4
A ‘National Community’?
State, Economy and Society, 1933–1939
Gleichschaltung and Hitler’s State
Hitler became Chancellor on 30 January 1933; but he had by no means actually ‘seized power’, as the myth of the Machtergreifung (seizure of power), supported by the celebrations and propaganda of the Nazis themselves at the time, would suggest. He still had much to do to consolidate his hold over German administration, government and people; indeed, at this time many still felt that he could be harnessed and restrained, and his popular support co-opted and redirected.
However, in the course of 1933–4 Hitler systematically pursued a policy of so-called Gleichschaltung (literally, putting everyone ‘into the same gear’; co-ordinating, or bringing into line), in order to consolidate his hold on German politics and society. Even then, however, Hitler’s power was by no means absolute. His state was a complex system, riddled with rivalries among competing centres of power and influence, in which the notion of a charismatic Führer, above the fray, played a key role in maintaining a degree of cohesion. Equally important was the extent to which this system was, almost to the last, sustained by key elite groups (particularly in the Army and industry) who, while not necessarily themselves ‘Nazi’, must bear a large degree of responsibility for the functioning and consequences of the regime.
Hitler had declared that the elections following his appointment as Chancellor would be the last free elections in a parliamentary state. In the event, the elections of 5 March 1933 were less than ‘free’. On 27 February 1933 the Reichstag was set on fire. While uncertainty still surrounds the circumstances of the arson attack, there is no doubt that it was the Nazis who obtained the utmost benefit from the consequences of the fire. It was used as the pretext for an emergency decree on 28 February, which suspended most civil liberties and legitimized mass arrests of Communists and Social Democrats. In conditions of mounting tension, with rising violence on the streets, and left-wingers no longer able to express their opinions freely, the elections of 5 March were held under highly intimidating conditions. Nevertheless, Hitler and the NSDAP still failed to gain an overall majority: with 43.9 per cent of the vote, the Nazis won 288 seats, while the Left gained over 30 per cent of the vote (128 votes for the SDP and eighty-one for the KPD) and the Centre (seventy-three seats) and Liberals together won 18 per cent of the vote. Even with the votes for the right-wing DNVP the Nazi-dominated ‘government of national concentration’ could only barely command an absolute majority, and could not achieve the two-thirds necessary to pass an Enabling Law (Ermächtigungsgesetz) to alter the constitution and ‘legalize’ the destruction of democracy. Yet by 23 March this had become possible.
On 21 March the Reichstag was formally opened in the Garrison Church at Potsdam. Much was made of this carefully stage-managed ‘Day of Potsdam’ by the Nazis, who attempted to emphasize continuities between Frederick the Great, Hindenburg and Hitler, with the great traditions of German and Prussian history culminating in the figure of Hitler. Somewhat relieved by these appearances, the Bavarian People’s Party, the German State Party and the Centre Party were more prepared to consider voting for the Enabling Law. The Catholics in particular were rather reassured by Hitler’s insistence that the position of Christianity would be untouched in the future; and Centre Party politicians also felt that their willingness to ally with the Nazis might help to moderate the government – as had their former co-operation with Social Democrats in 1919, although in a rather different direction. The Communist Deputies were prevented from attending the Reichstag vote, as were twenty-one of the Social Democrats. In the event, when the Reichstag convened in the Kroll Opera on the evening of 23 March, the only members courageous enough to vote against the Enabling Act were the Social Democrats. Otto Wels read out their reply to Hitler, in which he stated: ‘At this historical hour, we German Social Democrats pledge ourselves to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and Socialism. No Enabling Law can give you the power to destroy ideas which are eternal and indestructible…’1 With the passage of this law, Hitler was able – with all the appearance of legality – to overthrow the remnants of any form of parliamentary democracy. He no longer needed to pay attention to the views of most of the nationalist members of the government, nor did he need President Hindenburg’s signature for the passage of legislation. Henceforth, ‘law’ could be used to justify any arbitrary act of the regime. But this garb of legality, while reassuring to moderate, middle-class Germans, did not preclude the use of violence and terror; it simply accompanied it.
