Life in the Third Reich: Daily Life in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945

Preface

When the Allies occupied a defeated Germany in the spring of 1945 they shared a desire to mete out retribution to those members of the Nazi leadership and their minions who had brought so much suffering and destruction to the world during five long years of war. This need was felt particularly strongly by the Russians, who believed that they had suffered the most from the barbarous cruelty handed out by Hitler’s forces in their crusade to subjugate the Slavic people and eradicate the blight of communism from Eastern Europe.

The problem was that it was not so easy to identify the middle- and lower-ranking Nazis once they had divested themselves of their uniforms, destroyed all incriminating documents and melted into the chaos of a disintegrated society. In the ensuing confusion, justice was rough and ready, frequently dispensed without due process by battle-weary, sleep-deprived soldiers who were understandably unforgiving and disinclined to adhere to the Geneva Convention. It was not unknown for captured Nazi officers who calmly enquired where they would be billeted to be deliberately pointed in the direction of patrols with instructions to shoot enemy soldiers on sight.

Senior Allied officers had devised their own way of distinguishing Nazi sympathizers from the general population. They were confident that if they were approached by civilian officials eager to assure their liberators that they had not been loyal Nazis, the officers could be sure they had identified the very Nazis they were looking for and could promptly lock them up.

Although Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels had all committed suicide in the final days of the war and many senior-ranking SS officers had evaded justice via the so-called ‘Vatican rat lines’ to South America, the Allies had some success in delivering formal justice to those they held responsible for ‘waging aggressive war’ and for initiating ‘crimes against humanity’. They put 22 of the most notorious members of the Nazi leadership on public trial at Nuremberg in November 1945, among them Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Albert Speer. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, was tried and found guilty in absentia. His fate was the subject of much speculation for almost three decades until his remains were discovered not far from Hitler’s Berlin bunker in 1972 and formally identified using genetic testing in 1998. The 23rd defendant, Robert Ley, had taken his own life before the trial began.

Behind closed doors, the judicial process had been fraught with unseemly squabbling between the Soviets and their former allies, who disagreed on many significant details. Overall, however, there was a belief that justice had been done and, more importantly, had been seen to be done. By the time subsequent trials had taken place of senior Nazi judges, members of the SS, a dozen or so extermination camp doctors and the most sadistic female concentration camp guards, the will to prosecute a vanquished enemy had given way to the desire to make the best of the peace that had been hard won and at such an enormous cost. Those Germans living in the west of their divided country were now allies of the European democracies, who were engaged in a Cold War with the Communist Bloc. The Soviet presence in East Germany and particularly in a partitioned Berlin was seen as a real and immediate threat to world peace. Consequently, Nazi hunting was left to amateurs such as Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor who would not let the world forget that men such as Dr Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann were still at large.

Hitler, Goering and Goebbels and other high profile members of the Nazi leadership were familiar faces through newsreels and newspapers but other members of the regime would prove hard to identify and track down.

Servicemen and women were impatient to go home and get on with their lives, and there was a general need to leave the horrors of the war in the past. Besides, there was a serious danger in presuming collective guilt when even the de-Nazification courts had identified three levels of ‘offenders’, distinguishing between the leadership, who would be indicted for ‘waging aggressive war’, and their subordinates accused of war crimes – as distinct from those deemed to be mere ‘followers’, who were unlikely to face prosecution. The process of de-Nazification was considered so large and complex that General Eisenhower estimated that it could take 50 years to purge Germany of Nazi ideology.

However, Germany’s infrastructure and administration was in ruins, so pragmatism and realpolitik took precedence. In 1945, eight and a half million people – more than 10 per cent of the population – were still registered members of the Nazi party, with the highest proportion being civil servants, lawyers and teachers. As these individuals were needed to run basic services, their past was frequently overlooked. In the 1950s, it was estimated that 60 per cent of the civil servants in Bavaria were known to be former Nazis, but it was not until the 1960s that the next generation began asking awkward questions of their parents and querying the complacency of Konrad Adenauer’s government regarding the prosecution of war criminals in the immediate post-war years.

The fact of the matter is that Hitler’s Germany was not comprised of hard-core fanatics, with a small minority actively or passively opposed to the regime (the latter justifying their failure to act by citing the feeble defence known as ‘internal emigration’, a term coined by German writer Erich Kastner).

The defendants in the dock at Nuremberg, November 1945. Of the 22 former functionaries of the Nazi leadership on trial, only Goering retained any semblance of his once formidable personality.

Even among the most devout followers, there were those who ‘had their reasons’ for being converted to the Nazi cause. Fifteen-year-old Hilde Schlegel joined after attending an event organized by the party at which she tasted real buttered rolls for the first time and consequently believed that Hitler would ensure a better quality of life for the underprivileged. Some joined out of self-interest, seeking advancement; others for the reasons frequently cited by historians – the belief that the National Socialists would bring political stability, prosperity, employment and the return of territory seized under the hated Versailles Treaty. But as this book will show, a sizeable proportion of Germany’s citizens impassively witnessed the country’s descent into dictatorship because they believed they were simply powerless to prevent it – as well as many more who could not see the danger until it was too late.

Chapter One

The Worst of Times

The Aftermath of 1918

‘The confused locksmith Drexler provided the kernel, the drunken poet Eckart some of the spiritual foundation, the economic crank Feder what passed as an ideology, the homosexual Roehm the support of the Army and the war veterans, but it was now the former tramp, Adolf Hitler, not quite thirty-one and utterly unknown, who took the lead in building up what had been no more than a back-room debating society into what would soon become a formidable political party.’

(William L. Shirer on Hitler’s takeover of the German Worker’s Party in 1921)

The Nazis did not attract their initial supporters through persuasive political argument, nor by appealing to their ideals and aspirations, but by simply promising to provide for their immediate and fundamental needs – work and bread. Many who voted for them in the 1920s and even some of those who joined their ranks and marched under their banners during these early days of ‘the struggle’, sincerely and naively believed that National Socialism offered the only credible opposition to Bolshevism.

Not all of Hitler’s early followers shared his virulent anti-Semitism, or subscribed to the more fanciful elements of his party’s pseudo-völkisch ideology, which declared that the Germans were descendants of an Aryan master race and were destined to rule over inferior nations.

In the immediate aftermath of the country’s defeat of November 1918, the population was weary, dispirited and looking for a leader with ready answers – someone who could identify those who were to blame for their misfortunes. Families throughout the country were grieving for the incalculable loss of life, confounded by the sudden and unexpected capitulation of an army they had been assured was on the verge of victory, and embittered by the futility of the sacrifice they had made in vain for the Fatherland. This sense of despair was compounded by the abdication of the Kaiser and the new Weimar government’s willing compliance with the punitive terms and conditions imposed by the Versailles Treaty. It is therefore no wonder that this poisonous atmosphere gave rise to extreme nationalism and the belief that the army had been betrayed, or ‘stabbed in the back’, to borrow a phrase attributed to General Ludendorff.

Defeat in November 1918 was seen as more than a military debacle. It brought humiliation to the German soldier who soon subscribed to the myth that the Army had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by defeatism generated at home by weak, defeatist politicians.

This grievous wound might have healed over time had it not been aggravated by the rampant inflation of 1922–3, which saw savings wiped out and wages devalued to the point where workers were being paid twice a day so that they could buy food while it was still affordable. Even so, it was not uncommon to see customers paying for produce with what had once been a month’s wages, all of which emphasized the fragility of the economy and the ineffectiveness of the Weimar government. Within a year the average price of a loaf of bread had risen from 165 marks to one and a half million.

In every village, town and city, men, women and children could be seen begging for food and spare change, or asking for menial work of any kind. Into this desperate situation the Nazis appeared under the guise of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party with a promise of jobs for the unemployed and relief for the impoverished. In addition, they declared their intention to purge commercial institutions of Jewish influence and to rid German business of ‘unfair competition’ (i.e. Jews). They vowed to crush the communists and put an end to the frequent and bloody skirmishes between rival political factions that made the streets unsafe for law-abiding citizens. They would also restore national pride by tearing up the hated Versailles Treaty and demanding the return of territory seized by the Allies after 1918. Every citizen was persuaded to believe it was his or her patriotic duty to vote for the programme. Hitler’s critics accused him of being a crude, ill-educated rabble-rouser, but he articulated the people’s anger and sense of injustice more effectively than the professional politicians and it was evident that he had touched a raw nerve.

‘He was not easily discouraged. And he knew how to wait. As he picked up the threads of his life in the little two-room apartment on the top floor of 41 Thierschstrasse in Munich during the winter months of 1925 and then, when summer came, in various inns on the Obersalzberg above Berchtesgaden, the contemplation of the misfortunes of the immediate past and the eclipse of the present, served only to strengthen his resolve … And there was born in him anew a burning sense of mission – for himself and for Germany – from which all doubts were excluded.’

(William L. Shirer on Hitler after his release from Landsberg Prison in December 1924, having served 264 days for planning the failed Munich Putsch [coup] the previous year.)

The Nazis’ popularity rose and fell during the 1920s as the economy recovered then dipped again following the 1929 Wall Street Crash. But by 1933, the German people had lost their patience with their elected representatives and were prepared to set aside any concerns they might have had with regard to the reported ‘excesses’ of the SA (the party’s brown-shirted enforcers) to give these untested newcomers a chance.

When inflation was at its height the German mark was of more value as fuel for the kitchen stove than as currency.

However, there was nothing inevitable about the Nazis’ seizure of power. In the final parliamentary election before Hitler was handed the chancellorship by the ageing President Hindenburg in January