The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Nazism aestheticized politics; but it also politicized the arts.240 ‘We have often been accused’, said Goebbels, ‘of dragging German art down to the level of a mere matter of propaganda - how is this? Is propaganda something to which one can drag something else down? Isn’t propaganda as we understand it also a kind of art?’ Art and propaganda were one, he went on: and their purpose was to bring about a spiritual mobilization of the entire German people:National Socialism is not only a political doctrine, it is a total and all-encompassing general perspective on all public matters. So our entire life has to be based on it as a matter of natural assumption. We hope that the day will come when nobody needs to talk about National Socialism any more, since it has become the air that we breathe! Thus National Socialism cannot be content with mere lip-service - it must be acted upon with hand and heart. People must get used inwardly to this way of behaving, they must make it into their own set of attitudes - only then will it be recognized that a new will to culture has arisen from National Socialism and that this will to culture determines our entire national existence in an organic manner. One day, the spiritual awakening of our own time will emerge from this will to culture.241

  Nazi emblems, signs, words and concepts permeated everyday life as part of this campaign. Not only were film, radio, newspapers, magazines, sculptures, painting, literature, poetry, architecture, music and high culture increasingly informed by Nazi ideals, or confined within the boundaries they set, but everyday culture was as well. Between the flag-waving and swastika-bedaubed days of ideological mobilization such as Hitler’s birthday or the anniversary of his appointment as Reich Chancellor, ordinary life was permeated by the principles and precepts of Nazism too. From 1935, as Victor Klemperer noted, the regime encouraged people to use new, pseudo-Germanic names of the months. Ever enthusiastic, Luise Solmitz began using them immediately in her diary, instead of the traditionally Latinate ones: Julmond, Brechmond and so on.242

  Advertising and design began to incorporate Nazi symbols and to adopt approved Nazi style.243 Foreign advertising agencies were banned, and the usual mechanisms were set up to ensure that posters and advertisements would be ‘German’ in origin and style. Consumer products were now advertised in a manner that conformed to the regime’s requirements as much as high art did.244 Everyday objects quickly acquired a political veneer. Already in March 1933 the sharp-eyed Victor Klemperer noticed that the toothpaste tube he purchased in the pharmacy was labelled with a swastika.245 Before long, people could buy eggcups, hairpins, pencils or tea services decorated with swastikas, or give their children presents like toy models of stormtroopers, music boxes that played the Horst Wessel Song, or a puzzle that asked them to ‘put the letters together correctly to make the name of a great leader: L-I-T-R-E-H.’246 The tubular steel furniture so beloved of the Bauhaus in the 1920s used up valuable metal badly needed for armaments, so in a convenient marriage of ideology and economics, it now gave way to lacquered wood and a pseudo-natural style - pseudo because it was increasingly delivered by industrial mass production, despite the appearance of being made by hand.247 Even a seemingly neutral area such as landscaping and garden design was not immune from this process: formality and foreign plants were out and a natural look based on native German species was in.248 Those who enjoyed collecting cigarette cards could now stick them into an album depicting ‘the struggle for the Third Reich’. Among cards available to smokers were portrayals of Hitler talking to a blonde child (‘Leader’s eyes - Father’s eyes’), Hitler and Technology, Hitler and Hindenburg and of course Hitler and the Workers.249 As a leading Nazi art magazine remarked in 1937: ‘It is everyday things, not great individual works, that give an era its cultural atmosphere.’250

