******

THE SPECIAL COURTS

FROM: Ingo Müller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge/MA, 1991), 152-159.

Nazi “justice” represented an abrupt departure from the legal system of the Weimar Republic despite some seeming continuity of institutions. The basic principles of a liberal constitutional state—authorities were subject to the rule of law as defined by a constitution and the protection of individual rights—were abandoned. Müller’s description of the Special Courts, which were established after the Reichstag Fire Decree, captures the essence of the Nazi legal system.

“Irregular” courts of special jurisdiction were not invented by the National Socialists. It had been common practice in Germany in the politically

turbulent years after the First World War to establish such courts, but they were shut down again after a short time. On March 21, 1933, when the new regime issued its decree on the formation of Special Courts, it was in fact authorized to do so by an ordinance dating from the republican era, granting the government powers to determine the courts’ personnel, procedures, and jurisdiction.

To start with, a Special Court was created in each of the twenty-six Court of Appeals districts, with jurisdiction over violations of the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Decree to Protect the Government of the National Socialist Revolution from Treacherous Attacks, passed after the Reichstag fire. Three professional judges were assigned to each court, usually transferred from the County Courts, and the procedures established satisfied the wishes of most conservatives for a drastic reduction in the rights of defendants and a stronger position for the prosecution. The court was required neither to conduct a pretrial investigation nor to open the trial with a determination that the charges brought by the prosecution were in fact justified. Judges were required to sign all orders for arrest presented by prosecutors; defense attorneys had no right to demand proof of charges, and the court could determine the extent of evidence to be considered entirely as it saw fit. Defendants had no right to appeal verdicts, which became enforceable at once. The speedy trials made possible by these regulations met the wishes that had often been voiced for “eliminating formalism” in criminal proceedings. They also corresponded to the ideal of the “good criminal trial,” which, in the words of Supreme Court judge Otto Schwarz, “fulfills the aim of punishing a crime … by letting the penalty follow upon the criminal act with the greatest possible thoroughness and speed, and at the lowest cost.” The aims of the Nazi leadership with regard to the legal system were in large measure realized when the Special Courts were created. The presence of three judges on the bench ensured that they would keep an eye on each other, and at the same time circumvented

the inconvenient participation of laymen. The fact that defendants had no recourse and that a sentence took effect immediately freed the judges from the necessity of making sure that procedures were followed carefully and that their decisions

would stand up under review. This made the work of the courts simpler in two ways: there were no appeals proceedings, and the trials that did take place could be shorter.

Furthermore, the methods developed by Nazi jurists, in particular the doctrine of “criminal types” … allowed the courts to dispense with fine distinctions about how the law defined a particular crime and whether the act committed actually fulfilled these requirements. And finally the brief and usually very general wording of the decrees on those crimes falling under the jurisdiction of the Special Courts in particular gave the judges even more freedom. Occasionally the laws in question set no limits at all on sentencing, so that every conceivable penalty, from one night in prison to death, was permissible. Thus, all in all, the decisions of the Special Courts tended to match the expectations put forward by the Reich minister of justice in one of his notorious “Letters to the Bench”: “A member of the Volk does not expect judges to provide detailed and learned commentaries on the law, nor is he interested in the numerous minor points which they have taken into consideration in reaching their opinion. He would like to be told, in a few words understandable to the general public, the decisive reason for his being right or wrong.”

The advantages of the Special Courts were so striking that soon after their creation, demands were raised for extending their jurisdiction to cover a broader range of crimes. Apart from the new offense of “insulting the Nazi party,” however, they received no new jurisdiction for the time being. Clearly the regime wished to profit as long as possible from the legitimation provided by the regular courts.

The situation began to change as the country prepared for war. … The decree entitled “Measures on the Constitution of Courts and Legal Procedures,” issued September 1, 1939, … did away with all lay participation on the bench of public courts, making them more flexible and at the same time freeing urgently needed “defense personnel.” …

A series of other new decrees increased the possible sentences for certain offenses: prison was changed to penitentiary; for serious crimes the death penalty was introduced and occasionally—as in the case of the Decree on Violent Criminals—made mandatory. Virtually all regulations passed or revised after 1938 gave jurisdiction to the Special Courts. The crime of “intentionally tuning in to foreign radio broadcasts” was to be prosecuted before a Special Court, as were the offenses listed in the Decree on Asocial Elements, those in the Decree on Violent Criminals, certain economic crimes, and “gangsterism.” …

The new criminal laws, written with the Special Courts in mind, contained drastically harsher provisions; couched in “terse, clear, and martial language,” they did not go into “detailed analyses of the elements of an offense” or waste much time on fine legal distinctions. A typical example of the wording of regulations under martial law is the “Decree for Safeguarding the Metal Collection of the German People,” issued on March 29, 1940: “The Council of Ministers for the Defense of the Reich hereby decrees: The collection of metal is a sacrifice demanded of the German people in the struggle for survival which has been forced upon them. Whoever reaps a profit from collected metal or metal designated for collection by the authorities or otherwise prevents such metal from being used for the designated purpose is guilty of causing harm to the Great German liberation struggle and will be punished by death. This decree takes effect as soon as it is proclaimed over the radio. Its validity extends to incorporated Eastern areas.”

A large number of “economic” offenses, most of them of a minor nature, such as the illegal slaughtering of animals, the hoarding of goods, and fraud involving food or rationing, were raised from the status of petty offenses to capital crimes. …

The fundamental offense underlying all wartime criminal statutes was a failure to see what was required in a “total war”: “Whoever stands on the sidelines while others risk life and limb for the glory of Germany and the liberty of future generations is a parasite. He incurs the contempt of the nation and the punishment he deserves from our courts.” The key statute in the practice of the Special Courts after 1939 was thus the Decree on Asocial Elements. In addition to the mandatory death penalty for looting or arson, it provided penitentiary or death sentences for offenses that took advantage of the blackout as well as for the thoroughly unspecific offense of “exploiting the unusual conditions imposed by the war [to commit] any other crime.” …

As a rule, the courts used the Decree on Asocial Elements as a basis for imposing generally harsher sentences, and since the focusing of all government efforts on the war led to budget cuts even for crime prevention, in the last analysis wartime conditions favored every sort of crime—if only because the quality of available paper declined. For example, Hugo Gohring, a railroad worker and father of seven children, who had to support his family on a salary of 260 marks per month and a dependents’ allowance of 50 marks per month, had over a long period been in the habit of removing objects of low value from the damaged packages he had to load and unload: brushes and combs, articles of clothing, and food. Since he had a previous record of petty thefts, he was tried as a “dangerous habitual criminal” before the Weimar Special Court. In its decision of October 13, 1944, the court observed: “The accused cannot be regarded as a dangerous habitual criminal.” It nevertheless sentenced him to death as an “asocial element,” because he had “exploited the unusual conditions imposed by the war” to commit his crimes. …

As a general rule, the Special Courts attached less importance to precise interpretation of the law than to defamatory distinctions between “criminal types.” A semiofficial commentary on developments since the outbreak of the war, published in 1940 and written by the press secretary of the Ministry of Justice, divided the clientele of the Special Courts into five groups: “(1) political and military enemies of the state, (2) economic parasites, (3) asocial elements, (4) destructive outsiders, (5) parasites in daily life.” Offices of Public Prosecution were granted the right to include anyone else in this group if they found such a step necessary; they could prosecute through the Special Courts not only those crimes for which they had specific jurisdiction but also all other crimes and offenses, if the prosecutors believed that “swift sentencing by a Special Court [was] called for in view of the seriousness or depravity of the deed, public reaction to it, or the danger it posed to public order and safety.” …

Prosecutors made generous use of their right to bring all cases of ordinary criminality before the irregular courts, because—as the Reich Ministry of Justice observed—they obviously had “more faith in the Special Courts” than in the regular ones. For this reason, the percentage of cases they dealt with in relation to the total was continually on the rise. In Hamburg, for example, from 1936 to 1939 only one out of every six criminal trials took place before the Special Court; by 1943 the proportion was already two thirds. Although the large number of cases dealt with was due partly to the increased number of such courts, it resulted in large measure as well from the speed with which the courts reached their decisions. In official language, the term “summary courts of the inner front” came into common usage, a reference not only to the short work that was made of trials there but also to the brutally harsh sentences passed. As high-ranking bureaucrats noted with satisfaction, they were “not very timid about long penitentiary sentences or the death penalty.”

The full extent of these “energetic” judges’ ruthlessness is illustrated by the case of Georg Hopfe, an office messenger who had been wounded in the war. On March 24, 1944, Hopfe and a friend who happened to be on home leave went on a pub crawl through Weimar; somewhere along the way, they were joined by a laborer named Fritz Nauland. After they had each drunk about six beers and had started for home, there was an air raid. When they saw a burning building that had been hit by bombs and several soldiers and rescue crewmen standing around waiting for the fire trucks to arrive, they decided to pitch in and do something at once. Nauland broke down the door, and the three men helped to save some of the building’s contents. In the course of this effort, Hopfe helped himself to an open bottle of perfume from a collection of them and later put a knockwurst in his coat pocket. Nauland took two bars of soap. For this, Hopfe was summoned before the Weimar Special Court on April 11 as an “asocial element.” A medical expert testified that the office messenger was “feebleminded to a slight degree,” and he freely admitted everything, since he considered the charges trivial: he and his friends had saved objects of much greater value by their courageous intervention, and he testified that he had only taken the knockwurst because he had not had anything to eat all evening. These circumstances did not in the least exonerate the accused in the eyes of the court, for “the value of the objects stolen is irrelevant.” It was just as irrelevant that he had not broken into an evacuated house in order to loot it—this alone would have been sufficient to constitute the crime of looting—but rather to rescue the property of the absent owners; the court found him guilty of looting “according to the intent of the law and healthy public opinion.” The “vile attitude evinced by the deed” and the “baseness of his character” revealed Hopfe to the court as an enemy of the people who deserved the death penalty: “Whoever commits such a despicable crime places himself outside the bounds of society.” Fritz Nauland had already been condemned to death by the same court earlier on account of the two bars of soap.

The Nazi leaders had dreamed of a judicial system in which the harshest of sentences could be imposed after a minimum of formalities, and with the Special Courts this wish was fulfilled. In their daily practice, the judges of these courts carried out their task of “intimidating the general public through psychological terror” to the complete satisfaction of the country’s leaders.

******

THE NUREMBERG LAWS ON CITIZENSHIP AND RACE (September 1935)

FROM: Hitler’s Third Reich, ed. Louis L. Snyder (Chicago, 1981), 211-214.

Even after the elimination of the radical leadership of the SA, its sporadic violence, especially against Jews continued. With the Olympic Games coming to Berlin the next year, Hitler and the NSDAP sought to recognize the motives of the SA and some party leaders, such as Julius Streicher, but at the same time to discourage extra-legal violence. In September 1935 the Nuremberg Laws on Citizenship and Race were decreed. They deprived Jews of the citizenship and forbade their marrying non-Jews. The laws also defined who was a Jew, which involved a series of gradations of “mixed bloods” (Mischlinge). Jews living in the Third Reich were essentially expelled from the professions and forced to work mainly as menial laborers or small shopkeepers. Many could not find any work at all. Unlike the earlier boycott of Jewish stores, the public reaction to these laws was largely favorable.

The Reich Citizenship Law of September 15, 1935

THE REICHSTAG HAS ADOPTED by unanimous vote the following law, which is herewith promulgated.

ARTICLE 1. (1) A subject of the state is one who belongs to the protective union of the German Reich, and who, therefore, has specific obligations to the Reich. (2) The status of subject is to be acquired in accordance with the provisions of the Reich and the state Citizenship Law.

ARTICLE 2. (1) A citizen of the Reich may be only one who is of German or kindred blood, and who, through his behavior, shows that he is both desirous and personally fit to serve loyally the German people and the Reich. (2) The right to citizenship is obtained by the grant of Reich citizenship papers. (3) Only the citizen of the Reich may enjoy full political rights in consonance with the provisions of the laws.

ARTICLE 3. The Reich Minister of the Interior, in conjunction with the Deputy to the Fuehrer, will issue the required legal and administrative decrees for the implementation and amplification of this law.

