Defying Hitler

 Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner

New York:  Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2002

ISBN	0374161577

(16-17)  Growing up during WWI  "The force and influence of these experiences are not diminished by the fact that they were lived through by children or young boys.  On the contrary, in its reactions the mass psyche greatly resembles the child psyche.  One cannot overstate the childishness of the ideas that feed and stir the masses.  Real ideas must as a rule be simplified to the level of a child's understanding if they are to arouse the masses to historic actions.  A childish illusion, fixed in the minds of all children born in a certain decade and hammered home for four years, can easily reappear as a deadly serious political ideology twenty years later.

"From 1914 to 1918 a generation of German schoolboys daily experienced war as a great, thrilling, enthralling game between nations, which provided far more excitement and emotional satisfaction than anything peace could offer;  and that has now become the underlying vision of Nazism.  That is where it draws its allure from:  its simplicity, its appeal to the imagination, and its zest for action;  but also its intolerance and its cruelty toward internal opponents.  Anyone who does not join in the the game is regarded not as an adversary but as a spoilsport.  Ultimately that is also the source of Nazism's belligerent attitude toward neighboring states.  Other countries are not regarded as neighbors, but must be opponents, whether they like ti or not.  Otherwise the match would have to be called off!"

(31)  "I reiterate that we should take note of the political reactions of children.  What 'every child knows' is generally the last irrefutable quintessence of a political development."

(56)  the inflationary economy of 1923  "The old and unworldly had the worst of it.  Many were driven to begging, many to suicide.  The young and quick-witted did well.  Overnight they became free, rich, and independent.  It was a situation in which mental inertia and reliance on past experience were punished by starvation and death, but rapid appraisal of new situations and speed of reaction were rewarded with sudden, vast riches.  The twenty-one-year-old bank director appeared on the scene, and also the high school senior who earned his living from the stock-market tips of his slightly older friends.  He wore Oscar Wilde ties, organized champagne parties, and supported his embarrassed father."

(86)  1930  "To my knowledge, the Bruning regime was the first essay and model of a form of government that has since been copied in many European countries:  the semidictatorship in the name, and in defense, of democracy against fully fledged dictatorship.  Anyone who takes the trouble to study Bruning's rule in depth will find all those factors that make this sort of government the inevitable forerunner of the very thing it is supposed to prevent:  its discouragement of its own supporters;  the way it undermines its own position;  its acceptance of a loss of freedom;  its lack of ideological weapons against enemy propaganda;  the way it surrenders the initiative;  and its collapse at the final moment when the issue is reduced to a simple question of power."

(91)  "In many respects the atmosphere in Germany resembled that which prevails today in Europe as a whole:  a passive waiting for the inevitable, still hoping to avoid it up to the last moment."

(103)  1933  "Even some of those who became Nazis at this time did not fully realize what they were doing.  They might think that they stood for nationalism and socialism, were against the Jews and for the pre-1914-18 status quo, and many of them secretly looked forward to a new public adventure, a repeat of 1923.  Still, they expected all that to take the humane forms usual in a civilized nation.  Most of them would have been deeply shocked if one had suggested that what they really stood for were torture chambers and officially decreed pogroms (to name but two of the most obvious things, and these are certainly not yet the final horrific culmination).  Even today there are Nazis who are shocked and alarmed if this is pointed out to them."

(118-119)  Reichstag fire  "Outside, against a flaming backdrop, like a Wagnerian Wotan, Hitler uttered the memorable words, 'If this is the work of the Communists, _which I do not doubt_, may God have mercy on them!'  We had no inkling of all that.  The radio was switched off.  Around midnight we sleepily took the night buses to our various homes,  At that very moment the raiding parties were already on their way to get their victims out of bed, in the first great wave of concentration-camp arrests:  left-wing deputies and literary figures, unpopular doctors, officials, and lawyers.

"It was only the next morning that I read about the fire, and not until midday that I read about the arrests.  Around the same time a decree of Hindenburg's was promulgated.  It abolished freedom of speech and confidentiality of the mail and telephone for all private individuals, while giving the police unrestricted rights of search and access, confiscation and arrest.  That afternoon men with ladders went around, honest workmen, covering campaign posters with plain white paper.  All parties of the left had been prohibited from any further election publicity.  Those newspapers that still appeared reported all this in a fawning, fervently patriotic, jubilant tone.  We had been saved!  Germany was free!  Next Saturday all Germans would come together in a festival of national exaltation, their hearts swelling with gratitude!  Get the torches and flags out!."

