The Holy Days of the Nazi Year
A religion needs times and places for worship, ways of making visible the invisible. Holidays and ceremonies are important ways of doing that. The Nazis gave major effort to founding and promoting what can reasonably be called religious holidays and rituals. As usual, several Nazis claimed control, primarily Goebbels and Rosenberg, though this was also an area of interest to Hitler.
By 1934 the Nazis had established their liturgical calendar. It began on 30
January, the anniversary of Hitler’s assumption of office. The anniversary of the announcement of the party program in 1920 came on 24 February. In This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
20
Chapter One
the first years of Hitler’s regime, the holiday emphasized the relationship between Hitler and his earliest followers, though during the war it came to emphasize the faith of early party members, faith that was now needed by everyone if Germany were to win. Heroes’ Memorial Day, honoring war dead, came in mid-March. The last Sunday in March was Duty of Youth Day, a rite of passage in which those crossing from youth to adulthood were reminded of their obligations to the Fatherland. Hitler’s birthday on 20 April was a cause for major celebration (the pinnacle coming on his fiftieth birthday in 1939, for which a remarkable film was made). The Nazis transformed 1 May from the Marxist Labor Day into the National Holiday of the German People, although it remained a holiday of the worker. Mother’s Day came early in May. Mothers with four or more children received medals. The summer solstice was particularly celebrated by the Hitler Youth and the SS.
The first part of September saw the supreme Nazi spectacle, the Nuremberg rally, an event that even those who did not attend participated in through massive press and radio (even television) coverage and Riefenstahl’s party rally films Victory of Faith and Triumph of the Will. The rallies grew in size and pomp until 1938.36 The 1939 rally, ill-named the “Party Rally of Peace,” was canceled just before the war began, but plans went on into summer 1940
for a rally that year.37 Work on the monumental buildings on the party rally grounds continued until late in the war. The Harvest Festival fell at the beginning of October. Hundreds of thousands of farmers gathered on the Bückeberg, a large hill in southern Germany, to hear Hitler praise the virtues of agriculture. The most sacred date on the Nazi calendar was 9 November, the anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Even Christmas, the last holiday of the year, took on a Nazi rather than a Christian interpretation. By the war years, the party published books on observing Christmas that had not a single mention of Christ. The German word for Christmas ( Weihnacht) made the task easier, since it did not include any direct link to Jesus Christ.38
The nature of Nazi holidays is clear in the case of 9 November, a pseudoreligious celebration of the first order. Its eventual significance was not obvious at its beginnings. In November 1923 Hitler resolved to stage a putsch. On 9 November, as the band of claimants on state power neared the Feldherrnhalle, a prominent public monument in Munich, the police opened fire. Sixteen of Hitler’s followers died. Hitler, lightly wounded, made his escape, subsequently serving a comfortable prison term. He reestablished the NSDAP in 1925, and at the party rally that year in Weimar, the blood-soaked flag that had been carried two years earlier This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Secular Faiths
21
became the Blood Banner, the most sacred treasure in the Nazi reliquary.
The day was observed as the “National Day of Mourning of the NSDAP” for the remainder of the Weimar Republic, though no one else paid heed.
In 1933, 9 November became a national holiday. That year, and annually until 1943, Hitler spoke to a gathering of his earlier followers in Munich on the evening of 8 November. Though only the long-term party members ( alte Kämpfer) attended, the next day’s newspapers printed the text of Hitler’s speech. On 9 November, ceremonies were held in Munich, the most dramatic of which was a reenactment of the 1923 march. Tall pylons with the names of Nazi dead lined the route, and buildings were draped with flags and black cloth. As Hitler walked past each pylon, loud-speakers announced the name of a Nazi who had died in Hitler’s service.
Upon reaching the Feldherrnhalle, a moment of silence was observed.
Following years saw ceremonies even more impressive. Munich annually was decked with flags and banners. In 1935 the sixteen dead were moved from their separate graves to a pair of “Honor Temples” in Munich where they took up “eternal watch.” It was as if they had been born again.
Flags that formerly had flown at half mast were now at full mast. The New York Times correspondent observed that Munich was celebrating “not a fu-neral but a triumph.”39 As the names of the sixteen were called in a last roll call before the Honor Temples, the assembled crowd of thousands answered “here” to each name, not a new technique but a moving one.
The Munich observances were relayed to the entire nation by press and radio, but most towns and schools organized their own rites. They were on a smaller scale then the ones in Munich, but, even so, flag-draped buildings, graveside ceremonies, and solemn meetings prevailed throughout Germany.
A typical such local celebration was held in a carefully decorated room.