First Supplementary Decree of November 14, 1935

On the basis of Article 3 of the Reich Citizenship Law of September 15, 1935, the following is hereby decreed:

ARTICLE 1. (1) Until further provisions concerning citizenship papers, all subjects of German or kindred blood who possessed the right to vote in the Reichstag elections when the Citizenship Law came into effect, shall, for the present, possess the rights of Reich citizens. The same shall be true of those upon whom the Reich Minister of the Interior, in conjunction with the Deputy to the Führer shall confer citizenship (2) The Reich Minister of the Interior, in conjunction with the Deputy to the Führer, may revoke citizenship.

ARTICLE 2. (1) The provisions of Article 1 shall apply also to subjects who are of mixed Jewish blood. (2) An individual of mixed Jewish blood is one who is descended from one or two grandparents who, racially, were full Jews, insofar that he is not a Jew according to Section 2 of Article 5. Full-blooded Jewish grandparents are those who belonged to the Jewish religious community.

ARTICLE 3. Only citizens of the Reich, as bearers of full political rights, can exercise the right of voting in political matters, and have the right to hold public office. The Reich Minister of the Interior, or any agency he empowers, can make exceptions during the transition period on the matter of holding public office. These measures do not apply to matters concerning religious organizations.

ARTICLE 4. (1) A Jew cannot be a citizen of the Reich. He cannot exercise the right to vote; he cannot occupy public office. (2) Jewish officials will be retired as of December 31, 1935. In the event that such officials served at the front in the World War either for Germany or her allies, they shall receive as pension, until they reach the age limit, the full salary last received, on the basis of which their pension would have been computed. They shall not, however, be promoted according to their seniority in rank. When they reach the age limit, their pension will be computed again, according to the salary last received on which their pension was to be calculated. …

ARTICLE 5. (1) A Jew is an individual who is descended from at least three grandparents who were, racially, full Jews. (2) A Jew is also an individual who is descended from two full-Jewish grandparents if: (a) he was a member of the Jewish religious community when this law was issued, or joined the community later; (b) when the law was issued, he was married to a person who was a Jew, or was subsequently married to a Jew; (c) he is the issue from a marriage with a Jew, in the sense of Section 1, which was contracted after the coming into effect of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor of September 15, 1935; (d) he is the issue of an extramarital relationship with a Jew, according to Section 1, and born out of wedlock after July 31, 1936.

ARTICLE 6. (1) Insofar as there are, in the laws of the Reich or in the decrees of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and its affiliates, certain requirements for the purity of German blood, which extend beyond Article 5, the same remain untouched.

ARTICLE 7. The Führer and Chancellor of the Reich is empowered to release anyone from the provisions of these administrative decrees.

The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, September 15, 1935

Imbued with the knowledge that the purity of German blood is the necessary prerequisite for the existence of the German nation, and inspired by an inflexible will to maintain the existence of the German nation for all future times, the Reichstag has unanimously adopted the following law, which is now enacted:

ARTICLE 1. (1) Any marriages between Jews and citizens of German or kindred blood are herewith forbidden. Marriages entered into despite this law are invalid, even if they are arranged abroad as a means of circumventing this law. (2) Annulment proceedings for marriages may be initiated only by the Public Prosecutor.

ARTICLE 2. Extramarital relations between Jews and citizens of German or kindred blood are herewith forbidden.

ARTICLE 3. Jews are forbidden to employ as servants in their households female subjects of German or kindred blood who are under the age of forty-five years.

ARTICLE 4. (1) Jews are prohibited from displaying the Reich and national flag and from showing the national colors. (2) However, they may display the Jewish colors. The exercise of this right is under state protection.

ARTICLE 5. (1) Anyone who acts contrary to the prohibition noted in Article 1 renders himself liable to penal servitude. (2) The man who acts contrary to the prohibition of Article 2 will be punished by sentence to either a jail or penitentiary. (3) Anyone who acts contrary to the provisions of Articles 3 and 4 will be punished with a jail sentence up to a year and with a fine, or with one of these penalties.

ARTICLE 6. The Reich Minister of Interior, in conjunction with the Deputy to the Führer and the Reich Minister of Justice, will issue the required legal and administrative decrees for the implementation and amplification of this law.

ARTICLE 7. This law shall go into effect on the day following its promulgation, with the exception of Article 3, which shall go into effect on January 1, 1936.

******

THE “CRYSTAL NIGHT” POGROM AGAINST GERMANY’S JEWS (November 9, 1938)

FROM: The Nazi Germany Sourcebook, trans. and ed. Roderick Stackelberg and Sally Winkle (London: Routledge, 2002), 222-226.

In 1938 the Nazis escalated efforts to force Jews to leave Germany by further depriving them of their ability to make a living. These efforts culminated with “Crystal Night” (Reichskristallnacht) on November 9-10—the wide spread destruction of Jewish property. Although the Nazis claimed it was a “spontaneous” action on the part of the German people in reaction to the assassination of a minor German official in Paris by a Jewish teenager, documents reveal it to be centrally orchestrated. The actions of that night were quickly followed with additional orders. A selection of these documents follows.

A. Orders issued to police by Gestapo Headquarters

To all state police offices and state police administrative offices. Berlin, Nov. 9, 1938

This teletype message is to be transmitted in the most rapid way.

1. Actions against the Jews and in particular against their synagogues will occur in a short time in all of Germany. They are not to be hindered. However, it is to be made certain, in agreement with the ordinary police, that plundering and similar law-breaking will be held to a minimum.

2. Insofar as important archive material is present in the synagogues, it is to be secured by immediate measures.

3. The seizure of some 20 to 30 thousand Jews in the Reich is to be prepared. Wealthy Jews above all are to be chosen. More detailed directives will appear in the course of this night. …

This teletype is secret.

Gestapo: H. Muller

B. Order of Chief of the SS Security Service (SD)

Teletype Message Munich, November 10, 1938, 1:20 a.m.

To all State Police Main Offices and Field Offices

To all SD Main and Sub-Sectors

SECRET

Urgent—to be submitted immediately to the chief or his deputy

SUBJECT: MEASURES AGAINST JEWS TONIGHT

Because of the attempt on the life of von Rath, Legation Secretary in Paris, demonstrations against the Jews are to be expected in the entire Reich in the course of this night—from the 9th to the 10th of November 1938. For the handling of these actions the following directions are issued:

1. The chiefs of the State Police Offices or their deputies will immediately after receipt of this teletype message establish telephone contact with the political leadership offices … within their region and arrange a conference about the handling of the demonstrations. … In this conference the political leadership offices are to be informed that the German police have received the following directives from the Reichsführer of the SS and the Chief of the German Police, which directives are to be conformed to by the political leadership offices in an appropriate manner:

(a) Only such measures may be taken which do not jeopardize German life or property (for instance, burning of synagogues only if there is no danger of fires for the neighborhood).

(b) Business establishments and homes of Jews may be destroyed but not looted. The police have been instructed to supervise the execution of these directives and to arrest looters.

(c) In business streets special care is to be taken that non-Jewish establishments will be safeguarded at all cost against damage.

(d) Subjects of foreign countries may not be molested even if they are Jews.

2. Under the provision that the directives given under No. 1 are being complied with, the demonstrations are not to be prevented but merely supervised regarding compliance with the directives.

3. Immediately after receipt of this teletype the archives of the Jewish communities are to be confiscated by the police, so that they will not be destroyed in the course of the demonstrations. Important in this respect is historically valuable material, not recent tax lists, etc. The archives are to be delivered to the respective SD Office. …

5. As soon as the events of this night permit the use of designated officers, as many Jews, particularly wealthy ones, as the local jails will hold are to be arrested in all districts. Initially only healthy male Jews, not too old, are to be arrested. After the arrests have been carried out the appropriate concentration camp is to be contacted immediately with a view to a quick transfer of the Jews to the camps. Special care is to be taken that Jews arrested on the basis of this directive will not be mistreated.

The receipt of this teletype is to be confirmed by the State Police Director or a deputy via teletype to the Secret State Police Office into the hands of SS Colonel Muller.

[signed] Heydrich, SS General [Gruppenfuhrer]

C. Decree relating to the payment of a fine by the Jews of German nationality, November 12, 1938

The hostile attitude of Jewry towards the German people and Reich, an attitude that does not even shrink from committing cowardly murder, makes decisive defensive action and harsh atonement necessary. I order, therefore, by virtue of the decree concerning the execution of the Four Year Plan of October 18, 1936 as follows:

1. On the community of Jews in Germany the payment of a contribution of 1,000,000,000 Reichsmark to the German Reich is imposed.

2. Provisions for the implementation will be issued by the Reich Minister of Finance in agreement with the Reich ministers concerned.

Berlin, November 12, 1938

The Commissioner for the Four Year Plan Goering, Field Marshal

D. Order eliminating Jews from German economic life, November 12, 1938

On the basis of the Decree of 18 October 1936 for the execution of the Four Year Plan, the following is ordered:

ARTICLE I

1. From January 1, 1939 operation of retail shops or mail order houses as well as independent handicrafts businesses is forbidden to Jews.

2. Moreover from the same date it is forbidden to Jews to offer goods or services in markets of any kind, fairs, or exhibitions, or to advertise such or accept orders therefor.

3. Jewish shops operated in violation of this order will be closed by police.

ARTICLE 2

1. No Jew can manage a firm according to the interpretation of the term “manager” under the Law for National Labor of January 20, 1934.

2. If a Jew is an executive in a business concern he may be dismissed with notice of six weeks. At expiration of this period all claims resulting from the employee’s contract, especially claims for severance pay or pensions, become null and void.

ARTICLE 3

1. No Jew can be a member of a cooperative society.

2. Jewish members of cooperatives lose membership from December 21, 1938. No notice is necessary.

ARTICLE 4

The Reich Economic Minister in consultation with other Reich ministers whose competencies are involved are empowered to issue regulations required by this decree. They may permit exceptions insofar as this is necessary for the transfer of Jewish firms into non-Jewish hands, the liquidation of Jewish businesses, or in special cases to insure the availability of supplies.

Berlin, November 12, 1938

The Commissioner for the Four Year Plan, Goering, Field Marshal

******

GERMAN GUN LAWS, 1938

The March 1938 Weapons Law Is significantly longer than those of the Republic. It contains provisions (that are omitted here) that relate to firearms manufacturers, importers, and dealers; to acquisition and carrying of firearms by police, military, and other official personnel; to the maximum fees which can be charged for permits; to tourists bringing firearms into Germany; and to the fines and other penalties to be levied for violations. It should be remembered that in 1938 laws were decreed by executive officials rather than passed by the Reichstag.

A. German Weapons Law (18 March 1938)

§1

Handguns may be purchased only on submission of a Weapons Acquisition Permit, which must be used within one year from the date of issue. Muzzle-loading handguns are exempted from the permit requirement.

§2

Holders of a permit to carry weapons or of a hunting license do not need a Weapons Acquisition Permit in order to acquire a handgun.

§3

A hunting license authorizes its bearer to carry hunting weapons and handguns.

§4

Firearms and ammunition, as well as swords and knives, may not be sold to minors under the age of 18 years.

§5

Whoever carries a firearm outside of his dwelling, his place of employment, his place of business, or his fenced property must have on his person a Weapons Permit. A permit is not required, however, for carrying a firearm for use at a police-approved shooting range.

§6

A permit to acquire a handgun or to carry firearms may only be issued to persons whose trustworthiness is not in question and who can show a need for a permit. In particular, a permit may not be issued to:

1. persons under the age of 18 years;

2. legally incompetent or mentally retarded persons;

3. Gypsies or vagabonds;

4. persons under mandatory police supervision [i.e., on parole] or otherwise temporarily without civil rights;

5. persons convicted of treason or high treason or known to be engaged in activities hostile to the state;

6. persons who for assault, trespass, a breach of the peace, resistance to authority, a criminal offense or misdemeanor, or a hunting or fishing violation were legally sentenced to a term of imprisonment of more than two weeks, if three years have not passed since the term of imprisonment.

