"So, dear reader, examine the  descriptive passages from the Germany of the
1930s, when the Nazis were assuming full power, and see what lessons can be
learned for our situation today.

As I write this, Ashcroft is telling the Congress that the Patriot Act --
the same act that more than 100 cities have voted not to honor because of
its numerous violations of rights guaranteed by the Constitution -- does
not give the Bush Administration enough police power and needs to be
expanded. (This at a time when American citizens have been arrested, not
charged and then stashed away on military bases, outside the judicial
system; and hundreds of foreign prisoners are being held by the U.S.
military at Guantanamo in violation of both the U.S. Constitution and the
Geneva conventions.)

Demonstrable government falsehoods are being published by a compliant
media, while that same media, owned by corporate giants, refuses to report
factual information that is embarrassing to the Administration. And
finally, the Pentagon is working on "contingency plans" for the next
unilateral invasion of a sovereign state by the U.S. military."

http://www.crisispapers.org/Editorials/germany-1933.htm

Germany In 1933: The Easy Slide Into Fascism

Bernard Weiner
Co-Editor, The Crisis Papers
June 9, 2003

If my email is any indication, a goodly number of folks wonder if they're
living in America in 2003 or Germany in 1933.

All this emphasis on nationalism, the militarization of society,
identifying The Leader as the nation, a constant state of fear and anxiety
heightened by the authorities, repressive laws that shred constitutional
guarantees of due process, wars of aggression launched on weaker nations,
the desire to assume global hegemony, the merging of corporate and
governmental interests, vast mass-media propaganda campaigns, a populace
that tends to believe the slogans and lies it's fed without asking too many
questions, a timid opposition that barely contests the administration's
reckless adventurism abroad and police-state policies at home, etc. etc.

The parallels are not exact, of course; America in 2003 and Germany seventy
years earlier are not the same, and Bush certainly is not Adolf Hitler. But
there are enough disquieting similarities in the two periods at least to
see what we can learn -- cautionary tales, as it were -- and then figure
out what to do with our knowledge. 

 

The veneer of civilization is thin. We know this from our own observations,
and various writers -- from Shakespeare to Sinclair Lewis ("It Can't Happen
Here") -- have shown us how easily populations can be manipulated by
leaders skillfully playing on patriotic emotion or racial or nationalist
feelings.

Whole peoples, like individuals, can become irrational on occasion --
sometimes for a brief moment, sometimes for years, sometimes for decades.
Ambition, hatred, fear can get the better of them, and gross lies told by
their leaders can deceive their otherwise rational minds. It has happened,
it happens, it will continue to happen.

One of the most outrageous and horrific examples of an entire country
falling into national madness probably was Hitler's Germany from 1933-45.
The resulting world war was disastrous, leading to more than 40,000,000
deaths.

A good share of what we know about how this happened in Germany usually
comes to us many years later from post-facto books, looking backward to the
horror. There are very few examples of accounts written from the inside at
the very time the events were unfolding.

One such book is "Defying Hitler," by the noted German journalist/author
Sebastian Haffner. The manuscript was found, stuffed away in a drawer, by
Haffner's son in 1999 after his father's death at age 91. Published in
2000, the book became an immediate best-seller in Germany and was published
last year in English, translated by the son, Oliver Pretzel. (His father's
original name was Raimund Pretzel; as Sebastian Haffner, he went on to a
highly successful career, writing in England during the war and then later
back in Germany. He authored "From Bismarck to Hitler" and "The Meaning of
Hitler," among many other works.)

"Defying Hitler" is a brilliantly written social document, begun (and ended
abruptly) in 1939; even though it fills in the reader on German history
from the First World War on, its major focus is on the year 1933, when, as
Hitler assumed power, Haffner was a 25-year-old law student, in-training to
join the German courts as a junior administrator.

You find yourself reading this book in amazement; there is so much
historical perspective, so much sweep of what was going on and predictions
of what later was to happen, so many insights into what led so many
ordinary Germans to join with or acquiesce to the Nazi program -- how could
anyone so young be so prescient in the midst of the brutal sordidness that
was Nazism? (Indeed, some critics claimed that Haffner must have rewritten
the book decades later; every page of the original manuscript was sent to
laboratories, which authenticated that it indeed had been composed in 1939.)

THE INDIVIDUAL IN SOCIETY

What distinguishes "Defying Hitler," in addition to its superb writing, is
that Haffner focuses on "little people" like himself, rather than on the
machinations of leaders. He wants to explore how ordinary Germans,
especially non-Nazi and anti-Nazi Germans, permitted themselves to be
swallowed whole into the Hitlerian maw.

