Introduction

THE THIRD REICH has made a deep impression upon our civilization, and its impact has not diminished with the passing years. How this regime could have come to power in a civilized nation and what was the nature of life under the Nazis are questions that are still asked -- especially among those too young to remember what National Socialism meant and those who never lived under the regime. This book seeks to illuminate the nature of the Third Reich through original documents of the period; in this way the flavor and purpose of the regime can best be recaptured. The central question which we seek to answer is a fairly simple one: What was life like under Hitler? Or: How did National Socialism impinge upon the consciousness of those who lived under it?

For this reason documents on foreign policy and on internal administration have been omitted, in favor of those on cultural life and social life. Moreover, in order to give a truer picture of the regime, the book concentrates on the years between 1933 and 1939. The impact of the war heightened many aspects of the ideas and actions which appear in these pages, but it seemed better to look at National Socialism in power before the extreme situation of a war. In any case, not much new was added after 1939 in cultural and social life, as the Nazis wished it to be understood. It is their view of the "good society" which this book seeks to illustrate.

This society would not allow for the differentiation between politics and daily life which many of us naturally make. Today, in most of the non-Communist Western world, politics is regarded as merely one compartment of life; it does not have to penetrate our very thought and being. But Hitler's aim was to construct an organic society in which every aspect of life would be integrated with its basic purpose. And in the terms in which this purpose was promulgated by the National Socialist party, no one could be allowed to stand aside. Politics was not just one side of life, or one among many other sciences; it was instead the concrete expression of the Nazi world view. This world view was held to be the very crux of what it meant to be a German, and therefore politics was the consciousness of race, blood, and soil, the essence of the Nazi definition of human nature.

This is what Hitler meant when he talked about the "nationalization of the masses"; will and power were the keys to winning the hearts of the masses, for they could lead the people back to the consciousness of their race. [1] Such a total view of politics meant -- as it was called after January 1933 -- Gleichschaltung, "equalizing the gears" of the nation. All individuals and all organizations in Germany had to be "nationalized," in the sense of making them subject to party control; for the party was the guardian of the Germanic world view and through the will and power of its chief, the Fuhrer, the good society would be brought into being. Thus trade unions were abolished and in their place the "German Workers' Front," which was under party control, was created. Educational institutions were integrated, as the party exercised control over students and teachers. A whole network of party organizations controlled professional and workers' groups, membership in which was compulsory. In addition, individuals were organized in other groups which sought mastery over their private lives, outside their professions -- from the Hitler Youth to the organization for "German mothers." The boundaries between public and private activities were abolished, just as the dividing line between politics and the totality of life had ceased to exist.

This was the totalitarian state, and the Nazi party, like the spider in its web, controlled all the lifelines of the nation. For us such a society means that all aspects of life are subordinated to the demands of politics. But the Nazis did not see their society in these terms. Political parties and other independent national groupings had to be abolished, for they were a part of that liberal politics which had torn the nation asunder, had set man against man and class against class. In contrast, under the Nazis the individual German had found a sense of belonging, based upon his membership in a community which through its world view reflected his own inner strivings. A party publication, one year after Hitler's seizure of power, sums this up: "The concept of 'political man' typifies a bourgeois mentality. Being 'political' means to act consistently according to a set standard of behavior. Political behavior is not one attitude among others; it must form the basic attitude toward life." [2] In an age of industrialization and class conflict man was to be integrated into his Volk; his true self would be activated and his feeling of alienation transformed into one of belonging.

Such was Nazi theory, even if in practice many people did manage to stand aside from this integration. The phrase "inner emigration" assumed some importance during the period of Nazi rule, for this seemed the only privacy left. There were no groups with an identity separate from party and state which one could join, no kind of group identification which was not in some way related to the "new Germany." To be sure, several important institutions managed to preserve their identity (at least on the surface): the churches, the bureaucracy, some economic organizations, and the military. But these were eventually brought under control by various indirect methods of persuasion. Against the churches a more sustained battle had to be fought, as some of our documents show. Yet this was never waged against a united front of all churches; indeed many important Catholic and Lutheran prelates collaborated enthusiastically from the very beginning of the Third Reich. Moreover, churches were under great pressure from their own members to "equalize their gears." The sad truth is that there was little opposition anywhere in 1933, and even when this developed later it was ineffective in breaking through the cultural conformity of National Socialist Germany.

Censorship was imposed upon foreign books, periodicals, and newspapers, and all domestic literary and artistic output was rigidly controlled. A wall was built around the nation, nonetheless effective for lacking stone and mortar. Within this wall Nazi culture had a free hand to determine, if it could, every man's attitude toward life.

The Nazis started on their course immediately after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Reich. A constant barrage of propaganda and exhortations and frequent mass meetings whipped up enthusiasm. This was accompanied by book burnings in every town, the Gleichschaltung of all cultural and social endeavors -- the insistence of a show of conformity to the revolution which had won the day. To be sure, by the summer of 1933 people did start to weary of the speeches, the constant mass meetings and parades which took up all free time. [3] At this point the Nazis applied increased pressures to counter the indifference, much of which came from sheer exhaustion. But by that time the battle for cultural conformity was won; nor did many (especially among the youth) slacken in their original enthusiasm.

The kind of culture that the Nazis, in their barrage, unloosed upon the population and then enforced is illustrated in this book. Within this culture there is no progression, no development, for "truth" was accepted as "given," laid down forever by the race -- as eternal as the Aryan himself. We must not, however, think of it as something merely imposed upon the majority by a ruling minority. The soil had been prepared for many decades, during which the German Right, in its opposition to modernity, had developed the identical kind of art, literature, and racial thought. Moreover, Nazi culture appealed to an unchanging popular taste, a fact to which we shall return. Nazi opposition to artistic and literary innovation had solid backing from people everywhere. Thus there was a static quality to this culture, and it would serve no purpose to divide our subject matter by dates or to attempt to show any cultural development, for it did not exist. What developed between 1933 and 1939 was the level of effective enforcement, not the kind of culture which was to be enforced.

