Book Review: The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich and Its Legacy

Alan E. Steinweis, Daniel E. Rogers, eds. The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich and Its Legacy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. xvii + 260 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8032-4299-9.

Reviewed by Hilary Earl (Department of History, Nipissing University)
Published on H-German (January, 2004)

If an essay collection is difficult to review, a Festschrift is usually impossible. The latter frequently lacks cohesion because its organizing principle is more often than not a person and not an historical question or issue. Honoring an eminent scholar--while admirable--does not generally lend itself to an integrated historical analysis, especially when the contributors have only the honoree in common. The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich and its Legacy, a collection of essays edited by Alan Steinweis and Daniel Rogers in honor of the pre-eminent German scholar Gerhard Weinberg, is an exception. The contributors of this volume, all scholars in their own right, are also former students of Weinberg and thus their research and his, have much in common. 

As the title suggests, the book is a collection of thirteen essays devoted to an examination of the impact of Nazism on various individuals, national groups, social institutions, and political movements. While the essays are not clearly delineated by chapters (this is not unexpected as one essay does not a chapter make), themes can be easily identified. Not surprisingly, many of the essays deal specifically with the effects of Nazi racial and population policy on various groups in and outside of Germany. For instance, Johnpeter Horst Grill, in "The American South and Nazi Racism," offers an examination of the ways in which Nazi racial policy influenced the debate about social equality in the southern United States, especially the discourse about the place of African Americans in American society. His study finds that for those people who already harbored racist attitudes, Nazi racial policy was embraced as an example to emulate, whereas for liberals whose tendency it was to promote social equality and justice, the opposite was true. Alan Steinweis' "Antisemitic Scholarship in the Third Reich and the Case of Peter-Heinz Seraphim" takes a longer view than Grill in his study of the lingering effects of Nazi antisemitism on the German academy. In his examination of the ways in which German scholars contributed to the persecution of European Jewry, Steinweis concludes that the antisemitic "scholarship" of contemporaries such as Seraphim--a leading Nazi Jewish scholar--had a profoundly negative impact on the development of Nazi racial policy during the Third Reich as well as a lasting effect in contemporary Germany which manifested in the absence of the legitimate study of Jewish life and culture in universities until relatively recently. 

Two essays on the impact of population and resettlement policy, "A Reassessment of Volksdeutsche and Jews in the Volhynia-Galicia-Narew Resettlement" by Valdis Lumans and "The Volksdeutsche of Eastern Europe and the Collapse of the Nazi Empire, 1944-1945" by Doris Bergen, are particularly illuminating. Lumans offers a reassessment of his earlier analysis (1993) of the role of resettlement policy on the origins of the "Final Solution" in light of recent scholarship on the subject. In particular, Lumans challenges Goetz Aly's position about the functionalist origins of the Holocaust, acknowledging the important but nonetheless limited role local officials played in the execution of Nazi racial policy in the region, while emphasizing the centrality of Berlin in the decision-making process. Bergen, on the other hand, offers a case study of the immediate and long-term effects of population policy on the ethnic Germans of eastern Europe which, in her view, was disastrous. She notes that the ethnic Germans of this area found their fate intimately linked to, and affected by, the German war effort and the regime's genocidal policy in more than material ways. Not only did Nazi resettlement policy cause a permanent shift of population transfers and ethnic boundaries, it also caused the erasure of ethnic coexistence. During the earlier years of the war, the Nazis emphasized racial hostility and competition, but at war's end, when it was fairly clear that the Germans would lose, ethnic Germans who had benefited from the earlier policy simply refused to abandon these ideas and found themselves, as a result, struggling to find a satisfactory place within their new communities. 

A second, but equally important focus of the book includes those essays devoted to issues of the internal organization of the Third Reich, especially the role of the military and paramilitary organizations in the functioning of the state and the execution of the "Final Solution." In one essay of particular interest to this reviewer, Edward Westermann's "Shaping the Police Soldier as an Instrument for Annihilation," Westermann offers a new interpretation of the reasons for the behavior of the police units on the eastern front, in the genocidal campaign that began with Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 and culminated in the European-wide murder of the Jews. Largely in response to the debate generated by Goldhagen's so-called ordinary Germans and Browning's ordinary men, but also building on his earlier work on Police Battalion 310,[1] Westermann posits an alternative explanation for why German policeman became exceptional killers. The answer is, in part, organizational. The forced militarization of the German police, coupled with their merger into the SS and subsequent indoctrination, meant that when the time came to carry out the racial war in the east in 1941, the Nazis found themselves with police battalions that were already well prepared "instruments of annihilation." Westermann's conclusions are reinforced in a subsequent article by David Yelton, "The SS, NSDAP, and the Question of Volkssturm Expansion." 

A third theme of the collection, the nature and functioning of power in the Third Reich, is highlighted in a comparative essay by Alan Wilt on the High Command structures of Germany, Britain and the United States. Here, Wilt emphasizes Hitler's influence on the command structure of the German military and the negative impact this had on military strategy and ultimately the outcome of the war. Yelton's essay on the creation and expansion of the Volkssturm, on the other hand, clearly illustrates the polycratic nature of the regime and the fierce competition that resulted from it, in this instance between the NSDAP (Bormann) and the SS (Himmler). The collection fittingly ends with a lengthy discussion of the legacy of Nazism in the legal, economic and political arenas in the context of war's end and the emergence of the fledgling Federal Republic. Daniel Rogers's concluding essay about the confrontation by the postwar German Chancellors with the Nazi past (particularly the Holocaust) suggests that the challenges posed by such a negative history have not yet disappeared. Because the troubling legacy of Nazism has not dissipated over time, what is certain, according to Rogers, is that at the highest levels of government the debate about the place of the Third Reich and its genocidal policy in German history will remain ambiguous. 

Admittedly, this collection contains a wide variety of essays on divergent aspects of the history of the Third Reich. As a result, it is perhaps not as focused as a collection that is devoted to a single theme might otherwise be. Nonetheless, The Impact of Nazism is an important book for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the high level of scholarship by the authors of this collection and the substantial contribution to the field of modern German history that each author makes individually and the book makes collectively. There is no doubt that the essays highlighted here add new insight into persistent and vexing questions about the place of the Third Reich in German history, the nature and functioning of the Nazi state, and the development and impact of population, racial, and foreign policy. Whether you are interested in the character of European fascism and the impact that Nazism had on fascist movements outside of Germany or the ways in which Germans confronted their recent past, there is an essay here for virtually everyone. On a more personal level, the book might be more appropriately titled, "Gerhard Weinberg's Legacy" which, in the form of a coterie of young, enthusiastic, and committed scholars, is indeed an impressive and important one. I recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about how Nazism impacted a wide-range of people in different countries and in different aspects of their lives. I also recommend it to those who teach advanced level courses on the history of the Third Reich because many of the essays here could be easily incorporated into various themes of such a course. Finally, the collection should be read by experts whose research intersects with the contributors of this book because, as I have suggested, the essays in this collection indeed add new perspectives to old interpretive questions of the functioning and legacy of the Third Reich. 

Note

[1]. Edward Westermann, "'Ordinary men' or 'ideological soldiers'? Police Battalian 310 in Russia, 1942," in German Studies Review 21 (February 1998), pp. 41-68.

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Book Review: Hitler's Volkssturm: The Nazi Militia and the Fall of Germany, 1944-1945.

David K. Yelton. Hitler's Volkssturm: The Nazi Militia and the Fall of Germany, 1944-1945. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. xv + 305 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-1192-8.

