IV
Nazi policy towards the Churches was thus in a state of some confusion and disarray by the eve of the war. The ideological drift was clearly away from Christianity, though there was a long way to go before the neopaganist alternative found general acceptance even within the Party. Yet for all the ideological in-fighting, one objective had remained clear from the very outset: the regime was determined to reduce, and if possible eliminate, the Churches as centres of real or potential alternative ideologies to its own.112 The primacy of this objective was nowhere clearer than in the regime’s treatment of one small but close-knit sect, the ‘Earnest Bible Researchers’, or Jehovah’s Witnesses. Since the members of this sect had sworn to obey only Jehovah, they refused absolutely to render an oath of loyalty to Hitler. They did not give the ‘German greeting’, go to political demonstrations, take part in elections or agree to be conscripted into the armed forces. Although their humble social background in the lower middle and working classes did bring them into contact with former Communists and Social Democrats, Gestapo claims that they were merely a front for labour movement resistance groups had no basis in fact whatsoever. Indeed, the Witnesses’ movement had some resemblances to that of the small, anti-liberal political sects of the immediate postwar years from which Nazism itself had sprung. Just as important for the police was the fact that their organization was directed from outside Germany, in the United States; the movement’s headquarters in Brooklyn was one of the earliest public critics of European fascism, and supported the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Predictably enough, Nazi Party organizations and Gestapo officers used crude intimidation and bullying to try to bring the Jehova’s Witnesses into line. But this only made them more stubborn. Fortified by a resolution passed at their international conference in Lucerne in 1936 strongly criticizing the German government, they began distributing what the regime regarded as seditious leaflets. The police responded with arrests and prosecutions, and by 1937 Jehovah’s Witnesses accounted for well over half of all cases brought before the Special Court in Freiberg, Saxony, and a substantial proportion elsewhere as well.113
Inside the prisons, the Witnesses steadfastly refused to abandon their faith and compromise with the secular state. While some prison governors and officials considered them no more than harmless fools, others, such as the governor of the Eisenach prison in Thuringia, made strenuous efforts to brainwash them, subjecting them to regular sessions of indoctrination. After a year, however, his experiment, begun in 1938, had made no real progress and was abandoned. Punishment and persecution for the Witnesses were simply tests of their faith, imposed on them, as they saw it, by God. Many of them refused to work in prison despite repeated punishments. Others went even further. The Jehovah’s Witness Otto Grashof, sentenced to four years in the Wolfenbüttel gaol for refusing to serve in the army and trying to convince another young man to do the same, went on hunger strike when his family was evicted from their home and his children taken into care. Brutal force-feeding had little effect, and he died early in 1940, weighing less than forty kilos.114
Legal repression had no effect on the Jehovah’s Witnesses, therefore. They were strengthened not least by the close family and community ties that bound many of them together. Frustrated at their refusal to knuckle under, the police and the SS began taking them straight into the concentration camps on their release from prison. Even a senior official at the Justice Ministry criticized the judiciary for failing to take the threat posed by the Jehovah’s Witnesses with sufficient seriousness. There were, he claimed, nearly two million of them in Germany - a gross exaggeration, since there were in reality fewer than 30,000 - and they were acting as a Communist front, an assertion for which, needless to say, there was not a shred of evidence. Nevertheless, the Gestapo unleashed a fresh wave of arrests. By the end of the Third Reich about 10,000 Witnesses had been imprisoned, 2,000 of them in the camps, where some 950 died.115 Here too, however, their sufferings only spurred them on to fresh acts of pious self-sacrifice and martyrdom. In some respects they were model prisoners, clean, orderly and industrious. Yet the SS man Rudolf Höss, a senior official in the Sachsenhausen camp in the late 1930s, reported later that Witnesses refused to stand to attention, take part in drill parades, remove their caps, or show any sign of respect to the guards, since respect, they said, was due only to Jehovah. Flogging only made them ask for more, as a sign of their devotion. Forced to watch the execution of fellow Witnesses who had refused to carry out military-related work or obey orders conscripting them into the armed forces, they only begged to be allowed to be martyred themselves. Höss reported that Himmler was so impressed by their fanaticism that he frequently held it up to his SS men as an example.116