Our presentation of Nazi cultural documents provides a further explanation of why so many people accepted and indeed helped to strengthen the Nazi rule. For we are dealing with an emotionally charged and unified ideology which was translated into fact by 1934. This ideology not only stands at the very core of this book but is also the crux of what the "good society" was all about. Adolf Hitler always stressed the ideological factor, the world view, which was of overriding importance to him. The new Germany was to be built upon the foundations of the "new man," and this man in turn was the product of the correct world view. The world view, or ideology (and the terms can be used interchangeably), was all-inclusive: a true instrument of reform. Originating in the wellsprings of man's nature, it pushed outward into all aspects of human life. Because this world view arose from the depths of the human soul, its expression must be cultural and not material. As a leading Romanian fascist put it: "History is an aspect of the majestic life of the spirit." [4]

That is why Hitler himself put such a high valuation upon artistic endeavors, and his own artistic ambitions must have played a part in this emphasis. The speech he delivered at the House of German Art in 1937 illustrates this stress upon the primacy of culture as truly expressive of the eternally creative essence of the race. The "new man" must be a culturally centered, creative person who through his creative drives activates his "Germanism." This idea had always been in the mainstream of German nationalism, and it aptly reflected, in its emphasis upon creativity, the frustration of the individual in an ever more impersonal society.

Throughout these documents we shall see the attempt to form this "new man," a process which began with early childhood and pervaded the whole tenor of adult life. Hitler really believed in the world view of race, Volk, and soil, and he had well-developed notions on how to transmit it to the people themselves. This above all else he considered essential.

"Every world view, be it correct and useful a thousand times over, will be without importance for the life of a Volk unless its basic tenets are written upon the banners of a fighting movement." [5] Such a movement must be highly organized in order to capture power in the nation, but this organization must, in turn, be securely rooted in the world view. Propaganda was therefore of the highest importance, though the word "propaganda" itself can be misleading. Hitler never thought you could sell National Socialism as one sells toothpaste or cigarettes; a much more sophisticated theory was involved.

Georges Sorel, to whom fascism is so much indebted, wrote at the beginning of our century that all great movements are compelled by "myths." A myth is the strongest belief held by a group, and its adherents feel themselves to be an army of truth fighting an army of evil. Some years earlier, in 1895, the French psychologist Gustav Le Bon had written of the "conservatism of crowds" which cling tenaciously to traditional ideas. Hitler took the basic nationalism of the German tradition and the longing for the stable personal relationships of olden times, and built upon them as the strongest belief of the group. In the diffusion of the "myth" Hitler fulfilled what Le Bon had forecast: that "magical powers" were needed to control the crowd. The Fuhrer himself wrote of the "magic influence" of mass suggestion and the liturgical aspects of his movement, and its success as a mass religion bore out the truth of this view. [6]

It is not necessary to ask whether Hitler had read either Sorel or Le Bon. The point is that all of them were expressing the problems of the mass society which the Industrial Revolution had produced and the doubts about the rationality of human nature which came with what Le Bon called the "era of crowds." The basic problem is illustrated by a quotation from Le Bon which Hitler, years later, acted upon with fatal decisiveness: "We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning, by means of suggestion and contagion, of the feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individuals that form a crowd." [7]

The irrational behavior characteristic of a mass society had been clearly formulated by the end of the nineteenth century, and the actual behavior of the crowds during the Dreyfusard struggles in France and during the first big anti-Semitic wave in Germany bore out the theories. In the world that industrialism had produced, the individual was alienated not only from his society but also from his rational nature. This was the all-encompassing problem, and Sorel as well as Le Bon envisioned the specter of a wild irrationality, which had to be directed by a leader into positive, constructive channels.

Industrialism seemed to such men to have destroyed the traditional relationships among men and to have exposed the basic irrationality of human nature. There were others, like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were also concerned with the "alienation" of man from his society, but they continued to hold to a belief in man's basic rationality. Hitler, needless to say, was not the heir of this tradition. He placed himself instead in the camp of Sorel and Le Bon. Hitler's understanding of this approach enabled him to take the road to power in a nation ravaged by crises and defeat. The use of basically irrational prejudices and predilections helped to bring about the acceptance of the Germanic world view which was Hitler's solution for ending the modern alienation of man.

For example, Hitler believed the mass meeting necessary because it enabled man to step "out of his workshop," in which he feels small, and to become part of a body of "thousands and thousands of people with a like conviction." [8] Thus he succumbs to mass suggestion. Alienation was to be exorcised, but the irrationality of human nature was basic to Hitler's own view of the world. These meetings were liturgical rites, staged with close attention to detail and purpose. We have reproduced accounts of two such festivals -- one that was frequently held in the schools, the other a summer-solstice festival. The individual, Hitler held, was obsessed by anxiety, and in the mass meeting he received courage and strength through a feeling of belonging to a greater emotional community.

The mass meeting became one of the most important techniques of the Nazi movement, especially in the years of its rise to power, when there were almost daily meetings of this sort in various regions of the Reich. But by themselves such meetings could not accomplish very much; mass suggestion had to pervade every area of culture: literature, painting and sculpture, the theater, films, and education. As a "total culture" it would animate the basic nationalist prejudices of the people, overcome their feeling of isolation, and direct their creative drives into the proper channels of race and soil. This is why there is an astonishing coherence among the documents of Nazi culture, for they all served the same basic purpose.

