Serving the Reich Read online

  Yet to many Germans these were the actions not of a ruthless dictator but of a resolute leader: they were a necessary means of bringing about public order and security in the face of the dangers created by the Weimar state. The plummet into total rule was accompanied by a widespread sense of relief and optimism. At last the political chaos seemed to have been tamed by a decisive and strong Führer who reflected the prevailing mood of conservative nationalism. Even Meitner, an Austrian Jew, did not view the Nazi government with outright foreboding. She told Hahn that Hitler had recently spoken ‘very moderately, tactfully, and personally’. Hopefully, she added, ‘things will continue in this vein’. For his part, Hahn expressed some support for Hitler’s cause while abroad, telling Canadian reporters he was under the impression that all the Jews who had been ousted and incarcerated were Communist agitators.

  The democratic voice

  Hitler understood that he could do pretty much as he pleased so long as he made it legal. By introducing their discriminatory and authoritarian policies in the form of new laws, the National Socialists exploited the German instinct for obedience to the state: one did not object to measures that were enshrined in law. The Prussian mentality in particular, trained to be loyal and subservient to authority, found it almost inconceivable to oppose what was state-ordained. The idea that laws could be morally criminal was virtually a contradiction in terms.

  All the same, how a conservative but humane society could capitulate to leaders with such vicious and abhorrent objectives has been the central question for historians of the Nazi era. The first consideration is obvious yet easily forgotten: we know now where Germany was heading, but the German citizens did not. It seems trivial to say that, to understand the events of 1933, we must set aside vision of the impending Holocaust. But it is hard to do so. As Alan Beyerchen says, ‘only in retrospect is it so apparent that the only truly honourable response to National Socialism was uncompromising defiance’.

  We should remember too that modern European society, while no stranger to bigotry and undemocratic rule, had no previous experience of this sort of extreme demagoguery, state repression and legalized racism. It was widely believed that Hitler’s government would be transient: that it would either soon lose power or be forced to moderate its extremes. That seemed to be the impression gathered by Wilbur Earle Tisdale of the Rockefeller Foundation’s European office on his excursions among German scientists: he wrote to his New York superiors in August 1934 that ‘observers inside and outside of Germany [are] unanimous in predicating [sic] the fall of the present government within a period of a few months’. He reported that Otto Warburg, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Cell Physiology in Berlin, suspected that the Nazis in fact ultimately planned to restore the monarchy!

  Yet we cannot ascribe the ascent of the Nazis simply to overoptimism and lack of foresight on the part of the German people. Hitler’s party mobilized pervasive patriotism and deep-seated (if often mildly expressed) ethnic prejudice, coupled to the general population’s parochial self-interest, political and economic dissatisfaction, fear of Bolshevik revolution, and instinct to avoid trouble. These tendencies could be found across the political spectrum. Watching the options for political opposition evaporate, the despairing chairman of the moderate right German People’s Party (DVP) wrote that ‘behind the pretty facade of patriotic unity, do not infinitely many people operate only out of ambition, greed, class hostilities, and a desire for advancement to a degree that endangers the personal trust between ordinary Germans in the worst way?’

  Besides, in many respects the National Socialists did not look like far-right fanatics at all—why then would they be styling themselves as socialists? Their welfare policies seemed progressive; their economic strategy was Keynesian. And after the turmoil of the Weimar Republic, people of all political persuasions could see the attraction of firm, conservative government. ‘From 1929 on,’ wrote the civil servant Hans Bernd Gisevius,

  it became more and more apparent that the leaders of our left and centre parties were incapable of holding the masses in line. It seemed quite reasonable to hope that the rising flood [of public unrest] could be stemmed by the right and safely guided into evolutionary channels.

  Gisevius, whose instincts were fundamentally those of the conservative Prussian elite, felt that German liberalism*1 ‘must bear a considerable measure of guilt for the disaster of Nazism’. With its ‘overemphasis on individualism’, he said, it ‘contributed greatly to the dissolution of religious and ethical principles’.