From the spring of 1933 the Nazis engaged in a series of moves to extend and consolidate their power. Initial measures were taken to purge the civil service in the ‘Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service’ of 7 April 1933. Having survived the transition from Imperial Germany to the Weimar Republic relatively unscathed, the German professional civil service found itself under stronger attack in this new revolutionary upheaval. Jews were removed from the civil service, as were political opponents of the regime. The purge was, however, by no means as thorough as many NSDAP members would have liked, since considerations of administrative efficiency in some cases outweighed Nazi credentials. Furthermore, some civil servants who harboured misgivings about the Nazi regime justified their decision to stay as ‘preventing something worse’. Yet the overall record of civil servants in the Third Reich remains one of compromise, rather than serious subversion of the regime. At the same time, the traditional decentralization of the relatively recently unified Germany was attacked – a continuation of tendencies already evident towards the end of the Weimar Republic. The powers of the Länder were reduced by the Nazi seizure of power in the regional states in March 1933. (The takeover of Prussia the previous summer, with the installation of a Reich Commissioner in place of the elected government, had provided a useful precedent.) On 7 April 1933 ten so-called Reichsstatthalter (Reich Governors) were appointed, usually the senior Gauleiter of each state, except in the cases of Bavaria (Ritter von Epp) and Prussia (Hitler). The takeover was by no means smooth: as at national level, there were perpetual tensions between party and state. Frictions varied from place to place, depending on pre-existing political configurations and circumstances. Curiously, the heavy-handed actions of local party officials were often dissociated in people’s minds from the regime as a whole, and the person of Hitler in particular: people frequently asserted that ‘if only the Führer knew’, things would not be allowed to go on in the way they were locally.
While the Nazis made strenuous efforts to woo economic elites – many of whom had been belatedly persuaded to give financial support to the Nazi election campaign in the spring of 1933 – they had no such tender consideration for the bulk of the German people, the workers. Giving the appearance of populism by proclaiming 1 May a national holiday on full pay, the Nazis rapidly proceeded to dismantle and destroy the autonomous workers’ organizations. Trade unions were wound up and replaced by a body spuriously claiming to represent the interests of all German workers in the new ‘national community’, the German Labour Front (DAF) under Robert Ley. Walther Darré took control of the Reich Food estate (Reichsnährstand), dealing with the peasantry and agriculture, while small traders were organized into the HAGO (Handwerks-, Handels- und Gewerbe-Organisation). While in appearance developing a form of corporatism, in practice this was a coercive system in which none of the Nazi organizations actually represented the real interests of their ‘members’. At the same time, there was an assault on political parties. In the course of the spring and summer of 1933 these were either outlawed (starting with the KPD) or they dissolved themselves (the Centre Party formally dissolved itself on 5 July 1933). With the ‘Law Against the Formation of New Parties’ of 14 July 1933 a one-party state was formally established. No longer was there any legal parliamentary opposition: the sole function of the Reichstag was to acclaim the decisions of the Nazi government. Yet this government itself became progressively more chaotic in nature: cabinet meetings were less and less frequent, eventually being so rare that they ceased to fulfill any governmental function; and political decision-making processes became more and more a matter of gaining direct access to the Führer – an increasingly difficult task as he spent more time in his mountain retreat near Berchtesgaden and became less interested in the minutiae of most aspects of domestic policy.
On 30 January 1934, one year after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, the Reichsrat, or upper chamber of the Reichstag, was abolished and the federal system was effectively terminated by removing independent authority from the states. Perhaps the final major event in terms of initial constitutional change came with the death of President Hindenburg on 2 August 1934. Hitler made use of the occasion to merge the offices of President and Chancellor, and to take personal command of the armed forces. Abolishing Hindenburg’s title of Reich President, Hitler now styled himself ‘Führer and Reich Chancellor’. The Army and public officials now had to swear personal oaths of obedience to Hitler – oaths which subsequently proved for many to be a moral obstacle to resistance against Hitler’s regime.
The Army was able to ignore or surmount its potential misgivings about Hitler in August 1934 for a number of reasons. For one thing, Hitler had made no secret of his intention to pursue an aggressive foreign policy, revising the much-hated Treaty of Versailles. Hitler’s whipping-up of resentment against Versailles, and his sharp denunciations of the Jews and Bolsheviks whom he held to be the ‘November Criminals’ responsible for Germany’s national humiliation, had been constant themes prior to his coming to power. After becoming Chancellor Hitler lost little time in setting revisionist policies in motion: on 8 February 1933 Hitler informed ministers that unemployment was to be reduced by rearmament; in July 1933 Krupp’s euphemistically named ‘agricultural tractor programme’ started the production of tanks; and by 1934 explosives, ships and aircraft were in production – all contrary to the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, but greeted with approval by the Army itself.