A part of this pattern is the "dynamic," the urge to fight against evil. We are dealing here with a revolution and therefore the book begins with documents that serve to clarify what sort of a revolution this was supposed to be. There was violence: the battles of the SA, for example. "The masses do not understand handshakes," as Hitler himself put it. [9] But equal emphasis was put upon the "traditional links" of man: the Volk, his family, the proper morality. When the revolutionary impetus clashed with that of the traditional bonds, the latter won out. Hanns Anderlahn's account of a debate in the SA is especially revealing in this regard. The whole Nazi position on women and family is amazingly conservative, even if the Nazis tried to justify it on racial grounds.

The reason for this is clear: the ideology of the Nazi revolution was based upon what were presumed to be Germanic traditions; while the revolution looked to the future, it tried to recapture a mythical past and with it the old traditions which to many people provided the only hope of overcoming the chaos of the present. The omnipresent nationalism was combined with an attempt to recapture a morality attributed to the Volk's past. But that morality was not the one which the ancient Germans had practiced in their forests, or which the peasant, close to the soil, was supposed to exemplify in modern times. Yet this is a belief which the Nazi ideology encouraged and which novels like that of Josefa Berens-Totenohl proclaimed. In reality the morality which National Socialism offered as typically Germanic was the bourgeois morality of the nineteenth century: the sanctity of the family, of marriage, and of the unostentatious, dedicated life. Dedicated to the Volk, not to the making of money: the modern bourgeoisie was condemned because it had become "Judaicized." Nothing could be more typical of such attitudes than the speech given by Hans Naumann, a professor of literature at the University of Berlin, on the occasion of the burning of books in 1933. [10] He begins by stressing the urge to action: it is time to act against the un-German spirit, and if too many rather than too few books are given to the flames, what matter? He ends by stating that such activism is necessary to "make holy" once again the "pious bonds" of family, native land, and blood. The interplay between "heroic" activism and traditionalism dominates the movement.

Hitler called this the "greatest racial revolution in world history," a "revolution of the spirit." [11] It was a cultural revolution, and was not directed at instituting economic changes. He could thus appeal to old prejudices without threatening the existing economic system. This appealed, above all, to white-collar workers and the small entrepreneurs, as some of the statistics presented in this book will demonstrate. It was their kind of revolution: the ideology would give them a new status, free them from isolation in industrial society, and give them a purpose in life. But it would not threaten any of their vested interests; indeed it would reinforce their bourgeois predilections toward family and Gemutlichkeit, and restore the "good old values" which had been so sadly dismantled by modernity. This attitude should not be unfamiliar, for it pervades Gaullism in France and much of conservatism in the United States.

But the Nazi revolution was connected to a definite world view in which Hitler deeply believed and which is Central European rather than Western. Racism provided the foundations, as shown in our selections from the writings of three leading theoreticians, Hans F. K. Gunther, Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, and Alfred Rosenberg. Both Gunther and Clauss were university teachers. Their ideas were highly abstract, yet they were made concrete: the outward racial form was linked to the "race soul." From these ideas "stereotypes" emerged -- of the Aryan and the enemy, the Jew. Stereotyping was essential to the transformation of the ideology into a "fighting movement," for it made the abstract concrete for the purposes of mass suggestion. The other extracts in the section on the racial foundations point up extensions and practical applications of the theory, from the new biology (so important a foundation of racial thought!) to a guide for high-school students on how to recognize the racial soul of a person.

A race needs its heroes, and no revolution has ever succeeded without heroic examples. The hero the Nazis presented to their people was rooted in Hitler's world view and was equipped with great power of will. The proper use of the will was what made a man into a hero. It provided the impetus for transforming aspiration into reality. Here the Germans' interpretation of the philosophy of Nietzsche lay ready to hand, ideas which had influenced German intellectuals since the beginning of the century. Nietzsche's "will to power" became the will to actualize Hitler's good society. Alfred Baeumler, perhaps the most important academic philosopher of the Third Reich, shows the consequences of this use of Nietzsche. Emphasis upon the power of the individual will could be combined with memories of the war, where this power seemed to have been put to use. Ernst Rohm's exaltation of the soldier is typical in this connection. The SA leader himself had fought in the war and afterward with the Free Corps. Rohm illustrates the role which nostalgic memories of the war experience played in the Nazi movement. Adolf Hitler himself glorified the army, in which he had served, as the educator in decision making, courage, and responsibility. It represented, so he held, the antipode to the stock exchange. [12]

Activism was important. After all, the Nazis conceived of their party as a "movement." This and the irrational foundations of their world view represented strong opposition to intellectualism. Hitler summarized his own viewpoint in 1938: "What we suffer from today is an excess of education. Nothing is appreciated except knowledge. The wiseacres, however, are the enemies of action. What we require is instinct and will." [13] "Instinct" meant the love of Volk and race which came from a realm beyond empirical knowledge, from the soul. "Will" further emphasized the drive to transform this love into reality. The hero is no academic, no man of knowledge, but one who has developed his power of will to the fullest in order to activate his "healthy" instinct for what is right.

Joseph Goebbels' fictional hero, Michael, rejects university studies in order to join the Volk at work and help to save it. Michael reflects the greater social emphasis of the future propaganda minister, the socialism of National Socialism, which meant integration of the individual into the organic whole of the Volk. To the contemporary heroes, of whom Fritz Todt, the builder of the Autobahnen, may stand as example, were joined the heroes of the past. Frederick the Great of Prussia was transformed from the flute-playing friend of Voltaire into a militant activist. The revered Prussian monarch had to be dissociated from the Enlightenment, which stood for hated rationalism.

