It’s always glib to wheel out Nazi Germany as a case study in totalitarianism and the ruthless suppression of divergent views and dissent. One focuses too easily on the late 1930s and the war years, as well as the Holocaust.
Nora Waln (1885-1964) was an American writer married to an Englishman she had met in China while he worked for the Chinese Post Office. In 1934 they moved to Germany where her husband was about to embark on a period of private study in music.
During that time Nora Waln wrote Reaching For The Stars (1939). It is an unmatched portrait of life under the Reich, starting just five years after the liberal period of the Weimar Republic, and before the worst that was yet to come. The book is little known now, but the following extracts will provide a flavour of what Nora experienced as she watched free speech disappearing before her eyes, and with the active compliance of much of the population.
It’s important when reading these words to bear in mind that they describe a developed West European country less than a century ago.
“Still, sprich durch die Blume,” was said to me when I asked a simple question as we sat drinking coffee on a Rhineland terrace.
“Hush, speak through a flower!” It seemed a curious answer. Because I looked puzzled, it was amplified: “Do not speak the names of Government officials or Party members unless you praise them.” I felt hurt, for I had meant no harm. I probed no further that day. Mine had been but an idle curiosity.
Never before had I been so close to the frequent passing of tragedy, nor among a people who accepted tragedy as these. Every few days I encountered stories that appeared incredible in a land as outwardly serene and gay as this. For instance, I saw a woman go by, tall and fair, her beautiful face so marked by pain that I had to ask about her.
I was hushed and not answered until we were in our host’s house. Then, after the servant had left the room, pillows were put down along the crack of the door, a wad of plasticine stuck in the keyhole, and the telephone — which in Germany plugs into a wall socket — pulled from its connection “because the inventions for listening in on families are most easily applied to the telephone and some chance remark overheard might be judged treason”.
These arrangements completed, I was cautiously told the following about the woman. Two unknown men wearing the brown uniform of the National-Socialist Party had entered the house while husband and wife sat at dinner, and taken the husband away. Three months later four young men wearing black uniform with the “death’s head cap” had brought back a coffin, and informed her that her husband had committed suicide. It was forbidden to open the sealed casket.
My narrators carefully explained that the husband was not a Jew, but an Aryan, as they call non-Jews here, a distinction in tragedy of which I did not see the point. The party officials stayed until after the funeral. The widow was made to pay five thousand marks for “burial services”.
From what I could learn her husband had been a respected member of the community. Neither the community nor her kin had made any united protest. In fact, no protest of any kind had been made. And this was explained with the sentence: “It is not wise to interfere between individuals and the Party.”
Later, Nora mused on the phenomenon:
I found their [the Germans’] desertion of the cause of free speech disconcerting, and their failure to stand by kin and neighbours astounding.
She met a young German who had forgotten his papers when attending a rally at which Hitler was to speak. He was arrested for being too close to the podium but seemed untroubled:
“We young Germans must learn to be silent, not only when we are dealt with justly, but to endure injustice with silence,” he told me. “And I was not treated unjustly; I should not have forgotten my credentials.” When I showed my surprise he added: “Wir sind zu blindem Gehorsam verpflichtet!”
“We are pledged to blind obedience,” I repeated after him. “Yes,” he assured me solemnly.
Nora then started learning about prohibited books:
Going to the shoemaker to have some repairs done, I learned that he was away — indefinitely away. There had been a search for books. Such searches, so a 12-year-old son told me, are periodic but not systematic. A Party person may descend on only one house in a block when he comes. The child told me that it is not allowed to possess a book written by a pacifist, a communist, a Jew, a Mason, or any book about Masonry; any book on politics or political science other than National-Socialism; any book of science which refutes the National-Socialist theory of race and blood; or any novel or poems by any author who has in any writing whatsoever, ridiculed the National-Socialist Party Members or their tenets; any printing which gives any account of the Christian Church strife in Germany excepting that allowed by the Third Reich; or any book dealing with the German post-War period from a democratic or liberal point of view.
The searchers, two armed men, had found a book by the Englishman, Bertrand Russell, behind the shoemaker’s clock. The child said it was a book telling of paths which lead to peace.
“Does your father read English?” I asked.
“No, he cannot. The book belongs to a friend. We were keeping it for the friend.”
“Has the friend been arrested, too?”
“He is not in the Rhineland now and Pappa would not give his whereabouts or name.”
“Isn’t the responsibility your friend’s?”