It began with the ceremonial entrance of uniformed party groups, accompanied by elevating music. The crowd sang the 9 November hymn, “Today a Hundred Thousand Flags Are Marching.” An invocation, Hitler’s promise that the day would be forever observed in Germany, was followed by more music. A local dignitary then delivered a speech that tried to establish the myths of 9 November and to encourage the audience to follow the examples of devotion set by Hitler’s early followers. The local Hitler Youth band played a fanfare, and the chairman said: “We remember the first blood martyrs of the movement.” The flag-bearers lowered their flags. “On 9 November at twelve-thirty in the afternoon the following men, in true faith in the resurrection of their people, fell before the Feldherrnhalle and in the This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
22
Chapter One
court of the former War Ministry in Munich.” The names of the sixteen were read, followed by a poem:
You died
Struggling for our Reich.
You had to die
So that we
Could live victoriously.
Your deaths
Were the movement’s victory
And your heritage
Is to us eternal obligation.
Other dead of the party and the military were also remembered. The flags were raised, symbolizing the victory of the dead. After more poetry, songs, and praise of Hitler, the meeting closed with the party anthem, the Horst Wessel Song. 40
The Nazis used Christian imagery in abundance. Hitler said in 1934 that
“the blood which they shed has become the baptismal water of the Reich.”41 Terms such as blood martyr, sacrifice, holy, resurrection, Golgo-tha, and pilgrimage were regularly used. The Nazis, here and elsewhere, followed a strategy of infusing old symbols with new meaning, co-opting them for the new faith. A party writer made the point explicitly in 1939, arguing that Christianity had grown by incorporating pagan rituals. An adherent of earlier religions “had not the faintest idea that under the guise of his old customs a new and foreign religion was creeping up on him.”
Nazism also needed to fill traditional symbols with new ideological meaning, he continued: “National Socialism can consider its ideas secure only when they are anchored in the soul of each citizen.”42
The holiday contributed to the establishment of a pantheon of Nazi saints. All of those who died in Hitler’s cause, the “martyrs” of the movement, enjoyed honor, but the dead of 1923 wer
e at the pinnacle of veneration. Consider a 1935 description of their activities: “Out of the need, out of the agony, out of the baseness, out of the abyss of despair, out of the chaotic gorge of destruction and defenseless slavery, the names of the unknown soldiers thundered through the night of the people’s wretched isolation. Revenge for betrayal was the fire that burned within them, revenge forged from pain, molded from sorrow, hardened from honor wounded nigh undo death, enormous, unquenchable revenge.”43 This is not language about ordinary mortals. These were men who were models of virtue This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Secular Faiths
23
for Germany. Biographies of the sixteen presented them as suffering saints in Germany’s cause. A 1935 series of biographies began with the observation that “from their life portraits we will receive new courage to struggle for the future of the German people.” Of one it was said: “His hero’s death before the Feldherrnhalle was the towering culmination of a life that was nothing but a sacrifice for Germany.” A second victim “knew nothing higher than the Fatherland.”44
The dead even won immortality, which came through the Nazi triumph in 1933. The day after taking power, Hitler went to Munich to pay his respects to the dead, saying: “Und Ihr habt doch gesiegt, ” or “You have won after all.” The faithful repeated his words innumerable times on meeting-hall banners, in newspapers, by speakers, even on postage stamps. The holiday was also a popular theme in Nazi art.45
Nazi rhetoric suggested further kinds of immortality as well. The spirit of the martyrs somehow lived on. A book on the conduct of ceremonies in schools suggested: “Now they sleep again, quietly and peacefully, in their graves. A great bliss, an eternal joy, has come over them because of the words of praise and thanks by the Führer: ‘ Und Ihr habt doch gesiegt. ’”46 The Völkischer Beobachter wrote in 1936: “A year ago the heroes of the Feldherrnhalle took up eternal watch. Flags of mourning are now yellowed, tat-tered and superfluous. The dead have risen. They march once more before us and in us.”47 Many similar comments in the Nazi press proclaimed the immortality of the dead.
The Blood Banner was carried in each year’s Munich observances, but it also appeared at the Nuremberg rally. Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will shows Hitler consecrating new party banners by touching the Blood Banner to them. In some mystic way, power flowed from the old flag through Hitler to the new ones. As Robert D. Brooks observes, the ceremony connected past and present seamlessly, endowing the event with the deeds and beliefs of the past. It was a moving ceremony that unified those present, giving them a sense of participating in something larger than self and greater than the moment.48
Nazi Faith
The full panoply of Nazism reflected in distorted ways the rituals and ceremonies of a religious faith. As any faith, it used them to give mystic significance to the party’s everyday activities and to justify activities that otherwise would have appeared disgraceful. Moreover, these ideological This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
24
Chapter One
liturgies replaced traditional religious meanings with secular meanings, thereby dampening the lingering impact of competing messages.