§7

The manufacture, sale, carrying, possession, and import of the following are prohibited

1. “trick” firearms, designed so as to conceal their function (e.g., cane guns and belt-buckle pistols);

2. any firearm equipped with a silencer and any rifle equipped with a spotlight;

3. cartridges with .22 caliber, hollow-point bullets.

B. Regulations Against Jews’ Possession of Weapons (11 November 1938)

With a basis in § 31 of the Weapons Law of 18 March 1928 (Reichsgesetzblatt I, p. 265), Article III of the Law on the Reunification of Austria with Germany of 13 March 1938 (Reichsgesetzblatt I, p. 237), and § 9 of the Fuhrer and Chancellor’s decree on the administration of the Sudeten-German districts of 1 October 1928 (Reichsgesetzblatt 1, p. 1331 ) are the following ordered:

§ 1

Jews (§ 5 of the First Regulations of the German Citizenship Law of 14 November 1935, Reichsgesetzblatt 1, p. 1332) are prohibited from acquiring, possessing, and carrying firearms and ammunition, as well as truncheons or stabbing weapons. Those now possessing weapons and ammunition are at once to turn them over to the local police authority.

§ 2

Firearms and ammunition found in a Jew’s possession will be forfeited to the government without compensation.

§ 3

The Minister of the Interior may make exceptions to the Prohibition in § 1 for Jews who are foreign nationals. He can entrust other authorities with this power.

§ 4

Whoever willfully or negligently violates the provisions of § 1 will be punished with imprisonment and a fine. In especially severe cases of deliberate violations, the punishment is imprisonment in a penitentiary for up to five years.

§ 5

For the implementation if this regulation, the Minister of the Interior waives the necessary legal and administrative provisions.

§ 6

This regulation is valid in the state of Austria and in the Sudeten-German districts.

******

LAW FOR THE PREVENTION OF GENETICALLY DISEASED OFFSPRING

(July 14, 1933)

FROM: The Nazi Germany Sourcebook, trans. and ed. Roderick Stackelberg and Sally Winkle (London: Routledge, 2002), 154-155.

This law represents one of the earliest implementations of Nazi racial policy. This type of law had its adherents in the Weimar Republic as well as other countries such as the United States. It led to the sterilization of about 400,000 people. It was later expanded to include habitual criminals and “asocials,” including people receiving welfare payments. It was forerunner to the T-4 (“Euthanasia”) Program of the late 1930s.

The Reich Government has passed the following law, which is hereby announced:

PAR. I

1. Anyone who is suffering from a hereditary disease can be sterilized by a surgical operation if, according to the experiences of medical science, it is to be expected with great probability that his offspring will suffer from serious hereditary physical or mental defects.

2 Those who suffer from any of the following diseases are considered to be suffering from a hereditary disease within the meaning of this law: (1) Mental deficiency from birth; (2) Schizophrenia; (3) Circular [manic-depressive] illness ; (4) Hereditary epilepsy; … (6) Hereditary blindness; (7) Hereditary deafness; (8) Serious hereditary physical deformation.

3. Furthermore, persons suffering severely from alcoholism can be sterilized.

PAR. 2

1. The person to be sterilized has the right to make an application. If this person is incapacitated or under tutelage because of mental deficiency or is not yet 18, the legal representative has the right to make an application but needs the consent of the court dealing with matters of guardianship to do so. In other cases of limited capacity the application needs the consent of the legal representative. If someone who has attained his or her majority has received someone to look after his or her person, the consent of the latter is necessary.

2. A certificate from a physician approved for the German Reich is to be attached to the application, to the effect that the person to be sterilized has been informed of the nature and results of sterilization.

3. The application can be withdrawn.

PAR 3

Sterilization can also be applied for by the following:

The civil service physician

For the inmates of a sanatorium, hospital, nursing home, or prison, by the head thereof.

PAR. 4

The application is to be made to the office of the Genetic Health Court. …

PAR. 12

1. Once the Court has made its final decision for sterilization it must be carried out even against the will of the person to be sterilized. The civil service physician has to request the necessary measures from the police authorities. Where other measures are insufficient, direct force may be used.

2. If facts that necessitate a renewed investigation of the case come out, the Genetic Health Court must reopen the proceedings and suspend the sterilization. If the application was refused, it is only permissible to reopen the case if new facts have arisen that justify sterilization. …

******

THE T-4 (“EUTHANASIA”) PROGRAM (1939-1941)

FROM: The Nazi Germany Sourcebook, trans. and ed. Roderick Stackelberg and Sally Winkle (London: Routledge, 2002), 332-337.

With the approach of war in 1939, the measures in the sterilization law of 1933 were radicalized to include murder. First physically and mentally handicapped children, then adults were taken to killing centers, where they were murdered by lethal injection or in carbon monoxide gas vans. More than 70,000 people were murdered in this way. The secret code name for the program was “Aktion T-4,” derived from the Berlin address, 4 Tiergartenstrasse (Zoo Street), the headquarters of the program. Although the Nazis never admitted the existence of the program, there was a propaganda campaign to justify it as “euthanasia” (mercy killing). Public protest led by the Protestant and Catholic churches may have been responsible for the ending of the program in late August 1941. There are three documents: Hitler’s authorization of the program, a letter of complaint by the Bishop of Limburg, and a later account by a nurse involved in the killing.

Hitler’s authorization of the killing of the incurably ill

Berlin, September 1, 1939

Reichsleiter [Philipp] Bouhier and Dr. [Karl] Brandt, M.D. are charged with the responsibility of enlarging the authority of certain physicians to be designated by name in such a manner that persons who, according to human judgment, are incurable can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition, be accorded a mercy death.

[signed] A. Hitler

Letter from Bishop of Limburg to the Reich Minister of justice, August 13, 1941

Limburg/Lahn, August 13, 1941

To the Reich Minister of Justice, Berlin 334

Regarding the report submitted on July 16 by the Fulda Bishops’ Conference, I consider it my duty to present the following as a concrete illustration of destruction of so-called “useless life.”

About eight kilometers from Limburg in the little town of Hadamar, on a hill overlooking the town, there is an institution that had formerly served various purposes and of late had been used as a nursing home; this institution was renovated and furnished as a place in which, by consensus of opinion, the above-mentioned euthanasia has been systematically practiced for months—approximately since February 1941. The fact has become known beyond the administrative district of Wiesbaden, because death certificates from a Registry Hadamar-Mönchberg are sent to the home communities. …

Several times a week buses arrive in Hadamar with a considerable number of such victims. School children of the vicinity know this vehicle and say: “There comes the murder-box again.” After the arrival of the vehicle, the citizens of Hadamar watch the smoke rise out of the chimney and are tortured with the ever-present thought of the miserable victims, especially when repulsive odors annoy them, depending on the direction of the wind.

The effect of the principles at work here are: Children call each other names and say, “You’re crazy; you’ll be sent to the baking oven in Hadamar.” Those who do not want to marry, or find no opportunity, say, “Marry, never! Bring children into the world so they can be put into the bottling machine!” You hear old folks say, “Don’t send me to a state hospital! After the feeble-minded have been finished off, the next useless eaters whose turn will come are the old people.”

All God-fearing men consider this destruction of helpless beings as crass injustice. And if anybody says that Germany cannot win the war, if there is still a just God, these expressions are not the result of a lack of love of fatherland but of a deep concern for our people. The population cannot grasp that systematic actions are carried out which in accordance with Par. 211 of the German criminal code are punishable with death! High authority as a moral concept has suffered a severe shock as a result of these events. The official notice that N.N. had died of a contagious disease and that for that reason his body has to be burned no longer finds credence, and such official notices, which are no longer believed, have further undermined the ethical value of the concept of authority.

Officials of the Secret State Police, it is said, are trying to suppress discussion of the Hadamar occurrences by means of severe threats. But the knowledge and the conviction and the indignation of the population cannot be changed by it; the conviction will be increased with the bitter realization that discussion is prohibited with threats but that the actions themselves are not prosecuted under penal law. …

I beg you most humbly, Herr Reich Minister, in the sense of the report of the Episcopate of July 16 of this year, to prevent further transgressions of the Fifth Commandment of God.

[signed] Dr. Hilfrich

I am submitting copies of this letter to the Reich Minister of the Interior and the Reich Minister for Church Affairs.

Testimony of Nurse Berta Netz, Munich, 1962

In our ward there were children of both sexes, from infants up to about 16 to 18 years of age. They were extremely deformed children, epileptics, and mentally deficient children. They could only be kept busy with rudimentary games and by singing; the sick children could not be expected to do any real work. The adult patients also in our ward were women from the ages of 20 all the way to the elderly. The women were also mentally deficient, epileptic, etc., some of whom could be occupied with simple work such as darning socks or braiding rope.

In answer to the urgent charge and detailed discussions, I will now describe how I first became involved with the killing of a mentally ill patient and in what way the killings that came later were ordered and carried out.

I became aware for the first time around the fall of 1942 that killings were being carried out on our station. … It was still in the fall of 1942 when a newly admitted patient came to our station. It was a mentally deficient girl, about 17 or 18 years old, and Frau Dr. Wernicke ordered her to be sent to the isolation room. Some time after the admittance Frau Dr. Wernicke ordered injections of 2 cc of Morphine-Scopolamin as the patient’s treatment. The girl was then given daily injections of 2 cc of Morphine-Scopolamin for about 14 days. … The treatment was carried out mainly by head nurse Ratajczak. On the orders of Amanda Ratajczak I had to administer the aforementioned dosage of MS to one of the upper arms of the patient maybe two or three times during the time span mentioned above. I did not give any thought to this treatment at the time. But when the girl receiving this treatment died after 14 days, of course I came to the conclusion that her death had been caused solely by the injections given to her. Starting in that fall of 1942, adult patients and also children were often moved to the so-called isolation room. Of course in the meantime I realized the purpose of these transfers. But I could not bring myself to speak with anyone about it. On the one hand I was forbidden to do so by the pledge of secrecy, which was especially emphasized to me by the hospital director Grabowski and the head physician Dr. Wernicke. On the other hand as a nurse previously stationed in Stralsund, I had hardly any contact with the other nurses from Treptow and Obrawalde. Our living arrangements were also determined accordingly, so that only nurses who knew each other from before and had previously worked together in other institutions came into contact with each other. The selection of patients slated to be killed was made by head physician Dr. Wernicke. Usually before her rounds she obtained the medical histories, which were kept in a cabinet in the doctors’ room. During her rounds Dr. Wernicke examined the patient once more and then made decisions accordingly.

Therefore about once or twice a week adult patients or children were transferred to the isolation room on orders from Frau Dr. Wernicke. The patients transferred there were undressed, dressed in a nightgown, and put to bed. Frau Dr. Wernicke ordered transfers to the isolation room only on workdays, not including Saturdays. At the same time as the transfer order, Frau Dr. Wernicke determined the medication to be administered according to the patient’s age and constitution. … In general, on the orders of Dr. Wernicke there was only one patient at a time sent to the isolation room. It was relatively rare that both beds were occupied in this room. Each time after the transferred patients had been put to bed, the five (or fewer) tablets of Veronal were mixed into a glass of sugar water. Either head nurse Ratajczak or I got the tablets from the medicine cabinet and administered them. Station nurse Jankow never prepared any medications herself. Generally, after some encouragement, the patients drank the dissolved tablets without further ado. After the patients had swallowed the Veronal preparation they were give a glass of clear water to wash it down.

I cannot for the life of me remember a time when the Veronal preparation was not effective. Always after about a half-hour the patients were either asleep or in a semiconscious state. In answer to further questions I declare that no other medication except Veronal in tablet form was administered. Also as far as I know, no one used stomach probes or enemas on our station. After the above-mentioned half-hour had elapsed, the adult patient or child who was in the isolation room at the time was injected with morphine-scopolamin. When I had to give these injections, I first made sure that the patient was really asleep. … Once I had clearly determined that the patient was asleep, I administered the morphine-scopolamin from a filled syringe into the upper left arm of the patient or child. … The injections on our station were only carried out by head nurse Ratajczak and me. After the patients were in a sleeping state, further assistance was not necessary.