The Jehovah’s Witnesses were, however, alone amongst religious groups in their uncompromising hostility to the Nazi state. For all the courage of many leading figures in the mainstream Churches, and many ordinary members of their congregations, none of them opposed the Third Reich on more than a narrowly religious front. The Gestapo might allege that Catholic priests and Confessing pastors hid out-and-out opposition to National Socialism under the cloak of pious rhetoric, but the truth was that, on a whole range of issues, the Churches remained silent. Both the Evangelical and Catholic Churches were politically conservative, and had been for a long time before the Nazis came to power. Their fear of Bolshevism and revolution, forces that showed their teeth once more in reports of the widespread massacre of priests by the Republicans at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, strengthened them in their view that if Nazism went, something worse might well take its place. The deep and often bitter confessional divide in Germany meant that there was no question of Catholics and Protestants joining forces against the regime. The Catholics had been anxious to prove their loyalty to the German state since the days when it had been doubted by Bismarck during the 1870s. The Protestants had been an ideological arm of the state under the Bismarckian Empire and strongly identified with German nationalism for many years. Both broadly welcomed the suppression of Marxist, Communist and liberal political parties, the combating of ‘immorality’ in art, literature and film, and many other aspects of the regime’s policies. The long tradition of antisemitism amongst both Catholics and Protestants ensured that there were no formal protests from the Churches against the regime’s antisemitic acts. The most they were prepared to do was to try and protect converted Jews within their own ranks, and even here their attitude was at times extremely equivocal.
Yet the Nazis regarded the Churches as the strongest and toughest reservoirs of ideological opposition to the principles they believed in. If they could win the ideological battle against them, then it would be easy to mould the whole German people into a unanimous Nazi mass. Despite the many setbacks they encountered in their confrontation with the Churches, they did indeed seem to be winning this battle by 1939. Many lower officials in the regime concluded that the only way to combat the Churches was to develop an attractive alternative to Christian ritual. ‘It is necessary to effect a kind of mysticism’, a Gestapo report urged as early as 1935, ‘that exerts an even stronger effect on the masses than that which the Christian Church has built up through the objects of a - dusty - tradition, surrounding them with an atmosphere of foreign magic and covering them with the patina of age.’117 Yet despite the prevalence of such views amongst the more committed Nazis, most notably Heinrich Himmler, Hitler and Göring remained deeply sceptical about such attempts to revive what Goring referred to as the ‘ridiculousness’ of ‘Wotan and Thor’ and the ‘Germanic wedding’. The Nazi Education Minister Bernhard Rust inveighed against attempts to propagate ‘Valhalla as a substitute for a Christian heaven’.118 And on 6 September 1938, Hitler himself weighed in with a speech attacking attempts to turn Nazism into a religion:National Socialism is a cool, reality-based doctrine, based upon the sharpest scientific knowledge and its mental expression. As we have opened the people’s heart to this doctrine, and as we continue to do so at present,
we have no desire to instil in the people a mysticism that lies outside the purpose and goals of our doctrine . . . For the National Socialist movement is not a cult movement; rather, it is a racial and political philosophy which grew out of exclusively racist considerations. Its meaning is not that of a mystic cult; but rather the cultivation and command of people determined by its blood. Therefore we do not have halls for cults, but exclusively halls for the people. Nor do we have places for worship, but places for assembly and squares for marches. We do not have cult sites, but sports arenas and play areas . . . In the National Socialist movement subversion by occult searchers for the Beyond must not be tolerated.