Knowing the effects and consequences of Nazism, it is comfortable to assume that its followers were unpleasant people out to do ill. But few Germans became Nazis because they desired to massacre Jews or devastate Europe. While pursuing ignoble ends, Nazism appealed to what many Germans saw to be noble goals deeply rooted in German traditions. Nazism, after all, claimed to be the culmination, not the repudiation, of German history and culture, and it is surely true that many elements of the German past could be made consistent with Nazism. As Robert Gellately observed, the content of Nazi propaganda was “an indicator of what people sincerely hoped to be true.”49
Consider Helmut Stellrecht’s Faith and Action, something of a Nazi “book of virtues.” Despite the pressures of the war, at least 175,000 copies of an elegant edition were in print by 1944. It has brief chapters on faith, loyalty, bravery, obedience, blood, life, and death. Its words on faith suggest the tone: “Because faith is strength, it can do what seems impossible. It is the foundation of any deed. . . . The highest and most important in a person is not his knowledge and understanding, but his faith. Each is worth only as much as the faith he has.”50 The book’s religious intent is clear from a review in the party journal for propagandists: “He who wishes to give his growing children something better than the Jewish stories of the Old Testament or proverbs and psalms that have lost their meaning for us today can reach for this book. In noble form and in clear, powerful language, it is a guide for anyone seeking an understanding of the National Socialist worldview and outlook on life.”51 The passing phrase about Old Testament stories “having lost their meaning” is striking. Stellrecht’s book is presented as a new way to explain the meaning of life, as a guide for moral behavior.
This would not be possible had it ignored the deeply rooted traditional beliefs and values of its readers.
Jesus said faith was sufficient to move mountains. Stellrecht and the Nazis thought it could win wars. Nothing in the book suggests Auschwitz.
War is indeed glorified, but in a way that reinforces virtues most Germans readily accepted. Masses of similar material appeared. A German who did not think too hard or look too deeply could comfortably believe that Nazism stood firmly on the side of familiar virtues.
Religions address the great questions of life, including those of origins, destinations, and purposes. Nazism gave answers that, although perhaps not as satisfying as religious answers, still provided ways for citizens to This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Secular Faiths
25
make sense of the world around them. Nature rewarded strength and punished weakness. Germans had the good fortune to be born into nature’s favored race, one whose antecedents stretched back into the mists of time and forward into a glorious future.
The amount of material on this theme was enormous. Take, for example, a poem titled “My Boy,” published in 1939 in the Frauen Warte, the Nazi biweekly for women:
Now I live in you.
You shall and will live on
In times I will not see.
How wonderful that is!
It is as wonderful as in the old sagas,
When each tribe strove
To ensure its bloodline did not perish.
Still, you are yet small.
How could you know
That you are a branch on a large tree!
But the day will come
When I must tell you
That not only you,
But your fathers too will be judged by your deeds.
No, you do not yet understand that.
You dream and play throughout the day.
But when you understand,
Then I will know
That in each heartbeat in you and me
That keeps us living,
Also flows a drop of eternity.52
The poem presented each German as a link in an eternal chain, binding the past to the future.
A racially pure German “heaven” was the goal. It would be an earthly paradise that might take generations to achieve, one that required a transformation in human nature. As Hitler said in 1934, the Nazis were gradually building “a new German individual [ Mensch].”53
Though the party’s faithful would not in a literal sense live again to experience that heaven, neither were they truly dead, as the rhetoric of 9 November tried to prove. An elaborate book published in 1938 attempted a This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
26
/>
Chapter One
comprehensive list of all those who had died in Hitler’s service. As the book’s introductory poem titled “They Live!” claimed: They wander through the land and are not dead.
They are to us both admonition and warning,
For we the living are the heirs of great heroes.
Where their memory shines like fire,
Our path leads through night and misery to the light.
They are Germany. Germany will never die!
The Nazi anthem proclaimed that “comrades shot by the Red Front and Reaction march in spirit in our ranks.” The book asserted that the song was
“the prayer of the Germans.”54
The dead would in some sense experience the new earth as they lived on in their descendants. In February 1945 Goebbels wrote of a happy future for Germany’s children after a Nazi victory in the year 2000: “Our hopes will come true in their world and our ideals will be reality. We must never forget that when we see the storms of this wild age reflected in the eyes of our children. Let us act so that we will earn their eternal blessings, not their curses.”55 Again, there was a large amount of such material. It promised Germans an “eternal” reward for their loyal obedience.
Religions need their devils, or sources of evil. In contrast to the Aryan race, the most developed race and the one on which humanity’s future depended, stood the Jew. The Nazis frequently referred to “the Jew” rather than “the Jews,” a Satan figure in the literal sense. Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer often made the comparison. A 1943 issue, for example, carried a front-cover photograph of a Jew captioned “Satan.”56 Hitler made the same comparison in Mein Kampf, as did many other Nazis. The Jews were not simply inferior (as were, for example, blacks in Nazi ideology); they were the embodiment of evil, the antipole to the Aryan German. As Hitler had put it in Mein Kampf: “By warding off the Jews I am doing the Lord’s work.” In fighting the devil, anything goes.
Anti-Semitism was crucial to Nazism as a system, even if it was not central to many Germans. All the major Nazi propaganda claims at least implicitly rested on the argument that Hitler and his party were battling the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. Jews had controlled Germany before 1933, they had driven England and France into war against Germany, they were behind Marxism and its Soviet manifestation, and they organized anti-German forces throughout the world.
The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic Page 4