Furthermore, Hitler had just resolved a potential source of friction in relation to the traditional armed forces. The SA, under its leader Ernst Röhm, had become a large and rather unruly organization, propagating unwelcome notions of the need for a ‘second revolution’, and developing into a rival not only for the elite SS but also for the Army proper. Hitler decided that the support of the latter two groups was more important to him than was the SA; so he instigated the so-called Night of the Long Knives on 30 June 1934, during which the leaders of the SA were murdered along with other individuals with whom Hitler had fallen out, including Gregor Strasser, Gustav Kahr (who had been state commissioner for Bavaria at the time of the abortive putsch of 1923), and General von Schleicher. There were also a few cases of mistaken identity. Retroactively this mass murder – which continued for three days, entailing seventy-seven officially admitted deaths, although the true figure was much higher – was ‘legalized’ on 3 July 1934, when a law was passed simply stating that ‘the measures taken on 30 June and 1 and 2 July to strike down the treasonous attacks are justifiable acts of self-defence by the state’.2 Although few can have been genuinely taken in by the Nazi version of the terror, which they represented as a nipping in the bud of a treacherous plot against the regime, the garb of legality helped to allay disquiet in many circles; and many were also to an extent relieved that the more radical, unruly elements in the Nazi Party appeared to be being put in their place. In any event, the purge certainly helped in the co-option of the Army by Hitler.
Meanwhile, the Nazi regime was bolstered by an elaborate apparatus of terror. The first concentration camp for political opponents of the regime was opened at Dachau, near Munich, with considerable fanfare and publicity in March 1933. In subsequent years, well before the radicalization of the wartime period, a network of concentration camps was set up across Germany. These camps made use of prisoners as forced labour, sending labour gangs to Aussenlager or subsidiary camps, in the vicinity. Gangs of concentration camp inmates were marched through surrounding towns and villages to work long hours under inhumane conditions with very little food. Within the camps, brutality and violence were the norm. While certain methods of torture and execution were employed, these camps were not intended primarily for the physical destruction of their inmates (as were the extermination camps in the East which functioned from 1942). The SS, under the command of Heinrich Himmler, was able to arrest, detain, imprison, torture and murder, with little respect for any rule of law or putative notion of justice. Himmler, who between 1934 and 1936 took over the police powers of the Reich and State Ministries of the Interior, became on 17 June 1936 ‘Reichsführer-SS und Chef der deutschen Polizei im Reichministerium des Innerns’, thus effectively controlling the means of terror in the Third Reich. Fear of arrest, and fear of informers, led to public conformity and the leading of a double life for many Germans, who withheld their real views and feelings for expression only in complete privacy in the company of family and close friends.
The Nazis attempted to promote a great display of power and unity under the national Führer. The mass parades, the battalions marching past Hitler, the apparently adoring populace, hands raised in the Heil salute, fostered the image of a strong leader and a united people – as encapsulated in the slogan of ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!’ (‘one people, one empire, one leader’) – and indeed the myth of the Führer, above all the petty everyday conflicts and frictions, constituted a powerful element of cohesion in the Third Reich. But to a certain extent the Nazis’ self-promotion has been misleading. The myth of a strong leader in a one-party state, with a single official ideology and the back-up of force, fed into the concept of totalitarianism – a concept which proved particularly useful in the Cold War period after the Second World War when dictatorships of the Left and Right, communist and fascist, were simplistically equated. But it has become increasingly clear to serious analysts of the Third Reich that the monolithic image does not correspond to a more complex reality.
While the Nazis clearly took over the government of Germany, they never entirely took over the state: the tendency was rather to create new parallel party agencies, with spheres of competence and jurisdiction overlapping or competing with those of the existing administration, and armed with plenipotentiary powers directly dependent on the Führer’s will. In this ‘dual state’ there was no rational means of adjudicating between the rival claims of competing agencies to represent the undisputed fount of authority on a given issue – and there were, in addition to conflicts between party and state, also disputes between different party agencies. In the final resort, recourse had to be had to the Führer, and the ‘Führer’s will’ became the ultimate source of authority to resolve all disputes. The ‘Hitler state’, with the Führer, the only final source of arbitration, was to some extent a structural result of this relative administrative chaos.