The rounds were always made in the early morning hours. Right after that the patient was transferred to the isolation room, Veronal was administered, and a half hour later the injection of morphine-scopolamin was given. About noon or sometimes in the afternoon head physician Dr. Wernicke would confirm the death of the patient who had been sent to the isolation room. About two hours later, that would be in the late afternoon, the bodies were taken from our station to the morgue by male patients. …I myself never had anything to do with removing the corpses, nor did I ever entrust any of our nurses with that job. I also never went to the morgue. We wrapped the corpses in sheets and turned them over to the men from the graveyard commando. After cleaning, the sheets were returned to our station. …

I did not dare to speak with anyone at all about the incidents in Obrawalde. I was of course a member of the NSDAP and also a member of the National Socialist Women’s Organization, but I never went to a meeting.

I did not feel at all obligated because of my membership in the NSDAP to carry out all the orders given to me. As a nurse in mental institutions for many years I really did see it in some respects as a relief that the most seriously ill patients were released from their suffering by inducing their deaths. I can also say with a clear conscience that only very seriously ill patients on our station were killed.

As I mentioned before, it was not my affiliation with the party, but my subordinate relationship as a nurse and especially as a civil servant that obligated and compelled me to follow all the orders that Frau Dr. Wernicke gave me.

To the question of whether a refusal was perhaps possible, I must say that I did not dare to refuse. I always believed that if I refused, I would have to count on being sent to a concentration camp or some similar place. In answer to a further question I declare that I am not actually aware of any concrete case in which a nurse who refused to cooperate with the killing action was in any way prosecuted afterwards. Without being able to offer proof, I do however vaguely remember that a Fräulein Seel, who was previously in Kückenmühle, was sent from Obrawalde to a concentration camp or someplace like that, because she resisted some kind of orders. …

Of course I understood that what was happening in Obrawalde was wrong. But the assistance and the duties I had to perform there belonged to my profession, which I had pursued for many years, and which had become a part of me. I did not see any possibility of evading the orders of the head physician. As I performed each task, whether it was transferring patients or administering medication, I had certain inhibitions, and I really did not do anything willingly or on my own. The obligation and the duty to carry out everything as ordered was always hanging over me. The environment in which we lived as nurses was the world of the mentally ill. We hardly ever left the institution; we had a great deal of work to do and hardly had any contact with the outside world. …

I received a Christian upbringing as a child at home and also later. I could not at all reconcile the killing action in Obrawalde with my moral and Christian views. At that time I was very often alone, surrounded by my own thoughts; I stood face to face with myself, as it were, and cried. …

******

THE “EVACUATION” OF GERMAN JEWS (1942)

FROM: Inside Hitler’s Germany, ed. Benjamin Sax and Dieter Kuntz (Lexington/MA, 1992), 423-425.

Although there were numberous restrictions on German Jews causing great hardship, they, unlike eastern European Jews, had been largely spared from mass murder. That ended with the conclusion of the Wannsee Conference. In early 1942 the SS then began collecting information on the Jews remaining in Germany. The following directives issued in June provided detailed instructions for the “evacuation” (a euphemism for “transportation to a death camp”) of Jews to the East.

INSTRUCTIONAL PAMPHLET FOR OFFICIALS ENGAGED IN THE EVACUATION SCHEDULED FOR JUNE 11, 1942, FRANKFURT AM MAIN

Jews will be evacuated from the state police district and transported to the East. You have been designated to carry out this project, and you must accordingly follow the instructions contained in this pamphlet as well as the orally communicated instructions. I expect you to carry out this order with the necessary toughness, correctness, and accuracy. Only full-blooded Jews will be expelled. Stateless Jews are basically to be treated like German Jews. The Jews will attempt to soften you through pleas or threats or they may be obstinate. You must not allow yourself to be influenced in any way and you must not allow anything to interfere with the performance of your duty. …

You are to proceed accordingly:

1. At the designated hour you are to go to the home of the Jews you are assigned to. Should the Jews refuse to let you in or refuse to open the door, one of you must stay there while the other immediately notifies the closest police station. Once inside the Jewish apartment you are to call all members of the family together and read aloud the state police decree you received along with these instructions. The Jews are from then on to remain in one room, which you will select. A second official will remain with the family members the entire time. In the meantime you will deal with the head of the household.

2. You will accompany the head of the household through the residence. If heating stoves are in operation, no more coal is to be put on the fire. If there are slow-combustion stoves in use (such as Dutch tiled stoves or something similar), you must unscrew the oven door in order for the fire to die out while you are still in the apartment. The fire must be put out before you leave the residence.

3. Then you and the head of the household will proceed to pack a suitcase or knapsack. Care must be taken to include only that which is allowed under the provisions of the state police decree. You are responsible for ensuring that valuables, which, according to the decree, are not to be taken along, are not packed in the suitcase. The suitcase is then secured by you with sealing tape. If it is necessary to check with other family members, you will accompany the head of the household back to the room where the other Jews are waiting and then let them tell you what they want to have packed. If necessary you can let the head of the household remain in the room with the others and accompany the wife of the Jew or another family member to continue the packing.

4. Woolen blankets that you are allowed to take along must be rolled up or folded so as to facilitate their transportation.

5. Accompany the head of the household through the residence (including cellars and attics) to determine what (perishable) foodstuffs and livestock are on hand. You and the head of the household are to gather these items, if possible, and deposit them in the entry hail. You then inform the … National Socialist People’s Welfare Organization and have these items removed.

6. Valuables, savings account books, securities, and cash sums exceeding the allowed amount are to be collected by the Jew. These items or valuables are to be accepted by the officials, listed in an inventory, and packed in a bag or envelope. This container is to be sealed and marked with the name and address of the owner. The inventory is to be checked for completeness by the official and the Jew and acknowledged by signature.

STATE POLICE DECREE CONCERNING THE EVACUATION OF JEWS: (to be read to Jews by the police)

You are hereby notified that you are to vacate your residence within two hours. The officials in charge are obliged to remain with you until you have packed your suitcases and put your residence in order, and then they will escort you to the collecting point. You are asked to leave keys in various boxes and cabinets and to leave the inner door keys as well. If you have these keys on a certain key chain, they are to be removed and placed in their respective locks. The house and corridor keys are to be tied with a small ribbon along with a piece of cardboard listing your name, address, and identity number. These keys you will turn over to the official in charge. Before you leave your residence you must hand in the statement of assets, which is to be carefully filled out and signed.

You are to take the following with you:

1. Currency of 50 marks.

2. A knapsack or handbag with linen and utensils necessary for basic daily needs.

3. A complete set of clothes (two coats and a double set of underwear may be worn).

4. Food supply for several days, cutlery, plate, bowl, drinking cup, bottle.

5. Passport, identity card, work permit and other identity papers as well as food ration stamps, potato and coal ration cards. These are not to be packed but are to be carried on one’s person.

You are not allowed to bring: Securities, foreign currency, savings account books, and so on, as well as valuables of any kind (gold, silver, platinum), nor any livestock. Wedding bands and a plain watch may be brought. Valuables and precious metals are to be placed in a bag or envelope and handed over to the official. … The baggage that can be taken along is to have an identifying tag. … Each person is also to wear a nameplate around the neck listing name, birth date, and identity number. …

******

VICTOR KLEMPERER BEARS WITNESS (1942)

FROM: Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, Translated by Martin Chalmers (New York, 1999), vol. II: 48, 61, 65-66.

Klemperer was a Jewish-German professor of French literature at the University of Dresden. He was a dedicated diary writer until his death at the age of 78 in 1960, and what follows is a selection from the diaries he kept from January 1933 (just before Hitler came to power) to June 1945 (a month after World War II in Europe ended). These diaries had to be hidden, for if they were discovered it would mean death. Klemperer was able to survive the whole Nazi regime, which in itself was amazing. There were two main reasons for this. First, he was a veteran of World War I and second, he was married to a Christian-German woman. Out of the 1,265 registered Jews in Dresden in 1941 (when it was no longer legal to emigrate), Klemperer was among the 198 remained on February 13, 1945, when they were ordered to report for deportation to camps. That same night, the Allied bombing of Dresden began, and in the confusion, Klemperer tore off his yellow start and fled with his wife. They were able to escape the authorities until the Allied armies reached Germany. What follows are parts of three entries from 1942.

May 8, Friday midday

{From September 1, 1941 on, all Jews over six years old had to wear a yellow star that identified them as Jews.]

On Wasaplatz [a square] two gray-haired ladies, teachers of about sixty years of age, such as often came to my lectures and talks. They stop, one comes toward me, holding out her hand, I think: a former auditor, and raise my hat. But I do not know her after all, nor does she introduce herself. She only smiles and shakes my hand, says: “you know why!” and goes off before I can say a word. Such demonstrations (dangerous for both parties!) are said to happen frequently. The opposite of the recent: ”Why are you still alive, you rogue?!” And both of these in Germany, and in the middle of the twentieth century.

May 27, Wednesday, midday

This afternoon Eva is going to Pirna [a small village outside of Dresden where a friend lives] to fetch some money. I shall give her some diary pages of the last few weeks to take with her [so the friend can hide them in a suitcase]. After the house search I found several books, which had been taken off the shelf, lying on the desk. If one of them had been the Greek dictionary, if the [diary] manuscript pages had fallen out and had thus aroused suspicion, it would have undoubtedly meant my death. One is murdered for lesser misdemeanors. … So these parts will go today. But I shall go on writing. That is my heroism. I will bear witness, precise witness!

June 2, Tuesday toward evening

New decrees in judeos [against the Jews]. The choker is being pulled ever tighter; they are wearing us down with ever new tricks. All the things, great and small, that have accumulated in the last few years! And a pinprick is sometimes more agonizing than a blow with a club. I shall list the decrees once and for all: 1) To be home after eight or nine in the evening. Inspection! 2) Expelled from one’s own house. 3) Ban on radio, ban on telephone. 4) Ban of theaters, cinemas, concerts, museums. 5) Ban on subscribing to or purchasing periodicals. 6) Ban on using public transport: three phases: a) buses banned, only front platform of train permitted, b) all use ban except to work, c) to work on foot unless one lives 2 1/2. Miles away or is sick (but it is a hard fight to get a doctor’s certificate). Also ban on taxicabs, of course. 7) Ban on purchasing “goods in short supply.” 8) Ban on purchasing cigars or any kind of smoking materials. 9) Ban on purchasing flowers. 10) Withdrawal of milk ration card. 11) Ban on going to the barber. 12) Any kind of tradesman [for example, a plumber] can be called only after application to the Community. 13) Compulsory surrender of typewriters, 14) of furs and woolen blankets, 15) of bicycles—it is permissible to cycle to work (Sunday outings and visits by bicycle are forbidden), 16) of deck chairs, 17) of dogs, cats, birds. 18) Ban on leaving the city of Dresden, 19) on entering the railway station, 20) on setting foot on the Ministry embankment, in parks, 21) on using Bürgerwiese [Street] and roads bordering the Great Garden. … This most recent restriction since only yesterday. Also, since the day before yesterday, a ban on entering the market halls. 22) Since September 19 [last year] the Jew’s [yellow] star. 23). Ban on having reserves of foodstuffs at home. (Gestapo also takes away what has been bought on food coupons.) 24) Ban on use of lending libraries. 25) Because of the star all restaurants are closed to us. … 26) No clothing card. 27) No fish card. 28) No special rations, such as coffee, chocolate, fruit, condensed milk. 29) The special taxes. 30) The constantly contracting disposable allowance. Mine at first 600, then 320, now 180 marks. 31) Shopping restricted to one hour (three till four, Saturday twelve till one). I think these 31 points are everything. But all together they are nothing as against the constant threat of house searches, of ill-treatment, of prison, concentration camp, and violent death.

THE NAZI CAMP SYSTEM

FROM: Sam A. Mustafa, Germany in the Modern World: A New History (Lanham/MD, 2011), 185-186.

In keeping with the nature of the Nazi regime, the camp system described by Mustafa was a confusing maze with conflicting goals.

The Nazi state practiced incarceration without legal due process from the moment it began to take power. It became a massive industry unto itself. Over the years the regime proliferated nearly twenty thousand “camps” with different purposes. The term concentration camp is therefore a broad term that can mean several things. For purposes of clarity we should distinguish between six distinct kinds of institutions:

SPECIAL PRISONS or detention centers were set up generally for torture and interrogation, not prolonged incarceration, although some people did indeed spend long periods there, (The Communist leader Ernst Thälmann, for example, spent eleven years in three such prisons before being transferred to Buchenwald, where he was killed,) There were hundreds of special prisons across Germany, from early in the regime.