“We do not reason that way in our family. We believe that loyalty between friends is above submission to the imposed will of this usurper party. We are, every one of us, ready to die for that belief.”
It transpired the boy’s mother had gone to the concentration camp to find out what had happened to her husband – for having a prohibited book in his house.
Nora soon discovered that her own books, supposedly being shipped from France, had been stopped by the Reich customs. She had to go through them with a customs official. She questioned some of the books being refused entry. The official said: “I do my duty… If I let the book in I may find myself in trouble.”
Nora wondered if Germany had died or was in a trance like Snow White after eating a poisoned apple.
She was shown a newspaper article about traitors against the Reich which included a professor she knew who had just fled Germany. She asked about the professor’s brother-in-law. She was told
that during the Republic he had been an outspoken Social Democrat. When President von Hindenburg appointed Herr Hitler Vice-Chancellor on January 30th 1933, this man issued a pamphlet warning citizens against the encroaching dangers “of dictatorship”. After the Reichstag fire on February 27th, he had stated without reserve his opinion that the National-Socialists had done this themselves to unloose a wave of terror and ride to power on it.
He had worked hard to oppose them in the March elections, and issued a pamphlet against the proclamation of the anti-Jewish boycott of April 1933. He had tried to form a league of men and women organised to fight the “Law of April 7th” when published, because he felt that its “reform of the organisation of the Reich” simply meant the handing of Government over to complete Nazi control. He had issued a pamphlet telling Catholics that the Concordat signed between Hitler and the Vatican on July 8th would be betrayed by Hitler as soon as he had made what use he could of the Catholics.
On July 16th, not quite six months after Hitler became Vice-Chancellor, a law was published forbidding all parties except the National-Socialist Party. Shortly afterwards this man went for a walk one evening and did not return. At Christmas the wife shot their five-year-old son and herself “while of unsound mind”. She had that morning received a package a cigar box marked with a swastika and the word “traitor” before her husband’s name. It contained ashes.
I was not yet used to taking things like this as one must learn to do. I came round to find the narrator splashing cold water on my face. She herself was crying quietly. “You have got to learn to steel yourself against shock. This thing isn’t going to end in Germany or in Europe.”
Nora then described how the oppression worked:
During these days the National-Socialist Secret Police made silent arrests. Late at night and early in the morning they took man after man from German homes. News of this was not published, but it travelled as if carried by the birds. Rumour gave the number of the taken at more than 200, whispering that all were of the cultured class. I knew three of the arrested. One of them was our host of Christmas Eve. They were taken without accusation and thrown into prison without trial.
As accurately as I could learn this is how the arrests were made. The doorbell or knocker sounded. There stood two, or at most three, tall men with pairs of pistols in their belts — men between 25 and 45 with the daily-dozen-followed-by-a-cold-shower look, the smoothly tailored uniform, the precise manner, the direct speech which characterises the National-Socialist Party. The chosen hour was one at which they would find the wanted man relaxed, surprising him at a meal or in bed. They asked for their victim and were admitted. He got together the things they allowed him to have and went away with them.
Other members of the household behaved as if hypnotised. They had no faith that he would have a chance of freeing himself by any legal means, no hope that the courts of justice would be open to his use. Their minds were filled with memories of what they knew of others who had been taken in this way — disappearing forever, returned in a closed coffin or, if let out alive, coming back starved in body and crazed in mind. Yet they did nothing. Family and friends let their man go. They neither stayed the arrestors nor insisted that they be arrested with him. They did nothing.
“It would have been of no use. We should have been shot.”
When he was gone they wept and made efforts to find out where he was kept so as to send him food, bedding, clean things. They pulled wires trying to get him released — getting somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody else with power to have him let out.
The man’s church did not stand up in a body for his defence. The university where he had taken his degree made no move. Seemingly a German has no club or organisation of any kind which looks to his protection. I had believed that the Student Corps was modelled on the principles of chivalry and supposed it would do something for its members in such cases but learned that it does not.
So far as I was able to ascertain there is no German group whatsoever today who publicly maintains that a German man should have an open trial in a German court, and that the judgment of that court is German justice. The persons I questioned told me that the present-day Germans have forgotten the use of the Saxon Thing [an early Germanic assembly].
It seemed true. I saw and heard German men and women as yet unconnected with any such victim as well as relatives and friends of a person so imprisoned rest their heads in their hands and cry in despair: “We never had this in Germany before. It is not right. It is not right. But what can we do?” Many times I witnessed this.