Since Hitler often stood aside from the fray, only to enter at the last moment to side with the emerging winner, some analysts have been inclined to see him as a ‘weak dictator’. However, as others have rightly pointed out, when it mattered to Hitler he made sure his own views were predominant.3 The degree to which Hitler was able to realize given aims, or intervene in detailed policy-making, varied with respect to economic, foreign and racial policy in both the peacetime and wartime years. German society also proved somewhat resistant to its own reformation into a harmonious ‘national community’.
Society, Culture and Everyday Life
The Nazis did not only want to control the German people: they wanted to transform them into a cohesive, racially pure ‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) of national comrades (Volksgenossen) which would of course exclude those ‘community aliens’ (Gemein schaftsfremden) who were deemed inferior, ‘pollutants’ of the social body: Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, the hereditarily diseased and ‘a-social’ people. The 1939 edition of the People’s Encyclopaedia (Volksbrockhaus) defined the Volksgemeinschaft as ‘the life-community of people, resting on bonds of blood, on a common destiny and a common political faith, to which class and status conflicts are essentially foreign’.4 After the near civil-war conditions of the Weimar Republic, the notion of an organic, harmonious, biologically based racial community, with common political beliefs and a common historical destiny, transcending and healing the wounds of the preceding years, could sound intrinsically appealing to many Germans. Every effort was made by the regime to realize this concept of society, both through overt indoctrination and through the transformation of social organization and everyday experience.
Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment, created in March 1933, sought increasing control of all media of communication and culture. A symbolic early event was the burning of books written by Jews, socialists and other ‘undesirable intellectuals’ on 10 May 1933. Although instigated by radical students, the book-burning was given official blessing by Goebbels’ presence at the bonfires on Berlin’s central street, Unter den Linden. The event did not in practice succeed entirely in eradicating books by banned authors from libraries across Germany, but it certainly contributed to the ‘inner emigration’ – self-censorship and public silence – as well as the literal emigration of many authors, among them Thomas and Heinrich Mann and Bertolt Brecht. Subsequent cultural life in Nazi Germany was to a considerable extent reduced to the level of ‘German art’, typified by a mediocre realism in painting and grandiose schemes in architecture; in the fields of music and drama, some notable individuals compromised with the regime to continue to realize peaks of artistic perfection in the performance of German classics. Britain, and, on a larger scale, the USA, were the major beneficiaries of the mass exodus of cultural talent from Nazi Germany.
Goebbels also made use of the media of popular entertainment and less highbrow culture to attempt to influence the masses. Film was a highly effective medium for propaganda, and the Nazis became adept at producing short newsreel pieces glorifying the achievements of the Führer, illustrating popular adulation of Hitler, and celebrating the achievements of the Reich as a result of its ‘national awakening’. Care was taken to stress positive aspects and downplay features which would tend to alienate people and lose popular support. The press, which under the Weimar Republic had been diverse and decentralized, was gradually subjected to Nazi control. This was done partly by the Nazi publishing house gaining an increasing share in the outright ownership of newspapers, partly by increasing control over publishers, editors and journalists, partly by censorship, and partly by feeding stories through a Nazi-run news service. By the later 1930s the news in the different newspapers was sufficiently gleichgeschaltet (co-ordinated) and predictable for most people to adopt a cynical approach and put little store by what was said in German newspapers. The radio was similarly co-opted to Nazi ends, and mass ownership of the ‘people’s receiver’ (Volksempfänger) was encouraged – which trebled ownership in the six prewar years, giving Germany the highest percentage of radio owners in the world. The emphasis was placed on a combination of light entertainment and snippets of slanted ‘news’ coverage.
In education there was a purge of teachers lacking the appropriate racial credentials or political views, at both school and university levels. While a large number of school and university teachers in the Weimar Republic had held conservative and nationalist views, by no means a majority were of Nazi leanings. Many leading academics were forced into emigration, including, for example, Albert Einstein. Attempts were made to influence the contents of what was taught, as well as the people who taught it. While topics such as biology, history and German were fairly readily adapted for Nazi purposes, other scientific and technical subjects were less susceptible to Nazi distortion. Yet even at the level of school mathematics, examples could be used for exercises in arithmetic which sustained or propagated a certain world-view. Pupils were asked to do sums relating to the distance covered in certain times by tanks, torpedo boats, infantry battalions; they were asked to work out, given different speeds, at what distances from a town an enemy aircraft would be met by German air defence forces, if the latter started when the former were a certain distance away, and so on.5 The subject of Rassenkunde was introduced, putting across Nazi views on heredity and racial purity. Schoolchildren undertook such projects as bringing to school a photo of a relative and writing an essay describing the features characteristic of the racial group of the person illustrated. The overall balance of the curriculum was altered too. There was an increased emphasis on sport and physical fitness, with sport compulsory even at university. There was also an emphasis on community service through various work schemes – a useful means not only of attempting to inculcate a sense of community but also of obtaining cheap labour, particularly important in the later years of the Third Reich.
Attempts were also made to create a sense of national community through organizational means. On the one hand, old, previously autonomous organizations had their independence removed and their capacity for harbouring subversive views neutralized; on the other hand, people were harnessed for activities which gave them experience of comradeship and community at the same time as promoting particular Nazi aims. The luxuriant profusion of clubs, associations and societies characteristic of Imperial and Weimar Germany was pruned, coerced and remoulded into new, Nazi-dominated frameworks. The wide range of youth organizations, ranging from conservative and nationalist through Catholic to Social Democratic youth groups, were submerged into the Nazi youth organizations under the leadership of Baldur von Schirach. Children between the ages of ten and fourteen were encouraged and expected to join groups for boys (DJ) and girls (JM), while those between fourteen and eighteen were to join the Hitler Youth (HJ) and League of German Maidens (BDM) respectively. The Nazi youth organizations were at first similar to their non-Nazi predecessors in their open-air activities: camping, hiking and singing songs as they marched through the pine forests or sat by camp-fires at a lake-side. Many young people undeniably enjoyed the expeditions and comradeship engendered by these activities. But from December 1936 the Hitler Youth was given an official status alongside school and home as an educational institution which was supposed to cover all those in the relevant age groups. Children were expected to enter on 20 April (Hitler’s birthday) in the year in which they reached the age of ten. Membership finally became compulsory in a decree of March 1939. Meanwhile, since 1934 there had been an increasing emphasis on paramilitary activities and attitudes.
Nevertheless, it does not seem that the Nazi youth organizations were an unmitigated success in inculcating a Nazi world-view in those who participated in them. Many young people simply conformed to the minimum extent necessary to avoid sanctions. Other young people developed their own youth subcultures, which the Nazis failed to suppress. Alternative youth groups included the ‘Edelweiss Pirates’ (spontaneous groups of youngsters who waged war on the Hitler Youth), as well as the Leipzig Meuten, the Dresden ‘Mobs’, the Halle Proletengefolgschaften, the Hamburg ‘Deathshead Gang’ and ‘Bismarck Gang’ and the Munich Blasen. While these groups were in the main working class, the swing movement was largely supported by upper-middle-class enthusiasts for ‘decadent’ jazz music. It is quite clear, not only from isolated autobiographical accounts of individual alienation from the Hitler Youth (such as that by Heinrich Böll) but also from these more visible subcultural groups – members of which ran considerable risks, and did not always escape Nazi retribution for their nonconformity – that Nazi attempts to bend the minds of a whole generation were at best only partially successful.6
While youth was an obvious focus for investment in the future of Nazi Germany, so too were the progenitors of future generations: women. In this area, Nazi ideology was clear in principle but less than consistent in practice. As is well known, the Nazis promoted the view of women’s role being confined to ‘children, kitchen, church’ (Kinder, Küche, Kirche). The birth rate had been declining in early twentieth-century Germany, and the Nazis wanted to reverse this trend and replenish the ‘racial stock’. A variety of means were attempted, many of which were not specifically Nazi but represented more widespread attitudes at the time. In the depression of the late Weimar years there had been much criticism of ‘double earners’, and the effective expulsion of women from sections of the labour force was underway before the Nazis came to power. After 1933 the pattern of female participation in the labour force was a partially contradictory one. While Nazi prejudices had a deep impact in some areas – the exclusion of women from practising law or becoming judges is an example – in other areas, such as the caring professions and primary school teaching, female participation increased slightly. By the later 1930s the pressures of rearmament and labour shortage encouraged a higher female employment rate. There is some dispute among historians as to whether, during the war years, ideology or economic necessity took precedence in policies on female employment.
At the same time, birth control techniques were discouraged, and the benefits and virtues of having a large family were promoted. Attempts were made to propagate a view of marriage as being for the purpose of producing healthy, racially pure stock, with the state having a clear interest in the reproduction of a ‘superior’ species. As in other areas, Nazi views were dressed up to appear scientifically respectable: the expert – the doctor – had a role to play in giving a medical blessing to what might otherwise have been seen as purely the intimate, private affair of an individual couple. The decision to reproduce was not a matter solely for individuals, but an affair of the state, responsible for ensuring healthy future stock – and for sterilizing those people deemed unfit to pass on their genes into the genetic pool of the next generation. Such views were insidiously put across in such seemingly non-propagandistic publications as popular dictionaries of health and medicine, such as Knaurs Gesundheitslexikon.7 Financial incentives were given to those having numerous children, and symbolic rewards in the form of a ‘mother’s cross’ (Mutterkreuz) were awarded to those having eight, six or four children (gold, silver and bronze crosses respectively). Courses in motherhood and domestic science were run by the Nazi women’s organization, the Deutsches Frauenwerk (DFW), which had been established in September 1933 to co-ordinate the various women’s organizations of pre-Nazi Germany. Along with the original NSDAP organization, the National Socialist Frauenwerk (NSF), the DFW attempted to organize and mobilize women. Like Nazi youth organizations, Nazi women’s organizations had a limited impact: working-class and rural women proved relatively impervious to their supposed attractions. Moreover, Nazi women’s policy was in any case subject to intrinsic contradictions: while attempting to emphasize the woman’s role as wife and mother, it simultaneously tended to take her away from the family through time-consuming organizational activities. As it turned out, the essentially private sphere of family life proved relatively resistant to Nazi infiltration and ‘co-ordination’.8 Moreover, issues of ‘race’ and class often cross-cut questions of gender.
In the sphere of work, similar attempts were made to foster a sense of community. Programmes such as ‘Strength through Joy’ (Kraft durch Freude) and ‘The Beauty of Work’ (Schönheit der Arbeit) made a pretence at fostering the health and well-being of workers. Although a few benefited from well-publicized holidays, such as pleasure cruises, many were not taken in by the propaganda about the ‘factory community’ in which individual effort served the good of the whole community. On the other hand, with the demise of independent trade unions the experience of collective solidarity was lost; and with the introduction of individual wage negotiations for individual advancement, working-class collective identities and bonds began to be eroded. Nazi policies may not always have had the effects intended; but they were not without impact altogether.
Not all organizations and ideologies were equally susceptible to Nazi co-ordination, penetration or subversion. Catholics had initially proved more resistant to the attractions of pre-1933 Nazi electoral propaganda than had Protestants. The Reichskonkordat of 1933 appeared to establish a modus vivendi for Catholicism with the Nazi regime, but Catholics were concerned to preserve a strict separation between the spheres of religion – which remained their preserve – and politics, which could be left to the state. When the latter encroached on the former, Catholics were prepared to resist, as in the campaigns waged against the Nazi attacks on confessional education and attempts to remove crucifixes from schools.9 The Protestant churches, lacking the transcendent loyalty to a higher authority equivalent to the Catholic focus on Rome, initially appeared more vulnerable to Nazi incursions. But Nazi attempts to co-opt Protestantism, with the appointment of a ‘Reich Bishop’ and the formation of a movement of pro-Nazi ‘German Christians’, soon led to a serious rift among Protestants. Those who recognized the essential criminality of the Nazi regime came to sympathize with the ‘Confessing Church’, associated with theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller. A majority of Protestants sided with neither the German Christians nor the Confessing Church, and the latter two groups were in the event subject to internal divisions and disputes. The Nazis eventually gave up their attempt to co-opt Christianity, and made little pretence at concealing their contempt for Christian beliefs, ethics and morality. Unable to comprehend that some Germans genuinely wanted to combine commitment to Christianity and Nazism, some members of the SS even came to view German Christians as almost more of a threat than the Confessing Church.10
Clearly there was a wide range of opinions among Christians of different confessions, political perspectives and social backgrounds, and different issues took precedence for different individuals at various times. For many lay people, the ‘pastors’ squabbling’ (Pfarrergezänk) must have seemed at best an irrelevance to the pressing concerns of everyday life. For some members of the laity, the singing of hymns with deeper meanings may have helped them to retain a sense of the transience of contemporary oppression, while not galvanizing them against the regime, and may hence have aided regime stability.11 On the other hand, it was also possible to hold what would otherwise have been forbidden political gatherings under the guise of church meetings or Bible study groups. But insofar as it is possible to generalize on a complex issue, it must be said that, whatever the diversity of opinion and action, the record of most Christians (Protestant and Catholic) was at best a rather patchy and uneven one. With the notable exception of those religious individuals and groups who stood out for their principled resistance to the regime – of whom more in the next chapter – it seems that, for many Germans, adherence to the Christian faith proved compatible with at least passive acquiescence in, if not active support for, the Nazi dictatorship.
Economy and Society
Undoubtedly of major impact on most people’s attitudes and perceptions was their economic experience. Weimar democracy had been associated, for millions of Germans, not only with national defeat and a humiliating peace treaty, but also with economic disaster. Many had survived the inflation of 1923 only to be buffeted by the slump which started in 1929. Despite the increasing political repression, for a large number of Germans the Third Reich appeared to give new hope of prosperity and stability. Small retailers looked forward to the suppression of their rivals, the big department stores; peasants looked forward to a rightful place in a country proclaiming the importance and glory of ‘blood and soil’; industrialists welcomed the suppression of trade union rights in the hope of regaining power for the employers, eroded under the Weimar system. While socialists and communists, Jews and other committed opponents of the regime viewed it with foreboding, for many apolitical Germans the ‘national awakening’ appeared to offer hopes of a brighter future.
What actually happened to German economy and society in the Third Reich, and what were the relationships between economics and politics under Nazi rule? Controversies over these questions are far from settled. The Nazis themselves proclaimed that they were effecting a ‘national revolution’, although the hopes of more radical Nazis were rapidly dashed after they attained power, leading to pressure from the party ranks for more radical action and a ‘second revolution’.
It is clear that Hitler’s overriding interest lay in the preparation for the conquest of Lebensraum and not primarily in the transformation of the economy. In his view, everything must be directed towards the ultimate goal of rearmament. As Hitler put it in a speech to his cabinet only a week after becoming Chancellor, on 8 February 1933: ‘The next five years in Germany had to be devoted to rendering the German people again capable of bearing arms. Every publicly sponsored measure to create employment had to be considered from the point of view of whether it was necessary with respect to rendering the German people again capable of bearing arms for military service. This had to be the dominant thought, always and everywhere’.12 In so far as there was a coherent, specifically Nazi economic programme, it had two main features: the notion of self-sufficiency, or ‘autarky’ and the notion of expanded living-space in central Europe, encompassing particularly lands to the southeast and east of Germany. These notions were, of course, integrally related to the development of a self-sufficient war economy sustained by territorial expansion and exploitation of the raw materials and labour of conquered territories. At the same time as giving priority to rearmament, however, the Nazis were concerned to retain popular support, which meant paying attention to consumer pressures and not imposing severe levels of austerity on the people. These different objectives were not entirely compatible, and periodic strains and crises resulted from attempts to pursue mutually contradictory strands of policy. Such crises also had effects on, for example, the timing of certain foreign policy moves, such as the remilitarization of the Left bank of the Rhine in 1936.
Initially, the economic policies of Nazi Germany were controlled by the relatively orthodox former President of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, as Minister of Economics. Deficit financing began in 1933 with the issue of so-called Mefo Bills, which served to disguise spending on rearmament under the cover of the spurious ‘Metallurgische Forschungsgesellschaft m.b.H.’. On 1 June 1933 the first ‘Reinhardt Programme’ was announced with the ‘Law to Reduce Unemployment’, followed by a second plan on 21 September 1933; and on 27 June 1933 there was a law initiating the construction of autobahns. While the economy had already begun to turn around in 1932, prior to the Nazis’ participation in government, economic recovery up to 1936 was certainly aided – perhaps speeded up – by Nazi work-creation schemes, motorization and construction works, and their willingness to engage in deficit financing. Many of these early schemes were of an infrastructural nature, facilitating later mobilization for war without being directly war-related themselves. While autobahns would later be highly useful for the rapid movement of troops, they could also serve more immediate ideological ends, symbolizing the rebuilding of the community and the integration of its different parts into one future-oriented national whole.13 Schacht’s New Plan of 1934 marked the first stage in the planned development of autarky (although Schacht himself was an opponent of out-and-out autarky), with bilateral trade agreements between pairs of countries not relying on certain international foreign currency exchanges.