Nazism, he concluded, was based on respect for the laws of nature, which themselves were given by God; at its centre was the creature whom God had created to rule the earth, namely the human being, and it was by serving the interests of humanity that Nazism served God. ‘The only cult we know is that of a cultivation of the natural and hence of that which God has willed.’119
Many observers over the years have seen in Nazism a kind of political religion.120 Its use of religious language, ritual and symbolism, its unquestionable and unalterable dogma, its worship of Hitler as a messiah come to redeem the German people from weakness, degeneracy and corruption, its demonization of the Jew as the universal enemy, its promise that the individual, racked by doubt and despair in the wake of Germany’s defeat in 1918, would be born again in a shining new collectivity of the faithful - all these were strongly reminiscent of a religion, shorn of its supernatural elements and applied to the world people really lived in. The Nazis had no hesitation about adapting the Ten Commandments or the Creed to the purposes of a nationalistic catechism of belief in Germany or its Leader, nor did they shrink from using language that portrayed Hitler’s gathering of his early supporters such as Göring and Goebbels in the same terms as the Bible portrayed Jesus gathering His early disciples.121 ‘Once you heard the voice of a man,’ Hitler told his followers on 11 September 1936 at the Nuremberg Party Rally, ‘and that voice knocked at your hearts, it wakened you, and you followed that voice.’122 Clearly much of this was calculated to have an appeal to disoriented people searching for a solution to the terrible problems they confronted in the chaotic times they lived in. Equally clearly, the more the Third Reich moved away from the attempt to co-ordinate the Churches and towards the drive to destroy them, the more the regime began to take on quasi-religious qualities of its own.123 But one must be careful about pushing the religious metaphor too far. It would be just as easy to interpret Nazism by means of a military image: the promise of turning defeat into total victory, the image of a nation marching in step, annihilating its enemies and merging the doubting individual into the motivated military mass, the hierarchical command structure dominated by the great military leader, and so on; and though religion and militarism have often been connected, in essence they have also frequently been two quite different and mutually hostile forces.124
Nazism as an ideology was no religion, not just because Hitler said it was not, nor because it had nothing to say about the hereafter or eternity or the immortal soul, as all genuine religions do, but also, more importantly, because it was too incoherent to be one. Leading Nazis did not spend time disputing the finer points of their ideology like medieval scholastics or Marxist-Leninist philosophers, their modern equivalents. There was no sacred book of Nazism from which people took their texts for the day, like the bureaucrats of Stalin’s Russia did from the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin: Hitler’s My Struggle, though everyone had to have it on their bookshelf, was too verbose, too rambling, too autobiographical to lend itself to this kind of use. Nor in the end did Nazism promise any kind of final victory to be followed by a Heaven-like stasis; rather, it was a doctrine of perpetual struggle, of conflict without end. There was nothing universal about its appeal, as there is with the great world religions, or with major political ideologies such as socialism and Communism: it directed itself only to one small segment of humanity, the Germans, and ruled everyone else ineligible for its benefits. Conservative philosophers of the mid-twentieth century commonly argued that Nazism as a political religion filled the need for religious faith felt by millions of Germans who had been left bereft by the secularism of modernity. But its appeal cannot be reduced in this way. Millions of Catholics opposed it or remained relatively immune. Millions of Protestants, including many of the most committed, such as the German Christians, did not. Millions more people resisted its ideological blandishments despite having grown up in the atheistic and anticlerical political traditions of the German labour movement.125
Religion does not necessarily imply a rejection of democracy, rationality or toleration; some historians have pointed out that the labour movement too had its banners, its rituals, its dogma and its eschatology, though none of this prevented the Social Democrats from embracing democracy, rationality and toleration. Nor, finally, are dogmatism, faith in a great leader, intolerance or belief in future redemption from present ills confined to religious modes of thought and behaviour. Nazism’s use of quasi-religious symbols and rituals was real enough, but it was for the most part more a matter of style than substance. ‘Hitler’s studied usurpation of religious functions’, as one historian has written, ‘was perhaps a displaced hatred of the Christian tradition: the hatred of an apostate.’126 The real core of Nazi beliefs lay in the faith Hitler proclaimed in his speech of September 1938 in science - a Nazi view of science - as the basis for action. Science demanded the furtherance of the interests not of God but of the human race, and above all the German race and its future in a world ruled by ineluctable laws of Darwinian competition between races and between individuals. This was the sole criterion of morality, overriding the principles of love and compassion that have always formed such an important element in the beliefs of the world’s great religions.127 A conceptualization of Nazism as a political religion, finally, is not only purely descriptive but also too sweeping to be of much help; it tells us very little about how Nazism worked, or what the nature of its appeal was to different groups in German society. The failure of the Third Reich to find a substitute for Christianity, indeed the feebleness of such attempts as it did make, was nowhere more apparent than in its policy towards the youth of the country, Germany’s future.