Albert Leo Schlageter occupies a place of his own in the Nazi gallery of heroes. An early Nazi, he fell in battle fighting against the French in 1923, and the afterword to an edition of his letters is a good example of the homage paid to him. Schlageter, like all Nazi heroes, symbolizes the "new man." The conversation between his friend August and August's father shows quite clearly the exaltation of this "new man" -- the young generation. Hanns Johst, the most famous of the playwrights who wrote for the Third Reich, had dramatic power, and his play Schlageter was often performed, especially in the early days of the regime.

Other components of the myth have already been mentioned. The flag-raising ceremony for school children shows how the myth was implanted: the set pieces, the constant repetitions -- in fact, the whole liturgical form. The description of the summer-solstice festival gives us some idea of the effect such ceremonies (and the real-life heroes) must have had upon susceptible youth. This was not as formal as the flag-raising ceremony, but its content was more fluid, more directly emotional.

The task of culture was laid down, and it held a central place in the Nazi scheme, as we have already made clear: the spreading and rooting of the world view for whose sake the revolution had been made. It built upon the inclinations of the audience. Throughout the extracts in this book there run not only the themes of race and Volk but also the drive for rootedness in the Volk. Intellectualism was decried, for the Volk is one and culture must not separate itself from these roots. This is what Hitler meant when he said that "to be German means to have clarity"; thus his pride in having boiled down the Nazi ideology to a mere twenty-five points in the party platform. [14]

But the purpose that culture served must never be lost from view: it clarified the world view, it spread it and evoked an enthusiastic reception for it. Once again it was built upon popular taste and prejudices. The masses of people (and not just in Germany) do not like "problem art," do not care for the distorted pictures of expressionists: they do not understand the searchings of such art. The same can be said about literature, indeed all cultural endeavor. People like their pictures simple and easily understandable and their novels should have gripping plots and large amounts of sentiment. The lowest common denominator of popular taste has a sameness about it which does not vary from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, or indeed from country to country -- whether we think of the "shilling shocker" in England or the novels of a Courths-Mahler in Germany (without varying her sentimentality or simplicity of style, Courths-Mahler, between 1864 and 1950, wrote more than two hundred nearly identical novels, which had a combined sale of 27 million copies). But in Germany the popular taste was skillfully used as a vital part of a whole world view in the name of creating an "organic" Volk. Goebbels' "cleansing of art" catered to this taste, which was said to represent the "healthy instinct of the Volk." That instinct, then, was conservative (as it is today) and was used for the purposes of the Nazi ideology.

In this effort the historical connections with the past were exploited (to Sorel a vital ingredient of the myth), and the virtues of pre-industrial society were stressed. How typical that in the great Exhibition of German Art in 1937, rural and family motifs overwhelmingly predominated. In contrast to the uprooted worker, filled with the anxiety of his alienation, the peasant, rooted in the soil, became the prototype of the "new man." The novel was the great popularizer of this image. Josefa Berens-Totenohl sold over a quarter of a million copies of Der Femhof during the Third Reich, from which we offer an excerpt designed to show the idealized peasant and what he stood for. Berens-Totenohl's work is typical of a host of sentimental novels popular during the Third Reich. Their essential crudeness was tempered by a viable plot and, at times, passable writing. Tudel Weller's Rabauken! on the other hand can serve to show the Nazi novel at its most racially crude and blatant.

The theater, radio, and films entered the fray. The typical playbill, the description of what happened to the theater at the beginning of the regime, the list of film titles given in this section will serve to show how the Nazis made use of these media. Radio plays a part of particular importance, for Hitler had great respect for the effectiveness of the spoken word. Speeches played a central role in the Nazi liturgy, whether at mass meetings or festivals. Radio carried the word to the masses. Not only were cheap radio sets put on the market, but loudspeakers were hung in the streets.

Yet, the pace of this cultural drive was always difficult to sustain. The very sentimentality which made it appealing to the public worked against the standards of morality for which Nazism stood. They stressed the bonds of the family, moderation in sexual and social behavior in consideration of the duties owed to the Volk. But the romanticism involved in the ideology could lead to a celebration of love for its own sake as well as abandonment to the pleasures of the flesh, and such attitudes also became part of the social reality. Popular sentimentality easily slips into forbidden regions, and a ruling class is apt to become detached from its own moral strictures -- though Hitler himself, in spite of his unpublicized attachment to Eva Braun, never really did so.

This irrationalism seems to clash with what is popularly regarded as the essence of the natural sciences. However, as science had become ever more specialized during the nineteenth century it had withdrawn from a concern with the world as a whole. The age of Newton was long past and the modern scientist could view his specialty according to one set of criteria and the world as a whole according to another. Rationalism in the laboratory could be combined with irrationalism in the scientists' world view. Nazi science went a step beyond this. Here the ideology was so strong, so dominant, that it penetrated into the laboratory. The gap between science and the world was overcome, not in favor of a scientific method but of an irrational ideology. Both Johannes Stark and Philip Lenard were famous Nobel Prize-winning scientists. How they attempted to introduce Nazi ideology into their science, the documents themselves explain. The idea behind such attempts was always to strive for an organic unity between science and the Nazi world view, just as the Volk itself should be an organic whole. Alienation must be ended here as well as in all other fields of endeavor.