Also, very frequently, I heard a hope expressed: “This terrible time will pass. It can’t last. It will pass.” By some miracle, with “no civic effort on the wisher’s part, a Santa Claus, a fairy godmother, a Prince Bismarck, would arrive on the scene of German history and make everything right again.”
Others said: “Herr Hitler does not know what is done in his name. He is a good man. He will straighten it out when he knows.”
Nora was despondent but also optimistic. She finished the book in England before the war broke out, commenting:
Much in Germany has already gone, but brave men and women hold up the edifice of civilisation, and their support is an educated populace, a populace waking to the realisation of the danger.
Nora had underestimated just how far Germany was going to descend into the heart of darkness, but her book is a warning from history for all time.
Postscriptum: Radio 4’s World at One programme on August 29th 2024 had Luke Tryl of the Think Tank More In Common on to discuss the public’s perception of the proposed smoking ban in outdoor places. His comments were about the public reception of state public health measures, but had more wide-ranging relevance:
When it comes to public health, in general public opinion is willing to be quite authoritarian… sometimes there can be an assumption amongst politicians and the commentariat that there’s a big body of public opinion worried about the nanny state. That just isn’t true across a range of measures, particularly on public health, particularly where children might be involved, the public are really willing to be quite tough… there’s been a shift in public attitudes… where did we see that the most? We actually particularly saw that with lockdown, people, politicians saying the public won’t wear this. Actually, there was a big chunk of the public who still wanted us in lockdown long after the pandemic had subsided. I would say, always assume the public are going to want to be tougher than politicians.
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The job of the Nudge Unit is to ensure that the the proletariat willingly accept Government dictats and clamour for more of the same.
The original trial with Covid worked beyond their wildest dreams, and in many cases has created lifelong subservience.
They are now also ensuring that people will no longer have access to the means of making up their own minds as alternative sources of information are discredited and eventually closed down, and the ability of individual to seek out truth is completely eliminated at school.
See also the green agenda, immigration and the Ukraine “invasion”.
In my experience on the whole, it wasn’t the proletariat who willingly accepted government diktats, as most of us worked as normal right through the ‘covid years’, and therefore freely associated more than most.
In my experience it was the administrative class who both received furlough while petrified at home, and demanded longer and harder lockdowns.
I think, as far as the elites are concerned, the administrative (or so-called ‘professional’) class are part of the proletariat. The difference being that they do not understand that yet, as they consider themselves to be more elite than prole. They will soon learn that their ego has caused them to make a terrible mistake.
I agree with your points, but still think it’s important to highlight the difference.
You see the useful idiots gluing themselves to the road clamouring for their own impoverishment.
This is a fascinating book which I was recently given from my late father’s library. The writer’s narrative begins in June 1934 and describes her life in Germany and her insight into the German temperament. If you can buy or borrow a copy, you will find the book hard to put down.
As the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi) was pleased to discover in East Germany it is all too easy to get people to act as spies upon their neighbours. Unpaid too so there was no drain on resources, they were positively overwhelmed with valuable and accurate information supplied by compliant, unquestioning and willing volunteers all too ready to inform on their neighbours, employers and even family members.
I fully expect to see more -much more – of this in the next five years before the current crypto-communist administration is removed from office. I am going long on piano wire …
And all done in the days just before the world wide web and the associated equipment was developed. One of my late old friends was someone who emigrated from East Germany in the early ‘60s, and a decade or so back we did a holiday trip which included the city he was born in, Leipzig, in which there was a museum related to the way the STASI worked. There was actually a guide that showed us round, and it was a fascinating place.
I don’t know what they would have done if they still existed by the time the www became popular. Perhaps China or Russia today might be relevant; who knows.
The point of this article was proven just yesterday:
https://x.com/goddeketal/status/1829659111656476688
And so they did in 2020 when the health panic broke out. That is what occurred to me quite early on, and was part of the reason why I became a donor to this site (when it was called “lockdown sceptics”). Maybe the general public is always vulnerable to that, not just the citizens of Germany in the 1930s.
The “panic” did not “break out”. If there was panic, it was induced by malevolent forces. Some people probably did panic- the most susceptible – most people I know were fairly calm.
Governmental misconduct, misfeasance and malfeasance over Covid opened the eyes of vast numbers of people around the world.
But that is not enough.
