“A lively, extremely readable, and unique work. Tubach draws on archival wartime correspondences by soldiers on the front lines to loved ones on their devastated home fronts. German Voices is a long-overdue cultural study and a must-read for any student and scholar of German history and cultural studies.”―G.H. Hertling, University of Washington

“A sensitive and thoughtful exploration. Tubach’s use of personal interviews lends the narrative a deeply human touch. His ability to combine insight, empathy and objectivity make the book a fascinating and compelling read.” – Bernat Rosner, co-author of An Uncommon Friendship: From Opposite Sides of the Holocaust

Frederic C. Tubach is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of California, Berkeley, and the coauthor of An Uncommon Friendship: From Opposite Sides of the Holocaust.

German Voices

Memories of Life during Hitler’s Third Reich

By Frederic C. Tubach, Sally Patterson Tubach

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-26964-4

Contents

List of Figures, ix,
Preface, xi,
Acknowledgments, xv,
Introduction, 1,
1. Jobs and the Olympic Games, 20,
2. Jungvolk and Hitler Youth, 42,
3. War and the Holocaust, 60,
4. In Search of Individuals, 100,
5. German Soldiers Write Home, 198,
Notes, 263,

CHAPTER 1

Jobs and the Olympic Games

Following the swift Nazi takeover in 1933, the interplay of persuasion and coercion alone was not enough to consolidate the party’s authority. Other factors, including the Olympic Games of 1936, which legitimized the Nazi movement before the world, and the completion in 1937 of Hitler’s first, successful Four-Year Economic Plan—profound displays of harmony and accomplishment, requiring three years of careful preparation on all levels of society—brought Hitler to the apex of power.

JOBS

The generation growing up in the early 1930s saw hunger and unemployment all around them. If they lived in nice houses and their parents patronized the neighborhood butcher, baker, and grocer, these individuals nevertheless remember the beggars who knocked on their doors and asked for work, food, or handouts. “Meister, hast du keine Arbeit?” (Boss, don’t you have any work?) still echoes in the memory of a man from Cologne, whose father owned a sizable carpentry shop. For the parents, who had no knowledge of rough-and-tumble, open-ended capitalism, such need was hard to take. Since Bismarck, the older generation had come to believe in social and economic stability, and whenever that broke down, they expected the state to step in and help.

After January 30, 1933, when Hitler was handed control in the German parliament, he lost no time in making his first move. On February 2, he presented his first Four-Year Plan to the public. Relief from economic hardship was exactly what Germans wanted to hear, and he addressed this concern directly:

We see in the terrible fate that has been haunting us since 1918 only an expression of our decay. However, the entire world is in the grips of a deep crisis. The historical balance of forces has been removed. The insane idea of victors and vanquished prevents any confidence from developing between nation and nation, and with that a chance for an economic recovery.

But the misery of our people is horrible. The proletariat of the hungry and unemployed millions in industry is now joined by the progressive deterioration of the entire middle class. If this general decay engulfs the German peasantry as well, then we will face a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.

Hitler, of course, was interested not only in providing his views of economic conditions, but also in evoking an apocalyptic vision of total collapse that only the Nazi movement could prevent.

During the three years leading up to the Olympic Games, most Germans—even those not fond of the Nazi regime—thought that the Nazis had made good on their promise to lift the German economy out of the depression. Those who, with the help of hindsight, now stress that Hitler was already mobilizing the German economy for war miss the point. The vast majority of Germans did not and could not know that mobilization for war was foremost in Hitler’s mind. What they did know was that work materialized, living standards rose, and unemployment largely disappeared. On March 26, 1937, a few days before the general election of March 29, a student wrote a composition for a class assignment with the title “Wahlzeit” (Election time): “Now the German people have the chance to show their gratitude toward the Führer…. Things are moving, chimneys are smoking again, farmers are filled with hope, workers’ brigades till the land and soil, the army marches, youth sings and has faith, and the Saarland has returned home.” 4 He received an A-/B+ for his eff orts.

This young student welcomed the advent of an astonishing new age of work, hope, and fl ag-waving; for the millions of older Germans who had been unemployed, however, the changes came largely as a great relief. Looking back at the Nazi era after World War II, the child of a father who had been unemployed remarked:

After all, the party called itself, oddly enough, the National Socialist German Workers Party [National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP]. Work was promised and work was created. Now we know the reasons why work was created. But you have to see it from the point of view of the father of a family, who had been unemployed for three, four, five, seven years and had to make do with a few pennies from social welfare. The Nazis gave him a uniform and boots. Hunger is what churned around in my stomach and intestines. Mother cried because she was unable to give us anything to eat, and we were four children. I can really understand that a father who looks at his children and finds a job will say, “Well, that is to the credit of Hitler.” And then there was this immense propaganda effort that influenced the masses. I can really understand all of that.

