas are faithfully reflected in the official Commentary on the Reich Citizenship Law. The authors were ranking officials of the Ministry of the Interior. Wilhelm Stuckart was Secretary of State (the number-two man) and Hans Globke the head of various important divisions. Stuckart was a young man who had risen rapidly by virtue of his party connections. He eventually resigned his position, perhaps because of his dislike of the policy of the "final solution." Hans Globke may have been no more than a nominal party member; it has been claimed that he was a trusted informer for the Catholic Church and supplied information on what went on in his important ministry. Globke fared well in the Federal Republic after 1948, becoming the head of the Federal Chancellery under Konrad Adenauer.

The Reich Citizenship Law was an integral part of the Nuremberg Laws, which excluded the Jews from the German community, going so far as to forbid Jews to have Christian servants in their homes. From the Commentary it is quite plain that the law is directed primarily against Jews, for Danes and Poles living in the Reich are given an opportunity to become Reich citizens. This puzzling edict -- the Danes were Nordics, but the Poles were despised Slavs -- may be explained by political opportunism: there was a large Polish population in Prussia and the time to deal with it had not yet come. Moreover, the treaty of friendship between Hitler and the Polish dictator, Marshal Pilsudski, played a role in this instance of racial inconsistency.

The distinction between Reich citizens and state citizens gave the leadership power over those people who lived in Germany but had not been admitted to full citizenship. Moreover, by making Reich citizenship an honor that had to be earned, the leadership obtained one more method by which to reward or to punish, and thus to strengthen their hold over the population. In practice state citizenship tended to be a matter of age; after attaining their majority all Aryans became Reich citizens unless they had committed a political crime or a felony. For basic to the law and the Commentary is the concept of the state as the mere instrument of the Volk. Stuckart and Globke expressly reject the Roman-law concept of the state as a separate corporate entity.

Civil rights, by definition, were restricted by the interests of the community of the Volk, and were not ideals protected either by the law or by the state. Both Schmitt and the authors of the Commentary specifically oppose their theories to those of liberalism, an outmoded concept of individual freedom whose day was past. This redefinition of civil liberties pervades all of the Nazi culture, and can be seen in action, for example, where academic freedom was concerned (see pages 314-316).

The view that the Jews were outside the law, implied by Stuckart and Globke, is stated in all its cruelty by Walther Buch, the Supreme Party Judge empowered to deal with intra-party charges of corruption and slander. His remarks were published in the official journal Deutsche Justiz. He wrote at a time when "the gloves were off" in connection with the Jews, when the burning of synagogues on November 10,1938, had symbolized a growing violence which stood midway between the Nuremberg Laws (1935) and the "final solution" of the Jewish question.

A change in legal concepts within older forms is without effect unless the judicial bureaucracy is imbued with the "new spirit." Roland Freisler (1893-1944) calls for just such a change in his preface to the Kalender (or Handbook) of the Judicial Civil Service. At that time Freisler was Secretary of State in the Ministry of Justice. In 1940 he became President of the People's Court, which had been created in 1934 to provide speedy justice in cases of treason -- a wide jurisdiction at a time when treason had been extended to include not merely concrete acts but opposition in any form to the ideology of the Nazi state. Freisler proved himself an efficient hangman, and it was before him that the leaders of the 1944 revolt against Hitler were tried. Freisler was killed by an Allied bomb in the midst of that trial.

His aim in this preface was to break the resistance of the old-line Prussian civil servant who, much like his English counterpart, regarded himself as being beyond political influence. Here too no man or institution could be allowed to stay beyond the reach of the Volk and its ideology. However, in practice many civil servants were never wholly "reformed," though the Nazis had considerable success with an officialdom which tended to be politically conservative.

The state was merely the "external" instrument of the Volk: the law and judicial administration must be swallowed up by the encompassing world view. The outward forms were kept, for Hitler conceived of his Reich as a "revolution of the spirit." But this kind of revolution did change the German reality, largely through the distinction between form and substance which runs through these documents and many others in this book.

G.L.M.

Public Law in a New Context, by CARL SCHMITT

What is the meaning of the Reich Law of March 24, 1933, which in the form of a constitutional revision was adopted by the full two-thirds majority in accordance with Article 76 of the Weimar Constitution? This so-called Enabling Act was decided upon by the Reichstag only in execution of the popular will as it had become perceptible in the Reichstag election of March 5, 1933. [1] In reality the election, even from a legalistic point of view, was nothing but a referendum, a plebiscite through which the German people acknowledged Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist movement, as the leader of the German nation. The municipal elections of March 12 merely served to reiterate the will of the people. Hence the Reichstag and the Federal Council (Reichsrat) acted merely as the executive organs of the popular will. To the so-called positivistic jurists it seems very natural to see in this law the legal basis for today's state. The expression "Enabling Act" seems even to strengthen the inclination toward such a misconception. It is therefore necessary to recognize the term "Enabling Act" as a juristically inaccurate, even erroneous designation, and it would be more expedient to avoid the term altogether, especially since it is used neither in the title ("Law for the Redress of the Distress of the People and the Reich") nor in the text of the law and has been injected into the law from the outside. In reality, this "Enabling Act" is the temporary constitutional law of the new Germany....

The German revolution was legal -- that is, it was formally correct in accordance with the earlier constitution. It stemmed from discipline and the German sense of order. Besides, its legality derives from the Weimar Constitution -- that is, it is legal in terms of a discarded system. It would be juridically wrong and politically an act of sabotage to regard this kind of legality as being a continuation of the validity of discarded juristic ideas, institutions, or norms and hence an acceptance of the letter and spirit of the Weimar Constitution. The validity of the German revolution is not based on the fact that a dozen deputies were ready, by their votes, to make up the 15 per cent difference between a simple and a two-thirds majority, and the power of today's German state does not depend on the premises, provisos, or even mental reservations under which that group gave its acquiescence. It would be politically, morally, and legally nonsensical to trace power back to impotence and thus surreptitiously return power to a powerless system. What is alive cannot identify itself with death, and power cannot legitimize itself in terms of impotence.

When Rudolf Hess, our Fuhrer's deputy, at the party convention in Nuremberg in 1933, declared that that party convention was in reality the "Reichstag" of the Third Reich, he was correct. But the concept "Reichstag" no longer is determined according to the institution of that name as understood by the Weimar Constitution. And when the Fuhrer's deputy asserts the principle that "all power stems from the people," that is something entirely different from what the liberal-democratic Weimar Constitution means when it uses the identical words in its Article I. Our entire public law, including all regulations still in force taken over from the Weimar Constitution, stands in an altogether new context.... The right of our new state stands in opposition to all false juristic constructions which would like to lead the National Socialist state back to the pathways and thought patterns of the old, superseded theory of state.

In view of the fundamental importance of the idea of leadership, it is necessary to understand clearly, and on a theoretical basis, the central concept of the National Socialist state law, the concept of leadership, and never to lose sight of its specific uniqueness. In order to understand the concept in its fullest importance and to defend it against falsifications and obfuscations, it is first and foremost necessary to confront it with several other, seemingly closely related concepts. For such concepts, though altogether necessary and indispensable in their own spheres, are imbued with a totally different spirit and are therefore eagerly used to assimilate the idea of leadership, thereby paralyzing its inherent strength. It is well known that a consistent liberal democracy looks for its ideal in political "leaderlessness." It has not yet dawned upon the consciousness of most German jurists that for more than a century a whole system of specific conceptual formulations has been at work to eliminate the idea of leadership and that the levers of these concepts have been applied precisely at points where they perforce were politically most destructive, and even annihilating.

Under the pretext of building legal concepts, constitutional thinking, dominated by its fundamental principle of security, calculability, and measurability, changed all ideas, concepts, and institutions to abstractions for which norms had been established beforehand. It is maintained, for example, that every duty, if it is to be a lawful obligation and juridically relevant, should have a basis that is normatively measurable and, consequently, its content should be subject to judicial examination. In this simple manner a type of duty inaccessible to individualistic-liberal legal philosophy is eliminated from jurisprudence, and the monopoly of jurisprudence as such creates a definite political world view (which is by no means of specifically legal or scientific character). The vitally necessary duties of allegiance in a leadership state -- for example, the duties of obedience on the part of civil servants and racial comrades, which are legal duties in the fullest sense -- are thus converted into "merely moral" or "merely political" matters and thereby stripped of their legal core. This line of thought celebrated its triumph in the Leipzig lawsuit brought by the ousted Prussian government of the Weimar system against the German Reich? The allegiance of the various states (Linder) to the Reich is obviously a legal duty of political content, yet its essence was destroyed by this separation of law from politics, so that an especially typical representative of the Weimar system could ironically refer to it as "sentimentality." From this point of view, the placing of the National Socialists and the Communists on the same political footing was "law" as differentiated from "politics." On the other hand, to distinguish between the Communist organization (obviously a deadly enemy of the German state) and a German national movement was regarded as an offense against "equality before the law," and as "political" rather than "legal" evaluation. Here the hostility to the state that is at the core of the liberal antithesis of law and politics became manifest. ...

Our concept is neither capable of nor does it need any mediating image or representative comparison. It stems neither from baroque allegories and representations nor from a Cartesian idee generale. It is a concept of immediate actuality and real presence. For that reason it demands, as a positive requirement, an unconditional similarity of racial stock between leader and followers. The continuous and truthful contact between leader and followers and their reciprocal loyalty rest upon this racial similarity. Only this similarity of racial stock can prevent the leader's power from becoming tyranny and despotism; only this makes it essentially different from the domination of an alien-structured will, no matter how intelligent and well-intentioned it may be.

The racial similarity of the German people in process of unification is, therefore, the indispensable precondition and foundation for the concept of the political leadership of the German people. It was not as a theoretical thought-out postulate that, at the National Socialist German Jurists' Convention in Leipzig in 1933, the idea of race again and again was given the center of attention -- as well as in the powerful closing speech by the Fuhrer himself; in the inspiring address by the leader of the German Law Front, Dr. Hans Frank; and in such excellent special reports as that by H. Nicolai. Without the principle of the similarity of kind the National Socialist state could not exist, and its jurisprudence would be unthinkable. It would at once be handed back with all its institutions to its liberal and Marxist enemies, who now either criticize with a show of superiority or offer obsequious assimilation.

It is especially necessary for the scientific jurists of the new German law to become fully conscious of the force with which this concept of similarity of racial stock penetrates all systematic juridical considerations. The idea that a judge is normatively bound to a law has today become theoretically and practically untenable in many fields of practical jurisprudence. No law can any longer provide the calculability and security which, according to constitutional· thinking, belongs to the definition of law. Security and calculability do not lie in normativeness but in a situation that is postulated as "normal."

From Carl Schmitt, Staat, Bewegung, Volk: Die Dreigliederung der politischen Einheit (Hamburg, 1933), pp. 7-9, 36-37, 42-43.

_______________

Notes:

1. The Reich Law of March 24, 1933, conferred what amounted to absolute powers upon Adolf Hitler. Article 76 stipulated that a two-thirds majority could amend the Constitution. The elections of March 5, 1933, gave the Nazis a bare majority in the Reichstag and 43.9 per cent of the popular vote (almost 90 per cent of the population voted). The Communist party did not take part, for it had already been outlawed, and this election was the last in which the other political parties were allowed to participate. If the Communists had voted, the Nazis would not have received even a bare majority in the Reichstag.

2. On July 20, 1932, Chancellor von Papen used his emergency powers in order to depose the Social Democratic government of Prussia. The Prussian government did not resist, but instead brought a lawsuit before the Supreme Court. Hitler's advent to power meant the failure of this action.

Civil Rights and the Natural Inequality of Man, by WILHELM STUCKART AND HANS GLOBKE

The political science of the past century regarded the state as an entity in itself, as an abstract juristic state-person. On the other hand, the fundamental political value of National Socialism is not the state as such, but the people. Here, perhaps, the deepest differences between the Germanic world of ideas and Romance (Latin) thought are manifest. In Germanic community thinking, the state consists of a system of communities -- family, clan, an organized body of a hundred men, Volk community -- each of which may encompass a number of more closely knit communities. The entire life of the individual comrade unfolds within these communities. Outside of these communities no human life exists in the legal sense, but only a biological, vegetative existence; thus anyone expelled from the community for a crime is an outlaw. Thus the state is not something "other" in contradistinction to the comrade or even something "above" the comrade. Rather, the comrades of the community in their totality constitute the state.

For Romance thought, however, the state, as an abstract personality with its administrative governmental apparatus, occupies the center. In the individualistic-liberal conception, which was strongly influenced by Romance thought, the primary element was the free and independent individual and the totality of all individuals in society. For this reason alone the state was worthy of protection because, through the "free play of forces," it supposedly achieved the greatest possible happiness for the individual as well as for the sum of individuals. The general public looked upon the state as an apparatus that stood apart from, or even above, the individual, as an independent mechanism which, juristically, was conceived as a political personality floating high above the people. This concept of the state was entirely in keeping with the prevailing mechanistic world view. Exercising a strict control over society, this juristic political personality, entirely cut off from the people, had to promote the free development of the individual and had to see to it that no one's personal liberty was restricted. State and people, the supreme power and the individual subject to it, confronted each other, strictly divided from each other. The lone individual was the opponent of the abstract state personality. Both entered into legal relations with each other, though not as equals. The reality of the Volk and of the state dissolved into a system of legal relations between the state and the isolated individual. The enduring legal nexus between the individual and the state was expressed in the status of citizenship viewed as a legal relationship between the two. The essence of citizenship exhausted itself in its positive-legal relationship within the liberal constitutional state. With painstaking concern for the individual and his rights, the content of citizenship was discussed and precisely determined. Obviously, this concern referred essentially to the rights of the citizen, to his influence on the state and his independence from that state. In accordance with the individualistic mode of thought, the essence of citizenship, save for some obligations of the citizenry, such as service in the armed forces, was regarded as a cluster of rights" the so-called civil rights, which were essentially directed against the state. In every constitution, in particular in the Weimar Constitution, the so-called basic rights played a dominant role. Above all, the principle of equality was most scrupulously guarded. Rights and duties were the same for every citizen. Blood relationship, particularly, was not taken into consideration at all. There was no Volkish foundation for citizenship. The question of the Volkish relationship of the individual citizen was never raised.

The revolution in the conception of the state has perforce changed the concept, essence, and content of nationality and citizenship. National Socialism has put the people directly into the center of thought, faith, and will, of creativity and life. As Reich Minister Frick says, [National Socialism] derives from the mightiest of all traditions on earth: from the eternity of the people which ever renews itself.