(128)  March 1933  "These elections, the last that were ever held in prewar Germany, brought the Nazis only 44 percent of the votes (in the previous elections they had achieved 37 percent).  The majority was still against the Nazis.  If you consider that terror was in full swing, that the parties of the left had been prohibited from all public activity in the decisive final week before the elections, you have to admit that the German people as a whole had behaved quite decently.  However, it made no difference at all.  The defeat was celebrated like a victory, the terror intensified, the celebrations multiplied.  Flags never left the windows for a whole fortnight."

(144)  Nazism as an infection, "the wolf virus" 

(151)  The day they threw the Jews out of the law courts  "Meanwhile a brown shirt approached me and took up position in front of my worktable.  'Are you Aryan?'  Before I had a chance to think, I said, 'Yes.'  He took a close look at my nose - and retired.  The blood shot to my face.  A moment too late I felt the shame, the defeat.  I had said 'Yes'!  Well, in God's name I was indeed an 'Aryan.'   I had not lied, I had allowed something much worse to happen.  What a humiliation, to have answered the unjustified question as to whether I was 'Aryan' so easily, even if the fact was of no importance to me!  What a disgrace to buy, with a reply, the right to stay with my documents in peace!  I had been caught unawares, even now,  I had failed my very first test.  I could have slapped myself."

(155)  "We were not equal to the situation, even as victims.  If you will allow me this generalization, it is one of the uncanny aspects of events in Germany that the deeds have no doers and the suffering has no martyrs.  Everything takes place under a kind of anesthesia.  Objectively dreadful deeds produce a thin, puny emotional response.  Murders are committed like schoolboy pranks.  Humiliation and moral decay are accepted like minor incidents.  Even death under torture only produces the response 'Bad luck.'"

(185)  "Today the political struggle is expressed by the choice of what a person eats and drinks, whom he loves, what he does in his spare time, whose company he seeks, whether he smiles or frowns, what he reads, what pictures he hangs on his walls,  It is here that the battles of the next world war are being decided in advance.  That may sound grotesque, but it is the truth."

(199-200)  "The plight of non-Nazi Germans in the summer of 1933 was certainly one of the most difficult a person can find himself in:  a condition in which one is helplessly, utterly overwhelmed, accompanied by the shock of having been caught completely off balance.  We were in the Nazis' hands for good or ill.  All lines of defense had fallen, any collective resistance had become impossible.  Individual resistance was only a form of suicide.  We were pursued into the farthest corners of our private lives;  in all areas of life there was rout, panic, and flight.  No one could tell where it would end.  At the same time we were called upon, not to surrender, but to renege.  Just a little pact with the devil - and you were no longer one of the captured quarry.  Instead you were one of the victorious hunters."

(213- 217)  A conversation in the law study group  "It happened just after the murders in Copenick.  Brock and Holz came to our meeting like murderers fresh from the deed.  Not that they had taken part in the slaughter themselves, but it was obviously the topic of the day in their new circles.  They had clearly convinced themselves that they were in some way accomplices.  Into our civilized, middle-class atmosphere of cigarettes and coffee cups the two of them brought a strange, bloodred cloud of sweaty death.

"They started to speak of the matter immediately.  It was from their graphic descriptions that we found out what had actually happened.  The press had only contained hints and intimations.

"'Fantastic, what happened in Copenick yesterday, eh?'  began Brock, and that was the tone of his narrative.  He went into detail, explained how the women and children had been sent into a neighboring room before the men were shot point-blank with a revolver, bludgeoned with a truncheon, or stabbed with an SA dagger.   Surprisingly, most of them had put up no resistance, and made sorry figures in their nightshirts.  The bodies had been tipped into the river and many were still being washed ashore in the area today.  His whole narrative was delivered with that brazen smile on his face which had recently become a stereotypical feature.  He made no attempt to defend the actions, and obviously did not see much need to.  He regarded them primarily as sensational.

"We found it all dreadful and shook our heads, which seemed to give him some satisfaction.

"'And you see no difficulty with your new party membership because of these things?' I remarked at last.