Reviewed by Larry V. Thompson (Department of History, United States Naval Academy)
Published on H-German (March, 2003)

During Weimar's violent initial phase, the Nazis helped educate the German public that conducting politics was tantamount to waging war. And, later, Hitler bedazzled the Republic with his staged political extravaganzas designed to suggest that politics was above all good theater filled with high drama. Perhaps inadvertently, David Yelton's study of the Volkssturm reveals that what began as heroic drama ended up as tragic farce in the Third Reich's theater of the absurd. His work captures the buffoonery displayed by the Gauleiters and their subordinates as they sought to work their way toward the Fuehrer while using the militia for their own protection and advancement. Moreover, Yelton highlights the plotting and scheming of leading Nazi actors (Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, and Albert Speer) bent on upstaging one another to gain control of the militia, and the manpower embodied in it, to promote their organizations and obtain top billing for themselves with Hitler. Just as with stage villains, however, their various duplicities combined to curtail the militia's potential. 

The brief history of the Volkssturm (the 1944 mobilization of German civilian males between the ages of sixteen and sixty to form a national militia to resist the allies) is well known. Early on, war crimes prosecutors as well as scholars maintained that the Volkssturm failed to help stem the Allied advance because it was poorly led and trained, badly equipped, and composed of those who were physically and chronologically unable to withstand the rigors of combat. The general conclusion was that the militia was a tragic example of what state tyranny and fanaticism could create when faced with a national emergency. David Yelton, professor of history at Gardner-Webb University, reconfirms this judgment. His study, however, does more than recapitulate the known. He argues that the Volkssturm was not simply a vehicle that the party cynically hoped it could ride to regain domestic power and influence lost during the war. He demonstrates how true believers, first and foremost Martin Bormann, viewed the German civilian militia as the instrument through which victory would be salvaged or, at worst, defeat averted. Why would zealots believe that military amateurs could defeat Germany's more numerous and better armed adversaries? Because they insisted that a racially superior people, convinced of its superiority, could not and would not admit defeat. To the contrary, they argued that Germans, motivated by effective propaganda and inspired by the party leadership, could be mobilized to fight so fanatically that their enemies, lacking in racial superiority and without similar fanaticism, would choose to make peace. Bormann and others, Yelton argues, sincerely saw the militia as Germany's last best weapon. 

In short, Yelton insists that ideology played a vital role in the creation of the Volkssturm and that it continued to be a factor in how the organization evolved and performed. However, Bormann learned at the outset that ideology had to be employed selectively. For example, the notion that aroused racial nationalism would bring victory implied using the Volkssturm to spearhead a German resistance movement. But resistance in the guise of partisan warfare stripped those prosecuting it of combatant status. Fearing that partisan war would expose all German citizens to unrestricted Allied military reprisals, and mindful that this threat had a negative effect on the public's acceptance of the Volkssturm, Bormann fought for the militia's designation as a military formation. Ideology thus receded into the background in this instance; however, it reappeared center stage when Bormann demanded that the militia be organized along egalitarian lines to conform with the propaganda trumpeting the creation of a Nazi social revolution. Consequently, Bormann wanted no cliques, no occupational groupings, and no class distinctions to determine militia unit composition. 

In reality, manpower demands from the military and the armaments sector forced him to compromise on unit cohesiveness as well as in deferring large numbers of civilians from militia service. While the egalitarian image of the Volkssturm was a facade, millions of men technically were forced into it. And, as Yelton demonstrates, this experience not only affected them but had a huge impact on the work place, families, leisure time, even religious activities, since limited time for training involved drill on Sunday mornings. Not surprisingly, compulsory militia service influenced, for better or worse, civilian morale. The party soon came to realize that the impact on morale was more negative than positive, which meant redoubling propaganda efforts to counteract grumbling over inequities and the loss of free time. Despite all propaganda and coercive efforts, the anticipated national defiance expected from the vaunted Volksgemeinschaft failed to develop. 

Yelton is able to assess civilian morale during the last two years of the war and the party's efforts to strengthen it because of his exhaustive research in archives at every level of state and party governance during the Third Reich. As a national entity, the militia's records were dispersed over a wide spectrum of governmental, business, industrial, professional, and party agencies. While many records were destroyed or lost, those that survived remain scattered among archives and repositories all over Germany. German reunification subsequently forced Yelton to expand his research to include records held in the areas where access had previously been denied. Yet, reunification enabled him to broaden and deepen his research base, especially at the local level, thus permitting for the first time an assessment of the militia's grassroots reception. Consequently, the scope of his research permits insights that make his study the most comprehensive one to date. For example, he demonstrates that the Volkssturm's combat performance in the East was far more successful than earlier studies indicate. 

Why? The kind of war being waged there made racial ideology more persuasive to Germans convinced that they were fighting for their national survival and a badly outnumbered German army proved willing to train and use them on that front. The mediocre performance of the militia in the West is explicable for the opposite reasons. Army indifference and the widespread belief that the western allies were not bent on their annihilation convinced Volkssturm units, left mostly on their own or led by incompetent party hacks, to flee or surrender. Mediocre militia performance overall, notwithstanding, Yelton's statistical tables reveal that the Volkssturm suffered appallingly high casualties during limited combat exposure. 

In addition to providing insights into the militia's military performance, this study highlights the centrality of manpower shortages in Germany's conduct of the war. Bodies were necessary to achieve goals. Fighting over human material was more than a game; it was the key to personal and organizational power, the critical factor for military victory, and the best way of impressing Hitler with promises of successful results. Yelton demonstrates that no one played the game better in the latter stages of the war than Martin Bormann. He even argues that Bormann got the best of Himmler in gaining control of the militia for himself. Hence, the struggle for supremacy over the Volkssturm not only underscores the manpower issue, it also reveals once again the administrative chaos that substituted for governance in the Third Reich. Yelton's work thus contributes to the ongoing discussion among students of Nazi Germany as to whether ideology or function was the more crucial for decision-making and governance in peace or war. In sum, this is a slim monograph (164 pages of text) which is heavily documented, statistically driven, and impressively researched. It adds much to our understanding of the Volkssturm, civilian morale near the end of the war, and the importance of ideology in prolonging that conflict. Moreover, despite its narrow topical focus, it contains insights that are of value to broader interpretive questions that currently dominate many research agendas.

BOOK REVIEW: Life and Death in the Third Reich

Peter Fritzsche. Life and Death in the Third Reich. Cambridge/Mass.: Belknap Press, 2008. 384 S. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-02793-0.

Reviewed by Pamela Swett (Department of History, McMaster University)
Published on H-German (June, 2008)

The Intimacy of Complicity

 

A decade ago Peter Fritzsche published his very popular and still widely assigned Germans into Nazis. In that book, he focused on the process by which a sizeable minority of the German population came to agree with Adolf Hitler and his early followers that Germany needed a new politics that would bring "the idea of the nation to life," as the call to arms in 1914 had done.[1] Now Fritzsche provides us with a book in which we see the implementation of that ideology once the party gains power. Process remains critical to his analysis. Though the NSDAP enjoyed a meteoric rise to prominence in the early 1930s, Fritzsche argues in Life and Death that much work remained to be done, starting in 1933, to convince large sections of the population that Germany was on the right course--indeed, the only course.

That the regime succeeded in amassing and maintaining broad support even through the darkest days of the war is not a new idea. What is original and ultimately very powerful about Fritzsche's analysis is his ability to unravel the ways individuals wrestled with becoming (and I would add remaining) Nazis--among close friends and family members, and within their own minds and hearts. As the book approaches German military defeat, Fritzsche assesses what Germans knew of the genocide, and here again he traces the emotional struggles of surviving Jews and non-Jewish Germans. While the workings of memory have been central to scholarship on the postwar era for some time now, Fritzsche's concluding chapter offers insight into the construction of these very memories--the psychological roots of the miscomprehension and willful amnesia regarding the crimes committed by Germans that plagued the first post-war generation.