"The point of departure of National Socialist doctrine does not lie in the state but in the Volk. That is to say, in order to be able to test, judge, and correct the nullity and hence the appropriateness of external Volkish forms, it is necessary to grasp their purpose above and beyond their suitability as means. Therefore the focal point of all National Socialist thought lies in the living substance which we, according to its historical development, call the German Volk." (From the Fuhrer's final address at the party congress of 1935.) The community of the people, sustained by a community of will and a community consciousness of honor of the racially homogeneous German people, constitutes political unity. This community is not only spiritual but real. The real bond is the common blood. This community of blood creates the Volkish-political unity of the thrust of the will against the surrounding world. The Volkish-political community is the keystone of our entire governmental and Volkish life. Accordingly, we do not look upon the state from the individualistic-liberal point of view -- namely, as an abstract state personality with its state apparatus, standing apart from and above the individual. The state is the Volkish olitical organization of the living organism -- the Volk. The state concept of National Socialism is the idea of the Volkish-political community. The opposition between the state idea and the state purpose, on the one side, and nation and Volkdom on the other, which runs through history -- the rupture between Volk and state from which in the past the German people have suffered greatly -- has been overcome. Today we understand that the nation is to the state as content is to form, as purpose is to means. The state is the means to the end of safeguarding the people. "Its end is the preservation and promotion of a community of living beings who are physically and psychologically alike. This preservation is first and foremost concerned with the racial stock and thereby permits the free development of all the energies dormant in this race." (The Fuhrer in Mein Kampf.)

The Reich is the exterior structure of the law in which the ordered community of the Germans assumes an external appearance. It is the legal concept of German political unity. Consequently, the idea of the Third Reich has a profound constitutional importance. The Third Reich is the German Volk idea become a reality. It should, therefore, not be regarded as a special organism and as an abstract state personality above the people. Rather it is, and will increasingly become, the political-Volkish organization that fully harmonizes with the vital laws of the organism, the people. The Reich is the political and legally constituted Volk community within the German living space. Hence we no longer look upon the Reich as a self-sufficient, abstract state, existing by and for itself. Rather, for us the Reich is the community order of the totality of Volkish life -- the highest organizational manifestation of the Volk community, bound by ties of blood, which gathers all the organizations and functions of the people into an active unity, into public power. The Reich organization as such can no longer be considered to have an existence and purpose of its own, as is the case in the individualistic concept of the state. If, however, the state -- not its apparatus, but the state in the Volkish-racial sense -- derives from the nation, if it is the organization of the living organism, of the people, this, consequently, is also a clear expression of the fact that the state is not an insignificant entity. The people need an organizational structure suitable to their character, and the organizational framework must have its content, if the people are not to be an amorphous mass and the Reich a rigid, dead form. The repudiation of the abstract state personality, however, does not prevent the Reich -- as the political- Volkish organization of the people -- from being the vehicle of rights and duties; in other words, the Reich has full competence in all legal proceedings. The vehicle of this competence is no longer the abstract legal figure of the state, but the community of the Volk in its politically formed and legally ordered structure.

This conception of Volk and Reich also determines the relationship of the individual to the whole. As we have already emphasized, the liberalistic conception of the state put the individual and society in opposition to the state. It did this by emphasizing the individual's right to the greatest possible degree of unrestricted activity and by assuming that it was its duty to free the citizen from the fetters of an over-powerful state authority and to protect him from state interference. The individual was not looked upon as a member of a community, but as an opponent of the state. The relationship of the individual to the state was determined in terms of the person as such and favored the individual at the expense of society as a whole. According to the National Socialist conception, however, it is not individual human beings, but races, peoples, and nations that constitute the elements of the divinely willed order of this world. The individual is rooted in his Volkdom as a fate. The community of the Volk is the primary value in the life of the whole as well as of the individual. The individual human being can be conceived only as a member of a community of people to whom he is racially similar, from whom he inherits his physical and spiritual endowments (family, Volkdom). National Socialism does not recognize a separate individual sphere which, apart from the community, is to be painstakingly protected from any interference by the state. The moral personality can prove itself only within the community. Every activity of daily life has meaning and value only as a service to the whole. Thus the life of the individual can be developed to the full only in the service of the Volkish community. In the legal order, therefore, the position of the individual is no longer determined in terms of the person as such, but in terms of the community. From the standpoint of the public interest, as against that of a private person, the center of concern is no longer what the individual requires for the free development of his potentialities, or for the attainment of his personal goals, his striving for personal gain and possessions, and how much of this he can forgo for the sake of the community in times of emergency. Rather, on the basis of the highest responsibility to Volk and Reich, National Socialism poses the question: How much scope does the community grant to the rights of the individual? Thus a clear order of rank is created between the needs of the community and the justifiable aspirations of the individual. This does not mean the denial of the individual's civil rights, but his incorporation into a Volkish structure based on social justice and honor. He is evaluated as the smallest unit of the nation and as a part of the whole; he is protected by law for the sake of the whole. Civil rights and duties do not flow from the unrestrained personality of the individual being and from the legal relations between him and the state personality. Instead they derive from his own rank and position in the community. The individual is born as a member of his Volk. This membership creates for him rights and duties toward the Volk as a whole and all its other members. Hence the rights and duties of the individual do not owe their existence to a bilateral legal relationship between the individual person and the state person. Rather, they grow directly out of the individual's membership and position in the community.

Reich citizenship, the totality of all Reich citizens, is the people in its political configuration. Acquirement of citizenship places the racial comrade who belongs to the state in full possession of the rights and duties emanating from his membership in the Volk. The Reich Citizenship Law assigns the German national or citizen of kindred blood his proper place as a full member in the Volkish community. This membership creates full political rights and duties.

The Reich Citizenship Law actualizes the Volkish ordering of the German people on the political level. Thus it has become the safeguarding and supporting foundation of the entire political Volk order of the Third Reich. No other legislation adopted since the National Socialist revolution has so completely rejected the intellectual attitude and the state concept of the past century. In the Reich Citizenship Law, National Socialism sets the doctrine of the equality of man and of the fundamentally restricted freedom of the individual vis-a-vis the state against the hard yet necessary fact of the natural inequality and disparate natures of men. From the dissimilarity of races, peoples, and human beings there follows a necessary differentiation in the rights and duties of the individual. This dissimilarity, based on life and on unalterable natural laws, is reflected in the Reich Citizenship Law in terms of the basic political organization of the German people. Thus, it differentiates between state subjects and Reich citizens. A state subject, according to Paragraph I of the Law, is one who is under the protection of the German Reich and who therefore is especially obligated to it. A Reich citizen, on the other hand, is a subject of German or of kindred blood who by his attitude proves that he is willing and able loyally to serve the German people and the Reich. The structure of the Volkish life and Volkish order, and of the leadership state based upon it, requires that state subjects be distinguished from foreigners and stateless persons and that the inner-political Reich right of citizenship be established as the qualification for the exercise of civil rights and duties. It was alien to liberal legal thinking to link the exercise of political rights and duties to the Volkish descent and membership of the individual. It follows from the National Socialist concept of the state that the National Socialist state, as a Volkish state, necessarily makes the exercise of civil rights dependent upon membership in the Volk. What is German, and what either benefits or harms the German people and the Reich, can be sensed, known, and hence determined only by those of German blood. Thus in addition to state citizenship, membership in, or racial kinship with, the German people is a prerequisite for Reich citizenship rights.

Thus the Reich Citizenship Law fulfills a basic demand of the National Socialist party platform:

Only he who is a racial comrade can be a citizen. Only one who is of German blood, no matter what his religious faith, can be a racial comrade. Therefore no Jew can be a racial comrade. Anyone who is not a citizen can live in Germany only as a guest and is subject to special legislation for foreigners. The right to determine the leadership and legislation of the state may be granted only to citizens. We demand, therefore, that every public office, regardless of its importance, and whether in the Reich, in the Land, or in the municipality, be occupied only by citizens.


The Reich Citizenship Law elevates the bearer of German or racially kindred blood above the rest of the state's subjects by according to him alone the right to assume full Reich citizenship. All persons of alien blood -- hence, especially Jews -- are automatically excluded from attaining Reich citizenship.

But citizenship is not automatically granted to a subject of German or of racially kindred blood. Rather, the Reich Citizenship Law demands from him the will and ability loyally to serve the German people and the Reich. Before assuming the right of citizenship, he must show by his attitude that he has fulfilled this precondition.

In principle, the subjective precondition for Reich citizenship -- namely, the will to serve the German people and the Reich -- can be assumed as fulfilled unless there is evidence to the contrary. For the Reich Citizenship Law by no means aims to restrict the exercise of political rights to a small fraction of the German people to the exclusion of all other racial comrades. However, it is the sense and purpose of Reich citizenship legislation not to admit indiscriminately every state subject to citizenship upon the attainment of a certain age, but to grant it only after an evaluation of the subject's worthiness and then by an act of sovereign power, namely, the issuance of a patent of citizenship. Consequently, the vast majority of all state subjects will be granted full Reich citizenship upon their attainment of a certain age. On the other hand, by denying or even withdrawing citizenship it is possible to exclude misfits from having a voice in political matters. Crime, offenses against the state, violations of civic obligations, such as refusal or unworthiness to serve in the armed forces, loss of the right to hold public office, professional unworthiness, will exclude the state subject from Reich citizenship....

A member of any minority group demonstrates his ability to serve the German Reich when, without surrendering membership in his own specific Volk group, he loyally carries out his civil duties to the Reich, such as service in the armed forces, etc. Reich citizenship is, therefore, open to racially kindred groups living in Germany, such as Poles, Danes, and others.

It is an altogether different matter with state subjects of alien blood and race. They do not fulfill the blood prerequisites for Reich citizenship. The Jews, who constitute an alien body among all European peoples, are especially characterized by racial foreignness. Jews therefore cannot be regarded as possessing the capability for service to the German people and the Reich. Hence they must remain excluded from Reich citizenship.

According to the law, the Reich citizen alone is the bearer of political rights. Only he can participate in the Reichstag elections or be a candidate in them; only he can take part in plebiscites, occupy honorary offices in state and municipality, or be nominated as a professional or honorary public servant. Hence, in the future no Jew can hold such public office.

In view of its far-reaching consequences and its supreme importance for the nation as well as for the individual, Reich citizenship can be granted only with the greatest prudence and only through the specially empowered offices of the Reich and party leadership. Thus, in accordance with the will of the Fuhrer, the Reich citizenship patent will be the most valuable document that the nation has to bestow and the highest honor that a German citizen can ever earn. Therefore it is obvious that Reich citizenship can be withdrawn if the prerequisites to it, especially conduct worthy of a citizen, no longer hold.

A German state subject does not gain full Reich citizenship simply through his ethnic origin or through activity in behalf of the German people, but only after an investigation of his worthiness and through an act of sovereign power by the grant of the citizenship patent. The necessary continuous examination of the German nation will lead to the exclusion from political life of all elements unfit for the continued development of the German people and the Reich. Thus, for all time, it will put the fate of the German nation into the hands of the bearers of good German heritage and German spirit.

After the Reich citizens, those who alone are authorized racial comrades, the state subjects form a much wider circle.... Up to now, the concept of state subject has never been legally established; its interpretation was left to jurisprudence. Now the Reich Citizenship Law provides a legal definition. According to it, the material content of state citizenship is membership in the protective association of the German Reich, that is, the right to the protection of the German Reich. The duties of a state subject to the German Reich are indissolubly linked to this right. State citizenship has importance in internal politics as well as in the sphere of foreign politics. In its relation to international law it distinguishes between the citizen and foreigner, that is, the individual who is either a citizen of another country or stateless. In internal-political terms it is the protective fellowship of all who belong to the same state association. This protective fellowship embraces, in the first place, all Reich citizens, but beyond that all other racial comrades -- those who, because of their youth have not yet attained full Reich citizenship, those to whom Reich citizenship has been denied or from whom it has been withdrawn, and finally all subjects of alien ethnic origin. The possession of state citizenship establishes the basis of the legal position of the state subject as a member comrade in the protective state association. This is not a bilateral legal arrangement between the state and the single individual. Rather, the legal position of the state subject within the protective association creates legal relationships extending in diverse directions. The public rights and duties of the state subject emanate from his membership in the state protective association.

Through the separation of state citizenship from the acquisition of state civil rights by virtue of the grant of Reich citizenship, the concept of state citizenship has lost its political content. The political privileges heretofore connected with state citizenship no longer exist. The state citizen as such no longer enjoys any political rights. He can, of course, utilize all public institutions according to prevailing regulations; he can, to the extent that there are no legal restrictions, be gainfully employed; and he enjoys the protection of the state organism. Conversely, he is obligated to help carry all public burdens and in emergencies to come to the defense of the state with everything he possesses. He has, however, no political state rights. The possession of state citizenship does not give him a claim to Reich citizenship.

In contrast to Reich citizenship, state citizenship is not dependent or membership in the blood or ethnic fellowship. Accordingly, even those of alien races may in the future acquire German state citizenship, provided that their total personality fulfills prevailing requirements. To be sure, since the law of May 15, 1935, claims for naturalization are no longer valid. Rather, the grant of German state citizenship depends on the decision of the naturalization authorities, who are duty-bound to conduct a thorough examination and evaluation of the applicant. In the course of time, new regulations pertaining to the acquisition and loss of state citizenship will have to be promulgated, in keeping with the concept already expressed in the law of May 15, 1935, that German state citizenship can no longer be acquired, lost, or changed arbitrarily.

From Wilhelm Stuckart and Hans Globke, Kommentare zur deutschen Rassengesetzgebung (Munich and Berlin, 1936), Vol. I, pp. 20-26, 28-30.

The Reich Citizenship Law

The Reichstag has unanimously passed the following law, which is herewith made public:

Para. 1

(1) A state subject is anyone who belongs to the protective association of the German Reich and who therefore is especially obligated to it.

(2) State citizenship is acquired according to the regulations of the Reich and State Citizenship Law.

Para. 2

(1) Only the state citizen of German or of kindred blood who by his conduct proves that he is willing and able loyally to serve the German people and the Reich is a Reich citizen.

(2) The right to Reich citizenship is attained through the conferment of the Reich citizenship patent.

(3) The Reich citizen is the exclusive bearer of full political rights, according to the criteria of the laws.

Para. 3

The Reich Minister of the Interior, in agreement with the deputy of the Fuhrer, shall promulgate the necessary legal and administrative regulations for the execution and supplementation of this law.

Nuremberg, September 15, 1935
At the Reich Party Congress of Freedom
Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler
Reich Minister of the Interior Frick

From Wilhelm Stuckart and Hans Globke, Kommentare zur deutschen Rassengesetzgebung, Vol. I, p. 31.

The Jew Is Outside the Law, by WALTHER BUCH

The Jew is not a human being. He is an appearance of putrescence. Just as the fission-fungus cannot permeate wood until it is rotting, so the Jew was able to creep into the German people, to bring on disaster, only after the German nation, weakened by the loss of blood in the Thirty Years' War, had begun to rot from within.