WINNING OVER THE YOUNG
I
A picture of Adolf Hitler is hanging on the wall in almost every classroom. Next to the memorial plaque in the stairwell a particularly valuable portrait of the Leader, acquired from funds of the Nölting Foundation, holds a place of honour. Teachers and pupils greet each other at the beginning and end of every lesson with the German greeting. The pupils listen to major political speeches on the radio in the school hall.
Thus reported the headmaster of a state secondary school in Wismar at the end of the school year 1933-4, a year, as he noted, of ‘growing into the thought-world of the new National Socialist state’.128 The process of adjustment had been made easier, he noted, through the membership of the staff in the National Socialist Teachers’ League and of the pupils in the Hitler Youth. It was also pushed on by a stream of new regulations and directives from the government in Berlin and the state authorities in other parts of Germany. Already on 30 July 1933 a central decree laid down ‘Guidelines for History Textbooks’ according to which history lessons had from now on to be built around the ‘concept of heroism in its Germanic form, linked to the idea of leadership’. Soon students were being set essays on topics such as ‘Hitler as the accomplisher of German unity’, ‘the nationalist revolution as the start of a new era’, ‘the film “Hitler Youth Quex” as a work of art’ and ‘I am a German (a word of pride and duty)’. One school student’s imagination ran riot in an essay on ‘Adolf Hitler as a boy’, written in 1934:
The boy Adolf Hitler was no stay-at-home. He liked to rough-and-tumble with other boys in the open. Why was he staying out so long today? His mother went restlessly from the cooker to the table, shook her head,
looked at the clock, and began to think the worst about what Adolf was up to again. A few hours before she had seen from the window how he took off with a dozen other boys, who were almost all a head taller than slight Adolf and if it came to it could give him a real thrashing.
Then the door burst open and her Adolf stormed in, with bumps on his head and scratches on his face, but also with shining eyes, and shouted: ‘Mother, the boys have made me their General today.’129
Another child, pupil at a primary school, given the question ‘Were our Germanic ancestors barbarians?’, knew immediately how to draw a parallel with the recent past: ‘The allegation that our Germanic ancestors were barbarians’, he wrote, ‘is just as much a lie as for example the lie that Germany alone was to blame for the world war. It has been proved that the Germanic tribes stood on a high cultural plane even in the stone age.’130 The Nazi cult of death found its way into lessons too, as schoolchildren were asked to write about Horst Wessel and other martyrs for the Nazi cause. ‘We must not forget either, those who fell for the movement,’ wrote a fourteen-year-old in 1938, and added: ‘in thinking about all that we must also think of our own death’.131
Numerous essay questions also required school students of all ages to regurgitate the antisemitic bile the regime poured into them. Erna, a primary school pupil, sent her essay for publication in Streicher’s The Stormer, of which she readily confessed to being a reader. Set the topic of ‘The Jews are our misfortune’, she wrote: ‘Unfortunately many people still say today: “The Jews are also God’s creatures. So you must respect them too.” But we say: “Vermin are also animals, but despite this we exterminate them.”’ On occasion, particularly in working-class districts, schoolchildren could take a different view. In 1935, for example:In a lesson that was devoted to those who had fallen for their country in the war, the teacher said that very many Jews had fallen as well. Straight away a young Nazi exclaimed: ‘They died of fright! The Jews don’t have any German Fatherland!’ At this, another pupil said: ‘If Germany isn’t their Fatherland and they died for it despite that, that even goes beyond heroism.’132
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