The book is chronologically organized around four long chapters. Surprisingly perhaps in this age of digital reproduction, the text is unaccompanied by photographs. He relies heavily on letters and diaries, which, along with the graceful prose we have come to expect from Fritzsche, provide dramatic evidence and a level of narrative coherence that make the book eminently readable from cover to cover. As he explains in the introduction, these sources are most useful to his overall argument, because they "transcribed the strain of conversion" (p. 10).

The first chapter, "Reviving the Nation," discusses the early years of the regime and individuals' attempts to come to grips with the new situation. He centers his chapter around three personal narratives: one whose author welcomed the revolution; one who resisted it; and one who reconciled himself to it, even "surrendering himself [at times] to the embrace of the national community" (p. 35). While Fritzsche notes that some Germans converted for reasons of fear or because of social pressure, and many continued to distrust, dislike or simply misunderstand individual policies or principles, he chooses to focus on the vast majority of Germans who came to believe that "National Socialism had healed German history" and that it "offered them a new, improved version of national life" (p. 37). Seeking therefore to understand the attractions of the National Socialist future, Fritzsche turns his discussion to the Volksgemeinschaft and revisits the allure of 1914, the catastrophe of 1918, and the failure of the republican era to recapture a sense of unity torn asunder by defeat and the ensuing instability. After 1933, the party won converts not simply through its rhetoric of national revival or by the force it used to undermine the myriad local class- and confessional-based cultural activities throughout the country, but by involving millions as volunteers in the collective effort. 

"Coordination," writes Fritzsche, "was a process of dissolution and affiliation" (p. 51). He emphasizes affiliation with a glimpse into the audiovisual spaces of the new era--the way film, radio, advertising, and magazines created a common culture (unter uns) within Germany that marked the boundaries of the exclusive people's community. Moreover, Fritzsche argues that the camera-ready staging of major and minor political events, from party rallies to the broadcasting of speeches, reinforced the sense that history was being made, indeed remade, and that the individual too was a participant in this heroic mission.

Fritzsche's insights in this chapter are twofold. On the one hand he argues that the very discomfort that came with conversion was so common an experience that it actually contributed to the construction of a shared community. On the other hand, the desire of most non-Jewish Germans to accept the Volksgemeinschaft "as a workable ideal" meant that they became eager consumers of the "images of acclamation" (p. 75) that flooded the audio-visual landscape.

In "Racial Grooming" we learn how this more general unter uns mentality was cast in racial terms and see the tasks that lay ahead for both ordinary Germans and the movement's "racial warriors," who were writing and implementing policy. Turning Germans into "Aryans" was a monumental task, and once again ordinary Germans were enlisted in the project. Fritzsche recounts the process by which members of the people's community assembled their own "Aryan" passports and visited a variety of reeducation camps. Everyone from young members of the Hitler Youth and their older siblings performing their labor service to professionals and civil servants in their forties and fifties were commanded to spend time away from home to learn their new roles. Undoing bonds to other milieus was the aim, and learning to fit in was the assignment. Those not welcome in this new environment, of course, were sorted and shunted off to their own camp system: communists and socialists, "asocials," and the disabled. In these pages and the last section that follows on the major antisemitic legislation and events of the prewar years, readers don't receive much in the way of new analysis, but the concise treatment of the timeline and the inclusion of diary excerpts to personalize the narrative make for engaging reading.

In "Empire of Destruction," the author frames the war as an imperialist project. Though the Nazi leadership had no detailed plan or set boundaries in mind, Fritzsche notes that its priorities for the East and "the demands of war forced the Germans to adopt more modest approaches" (p. 165). In the first years of the war, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans were repatriated into the expanding empire, and Fritzsche does well to devote a section to this aspect of Nazi hubris. Of course, this population transfer was made possible by the enslavement and slaughter of Jews and Slavs in these same areas, inspiring the local Baedeker to advertise Cracow and Lublin as "(now Jew-free)" (p. 176) and leaving thousands of apartments fully furnished and ready for new tenants. His arguments about the radicalization of policy toward Europe's Jews and Germans' enduring loyalty to Nazism work as one: since National Socialist ideology positioned Germany as the victim of history, military setbacks after 1941 reaffirmed the extent of the so-called Jewish menace, necessitating the annihilation of that threat and tying Germans ever more closely to the do-or-die message of the war. This chapter is the most historiographically minded in the book. Students and instructors alike will appreciate Fritzsche's analysis of key recent and classic scholarship, including work by Elizabeth Harvey, Christopher Browning, and Omer Bartov. Without forgetting that local inhabitants across the continent were often eager participants in the hunting down and killing of Jews, Fritzsche emphasizes the metropolis in his discussion of the Nazi empire. He includes a lengthy section on the deportation of German Jews, and he reminds the reader that Auschwitz lay within the expanded borders of the Reich, with a direct phone line from Berlin to the rail station's sorting platform.

The absence of Jews from most Germans' lives (soldiers and civilians alike) by the end of 1942 was critical to their understanding of the last years of the conflict and the early postwar period. In his final chapter, Fritzsche depicts how, as civilians began to see themselves as victims of Allied aerial bombardment and flagging military fortunes after Stalingrad, the Jews remained only as an abstraction. Non-Jewish Germans' stories of bombings, deprivation, and fear of impending catastrophe, which arrived for some in the form of expulsion and rape, were told and retold and faced no competition, no counter-narratives from Jewish neighbors who had by the end of the war been gone for years. The sense of victimhood among Germans on the home front made it easier not only to forget deported neighbors but also to blame the abstract image of the Jew for the destruction. "When it came to the Jews," writes Fritzsche, "many Germans let themselves be bombed into a clear conscience" (p. 260). Moreover, if the bombings were retribution for the brutal treatment of Jews, then, many Germans concluded, further retaliation would follow defeat. So just as the process of becoming Nazis, though difficult for some, had united the nation, in the war's final years Germans overlooked any pangs of guilt or shame to fight on together, because they feared the non-Nazi future that awaited them. Fritzsche concludes that the regime allowed German civilians and soldiers to witness, participate in, or at the very least know enough about the genocide to produce an "intimacy of complicity" (p. 286) that successfully bonded them to the fate of the regime.

So what did Jews and non-Jews in Germany know about the extermination that was proceeding not so far away? In sum, Fritzsche argues that many Germans on the home front in the early 1940s knew about mass shootings of civilians, including women and children, and the participation of the Wehrmacht in this brutality. Without specific details about Auschwitz and other death camps, however, "the Holocaust was largely contained by the knowledge of mass murder on the military front" (p. 264]. In other words, even the most pessimistic, including Victor Klemperer, could grasp atrocities like Babi Yar but continued to see the rumors of mass death among evacuees, including the use of gas, as "events and episodes" (p. 264)--retaliation by a defeated army rather than part of a well-planned and orchestrated campaign of genocide. Among non-Jews too, the information remained vague, though the belief that the bombing runs were the vengeful actions of international Jewry should be viewed as an admission that unspeakable crimes had been committed.

Life and Death in the Third Reich is a subtle, analytic text, rather than a survey of Nazi Germany. No sustained treatment of women or family policy is included, and resistance too is left out. The book presumes a fair amount of knowledge about the party and state bureaucracies and Adolf Hitler's role in these structures. Some readers may find that non-Jewish victims of the regime do not receive enough attention. I suspect as well that the complexity of the argumentation will be beyond all but the best undergraduates. However, the strength of chapters 1 and 4 alone should make this book a standard on graduate syllabi and reading lists. In these two chapters, the book convincingly demonstrates how an overwhelming proportion of non-Jewish Germans came to hold the goals of the regime in such high regard, and why they continued to believe in the Third Reich even once defeat was unavoidable, if anything "blaming the Nazis for destroying Nazism" (p. 272). It shows ordinary Germans as they most likely were: at times conflicted, ebullient, ashamed, disappointed and fearful, and it illustrates how these emotions (both the good and the bad) could unite the population behind National Socialism in ways not easily undone by the collapse of the regime or even by the full disclosure of the facts of the Holocaust at war's end. No monograph does a better job of dwelling in the complexities of individual experiences in the Third Reich and connecting those lived experiences to the big issues that still fascinate scholars and students: the attractions of community and the extent of complicity, the will to survive and to forget, and the blind spots of reconciliation.