From an article by Supreme Party Judge Walther Buch on the idea of German honor, in Deutsche Justiz, Oct. 21, 1938. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

Anchoring the Civil Service in the Nation, by ROLAND FREISLER

Since the 1937 handbook (Kalender) for officials in the administration of justice was published, the position of all civil servants in the new German Reich has undergone a fundamental strengthening. The German Civil Service Law of January 26, 1937, closed a development which had been purposely introduced by the National Socialist state leadership in 1933. It would be wrong to speak injuriously of the body of civil servants who did their duty during the Weimar interregnum. However justified the stigma that attached itself to some civil servants for their corrupt and un-German behavior, it must be acknowledged that the overwhelming majority of public servants sought to remain aloof from the immorality of an internally disoriented system, and succeeded in so doing. It will forever be a claim to fame for the creators of the Prussian civil service that it was able to inject into the blood of the whole body of German civil servants its own lofty sense of self-sacrificing duty to people and state, and maintained its essence even during the ravaging storm of unpatriotic discord that plagued Germany for fifteen years.

But there was one particular consequence of that storm: the German-conscious official could oppose the dangerous, and frequently forcibly imposed, influence of democratic-Marxist rule only by clinging rigidly to the formalism of bureaucratic procedure. Many examples could be cited how, even in the sphere of the administration of justice, the enforcement of Marxist ideology foundered on the arduous utilization and exploitation of legalistic regulations. Thus, in many cases, the German civil servant was trained in, or forced to adopt, a purely formalistic mode of thought -- a habit of mind that was out of place the moment the National Socialist revolution swept away the Marxist phantom.

As a movement born from life itself, and life-creating in turn, National Socialism demands the rejection of formalistic rigidity in thought and action and expects from its officeholders and trustees a living and dynamic attitude. This dynamic must be rooted in the newly awakened soul of the people. It was only a natural consequence of the seizure of power that, by virtue of the Civil Service Law of April 1933, racially and ideologically alien elements were eliminated from the civil service. Beyond and above that, when the unity of party and state had become law, the need arose for a broader and deeper anchoring of the German professional civil service in the service of the Fuhrer and in the totality of the nation.

Thus, even here National Socialism fought its battle in a war against bureaucracy and regulations that, for better or for worse, was bound to become a commonly used slogan -- in the better sense because it expressed a sound instinct in opposition to everything that was estranged from life, everything that was dead and moldy, and in the worse sense wherever there were some who seized upon it as a banner to smuggle in the contraband of their own selfish interest and wrongdoing.

Bureaucracy does not exist merely in an office and in the ranks of professional public servants. Bureaucracy can be found in all walks of life. A bureaucrat is not just the man behind a desk who because of a multitude of rules has lost sight of the purpose of his own existence. A bureaucrat, rather, is anyone who goes through life with his eyes fixed on his toes -- whether he be a builder who with all his calculations has lost sight of the larger purpose of his enterprise; or a merchant who knows how to deal with figures but not with the goods, the very essence of his business; or the soldier who in a moment of decision clings to service regulations instead of taking responsible action on his own. Bureaucracy, therefore, is a sickness which grows out of the general human condition. However, it finds its most nourishing soil in the air of an office, and it must be fought there as well as everywhere else. Because it grows out of a basic attitude toward life, it must be fought by a renewal of the proper attitude. Thus the struggle against bureaucracy is closely bound up with the demand for a national and socialistic profession of faith from every single civil servant.

Here is the crux of the German Civil Service Law. Thus the law of January 1937, in contrast to all previous civil service legislation, does not begin by setting down the rules and regulations of the civil service. Rather, after a short definition of the conceptual features of public service in general, it puts this principle at the apex: anyone who wants to be or to become a civil servant must be ready to profess unconditional faith in all the obligations which the National Socialist state imposes. The indissoluble bond with the Fuhrer, which the civil servant solemnly affirmed when he took his oath of office on the person of the Fuhrer, can grow only from the deepest permeation with the true spirit of the movement. From this bond stem the roots the civil servant has in the Volk, of which he is a part and member.

From Kalender fur Reichsjustizbeamte (Berlin: R. v. Decker's Verlag and G. Schenck, 1938), pp. 17- 18.
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10. Workers and Shopkeepers

Editor's Introduction


The Volk was to be an eternal unity and an its members were supposed to be equals in status if not in function. Hierarchy there must be, but the place of individuals within it should be determined by their service to the Volk, and though one member might be an employer and the other a worker who did the employer's bidding, both, theoretically, were equal in status, for they were united by a common ideology and a common purpose. It is clear from the statistics of party membership that this point of view did not greatly appeal to the German working classes; that it attracted instead those who were in fact losing status as their economic position deteriorated. The strong socialist tradition among the German working class made it difficult for the Nazis to win converts among them, though obviously some of the "proletariat" did join the party. Once Hitler was in power the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeits-Front) was formed to take the place of the traditional trade unions. Indeed, by the summer of 1934 all salaried employees were required to become members of the Labor Front, which was organized according to the industries in which the workers were employed.

Robert Ley (1890-1945), who became the leader of the German Labor Front, proceeded to build an empire which not only organized and looked after the social well-being of the salaried workers, but also attempted to surround them with the "right" cultural atmosphere. An official publication summed up the nature of the Labor Front: "Above all, the German Labor Front is not an economic organization but a political one. As an organization affiliated with the NSDAP, it is a part of the National Socialist movement." [1] The party and the all-encompassing labor organization were one: the definition of politics as a total culture, which we have had occasion to mention so often in this book, applied in this area as in all others.

The salaried worker could not escape the tentacles of the Labor Front, for it controlled hiring and firing, workmen's compensation and insurance, as well as care for the elderly and disabled workers. The "socialism" in the party title was given concrete expression through a paternalism which was supposed to end class differences on behalf of the unity of the Volk. The essence of this paternalism was represented by the Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) movement, which had been created as an independent organization in 1933 but had been made a part of the Labor Front a year later.

The idea behind Strength Through Joy was to help the worker improve himself in his leisure time -- joining travel groups, going to the theater and the opera, attending lectures, and participating in sports. In 1934 some nine million workers took part in these activities; by 1939 their number had risen to fifty-five million. Through Strength Through Joy the Labor Front owned enterprises of its own, from seagoing ships to the Volkswagen factory -- which was attempting to develop a "worker's car." But ideology played a dominant role here too, and one of the most important branches of this movement was that concerned with educating the workers in the Nazi world view. The description of the ideal Nazi spirit in the plant (1938) illustrates how this educational effort operated at the shop level. Here the example is set by the Youth Labor Service, which consisted of those workers (Werkschaaren) singled out as "Nazi fighters" within each plant and who formed an elite cell within each plant organization.

As competition was thought to be essential to efficient industrial management, the Labor Front sponsored contests among the workers. "The Struggle for the Achievement of German Socialism" describes such a competition among elite workers from different crafts and plants -- among those who wore the blue blouse, the uniform of the Werkschaaren. Socialism, in Nazi terminology, meant competition in the service of the Volk as opposed to a supposed Marxist proletarian class equality. From 1934 on, the German Labor Front sponsored nation-wide competitions (Reichsberufwettkampf) -- starting at the local level, where the contestants gave "Testimony of German Workmanship," and leading to finals on the national level, where the rewards were an audience with the Fuhrer and further professional training at state expense.

Militant dedication was desired, and the phraseology of war was taken over by the Labor Front to describe the quest for maximum output; indeed the term "front" as used here is a direct appeal to the mentality of the trenches. Typically enough, this competition was not confined to increased production or better workmanship, but included tests of the workers' knowledge of the Nazi world view. The Labor Front wanted to produce a "new type of worker," far removed from the class-conscious workman of earlier days: thus the picture of the workers sitting on school benches being instructed by the educational branch of the Strength Through Joy movement. But old habits die hard, as the condemnation of loafing and absenteeism by the Reich Trustee of Labor shows (1938). This individual was responsible for the increased production required under the Four-Year Plan, whose main goal was to strengthen Germany's military might. In this context, however, loafing means more than merely slackness on the job; it was the government's fear of strikes which was in large part responsible for this regulation. Striking had been strictly forbidden ever since the abolition of the old trade unions and the arrival of the Labor Front; nevertheless, some (unreported) wildcat strikes did take place during the Third Reich.

How the workers were coerced, what form of "discipline" could be imposed in actual practice, is shown in the official warning to plant managers to respect the rights of the workers. The "border fortifications" mentioned. in the document were those of the West Wall, which faced France, and the hundreds of thousands of workers needed to build them were supplied by the Labor Front.

The wage controls set up by the Four-Year Plan affected all salaried employees, not just the stenographers mentioned in our selection (and it must be remembered that at that time there was as much competition for good stenographers as there is in our own day).

Comrade Muller illustrates the "ideal type" of worker, the true German man. Like so many other workers, Muller has been taken in by international Marxism, typified here by Herr Flex. But his true Aryan nature rebels when he finds out that Flex is a traitor to the Fatherland and, in addition, a tool of the employers. Honesty versus hypocrisy is the theme of this story, as of so much else in Nazi literature -- the German Volk is as straight as the trunk of a tree. Walter Dach was a prolific author who more often than not wrote in the service of the Strength Through Joy movement. For that movement he specialized in writing travel books and stories about "true workers," such as the one given here.

The price which had to be paid for the Third Reich involved more than cultural conformity. The wages of salaried workers were frozen and their ability to move from one job to another was rigidly controlled. And there were other financial sacrifices, as the examination of the Nazi taxation system shows. The ideology intrudes into the tax structure. Single persons had to pay significantly higher taxes than people with children; in fact, premiums were paid on an ascending scale for the bearing of children. The "family rich in children," as the Nazi vocabulary has it, not only was a guarantee for the future of the race but also was important for Germany's military strength. Such families had to be Aryan, and the children of women of mixed marriages did not count for tax purposes. Jews themselves had to pay special taxes which were meant to be confiscatory, and which are not mentioned in this account of the Nazi tax structure by a leading democratic Swiss paper.

The rise in the cost of living has to be considered in relation to both the wage freeze for salaried employees and the tax structure. Quite clearly these factors produced a price-wage squeeze for those below the top-income levels. For all the talk of equality in the Volk community, the salaries of the "top brass" in the nation were high enough to provide an escape from the increasingly tight economic situation in which the rest of the Volk found itself.

Small business was affected in a special manner, a fact which is not lacking in irony. For the Nazis in their rise to power had made themselves the champions of small business, and our statistics on party membership show that the merchants were responsive to this Nazi appeal. Throughout the first years of the Third Reich small business fought for leadership in the economy. But it was big business which won the fight in 1936 (increasing economic centralization was one feature of the Four-Year Plan). By 1939 the situation of the retail trade was desperate, as the account of the highly reliable Swiss Neue Zuricher Zeitung demonstrates. The SS paper, Das Schwarze Korps, in its attack on the retail trade a few months before the outbreak of the war, suggested that the merchants adopt another profession. There is no doubt that what it had in mind was the armaments industry -- as the Neue Zuricher Zeitung realized. Price control worked to the same end, though the merchants tried to defeat its purpose. However, punishment for violations of the price-control regulations was instantaneous and severe, as the butchers' guild in Bockum-Hove (a small town near Hamm in Westphalia) discovered. Such united resistance is a measure of the desperation of a whole section of the retail trade, coming as it did at a time when the Third Reich was already six years old and its terror and cultural control in full swing.

The butchers lost their battle; indeed, economically speaking, the middle classes were betrayed. But, for all that, no real resistance movement developed and the manifestations of middle-class restlessness are isolated and minimal. Nor do we have any accounts of significant dissatisfaction among the working classes. To be sure, the risks involved in protest grew greater as the years wore on, and protests eventually led to prison or concentration camps rather than to economic change. But it would not be amiss to see here, once more, the results of a successful cultural drive. Belief in the world view, drummed into the population from all sides, must have helped in overcoming economic dissatisfaction. In addition to the personal security so many people found in the ideology, the workers also enjoyed the security provided by the paternalism of the Labor Front. Not only did the workers benefit from the economic aspects of this organization, but Strength Through Joy opened up cultural vistas hitherto accessible only to the upper classes and made it possible for them to travel to foreign and exotic lands. To a certain extent, at any rate, this chapter demonstrates the Nazi success in "denying primacy to economic considerations in the ordering of the social structure." [2]

G.L.M.

_______________

Notes:

1. Die Deutsche Arbeits-Front: Weseu-Ziel-Weg (Berlin, 1943), p. 8.

2 Die Deutsche Arbeits-Front: Wesen -- Ziel -- Weg. p. 14.

THE WORKER: IDEAL AND REALITY

Statistics on Occupational Composition of Members of the Nazi Party

Image

From Wolfgang Schafer, NSDAP: Entwicklung und Struktur der Staatspartei des dritten Reiches (Hannover and Frankfurt: Norddeutsche Verlagsanstalt O. Goedel, 1956), pp. 17, 19. (Reprinted by permission.)

WORKERS AND SHOPKEEPERS

The Struggle for the Achievement of German Socialism


No Need for Cultural Snobbery

In Silesia we watched platoons of hand-picked National Socialist shop and factory workers (Werkschaaren) at work, and saw their energetic commitment to the battle for Volkdom and their enormous accomplishments in the "Testimony of German Workmanship." To those for whom this is no more than a mere concept, in the "Testimony of German Workmanship," the work platoons prove not only that they are willing to solve political and cultural problems, but also that they want to set a high standard for their vocational skills. In the "Testimony of German Workmanship," the work platoons prove that they personify the whole varied world of German labor, that everywhere in the Reich where a hammer is swung or a flywheel turns they represent the principle of voluntary maximum output and the most intense spirit of militant dedication. Thus, in the "Testimony of German Workmanship," the work platoons are creating products of superlative quality from their various shops. Electricians demonstrated their skill at splicing telephone cables in the most instructive manner. Woodworkers produced inlay work of the most intricate designs. Glassblowers, using skills of the greatest antiquity, created beautiful vessels out of their shining, diaphanous material.

These are the work platoons in the "Testimony of German Workmanship." We found them as enthusiastic in their participation in festivities as they are in emergencies and in the construction of homes. Wherever men wear the blue blouse, [1] they feel themselves wholly committed to leap into the breach, to tackle any task without reservations; they stake their honor on being the activist storm troop of their workshops and factories.

Now we are among Hannoverian platoons of Werkschaaren. Here we find the same display of a sense of duty; here, too, we find the same principle of such platoons at work: Fulfillment of one's daily duties, especially in the life of labor, is the supreme task of every member of the platoon.