Whilst there is still some shadow of democracy in the UK everyone who can see the harms and the threat to all our futures needs to join a political party and become an activist and change it all.
eg. Labour has around 350,000 members.
There are 33 million in employment in the UK and large numbers not economically active.
So if just over 1 in every 100 adults who don’t like what the Labour Party is doing joined and was active they could in combination outvote all other groupings in the Labour Party.
Of course there are some nasty manipulators in the Labour Party who will do all they can to contain and make life difficult for those they oppose and it will take time to learn how to make the system work to change it.
So staying power and determination is needed and sadly I doubt around one in a hundred have those qualities.
The panic didn’t “break out.” It was deliberately stoked by the MSM and the Government. The propaganda and coercive control psychological techniques were relentless. The only way to avoid it was to NOT watch or listen to the MSM. I strongly suspect that the sceptics/refusniks were the minority who had already learned to distrust and ignore the MSM.
“Others said: “Herr Hitler does not know what is done in his name. He is a good man. He will straighten it out when he knows.”
Some Russian citizens said that about Stalin too.
Ant-establishment rhetoric will not be tolerated…
We’re getting there
The book may be had through the excellent Internet Archive – here: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.176232/page/n95/mode/2up
Thank you
Le Bon: The Crowd (published in 1895!) describes how, as a result of propaganda, the consciousness of the individual gets so degraded to a level where they believe totally illogical, suicidal ideas.
The 20th century is an example of how relevant and true his observations were.
After Brazil-X stand by for a week of MSM pile-on against Telegram. The smear tactic will be that because criminals use Telegram it must be Satanic, thus immediately discouraging objections to banning it. There will now be massive coverage of various criminals used Telegram to plot their deeds, ignoring the vast majority who simply don’t want to risk having the morning call from the police after daring to criticize a Government official or policy. And the general public, having been thus nudged and gaslighted over the years, will happily go along with and or even say it doesn’t go far enough.
Heard James O Bingo saying exactly that on LBC three days ago “… for the hard of thinking: the platform hides bad people and that’s what your ‘free speech and Orwellian Nightmare’ rhetoric achieves…”
Fool.
Yesterday I joined the Free Speech Union.
I didn’t do it for me, because I’m at a stage in life where I’m very likely to be targeted for “punishment” and I don’t do social media.
I did it to help support the brave people who ARE at more risk because they have more to lose.
If we don’t support those who have put their heads above the parapet to stand up for free speech the battle will be lost. I’m now doing my little bit.
By the time of the second lockdown my northern, working class, Scottish town was like a crap bank holiday: all the banks were open, but the shops were shut (except the big chains, obvs). People just walked about as normal.
In middle class, litigious, managerial South west England they all dutifully obeyed and cowered behind their curtains in masks, looking to inform on dissenters.
Some of my ‘favorite’ YouTubes from recent years.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez9jP29dljI
United Nations on Climate Change: “We own the science”
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM
Senior WHO official dodges questions about Taiwan’s WHO membership; praises China
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8FuHuUhNZ0
Justin Trudeau’s China dictatorship gaffe
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENEUktOrQV8
Jacinda Ardern – “We will continue to be your single source of truth”
Below is a graph from the Johns Hopkins Covid map showing cases, deaths and ‘vaccines’ for New Zealand. Three therapies were used: Novavax (subunit), Oxford/AZ (mRNA), Pfizer–BioNTech (mRNA).
It is important to note that all the lockdown measures were contrived entirely in the CCP while the WHO (including Gates) coerced the world to copy the ‘success’ of China. China did not use or copy any of the mRNA therapies.
Another book worth reading is Frank Binder’s “Sown With Corn: An Englishman Stands Against the Nazi Storm”. The Amazon summary says “Sown with Corn is the story of an English student studying in Germany at the university in Bonn during the rise of the Nazis. The author, Frank Binder, was himself a lecturer in English literature at the university during that same period, and in his later years in Germany may have been a British spy. The book is therefore almost certainly at least semi-autobiographical and the story rings vividly true. It has an intense realism born of Binder’s first-hand knowledge. The book tracks, through its characters, the spread of Nazi influence, not only among the people of Bonn and the intellectual elite of the university, but also in a rural community. The story is thus a microcosm of what happened in Germany generally. But though the story is sometimes grim, the courage of the few who refused to give in is inspiring. Its narrative makes it a compulsive page-turner, and the author’s writing brings scenes vividly to life.”