Note

[1]. Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 3.

Book Review: The Rise of the Nazis

Conan Fischer. The Rise of the Nazis. New York and Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. 211 pp. $19.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7190-6067-0.

Reviewed by Gisela Miller-Kipp (Department of Education, Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Duesseldorf)
Published on H-German (August, 2003)

A Discussion of the Rise of the Nazis to Power

 

The debate over the miniseries "Hitler: The Rise of Evil," briskly conducted of late in this venue, strongly testified to the demand for exact and valid information on Nazis and Nazism, in addition to a discussion of films as sources and media of history. In terms of intellectual demand, books seem to be a better choice, while it is the role of films--or rather of pictures--to generate a biographical and emotional understanding of history. The Rise of the Nazis serves both interests. 

Conan Fischer covers the decline of the Weimar Republic and beginning of the Third Reich, while bringing vivid insight into the political clashes, social splits, and ideological turmoil that took place in Germany from the mid-1920s to 1933. He does not, however, deliver a history of how the Nazis came to power. Rather, he inspects the case on the basis of selected data and studies already provided by earlier historiography. Fischer presents documents that offer supporting information and encourage a more detailed study. Thus, within the limits of its theme and 211 pages, the book gives a well-focused and informative discussion of "the rise of the Nazis," and serves as an introductory reader to historical controversies surrounding the subject. 

Apparently, educators used the first edition of Fischer's book as a general history, which it was not. In the second edition the author broadens his focus, to provide: "contextual information at certain points where the previous edition, perhaps, demanded a little too much prior knowledge," and "to be as accessible as possible to the new or general-interested reader" (p. 2). I have my doubts. The problem is not that of being more or less "general," which Fischer still is, but of a failure to mark clearly his own interpretation of historical events. The novice reader is sometimes left alone to evaluate the differing views under conditions when further context might have been helpful. My overall impression is that the second edition progresses from implicit judgment and supposition to an open reading of the questions discussed. Additionally, it is more exact and less general, which is more than fair to any reader. To give but one example, instead of using the term "the right," which appeared in the first edition, the text rephrases the term as "the conservative and radical right" (p. 24). 

The second edition takes in a small part of the research and discussion completed in the field since the publication of the first edition. Consequently, the list of "works cited" is slightly enlarged, and includes works published before 1995. The same is true for the "selected bibliography," which gives literature and comments on chosen titles on various aspects of Nazism. Both enumerations are rather selective, comprising special publications from Fischer's own field of study (Stormtroopers and the Nazis' attempt to gain power within working-class politics), yet omitting titles usually considered standard, at least in Germany.[1] No evidence is provided as to the criteria for selection in this list, and there is no discrimination between primary and secondary literature. Titles from the secondary literature date from 1961 to 2000; this choice was may have resulted from the need to cut through the kilometers of books on the rise of the Nazis. Even so, Fischer's selection seems appropriate and serves its purpose adequately. 

The appendix contains sixty-one documents of various character and varying historical weight or importance, including newspaper-clippings, literature, propaganda texts, speeches, statistics and historical records. They center on party policies and propaganda. Most documents deal with Hitler, such as: quotations from Mein Kampf, materials on the SA, including its organization and political in-fighting, and materials on the NSDAP, including its finances. With few exceptions, the selection of records is drawn from one regional archive in Germany. Several documents can be fully understood only in the light of events after January 30, 1933; in these cases, a relevant commentary would have been helpful as an aid to readers. Finally, the book presents a well composed index. 

Chapter One gives a historical outline of the rise and fall of Weimar. Weimar's heritage is now traced back as far as 1871, an addition to the first edition, in order to sketch the power politics of the new German Empire leading into World War I as well as to examine the "defeat" of Versailles as the fatal heritage of the new republic. From this standpoint, Fischer describes the "fall" of Weimar as the failed compromise between old imperial and new republican power, between unsatisfied and persisting imperial interests and the oncoming push for democracy, both with revolutionary potential. He sorts these divergences into political camps as represented by political parties and depicts them as pre-occupied with fighting one another in personal opposition as well as in the streets. The main focus here is on the Social Democrats, who are blamed for under-estimating the "old right" (p. 34), and the National Socialists. The condition of their respective influence is measured by poll results, where the society is seen as equally divided or politically polarized. Fischer follows the main-stream of political history. Small attention is paid to economy or socio-economics, and none is paid to the cultural character, emotional climate and collective mentality of the society. These contexts have been discussed at length in German history under the headings of "Republik ohne Republikaner" ("republic without republicans"), an approach that has moved the question of the fall of Weimar democracy into the realm of socio-cultural history. 

Chapter Two turns to "the ideological basis of Nazism," as it "continues to attract intense scrutiny from historians, political and social scientists" (p. 36). Even if that is the case, ideology per se does not answer the questions of why and how the Nazis came to power. When it is attached, however, to political interests and power politics, ideology contributes considerably to providing such an answer. This somewhat dated approach represents the state of the art. Fischer discusses several historiographic attempts to deal with national socialist ideology (or "Nazism," in this sense) and concentrates on its voelkisch dimension. It is in this dimension that the ideology in question succeeded in attracting wide sections of the Weimar (re)public, and winning applause and votes for the Nazis. The voelkisch message supported the national pride and imperial aspirations, which were reversed by Versailles. Dealing at length with this aspect, Fischer pays scant attention to other important elements of Nazism, like racism, and to different approaches towards Nazism, such as ascribing it to Hitler or to the Germans in general (a polemical line stretching from William Shirer to Daniel Goldhagen). 

Nazism was a compound and diverse ideology, framed to serve Nazi aspiration's for power. 

According to Fischer, Nazi ideology intended "not to bring Hitler to power" (p. 54), rather, it backed up "National Socialist policy and propaganda," and these are Fischer's next items. In Chapter Three, he sketches and discusses National Socialist policy and propaganda on the basis of the famous "Twenty-Five-Points," the program drafted by the NSDAP in 1923 (which is provided in the appendix), along with antecedent party guidelines from the infant DAP. The framework for the discussion rests on whether the party-program was a "catch-all" or aimed at establishing a working-class center and/or working-class image among the Weimar electorate. As we now know, it functioned in both ways. 

Chapter Four provides a closer look into "the organisation of the Nazi movement" (p. 76). Here, Fischer reveals his expertise in the field. He delivers a detailed study of the formation of the NSDAP in its rise to power, from the early twentieth century until Hitler's appointment as chancellor. He deals first with the struggles of the NSDAP amidst the minor parties on the right of the Weimar State, including membership statistics; next with the formation of the several bodies of the party, particularly the SA, and their competitive push for power; and last with the personnel of the party's National Directorate and its respective political rivalry (namely Hitler vs. Strasser). This chapter is an effective description of the formation of political power. Still, I want to point out two shortcomings in it. First, in his musings as to "who paid Hitler" (p. 91), Fischer omits some of the big spenders, like the Freundeskreis der Deutschen Industrie; there is no sufficient evidence, then, "that the National Socialists in essence funded themselves from the grass roots" (p. 175). Secondly, while pointing to the clash between the Deutscher Frauen Orden and the Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft, Fischer fails to consider Jill Stephenson's comprehensive study, The Nazi Organisation of Women (1981). There, he would have found figures on "the membership of the Women's Groups," about which he claims little is known (p. 178).