CONCENTRATION CAMP could refer to any number of institutions where people were imprisoned as punishment, often for political crimes, but in some cases simply for being “undesirable.” Many dissident churchmen, for example, were sent to Dachau, the first big camp, built near Munich in 1933. Homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, Socialists, and Communists, all could be found in these camps, where their punishment was in addition to the extremely harsh treatment usually some form of manual labor. Although their official purpose was not to kill their inmates, the terrible conditions and constant violence meant that inmates routinely died in large numbers. Some concentration camps became huge. At one point Buchenwald held over two hundred thousand inmates, several times more than the population of the nearby city of Weimar.

STALAG was an abbreviation for the German term for “base camp” or “holding camp.” These prisons were run by different branches of the German military and used for Allied prisoners of war. However, the treatment of prisoners varied widely, and the SS-run camps in the east were essentially concentration and slave-labor camps where hundreds of thousands, mostly Soviet prisoners, perished.

LABOR CAMPS were built all over Germany in various sizes. In some cases, particularly in regions with a lot of industry, there might be a central camp and then several “satellite camps” holding only a few hundred inmates who were being used to work in a single nearby business or factory. Some of these smaller camps were very obvious and in the midst of urban areas. In Braunschweig, for example, nine regional satellite camps routinely received prisoners from Auschwitz, Neuengamme, and other larger camps, to work in over fifty local businesses, with one of the satellite camps being practically in the midst of downtown, only four blocks from the main city government buildings. By 1943 labor camps had become the most numerous type of Nazi prisons.

TRANSIT CAMPS were established across occupied Europe, where people were held for varying lengths of time prior to being sent on to some other fate. (Many people who would otherwise have been killed managed to survive because they were rerouted for slave labor.)

DEATH CAMPS (the Germans later named them “Annihilation Camps”) were the largest and least numerous of the institutions. A half dozen were established by the SS beginning in early 1942, and located outside the borders of Germany, in the occupied eastern territories formerly in Poland. Their purpose was entirely genocidal, for “Jews and other enemy races,” although some political and other types of prisoners did end up there. Although there were only six such camps, they accounted for the majority of people murdered during the Holocaust. Auschwitz-Birkenau alone killed over a million people. Transport to a death camp usually resulted in execution by poison gas within forty-eight hours.

The typically ad hoc nature of the Nazi system does not make these classifications easy or simple, since many camps existed that performed multiple functions, or changed over time. The reason there were proportionately more survivors from Auschwitz than from the other death camps, for example, was that it was simultaneously a labor camp, a concentration camp, and a death camp, with three large institutions operating side by side. Nor is it easy to find a single responsible party for the imprisonment and death of people. The Nazi regime had no shortage of organs of oppression, and prisoners could end up in a camp for any number of reasons. By 1942, however, the SS had be come the principle actor in the running of death camps and the transferring of millions of their victims.

******

RUDOLF HOESS DESCRIBES MASS MURDER AT AUSCHWITZ

From Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, vol. VI, compiled by the Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, International Military Trials Nuremberg (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), pp. 787

Rudolf Hoess, who had been in charge of Auschwitz Concentration Camp, was tried as a war criminal by the Allied powers after the defeat of Germany. Hoess’s statement below was presented as evidence at his trial. He was later executed.

I, Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess, being first duly sworn, depose and say as follows:

I am forty-six years old, and have been a member of the NSDAP since 1922; a member of the SS since 1934; a member of the Waffen-SS since 1939. I was a member from December 1, 1934, of the SS Guard Unit, the so-called Deathshead Formation.

I have been constantly associated with the administration of concentration camps since 1934, serving at Dachau until 1938; then as Adjutant in Sachsenhausen from 1938 to May 1, 1940, when I was appointed Commandant of Auschwitz. I commanded Auschwitz until December 1, 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease making a total of dead of about 3,000,000.

This figure represents about 70% or 80% of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries. Included among the executed and burnt were approximately 20,000 Russian prisoners of war (previously screened out of Prisoner of War cages by the Gestapo) who were delivered at Auschwitz in Army transports operated by regular Army officers and men. The remainder of the total number of victims included about 100,000 German Jews, and great numbers of citizens, mostly Jewish, from Holland, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, and other countries. We executed about 400,000 Hungarian Jews alone at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.

The “final solution” of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe. I was ordered to establish extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time, there were already in the General Government [of Poland] three other extermination camps: Belzek, Treblinka and Woizek. I visited Treblinka to find out how they carried out their extermination. The Camp Commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of one-half year. He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto. He used monoxide gas and I did not think that his methods were very efficient. So when set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, I used Zyclon B, which was a crystallized prussic acid that we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening. It took from 3 to 15 minutes to kill the people in the death chamber, depending upon climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. We usually waited about one-half hour before we opened the doors and removed the bodies. After the bodies were removed our special commandos took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses.

Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their 10 gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each. The way we selected our victims was as follows: we had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit to work were sent into the camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated, since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process.

Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under their clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on in Auschwitz.

******

PUBLIC OPINION DURING THE THIRD REICH

FROM: Inside Hitler’s Germany, ed. Benjamin Sax and Dieter Kuntz (Lexington/MA, 1992), 461-466, 480-481.

Public opinion was not constant during the Third Reich. It tended to be more passive toward the regime in general, and any complaints were directed at local Nazi leaders. Deprived of any significant form of organization, the individual grumbled, refused to conform in private while being passive in public, but seldom protested policy or urged overthrow of the regime. After the defeat at Stalingrad in Spring 1943, public opinion became more hostile, even toward Hitler, but still remained cautious. Notice how the following reports—whether from the exiled Social Democratic Party or from Nazi institutions like the Gestapo (Secret Police) or Gauleiter (regional leaders) tended to agree. Notices the dates and sources.

REPORT OF THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN EXILE (SOPADE) (Spring, 1934)

Grumble yes, but to go beyond that and actively resist the regime is another matter—most are not yet prepared to go that far. An example of the cautious and tolerant reserve of the populace is an incident that transpired during the May Day festivities in Hamburg: “After Hitler’s speech came the song ‘Horst-Wessel’ [a Nazi anthem], whereupon many participants refused to offer the Hitler salute. A worker was questioned because of his attitude, was beaten and then ordered to leave the square. He was not arrested, but on the following day his unemployment money was cut off. The incident evoked only indifference among those present. There was no sympathy for the worker; instead, people said: ‘Well, he should at least have saluted!’” …

Gloating over the regime’s problems and passive resistance are characteristic of public attitudes and shed much light on the inner weakness of the opposition to the regime. This inner weakness is underscored by the following report from Baden:

“When one questions the critics as to how they envision a change in the political situation, one receives only a shrugging of the shoulders in response. People hope an economic boycott can be realized or that the army will act. In any case, no one seems to have a concrete formula, choosing instead to wait for some kind of a political accident to occur. [P]eople are more receptive to the idea that change can come about only through action within Germany itself. In this regard, however, people are inclined to believe that if this is the case it could take years for the present system to collapse.”

The weakness of its opponents is a strength of the regime. Its opponents are ideologically and organizationally weak. They are ideologically weak because the masses consist only of dissatisfied people, only grumblers; their dissatisfaction is based solely upon economic reasons. This is especially true of the middle class and farmers. These classes are the most vocal critics today, but their criticism stems from only narrow personal interests. These classes are the least willing to earnestly fight against the regime because they know the least about the need to fight. … Many fear that the collapse of Hitler would bring about a chaotic situation, allowing Bolshevism to come to the fore, and that those who would most immediately be affected would be the middle class and the farmers. The regime’s policy toward the masses is based on this fact.

The opponents of the regime are organizationally weak because it is in the nature of the fascist system to prohibit any organizational gathering of its opponents. The forces of the “reaction” are extraordinarily splintered. Among dedicated groups there are at least five that are monarchist- oriented. The workersí movement continues to be split into socialists and communists, while within these two main orientations there are countless subgroups. … The attitude of the church-based opponents of the regime is not uniform.

SECRET HANNOVER GESTAPO REPORT ON PUBLIC OPINION (August 1935)

Since the populace in general is timid and takes great care not to express its opinion publicly, it is becoming more and more difficult to observe and assess the public’s attitude. Unmistakable, however, is the fact that the internal political situation has lately been considerably tense, which has adversely affected attitudes. Even though trade and industry are apparently being conducted smoothly, a certain public uneasiness and dejection can be observed which manifests itself in varying degrees among various occupational strata. As to the size of the circle so affected, it must be said openly that its extent is much greater than the limits assigned to it by [National Socialist] Party offices, the Party press, and propaganda. It includes not only reactionary segments of the population and those elements subject to their influence, but this deep dissatisfaction reaches also into the Party and to its oldest members—which gives cause for serious concern.

The causes of this attitude, insofar as economic factors are not involved, … can be traced to the conduct of a segment of the lower- ranking leadership of NS organizations. This is especially true of the political officeholders. This has largely contributed to a loss of public confidence in these offices. Hence it is repeatedly said that Party offices continue to be staffed by men who, according to their past and present activities, are not suited for their positions. These men lack all sense of responsibility. Their life-styles and attitudes give rise to criticism, and they simply ignore directives from higher Party offices. The end result is that they undermine the authority and discipline within the Party itself. The general public does not understand that these individuals are not publicly taken to task for their mistakes. The public has the impression that such cases are purposely hushed-up, and that state government officials who feel compelled to take measures out of a sense of duty are being prevented from acting because of pressure being exerted by Party offices. This then inevitably leads to the assumption that the state is powerless. This undermines the authority of the state government. … The Party, especially the political branch, can maintain or improve its image with the public if in future only impeccable, unpretentious, and ideologically and morally schooled Party members are appointed to leading positions.

Another matter that has attracted considerable adverse criticism is the conduct of the press. Large segments of the population harbor the opinion that freedom of the press is being restricted and suppressed, and consequently that the truth is not being reported. Even Party members are critical when unpleasant incidents and punishments for mistakes are not publicized. It goes without saying that enemies of the Party and state are here especially vocal. I feel that it is imperative that change is brought about as soon as possible to remedy this situation. It is obvious that the public’s attitude is being influenced by increased reactionary activity, much of which emanates from circles that include political Catholicism, the Confessional church, and from citizens who refuse to be reeducated and who continue to mask themselves. Periodically even monarchist sentiments are expressed. The reintroduction of compulsory military service is giving rise to the hope of a “fourth Reich” in which the armed forces will exercise authority to the exclusion of the Party.

As far as individual occupational strata are concerned, one can point to economic factors as a cause for negative attitudes. In this regard the situation of the working class merits special attention in that wage rates are creating increased bitter resentment. … The increase in the cost of foodstuffs required on a daily basis, such as potatoes, vegetables, fruit, milk, eggs, and butter, has heightened the dissatisfaction among workers. They maintain that they have never seen such [high] prices. …

As far as the agricultural community is concerned, it seems to be the case that farmers naturally tend to be dissatisfied. … Discordance has been caused by the increase in membership dues payments to the National Food Ministry, especially when the peasant compares these payments to those made in earlier days to the Chamber of Agriculture, the Farmers’ League, or other earlier agricultural associations. Among craftsmen, complaints are heard about a lack of work and competition from department stores, cooperative stores, and Jewish businesses. Time and time again it is said that the Party program has not been adhered to in this matter.

In closing I might add that the mood of the populace, in regard to foreign policy developments, can be seen as a positive one. … There is now a new feeling of optimism that Germany can gradually free itself from its international encirclement. …

SOPADE REPORT ON THE ISOLATION OF WORKERS (November 1935)

The aim of all National Socialist mass organization is the same, no matter if it is Strength Through Joy or the Hitler Youth. These organizations are all attempting to “collect” or “look after” all citizens while actually taking away their independence and keeping them from coming to their senses. … Ley [head of the Labor Front] recently admitted in public that the “citizen” should no longer have a private life; that he should give up his private bowling club. This monopolizing of organizations is attempting to take away all independence; to squelch initiatives to form even simple associations; to keep like-minded people apart; to isolate the individual and at the same time bind him to the state’s organization.