  Although this comment tells us something about why Gisevius and his ilk initially welcomed the Nazis (he applied to join the party in 1933, hoping to gain professional advantage from it, but was refused), it nonetheless places too much blame on liberalism for provoking its antithesis. The fact was that liberals were not necessarily opposed to Hitler in the first place. ‘Even though liberal democrats disagreed with National Socialism on some levels’, writes historian Eric Kurlander, ‘they exhibited indifference, even enthusiasm for the regime on others . . . When liberals failed to resist, at least intellectually, it had less to do with fear of arrest or persecution and more to do with a tacit desire to accommodate specific policies.’ The National Socialists were offering much more than what they have now come to represent: state oppression, torture, racism and genocide.

  Werner Heisenberg fits this picture of the ‘conservative liberal’ optimist: in October 1933 he wrote that ‘much that is good is now also being tried, and one should recognize good intentions’. His close colleague Carl von Weizsäcker told writer Robert Jungk in the 1950s that (as Jungk put it) ‘although he [Weizsäcker] had a loathing for the leaders of this “movement” . . . in its beginnings he had a certain sympathy or, let’s say, understanding for National Socialism, because it appeared to him that there was the thrust of profound forces operating here’. That notion of ‘profound forces’ appears repeatedly in the attitude of the German scientists: a sense that politics were directed by tectonic influences they could not and should not hope to influence—and which were almost by definition of noble character, even if their immediate manifestations were squalid.

  Liberals and conservatives united in supporting Nazi foreign policy. Even the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and democrat Ludwig Quidde, who was exiled from Germany in 1933 and criticized the National Socialists thereafter, approved of rearmament and of Hitler’s plans to reunite Austria with Germany, claiming that this is what the Austrians wanted (many of them did indeed welcome the Anschluss in 1938). One could find liberals who defended the invasion of Poland; even the invasion of France found favour with some. They regarded these acts as part of a struggle for German liberation.

  It is in the light of such considerations that the German historian Karl Dietrich Bracher writes—with the German scientists specifically in mind—that

  Certainly opportunism and fear at the inception of the terrorism of the new regime were contributing factors [to the rise of Nazism]. But the coordination and self-identification with the totalitarian regime occurred to such an astonishing extent and with such speed that one cannot avoid the conclusion that there existed on the part of the great majority of the intellectual elite a very high predisposition and susceptibility towards it.

  When liberals did disagree with the regime, they were not necessarily prevented from saying so. The newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung published many articles critical of Nazi policies, but was not shut down until 1943, and was hitherto treated with remarkable lenience by the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who understood the value of appearing to tolerate dissent. One can also overestimate the dangers of protest, at least in the early years of Nazi rule. The threat of deportation to the camps or of a Gestapo interrogation cell did not necessarily loom. When, for example, the liberal writer, intellectual and politician Theodor Heuss refused to supply verification of his Aryan ethnicity, he suffered nothing worse than being denied membership of the Reich Association of the German Press. Without his pre
ss pass, he was stripped of the editorship of his political journal Die Hilfe in 1936, although he regained a pass the following year. In 1934 Die Hilfe published, without serious consequences, an anti-censorship article arguing that ‘religion, science and art are not means to be employed by the state; for the intellect blows wherever it wishes’. One would struggle to find comparable public statements from German scientists.

  The National Socialists were in any case insufficiently organized to suppress all criticism. Their apparent ruthlessness and focus in the early days of the Third Reich can give a misleading impression of how the regime mostly worked. It was no monolithic behemoth but was manipulated by rival power blocs, riven by internal factionalism and hindered by bureaucracy and incompetence. Besides, even if it had been a paradigm of efficiency, the secret police (Gestapo), numbering just 20,000 in 1939, was incapable of closely monitoring a population of eighty million. Neither did the Nazis seem particularly bothered to do so: in the pre-war years particularly, they did not ‘mould’ German mass society by force. ‘On close examination’, says Kurlander,

  we can find in the [early] Third Reich elements we would not expect in the dictionary definition of a totalitarian regime: a lack of controlling mechanisms, creative movements expressive of freedom such as jazz and swing, and extended influence of Jewish culture and its champions, even avant-garde attempts at modernism.

  Nor was the regime implacable in its resolve: some Nazi policies were revised in the face of public discontent, such as the ‘euthanasia’ programme that permitted extermination of disabled people.

