Germany in 1933: the easy slide into fascism

By Bernard Weiner

Defying Hitler
By Sebastian Haffner
Wiedenfeld and Nicolson 2002

The veneer of civilization is thin. We know this from our own observations, and various writers — from Shakespeare to Sinclair Lewis — have shown us how easily populations can be manipulated by leaders skillfully playing on patriotic emotion or racial or nationalist feelings. Whole peoples, like individuals, can become irrational on occasion — sometimes for a brief moment, sometimes for years, sometimes for decades. Ambition, hatred, fear can get the better of them, and gross lies told by their leaders can deceive their otherwise rational minds. It has happened, it happens, it will continue to happen.

One of the most outrageous and horrific examples of an entire country falling into national madness probably was Hitler’s Germany from 1933-45. The resulting world war was disastrous, leading to more than 40,000,000 deaths. A good share of what we know about how this happened in Germany usually comes to us many years later from post-facto books, looking backward to the horror. There are very few examples of accounts written from the inside at the very time the events were unfolding.

One such book is Defying Hitler, by the noted German journalist/author Sebastian Haffner. The manuscript was found, stuffed away in a drawer, by Haffner’s son in 1999 after his father’s death at age 91. Published in 2000, the book became an immediate best-seller in Germany and was published last year in English, translated by the son, Oliver Pretzel.

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

You find yourself reading this book in amazement; there is so much historical perspective, so much sweep of what was going on and predictions of what later was to happen, so many insights into what led so many ordinary Germans to join with or acquiesce to the Nazi program.

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

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

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

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

Then there was the economic factor, the terror associated with having no money with which to live, among other ingredients that went into the bubbling fascist vat: the humiliating terms of the Versailles Treaty that were placed on defeated Germany after World War I; the unceasing propaganda barrage in the mass media, helping citizens to agree with the government; the martial mentality that pervaded society: “From 1914 to 1918 a generation of German schoolboys daily experienced war as a great, thrilling, enthralling game between nations, which provided far more excitement and emotional satisfaction than anything peace could offer; and that is where [Nazism] draws its allure from: its simplicity, its appeal to the imagination, and its zest for action; but also its intolerance and its cruelty toward internal opponents...Ultimately, that is also the source of Nazism’s belligerent attitude toward neighboring states. Other countries are not regarded as neighbors, but must be opponents, whether they like it or not.”

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

In short, what should have been a strong political and moral opposition movement to Hitlerian policies meekly acceded to the destruction of their country’s institutions of law and social harmony.

Of course, fear of police-state action always was operative. “Join the thugs to avoid being beaten up. Less clear was a kind of exhilaration, the intoxication of unity, the magnetism of the masses. There was also (particularly among intellectuals) the belief that they could change the face of the Nazi Party by becoming a member, even now shift its direction.”

Haffner laments that the crimes of the Hitler administration, given this collective nervous breakdown, had very little impact on the population, which seemed to accept everything done in its name with a shrug of the shoulders. And so it became easier to simply permit oneself to sink, ever so slowly into this collective illness, into accommodation with the ruling party, even though the police-state was constantly violating citizens’ privacy.

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

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

The relevance and importance of Defying Hitler to the United States of today is evident as Ashcroft is telling Congress that the PATRIOT Act — the same act that more than 100 cities have voted not to honor because of its numerous violations of rights guaranteed by the Constitution — does not give the Bush administration enough police power and needs to be expanded, demonstrable government falsehoods are being published by a compliant media, while that same media, owned by corporate giants, refuses to report factual information that is embarrassing to the administration and finally, the Pentagon is working on “contingency plans” for the next unilateral invasion of a sovereign state by the US military.

Source: TruthOut.org