The National Socialists know quite well that a sense of solidarity is the main source of strength for the working class, and that is why all measures directed toward workers are attempting to kill this sense of a need to act as one body. All changes for the worse that they are heaping upon the workers in terms of wages, taxes, and social insurance are set up so as never to affect large groups simultaneously. Otherwise a general deterioration of conditions could create a general resistance movement. These policies of the National Socialists have had serious consequences, in part because the sense of solidarity had already begun to decline during the years of economic crisis. This crisis has brought workers to the point where they disregard the most important success of united action—the standard wage; instead they now seek work at any price.

GAULEITER REPORTS ON POLITICAL JOKES (April 1943)

The enemy is using all sorts of measures in the attempt to shake the mood and attitude of the populace and its trust in the country’s leadership. Therefore no rumor is too stupid, and no joke is too abusive. There will always be fools—aside from those elements who basically have a negative attitude—who will find a grain of truth in this. Many districts report unanimously that, lately, political jokes that deal with the person of the Führer himself have increased tremendously! From among the abundance of jokes, a few have been selected as examples and follow below:

The difference between the sun and Hitler: The sun “rises” in the East, while Hitler “sinks” in the East.

The difference between India and Germany: In India one person starves himself for all, while in Germany all starve for one person.

Young Max tells at school that his cat at home gave birth to kittens. He composed a short rhyme about it: “Our cat had a litter, five in all, four meowed ‘Heil Hitler,’ while one said nothing at all.” Several weeks later the principal came to visit the classroom and, calling on Max, said: “Not long ago you composed such a nice rhyme about your cat, please recite it again.” Upon which little Max began: “Our cat had a litter, five in all, four meowed ‘Heil Moscow,’ while one said nothing at all.” This shocked the teacher, who then demanded to know why the text had suddenly changed. Max answered that it was because four weeks ago the kittens were blind, but now four of them have had their eyes opened.

The Führer, Goering, and Mussolini are in a plane above Munich. They are discussing how they can best make themselves popular with the people of Munich. Goering decides that he is going to throw down lard ration coupons. The Führer decides he will throw down meat ration coupons. Mussolini goes up to the cockpit, pats the pilot on the shoulder, and says: “Give me some advice. I don’t have any lard or meat ration coupons to throw down; what can I do to become popular with the people of Munich?” The pilot advised him to throw the other two passengers down.

******

MILTON MAYER, THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE FREE (1955)

FROM: Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955) pp. 46-53. 56-59, 71-75, 96-99, 125-127, 159, 162, 166-171.

Shortly after World War Two, an American, Milton Mayer, visited Germany to discover what Nazism meant to the average German. For a year he had discussions with ten “average” Germans in a town he calls Kronenberg. The ages and occupations of the ten on “Crystal Night” (Nov. 9, 1938), when synagogues all over Germany—including the one in Kronenberg—were vandalized, were: Karl-Heinz Schwenke, 54, SA-man and janitor (formerly tailor); Gustav Schwenke, 26, soldier (formerly unemployed tailor’s apprentice); Carl Klingelhöfer, 36, cabinetmaker and member of the volunteer fire department; Heinrich Damm, 28, Party headquarters office manager (formerly unemployed salesman); Horstmar Rupprecht, 14, high-school student; Heinrich Wedekind, 51, baker; Hans Simon, 42, bill collector; Johann Kessler, 46, Labor Front inspector (formerly unemployed bank clerk); Heinrich Hildebrandt, 34, high-school teacher; Willy Hofmeister, 57, policeman. Mayer told them that:

I had come to Germany, as a German-descended private person, to bring back to America the life-story of the ordinary German under National Socialism, with the end purpose of establishing better understanding of Germany among my countrymen. The statement was true, and my German academic position gave it weight with them. But my greatest asset was my total ignorance of German—the only language that any of them, except the teacher (who spoke French) could speak. They were my teachers. “Mushi,” the old tailor, Schwenke, would call to his wife, “just listen to the way the Herr Professor says ‘Auf wiedersehen!’” My friends had ample opportunity to display their pedagogy and their patience with the Herr Professor, who was slow, but good-natured.

I did lie to all ten of them on two points: on the advice of my German colleagues and friends, I did not tell them that I was a Jew; nor did I tell them that I had access to other sources of information about them than my private conversations with them.

I think that I may now call all of them, with the excep​tion of the baker, friends of mine. I think that four of the ten, Tailor Schwenke, his son Gustav, Bank Clerk Kessler, and Teacher Hildebrandt (and, possibly, Policeman Hofmeister) told me their stories as fully as the stories were in them to tell. They were none of them, except the teacher, the student, and the bank clerk, at all fluent by temperament, but none of the ten consciously lied to me (in my opinion) except, possibly, Baker Wedekind and Tailor Schwenke, and the latter only on his role in the arson of the synagogue. I found no intolerable discrepancies or contradictions in their individual accounts over months of discussion; memory lapse, normal reserve, and, above all, the confusion and repression inherent in such cataclysmic experiences as theirs seemed to me to explain the small discrepancies and contradictions I observed. At no point did I try to trap any of them.

Only one of my ten Nazi friends saw Nazism as we—you and I—saw it in any respect. This was Hildebrandt, the teacher. And even he then believed, and still believes, in part of its program and practice, “the democratic part.” The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it. As we know Nazism, it was a naked, total tyranny which degraded its adherents and enslaved its opponents and adherents alike; terrorism and terror in daily life, private and public; brute personal and mob injustice at every level of association; a flank attack upon God and a frontal attack upon the worth of the human person and the rights which that worth implies. These nine ordinary Germans knew it absolutely otherwise, and they still know it otherwise. If our view of National Socialism is a little simple, so is theirs. An autocracy? Yes, of course, an autocracy, as in the fabled days of “the golden time” our parents knew. But a tyranny, as you Americans use the term? Nonsense.

When I asked Herr Wedekind, the baker, why he had believed in National Socialism, he said, “Because it promised to solve the unemployment problem. And it did. But I never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody did.”

I thought I had struck pay dirt, and I said, “What do you mean, ‘what it would lead to,’ Herr Wedekind?”

“War,” he said. “Nobody ever imagined it would lead to war.”

The evil of National Socialism began on September 1, 1939; and that was my friend the baker.

Remember—none of these nine Germans had ever trav​eled abroad (except in war); none had ever known or talked with a foreigner or read the foreign press; none ever wanted to listen to the foreign radio when it was legal to do so, and none (except, oddly enough, the policeman) listened to it when it was illegal. They were as uninterested in the outside world as their contemporaries in France—or America. None of them ever heard anything bad about the Nazi regime except, as they believed, from Germany’s enemies, and Germany’s enemies were theirs. “Everything the Russians and the Americans said about us,” said Cabinetmaker Klingelhofer, “they now say about each other.”

Men think first of the lives they lead and the things they see; and not, among the things they see, of the extraordinary sights, but of the sights which meet them in their daily rounds. The lives of my nine friends—and even of the tenth, the teacher—were lightened and brightened by National Socialism as they knew it. And they look back at it now—nine of them, certainly—as the best time of their lives; for what are men’s lives? There were jobs and job security, summer camps for the children and the Hitler Jugend [Youth] to keep them off the streets. What does a mother want to know? She wants to know where her children are, and with whom, and what they are doing. In those days she knew or thought she did; what difference does it make? So things went better at home, and when things go better at home, and on the job, what more does a husband and father want to know? The best time of their lives. There were wonderful ten-dollar holiday trips for the family in the “Strength through Joy” program, to Norway in the summer and Spain in the winter, for people who had never dreamed of a real holiday trip at home or abroad. And in Kronenberg “nobody” (nobody my friends knew) went cold, nobody went hungry, nobody went ill and uncared for. For whom do men know? They know people of their own neighborhood, of their own station and occupation, of their own political (or nonpolitical) views, of their own religion and race. All the blessings of the New Order, advertised everywhere, reached “everybody.”

There were horrors, too, but these were advertised nowhere, reached “nobody.” Once in a while (and only once in a while) a single crusading or sensation-mongering newspaper in America exposes the inhuman conditions of the local county jail; but none of my friends had ever read such a newspaper when there were such in Germany (far fewer there than here), and now there were none. None of the horrors impinged upon the day-to-day lives of my ten friends or was ever called to their attention. There was “some sort of trouble” on the streets of Kronenberg as one or another of my friends was passing by on a couple of occasions, but the police dispersed the crowd and there was nothing in the local paper. You and I leave “some sort of trouble on the streets” to the police; so did my friends in Kronenberg.

The real lives that real people live in a real community have nothing to do with Hitler and Roosevelt or with what Hitler and Roosevelt are doing. Man doesn’t meet the State very often. On November 10, 1938, the day after the arson of the synagogues, an American news service reported a trivial incident from a suburb of Berlin. A mob of children were carrying great sacks of candy out of the smashed shop window of a Jewish-owned candy store, while a crowd of adults, including some of the children’s parents (including, too, a ring of SA men in Brown Shirt uniform), stood watching. An old man walked up, an “Aryan.” He watched the proceedings and then turned to the parents and said to them: “You think you are hurting the Jew. You do not know what you are doing. You are teaching your children to steal.” And the old man walked off, and the parents broke out of the crowd, knocked the candy out of their children’s hands and dragged them wailing away. Man, in the form of the parents, had met the State, in the form of the SA. But it is doubtful if he knew it; after all, the SA men just stood there, without interfering.

In its issue of November 11, 1938, the Kronenberger Zeitung [the town newspaper] carried the following report, at the bottom of page 4, under a very small headline reading Schutzhaft, “Protective Custody”: “In the interest of their own security, a number of male Jews were taken into custody yesterday. This morning they were sent away from the city.” I showed it to each of my ten friends. None of them—including the teacher—remembered ever having seen it or anything like it.

1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939—until September 1, when, as the Head of the Government told them, Poland attacked their country—the little lives of my friends went on, under National Socialism as they had before, altered only for the better, and always for the better, in bread and butter, in housing, health, and hope, wherever the New Order touched them. “No one outside Germany seems to understand this,” said an anti-Nazi woman, who had been imprisoned in 1943, ostensibly for listening to the foreign radio but actually for hiding Jews (which was not technically illegal). “I remember standing on a Stuttgart street corner in 1938, during a Nazi festival, and the enthusiasm, the new hope of a good life, after so many years of hopelessness, the new belief, after so many years of disillusion, almost swept me, too, off my feet. Let me try to tell you what that time was like in Germany: I was sitting in a cinema with a Jewish friend and her daughter of thirteen, while a Nazi parade went across the screen, and the girl caught her mother’s arm and whispered, ‘Oh, Mother, Mother, if I weren’t a Jew, I think I’d be a Nazi!’ No one outside seems to understand how this was.”

The German language, like every other, has some glorious epithets, untranslatable, and wildgewordene Spiessburger is one of them. It means, very roughly, “little men gone wild.” Of themselves, such men would perhaps use the borrowed and Germanicized term Fanatiker. Fanatiker are not to be confused either with Spitzbuben, rascals, or with Bluthunde, hired hoodlums or goons. When I asked (of anti-Nazis and of Nazis) how many genuine Fanatiker there were in the Third Reich, how many little men gone wild, the hazard was never over a million. It must be remembered, especially in connection with Communism in Russia, and even with Fascism in Italy, that the National Socialist movement died young; it never had a chance to rear a whole generation of its own.

And the rest of the seventy million Germans? The rest were not even cogs, in any positive sense at all, in the totalitarian machine. A people like ourselves, who know such systems only by hearsay or by the report of their victims or opponents, tends to exaggerate the actual rela​tionship between man and the State under tyranny. The laws are hateful to those who hate them, but who hates them? It is dangerous, in Nazi Germany, to go to Communist meetings or read the Manchester Guardian, but who wants to go to Communist meetings or read the Manchester Guardian?