  The fact is that the National Socialists didn’t need always to show an iron fist. They seemed to realize that their opponents among the intellectuals would lack the stamina and resources, and probably the convictions, to pose any real threat. The political scientist and historian Alfred Weber at the University of Heidelberg resisted crude Nazi propagandizing in 1933 by insisting that the local police chief remove the swastika banner from his institute and then, when it was restored, simply closing the institute down. Although Weber suffered little more than being pilloried in the Nazi press for this ‘suppression of academic freedom’, he subsequently elected to retire and pursue his nonconformism with academic privileges and reputation intact. As Kurlander puts it,

  Weber’s abrupt change of heart indicates how daunting it must have been for even the most principled and influential academics to sustain their opposition in the face of goose-stepping students, cowardly administrators, and career-minded colleagues. Weber’s two-week refusal to coordinate [his institute] is the exception; his passive intellectual nonconformity over the ensuing twelve years the rule.

  As with some other modern dictatorships, the Nazis realized that strength comes not from brutal repression but from winning support with propaganda and populism, including the creation of a leadership cult. Time and again one finds Hitler disassociated in the minds of many Germans from the ugly acts of his underlings: whatever the failings of the Nazi Party, the Führer himself retained his popular appeal as a symbol of national pride, hope and regeneration. Even (perhaps especially) Nazi sympathizers clung to this vision of a flawless leader presiding over bungling and infighting bureaucrats.

  When the German press did carry complaints about the regime, these were typically expressed as economic rather than political dissatisfactions. People might not trouble themselves too much about moral principles or academic freedom, but they cared about food. When the economic situation deteriorated in 1935–6, leading to food shortages, there was unrest among the working class. But many of these grumblers would be found eagerly proclaiming their support at the next Nazi rally. ‘Rather Hitler than Stalin’ was the prevailing view.

  All this should prevent us from attributing too much specialness to the rise of the Nazis. While it surely involved a great deal of historical contingency, and while the determination of some historians to see Nazism as a uniquely German phenomenon warrants consideration, insisting too stridently on a Teutonic obsession with ‘blood and culture’ not only recycles the Third Reich’s own baleful tropes but negates the useful lessons we might draw from it. ‘The Third Reich was the product of a liberal democracy not unlike [the] contemporary United States’, says Kurlander, who adds that our susceptibility to such regimes becomes particularly strong in times of economic and political unrest, just as the rise of far-right parties in Europe today clings to the coattails of recession. It is not fanciful to draw a parallel between the extreme polarization of political culture in Weimar Germany, which made the country all but ungovernable, and recent political trends in the United States. At any event, the question of how German intellectual, scientific and academic cultures fared in the 1930s is not devoid of contemporary relevance.

  The plain fact is, then, that Nazism was not imposed but accepted and even welcomed. From Leipzig in May 1933, the author Erich Ebermayer*2 wrote

  One becomes ever more lonely. Everywhere friends declare their faith in Adolf Hitler. It is as if an airless stratum surrounds us few who remain unable to make such avowals. Of my young friends it is the best who now radically proclaim their allegiance to National Socialism . . . They run around in the plain Hitler Youth uniform, radiant with happiness and pride.

  The Jewish question

  No one was under any illusions about the anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party. That was clear enough from its leader’s early manifesto Mein Kampf:

  The Jewish people, with all its apparent intellectual qualities, is nevertheless without any true culture, especially without a culture of its own. For the sham culture which the Jew possesses today is the property of other peoples, and is mostly spoiled in his hands . . . the personification of the Devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.

  Of course, anti-Semitism was already deeply ingrained in the culture of the German-speaking nations. Gustav Mahler’s travails as director of the Vienna Court Opera from 1897 to 1907 are but one well-known example: even after converting to Catholicism (as many of Jewish origin did), he was relentlessly attacked by the press on ethnic grounds. Vienna was particularly nasty, but there was little there that would raise eyebrows throughout Germany. Anti-Semitism was more than popular prejudice, for it found some endorsement at the ‘highest’ intellectual and political levels. Immanuel Kant had advocated the ‘euthanasia of Jewry’, albeit by a conversion to ‘pure moral religion stripped of all laws and rituals’. In the late nineteenth century the Berlin-based historian, politician and philosopher Heinrich von Treitschke, a member of the Reichstag, publicly supported anti-Jewish sentiment and accused the German Jews of failing to assimilate. His statement in 1879 that ‘The Jews are our misfortune!’ became the motto of the newspaper Der Stürmer, the mouthpiece of Nazi anti-Semitism. (While Treitschke did not actually voice this opinion, merely writing that it was one heard all over Germany, it’s not clear that he would have disagreed with it.)