  The aestheticization of politics created the illusion that social, economic and national problems were immediately being solved by acts of will. It directed people’s attention away from many of the hard realities of life in a Germany that was still suffering from a severe economic depression in the early-to-mid-1930s, and towards fantasy-worlds and myths, stage-managed enthusiasm for the government and its policies, a feeling of living in a new world much of which, in fact, was illusion. In an advanced industrial culture such as that of Germany in the 1930s, these illusions depended to a degree on the resurrection of pseudo-archaic certainties such as ‘blood and soil’, Classical artistic models, traditional tonal music, and massively solid public buildings; but the means used were the most modern available, from radio and film to novel print techniques and the latest methods of construction. Much of this must have seemed startlingly new to the average person in rural or small-town Germany. Above all, Nazi culture, driven on by the Propaganda Ministry, aimed to crush individual thought and feeling and mould Germans into a single, obedient, disciplined mass, much as they appeared on the screen in Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.251 It implemented this aim only gradually, partly because of initial uncertainty about the direction of cultural policy, partly because of intra-party rivalries; but in the notable radicalization that occurred in 1937-8, the contours of Nazi cultural policy finally became clear to all. By this time, virtually all the organs of opinion-formation in German society had been taken over by Goebbels and his Propaganda Ministry, co-ordinated, purged of real and potential dissenters, Aryanized and brought under ideological, financial and administrative control. ‘Public opinion’ as such had effectively ceased to exist; the opinions that were purveyed on the screen, broadcast over the radio, or printed in newspapers, magazines and books were with few and very partial exceptions the opinions of the regime. Regular reports from the Gestapo and local and regional administrators kept Goebbels, Himmler and the other Nazi leaders informed on the state of opinion of the people and allowed the Propaganda Ministry to run specifically targeted propaganda campaigns in order if necessary to correct it. Nazi propaganda was the essential accompaniment to Nazi terror and intimidation in suppressing open dissent and creating mass support for the regime. In this respect, the Propaganda Ministry was one of the regime’s most obvious successes.252

  So deep was the penetration of Nazi propaganda, so all-encompassing its permeation of the German mass media, that it affected the very language Germans wrote and spoke. In his home in Dresden, Victor Klemperer began compiling a dossier of Nazi language - LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii, the language of the Third Reich. Words that in a normal, civilized society had a negative connotation acquired the opposite sense under Nazism, he noted; so that ‘fanatical’, ‘brutal’, ‘ruthless’, ‘uncompromising’, ‘hard’ all became words of praise instead of disapproval. The German language became a language of superlatives, so that everything the regime did became the best and the greatest, its achievements unprecedented, unique, historic and incomparable. Government statistics underwent an inflation that took them far beyond the limits of the plausible. Decisions were always final, changes were always made to last for ever. The language used about Hitler, Klemperer noted, was shot through and through with religious metaphors; people ‘believed in him’, he was the redeemer, the saviour, the instrument of Providence, his spirit lived in and through the German nation, the Third Reich was the eternal and everlasting Kingdom of the German people, and those who had died in its cause were martyrs. Nazi institutions domesticated themselves in the German language through abbreviations and acronyms, until talking about them became an unthinking part of everyday life. Above all, perhaps, Nazism imbued the German language with the metaphors of battle: the battle for jobs, the struggle for existence, the fight for culture. In the hands of the Nazi propaganda apparatus, the German language became strident, aggressive and militaristic. Commonplace matters were described in terms more suited to the battlefield. The language itself began to be mobilized for war.253

  If language structures sensibility, and the words available to a society set the limits to what is thinkable, then the Third Reich was well on the way to eliminating even the possibility of thinking about dissent and resistance, let alone acting it out in reality. Yet t
he minds of most Germans, of course, had been formed well before Hitler came to power, and powerful cultural traditions such as those shared by millions of Catholics, Social Democrats and Communists could not be wiped from the face of Germany overnight. Even amongst the millions who had voted for Hitler in 1932 and 1933, there were many, probably indeed the majority, who did not vote for the full package of Nazi ideology. Many middle-class voters had supported the Nazi Party at the polls not least because in the election campaigns of the early 1930s the Nazis had been deliberately vague about what they proposed to do once they had achieved power. The Nazi vote in 1932 was above all a protest vote, more negative than positive. Powerful, sophisticated and all-pervasive though it was, therefore, Goebbels’s propaganda machine could not persuade people that all their most dearly held values and beliefs had to be abandoned in the brave new world of Hitler’s Third Reich. Moreover, many people soon found the regime’s untiring demands for constant popular acclamation of its policies and leaders wearisome. ‘The huge hyperactivity in the field of cultural politics’, reported the Gestapo in the Potsdam district as early as August 1934, ‘is partly felt to be a burdensome compulsion and for this reason it is either rejected or sabotaged.’ Local cultural initiative had been stifled by the creation of huge mass organizations in the process of ‘co-ordination’. The introduction of the leadership principle everywhere only made things worse. ‘It is schematized, and thus nothing produces success, which is always individual.’254