Haffner makes occasional broad pronouncements about German character traits
("As Bismarck once remarked in a famous speech, moral courage is, in any
case, a rare virtue in Germany, but it deserts a German completely the
moment he puts on a uniform"), but he devotes a good deal of his attention
to the question of personal responsibility. If you read ordinary history
books, he says, "you get the impression that no more than a few dozen
people are involved, who happen to be 'at the helm of the ship of state'
and whose deeds and decisions form what is called history.

"According to this view, the history of the present decade [the 1930s] is a
kind of chess game among Hitler, Mussolini, Chiang Kai-Shek, Roosevelt,
Chamberlain, Daladier, and a number of other men whose names are on
everybody's lips. We anonymous others seem at best to be the objects of
history, pawns in the chess game, who may be pushed forward or left
standing, sacrificed or captured, but whose lives, for what they are worth,
take place in a totally different world, unrelated to what is happening on
the chessboard.

"... It may seem a paradox, but it is nonetheless the simple truth, to say
that on the contrary, the decisive historical events take place among us,
the anonymous masses. The most powerful dictators, ministers, and generals
are powerless against the simultaneous mass decisions taken individually
and almost unconsciously by the population at large... Decisions that
influence the course of history arise out of the individual experiences of
thousands or millions of individuals."

THE RIDDLE OF HITLER'S RISE

Haffner tries to solve the riddle of the easy acceptance of fascism in
Hitler's Third Reich. In March of 1933, a majority of German citizens did
not vote for Hitler. "What happened to that majority? Did they die? Did
they disappear from the face of the earth? Did they become Nazis at this
late stage? How was it possible that there was not the slightest visible
reaction from them" as Hitler, installed by the authorities as Chancellor,
began slowly and then more quickly consolidating power and moving Germany
from a democratic state to a totalitarian one?

All along the way, Hitler would propose or actually promulgate regulations
that sliced away at German citizens' freedoms -- usually aimed at small,
vulnerable sectors of society (labor unionists, communists, Jews, mental
defectives, et al.) -- and few said or did anything to indicate serious
displeasure. In the early days, on those rare occasions when there was
concerted negative reaction, Hitler would back off a bit. And so the Nazis
grew bolder and more voracious as they continued slicing away at civil
society. Many Germans (including some of Hitler's original corporate
backers) were convinced Nazism would collapse as it became more and more
extreme; others chose denial. It was easier to look the other way.

Haffner saw what was starting to happen, but retreated into his law
studies. Even while the Brownshirts were beating and killing people in the
streets, the courts with which he worked remained a solid bulwark in
defense of traditional democratic principles. And then one day, the Nazis
simply marched into the Berlin court buildings and took over Germany's
judicial system. Haffner was shaken to the core, but continued studying for
his final exams.

Shortly thereafter, he and his fellow students were dispatched to a kind of
boot camp for ideological and military training. Haffner, a Christian
anti-Nazi, found himself, to his astonishment and horror, wearing
jackboots, a swastika and learning how to kill.

In an inner monologue, Haffner says: "There are some things I must never
do: never say anything that I would be ashamed of later. Shooting at
targets is all right. But not at people. I must not commit myself, or sell
my soul... Oh dear! It dawned on me that I had already relinquished and
lost everything. I wore a uniform with a swastika armband. I stood to
attention and cleaned my rifle... .But that did not count: it was not me
that did it; it was a game and I was acting a part.

"Only what if, dear God, there was some court that did not recognize this
defense, but simply wrote down everything as it happened; that did not look
into my heart, but simply noted the swastika armband? Before that court I
was in a wretched position. Dear God, where had I gone wrong? What should I
say to the judge who asked, 'You wear a swastika armband and say that you
do not want to. Then why do you wear it?'"

Nazi propaganda, policies and terror had broken down traditional
support-networks. You couldn't be sure whom to trust. Everyone could be on
the government payroll, or could turn into informants to save their skins.
And so arms went out in Nazi salutes, militarist songs were sung at rallies
and on the streets, "each one of us the Gestapo of the others." In fear,
individualism was crushed, leaving most citizens to relate only to The
Leader, or to their military units, the comradeship offered by fascism.