To be a helper, to be the best comrade in the shop, is the aim of every Werkschaar man. Where could the National Socialism of the Heart be more honestly exemplified than in the workshop itself, amidst the thousand needs and problems of our everyday working day? There is a greatness about the events of our times, yet there are many among us who are full of doubt and of questions that are of burning and essential importance. The Werkschaar man wants to help his shop comrade, wants to show him the way, wants to give him enlightenment to the best of his will and ability.

But the answers can't be pulled out of one's sleeves, at least not by National Socialists with a sense of responsibility.

"You will find a rare scene here," the District Leader of the work platoon told us when we arrived. And it was indeed a strange scene that confronted us as we entered the red-brick school building and found grown men squeezed together on the low school benches. "Women are not admitted here, nor are civilians," the District Leader explained. "This is a general course of the 'German People's Educational Work' program, and our men come here mainly to get basic answers to any problem that comes up in their shops!"

"German People's Educational Work"? Isn't that a special branch of the NSG [2] Strength Through Joy, which has set up a gigantic education apparatus throughout the Reich? The office whose task it is to make the German worker familiar with the treasures of his national art, to give him the basic foundation of a good general education, and which thus, alongside the vocational training of the "Vocational Education and Shop Management" of the German Labor Front, does the most for popular education? The office which opens up for the German worker one of the many possible ways in which he can achieve social advancement through his own vocational skill and general knowledge?

From SA. -- Geist im Betrieb: Vom Ringen um die Durchsetzung des deutschen Sozialismus (Munich: Zeutralverlag der NSDAP, Frz. Eher Nachf., 1938), pp. 152-153.

_______________

Notes:

1. The uniform of the elite workers, the Werkschaaren.

2. Nationalsozialistische Gemeinde, or National Socialist Community.

The Correct Attitude Toward Work

To assure the success of Reich defense measures and the Four-Year Plan, General Field Marshal Minister-President Goring, as the authority responsible for the Four-Year Plan, on June 25, 1938, issued regulations concerning wage structures and transmitted to the Reich Trustee of Labor and the Special Trustee of Labor full power to take all necessary measures for the prevention of any damage to the rearmament program or the Four-Year Plan which might come about through spiraling tendencies in wages and adverse developments in working conditions.

In an important industrial enterprise in the Middle Elbe Economic Region, which had important obligations to fulfill within the framework of the Four-Year Plan, the working discipline was seriously impaired by the fact that part of the labor force frequently absented itself from work -- or, as it is called, "loafed" -- without any excuse whatever and on the slightest pretexts. As a result of such practices, production was so severely endangered that I was forced to exercise the power vested in me by the regulation of June 25, 1938, to order the strictest adherence to the regular work schedule set for this enterprise, and to declare that any further offenses would be subject to criminal prosecution. Nonetheless, after a short time various members of the work force, who did not yet possess the right attitude toward work and the correct understanding of their duties within the National Socialist state, endangered the productivity of the plant again by repeatedly absenting themselves without cause or permission, giving invalid reasons for their absence. The attitude of these members of the work force evidenced such a lack of responsibility toward the goals of the Four-Year Plan and such deliberate disregard of the idea of the plant community that these offenses could no longer go unpunished. On my request, therefore, the State Prosecutor immediately instituted a criminal court trial against the guilty persons. In accelerated proceedings, three members of the work force of the plant were found guilty of violating Paragraph 2 of the Regulation for Wage Structure of June 25, 1938, and were consequently sentenced to jail for one month, three weeks, and six weeks, respectively.

Several other similar cases are still pending.

Magdeburg, December 2, 1938

The Reich Trustee of Labor for the Middle Elbe Economic Region

From Official Communications from the Reich Trustee of Labor for the Middle Elbe Economic Region, No. 1, January 5, 1939. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

Plant Managers -- This Must Not Be!

... And something else: If someone wants to better himself financially in his position, he has a perfect right to do so and nobody can blame him. On the other hand, nobody can blame an industrial enterprise if it tries to stop an inexpedient migration of its skilled workers and attempts to keep those with experience.

But the best way to accomplish' this is not by subjecting a worker who could earn more somewhere else to threats and by implying that he will be sent to the "border fortifications." For every German, work on the frontier fortifications is a matter of honor! It would be a shameless degradation of this great work of the Fuhrer if attempts are made to convert it into a form of punishment!

From Der Angriff, Dec. 3, 1938. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection. )

A Wage Freeze for Stenographers

The Reich Trustee of Labor for the Economic Region of Bavaria has now issued a regulation concerning all female clerical employees in industry, trade, workshops, and the professions, especially stenographers, secretaries, and typists. The most important stipulations of this regulation are:

On entering a new employment, female employees may not demand a salary or any other consideration of any sort higher than that received in their previous employment. Business managers may hire such employees only at their previous salary and considerations. If, however, the prevailing salary scale of the new place of employment provides for higher pay, then the higher salary must be paid.

Female employees who have finished their apprenticeship, on entering a new employment or on becoming full-fledged clerks, may not receive pay higher than their salary scale. The same applies to females being employed for the first time.

Increases over the basic salary rates at the time of hiring may not be granted for a period of at least six months from the day the employee entered upon her duties. Any increase -- even if granted in individual cases -- must be communicated in writing, at least three weeks before becoming effective, to the Reich Trustee of Labor with a full explanation of the reasons for it and with a statement of the previous and proposed salary rates. It is not necessary to report salary increases which fall due within the framework of regular and contractual salary scales.....

Anyone found guilty of violation or evasion of this regulation is subject to a jail sentence and a fine, the latter of undetermined amount, or either one of these penalties. This regulation comes into force July 1.

From the Frankische Tageszeitung (Nuremberg), July 1, 1939. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

The Conversion of "Comrade" Muller, by WALTER DACH

"I must leave again right away," Muller said quickly, after he had swept up his boys, all three of them, in the circle of his mighty arms, the while shouting "Loafers! Vagabonds!" and, in accordance with a long-established custom, carried them out of the kitchen and threw them onto the beds. The youngest, a six-year-old, enjoyed it most, but all three roared and bellowed like lions.

"Must you go out again?" Muller's wife asked with a touch of apprehension. She knew that something was gnawing at him and boiling inside him. He was a regular fanatic in everything he did, and on occasion he easily became thoughtless. The cause of Labor seemed definitely lost; it had been drilled into him for a generation, so that he had to believe it now. But what wholly confused him was that he had no evidence for it. "Hitler is a slave of the bourgeoisie'" they had shouted for many years at political meetings. And now they saw how captains of industry and banker-princes had to ask this Hitler for favors.

"And they will certainly take him in!" Muller had tried to tell himself.

They want to. Could be. But will he permit himself to be taken in? That is the question. Frau Muller had never been particularly interested in politics. But this much she understood (in fact, she felt it): Hitler wants the best for the worker; one can trust him. He has himself stood on a scaffold as a simple worker, and he knows what's in the poor man's heart.

"He will forget, just like all the other big shots we've had before," grumbled Muller.

"I don't believe that," said his wife. "The man lives so simply, you can see that by his clothes. Of course, time will tell. By the way, there's a letter from the Association of the Saarlanders ... about the plebiscite." [1]

Muller mumbled something. Then he shaved, washed up, and changed his clothes -- and in between managed a few bites of food. "I tell you, this may be my lucky day. This Flex is quite a boy."

"That's just what I don't like," Frau Muller objected. "If some body is kicked out for swindling ..."

"I don't like that either," Muller said. "But what's it to do with me? All that was a long time ago, and none of us knows what really happened. Perhaps the board of directors may not be quite so clean either.... If you wanted to investigate every individual ... I tell you, then . . ."

***

At the Friedrichstrasse cafe Muller asked for Herr Flex, because he was unable to find him right away.

"Herr Director Flex?"

"Damn it all! Is Flex a director? Yes, he always had the devil's own luck!"

There he was. He was dressed differently now and appeared even more well-to-do. He approached Muller with mincing steps and stretched out both hands.

Muller was glad to escape being the center of attention. The elegant manner in which the customers filled their comfortable seats, the frock-coated waiters, and the music threw Muller into a state of confusion. This was not a beer joint for working stiffs.

Flex escorted Muller through several large rooms, prattling incessantly, nimble as a weasel. Finally they came to a smaller, more cozy-looking room where it was more quiet and just right for a friendly chat. Here Muller became more talkative....

"Yes," said Flex, as he blew a series of smoke rings -- he could always do that; sometimes he'd blow ten rings, one right after the other. "The world is large and yet so small. At the chemical plant there was really nothing doing for me. Shall I remain an insignificant clerk all my life and slave for three hundred marks a month or probably even less? While others grow fat and rich? Should I waste my talents in a back-breaking joint like that?"

And how about the swindle at the chemical plant? Muller was thinking.

"No, no, my dear Muller," Flex continued. "I made a big jump from Berlin to Paris. Then I was in Lyons and Strassburg. Not long ago I spent several weeks in Saarbrucken. You can see I'm on top of things now. As director of the agency of a great French-Luxemburger manufacturer.... Yes, yes, for the time being I've pitched my tent again in Berlin. But it's different from before, altogether different. ..."

Muller was saying to himself that you've got to believe him. Flex was wearing a suit of excellent material and workmanship. A golden watch fob dangled from his vest pocket. And he had rings on his fingers that must have cost a fortune. You could say the same of the pearl stickpin in his tie. He must also have a full wallet and a substantial bank account, Muller thought to himself.

"But things like that don't just happen by themselves," Flex continued. "You have to struggle for them. You have to know how to exploit advantages. You have to be alert, Herr Muller. You cannot allow yourself to stumble over obstacles and prejudices."

Muller was thinking: Why does he tell me all this?

"But how about you, my dear Muller? Let's have a good drink. Your health!"

Muller found it difficult keeping up with him. Flex had always been a great wine drinker.

"So you fellows here in Germany have made a little revolution since I've been gone, eh?" Flex looked around carefully and then broke into a boisterous laugh. But he continued in a whisper: "Muller, I must tell you: The Germans ... they can't even pull off a real revolution ... something like in France ..."

"Oh, we've had plenty of changes," Muller broke in. "I can't get over them."

Flex was taken aback for a moment. "But you personally? When they fired Chief Shop Steward Muller, how many hundred marks in pension did they give him?" He laughed again, openly mocking now.

"These are hard times," Muller said, and thought of his old ideals and the many functions and offices he once held. [2]

"In other words, dribblings, real dribblings!" Flex agreed with Muller's complaint. "Abroad we know all about it. I've met enough emigrants." He bent forward. "And will you take it all lying down? I can tell you, there's something cooking in the Saar region. The vote won't go for France, unfortunately. But status quo votes.... In the long run it will turn out to be the same thing, I hope. The coal mines will have to go to France. They are vitally important ... as is the whole Saar ... in peace as well as in war."

Flex moved his chair closer. "Muller, I have a real big deal -- and I need you."

Martin Muller was startled by the green glints in Flex's eyes. "You mean you can offer me another job?"

"Yes. Can you keep silence?"

"Of course, if it's necessary."

"It is, Muller, unconditionally. But you must promise me that you will tell nobody, not a single soul."

That must be a pretty peculiar job if there's so much secrecy involved, Muller thought. But he said: "I promise." Loud and clear. "I brought along my papers and letters of reference from my former positions." He drew them from his inside pocket.

Flex waved him silently away. His hand played with his wineglass. He swallowed another gulp for encouragement and then he began to speak as if he were in a business conference.

"Herr Muller, I have a special commission from the French armaments industry. For many years your chemical factory has been planning the production of a particular gas for industrial purposes. The experiments have now come to a successful end. That much we know. But we are interested in learning about all the details of the technical processes that are involved. My plans are made, but it would not suit my purpose to approach the engineers directly. The whole matter will have to go through three or four different hands. My contact must be a completely unsuspected man, someone who can be led by intermediaries to the secret. I have worked out how that will be done in detail. What I still need is the first man in the chain. And that will be you, Muller."

Muller sat motionless. He stared at Flex without blinking. Look how Flex was changing! His nose was growing longer and turning into a beak. His eyes grew craftier and now they were piercing and sharp. His hair seemed to stand on end until it grew into a regular cock's comb. A bird's head, a vulture, a regular carrion kite.

"Here is your chance," Flex continued. "You will receive a sum of money -- and nothing to sneeze at either. Besides, you will get your revenge. You will be satisfied, Muller. You don't have any misgivings, do you? You have always been an honest man, my dear Muller. I know. Too honest, in fact. Even as shop steward you could have looked out for yourself a little more. What did it get you? A kick in the behind. But this has nothing to do with honesty or the lack of it. It is merely a business deal, pure and simple. The capitalists of the whole world are related to each other anyway. In another year we would have found that secret in France ourselves. And you can believe me, there are excellent minds in the West, too. But why conduct experiments if there is another, quicker, and more direct way? Let me give you a tip, Muller, just in case you should develop moral scruples. Look at this thing from a political angle. Play a trick on the new regime in Germany. The gas, I can tell you, is a positively horrible thing. It eats its way through tanks and concrete cellars. The next war will be damned funny for Germany...."

Muller still sat motionless and silent before Flex. What things you can see if you select a point on the wall and keep staring at it! Gray, nebulous swaths seem to fill the room. Somewhere, someone was hammering on a piece of iron rail: Gas alarm! Columns of soldiers broke out of their trenches -- storming forward, gas masks on their faces. No artillery. A ghostly, silent combat in the field. They drop in ranks, like grass before the blade of the scythe. From the other side a gray fog rolls in. Gas! Gas! There is no defense against it. And three of the thousands who are dying there -- are they not Muller's boys? -- stretch out their arms toward Muller as they run, drop their rifles helplessly, threatening and cursing -- and then they themselves drop, tearing the masks from their faces in the agony of death, still moaning, crying: Father! ... Father! ... Traitor! ... Traitor!

"Muller! What's the matter with you? Wherever I am well off, there is my fatherland! Think of the pile of money! No other worker would hesitate a moment. The world will always go on like this: I come first, what do I care about the others?"

Now Muller stood up, very slowly, his eyes still fixed on the man across the table. He stretched himself to his full height, drew back his right hand -- and with the force of a blacksmith's hammer planted his fist in the middle of Flex's face. Blood sprang from his nose like water from a well.

Flex stumbled backward, then took hold of himself, turned the table over, and flung himself at Muller.

"A madman! He's gone crazy!"

Muller moved as if to strike Flex again. Flex backed away. Suddenly Fraulein Wackerhagen, a secretary at the plant, was there, as though she had been lurking in the next room. Waiters and other guests carne rushing in.

"Now I'm beginning to see it," Muller said after one glance at the secretary. "You've been spying on me at the plant gate for the longest time, just to see whether I might be willing to do your dirty work for you. But without me, friends. Without me ..."