  The mass acclamation which the regime demanded on occasions such as Hitler’s birthday, plebiscites and elections, Mayday and other festivals, was rendered as much out of fear as out of enthusiasm, and people were getting tired of constantly having to go to meetings and demonstrations, the Potsdam district Gestapo office reported two months later in October 1934.255 In radio, cinema, literature and the arts, as we have seen, all that Goebbels’s efforts to make propaganda interesting did was to make people bored, because individual creative initiative was stifled, the variety of cultural life was drastically reduced by censorship, and the monotony of Nazism’s cultural offerings quickly became tedious. Even the Nuremberg Rallies soon lost much of their power to inspire, despite the fact that those who attended were by definition the most fanatical and the most enthusiastic of Hitler’s supporters. As Social Democratic agents in Germany reported to the exiled party headquarters in Prague in 1937, with just a hint of exaggerated optimism:

  In the first two or three years one saw the Nazis’ morale at a high point, and the population still paid attention to the Leader’s announcements, which usually provided surprises. When the columns of Party activists marched to the railway stations, one saw in the streets not infrequently groups of women and men, and particularly young people, who cheered on the soldiers of the Party with enthusiasm. All that has gone. Even the greatest demonstration of power becomes boring in the long run. The hackneyed speeches have become familiar to the point of excess. Hitler’s former voters see in the Party no longer a redemptive force but instead the all-oppressing power-apparatus of a ruthless organization that is capable of anything. People let the Party divisions ordered to Nuremberg march past in silence. Here and there one hears a cry of ‘hail!’ from a persistent admirer, but it trails shyly away because nobody echoes it. As far as the population is concerned, this propaganda business is like everything else, just a way of getting money from them, nothing more. Always the same picture: the military, marching columns and groups bearing flags. Sometimes fewer, sometimes more. People cast a glance at them and go on their way.256

  Goebbels seemed, therefore largely to have failed in his aim of bringing about a genuine, long-term spiritual mobilization of the German people. What he had mostly achieved, except in a relatively small group of fanatical Nazi activists, was the kind of dull conformity he had seen as so unsatisfactory in 1933.257

  Nazi propaganda was most effective at the points where it hit the area of overlap between Nazi ideology and other ideologies. This was greater among some groups and areas than others. In the conservative, nationalist upper classes, the overlap was so considerable that men such as Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen, Defence Minister Werner von Blomberg, Justice Minister Franz Gürtner or Finance Minister Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk willingly entered into a coalition with the Nazis in 1933 and stayed there, whatever their reservations, through the following years. Some of them, like Papen, gradually realized that the differences between their own beliefs and those of the Nazis were greater than they had at first thought; others, like Gürtner, gradually came round to a greater degree of conformity under the impact of propaganda and the pressure of events. Amongst middle-class Germans, the regime’s propaganda offensive against ‘Marxism’ and Communism met with widespread support, helped by revulsion at the violent revolutionary rhetoric of the Communist champions of a ‘Soviet Germany’ and at the continuing ideological allegiance paid by the Social Democrats to Marxist theories of the socialist overthrow of existing institutions of capitalist society. Far more widespread was nationalist resentment at the 1919 Peace Settlement, a belief in the need to unite Germany in a rebirth of the spirit of 1914 after the deep and damaging divisions of the Weimar years, and a longing for a strong leader in the tradition of Bismarck. Similarly, antisemitism had become widespread in German culture during the Weimar Republic, though it never had much purchase on the organized working class, belief in the backwardness of Slavs was shared by almost everyone right of the Communists, and the conviction in the racial inferiority of black Africans was virtually universal.