MILLIONS OF MARKS FOR A LOAF OF BREAD

Then there was the economic factor, the terror associated with having no
money with which to live. One reads Haffner's description of the
hyper-inflation crisis, but it's difficult to accept or understand: "No
other nation has experienced anything comparable to the events of 1923 in
Germany. All nations went through the Great War, and most of them have also
experienced revolutions, social crises, strikes, redistributions of wealth,
and currency devaluation. None but Germany has undergone the fantastic,
grotesque extreme of all of these together; none has experienced the
gigantic, carnival dance of death, the unending, bloody Saturnalia, in
which not only money but all standards lost their value.

"... Anyone who had savings in a bank or bonds saw their value disappear
overnight. Soon it did not matter whether it was a penny put away for a
rainy day or a vast fortune. Everything was obliterated... A pound of
potatoes which yesterday had cost fifty thousand marks now cost a hundred
thousand. The salary of sixty-five thousand marks brought home the previous
Friday was no longer sufficient to buy a packet of cigarettes on Tuesday...
In August, the dollar reached a million [marks]... .In September, a million
marks no longer had any practical value... At the end of October, it was a
billion... The atmosphere became revolutionary once again."

When citizens face uncertainty on this scale -- and the fear and
dislocation that attend all such social traumas -- a man on a white horse
promising to restore order has great appeal, even to some staunch democrats.

There were other ingredients that went into the bubbling fascist vat: the
humiliating terms of the Versailles Treaty that were placed on defeated
Germany after World War I; the unceasing propaganda barrage in the mass
media, helping citizens to agree with the government; the martial mentality
that pervaded society. ("From 1914 to 1918 a generation of German
schoolboys daily experienced war as a great, thrilling, enthralling game
between nations, which provided far more excitement and emotional
satisfaction than anything peace could offer; and that is where [Nazism]
draws its allure from: its simplicity, its appeal to the imagination, and
its zest for action; but also its intolerance and its cruelty toward
internal opponents... Ultimately, that is also the source of Nazism's
belligerent attitude toward neighboring states. Other countries are not
regarded as neighbors, but must be opponents, whether they like it or not."

And then there is the inexplicable mystique that surrounds such men as
Hitler, that mesmerizes and lures millions into their web. "If my
experience of Germany has taught me anything, it is this: Rathenau [who led
a progressive government in 1921-22, and was then assassinated by
anti-Semitic thugs] and Hitler are the two men who excited the imagination
of the German masses to the utmost; the one by his ineffable culture, the
other by his ineffable vileness. Both, and this is decisive, came from
inaccessible regions, from sort of 'beyond.' the one from a sphere of
sublime spirituality where the cultures of three millennia and two
continents hold a symposium; the other from a jungle far below the depths
plumbed by the basest penny dreadfuls, from an underworld where demons rise
from a brewed-up stench of petty-bourgeois back rooms, doss-houses, barrack
latrines, and the hangman's yard. From their respective 'beyonds,' they
both drew a spellbinding power, quite irrespective of their politics."

When Hitler's in-your-face brand of "beyond" power -- with its meanness and
arrogance and menace, throwing opponents in jail, beating them, even
killing them -- met the traditional democratic culture, those on the other
end often had no tools at their disposal to combat the new hardball
politics: "It was then that the real mystery of the Hitler phenomenon began
to show itself: the strange befuddlement and numbness of his opponents, who
could not cope with his behavior and found themselves transfixed by the
gaze of the basilisk, unable to see that it was hell personified that
challenged them."

THE BIG LIE TECHNIQUE

And how did Haffner deal for so long with this menacing force in front of
him? "What saved me was... my nose. I have a fairly well developed
figurative sense of smell, or to put it differently, a sense of the worth
(or worthlessness!) of human, moral, political views and attitudes. Most
Germans unfortunately lack this sense almost completely. The cleverest of
them are capable of discussing themselves stupid with their abstractions
and deductions, when just using their noses would tell them that something
stinks."

Given their built-in weakness and their willingness to swallow the most
outrageous Big Lies emanating from the propaganda ministry and the media,
most Germans were fruit waiting to be plucked by the Nazi harvesters. "They
still fall for anything. After all that, I do not see that one can blame
the majority of Germans who, in 1933, believed that the Reichstag fire was
the work of the Communists. [The Parliament burned down and a convenient
Communist arsonist was fingered, which the Nazis used as the excuse to
unleash police-state tactics against all opponents.] What one can blame
them for, and what shows their terrible collective weakness of character
clearly for the first time during the Nazi period, is that this settled the
matter. With sheepish submissiveness the German people accepted that, as a
result of the fire, each one of them lost what little personal freedom and
dignity was guaranteed by the constitution; as though it followed as a
necessary consequence."