A more substantial criticism of the chapter, however, can be attributed to Fischer's failure to place the Nazi movement's organization into historical perspective, thus possibly still leaving the "general-interested reader" at a loss. There is also no contextualization to provide insight into the political logic of the party development and structure of the NSDAP. For instance, Fischer could have given the entire array of party branches and bodies, not leaving out, as he does, the two important bodies stemming from the SA: the Hitler-Youth and the Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrerkorps. The branching of the NSDAP reveals the political function of its organization, which was to move into all major sections of society through powerful and well-devised offers to numerous social groupings, and thus direct them all into the NSDAP. 

The following two chapters examine "the formation of the Nazi constituency" amongst "the middle class" (Chapter Five) and the "working class" (Chapter Six). Fischer dispels an almost-legendary reading of the rise of the Nazis, fostered by the first generation of critical historians, who blamed the "working class" for switching over to Hitler and the NSDAP. Discussing further historiographic approaches to the question as well as inspecting polls and membership data, Fischer now places the blame on both parties, bringing the middle classes more strongly into view. 

Perceiving "classes" heuristically as a social body, Fischer brings the case down to two simple questions: to whom was Nazi party policy and propaganda directed? And, who was attracted by it? Although not immediately apparent at the time, it was clearly visible from 1928 onward that party policy was to mitigate the aggressive working-class appeal of the NSDAP, to subdue the working-class ranks, and to direct itself toward the middle classes. The common ground of Nazi party policy was a voelkisch program, or the propaganda of a national community. This was a program that appealed to all and transgressed class interests. Subtly it harped on the old imperial dream, becoming bourgeois in its talk of the Volksgemeinschaft. Through these means, "middle- and working-class Germans cooperated to overthrow" the Weimar Republic, along with "the constitution and the system of values" it represented (p. 113). 

Fischer concludes with discussions of general options already put forward for understanding the Nazis' rise to power, such as describing it within the pattern of social and political modernization or within the historical frame of fascism. The author prefers to relate the Nazi rise to power to the twentieth-century move in Europe towards integration and reconciliation, away from social clashes, ideological fights, and political confrontation. Fischer sees sufficient "hope that National Socialism was indeed a particular response to events at a particular time in a particular place" (p. 142).

Historicizing "the rise of the Nazis," however, does not provide any clues as to the rise of Nazi "glory" and terror after the seizure of power. To understand that chapter of German history is an ongoing quest and part of the political legacy of the country. 

Note:

[1]. Examples include Bracher, Funke and Jakobsen, eds., Die Weimarer Republik (1987); Broszat, Duebber and Hofer, eds., Der Weg in die Diktatur (1985), and Jasper, ed. Von Weimar zu Hitler 1930-1933 (1968).

Copyright (c) 2003 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.

H-NET BOOK REVIEW: WELTANSCHAULICHE ERZIEHUNG IN ORDENSBURGEN DES NATIONALSOZIALISMUS: ZUR GESCHICHTE UND ZUKUNFT DER ORDENSBURG VOGELSANG

Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (January, 2009)

Paul Ciupke, Franz-Josef Jelich, eds. _Weltanschauliche Erziehung in Ordensburgen des Nationalsozialismus: Zur Geschichte und Zukunft der Ordensburg Vogelsang_. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2006. 190 pp. EUR 19.90 (paper), ISBN 978-3-89861-713-0.

Reviewed for H-German by Mark A. Bullock, Department of History, University of Illinois at Chicago

Vogelsang: A Castle Made of Sand

In 2006, _Ordensburg_ Vogelsang, in Germany's Eifel National Park, was opened to the public for the first time since the end of the Second World War. This opening sparked a debate among scholars, concerned citizens'associations, and local and regional government agencies about how this former training ground for a Nazi elite should be utilized and remembered.

This "castle," unbeknownst to many of its recent visitors, was part of an ambitious Nazi project, initiated by Robert Ley, to educate and train a corps of young Germans to lead the Third Reich into its thousand years of glory. The editors of this collection, Paul Ciupke and Franz-Josef Jelich, after introducing Vogelsang's past, ponder its future, asking if such places of "evil" should be ignored and allowed to fall into ruins. Or, should Vogelsang be retained as a special place for learning about and remembering Germany's past? As scholars, they only consider the second answer to their rhetorical question, arguing that Vogelsang provides new insights about how National Socialism sought to sustain itself. 

The story of Vogelsang remained obscure because there was no general access to the area, which was used as a training ground for British and Belgian soldiers until 2005. Built to blend into the surrounding landscape overlooking a valley, Vogelsang is one of the largest remaining examples of National Socialist architecture. It also represents yet another case of an ideology-fueled Nazi project that fizzled out. Constructed after 1934 to train "_Ordensjunker_," Vogelsang was one of four planned _Ordensburgen_.

These institutions were a part of the rather inchoate state and party apparatus that sought to provide further ideological education to young Germans both during and after primary school. Vogelsang competed with the Labor Service, Hitler Youth, and various Reich- and district (_Gau_) schools for recruits and influence over education. From 1936 until the end of the war, Vogelsang was used to teach young Germans Nazi ideology; first to the _Ordensjunker_, and later as an Adolf Hitler School (a type of boarding school for boys aged twelve to eighteen frequently described as a "prep school" for the _Ordensburgen_, founded in 1937 by Ley in cooperation with Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Youth). Unlike other Nazi sites of commemoration, no obvious atrocities were planned or committed at Vogelsang.

Instead, it was a place of socialization and instrument of domination, where the Nazi state engendered acceptance and support from young Germans. The history of Vogelsang tells us more about Nazi fantasies than anything else, for it never fulfilled its primary mission, having never graduated a single class of "cadets." 

Although opening Vogelsang to the public entails some risk, it also presents an opportunity for discussing how the Third Reich sought to wed its ideology to pedagogic theory to indoctrinate a faithful corps of young adherents. The editors grapple with the problem of deciding which elements of Vogelsang's history are useful for furthering the understanding and discussion of the Nazi past. The contributors to this book approach Vogelsang from a variety of academic disciplines. Their essays span the disciplines of history, architecture, history of education, and cultural studies. 

One complex of essays in the volume treats the theme of education, its content, and its audiences. Lutz Raphael's essay recapitulates the components of Nazi ideology, pointing out that Nazis targeted males under thirty more intensively than all other groups. But, of the some 500 young men who began the elite school in 1937, only 17 percent finished the first year. Vogelsang was similar to other types of Nazi schooling in that it emphasized military order, discipline, and hardness, as well as submission of individualism to the community. Kiran Klaus Patel discusses extracurricular National Socialist pedagogy in the so-called "camp" system.

Patel notes the generally low academic standards maintained in the "camp" schools, which focused on drilling ideology. Vogelsang, despite its designation as an "elite" school, had much in common with the low academic achievements of the camp system. Even worse, according to the author, Vogelsang included no practical training for running party and state organizations. Patel claims that this emphasis on ideology over praxis is typical of Ley's contribution to the Nazi educational system.

Vogelsang did little beyond conveying superficial propaganda, a fundamental problem that largely explains why the _Ordensburg_ failed to attract or retain a sufficient number of candidates. Gisela Miller-Kipp's contribution focuses on the concept of "elite" education in the Third Reich. Based on an analysis of the Adolf Hitler Schools (AHS) and oral histories of former students, she argues that elite schooling for the best male students is really a postwar concept and that the AHS did not, in fact, differ significantly from other, non-elite schools under the Nazis. While former students might remember themselves as part of an elite, historians should not describe this institution as successfully producing a corps of superior young Germans. Instead, Miller-Kipp contends that the AHS engendered an "elite consciousness" among its students by filling them with a sense of awe at the massive, monumental scale of Vogelsang. They came to see the greatness of the Third Reich and internalized a sense of power based on their close proximity to the state.