It is therefore not surprising that the astronomer Bruno Thuring goes back to an older tradition, that of Newton and Kepler, who had stressed the peaceful harmony of the world, in order to demonstrate the supposed unsoundness of Einstein's theory of relativity. Once more ideological considerations are overriding: Thuring uses racial rather than scientific proof to discredit Einstein's work. The consequences of this "Nazi science" came back to haunt the party. In 1944 Gauleiter Josef Wagner denounced Thuring, among others, for having discredited the "new physics" to such an extent that they were damaging the war effort. Wagner recognized, without mentioning Einstein, that the theoretical physics necessary for wartime scientific development had been stifled by the party in favor of merely one-directional research. [15]

Medicine followed the pattern of the other sciences. Objective research was rejected for the organic, for the treatment of the whole patient, including his soul -- and the ideological was again the decisive element. As Hans Schemm, the first Nazi Minister of Culture in Bavaria, put it: "We are not objective, we are German." [16] This becomes obvious in the speech of Kurt Gauger and in the extract from the pen of the medical director of the University Hospital at Kiel. Gauger's references to Jung must be seen in the context of the role this eminent psychiatrist played in Nazi Germany. Jung had accepted the presidency of the German Society for Psychotherapy after Hitler's rise to power, and identified himself with the "expanding form" and "formative seed" of the Aryan as opposed to the Jewish unconscious.

National Socialism was a religion; the depth of the ideology, the liturgy, the element of hope, all helped to give the movement the character of a new faith. It has been shown that Goebbels quite consciously used a religious terminology in many of his speeches. Moreover, Nazism was a total world view which by its very nature excluded all others. From this it followed that traditional Christianity was a rival, not a friend. But here Hitler at first went very slowly indeed, for he needed (and got) the support of the majority of the Christian churches. Since he was appealing to the bourgeois, as we have seen, it was difficult to uphold the bonds of family and the traditional morality and at the same time exclude traditional Christianity. Yet such was Hitler's purpose and he hoped that the penetration of his world view would work first to weaken and then to shut out Christianity altogether from the German mind. Completely heathen prayers, like the one reproduced in the section on religion, were the exception, though there was an attempt from the first to substitute a Nazi ceremony for Protestant Confirmation. The main effort was centered on combining Christ and the Volk by stripping Christianity of its historical element. Like science, Christianity should be absorbed into the ideology. The so-called "German Christians" noisily devoted themselves to this task. Though they were held down in favor of the established churches, which were supported by the majority of the population, the Nazi future would have lain with the Evangelical Christians had the war been won.

Other selections in this section show how the Nazi effort against traditional Christianity worked in practice and affected the lives of the people. It was covert and cautious in comparison with Nazi activities in other cultural areas. Much has been written about the reaction of the churches, which was slow and only partial at best. But Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich preached a series of Advent sermons which created a sensation at the time for their bravery. This in itself tells a great deal about the atmosphere under the Third Reich as early as 1933. For Faulhaber merely defended the Old Testament and not only was silent about the persecution of Jews that had already begun but also made a clear distinction between the Jews in the time of Christ and those who came after. Theologically well-founded as this may be, it can hardly be called resistance, except when viewed in the context of the ever greater momentum of the Nazi drive for a total culture. Thus he illustrates not only the reluctance of the churches to take a clear stand against the Nazis but also the direction and depth of the Germanic awakening, in which these sermons could be regarded as a trumpet call against the regime.

Faulhaber, like most church leaders, was an old-line conservative, not a Nazi. The Nazis believed that such older men could never really accept their Weltanschauung, even if they were not confessed Christians. The movement made much of the difference between generations. The young were set off against the old, and the same distinction that was made between the old and young nations was operative within the Volk itself. When Hitler damned the bourgeoisie, he was inveighing against the older generation, brought up under the Empire. Hanns Johst expresses this condemnation in his play Schlageter. The son, August, is fire and flame for the Nazi hero and his adventurous fight for the Fatherland. Schneider, the father, counsels caution. Moreover, typically enough, the father thinks in terms of social classes and making money (the two go together in the Nazi ideology), while the son wants "not to earn but to serve." The older man ridicules this attitude as "adolescent romanticism," but this romanticism symbolizes in reality the son's urge to "belong" to his Volk.

This emphasis on youth is common to most revolutions, and was employed by the National Socialists from the very beginning. To be vigorous meant to be youthful, the "new man" of heroic will had to be a figure of youth: killed in action against the enemy like Schlageter, dying while vigorously engaged in a great and strenuous effort like the constructor of the Autobahnen, Fritz Todt. The Nazi leadership itself was young; Hitler was only forty-four years old when he came to power. Moreover, the Nazis realized that if youth could be captured by their world view, the future was assured. Once again we find an attitude typical of all modern revolutions. Fascism in all countries made a fetish of youthfulness. What a contrast this offered to the elderly politicians haggling in parliaments or to the fossilized bureaucracies which ran the nations (and the political parties) of Europe. The Nazis capitalized on the discontent of youth, its spirit of rebellion against parents and school. Ever since the end of the last century a large and vocal section of bourgeois youth had wanted to detach itself from the "respectable" society into which it had been born. Hitler offered them a way, and many young people (not just the unemployed) streamed into the party ranks, lured by the activism of the Nazis, their stress on the heroic will, and their well-defined goals. They could criticize the "bourgeoisie" -- meaning their elders -- and still retain their deeply inbred bourgeois prejudices. For many young people, the ideal of action, adventure, and movement may initially have concealed the rights and wrongs of the Nazi goals themselves. The extract from Inge Scholl's memoirs is especially telling here. For her brother passed from enthusiasm to disillusionment and (unlike the majority of youth) to organizing an anti-Nazi resistance which ended in his death.