There was confusion all around. People were shouting questions and running among the chairs and tables. Everyone was pushing somebody else. Fraulein Wackerhagen was pulling Flex's nose to stop the bleeding.

"I probably will never be a real National Socialist," Muller said, quivering with emotion, "but one thing I do know: The workers don't want another war -- and neither does Hitler, he still has his stomach full from the last one. And he has already done several things about it -- at least more than any other government before him. That has to be admitted. And the Saar region has nothing to do with war. And a traitor I will not be. My three youngsters ..."

Suddenly the manager of the cafe appeared with a policeman, and Flex began to roll his eyes.

"What happened here?" the policeman asked.

"I belted him one," Muller said.

"How could you do such a thing? Are you crazy? A blow of such force ..."

"It's not too bad," Flex gurgled behind his blood-drenched handkerchief. He sounded so comical that everyone started laughing, including the policeman.

But it also showed that some game was being played which the police must not know anything about, especially since Flex anxiously demanded to pay the bill and to depart with his female associate.

The policeman grabbed him. "All right, off to the precinct station! And then to Alex!" [3]

From Walter Dach, Volksgenosse Muller II: Erzahlungen der Arbeit (Berlin: Schaffer-Verlag, 1935), pp. 21-31.

_______________

Notes:

1. At the Treaty of Versailles the coal-rich Saar was given the status of an independent nation (though economically tied to France) pending a plebiscite scheduled for 1935. The population could vote to join either France or Germany or retain its present status. In January 1935, 90 per cent voted for a return to Germany.

2. In the trade union and the Social Democratic party.

3 "Alex" is Berlin slang for police headquarters, in those years located at the Alexander Platz.

THE BILL IS PRESENTED

What the German People Pay in Taxes, 1939


In addition to the armaments race, in terms of numbers of guns, planes, trained soldiers, cadres, etc., there is another "race" among so-called civilized nations that is frequently overlooked -- that is, the monstrous growth of taxes with which the citizens are burdened. In this field, too, the Third Reich has registered top accomplishments. It is devoutly to be wished that those in some capitalistic circles in Switzerland and other democracies who are afflicted with admiration for the "order" existing in dictatorial countries, also occasionally give this problem of taxation some attention. In particular, the 1 per cent arms-defense tax over which we are now wrangling in Switzerland must appear as very moderate when compared with what the "racial comrades" in Greater Germany have to pay for their Fuhrer's dreams of glory.

We have before us an official summary of the direct and graduated taxes at present prevailing in Germany. It is a brochure of 120 pages with many statistical tables. The last page holds forth the consolation that "the introduction of changes is always possible." ... The tax blessings flow constantly further and the nerves grow more tense.

Altogether, there are 21 different taxes in the Reich today -- 12 property taxes and 9 communication taxes, not counting, of course, the purely local assessments with which municipalities try to cover their own special needs. And beyond those, there are the not inconsiderable "voluntary taxes," such as that of the "Winter Aid." [1]

The twelve property taxes are:

1. Income tax
2. Tax on wages
3. Capital-gains tax
4. Tax on boards of directors
5. Citizen's tax
6. Armaments tax
7. Corporation tax
8. License tax
9. Real-estate tax
10. Economic improvement assessment
11. Reich emigration tax (special tax on those who wish to leave Germany)
12. Inheritance tax

The brochure concludes with a "Tax Dates Calendar," which clearly indicates the days of each month on which part payments on one or another tax are due. There is not a single month in which a part payment on some tax is not due. February and August, for instance, each have eight such Tax Dates -- with two different taxes due on the 5th, three more on the 10th, two on the 15th, and one on the 20th. The brochure states: "These payment dates must be strictly observed." Grace periods have been abolished.

The basis of the whole structure is the Reich income tax. Here, from a social point of view, it is worthy of notice that sizable tax reductions are granted to married people in proportion to the number of children they have. The tax burden for single persons is so heavy that they find it next to impossible to put aside sufficient savings for the establishment of homes of their own. Widowed and divorced persons, up to a certain age, are classified as "single."

We give here some of the tax ratings for several categories: single persons (1); married couples without children (2); and married couples with two children (3).

Image

The unmarried "racial comrade" who earns 100,000 Reichsmarks must cough up exactly one half of it. For other high incomes (from 50,000 to 100,000 RM) the tax rate (in percentage figures) remains the same as for a 50,000 RM income. Widowed and divorced men and women who have Jewish children are regarded as single and have to pay the higher tax rate.

The rates for the wage tax, which is deducted in advance from the pay check, are also extremely high. In the middle brackets of wage and salary incomes, the tax amounts to about 15 per cent.

The citizen's tax rises progressively from 2 to 50 RM for incomes of 20,000 RM.

The real-estate and property tax amounts basically to 0.5 per cent.

The inheritance tax is levied on five different levels; it increases from 2 to 15 per cent for small inheritances and amounts to from 7 to 34 per cent for inheritances of 500,000 RM and over.

The license tax is based on the capitalization, revenue, and wage total of the individual enterprise. For the professional middle class, from which a great percentage of Hitler's original followers was recruited, it must be particularly disheartening to find itself now burdened down with this especially oppressive tax.

At any rate, a careful perusal of the brochure conveys the impression that the oft-mentioned "limit of endurance" is a highly variable proposition when it comes to tax assessments. A democracy not only safeguards our civil liberties but also saves us from slaving several months each year exclusively to pay taxes.

England also has a relatively high tax burden, especially for those with large incomes; but since the English and German legislative systems are altogether different, comparisons are extremely difficult to make. The German taxation system demands, in addition, a highly complicated executive and control apparatus, which in turn has to be paid for by the people.

From the National-Zeitung (Basel), Feb. 23, 1939. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

_______________

Notes:

1. A supposedly voluntary collection to help supply the poor with warm clothing and coal.

2. In 1939 the exchange rate was $1.00 = 2.49 Reichsmarks.

The Cost of Living, 1933-1937

Berlin, May 14 -- For the first time in a considerable period, the Institute for Market Analysis has analyzed retail prices and the cost of living in Germany. While several weeks ago it was still maintained that the cost of living had advanced by only 3.4 per cent during the four years of National Socialist direction of the economy, the Institute now admits an actual increase of 7.2 per cent. The figures are based on the consumption of the average worker's family, but they can be regarded as only conditionally valid for the whole population, since numerous relief measures and special allowances have been created for certain low-income categories.

For foodstuffs, prices increased by 11.5 per cent since 1933. Compared with prewar prices, costs have gone up 22.3 per cent, but compared with the price levels of 1929, there has been an actual drop of 23.4 per cent. For clothes, the price increase is as much as 17.5 per cent over 1933 and, in comparison with 1914,24.5 per cent. However, clothing prices are 28 per cent lower than in 1929.

Rents show no great index changes during the past four years. In comparison with 1929, rent is generally 3.7 per cent lower, but in comparison with that of prewar days, 21.3 per cent higher.

Among all categories included in the cost-of-living index, heat and clothing are the only ones whose costs have been reduced -- by 1.1 per cent -- since 1933. They are 11.3 per cent cheaper than in 1928, but 26.6 per cent more expensive than they were in 1914.

"Miscellaneous" items are 41.9 per cent higher than in 1914 and 0.2 per cent higher than four years ago. In comparison with 1929, there has been a reduction of 17.6 per cent.

The general price rise is even more obvious when present-day retail prices are compared with those of 1933. Butter increased by 35 per cent, margarine by 44 per cent, eggs by 31 per cent, potatoes by 22 per cent, meats generally by 18 per cent. The increase in beef is 18 per cent, in pork 11 per cent. But calf and lamb have risen by 40 and 41 per cent, respectively. Dairy products are generally 15 per cent higher, peas even 52 per cent higher, and beans 31 per cent higher. Oat cereals increased by 5 per cent, rice by 7 per cent, and sugar by 2 per cent. Vegetables are 2 per cent higher; whole milk 7 per cent. Bread is 2 per cent cheaper and other bakery products (pastry, etc.) 1 per cent. Rye bread and mixed breads are 2 per cent cheaper; specialty bread 1 per cent; mill products generally are noted as 2 per cent cheaper.

Under the category of heat and light, coal, gas, and electricity likewise have been reduced -- by 1 per cent each. But prices for overcoats, shirts, and shoes advanced 24, 17, and 8 per cent, respectively. For hygiene and care of the body, there has been a cost reduction of 2 per cent, and for transportation of 3 per cent. But the cost of home furnishings has increased 6 per cent, entertainment 1 per cent, newspapers 2 per cent, and cultural activities, 1 per cent.

On the whole, therefore, retail prices have advanced steeply. Price reductions have no relation to price rises. At the same time these figures do not take into consideration a general deterioration in the quality of goods and products. To mention only one example: the quality of bread has been sharply reduced by the complete outmilling of rye and by an admixture of 7 per cent corn meal to wheat flour.

The progressive deterioration in quality, of course, is not easily perceptible in the index figures. But it may be said that it more than counterbalances any modest price reductions, aside from the fact that it forces the consumer to turn to higher-priced products. Thus the price increases for meats are in reality steeper than appears from the index. Since very frequently certain lower-price cuts of meat were not available on the market, there was an enforced changeover to better-grade meat products and in consequence a corresponding increase in the real cost of living. The same can be said in connection with dairy products and certainly also with textile goods, which show a large admixture of artificial silk and wool fibers. Thus it is difficult to understand how the Institute for Market Analysis can present these factors as merely incidental and without real bearing on the actual cost of living.

From the Luxemburger Wort (Luxemburg), May 15-16, 1937. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

They Who Serve Are Well Paid

On the basis of a new Reich salary scale, according to reports from Berlin, the commander of a department of the armed forces, the chief of staff of the supreme command of the armed forces, and the chief of the German Reich police are now receiving a salary of 26,550 Reichsmarks annually. Secretaries of state, presiding judges of the superior courts, general-colonels, general-admirals, generals, and admirals receive 24,000 Reichsmarks per year.

From Pester Lloyd (Budapest), Feb. 23, 1940. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

The Situation of the German Retail Trade

One of the great slogans of the National Socialist economic program during the so-called "Period of Struggle" called for assistance to the small retail stores and handicraft enterprises and for the elimination of the giant department stores....

In the last several years the policy for supplying the population with consumer goods has undergone a complete reversal.... The index for retail trade sales has fallen behind the figures for 1928.... Even before the outbreak of the war, the scarcity of consumer goods impaired the viability of many small businesses to such an extent that their owners were unable to maintain a minimum standard of living and had to be supported....

The unfavorable position of the retail business gave the National Socialist offices charged with the recruitment of additional labor forces for the undermanned armament industry a welcome opportunity to subject small businesses and workshops to a careful combing over. In Berlin alone, some 10,000 shops and stores were closed under this sorting-out policy. The owners and members of their families lost their independence and were shepherded into the armament and building industries and into the administrative apparatus.

If, because of the scarcity of goods, many small businesses had become unprofitable even before the outbreak of the war, the tendency was definitely strengthened by the ration-card and certificate system which was instituted with the coming of the war. Distribution of goods was further curtailed.... As could be expected, many additional business enterprises have now become unprofitable and are already in severe financial difficulties.

From the Neue Zuricher Zeitung, Nov. 28, 1939. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

Throttling the Retail Trade

Das Schwarze Korps has repeatedly exposed the fact that there is an excess of manpower in the retail trade and has pointed to the imbalance it creates in the economic system. The recognition of this truth does not find a joyful echo everywhere, but that neither eliminates it nor does it spare our Reich leadership the task of creating a better balance and reducing the bloated apparatus of the distribution trade....

Thus it is evident that today we have more merchants than we can feed and at the same time a shortage of productive forces, which are utterly wasted in the hopeless endeavor to wrest a bare subsistence from superfluous retail-trade establishments. It is likewise understandable that those concerned see a great personal hardship in the proposal that they give up their hopeless profession and adopt another. But they and the German people as a whole have at long last the opportunity to rectify old mistakes and to bring a new order into the distribution of tasks in the community.

We must reduce the number of small distribution businesses to the absolutely necessary minimum and thereby strengthen productivity, safeguard and improve the living of superfluous merchants, and reduce the cost of living for the whole nation.

From Das Schwarze Korps, July 27, 1939. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

The Price Police

Berlin, January 20 -- Police administrative offices have been advised to pay increased attention to price control and to entrust this important task to specially qualified police officers, who are to be exempted from other duties....

Heretofore, when prices were checked by the police, many retail merchants excused themselves by claiming that they had just begun to mark their wares, or that the goods had just arrived for display. Such excuses are no longer to be accepted. It is of particular importance that imported produce -- fruits, vegetables, etc. -- should be clearly identified as such on their price tags or on the merchant's bill. The fixed maximum prices are known to be frequently exceeded. Some especially sharp merchants are marking their price tags on both sides. On one side they carry the correct price, and on the other the illegal higher price. When prices are inspected, they simply turn the tags around so that the correct price is showing....

Special care should be taken in the examination of bills and bookkeeping methods generally....

From the Frankfurter Zeitung, Jan. 11, 1939. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

A Butcher Resists

The Government Office in Munster reports: At Bockum-Hove I, the members of the butchers' guild refused to abide by the prices for meats as fixed by the county administrator [1] at the behest of the Government Price Control Office. The spokesman for the butchers told the police: "We won't let the county administrator set the prices for us." He was thereupon ordered by the chief administrative officer of the region [2] to be taken into custody and was lodged in the police jail at Recklinghausen.

From the Frankfurter Zeitung, Oct. 15, 1939. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

_______________

Notes:

1. Landrat, the appointed government official who administers a county.

2. Regierungsprasident, the appointed official who administers a whole region for the government.
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Re: NAZI CULTURE: INTELLECTUAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL LIFE IN

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11. The Assumption of Power

Editor's Introduction


THE EVENTS OF January 30, 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, affected all Germans, each in his own way. Unfortunately, few descriptions have come down to us of how the Nazi take-over was received by members of the population at large. The elections held in March of that year may be significant in this regard, for though they were conducted under mounting Nazi pressure, they were the last free elections for many years to come. The Nazis did not attain an absolute majority, receiving 43.9 per cent of the vote, but they did increase their strength. The results of these elections served to accelerate the National Socialist effort to absorb all of German political and cultural life.

Just how this was done is illustrated by two excerpts which convey the flavor of what was happening. Otto Knab's account of how the Nazis took over a small Bavarian town near Munich was published in Switzerland in 1934, when the memory of the event must still have been fresh. This was a town in which everyone knew each other, in which the temper of life was placid -- and, judging from the composition of the City Council, the prevalent political atmosphere was conservative. The irony which pervades the account of a revolution made by amateurs must not disguise the fact that they were successful, that they did take over the public life of the town, however harmless their actions may have appeared. For the National Socialist revolution did not storm the barricades, but arrived through a legal seizure of power and threw the might of the government of the Reich behind the aims of the party.