Physical education in AHS is the subject of Harald Scholtz's contribution, which discusses how Hitler's "inversion" of traditional, humanist educational theories was put into practice by his paladins. One such contrast was the predominant role of physical education. Entrance "exams" for the AHS focused primarily on the child's physical and mental hardness.

Upon entry, Hitler's "elite" students were subjected to a mostly improvised course of instruction, since school leaders failed to draft lessons plans for most subjects before 1944. AHS students, who graduated with the _Abitur_, did not attend regular classes for more than four years. Alfons Kenkmann's contribution clarifies the identity of the _Ordensjunker_.

Candidates to the _Ordensburgen_ were between twenty-three and thirty years of age, and those over twenty-six had to be married. In addition, they had to be party members, or at least demonstrate proof of participation in Nazi organizations, and be physically healthy and racially "pure." Successful candidates were admitted to a four-year course of study, each year at a different _Ordensburg_. The first class was admitted in 1937, but no cohort ever completed the full four years, as the war interrupted the program in 1939. 

A second group of essays documents Vogelsang's institutional and architectural contexts. Gerhard Klein recounts the history of Vogelsang's sister _Ordensburg_, Sonthofen, in Bavaria. Constructed in 1934, Sonthofen, like Vogelsang, played a marginal role in training _Ordensjunker_. Klein notes that Sonthofen could claim a number of world-class athletes among its student recruits. 

Sonthofen's alpine location afforded the athletes optimal training conditions, while the state provided financial support. But Sonthofen's most important function in the Third Reich was as an AHS after 1937. Monika Herzog's essay on the construction history of Vogelsang notes that, other than its monumental scale, no one feature defined Nazi architecture. Most buildings constructed during the Third Reich were admixtures of old and modern styles, for Hitler did not want to merely copy the great structures of the past, but believed that his Germany should create its own style.

Vogelsang's designer, Clemens Klotz, adhered to neither the old nor new schools, but he still effectively combined the two styles in his plans for the _Ordensburg_. Relying on wood and stone, Klotz designed a building complex that placed a new, National Socialist spin on an object representing Germany's crusading past--the castles of the Teutonic Knights, which were both temples of worship and staging areas for military conquest. Klotz intentionally incorporated these concepts in Vogelsang's design, creating a totalizing aesthetic concept to house and train a corps of young men to spread their quasi-religious racial beliefs as they expanded Germany's power. 

A third group of essays addresses the structure's postwar history. In his first essay, Michael Schröders gives a brief history of Vogelsang after its capture by American troops in early 1945 and subsequent use as a barracks and training area for British and then Belgian soldiers. The Belgians took pains to preserve the historical substance. In addition to repairing structures damaged during bombing, the Belgians even restored some of the Nazi reliefs, despite their overt fascist symbolism. In a second essay, Schröders describes the fate of Vogelsang's significant library in the years following the war. In an effort to protect the collection, its head librarian dispersed it across several local schools. 

Presumably half of these items were never recovered, and records were poorly maintained after the war. The universities of Bonn and Cologne, whose libraries were damaged in the war, ended up with some 20,000 volumes. Aside from small holdings of Nazi literature, the bulk of which was in the form of party journals and magazines, Vogelsang's library was indistinguishable from any academic library containing standard collections on history, theology, law, political science, art, and literature.

The volume closes with several pieces on the current significance of the structure. Fortunately, Vogelsang will not suffer abandonment or destruction, as its unique surroundings led to the formation of the Eifel National Park in 2004. Moreover, several foundations and local, regional, and state governments have banded together to determine how to best transform Vogelsang into a documentation center, as well as a multi-use tourist destination. Efforts are already underway to create an on-site museum that places the castle's history within the context of the Nazi quest to build a racially pure nation. The elite schools stood alongside the Nazi euthanasia and forced sterilization programs in Hitler's plan for a "new" Germany. Yet Vogelsang's future also includes a museum for nature and environment, as well as an administrative and visitor center for the national park. Volker Dahm argues that allowing the site to fall into ruin, or barring public access, will establish a counterproductive "aura of secretiveness" about the location. 

The program for the site's rehabilitation can only be understood in the context of similar activities elsewhere. In separate essays, Manfred Struck and Bernd Faulenbach describe how former Nazi sites are selected for preservation and how public access is controlled. They enumerate recent trends in how Nazi sites are preserved and utilized for future generations, pointing in particular to sites like Vogelsang, where none were tortured or murdered. While much consideration is given to the recently opened displays at Obersalzberg and Nuremberg, the articles by Struck and Faulenbach ignore other innovative efforts to preserve, or at least find new uses for, structures from the Nazi past. Mostly local groups have enthusiastically sought to preserve and document the massive flak towers and air-raid bunkers that still exist, most notably in Berlin-Gesundbrunnen and Hamburg. For example, Berliner Unterwelten, e.V. provides chilling tours of the bunker complex and flak tower in Humbolthain Park. Hamburg's flak tower now contains recording and radio studios. The omission of these imposing remnants of Nazism seems like a missed opportunity to widen the scope of these articles, for these flak towers and bunkers have been preserved and simultaneously found new uses, including as economically sustainable educational centers. 

The final essay, by Rainer Stommer, considers the modern fate of another monumental project by Vogelsang's architect: Prora, formerly known as KdF-Seebad Rügen, which lies incomplete on the Baltic coast, encompassing an area nearly the size of the Nuremberg party rally site. Intended as a seaside resort, the project's massive scale prevented its completion before the outbreak of war. From 1952 until German reunification, the resort served as a barracks for East Germany's army. Stommer mainly details the German federal government's efforts to find new uses for this massive complex, much of which lies in ruins. A central block of the development now holds museums, both private and state-owned, but many buildings remain unoccupied.

Success in attempts to attract buyers to convert the functional structures into hotel, retail, and residential spaces has been mixed, as refurbishment costs are prohibitive. Stommer laments this troubling state of affairs and argues that purely economic considerations should not determine the fate of Prora. To allow it to fall apart would be to lose not only the chance to document and teach about the Third Reich, but also an opportunity to support an economically depressed region through sponsoring tourism. 

Vogelsang is an exceptionally complex space due to its combination of landscape, architecture, and former political function. While not a place to memorialize the victims of a criminal regime, Vogelsang nonetheless reminds of the Nazi past. It was, as the volume's editors write, "a place of educational power, of selection, and indoctrination" (p. 11). This collection casts light on an interesting and little-understood component of the National Socialist education system. The largest criticism I have to offer lies in the organization of the volume; often vital information that would be helpful to understanding material at the beginning of the volume is not discussed until later essays; both Kenkmann's and Klein's essays cover material that really belonged in the editors' introduction. Although some articles lack enough context and frequently overlap in terms of material covered, they nonetheless offer an insightful and cross-discipline analysis of Vogelsang. They provide a glimpse into the deliberations behind the project of preserving and documenting historical structures bound to the Nazi past. But their primary contribution comes in the field of educational history. Several authors debunk the myth of "elite" schooling in the Third Reich through their close analyses of the _Ordensjunker_ program and the AHS housed in Vogelsang.

Disciplining Germany: Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction after the Second World War.

Ursula R. Mahlendorf. The Shame of Survival: Working Through a Nazi Childhood. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. 365 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-271-03447-8.

Reviewed by Laurie Marhoefer (Syracuse University)
Published on H-German (December, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

Working Through a BDM Childhood

 

The title of Ursula R. Mahlendorf's meticulous, moving memoir of growing up in Lower Silesia (now southwestern Poland), makes the process of working through a personal history as a member of the "Hitler Youth generation" visible. Mahlendorf's explanation for the title demonstrates one of the memoir's strengths: its author's urge to go beyond a mere recounting of her childhood in order to show her readers how she has grappled with these stories, drawing many, increasingly shame-provoking, meanings from them at different moments in her later life.

