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    German Voices: Memories of Life during Hitler's Third Reich
    German Voices: Memories of Life during Hitler's Third Reich
    German Voices: Memories of Life during Hitler's Third Reich
    Ebook304 pages5 hours

    German Voices: Memories of Life during Hitler's Third Reich

    By Frederic C. Tubach

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    What was it like to grow up German during Hitler’s Third Reich? In this extraordinary book, Frederic C. Tubach returns to the country of his roots to interview average Germans who, like him, came of age between 1933 and 1945. Tubach sets their recollections and his own memories into a broad historical overview of Nazism—a regime that shaped minds through persuasion (meetings, Nazi Party rallies, the 1936 Olympics, the new mass media of radio and film) and coercion (violence and political suppression). The voices of this long-overlooked population—ordinary people who were neither victims nor perpetrators—reveal the rich complexity of their attitudes and emotions. The book also presents selections from approximately 80,000 unpublished letters (now archived in Berlin) written during the war by civilians and German soldiers. Tubach powerfully provides new insights into Germany’s most tragic years, offering a nuanced response to the abiding question of how a nation made the quantum leap from anti-Semitism to systematic genocide.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of California Press
    Release dateMay 11, 2011
    ISBN9780520948884
    German Voices: Memories of Life during Hitler's Third Reich
    Author

    Frederic C. Tubach

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

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      Book preview

      German Voices - Frederic C. Tubach

      CHAPTER ONE

      Jobs and the Olympic Games

      Following the swift Nazi takeover in 1933, the interplay of persuasion and coercion alone was not enough to consolidate the party’s authority. Other factors, including the Olympic Games of 1936, which legitimized the Nazi movement before the world,¹ and the completion in 1937 of Hitler’s first, successful Four-Year Economic Plan—profound displays of harmony and accomplishment, requiring three years of careful preparation on all levels of society—brought Hitler to the apex of power.

      JOBS

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

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

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

      But the misery of our people is horrible. The proletariat of the hungry and unemployed millions in industry is now joined by the progressive deterioration of the entire middle class. If this general decay engulfs the German peasantry as well, then we will face a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.²

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

      During the three years leading up to the Olympic Games, most Germans—even those not fond of the Nazi regime—thought that the Nazis had made good on their promise to lift the German economy out of the depression. Those who, with the help of hindsight, now stress that Hitler was already mobilizing the German economy for war miss the point. The vast majority of Germans did not and could not know that mobilization for war was foremost in Hitler’s mind.³ What they did know was that work materialized, living standards rose, and unemployment largely disappeared. On March 26, 1937, a few days before the general election of March 29, a student wrote a composition for a class assignment with the title Wahlzeit (Election time): Now the German people have the chance to show their gratitude toward the Führer. . . . Things are moving, chimneys are smoking again, farmers are filled with hope, workers’ brigades till the land and soil, the army marches, youth sings and has faith, and the Saarland has returned home.⁴ He received an A−/B+ for his efforts.

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

      After all, the party called itself, oddly enough, the National Socialist German Workers Party [National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP]. Work was promised and work was created. Now we know the reasons why work was created. But you have to see it from the point of view of the father of a family, who had been unemployed for three, four, five, seven years and had to make do with a few pennies from social welfare. The Nazis gave him a uniform and boots. Hunger is what churned around in my stomach and intestines. Mother cried because she was unable to give us anything to eat, and we were four children. I can really understand that a father who looks at his children and finds a job will say, Well, that is to the credit of Hitler. And then there was this immense propaganda effort that influenced the masses. I can really understand all of that.⁵

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

      By the late 1930s, propaganda had convinced the Germans not only that their economy was strong and growing stronger, but also that there was no war agenda hidden behind the economic data. Eventually, many critics began to waver in their negative views of the Nazis and to fall in line. One such individual, a good Catholic born in 1913, remarked, In 1936–37—I still remember it well—pronouncements of the church were read from the pulpit that were considered to be propaganda against the Nazis. . . . I still remember my mother saying, ‘Good God, how can they proclaim such stuff in church? After all, everything is turning out just fine.’ ⁶

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

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

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