In Herne, an industrial city in the Ruhr Valley (in 1931 it had 98,400 inhabitants), the Nazis did not fare very well, even two months after Hitler's seizure of power. In the municipal elections of March 12, 1933, the NSDAP emerged as the largest single party, but only on the basis of a third of the total vote cast. The Catholic Center party came next -- only to be expected in a Catholic region -- and the Communists ran third: apparently a self-conscious working class still existed in this highly industrialized part of Germany. Their relatively bad showing need not have worried the Nazis, for the Reich government came to their aid; by the end of the year all rival political parties had been dissolved. Moreover, a new law on local government (1934) gave the party the decisive voice in appointing or firing mayors and aldermen.

Meanwhile the party proceeded to change the tempo of life in the city. Not only were street names changed and voluntary organizations taken over, but the Nazis employed methods which had served them well during their rise to power. A constant round of mass meetings, parades, and the flying of flags kept the population in a permanent state of excitement. A host of party-sponsored activities sooner or later involved every citizen with the Nazis whether he liked it or not. The city historian of Herne graphically describes the methods used to take over his town and the changed tempo of life which resulted. Though he writes much after the event (1963), he has only to list what actually took place for us to visualize what life must have been like during those stormy days of 1933.

The take-over on the local level was as bloodless as the take-over in the Reich as a whole. The proceedings of the City Council of Cologne at its first meeting after Hitler became Chancellor give little evidence of an opposition still physically present in the chamber. Konrad Adenauer and the Catholic Center party had ruled Cologne for sixteen years. Both vanished in the wave of enthusiasm for the Nazis. For until this meeting the Nazis had been a tiny minority on the City Council. The Nazi speaker, Joseph Grohe (b. 1902), was Gauleiter of the Koln-Aachen district of the NSDAP and "leader" of the Nazi aldermen. He was also a member of the Prussian State Diet. Indeed, Grohe had joined the party as early as 1921, and this speech was reprinted in a book published to celebrate his twentieth anniversary as a party member (1941). By that time he had served as Gauleiter for ten years, and he was to continue in that office until the collapse of the Third Reich. No doubt, this speech, indeed this council session, represents the highlight of his career.

For the average citizen it may well have been little things rather than the bigger political events that impressed the change upon his mind. Hermann Stresau, novelist and opponent of the regime, looks back upon a few such incidents.

All of these descriptions of what happened at the assumption of power are far from complete, but they should serve to give an impression of the take-over on the local level, where it affected each citizen most immediately and deeply. As far as the average citizen was concerned, the changes were instituted peacefully; nevertheless, they were ruthlessly complete. It was possible simply to go along, to swim with the current, and to slide into the Nazi pattern of life. Indeed, this was the path of least resistance, even if one had not voted for the Nazis in March 1933. Once a beginning had been made, everything else followed -- the Nazi cultural drive began to get hold of and to mold the population. What this meant we have seen in this book.

The working classes of Herne had voted Communist in considerable numbers as late as March 1933. But with their unions destroyed and their party proscribed, there was little left to stiffen any resistance they might have offered. Above all, unemployment had been done away with by the end of 1933, and this achievement spoke louder than the sentiments of bygone times. The old ruling classes of the Empire, a nobility which had successfully survived throughout the Republic, offered scattered resistance. A mass movement frightened their aristocratic sensibilities, and the Christianity to which they had a deep allegiance seemed menaced by the Nazi ideology. However, many of this class, led by the Princes of Prussia, who hoped that Hitler would restore the monarchy, joined the Nazi movement. Most took the view of the high-born lady, Baroness Richthofen, which is recalled by Erich Ebermayer in his memoirs. That lady had to defend her acquiescence in the Nazi regime to Ebermayer's mother, the wife of the one-time Chief Public Prosecutor of the Republic and, like her son, an opponent of all the Nazis stood for.

The attitude of Baroness Richthofen was by no means confined to members of her class; it provided a powerful rationale for the acceptance of evil, and not just in Germany. If there had been barricades instead of legality in 1933, men and women would have been forced to make more reasoned decisions. The legal assumption of power, however, allowed them to drift into the open arms of the Third Reich, finding themselves in an embrace from which there was no escape, except prison or exile. Conformity took precedence over personal friendships, however old and valued. Yet we must always remember that there were many who were enthusiastic for the new order, to whom the Nazi ideology seemed to give a new meaning to life.

Fellow traveler or adept, both found themselves partners in the most far-reaching attempt to impose a monolithic cultural pattern upon a modern nation which the Western world had yet seen. Throughout this book we have been concerned with the way in which this pattern was made to penetrate into the population, and with it the world view for which it stood. We can now see the Nazi assumption of power in its proper dimensions -- as opening the gate through which this Nazi culture poured down upon the people. That it struck so many responsive chords is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all. Men will rationalize, will allow themselves to drift into situations, but that millions should have identified themselves wholly and unconditionally with Nazi culture gives a seriousness to these documents which cannot be brushed aside as merely the creation of clever or successful propaganda.

G.L.M.

Our Town under the Swastika, by OTTO MICHAEL KNAB

If somewhere a situation arises which causes people to say: "There's something in the air," one talks strikingly little about this situation and about this air which brings forebodings of some ominous occurrence. Such was the case between March 5 and 6, 1933, in our little town on the lake. The mood was one of slight weariness, like the early-March cloudy sky. The elections, carried out amid the enthusiasm of January 30, were over. Some of those who never grow weary even dreamed about the possibility of a coalition. Nobody joined them in their fantasies. Something like a hangover (though no one would admit it) stuck to the remembrances of these election results of March 5. [1] Those who before had declared that one must give Hitler a chance -- maybe he will still make it, they would say, because otherwise we will have Bolshevism -- seemed to have become somewhat unsure of what was in the offing. On the side of the victors, on the Brown one that is, such a suspicious stillness prevailed that no one could see clearly what was to come.

Then, with the first announcements, the bombs exploded! There were rumors, quickly denied, spread anew, again denied, and eventually repeated as facts: there was a revolution in Munich. Now it was a matter of indifference whether Held had resigned or had been arrested, or whether Stutzel defended himself or not, or whether Epp had been appointed State Commissioner, whether he was already in Munich or only on the plane. [2]

The only important thing was that the Brown revolution had begun. What would happen now?

Timid persons recalled 1918. [3] Utterances like "arrest of hostages," "put them against the wall," "surrender arms," were heard. Threats which had been uttered during the election campaigns a hundred times now took on the shape of reality. What was in the making?

In the meanwhile, the National Socialist leaders of the town clung feverishly to the telephone. What they heard from the party offices was no more certain than the rumors that ran through the streets. Confirmation, denial, alarm, denial. Confirmation, denial, but finally a sure, hard fact: Alarm! The order was sent out all over the country.

"The swastika is to be raised above all public buildings. Resistance is to be crushed!" The public did not know about this order, but they saw the results of its execution. The twilight had not yet been wholly tinged with darkness, when the SA was already under arms.

"The SA under arms" represented not one but two conceptions. First, "the SA"! The "old fighters" were long known in the town; some were looked upon with pity, with understanding, some with tolerance, others with repulsion and disgust. The townsfolk did not know the others who had joined since January 30 and who now marched in the brown uniform. There were many young people especially. Now they were standing alongside the veterans, who had many fights behind them, palpitant with a lust for action.

"Under arms"! This was the second conception. In the cities where the SA was old enough to have been trained in the handling of guns, it must have been quite a military spectacle to see the Brown army equipped with all the accouterments of war. Here in the town the spectacle was of a military character only in the first ranks of the battalion; the other ranks looked more romantic than military. The marching went well, at least as far as one could judge in the darkness. The sudden wheeling to the right or left and the about-faces were reminiscent of recruits on the parade ground. At the order "Halt! there was a picturesque potpourri, as in some movie scenes in which masses of Bedouins gesticulate wildly with rifles. Anyone who was not afraid to keep step with the marching executive committee of the revolution could hear the battle-scarred veterans giving all sorts of coarse admonitions to the young revolutionaries, such as: "Hold your rifle up, dummox!"

The only dangerous aspect about these goings-on was that the rifles were loaded with live ammunition. All that was needed was an unfortunate accident to set off this mostly untrained horde on a wild shooting spree. But who wanted to prevent a revolution in a little town? Therefore the SA marched under arms to carry out their first deed.

The District Office peacefully submitted to the violence and capitulated before the rifles; it hung a red banner with a black swastika from the skylight. An armed guard stayed behind for the security of the fluttering revolution. The mayor was not in the City Hall, but this too was of no importance. Whether he agreed or not, the banner would have been hoisted anyway. Again two guards stepped forward and placed themselves under the raised banner. By now several hundred people had arrived on the scene. They looked around here and there, like inspectors, and they asked one another what the name of the song was which the armed men were singing in celebration of their victory. Hardly anyone knew the song. It was the "Horst Wessel" song. One of the initiated explained: "They've just sung 'Lift high the banner' ('Die Fahne hoch')."

So much had the will of the people been fulfilled in this revolution.

But now there were not enough banners. That is, there were enough banners to fit in windows, but no big ones such as were proper for public buildings. But an order is an order! So they took the largest of the small banners -- it measured about one meter on each side -- and marched off with it toward the flagpole at the railroad station.

Again: "Attention!" Again: "Lift high the banner!" And the little red cloth hastily climbed up, ten times higher than its own length. It must have been quite lonesome up there for the little emblem of the great revolution. Thus the first victory had been achieved without bloodshed. The inn near the railroad station had become supreme political headquarters. Here the fighters met to drink toasts to their victory, while the older ones had some private scores to settle. They marched to the dwellings of the Red officials and took their first prisoners without encountering resistance. But it was only on the following day that people learned who had been beaten up, who had been delivered to Munich, whose houses had been searched. Outwardly everything looked peaceful, just as everything looks peaceful today. The burghers went to their regular tables in the pubs that night, even if they were not in their usual gay mood. A club meeting was held, but its members were somewhat distracted. Housewives were late in placing dinner on the table, and workers stayed home.

But armed guards stood at attention in front of three buildings in the town. But did they really stand, so to speak? At about ten o'clock that night two lads were leaning against an apartment building next to the City Hall, the collars of their civilian coats turned up, for the olive-green uniform coats of the SA had not yet been designed at that time. On their heads they wore the SA caps, signs of their revolutionary dignity, and on their left arms was the red band bearing the swastika. They were flirting excitedly with two well-stacked young women. It was a rather cold night. A cigarette might warm them up. So each of the lads stuck a cigarette in his mouth and the girls lit the matches, holding them under the noses of their heroes.

At this moment a man passed by. He was a member of the Stahlhelm, [4] hence not especially a friend -- indeed, the very opposite. He walked up to the guards, who were comfortably leaning against the wall, and stood there, his legs spread, and yelled: "You louts! Don't you know that you're not supposed to smoke and flirt while you're on guard duty?" As if a superior had reprimanded them, the heroes of the day dropped their cigarettes and went to fetch their rifles, which were leaning peacefully against the wall. And they went back to the City Hall, marching like soldiers.

The Stahlhelmer had long since disappeared. So had the ladies. The banner of the revolution waved above its guards, who were silent and tight-lipped -- until a gust of wind ripped the proud banner on the roof gutter, tearing it from top to bottom. It was wounded On the first day! ...

***

Earlier, our little town had had a Town Council. Today this institution is called the "Council of the Town." Not only clothes make the man, but also words. But before things had gone that far, two stages had to be passed through. First of all, the Town Council had to be formed legally in accordance with the results of the March ejections. Thus it was not racially pure, not yet all Brown. There were two Black-white-reds, two Reds, and four Blacks, opposing eleven Browns. [5]

During the first session there were clashes between Black-white-reds and Blacks, attacks by the Browns, and declarations of loyalty by those who were not Brown. Finally, in order to get rid of the former mayor in a nice way, he was appointed honorary mayor. But this is a story in itself and not without charm.

The example of the big cities was followed during the second session: the Reds were kicked out. This is how it happened: The two little men of the color, one of whom by the way had several weeks of concentration camp behind him, had so much character that they did not utter the greeting "Heil Hitler" and lift their hand in a salute as had become the custom during the opening ceremonies of the sessions. Had they done so, they would have been reviled for their hypocrisy. Since they did not do so, the new mayor poured a flood of invective On them and ordered them to leave the session once and for all in their own interest. They took their hats and left. Councillor Elert, a member of the German National party, ... had the courage to ask for the legal basis of such procedures. In very energetic terms he was told that National Socialist procedures, as revolutionary acts, did not require any legal justification. Besides, this was going to be done everywhere now and the laws justifying these steps would come later: he must realize that a revolution was going on, which certain persons obviously had forgotten.

At the third session the Blacks also disappeared. In accordance with an order issued by the Bavarian Minister of the Interior, Herr Wagner, they had been arrested all over the Land and had been released only after signing written declarations in which they agreed to quit the Bavarian People's party and give up their elective offices (in town, municipal, and Land governments). Thus a specific means was found for expelling each specific group. But the effects were deadly for all.

In the subsequent period the German Nationals were gradually coordinated with the Nazis and squeezed against the wall until they had become completely meaningless. Then they were accepted as guests in the Nazi groups and placed the Brown uniform over their Black-white-red souls as a cover. In Our town there was only One left. Thus did the day come On April 24, 1933, when the "Council of the Town" became racially pure along National Socialist lines....

***

It was high time that something was done about culture in our little town. During the years of struggle the movement had had no time to waste on such a luxury item as culture. Now, however, overnight, a man had been appointed whose job was to foster and promote culture. He was a kind of obscure character and his name was Rucke. Up to now nobody had ever heard of him, so he had to make people talk about him. There were about 120 clubs and associations in the town, about One third of which concerned themselves with cultural matters, not only those of the body but also those of the soul. There were music and choral societies, theater groups, and modest quartets, and folklore and literary circles.

Some of them were quite active. Since the city was near, hardly a week went by without the announcement of a concert or a lecture by some famous person. In addition, a large artists' colony was being established on the shores of the lake. Thus anyone who wanted to partake of the joys of culture could help himself freely. But even a cultural guardian of a town wants to do something on occasion. So he convened sessions for the purpose of discussing how another dozen performances could be added to the already existing fifty monthly performances, and how all the clubs and societies and their work could be united in one hand (centralization was now the last word) -- in a Brown hand, of course. For this purpose a new association was called into being, the National Socialist Cultural Community.

The first thing it did was to make an ass of itself.

The cultural guardian called for a public meeting and delivered a long speech. At the end of it everybody wondered: What exactly did he want?