Mahlendorf writes that when she began the memoir in 2004, "survival" (p. 8) was the focus of the first draft. Indeed, she survived a great deal. Born in 1929 in a family on the edge of poverty (her father's death left her mother to support three children as a dressmaker), Mahlendorf found opportunity in the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM). At sixteen she experienced the fall of Germany, the Red Army invasion, the occupation of her home town (Strehlen, now Strzelin), a typhoid epidemic, and the expulsion of her family and neighbors (along with millions of Germans living east of Germany's new postwar borders) and resettlement in West Germany. She titled the first draft of her memoir "Survivor," but while rewriting, Mahlendorf came to perceive deeper meanings about her "implication in Nazism" that made her initial title a humiliation (p. 8).

In some of her stories this transformation is strikingly clear. One tells the tale of Mahlendorf's admission to teacher training. Her enthusiastic participation in the BDM won her a spot at one of its teacher seminars in 1944. On a superficial level, this moment offered her a chance to get the higher education that her family's class status and her mother's lack of support had thus far denied her. Yet, more fundamentally, she came to see that joining the teacher seminar put her "in the belly of the beast" of Nazism (p. 160). The school was intended to train young women, who qualified for admission through academic standing as well as by proving their descent from "Aryan stock," to take part in the German colonization of eastern Europe. Like so many other memories, this episode came to be a source of horror for the now left-identified, feminist Mahlendorf: "Years later, when I read of BDM girls just a little older than we were then serving in these eastern settlements, participating in driving out the native Polish population and introducing the ethnic German settlers to Germanic values, I shuddered to think what my future might have held" (p. 166). Only after Adolf Hitler's suicide did Mahlendorf seriously question the Nazi worldview; she seems not to doubt that she would have joined in the violence had she been called upon to do so, and hopes that her book will elucidate "how a perpetrator is made" (p. 8). Mahlendorf pointedly disavows any identification of herself as a victim, and hesitated for years to write about her life because she feared contributing to the discourse of Germans as victims. In redrafting her title, she realized, however, that she had figured herself in just that way: "in my pride at having survived the Nazi regime, I had appropriated the term survivor from the victims of the Holocaust, the potential perpetrator making herself into a victim as well" (p. 8). She kept "shame" in her final title. Admittedly, her initial choice of "survivor" as a title for a narrative that offers, among other things, a memoir of a happy Nazi teenage girl is shocking. Knowing that this was her first choice of a title invites the reader to second-guess many of her recollections, and even to condemn her. Yet, Mahlendorf included this story in the book. She even confronts the reader with it in the first pages of her introduction.

Mahlendorf's insistence on making her own "working through" visible, even when doing so shames her and leaves her vulnerable, makes this a fascinating memoir. In its pages, several of Mahlendorf's identities are at odds. She is there as an alienated German teenager who finds meaning in Nazism and as an American academic struggling to come to terms with her Nazi childhood. She is a small child uprooted by her father's death, a teenager who finds a surrogate father in Hitler, a woman in her fifties who agrees with her brother that "we were glad that Father had died when he did" (their father, a member of the SS, died in 1935 of kidney disease)--although neither she nor her brother, who have both recently read Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men (1993), can bring themselves to name their dread--and a woman in her seventies who through therapy and volunteering at a California kindergarten begins to mourn her father and, finally, to feel joy. These multiple versions of meaning that Mahlendorf has drawn from her stories leave a reader with a fractured, rich impression of her Nazi childhood and her subsequent "workings through."

The Shame of Survival also offers a window onto everyday life in Nazi Germany as seen from the perspective of a lower-middle-class "Aryan" girl in Silesia. Kristallnacht passes with no comment from Mahlendorf's mother, aside from a warning to her nine-year-old daughter not to ask questions. Mahlendorf forgets it, and her brother's missing Jewish playmates, until "a flash of recognition in May 1945 when, somewhere on a refugee-clogged road in Sudeten Czechoslovakia, disoriented with fear, I encountered a group of emaciated, bald, rag-covered figures. "They are Jews," someone said" (p. 69). The BDM attracts her because of its not-always-realized pretensions to establish a classless hierarchy and its funneling of generational rebellion. Schoolteachers celebrate German conquests. When these are reversed, they parrot Joseph Goebbels's propaganda about a secret weapon and final victory. Alternatives to Nazism come into Mahlendorf's life in subtle ways, such as in a dissenting teacher's lessons about classical humanism, and do not seem to have made much of an impression on her until the Nazis fell.

The memoir's most vivid sections treat the period of her life during and after 1945. Mahlendorf's immediate family initially flees the Red Army, but then navigates chaos, violence, depredation, and epidemic to remain in their apartment until 1946, when they are sent to board a train that deposits them in a refugee camp outside of Bremen. Mahlendorf is initially devastated by the fall of the Nazi regime, and then furious at the leaders who betrayed her and at the adults she comes to blame for allowing the Nazis to dupe her. This fury seems to sustain her, first through the struggle to stay alive in the immediate postwar years, and then in her fight to get an education. An impoverished refugee in West Germany, she undertakes the near-impossible task of qualifying for university admission. 

Success enables her to leave Germany for an academic career in the United States. Her descriptions of this part of her life have more color than most of the sections on her childhood and BDM days, which are marked by emotional flatness. Yet, the color here is of intense fury. Mahlendorf seems alienated from most of those around her, especially from people her own age, and from her mother. In the memoir's final sections, where it reaches its emotional climax, the cause of this lack of dimension in the earlier sections becomes apparent. Mahlendorf describes her adult realization that she lacked access to her emotions and suffered from depression. After a suicide attempt, she undertook years of therapy. Rather than explain her emotional state as a product of her childhood (which it undoubtedly was), Mahlendorf describes how "working through" her childhood, including by writing this memoir, helped her to understand her depression and process her emotions. This final section, which features Mahlendorf in the act of writing the memoir's final pages, reveals that the emotional flatness of the earlier sections is part of the story. Her honesty here and elsewhere makes The Shame of Survival a rewarding meditation on Nazism and its long aftermath.

A Child Of Hitler: Germany In The Days When God Wore A Swastika

A Child of Hitler: Germany in the Days When God Wore a Swastika Paperback – January 1, 2005

by Alfons Heck (Author)

 

Review

"A marvelous story that needs to be told" -- Baltimore Sun, 1985

"It is a complicated, lingering history that Heck carries with him." -- Boston Globe March 29, 1985

"Necessary for a full understanding of World War II" -- Detroit Free Press 1985

"This is savagely good yarn. As good in many respects as Erich Maria Remarque's ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT as a social history of common people in uncommon times." -- Los Angeles Times March 7, 1985

 

 The book,and its sequel, "The Burden of Hitler's Legay," is a unique inside view into the methods of youth indoctrination. The author is the only former high-ranking Hitler Youth leader who writes and speaks openly about his adolescent fascination with Adolf Hitler. 

 

The book is the basis for the 1991 HBO documentary "Heil Hitler: Confessions of a Hitler Youth." Alfons Heck is the narrator and subject of the film, for which he won an "Emmy" and a "Peabody," as well as other awards.

The BBC also used the book in 1988 as source material for its documentary "The Fatal Attraction of Adolf Hitler," in which the author is featured. That film is frequently aired on A&E's "Biograph" series, as well as on the "History Channel."

Heck is also the co-author of the award-winning young adult book "Parallel Journeys," the account of his life as described in "A Child of Hitler," but in contrast to that of his former lecture partner, Helen Waterford, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz. The late Helen Waterford and Alfons Heck gave joint lectures to hundreds of schools across the United States for nearly ten years. Heck still continues to give lectures at schools and universities. In 1999, he gave the keynote speech during the Holocaust Awareness Week at the University of Colorado at Boulder, based on his book.

 

As a student of the Second World War I am very critical when it comes to the books I read over the subject and their sources. Heck's account is nothing short but a must read on the subject. I believe this work is as important as "The Diary of Anne Frank". Most books over this period usually concern themselves with portraying the Germans as monsters and sadists but Heck really gives us an inside depth into the Nazi mentality, especially the Hitlerjugend. In the end he makes the assertion that most regular Germans were the other victims of Hitler besides the Jews and as you read the book you begin to see on what he grounds he bases this claim. The book is a fast read, easy to follow, rich in detail, and very touching. As my German title suggests, "one must read this book"!

Portrait of the artist under the Reich

Wolfram: The Boy Who Went to War

Roger Moorhouse delights in a Second World War family memoir that stands out from the crowd.

Author: Giles Milton
Publisher: Sceptre
Reviewed by: Roger Moorhouse
Price (RRP): £20

It would be easy to make the assumption that Giles Milton’s new book is little more than a vanity project. It is, after all, the story of his own father-in-law and of his experiences growing up in the Weimar Republic and as a soldier in the Second World War.

Yet, such an assumption would be wholly misplaced. Rather than one of the countless wartime memoirs that provide little of any historical or literary worth, Milton’s book offers much of value to the reader.

Wolfram was born in 1924 and spent his formative years under the shadow of the Third Reich, growing up near the town of Pforzheim in the Black Forest. Coming from a rather bohemian, free-thinking background (his father was an artist, and he too would become an artist of some renown), he was little impressed by Hitler and the Nazis.

But the Third Reich swiftly made its presence felt in his life; particularly when he was transported to the eastern front as part of a labour battalion, and then when he was sent to Normandy as a conscript.
Wolfram is an engaging character. Thoughtful and circumspect, he occasionally comes across as an aesthete journeying through the Hades of wartime; savouring what little spiritual nourishment he could find; a beautiful landscape or the mournful chanting of an Orthodox funeral, before being wrenched back to the living death of war.

Of course, aside from such esoteric flourishes, Wolfram’s experiences – and those of his family on the home front – were scarcely extraordinary for Germans of the wartime generation.
Yet, the beauty of Milton’s book is the way that he has woven those experiences not only into a wider narrative, but also into the narratives of those that were close to Wolfram; childhood friends and family members.

The result is a book which deftly juggles the micro and the macro, ably contextualising Wolfram’s life and incorporating it into the broader story. Importantly, Milton’s use of the first-hand material that he has had access to – diaries, letters and interviews – is exemplary. In contrast to some books of this type, one never feels that the raw material is being stretched too thin, and neither does one sense that it is overused, presented clumsily, without sufficient explanation or context.

Milton’s writing, too, is first-rate. Engaging, poignant and vivid, he wrings just the right amount of pathos from his story, and shifts seamlessly between the varying ‘voices’ of his narrative.
Therefore for all its apparently homespun origins, this is a very valid and interesting book, which offers an illuminating insight into the experience of ‘ordinary’ Germans living in ‘small-town’ Germany.

Roger Moorhouse is the author of Berlin at War (The Bodley Head, 2010)

Youth's view of Hitler's rise finally has an audience

The dictator's paramilitary machine ... the Strum Abtellung (brown shirts) return from manoeuvres on a Sunday in Nuremberg.

Malcolm Brown

November 27, 2010
JOHN RISCHBIETH, then a pupil at St Peters College, Adelaide, was awestruck when, as a 17-year-old in Germany in 1935, he became surrounded by beaming members of the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) and the Bund Deutscher Madchen (League of German Girls), showing him around the brave new Germany Adolf Hitler was creating.

He saw the brown shirts - the Sturm Abteilung- marching the streets with their spades, picks and rifles. He saw the SS officers with their daggers and revolvers, and he saw the banners, the flags, the Nazi insignia. He felt a sick feeling develop within him.

Mr Rischbieth, 93, was one of the boys who took photos during the visit, many of which he kept for decades until last year when, honoured for his service in World War II with the Royal Australian Navy, he saw fit to unearth them.

Some are in a new book, The 39ers - stories of part-time military who enlisted before World War II and went on to serve in the war, initiated by the Reserve Forces Day Council and being launched today at Victoria Barracks.

Although taken by innocent schoolboys, they capture the fervour and the militarism sweeping the country two years after Hitler came to power.

Mr Rischbieth, whose father migrated to Australia from Germany in 1835, was with a group of 15 Australian schoolboys taken on a tour of North America, Britain and Europe. They included six from St Peters College.

Mr Rischbieth shook hands with George V, attended a world Rover Scout moot in Sweden, then did a two-week tour of Germany escorted by two blond, blue-eyed ambassadors for German youth, Herbert Roloff and Toni Reinhart.

The boys were accommodated at castles, hostels and camps. In Berlin, they were welcomed by the mayor. ''Of course, they insisted the Germans were peaceful and had no intention of upsetting the world and all that nonsense,'' Mr Rischbieth said.

The boys were shown the stadium being prepared for the next year's Olympics and might have met Hitler himself except the fuhrer was running late and the boys had to catch a train.

But the boys were less than impressed by what they saw. Italy had invaded Abyssinia and they could see the Germans had the same belligerence. ''When we got onto the ship for Australia, we started to compare notes,'' Mr Rischbieth said.

That unease had not been lost in January 1939, when Mr Rischbieth joined the RAN Reserve. ''I was convinced the war was coming,'' he said. ''Chamberlain said, 'Peace in our time!' I said, 'Like hell!'''
Mr Rischbieth was mobilised when war broke out, serving initially on an armed merchant cruiser, the HMS Moreton Bay. In 1941, having been commissioned, he joined a light cruiser, HMAS Hobart, and served with it in the Mediterranean, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies.

In the Battle of the Coral Sea, as assistant air defence officer, he was posted on the bridge to watch enemy aircraft and call out ''bombs away!'' when they released their load, prompting extreme evasive action. The Hobart was not hit by bombs but was strafed.

When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, Mr Rischbieth was on a ship coming into Rabaul and, concerned that the Japanese might lob a grenade, he went ashore to speak to an Australian officer. The officer, John DeRavin, had been one of the boys on the trip to Germany 10 years before.

Mr Rischbieth, who returned after the war to work at a shipping company, George Wills and Co, and ended as managing director, will attend today's launch. He is the last survivor of the St Peters boys who went on the German trip. Three were killed in action.

The 39ers is published by the Reserve Forces Day Council ($25). To order, contact the council via www.rfd.org.au

HITLER'S FINAL FORTRESS - BRESLAU 1945

Richard Hargreaves

In January 1945, the Red Army unleashed its long-awaited thrust into Germany with terrible fury. One by one the provinces and great cities of the German East were captured by the Soviet troops. Breslau, capital of Silesia, a city of 600,000 people stood firm and was declared a fortress by Hitler.A bitter struggle raged as the Red Army encircled Breslau, then tried to pummel it into submission while the city's Nazi leadership used brutal methods to keep the scratch German troops fighting and maintain order. Aided by supplies flown in nightly and building improvised weapons from torpedoes mounted on trolleys to an armored train, the men of Fortress Breslau held out against superior Soviet forces for three months. The price was fearful. By the time Breslau surrendered on May 6, 1945, four days after Berlin had fallen, 50,000 soldiers and civilians were dead, the city a wasteland. Breslau was pillaged, its women raped and every German inhabitant driven out of the city which became Wroclaw in post-war Poland. Based on official documents, newspapers, letters, diaries and personal testimonies, this is the bitter story of Hitler's Final Fortress.

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