Strange as it may seem to some of the people who know me, one of my old hobbies involved devouring anything and everything I could get my hands on concerning the Third Reich. I grew up in an ex-pat German family, so I had ample opportunity to get a feel for what life under the Reich really was like. My research served to flesh it out, and fill in a lot of the blanks. It even cleared up a mystery or two, such as what was going on with my father’s disappearing neighbors. He’d go to sleep at night, and in the morning, they were gone! Not a sound was heard. Poof! They just disappeared. More than one neighbor, more than once. My father always got uncomfortable, and went sort of pale, when he talked about that.
As an adult, I read William Shirer’s ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’, and there it was, an exact description of what my father had gone through! Turns out the authorities in his region were taking a page from the Spanish Inquisition. They were going around padding the wheels of vehicles so that no one would hear them, and spiriting off people in the dead of night. The reason? To instill maximum fear and dread into the locals. When people just ‘poof’ into the night, it is a lot scarier than when they are seen being dragged off.
You will notice that I said, ‘in his region’. I used that term because my father’s experience was completely different from my mother’s. They came from completely different regions, and Germany under Hitler was a mosaic of different regional ideologies. In some regions, the Gauleiters were kinder to the populace than in others. This was more than just a personality quirk; National Socialism was itself a hodgepodge of loosely glued together ideologies. Joseph Goebbels, for example, leaned strongly towards communism, and wanted a German-Russian peace. What held the whole ramshackle thing together was Adolf Hitler, and Adolf Hitler was a master at making everyone believe they were his one and only one.
My father grew up in Lower Saxony, and he had it very, very bad. Disappearing neighbors were the least of it! After his mother was declared unfit, he was fostered out to relatives, passed around, and eventually ended up in a boy’s home. If you are thinking that the government interfered unjustly in taking him away from a loving mother, don’t. It was completely justified. This was one thing that the Reich actually got right. There is one story he told about his childhood that really stands out. At the time, he was living with an aunt who was quite devout. He probably got his own interest in religion from her – but that has nothing to do with this. As the story goes, her house was raided on at least three occasions; the floor boards were ripped up, and any newly turned earth in the garden fell under government suspicion. What were they searching for? Apparently, her bible. That was how it went in that region.
Make no mistake about it, house searches were fairly normal. Authorities performed them for reasons that ranged from making sure Hitler’s photo and the obligatory copy of Mein Kampf were displayed correctly, to hunting for illegally hoarded butter and foodstuffs, to the well known ones where it was suspected that people were sheltering enemies of the state.
My mother, by comparison, fairly breezed through the era. Sure, they had to hide their butter under potted plants, and learned the requisite Nazi songs at school, but in general, nobody was forced to take it too seriously. One of the main differences was that the village school teacher was the ranking Nazi in the area, and he was only a member of the party because he’d been forced to join it. He routinely interfered in attempted arrests, smoothed things over, and he probably was the reason my grandfather and great-grandfather were not deported.
That side of the family is complicated, even more so than my father’s. My grandfather could not prove his racial purity due to an inability on the part of Reich genealogists to track his Hungarian mother’s family line. When it came to her, the entire village developed collective amnesia – which is quite common behavior among southern German villages when they don’t feel like cooperating. But, the threats of deportation did not come from that. No, it was because my grandfather and great-grandfather had the audacity to insult Nazism straight to the Kreisleiter’s face. Somehow, for some reason, they escaped punishment.
My grandmother’s half-brother, meanwhile, had been recruited from Hitler Youth into the SS. He had a blast strutting around, showing off his new position. It was not to last, however. By the end of the war, he’d had enough. This proves the lie to the assertion that the Hitler Youth and SS were maniacal fighters until the very end. When my uncle got shot in the arm, the army surgeon, seeing which way the wind was blowing, let his scalpel slip just enough to remove my uncle’s SS tattoo along with the bullet. Towards the end of the war, large numbers of SS men had their tattoos removed, but those removals were traceable. My uncle’s wasn’t.
But he still had to go into hiding after the war. The village, being the southern German village that it was, happily hid him. They also turned out on the steps of the town hall, and demanded the release of the village school teacher, who had been arrested by the allies. He’d done what he had to do to protect them all, and they were damned if they were going to let him be punished for it.
(image source: pixabay.com)
My Grandfather, meanwhile, had gotten the boot from the regular army, and been reassigned to the OT. The Todt Organization was a construction division that, after Fritz Todt’s death, was headed up by Albert Speer. Their job was to follow the regular army, rebuilding roads and other infrastructure destroyed by the fighting. My grandfather spent almost the entire war on the eastern front. His unit was behind the regular army at Stalingrad, and, when the Russians performed their pincher maneuver, he was far enough back to see it coming. He did what everyone else in my family seems to do when they see the enemy coming: he got the hell out of there!
Thus, he survived Stalingrad.
As the war came to its conclusion, he’d also had enough. At the time, he was on the Russian front, and, well… he deserted. He made his way, on foot, from Russia to his home in southern Germany. Along the way, it was the very same locals that the Germany army had overrun, and often brutalized, who now hid a German deserter from his own people.
Many strange myths grew up around the Nazis after the war. One was that theirs was a hyper-efficient regime. It wasn’t. Hitler let his underlings do whatever they wanted. There was no uniform ideological doctrine. Nazism was basically whatever you wanted to read into it. At times, it was more like a Three Stooges movie than an actual regime. That the German nation was able to fend off the super-powers of the time says more about them, than it does about the Nazi regime. What is says isn’t all that complimentary.
Unfortunately, we are now facing the utterly bizarre in terms of what the Nazi legend has become. There are conspiracy theorists who believe Hitler escaped and went to live on a base on the moon. Yes, they do! They also believe that the Nazis were in contact with a race of Aliens who bequeathed them extraterrestrial technology, and that Nazis have developed a secret space program for the United States of America.
No! No, no, no! I tell you, NO! If you put aside the strange histories, and talk to the people who were there – or at least read what they wrote – you soon find out that the Nazis were about as likely to have been contacted by aliens bearing gifts, as the Queen of England is likely to give it all up to go live in a fisherman’s hut. The Nazis, particularly the SS, were die-hard occultists. However, there is absolutely nothing that proves they had any success in their search for ancient knowledge. They were simply too scattered, too prone to in-fighting over territory and the Fuhrer’s favour, to pull off anything that spectacular.
The other bizarre thing that I see happening these days is the ‘Germany did nothing wrong’ movement. Many of its adherents present Hitler as a kind man, one who was totally misunderstood, and wrongly reviled.
Absolutely not!
Okay. I will agree that there has been a lot of exaggeration, and I support historical revisionists such as David Cole Stein. The right to question should also apply to the second world war. But… life in Nazi Germany was horrible for many regular Germans. Nazism was not very popular. People were threatened, beaten, and even killed for simply voicing dissent. Germany did a lot of wrong, and they did it to their own people.