In the America of the 1950s one hears, on the one hand, that the country is overcome by mistrust, suspicion, and dread, and, on the other, that nobody is afraid, nobody defamed, nobody destroyed by defamation. Where is the truth? Where was it in Nazi Germany? None of my ten Nazi friends, with the exception of the cryptodemocrat Hildebrandt, knew any mistrust, suspicion, or dread in his own life or among those with whom he lived and worked; none was defamed or destroyed. Their world was the world of National Socialism; inside it, inside the Nazi community, they knew only good-fellowship and the ordinary concerns of ordinary life. They feared the “Bolsheviks” but not one another, and their fear was the accepted fear of the whole otherwise happy Nazi community that was Germany. Outside that community they never went, or saw, or heard; they had no occasion to.

That Nazism in Germany meant mistrust, suspicion, dread, defamation, and destruction we learned from those who brought us word of it—from its victims and opponents whose world was outside the Nazi community and from journalists and intellectuals, themselves non-Nazi or anti-Nazi, whose sympathies naturally lay with the victims and opponents. These people saw life in Germany in non-Nazi terms. There were two truths, and they were not contradictory: the truth that Nazis were happy and the truth that anti-Nazis were unhappy. And in the America of the 1950s—I do not mean to suggest that the two situations are parallel or even more than very tenuously comparable—those who did not dissent or associate with dissenters saw no mistrust or suspicion beyond the great community’s mistrust and suspicion of dissenters, while those who dissented or believed in the right to dissent saw nothing but mistrust and suspicion and felt its devastation. As there were two Americas, so, in a much more sharply drawn division, there were two Germanys. And so, just as there is when one man dreads the policeman on the beat and another waves “Hello” to him, there are two countries in every country. …

It is actual resistance that worries tyrants, not lack of the few hands required to do the dark work of tyranny. What the Nazis had to gauge was the point at which atrocity would awaken the community to the consciousness of its moral habits. This point may be moved forward as the national emergency, or cold war, is moved forward, and still further forward in hot war. But it remains the point that the tyrant must always approach and never pass. If his calculation is too far behind the people’s temper, he faces a palace Putsch; if it is too far ahead, a popular revolution.

It is in this nonlitigable sense, at least, that the Germans as a whole were guilty: nothing was done, or attempted, that they would not stand for. The two exceptions were euthanasia, which was abandoned, and the pagan “Faith Movement” of Alfred Rosenberg, which was aborted. Local hoodlums could beat up Communists or Social Democrats, desecrate Jewish cemeteries or smash Jews’ windows by night; the local police, overseen by the Gestapo, would make a routine and invariably unsuccessful investigation of the assault; and the ordinary demands of decency would be satisfied. The Kronenbergers, being decent folk, would, perhaps, turn over in their beds—and sleep on.

The burning of a synagogue was something else; it approached, closely and almost dangerously, the point at which the community might be awakened. If not sacrilege, it was, after all, lawless destruction of valuable goods, an affront to the German property sense (much deeper than ours) and, no less, to the responsibility (much sterner than ours) of the authorities to uphold the law. When the synagogue was burned in Kronenberg, local SA men (including Tailor Schwenke, my friend) were used incidentally; but the arson was planned and directed by outsiders, from a big city forty miles away. In the pattern of American gangsterism’s importation of killers from New York to Chicago or vice versa, the local officials were helpless and, by transference, the community, too.

The German community—the rest of the seventy million Germans, apart from the million or so who operated the whole machinery of Nazism—had nothing to do except not to interfere. Absolutely nothing was expected of them except to go on as they had, paying their taxes, reading their local paper, and listening to the radio. Everybody attended local celebrations of national occasions—hadn’t the schools and the stores always been closed for the Kaiser’s birthday?—so you attended, too. Everybody contributed money and time to worthy purposes, so you did, too. In America your wife collects or distributes clothing, gives an afternoon a week to the Red Cross or the orphanage or the hospital; in Germany she did the same thing in the Nazi Frauenbund, and for the same reasons. The Frauenbund, like the Red Cross, was patriotic and humanitarian; did your wife ask the Red Cross if “Negro” plasma was segregated from “white”?

One minded one’s own business in Germany, with or without a dictatorship. The random leisure which leads Americans into all sorts of afterhour byways, constructive, amusing, or ruinous, did not exist for most Germans. One didn’t go out of one’s way, on a day off, to “look for trouble”—there less than here. Germans were no more given to associating with nonconformist persons or organizations than we are. They engaged themselves in opposing the government much less than we do. Few Americans say “No” to the government—fewer Germans. None of my ten friends said “No” to the Nazi government, and only one of them, Teacher Hildebrandt, thought “No.” Men who are ever going to say “No” to the government are for the most part—not uniformly—men with a prior pattern of politically conscious impulse. But such men were, in Hitler’s Germany, either Nazis or anti-Nazis. If they were Nazis, they said “Yes,” with a will. If they were anti-Nazis, their past record, like the teacher’s, hung over their heads. Far from protesting, these, the only Germans who might have protested in quantity, had the greatest incentive of all to conform. They were like men who, in McCarthy-ridden America, had been Communists in their youth, who hoped that their past was safely buried, and whose sole concern was whether or not their names turned up in the day’s un-American activities testimony. Of all Americans, they would be the least likely to participate now in protest or opposition. “I never got over marveling that I survived,” said Herr Hildebrandt. “I couldn’t help being glad, when something happened to somebody else, that it hadn’t happened to me. It was like later on, when a bomb hit another city, or another house than your own; you were thankful.” “More thankful for yourself than you were sorry for others?” “Yes. The truth is, Yes. It may be different in your case, Herr Professor, but I’m not sure that you will know until you have faced it.”

You were sorry for the Jews, who had to identify themselves, every male with “Israel” inserted into his name, every female with “Sarah,” on every official occasion; sorrier, later on, that they lost their jobs and their homes and had to report themselves to the police; sorrier still that they had to leave their homeland, that they had to be taken to concentration camps and enslaved and killed. But—weren’t you glad you weren’t a Jew? You were sorry, and more terrified, when it happened, as it did, to thousands, to hundreds of thousands, of non-Jews. But—weren’t you glad that it hadn’t happened to you, a non-Jew? It might not have been the loftiest type of gladness, but you hugged it to yourself and watched your step, more cautiously than ever.

Those who came back from Buchenwald in the early years had promised—as every inmate of every German prison had always had to promise upon his release—not to discuss his prison experience. You should have broken your promise. You should have told your countrymen about it; you might, though the chances were all against you, have saved your country had you done so. But you didn’t. You told your wife, or your father, and swore them to secrecy. And so, although millions guessed, only thousands knew. Did you want to go back to Buchenwald, and to worse treatment this time? Weren’t you sorry for those who were left there? And weren’t you glad you were out?…

None of my ten friends ever encountered anybody connected with the operation of the deportation system or the concentration camps. None of them ever knew, on a personal basis, anybody connected with the Gestapo, the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service), or the Einsatzgruppen (the Occupation Detachments [Task Forces], which followed the German armies eastward to conduct the mass killing of Jews). None of them ever knew anybody who knew anybody connected with these agencies of atrocity. Even Policeman Hofmeister, who had to arrest Jews for “protective custody” or “resettlement” and who saw nothing wrong in “giving the Jews land, where they could learn to work with their hands instead of with money,” never knew anyone whose shame or shamelessness might have reproached him had they stood face to face. The fact that the Police Chief of Kronenberg made him sign the orders to arrest Jews told him only that the Chief himself was afraid of getting into trouble “higher up.”

Sixty days before the end of the war, Teacher Hildebrandt, as a first lieutenant in command of a disintegrating Army subpost, was informed by the post doctor that an SS man attached to the post was going crazy because of his memories of shooting down Jews “in the East”; this was the closest any of my friends came to knowing of the systematic butchery of National Socialism.

I say none of these ten men knew; and, if none of them, very few of the seventy million Germans. The proportion, which was none out of ten in Kronenberg, would, certainly, have been higher among more intelligent, or among more sensitive or sophisticated people in, say, Kronenberg University or in the big cities where people circulate more widely and hear more. But I must say what I mean by “know.”

By know I mean knowledge, binding knowledge. Men who are going to protest or take even stronger forms of action, in a dictatorship more so than in a democracy, want to be sure. When they are sure, they still may not take any form of action (in my ten friends’ cases, they would not have, I think); but that is another point. What you hear of individual instances, second- or third-hand, what you guess as to general conditions, having put half-a-dozen instances together, what someone tells you he believes is the case—these may, all together, be convincing. You may be “morally certain,” satisfied in your own mind. But moral certainty and mental satisfaction are less than binding knowledge. What you and your neighbors don’t expect you to know, your neighbors do not expect you to act on, in matters of this sort, and neither do you.

Men who participated in the operation of the atrocity system—would they or wouldn’t they tell their wives? The odds are even in Germany, where husbands don’t bother to tell their wives as much as we tell ours. But their wives would not tell other people, and neither would they; their jobs were, to put it mildly, of a confidential character. In such work, men, if they talk, lose their jobs. Under Nazism they lost more than their jobs. I am not saying that the men in question, the men who had firsthand knowledge, opposed the system in any degree or even resented having to play a role in it; I am saying, in the words of Cabinetmaker Klingelhöfer, that that is the way men are; and the more reprehensible the work in which they are voluntarily or involuntarily engaged, the more that way they are.

I pushed this point with Tailor Marowitz in Kronenberg, the one Jew still there who had come back from Buchenwald. On his release, in 1939, he was forbidden to talk of his experience, and, in case he might become thoughtless, he was compelled to report (simply report) to the police every day. Whom did he tell of his Buchenwald experience? His wife and “a couple of my very closest friends—Jews, of course.”

“How widely was the whole thing known in Kronenberg by the end of the war?”

“You mean the rumors?”

“No—how widely was the whole thing, or anything, known?”

“Oh. Widely, very widely.”

“How?”

“Oh, things seeped through somehow, always quietly, always indirectly. So people heard rumors, and the rest they could guess. Of course, most people did not believe the stories of Jews or other opponents of the regime. It was naturally thought that such persons would all exaggerate.”

Rumors, guesses enough to make a man know if he wanted badly to know, or at least to believe, and always involving persons who would be suspected, “naturally,” of exaggerating. Goebbels’ immediate subordinate in charge of radio in the Propaganda Ministry testified at Nuremberg that he had heard of the gassing of Jews, and went to Goebbels with the report. Goebbels said it was false, “enemy propaganda,” and that was the end of it. The Nuremberg tribunal accepted this man’s testimony on this point and acquitted him. None of my ten friends in Kronenberg—nor anyone else in Kronenberg—was the immediate subordinate of a cabinet minister. Anti-Nazis no less than Nazis let the rumors pass—if not rejecting them, certainly not accepting them; either they were enemy propaganda or they sounded like enemy propaganda, and, with one’s country fighting for its life and one’s sons and brothers dying in war, who wants to hear, still less repeat, even what sounds like enemy propaganda?

Who wants to investigate the reports? Who is “looking for trouble?” Who will be the first to undertake (and how undertake it?) to track down the suspicion of governmental wrongdoing under a governmental dictatorship, to occupy himself, in times of turmoil and in wartime with evils, real or rumored, that are wholly outside his own life, outside his own circle, and, above all, outside his own power? After all, what if one found out?

Suppose that you have heard, secondhand, or even firsthand, of an instance in which a man was abused or tortured by the police in a hypothetical American community. You tell a friend whom you are trying to persuade that the police are rotten. He doesn’t believe you. He wants firsthand or, if you got it secondhand, at least secondhand testimony. You go to your original source, who has told you the story only because of his absolute trust in you. You want him now to tell a man he doesn’t trust, a friend of the police. He refuses. And he warns you that if you use his name as authority for the story, he will deny it. Then you will be suspect, suspected of spreading false rumors against the police. And, as it happens, the police in this hypothetical American community, are rotten, and they’ll “get” you somehow.

So, after all, what if one found out in Nazi Germany (which was no hypothetical American community)? What if one came to know? What then?