Evidence that Nazism appealed to youth comes to us from all sides, and the Nazis themselves saw in the young people the key to the future of the movement. That is why we have devoted one of the longest sections in the book to youth. Education is crucial here, for if an ideology can be institutionalized through the educational establishment it has won a major battle. The Nazis realized this only too well, and youth in its turn seemed ready for the message. The account of Paul Oestreich, an anti-Nazi progressive educator, provides additional testimony.

The initial enthusiasm of youth was carefully directed and exploited, as the subsequent extracts demonstrate. They are taken from elementary-school readers, books for young boys, as well as readings for the upper classes of high schools. Some of the themes are constantly repeated. For example, Otto Dietrich's story about the "daring flight" is taken from a primer for the upper grades, but the theme recurs throughout other textbooks as well. In linking the daring flight in stormy weather to Hitler's dominance over the elements, the Nazi party press chief made a point which did not need elaboration. Even the young could understand the analogy with Germany's perilous state in the world. The symbols of sun and fire, so prevalent in the Nazi ideology, are also used in profusion. Baldur von Schirach's "victory" makes use of the myth of the sun and makes it understandable to the students. It is of a piece with the exaltation of the sun and fire at the summer solstice, described in a previous section. The tone which prevailed in the schools is indicated by the list of the subjects which students were required to write on at the end of each school year, or by the way in which an alumni address list handles the Jewish alumni of an earlier day. They are simply grouped together as numbers, not as persons with individuality.

Some readings on education have been used earlier in the book, for they document so well the application of the Nazi theory. Thus the description of the teaching of the new biology could have been placed in this section, or the guide for students on how to read the racial soul. Race was central to the world view, and education was the most important instrument for its diffusion. Educational examples were therefore necessary in discussing the foundations of the ideology.

Education was not merely the concern of the schools. Hitler's emphasis upon organization has already been mentioned, and this included the purposeful organization of leisure time. Membership in the Hitler Youth was all but compulsory. The principles upon which it was run are best seen through the eyes of its leader, Baldur von Schirach. What if this extracurricular activity came into conflict with the family and the school? It is clear from the readings that Schirach wanted to avoid such a clash, but in the last resort the ideology triumphed over other considerations, and the Hitler Youth was the organization directly concerned with strengthening the Nazi world view among the young. It is not difficult to say which would prevail if family and school did not fit themselves into the organic Volk.

The university continued the indoctrination toward a total culture, and not only by offering courses on race and the Volk. Both student and professor were integrated into the Nazi conception of the German people. At the university level too the students were required to take part in an extracurricular activity -- the compulsory Labor Service (Arbeitsdienst). Like Goebbels' Michael, they should not stand apart, but should learn to share the physical labor of the people. The criteria for admission to the University of Berlin, which applied to all universities, indicate what kind of students were desired. The student organization within the university was a branch of the party. Its leader, Gerhard Kruger, uses the word "socialism" to denote the total service to the Volk which was demanded of students. This was designed to keep the students from viewing themselves as an elite within the nation. The party leadership brooked no rival elites.

National unity was also a prime consideration in the role of the professors, not only unity with the Volk but also an organic unity between the world view and the various academic disciplines. This is the essence of the talk given by the leader of the Association of University Professors, in which he defines academic freedom as the fulfillment of this task of unity. We have already seen a similar spirit guiding attempts to create a new kind of natural science. The organic ideal always stands in the forefront. The intellectual was to give up his illusions of superior status, just as the worker was to renounce the concept of class struggle. These were divisive forces and therefore evil.

The Volk encompassed all of life, and life gained its fulfillment within it. There could exist no "eternal" criteria outside this final good; hence the law too had to be adjusted to this "fact." The concept of law as reflecting a system of values transcending the Nazi world view was condemned as liberal, serving merely to fragment the nation. Carl Schmitt, the most celebrated jurist of the Third Reich, explains this in constitutional terms. A new state has been created in which all power, and therefore all law, springs from the needs of the Volk as directed by the leader.

The leadership structure was central to the government of the state, and the organizational principle of the Nazi party was applied to the whole nation: the leader and followers were the poles around which the public life of Germany was to be organized -- and as there was to be no division between public and private life, this took in all aspects of human endeavor. The Third Reich sought to create a new hierarchy, once more a part of the urge to substitute fixed personal relationships for the fluidities in human life which industrialization had brought about.

But this hierarchy was not the traditional one of nobility, bourgeois, and working class. The Nazis hated the old nobility and thought that the bourgeoisie had failed. Leadership was to be based on that personality, regardless of background, which had the will and power to actualize the Volksstaat (the state of the Volk). In Hitler's view, man's progress had not derived from the activities of the majority, but was the product of the individual personality, its genius and will to action. [17] The "new men" were the leaders, and as they had led the party to victory so they must now lead the state. Hitler envisaged the government of the Reich as a hierarchy of leadership: from the local leaders up to himself as the Fuhrer of all the people. In reality the Third Reich was a network of rival leaders, each with his own followers and his own patronage. Hitler kept them competing against one another and in this way was able to control the whole leadership structure.

The rejection of majority rule meant that all leaders were appointed by those who were above them in the hierarchy and, in the last resort, by the highest leader of them all, the Fuhrer himself. A government of this type has the appearance of being imposed upon the people: they had no say in its making and no control over its activities. Schmitt's stress upon the Artgleichheit (equality in kind) between leader and Volk is meant to answer this criticism. For the Nazi system was not to be a mere dictatorship from above, but was supposed to be based upon a truly democratic principle of government.

The world view is basic once again to an understanding of the Nazi meaning of democracy. Fuhrer and Volk were equal in kind because they shared the same race and blood; the human nature of each individual German and that of his leaders was thought to be identical. Therefore their aims must be identical as well, as both wanted to fulfill themselves by bringing about the true Germanic state. Leader and led were a part of the same organic Volk. What distinguished the leader from the masses was his ability to make them conscious of their peoplehood and to lead them toward its fulfillment. He had all the attributes of those heroes whom we mentioned earlier.

No independent groupings could exist outside this structure, and no one should think himself superior to his fellow men. Indeed, even the leaders must never have a superior attitude; rather they should be devoted to service and responsibility. This explains Hitler's special concern that intellectuals would feel superior to others because of their knowledge and thus form a separate group within the Volk which would be difficult to control. In the section on education we have shown the attempts to keep students and professors from thinking of themselves as distinct from the "people at work." In the new Germany there could be only appointed leaders and the masses, both tied together by a common race and peoplehood, serving a shared goal which expressed everyone's inner convictions.

Wilhelm Stuckart and Hans Globke, in their official commentary on the Nazi citizenship law, clarify further the implications of the Nazi concept of government. They repeat the contention that the individual can only be thought of as a member of a community -- and the German community is one of blood and race. Citizenship in the Reich therefore is based no longer upon mere territorial considerations, but upon the Aryan race. Roland Freisler, later to become the notorious judge of the People's Court, draws the logical conclusions from this view of law and citizenship when he calls for the abolition of an "impartial" officialdom. He holds out the hope that both bureaucratic formalism and legalism (especially rampant in Germany) would be eliminated and a new spirit prevail. If an official is imbued with the principles of National Socialism he will be a flexible new man -- having his eye not on the legal paragraph but upon the final goal.

In the documents presented so far both theory and practice mix with one another. The theory was put into practice and made itself felt in the lives of the people. But how did the "little man" actually fare? The workers had never given heavy support to the Nazis in their rise to power, but the Nazis nevertheless had an idealized picture of the worker ready at hand. He works diligently and aims at quality, in the tradition of the medieval artisan. In addition, he seeks ideological strength by attending evening courses offered by the party. If he has been a Marxist, like Muller, he soon finds out how he has been duped: for his Aryan honesty and strength will rebel against Marxist tactics (from which, however, Hitler admitted in Mein Kampf that he had learned a great deal). Like Muller, the German worker was, after all, a Volksgenosse -- a member of the Volk. The ugly reality of course was quite different: it was necessary to forbid strikes, and one reading shows how the cause of the Volk could be used to terrorize workers into being content with their present position and wages.

If the workers had never given the Nazis their wholehearted support, the petit bourgeois had. Their position in the Third Reich is shown by a schedule of tax distribution and living costs, as well as by an account of the attempt to reduce the number of independent retail enterprises. In contrast to the peasant, the "trader" had, it must be remembered, always been in bad repute, as a symbol of hated modernity: the ideology supported economic policy. But if the petit bourgeois were disappointed, they failed to show it, except in isolated instances. They seemed to play no part in such small resistance groups as existed. The ideology may well have kept its hold over them to the last.

The assumption of power in the spring of 1933 and how it affected the people has been left to the end. For this will be more meaningful if the whole Nazi revolution has first been understood. From the documents given here it is plain that the revolution arrived not with a rush but covertly and, at times, even comically. There were no battles to fight, no bastilles to storm. Men and women fell into the arms of the new Reich like ripe fruit from a tree. The remarkable account of the Nazi seizure of the City Council of Cologne shows the relative ease with which the change of government was accomplished -- here, in the Catholic Rhineland, in a city which had been ruled the previous sixteen years by its mayor Konrad Adenauer. Carl Schmitt could boast with some justice that the Nazi revolution was orderly and disciplined. But the reason lies not so much within the Nazis themselves as in the lack of an effective opposition. For millions the Nazi ideology did assuage their anxiety, did end their alienation, and did give hope for a better future. Other millions watched passively, not deeply committed to resistance. "Let them have a chance" was a typical attitude. Hitler took the chance and made the most of it.

This book begins with an analysis of the nature of the Nazi revolution and ends with the actual assumption of power. In between we have attempted to show what Hitler's call to activate the world view actually meant and how it affected the lives of the whole population. One important aspect of the Third Reich would seem to have been neglected: the increasing terror which accompanied the drive for a total culture. Though many of the readings presented in this book reflect the pressures brought to bear on the people to conform (especially in the section on Christianity), we have not specifically documented the terror itself. The true nature of the terror has to be experienced and cannot be captured in the printed word. How can one convey through documents the hasty glance over the shoulder, the sudden silence in front of a stranger?

No section has been devoted to the real victims of the regime, to those against whom the "spiritual" revolution was in the end directed: the Jews. It would have been artificial to separate the "Jewish question" from the rest of the ideology and from the cultural drive of which it was an inseparable part. Every section of this book is filled with the Nazis' anti-Jewish obsession. They are the liberals who have to be liquidated, the Marxists who must be destroyed -- in short, the all-pervasive enemy of the race. The bourgeois emphasis upon family, morality, and traditional bonds did not apply to them: their families could be torn asunder, their property could be looted and confiscated, their roots in Germany torn up. As the Nazi revolution focused upon the Jewish stereotype, it entered into every facet of Nazi thought.

The Jewish problem was carried to the people as an integral part of the whole "renaissance of the Volk." It had its impact on mass consciousness as such, and was not something isolated or detached. The Jew was but a protruding peak of the ideological iceberg, and we have tried to convey an impression of the iceberg as a whole, for this is what the Nazis themselves wanted to convey to the people. If for Hitler the Jew was a "principle," [18] for the average German he must have been similarly abstract. Perhaps he witnessed the arrests of Jews and felt sympathy, or saw the burning of the synagogues on November 10, 1938 -- but his personal involvement would have been small. There were those who tried to help, but this was asking for martyrdom, self-sacrifice; it required a heroism that has always been rare in history. Aiding the "enemy" of the race called for a true heroism, quite different from that which the Nazis advocated. For their heroes were part of a group, the Volk, which gave them strength but also sheltered them. Helping Jews against the "fury of the people" had to be a lonely, individual action. It should not surprise us that so few took this course; it is surprising that there were so many thousands who did. In a book devoted to how the Third Reich affected Germans it would be misleading to give a separate treatment to the Jewish question.