In short, what should have been a strong political and moral opposition
movement to Hitlerian policies, meekly acceded to the destruction of their
country's institutions of law and social harmony. The result in society was
a clear leaning toward the dynamic, muscular policies advocated by the
Nazis, and a seething "anger and disgust with the cowardly treachery of
their own [opposition] leadership."

Of course, fear of police-state action always was operative. "Join the
thugs to avoid being beaten up. Less clear was a kind of exhilaration, the
intoxication of unity, the magnetism of the masses. Many also felt a need
for revenge against those who had abandoned them. Then there was a
peculiarly German line of thought: 'All the predictions of the opponents of
the Nazis have not come true. They said the Nazis could not win. Now they
have won. Therefore the opponents were wrong. So the Nazis must be right.'
There was also (particularly among intellectuals) the belief that they
could change the face of the Nazi Party by becoming a member, even now
shift its direction."

All of this follows the normal range of psychology, Haffner says. "The only
thing that is missing is what in animals is called 'breeding.' This is a
solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces,
something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle, and dignity to
be drawn on in the hour of trial. It is missing in the Germans. As a nation
they are soft, unreliable, and without backbone. That was shown in March
1933. At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the
occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and
capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown. The result of this
million-fold nervous breakdown is the unified nation, ready for anything,
that is today the nightmare of the rest of the world."

Haffner laments that the crimes of the Hitler administration, given this
collective nervous breakdown, have very little impact on the population,
which seems to accept everything done in its name with a shrug of the
shoulders. "It is one of the uncanny aspects of events in Germany that the
deeds have no doers, the suffering has no martyrs. Everything takes place
under a kind of anesthesia. Objectively dreadful deeds produce a thin, puny
emotional response. Murders are committed like schoolboy pranks.
Humiliation and moral decay are accepted like minor incidents. Even death
under torture only produces the response 'Bad luck'."

THE SLIDE TOWARD FASCISM

And so it becomes easier to simply permit oneself to sink, ever so slowly
into this collective illness, into accommodation with the ruling party,
even though the police-state is constantly violating citizens' privacy. "We
were pursued into the farthest corners of our private lives; in all areas
of life there was rout, panic, and flight. No one could tell where it would
end. At the same time we were called upon, not to surrender, but to renege.
Just a little pact with the devil -- and you were no longer one of the
captured quarry. Instead you were one of the victorious hunters."

Certainly, Haffner and others like him felt their own slide toward
complicity with the Nazis, as their sense of self faded. "Things were quite
deliberately arranged so that the individual had no room to maneuver. What
one represented, what one's opinions were in 'private' and 'actually,' were
of no concern and set aside, put on ice, as it were. On the other hand, in
moments when one had the leisure to think of one's individuality... one had
the feeling that what was actually happening, in which one participated
mechanically, had no real existence or validity. It was only in these hours
that one could attempt to call oneself morally to account and prepare a
last position of defense for one's inner self."

Haffner was approaching decision time about his future if he stayed in the
Third Reich. But it's clear which way he was leaning, as his analyses got
darker and darker. "It is said that the Germans are subjugated. That is
only half true. They are also something else, something worse, for which
there is no word: they are 'comraded,' a dreadfully dangerous condition.
They are under a spell. They live a drugged life in a dream world. They are
terribly happy, but terribly demeaned; so self-satisified, but so
boundlessly loathsome; so proud and yet so despicable and inhuman. They
think they are scaling high mountains, when in reality they are crawling
through a swamp. As long as the spell lasts, there is almost no antidote."

He hung in until 1938. Just prior to the Second World War, Haffner left
Germany for England to join the war-effort against fascism. He did not
return until the mid-'50s.

 

So, dear reader, examine the above descriptive passages from the Germany of
the 1930s, when the Nazis were assuming full power, and see what lessons
can be learned for our situation today.

As I write this, Ashcroft is telling the Congress that the Patriot Act --
the same act that more than 100 cities have voted not to honor because of
its numerous violations of rights guaranteed by the Constitution -- does
not give the Bush Administration enough police power and needs to be
expanded. (This at a time when American citizens have been arrested, not
charged and then stashed away on military bases, outside the judicial
system; and hundreds of foreign prisoners are being held by the U.S.
military at Guantanamo in violation of both the U.S. Constitution and the
Geneva conventions.)

Demonstrable government falsehoods are being published by a compliant
media, while that same media, owned by corporate giants, refuses to report
factual information that is embarrassing to the Administration. And
finally, the Pentagon is working on "contingency plans" for the next
unilateral invasion of a sovereign state by the U.S. military.


Copyright 2003 by Bernard Weiner