One of my interviewees recalled a remark of an anti-Nazi whom his father had known. Although this opponent of Hitler had fought against the Nazis in the 1920s, he still praised their economic accomplishments when he mused, “Is Hitler a genius or what?” The economic success attributed to the Nazis only added to Hitler’s nimbus as savior—an aura carefully constructed since 1933. Hitler’s magic lasted among the true believers throughout the war, in some cases to the very end. And Hitler himself believed in his own invincibility; had he not, after all, survived a whole string of assassination attempts?

By the late 1930s, propaganda had convinced the Germans not only that their economy was strong and growing stronger, but also that there was no war agenda hidden behind the economic data. Eventually, many critics began to waver in their negative views of the Nazis and to fall in line. One such individual, a good Catholic born in 1913, remarked, “In 1936–37—I still remember it well—pronouncements of the church were read from the pulpit that were considered to be propaganda against the Nazis…. I still remember my mother saying, ‘Good God, how can they proclaim such stuff in church? After all, everything is turning out just fine.'”

The Nazis implemented programs to improve workers’ lives and enhance their leisure time. The leadership was well aware that German labor had been a strong supporter of the Socialists and Communists, and they wanted to destroy the last vestiges of leftist loyalties among the working class. Robert Ley, for example, was in charge of the Deutsche Arbeiterfront (DAF, German Labor Front) and developed vacation philosophy and policy for workers:

When someone arrives at a beach resort, he must be able to forget his past right away. I would like to arrange things in such a way that he is swept off his feet immediately by a general mood filled with excitement, so much so that it will take his breath away and he will not come to his senses with all that music, dancing, theater visits, and so on. Up until now you needed seven days just to get adjusted to vacation time and to get in touch with other people. And during the last seven days you already had to get used again to the worries of everyday life. That must be stopped. Starting with the first hour, the vacationer must be submerged in an intoxicating environment [and it must last] up to the very last second, when he climbs back onto his train to go home. This is also the wish of der Führer, and so we want to construct this beach resort with these leisure principles in mind: a theater, a movie, evening shows, music, dance locales and so on.

Kraft durch Freude (KdF, Strength through Joy) was the Nazi organization charged with implementing vacation policy. It administered a wide range of activities, including propaganda rallies, theater performances, operas, symphony concerts, cabarets, nightclub acts, and group travel. Except for the meetings designed specifically for ideological advertising, many of these vacation programs had little explicit political content. During the 1930s Germans began to experience and enjoy mass entertainment and the glitzy, modern world of escapist illusion. The Nazi utopia of a Reich to last a thousand years and this world of entertainment mutually reinforced each other.

The Nazis never flagged in their efforts to control all aspects of leisure time. They developed, for instance, special cultural programs for the handicapped, such as the blind, the deaf, and those who had become invalids as a result of workplace injuries. Their efforts paid off . In 1934, only 9,111,663 participated in the KdF programs; by 1937, the number of participants had grown to 38,435,663—as the KdF authorities pointed out with utmost precision.

In the early years, the economic mobilization and upswing also included efforts to feed the hungry—not unlike in the United States in the 1930s, but with an important addition. In a major campaign to collect money and food for the neediest citizens, the Nazis, thanks to their centralized command structure, were able to mobilize everyone down to the village and even city block level. Anyone who was employed, even for minimum wages, had to sacrifice 10 percent in additional taxes to benefit their poorest fellow citizens. The Nazis drove such efforts to collect money so hard, however, that in many communities complaints arose about the pressure to contribute. Grumblings were closely monitored by the party and, in more prolonged and severe cases, reported to the Gestapo.

By collecting money from every German household, the Nazis nurtured a sense of solidarity among all members of society, rich and poor, well fed and hungry. Nothing symbolized the Nazis’ aid to the elderly, sick, and poor better than the ubiquitous Sammelbüchsen (collection boxes) for small change. Painted bright red, the cone-shaped metal boxes had small slots on top surrounded by metal cuff s, meant for coins, as well as holes for depositing rolled-up bills. A metal grate covered the slot on the inside, preventing deposited coins from escaping even if the box were turned upside down and shaken. These boxes had a dual function: to collect money and to make it apparent to every German that the Nazi state cared for everyone, even its weakest citizens. The younger generation could not fail to notice this display of altruism, which for the Nazis, of course, was also a way of inculcating a sense of loyalty to the regime. Virtually every German with spare change deposited money into these boxes. Such actions constituted one of the social elements of the National Socialist German Workers Party.

I had a great-aunt, a member of the older generation. She was the spinster sister of my step-grandfather and beloved by all the villagers for her volunteer work at the local kindergarten and at the home for the poor and sick. She was also known for her poetry, which mourned the dead and celebrated weddings and anniversaries. She wrote her poems in a neat notebook. This gentle old woman wrote “Heil Hitler” at the bottom of the page of each of her poems. Her world was simple. She liked Hitler because he fed the poor.

Young Germans may have been just as impressed by the antipoverty efforts of the Nazis, but for them these were plainly heady times. By 1936 earlier fears about unemployment had vanished. The young believed in better days to come, a secure future with fulfilling work, to be created in the new Germany they would inherit. For them it was all sunshine as the Zeppelin flew over the various regions of Germany, the swastika ablaze on its tailfins.