There was nichts dagegen zu machen, “nothing to do about it.” Again and again my discussions with each of my friends reached this point, one way or another, and this very expression; again and again this question, put to me with the wide-eyed innocence that always characterizes the guilty when they ask it of the inexperienced: “What would you have done?” …

[Bank Clerk Kessler said:] “The situation in Germany got worse and worse. What lay underneath people’s daily lives, the real root, was gone. Look at the suicides; look at the immorality. People wanted something radical, a real change. This want took the form of more and more Communism, especially in middle Germany, in the industrial area, and in the cities of the north. That was no invention of Hitler; that was real. In countries like America there is no Communism because there is no desire for radical change.

“Hitlerism had to answer Communism with something just as radical. Communism always used force; Hitlerism answered it with force. The really absolute enemy of Communism, always clear, always strong in the popular mind, was National Socialism, the only enemy that answered Communism in kind. If you wanted to save Germany from Communism—to be sure of doing it—you went to National Socialism. The Nazi slogan in 1932 was, ‘If you want your country to go Bolshevik, vote Communist; if you want to remain free Germans, vote Nazi.’

“The middle parties, between the two millstones, played no role at all between the two radicalisms. Their adherents were basically the Bürger, the bourgeois, the ‘nice’ people who decide things by parliamentary procedure; and the politically indifferent; and the people who wanted to keep or, at worst, only modify the status quo.

“I’d like to ask the American Bürger, the middle-class man: What would you have done when your country stood so? A dictatorship, or destruction by Bolshevism? Bolshevism looked like slavery and the death of the soul. It didn’t matter if you were in agreement with Nazism. Nazism looked like the only defense. There was your choice.”

“‘I would rather neither,’” I said.

“Of course, Herr Professor. You are a bourgeois. I was, too, once. I was a bank clerk, remember.”

Of my ten friends, only two, Tailor Schwenke and Bill-collector Simon, the two alte Kampfer [“Old Fighters”], wanted to be Nazis and nothing else. They were both positive—still are—that National Socialism was Germany’s and therefore their own, salvation from Communism, which, like the much more sensitive bank clerk, they both called “Bolshevism,” “the death of the soul.” “Bolshevism” came from outside, from the barbarous world that was Russia; Nazism, its enemy, was German, it was their own; they would rather Nazism.

Did they know what Communism, “Bolshevism,” was? They did not; not my friends. Except for Herr Kessler, Teacher Hildebrandt, and young Horstmar Rupprecht (after he entered the university, in 1941), they knew Bolshevism as a specter which, as it took on body in their imaginings, embraced not only the Communists but the Social Democrats, the trade-unions, and, of course, the Jews, the gypsies, the neighbor next door whose dog had bit them, and his dog; the bundled root cause of all their past, present, and possible tribulations. Prior to 1930 or 1931, none of my ten friends, except Tailor Schwenke and Bill-collector Simon, hated any Communist he knew (they were few, in nonindustrial little Kronenberg) or identified him with the specter; these were flesh-and-blood neighbors, who would not break into your house and burn it down. After 1933 or 1934 these same neighbors were seen for “what they were”—innocently disguised lackeys of the specter. The Bolshevist specter outraged the property sense of my all but propertyless friends, the class sense of these déclassé Bürger, the political sense of these helpless subjects of the former Emperor, the religious sense of these pro forma churchgoers, the moral sense of these unexceptional characters. It was “the death of the soul.”

The question was not whether Communism threatened the country …; the question was whether the Germans were convinced that it did. And they were. They were so well convinced, by such means as the Reichstag fire of 1933, that the Nazis were able, ultimately, to establish anti-Communism as a religion, immune from inquiry and defensible by definition alone. When in 1937 the Pope attacked the “errors” of National Socialism, the Nazi Government’s defense of its policies consisted of a Note accusing the Pope of “having dealt a dangerous blow to the defense front against the world menace of Bolshevism.”

Those Germans who would do anything, be anything, join anything to stop Bolshevism had, in the end, to be Nazis. And Nazism did stop Bolshevism. How it stopped Bolshevism, with what means and what consequences, did not matter—not enough, at least, to alienate them. None of its shortcomings, mild or hideous, none of its contradictions, small or calamitous, ever swayed them. To them, then and now, Nazism kept its promise.

Three of my ten friends, the bank clerk, Kessler, the salesman, Damm, and the tailor’s apprentice, Herr Schwenke’s son Gustav, were unemployed when they joined, and the first two were family men in middle life at the time. In all three cases they joined, I think, because they were unemployed—which is not in the least to say that they would not have joined if they hadn’t been. The two Old Fighters, Tailor Schwenke and Bill-collector Simon, when they joined in 1925, were both employed (the tailor self-employed), but the inflation which had just ended had reduced them (and nearly all other petit bourgeois Germans) to near-starvation.

Willy Hofmeister, the old policeman, joined the Party in 1937 because the new Police Chief said that all the men must join. When I asked him if he could have refused, he said, “Ein Millionar war ich ja gar nicht. A millionaire I was not.” (The Sicherheitspolizei, or detective force, one of whose five members he was in Kronenberg, was subsequently attached willy-nilly to the Gestapo, just as the Volunteer Fire Department was placed under the SS). Horstmar Rupprecht, the student, had been a Nazi since he was eight years old, in the Jungvolk, the “cub” organization of the Hitler Jugend; his ambition (which he realized) was to be a Hitler Youth leader; in America he would certainly have been a Scoutmaster.

The two most active churchmen of the ten, Herr Klingelhöfer, the cabinetmaker, and Herr Wedekind, the baker, both of them vestrymen of their parish church, were the two who today (and, I think, yesterday) put the most emphasis on the “everybody-was-doing-it” theme. (They were both “March violets,” [those who joined the NSDAP after Hitler became chancellor]). The fact that they were, of the ten, the two retail tradesmen doubtless contributed to their sensitivity to this urge to go along (mitschwimmen [swim along] was the term each of them used) with the Party as they had with the Church; the cabinetmaker freely admitted that his church activity “didn’t hurt” his coffin-making, although neither he nor I would say that he was a churchman because it was good business to be one.

Neither Klingelhofer nor Wedekind read the Party Program, the historic Twenty-five Points, before they joined, while they were members, or afterward. (Only the teacher, of the ten, ever read it.) …

When people you don’t know, people in whom you have no interest, people whose affairs you have never discussed, move away from your community, you don’t notice that they are going or that they are gone. When, in addition, public opinion (and the government itself) has depreciated them, it is still likelier that you won’t notice their departure or, if you do, that you will forget about it. How many of us whites, in a white neighborhood, are interested I in the destination of a Negro neighbor whom we know only by sight and who has moved away? Perhaps he has been forced to move; at least the possibility occurs to us, and, if we are particularly sensitive, and we feel that perhaps a wrong has been done that we can’t rectify, it is comforting to hear that the Negro was also a Communist or that he will be happier wherever he’s gone, “with his own people,” and was even paid a handsome bonus for moving.

Four of my ten Nazi friends—the tailor and his son, the baker, and the bill-collector—said that the only Jews taken) to Kah-Zed, concentration camp, were traitors; the rest were allowed to leave with their property, and, when they had to sell their businesses, “the courts” or “the finance office” paid them the market value. “I’ve heard that the Jews who left late could only take fifty or a hundred Marks with them,” I said to the tailor, who was talking about “the courts.” “I don’t know about that,” he said. “How should I know about that?” He had “known,” a moment before, about “the courts,” but I didn’t remind him. “I’ve heard,” I said to Herr Simon, the bill-collector, who was talking about “the finance office,” “that they could only take part of their property with them.” “Well, why not?” said Herr Simon “If they wanted to leave, the State had a right to a share. After all, they had made their money here.”

The fact is, I think, that my friends really didn’t know. They didn’t know because they didn’t want to know; but they didn’t know. They could have found out, at the time, only if they had wanted to very badly. Who wanted to? We whites—when the Negro moves away—do we want to find out why or where or with what he moved? The teacher, the student, the cabinetmaker, and the bank clerk, these four at least, suspected the truth of the “market value” myth, and the policeman, to whom you or I would entrust our goods and our chattels without hesitation after five minutes of talk, spoke with contempt of the “weisse Juden,” the “white Jews,” the hawks who fell upon the property that the Jews had to sell in a hurry. Four of my friends suspected the truth, at the time; what should they have done?

“What would you have done, Herr Professor?” Remember: the teacher excepted, nine of my ten friends didn’t know any Jews and didn’t care what happened to them—all this before Nazism. And it was their government, now, which was carrying on this program under law. Merely to inquire meant to attack the government’s justice. It meant risk, large or small, political or social, and it meant risk in behalf of people one didn’t like anyway. Who but an ardent Christian, of the sort that takes Matthew 5 seriously, would undertake the risk of inquiring; who, if injustice were to be discovered by inquiry, would undertake the penalty of protesting? I am sorry to say that none of my friends was that ardent a Christian. …

A member of the pre-Hitler Prussian cabinet, asked what caused Nazism, said: “What caused Nazism was the clubman in Berlin who, when he was asked about the Nazi menace in 1930, looked up from his after-lunch game of Skat [a card game] and replied, ‘Dafür ist die Regierung da. That’s what the government’s there for.’”

Arguing with an American, you may ask him, with propriety, “All right—what would you have done if you had been President?” You don’t ask one of my Nazi friends what he would have done if he had been Führer—or Emperor. The concept that the citizen might become the actual Head of the State has no reality for my friends. Why not?—Didn’t Hitler become the Head of the State? “Not at all,” said Herr Simon, the bill-collector, and then he went on to enlighten me on legitimacy. Hitler was appointed by the Head of the State. The true German ruler is the monarch. … My friends, like all people to whom the present is unpalatable and the future unpromising, always look back. Looking back, they see themselves ruled, and well ruled, by an independent Sovereign. Their experience with even the outward forms of self-government does not, as yet, incline them to it.

The concept that the citizen actually is, as such, the Head of the State is, in their view, nothing but self-contradiction. I read to three of my friends a lecture I had prepared, in which I was going to say that I was the highest official of the United States, holding the office of citizen. I had used the word Staatsbürger. “But that,” said all three, in identical words, “is no office at all.” There we were. “But it really is the highest office in America,” I said; “the citizen is the Sovereign. If I say ‘souveräner Staatsbürger’ will that be clearer?”

“Clearer, certainly,” said Herr Kessler, the bank clerk, “but more wrong, if I may, Herr Professor. Those two words do not go together. The idea is not a German idea. It says that the citizen is the ruler, but there are millions of citizens, so that would be anarchy. There could be no rule. A State must have a Head, not a million or fifty million or a hundred million Heads. If one of your ‘sovereign citizens’ does not like a law, do you allow him to break it? If not, your ‘sovereign citizen’ is only a myth, and you are, like us, ruled by real rulers. But your theory does not admit it.”

“We hear a lot about America,” said Policeman Hofmeister, “not only now, but all our lives we have heard a lot, because so many of us have relatives who have gone there. Now we always say in Germany, ‘Monarchie oder Anarchie’, [monarchy or anarchy]; there is nothing in between, and Anarchie is mob rule. We have heard of your American cities ruled by gangsters working with dishonest politicians who steal the people’s money and give them poor service, bad roads, and such, charging them always for good roads or good sewers. That we have never known here in Germany, not under the Kaiser, not under Hitler. That is a kind of Anarchie, maybe not mob rule but something like it.” “You think,” said Herr Simon, who did not always remember to call me Professor, “that there is one kind of dictatorship, the kind we had here. But you might have a dictatorship not by the best of your people but by all, or a majority, of your people. Isn’t that possible, too?”

“I suppose so,” I said, “but it is hard to believe. I should say that National Socialism had some of that in it, that dictatorship by the majority.”

“Yes,” said Herr Simon, “but what about the law against drinking liquor that you had in the United States. Wasn’t that a majority dictatorship?” …

My Nazi friend Simon had not heard of John Stuart Mill, the philosopher of liberty, who was worried about “the tyranny of the majority,” or of Alexander Hamilton’s staggering dictum, “Your ‘People,’ Sir, is a great beast.” …

“What no one seemed to notice,” said a colleague of mine, a philologist, “was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.” …

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so I small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted’ that, unless one were detached from the whole I process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—’Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have changed here before they went as far as they did; they didn’t, but they might have. And everyone counts on that might.

“Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You see,” my colleague went on, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting some​how. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?— Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

“Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. …

“And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the be​ginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

“But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must wake an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing