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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