* * *

By 1936 the Nazis had succeeded in splitting the public sphere into two distinct but mutually supportive elements: the “big show,” with its projection of a new utopia, on the one hand, and the ever-more-secretive application of violence against all those who opposed them or whom they considered undesirable, on the other. To create a vision of themselves as they wanted to be seen by others, however, they organized two grand events in addition: for Germans, the 1934 Nuremberg party rally; and for the rest of the world, the 1936 summer Olympic Games.

THE NUREMBERG PARTY RALLY

More than any other medium, Leni Riefenstahl’s 1934 documentary film about the annual Nuremberg party rally, Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), introduced the Nazi Party to the astonished audience of the German population at large, and to this day it stands as a masterpiece of propaganda. There was no television, after all, and news consisted of after-the-fact reports in newspapers and visual summaries at the beginning of entertainment films. Only the radio projected the immediacy of the events the Nazis staged for public consumption, but the radio was a poor substitute for Nazi happenings that were arranged primarily for the eye. A stage was needed for Hitler’s words, and a stage had to be seen to be appreciated. Riefenstahl’s film had an enormous impact, particularly on the younger generation. It also set the tone for Nazi propaganda films in general, and eventually led to her internationally acclaimed documentary on the Berlin Olympics of 1936.

What made Triumph of the Will so effective as a visual introduction to the Nazi movement? The movie opens with a view out the window of an airplane. The spectator (eye of the camera) sees clouds move by swiftly as the plane descends for a landing—a new visual experience for most Germans, who had never fl own in an airplane. The anonymous spectator, a German Everyman who takes in this novel scene—clouds, sky, and the city slowly unfolding below—though not identified until after the landing, is Hitler, who debarks to a tumultuous reception at the Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg, the Reichsparteitag of 1934. In this opening scene, the identification between Hitler and the passive moviegoer takes place on a preconscious level: the eye of the camera and the eyes of the viewers watching the film in theaters all over Germany turn out to share Hitler’s own field of vision as his JU-52 prepares to set down in Nuremberg.

The documentary then switches to individual Germans pursuing various private tasks as they prepare to participate in the mass rally. Their activities are familiar to all: the old woman peering out the window from behind geranium boxes; young men polishing their shoes, washing themselves, or playing catch in a springtime meadow. The backdrop to all this is a sun-drenched Nuremberg, the ancient and familiar city of the trade guilds and the Meistersinger, though now it is festooned with swastikas and striking streamers.

As the film continues, individual Germans slowly transform into a mass. In one scene, uniformed members of an Arbeitsdienst (work brigade) are lined up in formation, with each member shouting out in turn: “Comrade, where are you from?” and another member of the group answering, “From the Alps,” or another, “From the seashore.” The subliminal message is clear: only in this tightly knit formation is it possible for them to hear and contact each other, to ask questions and give answers as to their origins. The scene concludes with a ritual chant by the entire group that gives voice to their solidarity as one body.

Similar transformations of the individual are repeated throughout the documentary, up to the climax, when approximately 100,000 Nazi Party members, all assembled on the Nuremberg rally grounds, are organized into two huge blocks of black (the brown color of the Nazi uniforms in a black-and-white film) separated by a broad white concrete pathway, on which Hitler walks, slowly and silently, up to the tribune and the speaker’s platform. The masses now become an aesthetic foil; all individual differences are obliterated in a metamorphosis that presents only one individual, Adolf Hitler, in splendid isolation. This central scene of the Nazi celebration brings us back to the beginning of the documentary, where the eye that sees is initially our own; the propaganda equation is solved as we have become him, and he us.

Depicted in this way, the masses are a centerpiece of Nazi aesthetics, signifying power. The film creates a realm of its own, one in isolation from anything around it, and Hitler emerges in the middle as a self-contained symbol devoid of any contingencies. This quasi-religious Hitler persona, created over time, first appeared full-blown in this film. The cinematic images were replete with self-referential significance, while nothing was said about any moral sensibilities the passive participants might have brought, whether to the stadium in Nuremberg or to the movie theaters all over Germany. The Germans and the world had never seen anything like it.

What about German moviegoers curious about their new leader? In a series of visual tableaux, they are coaxed to identify with the enthusiastic masses. But the masses in this right-wing revolution have little in common with the masses of the French Revolution, who were the subjects of their history, storming the barricades and bringing down the old order. They also share nothing with the more recent revolution, that of the Communists in 1917, who took over streets and towns and murdered the czar. The Germans who participated at Nuremberg were portrayed as representing the entire Volk, but in reality they were a prop for Hitler in his big show. To create such a grand impression, members of the various Nazi organizations from the entire country came together, arriving by train, bus, and bicycle and filling the parade grounds with the brown uniform of the Nazi Party. For anonymous moviegoers sitting in darkened theaters, it was all a novel experience, disconnected from their daily lives.

(Continues…)Excerpted from German Voices by Frederic C. Tubach, Sally Patterson Tubach. Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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