"Immediately he became defensive and his face took on a bold Mussolini expression.  'No, not at all,' he declared.  'Do you feel pity for these people?  The man who shot first the day before yesterday knew that it would cost him his life, of course.  It would have been bad form not to hang him.  Incidentally, he has my respect.  As for the others - shame on them.  Why didn't they put up a fight?  They were all longtime Social Democrats and members of the Eiserne Front [non-Communist leftist semimilitary group].  Why should they be lying in their beds in their nightshirts?  They should have defended themselves and died decently.  But they're a limp lot.  I have no sympathy for them.'

"'I don't know,' I said slowly, 'whether I feel much pity for them, but what I do feel is an indescribable sense of disgust at people who go around heavily armed and slaughter defenseless victims.'

"'They should have defended themselves,' said Brock stubbornly.  'Then they wouldn't have been defenseless.  That is a disgusting Marxist trick, being defenseless, when it gets serious.'

"At this point Holz intervened.  'I consider the whole thing a regrettable revolutionary excess,' he said, 'and between you and me, I expect the responsible officer to be disciplined.  But I also think that it should not be overlooked that it was a Social Democrat who shot first.  It is understandable, and in a certain sense even justified, that under these circumstances the SA takes, er, very energetic countermeasures.'

"It was curious.  I could just about stand Brock, but Holz had become a red rag to me.  I could not help myself.  I felt compelled to insult him.

"'It is most interesting for me to hear your new theory of justification,' I said.  'If I am not mistaken, you did once study law?'

"He gave me a steely look and elaborately picked up the gauntlet.  'Yes, I have studied law,' he said slowly, 'and I remember that I heard something about state self-defense there.  Perhaps you missed that lecture.'

"'State self-defense,' I said, 'interesting.  You consider that the state is under attack because a few hundred Social Democrat citizens put on nightshirts and go to bed?'

"'Of course not,' he said.  'You keep forgetting it was a Social Democrat who first shot two SA men -'

"'- who had broken into his home.'

"'Who had entered his abode in the course of their official duty.'

"'And that allows the state the justification of self-defense against any other citizens?  Against me and you?'

"'Not against me,' he said, 'but perhaps against you.'

"He was now looking at me with really steely eyes and I had a funny feeling in the back of my knees.

"'You,' he said, 'are always niggling and willfully ignoring the monumental developments in the resurgence of the German people that are taking place today.'  (I can hear the very word 'resurgence' to this day!)  'You grasp at every little excess and split legal hairs to criticize and find fault.  You seem to be unaware, I fear, that today people of your ilk represent a latent danger for the state, and that the state has the right and the duty to react accordingly - at the very least when one of you goes so far as to dare to offer open resistance.'

"Those were his words, soberly and slowly spoken in the style of a commentary on the Civil Code.  All the while he looked at me with those steely eyes.

"'If we are dealing in threats,' I said, 'then why not openly?  Do you intend to denounce me to the Gestapo?'

"About here Von Hagen and Hirsch began to titter, attempting to turn it all into a joke.  This time, however, Holz put a spanner in the works.  Quietly and deliberately (and it was only now that I realized, with a certain unexpected satisfaction, how deeply angered he was):

"'i admit that for sometime I have been wondering whether that is not my duty.'

"'Oh," I said.  I needed a few moments to taste all the different flavors on my tongue:  a little surprise, a little admiration for how far he was prepared to go, a little sourness from the word 'duty,' a little satisfaction at how far I had driven him, and a new cool insight:  that is the way life is now, and that is how it has changed - and a little fear.  having made a quick assessment of what he might be able to say about me, if he went through with it, I said, 'I must say that it does not speak for the seriousness of your intentions that you have been thinking about it for some time, only to tell me the result of your thoughts.'

"'Don't say that,' he said quietly.  Now all the trumps had been played and to raise the stakes further we would have had to become physical."

(223)  "The Germany that was 'my country' and the country of those like me was not just a blob on the map of Europe.  It was characterized by certain distinctive attributes:  humanity, openness on all sides, philosophical depth of thought, dissatisfaction with the world and oneself, the courage always to try something fresh and to abandon it if need be, self-criticism, truthfulness, objectivity, severity, rigor, variety, a certain ponderousness but also delight in the freest improvisation, caution and earnestness but also a playful richness of invention, engendering ever new ideas that it quickly rejects as invalid, respect for originality, good nature, generosity, sentimentality, musicality, and above all freedom, something roving, unfettered, soaring, weightless, Promethean.  Secretly we were proud that in the realm of the spirit our country was the land of unlimited possibilities.  Be that as it may, this was the country we felt attached to, in which we were at home.

"This Germany has been destroyed and trampled underfoot by the nationalist, and it has at least become clear who its deadliest enemy was:  German nationalism itself and the German Reich.  To stay loyal to it and belong to it, one had to have the courage to recognize this fact - and all its consequences."

(229)  "It is a commonly held belief that caution is just as dangerous as recklessness, and that caution deprives one of the pleasure of taking risks.  Incidentally, everything I have experienced in my life reinforces the truth of this perception."

(242)  Remark overheard on the Nazi take-over of the Christian church  "For pity's sake, now we even have to fight for the faith that we don't have."

(257)  In order to qualify for his court exams, Haffner had to spend time in a Nazi training camp  "Four weeks later I was wearing jackboots and a uniform with a swastika armband, and spent many hours each day marching in a column in the vicinity of Juterbog.  Along with all the others, I chorused 'Do You See the Sunrise in the East' or 'Heathlands of Brandenburg' and other marching songs.  We even had a flag - with a swastika, of course - and sometimes this flag was carried before us.  When we came through villages, the people on either side of the road raised their arms to greet the flag, or disappeared quickly into some house entrance.  They did this because they had learned that if they did not, we, that is I, would beat them up.  It made not the slightest difference that I - and, no doubt, many another among us - fled into entryways to avoid these flags, when we were not marching behind them.  Now we were the ones embodying an implicit threat of violence against all bystanders.  They greeted the flag or disappeared.  For fear of us.  For fear of me.

"I still feel dizzy when I consider my predicament then.  It was the Third Reich in a nutshell."

(261)  The SA officer  "I cannot say that he made an unpleasant impression.  He was a small, dainty, brown-haired young man with lively eyes, not a bullyboy.  But I noticed a peculiar expression on his face - it was not even particularly disagreeable, but it reminded me of something and it bothered me.  Suddenly I remembered:  it was exactly the expression of brazen audacity that Brock had worn ever since had had become a Nazi."

(267-268)  "The worst came when he had finished.  A fanfare signaled the national anthem, and we all raised our arms.  A few hesitated like me, it was so dreadful shaming.  But did we want to sit our examinations, or not/  For the first time, I had the feeling, so strong it left a taste in my mouth, 'this doesn't count.  This isn't me.  It doesn't count,' and with this feeling I, too, raised my arm and held it stretched out ahead of me, for about three minutes.  That is the combined length of 'Deutschland uber alles' and the 'Horst Wessel Song.'  Most of us sang along, droning jerkily.  I moved my lips a little and mimed singing, as one does with hymns in church.

"But we all had our arms stretched out, and in this pose we stood facing the radio set, which had pulled these arms out like a puppeteer manipulates the arms of his marionettes, and we all sang or pretended to do so, each one of us the Gestapo of the others."

NB:  Are you going to act as the Gestapo for yourself?

(272)  "Finally, there was  a typically German aspiration that began to influence us strongly, although we hardly noticed it.  This was the idolization of proficiency for its own sake, the desire to do whatever you are assigned to do as well as it can possibly be done.  However senseless, meaningless, or downright humiliating it may be, it should be done as efficiently, thoroughly, and faultlessly as could be imagined."

(279-280)  "What about me?  I notice that I have not had occasion to use the word 'I' in my story for quite a while.  I have used either the third person or the first person plural;  there has been no opportunity to use the first person singular.  That is no accident.  It was one of the points - perhaps _the_ point - of what was happening to us in the camp that the individual person each of us represented played no part and was completely sidelined.  That just did not count.  Things were quite deliberately arranged so that the individual had no room for maneuver.  What one represented, what one's opinions were in 'private' and 'actually,' was of no concern and set aside, put on ice, as it were.  On the other hand, in moments when one had the leisure to think of one's individuality - perhaps if one awoke at night in the midst of the multifarious snoring of one's comrades - one had a feeling that what was actually happening, in which one participated mechanically, had no real existence or validity.  It was only in these hours that one could attempt to call oneself morally to account and prepare a last position of defense for one's inner self."