  In all these areas, Nazi propaganda was able to build on existing beliefs and values and create a new consensus that may well have encompassed a majority of the German people, though it hardly ever reached universal acceptance in any of the areas it touched upon. Moreover, the Nazi spin on specific events could usually convince people if it appealed to their existing fears and prejudices. On the face of it, for instance, the regime’s explanation of the Reichstag fire in 1933 was not particularly plausible, and was indeed publicly falsified by the subsequent trial. Yet people already infused with fear of the Communists could easily be persuaded that van der Lubbe had been acting as a tool of a revolutionary conspiracy when he burned down the nation’s legislature. Similarly, the murders committed on Hitler’s and Göring’s orders in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ were quite blatantly outside the law; yet the German tradition of treating law as a creation of the state, and the widespread fear of further revolutionary violence of the kind the brownshirts seemed to be preparing, combined to convince most people of the legitimacy of Hitler’s actions. Indeed, the regime succeeded within a remarkably short space of time in elevating Hitler to a status of almost mythical impregnability, deflecting criticism and discontent onto his subordinates and projecting on to him all kinds of unrealistic hopes and desires. Hitler became the Leader who was above party, almost above politics. For the great majority of Germans, including millions in the otherwise recalcitrant Catholic and working-class communities, Hitler was the Leader who could do no wrong.258

  Where Nazi propaganda ran up against deeply ingrained attitudes, however, it found it far less easy to make an impact. Correspondingly, it was most successful with people whose opinions were not strongly formed, which meant above all the young. Moreover, whatever propagandists might claim, people had a clear idea of the realities of the economic and social situation on the ground. They did not find it difficult to disbelieve the grandiose claims of the Propaganda Ministry. The proclamation of the abolition of class differences, the creation of a unified national community, or the miraculous recovery of the economy meant little to them if their own situation continued to show few improvements over the dire straits of the early 1930s. Propaganda depended for its effect, in other words, not least on the extent to which it bore at least some relation to the truth, when it came to specific issues like the economy, or Germany’s place in the world. Success bred support for the regime and belief in its purposes, failure created sceptic
ism about its claims and doubts about its policies.259 Yet, the Nazis claimed, time was on their side. The permeation of the thought and actions of all Germans did not depend simply on the power and sophistication of propaganda in the present. In the longer term, remoulding the educational system would create a new generation of young Germans who had known no alternative source of values to Nazism. Yet there was of course one area in which such values did persist, long after Marxism, socialism and all the other political and social creeds had been swept away. That was religion. For reasons of political expediency and caution, the Third Reich had stopped short in 1933 of attacking the Churches and their dependent secular institutions. As it became more self-confident, however, it began to turn its attention to Christianity too, and to seek a means of either converting it to a form more suitable to the new Germany, or, if that did not work, of doing away with it altogether.

  3

  CONVERTING THE SOUL

  MATTERS OF FAITH

  I

  The Nazis abhorred the confessional division of Germany, and, in an obvious parallel to their policy of co-ordination in secular areas of politics, culture and society, many of them wanted a single national religion with a single national Church. The division, they believed, had deepened under the Weimar Republic during bitter conflicts over issues such as education, welfare, mixed marriages and local religious processions, undermining the national will.1 The German Evangelical Church seemed to the Nazis to offer an almost ideal vehicle for the religious unification of the German people. Uniting the Lutheran and Calvinist faiths since the early nineteenth century, the Evangelical Church, unlike its Catholic counterpart, owed no real allegiance to any worldwide body or any institution, such as the Papacy, outside Germany itself. It had long been politically extremely conservative. In the days of the Bismarckian Reich it had been effectively an arm of the state; the King of Prussia, who also served as German Emperor, was Head of the Evangelical Church in Prussia, and he made no secret of the fact that he expected it to show loyalty to established institutions. German nationalists saw the German Reich as a Protestant state, a belief expressed in many ways over the decades, from the persecution of Catholics by Bismarck in the 1870s to the widespread and sometimes murderous hostility shown to Catholic priests by German troops during the invasion of France and Belgium in 1914. Germany’s Protestant clergy had presented the First World War as a religious crusade against the Catholic French and Belgians and the Orthodox Russians, and it was clear that, for many, nationalism and Protestantism had become two sides of the same ideological coin.2