Strangely enough, he allowed free discussion. So he was asked what his speech had been all about and just what new plans he had in mind. The cultural guardian, no lazy man he, freely admitted that this was exactly what he would like to find out from the people assembled there. He would like to get his plan, and an idea on how to launch something novel, from the discussions. The people in the audience were vastly amused by this, but they were shy with suggestions after seeing one of the local physicians being treated quite rudely. The meeting had one result at least. A sheet of paper was passed around and all those who wanted to apply for membership and were prepared to contribute fifty pfennigs monthly were invited to sign it.

Then the cultural guardian himself had some ideas. Since it seemed to him that German culture had been neglected in recent years, he started the first cultural evening with a talk on the topic: "Five Years in Rumania." His daughter sang and read Rumanian poems, which, of course, nobody understood, but everyone applauded vigorously. Later she performed a Rumanian national dance with some other girls -- I don't know whether it really was Rumanian. Finally he gave a two-hour lecture, during which he projected on the wall all the postcards he had received during his five-year stay in Rumania.

When the lights in the hall were switched on again the entire assemblage woke up with a fright, rubbing the sleep out of their eyes.

On Herr Rucke's second cultural evening, someone who had been in the Far East and Java told some fantastic stories which would have made Karl May [6] turn green with envy.

After this double debut of German culture the cultural guardian disappeared ingloriously and into his place stepped a certain Doctor Zweihauser. His first project was the elimination of the National Socialist Cultural Community, whose function was taken over by the Combat Groups for German Culture. The members reaped several advantages from this new arrangement. First, instead of paying fifty pfennigs monthly, they were now privileged to pay one mark every month. The real advantage was that the new society did not bother them with any kind of performances, save for the collection of the dues. Instead something new was being founded, the Group for German Performances, which was to bring true National Socialist theater to the people. One had merely to become a member of this organization and pay for a seat in the theater each month and everything else was in perfect order.

From Otto Michael Knab, Kleinstadt unterm Hakenkreuz: Groteske Erinnerungen aus Bayern (Lucerne: Verlag Raber & Cie., 1934), pp. 11-16, 23-25, 76-79.

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Notes:

1. See note, page 323.

2. On March 9, 1933, Hitler carried out a coup d'etat in Bavaria, deposing the government of Heinrich Held (1924-1933) and installing General Franz Ritter von Epp as commissioner with absolute power. Karl Stutzel was the Bavarian Minister of the Interior.

3. In 1918 a left-wing socialist revolution took place in Munich.

4. The largest German veterans' organization, a competitor at first to the Nazis for the allegiance of the German right.

5. The Black-white-reds were the members of the German National party (DNVP), who used the old colors of imperial Germany. The Blacks were the members of the Catholic Bavarian People's party. The Browns, or Brownshirts, were the Nazis.

6. Karl May (1842-1912) was a writer of adventure stories, the most famous of which dealt with the American Indians. Most Germans had read these "Wild West" stories in their youth.

The Changed Tempo of Life: The City of Hern

The life of the citizens had changed. Even old familiar streets now had other names. Thus Rathausplatz was now called Adolf-Hitler-Platz, Bebelstrasse became Hermann-Goring-Strasse, Otto-Hue-Strasse became Schlageterstrasse, [1] Neustrasse became Franz-Seldte-Strasse, [2] Rathenau-Platz became Tosef-Wagner-Platz (when Gauleiter Wagner fell into disgrace it was renamed Hans-Schemm-Platz [3]).

Later the first part of Behrenstrasse was named Strasse der SA, Rosenstrasse became Willi-Woide- Strasse, and the first part of the old Shamrockstrasse became Gustloffstrasse [4] The citizens got used to the new names as they got used to everything else. It was a bad time for individualists, because the party and the state reached out their hands for all people. Anyone who was looking for a job or needed a passport, or even merely wanted to join a club, had to present his genealogical chart. Thus marriage- license bureaus and the parish rectories were kept quite busy. If two people wanted to get married they had to present a letter from the public health authorities stating that they were suitable for marriage. If there were certain illnesses in the family, this created enormous difficulties and led to investigations in accordance with the Law of July 14, 1933, for the prevention of hereditary diseases among the rising generation. New courts were set up, such as the Hereditary Health Court (for Herne-Bochum) [5] and the Entailed Estates Court at Herne, where the twenty-one entailed farmers who were still left over in Herne ultimately had to file appeals in cases dealing with their farms. The work book was an essential personal document in many professions. New authorities were called into being, such as the Draft Board and the District Army Command in the Masonic Lodge building on Hermann-Lons-Strasse, as a result of the establishment of the Wehrmacht, and the Reich Labor Service. On October 1, 1935, the first age groups of young people eligible for labor service were called up and the first age group eligible for military service moved out on November 1, 1935. At the same time, those born in 1913 and 1916 were mustered for labor and military service respectively on November 13.

The party itself displayed great inventiveness in interfering in all spheres of life. It simply controlled everything through its secondary organizations: no welfare activity could be conducted without the interference of the National Socialist Public Welfare Organization, no cultural event could take place without the Strength Through Joy. [6] New notions and slogans were always being coined in order to organize and to levy financial contributions, for such purposes as thanks offerings to the nation, National Labor Days, tributes to the prolific German families, thanks offerings to the workers of Germany, excursions for old party members, the banner of the DAF [7] National Socialist Model Factory ...

There were always new organizations and institutions, such as the Country School for Mothers, the Mother and Child Welfare Organization, Childrensland Camps, the Food-Supply Welfare Organization. Further: Winter Aid, the one-dish meal on Sunday, National Solidarity Day ...

And orders constantly rang out: "Display the flag!" and only the swastika banner was allowed to be displayed; the old Reich colors -- black, white, and red, much used at first -- were soon prohibited. There was always a reason for celebration, marches, and demonstrations. The course of the year took on a new rhythm. A cycle of festivities was arranged which was always being repeated. And the racial experts of the party already spoke reverently about renewing the myth. The traditional festivals had to take a back seat. Christmas developed into a feast of the winter solstice. The Hitler Youth no longer sang Christian Christmas carols, but "High Night of Clear Skies." All the while the propaganda machines went on working briskly, and the great hubbub and eternal thundering, the constant repetition of slogans (the one-dish meal on Sunday required at least six impressive admonitions in the newspaper) which accompanied this must not be forgotten. And in fact the events did unfold obtrusively and noisily and a plain sober description of them cannot give a proper idea of the fuss and fanfare that accompanied them.

From Herne 1933-1945: Die Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, edited by Hermann Meyerhoff (Herne, 1963), pp. 94, 96.

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Notes:

1. See page 94.

2. Franz Seldte was the Nazi Minister of Labor, formerly the leader of the Stahlhelm veterans' organization.

3. See page 265.

4. Wilhelm Gustloff was the Nazi leader in Switzerland. He was assassinated in 1936.

5. See page 90.

6. See page 342.

7. The German Workers' Front.

The Nazis Take Over Cologne

First City Council Meeting after the Assumption of Power, March 30, 1933

GROHE: [1] German men and women! Today, for the first time, the City Council of Cologne is meeting under the auspices and at the bidding of the national uprising of the German people. All of Cologne stands under the spell of our gathering. Tens of thousands are assembled in streets and squares so that they may experience this event with us over the loudspeakers. And additional hundreds of thousands are anxiously awaiting the press dispatches that will announce that the decisions of this meeting will be in harmony with the will of the overwhelming majority of the people of Cologne.

First we must thank the city administration of Cologne for the festive adornment of the hall in which we are meeting, so much in keeping with the importance of this day. We greet the coat of arms of our city of cologne. We bow our heads to those black, white, and red flags which once proclaimed Germany's greatness and glory to the world, and we look with pride and satisfaction at yonder Swastika banner which Adolf Hitler bequeathed to us and under which Germany's resurrection out of the abyss was prepared and was enabled to achieve the greatness of this day. (Loud applause.)

We see in this hall the portraits of our venerable General Field Marshal and Reich President von Hindenburg, and the German People's Chancellor and Fuhrer, who will lead us to national freedom and social justice: Adolf Hitler. (Shouts of "Bravo!" and "Heil!") With veneration for their personal greatness and for the greatness of their deeds, and with a pledge of unconditional obedience, we implore them both this day to accept honorary citizenship of our metropolis on the Rhine. (Loud applause.) It is a great hour that we celebrate today. The proudest, most heroic, and most industrious people in the world were torn apart and plunged into a gruesome abyss by the revolt of November 1918. The most exemplary people on earth became a conglomeration of selfish interest groups and a chaotic tangle of class hatred and obscurantist caste prejudice. A people of power and outstanding honor became the plaything of other nations and a victim of international capitalistic exploiters.

For us, the representatives of the people of Cologne, this fall from the greatest heights to the lower depths was even more painful and shameful, for the spirit of treason and fratricidal warfare of 1918 raised its head in our city. And as if that were not enough, the torch of separatism, lighted by our enemies, was first raised in our city and destroyed great values of national prestige and the feeling of Volkish togetherness.

Now the day has dawned for the re-establishment of German existence in Cologne. What the history of our city has so far never been able to record (without doubt, the result of the oppression and endeavors of our enemies) has now become reality: the people of Cologne have overwhelmingly avowed their faith in German Volkdom and in the national unity of a great German Reich. (Loud shouts of "Bravo!") And this, German men and women, we owe to the German Volksmann Adolf Hitler, who, from nothing and as an unknown among the millions of our people, began the battle against degradation and stupidity and who, in the face of countless difficulties, awakened in the German people the national revolution which we have celebrated with unbounded jubilation in these last weeks and days. We owe this revolution also to the many Germans, known and unknown, who in years of devoted labor left nothing untried in their efforts to help the idea of national honor and social justice to break through to victory. In this hour we also think of the thousands, and thousands of thousands, of National Socialist SA and SS men and other party comrades who, in constant disregard of their own personal interest, fought as soldiers of Adolf Hitler, and thus as soldiers in the rehabilitation of Germany, and who by their tenacity, courage, and fidelity ushered in the day of national renaissance. (Bravos and applause.)

We know that not all of our opponents acted against their better knowledge. In everything pertaining to their sense of honor, we esteem the German people too much to assume that most of them opposed the National Socialist movement out of malice. Rather, we are of the opinion that only a small fraction of our people -- and mainly those so-called German "citizens" who have nothing in common with the German racial community because of their alien blood values -- tried to thwart the rebirth of the German nation. We want, therefore, to take no revenge on those who heretofore have opposed us. We fully open our arms and the gates of our movement to receive and to include in our Volk community all who still have a feeling for the glory and heroism of the German past and for the necessity to re- stablish the German Volk community. (Loud applause.) In deep veneration, therefore, we bow our heads before our brothers who fell on the battlefield in the Great World War. To honor them let us rise from our seats and remember, with equal veneration and gratitude, those racial comrades who lost their lives as heroes of the national revolution in their unselfish battle for a new Germany and for a new greatness of our people. (Loud "Pfuis!" from the left. Shouts: "Stand Up!" "Outside with you scoundrels!" "Scoundrels!" The chairman rings his bell. )

I notice, German men and women, that you have risen from your seats in honor of our heroes, and I thank you.

German men and women! We are experiencing the most enthusiastic renaissance of the German people under the sign of the Swastika. The national revolution has been accomplished with a discipline and order unprecedented in German history. Let us draw the conclusion from the needs of our times and from the form in which the revolution was carried through. Just as the spirit of discord and self- interest has been overcome, so the period of the party state and party coalitions has likewise come to an end. (Loud applause. )

If the unity of the German people in its overwhelming majority was possible only in the spirit of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism, then the new Reich can be built only in the same spirit and according to the same principles.

Everybody has to come to terms with the fact that this has been the last multi-party election. [2] (Applause.) The new election scheduled four years from now will deal, as far as it is humanly possible to foresee, with the plan of a new constitution (Loud applause), which will eliminate the selfishness of classes and programmatic party faiths and instead will ensure a new Volkish state structure. (Applause.)

With the assumption of power, Adolf Hitler and his fellow warriors have once and for all overcome the system of coalitions and barter. (Stormy applause.)

Thus despair and wretchedness have been uprooted in accordance with the will of the majority of the German people.

In addition, we have established the basis for unleashing the constructive forces of the nation -- personal incorruptibility, strength of character, and competence for action and accomplishment -- and for gathering all, without regard to their previous political allegiance, into one force for honest and cooperative labor in the interest of the whole people. (Applause.) It is your task, German men and women, to accept the new way of life ushered in by us -- to obey our justified and proven will to create and to help us to realize our basic demands. Your previous efforts and your legitimate demands in the economic and cultural spheres, you will now find easier to maintain in the new Reich of Adolf Hitler and the Swastika than was possible in the multiparty state.

But we want to make it absolutely clear that we are determined to eradicate ruthlessly all those who endanger the people, and that we shall not under any circumstances permit corruption and the propagation of any special interests that are inimical to the common welfare. (Applause. )

As a matter of principle, we deny Marxists the right to any activity within Germany. (Loud and lasting applause.) Therefore the question can never arise whether Marxist parties should be admitted to the councils of the city parliament. ("True, true!" Applause.) Anyone who believes in the class struggle and is internationally oriented cannot at the same time claim that he is willing to serve the interest of our city and our people. ("True!")

Only the interests of our city and our people will be represented and realized in this Chamber. We confess that we have succumbed to the sentimentality that clings to the German people when today we merely exclude from politics those who are responsible for the misery of our people and who betrayed our country -- without at the same time calling them humanly and personally to account. ("Hear! Hear!")

Let us remember how thousands of our comrades who strove for nothing else but to save Germany were thrown out of work to starve, were tossed into jail, were beaten and murdered by the hundreds, how the National Socialist newspapers were suppressed, and how the refusal to make public halls available and the curtailment of the right of assembly were invoked to make the work of building a new and better Germany more difficult and even impossible. (Shouts of "Pfui!") Representatives of Social Democracy are still sitting here in this representative assembly, even though most of their leading comrades not only are accomplices in Germany's former shame but even today spread the basest slander against the new Germany abroad. (Stormy shouts of "Pfui!") These Social Democrats have good reason to lift their eyes in thankfulness that they have not received the treatment which they could rightfully expect in the light of their past deeds.

Just recall what Ebel had to suffer in this Chamber when he was our one and only council member. ("Hear! Hear!") Recall also how we were treated before the last election, when only three National Socialists sat in this Chamber, and how you curtailed our right to free speech and did not even allow us to present motions. (Shouts of "Pfui!")

Think of the malicious and mocking manner with which for years you tried to degrade us in the eyes of the people, and then measure, by our present magnanimity, the energy and human greatness which motivates us National Socialists.

We removed Herr Adenauer" from office, not because he was a member of the Center party, but because we recognized him as a man whose concepts of morality and character we fail to understand ("Hear! Hear!") and because his actions were absolutely detrimental to Cologne and the whole of Germany. (Applause.)