(282)  "Or the other day when somebody else - otherwise a pleasant comrade - had talked about the trial of those accused of setting the Reichstag fire and said, 'I don't really believe they're guilty.  But what does that matter?  There are enough witnesses against them.  So why not just chop off their heads and be done with it.  A few more or less don't make any difference.'  (He said it pleasantly, without rancor.)

"What can one say to that?  There is no answer.  The only answer is to take an axe to the person's head who said it.  Just so.  But me with an axe?  Besides the man who said it is quite decent otherwise."

(285-288)  "To start with the essential point comradeship completely destroys the sense of responsibility for oneself, be it in the civilian or, worse still, the religious sense.  A man bedded in comradeship is relieved of all personal worries, and of the rigors of the struggle for life.  He has his bed in the barracks, his meals, and his uniform.  His daily life is prescribed from morning to night.  He need not concern himself with anything.  He lives, not under the severe rule of 'each for himself,' but in the generous softness of 'one for all and all for one.'  It is often of the most unpleasant falsehoods that the laws of comradeship are harder than those of ordinary civilian life.  On the contrary, they are of a debilitating softness, and they are justified only for soldiers in the field, for men facing death.  Only the threat of death justifies and makes this egregious dispensation from responsibility acceptable.  Indeed, it is a familiar story that brave soldiers, who have been too long bedded on the soft cushions of comradeship, often find it impossible to cope with the harshness of civilian life.

"It is even worse that comradeship relieves men of responsibility for their actions, before themselves, before God, before their consciences,  they do what all their comrades do.  They have no choice.  They have no time for thought (except when they unfortunately wake up at night).  Their comrades are their conscience and give absolution for everything, provided they do what everybody else does...."

"It was comradeship, which in a few weeks in a camp at Juterbog had molded us -Referendars [court officials], after all, with an intellectual, academic education, future judges - into an unthinking, indifferent, irresponsible mass, in which sayings like those about Paris or the Reichstag fire were commonplace, went unanswered, and set the intellectual tone.  Comradeship always sets the cultural tone at the lowest possible level, accessible to everyone.  It cannot tolerate discussion;  in the chemical solution of comradeship, discussion immediately takes on the color of whining and grumbling.  It becomes a mortal sin.  Comradeship admits no thoughts, just mass feelings, of the most primitive sort - these, on the other hand, are inescapable, to try and evade them is to put oneself beyond the pale.  How familiar were the attitudes that governed our camp comradeship absolutely and irrevocably!  
They were not really the official Nazi party line, they certainly had a Nazi character.  They were the attitudes we had had as boys during the Great War, which had dominated the Rennbund [an informal sports group] and the athletics clubs in t he Stresemann era.  A few Nazi-specific ideas had not yet taken root.  For instance 'we' were still not virulently anti-Semitic.  But 'we' were not prepared to make an issue of it.  That was a trifle.  Who could take ti seriously?  'We' had become a collective entity, and with all the intellectual cowardice and dishonesty of a collective being we instinctively ignored or belittled anything that could disturb our collective self-satisfaction.  A German Reich in microcosm.

"It was remarkable how comradeship actively decomposed all the elements of individuality and civilization.  The most important part of individual life, which cannot be subsumed in communal life, is love.  So comradeship has its special weapon against love:  smut.  Every evening in bed, after the last patrol round, there was the ritual reciting of lewd songs and jokes.  That is a hard and fast rule of male comradeship, and nothing is more mistaken than the widely held opinion that this is a safety valve for frustrated erotic or sexual feelings. These songs and jokes do not have an erotic, arousing effect.  On the contrary, they make the act of love appear as unappetizing as possible.  They treat it like digestion and defecation, and make it an object of ridicule.  The men who recited rude songs and used coarse words for female body parts were in effect denying that they had ever had tender feelings or been in love, that they had ever made themselves attractive, behaved gently, and used sweet words for these same parts... They were rough, tough and above such civilized tenderness."

(292)  "Nevertheless, the condition of comradeship, dangerous as it is, has its weak point - as does every condition that is based on deception, doping, and mumbo-jumbo. The moment, namely, that its external requisites are missing, it disappears into thin air.  That has been observed many thousand times, even with genuine, legitimate, wartime comradeships:  men who in the trenches would have given their lives for one another, and more than once shared their last cigarette, feel the greatest shyness and inhibitions when they meet again as civilians - and it is _not_ the civilian meeting that is deceptive and illusory."