This book does not pretend to give a complete picture. Rather it aims to offer a taste of what National Socialism wanted to create, how it met the crisis of the post-World War I world, and how it affected the German population. But these documents also convey an idea of how "mass consciousness" can be created and manipulated in a nation. Hitler and his fellow leaders genuinely believed in their world view, but they also sought quite consciously to induce the population to share this belief. It is no coincidence that the Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment became so important, or that Hitler was personally closest to Joseph Goebbels, the expert manipulator of mass opinion.

Yet it would all have come to naught if the world view itself had not reflected already existing prejudices among the people, The bourgeois ideas which had become rooted in the German mind during the nineteenth century were combined with an omnipresent nationalism, and both were built into the ideology of race, blood, and soil. For those millions who yearned for a restoration of morality and family life, and for those who wanted Germany to take its rightful place among the nations, Hitler offered hope -- even if they rejected most of his racial ideas. How many said: "He will become respectable in office," and repudiated his racism, which "no sensible person could believe"! But the racism and all that it meant proved to be not excesses but an integral part of the ideology, and those who hoped differently were doomed to disappointment. They became the "old generation" whom Hitler called the "bourgeoisie which is finished" [19] though he had skillfully used their moral values and their nationalism on his road to power. By "used" we do not mean to imply that these ideas were not part of a world view genuinely held by Hitler. We have mentioned before the constant interplay between theory and application, but to this must be added the equally close interplay between genuinely held belief and its manipulation for the purpose of making it the sole national religion.

There is one late development in Nazism which falls outside the scope of this book: that of the SS. It came to be of truly great importance only after 1939. Here, among those who considered themselves the racial elite, both the bourgeois values and the nationalism tended eventually to drop away. During the war the SS was made up of not only Germans from the Reich but Aryans from other countries as well. Moreover, the bourgeois morality, the traditional family bonds, had little standing in the eyes of men who regarded themselves as a new order (Orden) of knights. To them only race and power counted. But this was a late development and did not affect the population as a whole -- though it would have done so if the war had been won.

Hitler's world has gone forever [?!]. But many of the basic attitudes and prejudices which went into his world view are still with us, waiting to be actualized, to be directed into a new mass consciousness. The documents which follow may seem to the reader, thirty years later, to be so outrageous as to verge on the comical. Yet we must remember that at one point in history a regime did take these ideas seriously and so did millions who lived under it. Nazism was overthrown by a foreign war, not by internal revolution, and a larger resistance to Nazism grew up only as the war was being lost. This is partly explained by Hitler's successes: both in foreign policy and internally. During the years when these documents were written and their ideas put into practice, unemployment had vanished (there were over 6 million unemployed in 1933), the boundaries of Germany were being extended, and the humiliating Treaty of Versailles was being liquidated. The world view was spread against the background of considerable success.

Yet the world view for which Hitler stood is in itself a part of this success. That some of its basic attitudes are still with us should give pause for thought. Perhaps far from being farfetched and almost comical, this ideology appeals to a basic need for an organic community, for historical continuity, and for the shelter of a firm and established morality. A revolution of the spirit is for many men more tempting than one which brings about social or economic changes and which might lead to chaos instead of cementing order. Nazism exemplifies the dangers which can lurk behind this facade of conservatism, a modern conservatism which is vulnerable to extreme views even if it rejects them. It is unfashionable to speak of the lessons of history, but perhaps there is a lesson for the present hidden among these documents of the past.

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Notes:

1. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich, 1934), p. 373.

2. Kampf: Lebensdokumente deutscher Jugend (Leipzig, 1934), p. 307.

3. For a good description of this process, see William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1930-1935 (Chicago, 1965), Chapter 17.

4. Horia Sima, Destinee du nationalisme (Paris, n.d.), p. 19.

5. Mein Kampf, p. 418.

6. Ibid., pp. 116 ff.

7. Gustave Le Bou, The Crowd (London, 1922), pp. 35-36.

8. Mein Kampf, p. 536.

9. Ibid., pp. 371-372.

10. Reprinted in Hildegard Brenner, Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg, 1963), p. 188.

11. Quoted in the Frankfurter Neue Presse, Jan. 28, 1958; and in Ernst Deuerlein, "Hitlers Eintritt in die Politik und die Reichswehr," Viertelsjahrschrift fur Zeitgeschichte, 7 Jahrg., Heft 2 (April 1959), p. 219.

12. Mein Kampf, p. 306.

13. Quoted in the Danziger Vorposten, May 2, 1938.

14. Mein Kampf, pp. 423-424; The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, trans. by Norman Baynes (London, 1942), Vol. 1, p. 587.

15. “Gegenwartige Lage in der Physik," Aktenvermerk fur den Reichsleiter (Alfred Rosenberg) von J. Wagner, reprinted in Leon Poliakov and Josef Wulf, Das dritte Reich und seine Denker (Berlin, 1959), pp. 101-103.

16. Benedikt Lochmuller, Hans Schemm (Bayreuth, 1935), Vol. 1, p. 40.

17. Mein Kampf, p. 379.

18. Hermann Rauschning, Gesprache mit Hitler (New York, 1940), p. 220.

19. Ibid., p, 44.

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