  To both Jews and non-Jews in Germany, Nazi anti-Semitism must have seemed, at least initially, just more of the same. As the Jewish writer Joseph Roth commented bitterly, writing in exile from Paris in the autumn of 1933,

  If you want to understand the burning of the books, you must understand that the current Third Reich is a logical extension of the Prussian empire of Bismarck and the Hohenzollerns, and not any sort of reaction to the poor German republic with its feeble German Democrats and Social Democrats.

  Even shortly after the war, when the realities of the Final Solution had become known, one survey indicated that about one in five Germans agreed with Hitler’s treatment of the Jews and another one in five were broadly in favour but felt that he went too far.

  Germany was not alone in any of this, as the Dreyfus affair in France illustrated. But although distrust of the Jews was widespread in Europe, it didn’t have the same flavour everywhere. We are apt now to make the assumption that anti-Semitism was a clearly defined and uniform position associated with the conservative right, predicated on a general disparagement
of non-European races, and opposed (when at all) for moral reasons. But none of these things is generally true.

  One could, for example, identify with many liberal beliefs while indulging pronounced, even virulent anti-Semitism. As Kurlander says, ‘the aspects of Nazi ideology that most offend modern liberals—its virulent, expansionist völkisch nationalism and racial anti-Semitism—were the least problematic components of National Socialism for a great number of democrats during the last years of the Weimar Republic’. There was no social stigma, no self-censorship, that might restrain one from casually expressing anti-Semitic sentiments, any more than other forms of prejudice and stereotyping.

  Yet German liberalism, more than that of other European nations, found particular room for dislike of Jews. Especially after the First World War, there was widespread doubt in Germany that ethnic minorities could ever be assimilated—or at the very least, assimilation was considered the price of social acceptance. The German political writer Paul Rohrbach provides a good example of how such attitudes were expressed among intellectuals. Having travelled extensively in Asia and Africa, he had a high regard for Chinese and Japanese culture, and was optimistic about the development prospects of Africa. He held socially progressive views, particularly concerning the status of women. Yet he was a strong patriot, convinced of the need to preserve national honour, and bigoted about race. In 1933 he joined the NSDAP, although his relationship with the party was often fraught.

  The ‘Jewish question’ was regarded as a matter of politics, not morality. One might debate it in much the same spirit as one discussed the conduct of trade, war or taxation. Like racism today, it could be seen as nothing personal: you could lament an excessive Jewish influence on politics and commerce, or perpetuate anti-Semitic stereotypes, while enjoying good friendships with Jews. Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s economic minister, offers an interesting case study of the complexities of anti-Semitism at this time. He was in many respects a liberal, and although he became a supporter of the Nazis and president of the Reichsbank, he lost his influence after a disagreement with Hitler in 1937 (‘You simply do not conform to the general National Socialist framework’, Hitler told him two years later) and eventually became a member of the German Resistance. He was imprisoned after the failed assassination plot of June 1944 and sent to Dachau, but survived. Schacht was instinctively averse to racial hatred, and was frequently reprimanded by party officials for speaking out against attacks on Jews and their property. He argued against some anti-Semitic measures on the grounds that they would weaken Germany domestically and isolate it abroad. Put on trial at Nuremberg, Schacht claimed that he had served in the government ‘to prevent the worst excesses of Hitler’s policies’, although some historians argue that he aided the Holocaust by expropriating Jewish property. He was acquitted at the trials, and later became an adviser to developing countries on economic development. Schacht’s trajectory shows how unwise it is to attempt to label individuals as Nazi or not, or as pro-/anti-Semite. We can find liberals quietly acquiescing to a pervasive anti-Semitism, and on the other hand some prejudiced people driven by the Nazi excesses into defending the Jews. Few scientists actually served in the Nazi administration; but few, too, spoke out publicly against the regime and actively opposed it. Does this make them better or worse than Schacht?