We cannot, therefore, acknowledge that any group of this Chamber which values honor, decency, and moral cleanliness seriously believes that it could rally to the defense of this man and his deeds. Identification with the person of the discarded Lord Mayor is an identification with the attitude and deeds of this man and consequently deserves the same judgment and militant hostility. ("Hear! Hear!" Applause.)

In this hour, we reavow the promises we made to the national-minded, Germany-conscious population to fulfill to the last letter everything we represented and asserted in the years of battle and opposition. (Loud applause.)

We stretch out our hand to all racial comrades of good will and bid them welcome as fellow workers in the accomplishment of our great German task. Together we will rebuild our Rhenish cathedral city into an ornament of German Volkish life and will make its administration a model of cleanliness and frugality. (Applause.)

Finally, we thank the new head of the city of Cologne for his ready and responsible work and for his great skill in the choice of his co-workers.

(The National Socialist members rise and break into spirited shouts of "Heil!" to the incoming Lord Mayor.)

We shall work closely with the new leader of our city and his administration and shall endeavor to create a cleaner Cologne and thus eventually add to the prestige and greatness of Germany. Long live Cologne! Long live Germany!

(Enthusiastic shouts of "Heil!" The assembly rises and sings the national anthem.)

From Peter Schmidt, Zwanzig Tahre Soldat Adolf Hitlers, Zehn Tahre Gauleiter: Ein Buch von Kampf und Treue (Cologne: Verlag Westdeutscher Beobachter, 1941), pp. 198-204.

_______________

Notes:

1. See page 366.

2. The reference is to the election of March 1933. See page 323.

3. Konrad Adenauer was Lord Mayor of Cologne from 1917 to 1933.

Little Things Create Pressures, by HERMANN STRESAU

The German way or, rather, that which is German sits closer than ever on the body, it constricts one, and at times takes one's breath away. Hitler's rule is no longer the rule of Hitler alone. One could almost think he had become a secondary figure or, even, an advertising poster. But this does not change anything of that pressure.

It is hard to explain what this pressure consists of. Nothing happens to us personally. We hardly notice the party out here as long as we do not leave our forest. But on the way to Berlin one hears and sees many things. These are not always special events, but small, unimportant experiences which keep the feeling of pressure alive. For example, the following little event on a bus: It is evening, just before departure time. A short man sits in front of me. By profession he is a gardener and he has a part-time job as a night watchman in the settlement. I know him because Jackie once replaced him. He is a timid, rather simple-minded, talkative but completely harmless person. A tall, broad-shouldered chap wearing a black melon-shaped hat entered the bus. He had an unpleasant appearance and looked something like the way a policeman in civilian clothes looks in the movies. He sat down next to the short fellow and greeted him after he had called out a "Heil Hitler!" in a baritone voice to everyone in the bus. They talked about the weather, the frost, and the little gardener observed quite harmlessly: "Strict rulers don't rule for long." This is a popular saying that one can hear in almost every conversation touching on that kind of frosty weather. What did the fat fellow do? He bent forward, cleared his throat, and said with noticeable emphasis: "I don't quite understand what you mean by that, Mr. --." The little fellow obviously did not know how close he came to being thrown into a concentration camp.

Another time a young mother was sitting in the bus with her little girl, who was about four or five. She was standing on the seat and was looking at the world outside her window with great interest. A young SA man was walking up and down in front of the waiting bus. Suddenly the little girl said: "Look, Mommy! That man won't come in here, will he?" Horrified, the mother placed her hand on the child's mouth and warned her to be quiet.

This is called the Volk community....

To this must be added the turnover in generations: there are more and more people growing up who have had no experience of the war. They are oblivious of the experiences of the older generation and are apt to look upon war as a refreshing adventure or even as an opportunity to develop great virtues. I cannot so easily forget one morning in the library when a colleague and I, working on a catalog, got to talking about the war novels, most of them anti-war, which were at that time being published in great numbers. Without being dramatic, the two of us shared the opinion that war was a "swinish business," since we had taken part in the war and had had a belly full of war once and for all. At this point a little girl employee, who was still on probation, interrupted us and rather insolently asserted that there was something elevating about war. "How's that?" I asked her. The little girl who was not yet twenty, a beautiful, delicately built thing, and on top of this slightly deformed, baffled us. Why? Well, after all, war brings out the best qualities: a sense of sacrifice, comradeship, and courage. What was one supposed to say to this? My colleague grouchily advised her first to live through the whole "swinish business" herself. But one cannot refute the argument of an idealistic young girl this way. She will usually answer with a contemptuous, disparaging facial expression, perhaps even rightly so. I tried to explain to her: in ancient times there were epidemics, such as plagues and cholera, which also provided plenty of opportunities to develop human virtues -- readiness to help others, a sense of sacrifice, etc. I asked her whether because of these virtues we ought to regret that we have successfully exterminated these epidemics? The girl had no comment to make on this, but she did not seem to be overly convinced. At least she didn't offer the most stupid of all arguments, which some people have come up with: there have always been wars, therefore we will always have wars. The stupidity of this logic becomes apparent only when millions of people have paid for it with their lives.

From Hermann Stresau, Von Jahr zu Jahr (Berlin: Minerva-Verlag, 1948), pp. 94-95, 168.

Vanishing Friends, by ERICH EBERMAYER

Leipzig, May 9, 1933

One becomes ever more lonely.

Everywhere friends declare their faith in Adolf Hitler. It is as if an airless stratum surrounds us few who remain unable to make such avowals.

Of my young friends it is the best who now radically proclaim their allegiance to National Socialism. This is not to be denied. The two sons of the Leipzig art historian Wilhelm Pinder, two excellent young men of the first-class breed -- the younger one had closely attached himself to me for a long time -- are downright possessed Nazis. One can't even discuss things with them, because they believe. And there are no rational arguments against faith. They run around in the plain Hitler Youth uniform, radiant with happiness and pride. When today in the Schreber pool, our reopened Thomaner [1] meeting place, I made an attempt to have a talk with Eberhard Pinder, daring to express -- how weak and powerless one already is vis-a-vis this triumphant youth! -- the idea that perhaps our whole ancient culture, the patrimony of the intellectual and artistic values of the last four hundred years, would go under in the vortex of our time. And the triumphant little gentleman, naively and a little bit shamelessly, said: "And what if it does, my dear friend! This culture is really not so important! According to the word of the Fuhrer, the Thousand-Year Reich is already arising. And it will create a new culture for itself!"

My mother experienced something similar. She already had a radical falling out over politics with Baroness Richthofen, one of her closest friends. It was over the new flag. Frau von Richthofen demanded that she should now at last get a swastika flag made for herself. Mother indignantly rejected the idea, saying she would never think of such a thing, and if anybody forced her she would hang out "this rag from the toilet window." A beautiful, clear, and German language ... otherwise not customary among the ladies of high society.... The Baroness then took offense with an audible noise, and the old friendship broke up. Mother suffers from it more than she admits.

From Erich Ebermayer, Denn heute gehort uns Deutschland ...: Personliches und politisches Tagebuch, von der Machtergreifung bis zum 31 Dezember 1935 (Hamburg and Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1959), pp. 75-76. (Reprinted by permission of Paul Zsolnay Verlag and Erich Ebermayer. )

_______________

Notes:

1. Thomaner were alumni of a famous Gymnasium in Leipzig.
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Re: NAZI CULTURE: INTELLECTUAL, CULTURAL AND SOCIAL LIFE IN

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1. "The Four Elements," a painting which hung over the mantelpiece in Hitler's house in Munich

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Hitler honored Adolf Ziegler's "The Four Elements" by placing it over the mantelpiece of his own room in the "Fuhrer's house" in Munich. This technically accomplished painting, which was also shown in the 1937 Exhibition of German Art, is an example of an artistic realism which leaves nothing to the imagination. Ziegler was president of the Reich Chamber of Art and organized the exhibition of "degenerate art."

2. The ideal Aryan family as represented on a calendar [From Kaknder des rassenpolitischen Amtes der NSDAP, 1938.

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The ideal Aryan family as represented on the cover of the calendar the "New Volk," issued by the office of racial politics of the NSDAP.

3. An example of the kind of poster art that played an important role in Nazi propaganda [From Anschlage, deutsche Plakate als Dokumente der Zeit (Munich, 1963)]

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Poster art played an important role in Nazi propaganda. This poster, produced by the German Workers' Front, reminds the workers that the comradeship of the soldiers at the front must be carried over into the "battle for production." The workers were laboring in the shadow of those who had sacrificed all for the Fatherland.

4. The Honor Cross of the German Mother [From Das Jahr IV (Berlin, 1939)]

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The Honor Cross of the German Mother, modeled after the Iron Cross.

5. Adolf Ziegler's "The Judgment of Paris," illustrating ideal Aryan types [From Die Kunst im dritten Reich (1939)]

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Adolf Ziegler's "The Judgment of Paris," illustrating ideal Aryan types

6. Awakening" by Richard Klein, which was shown at the 1937 Exhibition of German Art [From Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung 1937]

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Richard Klein's "Awakening," which was shown in the 1937 Exhibition of German Art, combines the realistic with the sentimental. Klein was one of the publishers of the official NSDAP journal of art, Kunst im dritten Reich, and director of the Munich Academy of Applied Art.

7. A painting of the ideal German girl [From N. S. Frauenvarte, Heft I, Jahrg. 8 (July 1939)]

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This painting of the ideal German girl, by Paul Keck, was included in the 1939 Exhibition of German Art.

8. " A film advertisement, 1936 [From Schleisische Tageszeitung, November 16, 1936 (Wiener Library Clipping Collection).)

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Reality often failed to correspond to the desired ideal, as this 1936 film advertisement shows.

9. Arno Brecker's sculpture representing an idealized Germanic hero [From Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung 1942]

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Arno Brecker was one of Hitler's favorite sculptors. His "The Party" flanked one of the entrances to the new Reich Chancery. In this sculpture classical realism has been employed to represent the "ideal type" which appears throughout Nazi painting and poster art.

10. "The Guardian" by Arno Brecker, one of Hitler's favorite sculptors [From Franz Rodens, Vom Wesen deutscher Kunst (Berlin, 1941)]

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"The Guardian," by Arno Brecker, a good example of the idealized Germanic hero popular in the Third Reich.

11. A mural idealizing active youth [From Die Kunst im dritten Reich (1939)]

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A mural by Jurgen Wegener, idealizing active youth.

12. Works by George Grosz and Elk Eber, a confrontation between "degenerate art" and "true" Nazi art [From Deutsche Kunst und entartete Kunst, edited by Adolf Dresler (Munich, 1928)]

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These two pictures were reproduced side by side in a German art book in order to illustrate the superiority of "true" Nazi art over the "degenerate art" which satirized the front-line soldier. The confrontation pits George Grosz, the Republic's leading left-wing painter, against Elk Eber, an old party member and designer of Nazi propaganda posters.

13. A peasant house built after 1933, but in the style of the Middle Ages [From Die neue Heimat (Munich, 1940)]

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In practice, adhering to the eternal verities often meant copying ancient models. This peasant house would seem to date back to the Middle Ages; it was, in fact, built after 1933 and was praised as "completely modern" while representing a "soil-bound" style.

14. A "shrine of honor" of the Hitler Youth; a faithful copy of an ancient German hall [From Die neue Heimat (Munich, 1940)]

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This "shrine of honor" of the Hitler Youth (in memory of their heroes and martyrs) is a faithful copy of an ancient Germanic hall, complete with the heathen symbols of the "forefathers."

15. The House of German Art in Munich, designed by Hitler's favorite architect, Paul Ludwig Troost [From Franz Rodens, Vom Wesen deutscher Kunst (Berlin, 1941).]

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The House of German Art in Munich. Designed by Hitler's favorite architect, Paul Ludwig Troost (1878-1934), it is an example of the imitation of classical forms in monumental public buildings.

16. A painting by Adolf Hitler [From N. S. Frauenwarte, Heft III, Jahrg. 6 (August 1937)]

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One of Hitler's own paintings, in which he has merely copied an historic building. It affords some insight into his artistic tastes.

17. Hitler as the "friend of children" [From Fibel fur die Grundschule (Gutersloth, 1935)]

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Hitler as the "friend of children." This photograph accompanied the story reproduced from the children's primer.

18. German school children in uniform [From NSDAP Standarten Kalender 1939.]

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"If all of German youth looked like this, we would have no need to fear for the future." A class in uniform from the NSDAP Standarten Kalender 1939.

19. German girls in the dress of the Bronze Age [From N. S. Frauenhuch (Wiener Library Photographic Archives).]

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The Bund Deutscher Madel was indoctrinated with "Faith and Beauty," which often involved acting out supposed ancient Germanic customs. These girls are in the dress of the Bronze Age.

20. An open-air theater in the kind of romantic setting popular under the Third Reich [From A Nation Builds (New York: German Information Library, 1940)]

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Open-air theaters were especially popular because of their romantic and natural settings, most appropriate for theatrical presentations of the Nazi ideology. This theater was named after Dietrich Eckart, an influential friend of Hitler in the early days.

21. The actor Werner Krauss in the 1940 film Jew Suss [From H. H. Wollenberg, Fifty Years of German Film (London, 1948)]

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The famous actor Werner Krauss portraying the typical Jewish stereotype in the Nazi film Jew Suss (1940), which dealt with the rise and fall of a Jewish financier in the eighteenth century.

22. The actor Lothar Muthel as Schlageter, in the famous Nazi drama of the same name [From Berliner Illustrierte (1933), No. 17]

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Lothar Muthel in the role of Schlageter, from the first performance of Hanns Johst's drama (1933).

23. A mythological painting of Hitler speaking to his early followers [From Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung 1937]

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Hermann Otto Hoyer called this mythological painting of Hitler speaking to his early followers "In the Beginning Was the Word." It was included in the 1937 Exhibition of German Art.

24. Monumental buildings designed as a setting for mass meetings and parades at Nuremberg [From Die Kunst im dritten Reich (1937)]

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These monumental structures were designed as a setting for mass meetings and parades at the Nuremberg Party Days. They are the work of Albert Speer, architect who became Inspector-General of Buildings for Berlin and, later, Minister of Armaments and War Production.

25. An advertisement exhorting the people to observe the weekly "one pot" meal [From Ewiges Deutschland, Heft III, Jahrg. 4 (March 1939)]

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Advertisements such as this one were common in the Third Reich. Here the people are exhorted to observe the weekly "one pot" meal, which was supposed to conserve food, especially meat. The legend reads: "the meal of sacrifice for the Reich."

26. Hitler addressing a Party Day meeting in Nuremberg, 1935 [From Leni Riefenstahl, Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag
Films (Munich, 1935)]


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Hitler addressing a Party Day meeting in Nuremberg (1935).
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