By 1935, however, it was becoming clear that, despite the return towards full employment, Germany’s economic problems were by no means resolved. With a shortage of foreign exchange reserves, a choice had to be made between the import of raw materials for the rearmament programme or of foodstuffs for consumers. Moreover, there were splits within industry: while some industries, most notably the great chemical combine I. G. Farben, supported the manufacture of synthetic materials and an economy of autarky, others, more export-oriented, were opposed to such policies. In August 1936 Hitler issued a key memorandum stating that Germany must be ready for war within four years, and that economic activity must be geared towards this primary end. On 18 October 1936 the Four Year Plan was announced, with Goering in charge. Yet despite the precarious economic condition of Germany, and the overriding priority given to rearmament, there was to be no drop in the standard of living of consumers. From then on, in attempting to pursue both these objectives, economic policy became less and less orthodox and increasingly unbalanced.
The Four Year Plan involved close collaboration between members of certain industries – again, particularly I. G. Farben – and Nazis in high positions. It represented to some extent a clear illustration of the proliferation of spheres of competence and institutional rivalries in the Nazi state, as the powers of Goering conflicted with those of the Ministers of Labour (Seldte), Agriculture (Darré) and Economics (Schacht). Schacht in fact resigned his post in November 1937, partly because of these conflicts. Not only were there party–state conflicts, but also conflicts between different sections of the party. There were, for example, conflicts between party agencies concerned with rearmament, and those more concerned with aspects of consumer satisfaction or popular opinion, such as the DAF.
These developments have been variously interpreted. While rearmament has often been held up as one of the prime factors in German economic recovery in the 1930s, R. J. Overy suggests that it was only increasingly important after 1936, and that in fact attempts to orientate the economy towards war actually slowed down the rate of recovery and growth, partly because of the resistance of some cartelized industries to Nazi policies. Yet Overy plays down Volker Berghahn’s emphasis on what the latter calls a deliberate ‘unhinging’ of the economy from 1936, when traditional economic considerations were discarded and ultimate economic salvation was predicated on a successful war of conquest.14 The relationships between industry, party and state are also more complex than sometimes assumed. Although the older orthodox Marxist interpretation of fascism as the last-ditch stand of a capitalist state in crisis is untenable, it is by no means clear either that a pure ‘primacy of politics’ was achieved. Some industries benefited from close collaboration with the state; others attempted to resist interference; and while the Nazis attempted to control the direction of economic policy, they were by no means always successful; nor could they be, given their own partly mutually contradictory aims. Moreover, the successes of economic recovery and a return to full employment by 1936 had by 1939 generated a shortage of skilled labour, necessitating the conscription of workers into compulsory labour service on certain projects. There were also conflicts between aspects of Nazi ideology and the demands of reality: women, for example, despite Nazi views of their proper place being in the home, in fact participated in increasing numbers in paid employment outside the home, even before the more acute shortages of (literally) manpower in wartime years.
What is quite clear is that, far from achieving a social revolution, the effects of Nazi economic policies on society represented in large measure a continuation and perhaps exacerbation of previous socioeconomic trends. Realities under Nazi rule by no means corresponded with pre-1933 election promises. While the return to full employment did mean jobs and a steady income for many, the associated withdrawal of trade union rights and collective bargaining, as well as the very variable rates of pay and conditions, rendered the experience at best an ambiguous one. Despite attempts by the All-German Federation of Trade Unions (ADGB) to reach a compromise with the new regime in April 1933, autonomous trade unions had been unequivocally smashed; and although many workers were prepared somewhat cynically to enjoy any holidays or outings offered to them by organizations such as Strength through Joy, few really swallowed much of the propaganda about the ‘harmonious factory community’ and the like. While concessions were made to small businesses, in so far as they did not conflict with major political aims, other demands of small retailers were not met; in particular, big department stores continued to flourish. While peasants were praised in Nazi ideology, the measures taken under Darré (who had replaced Hugenberg as Minister of Agriculture in June 1933) were by no means universally popular. The control of the production, distribution and pricing of foodstuffs by the Reich Food Estate and the control of the inheritance of farms under the Entailed Farm Law met with the hostility of considerable numbers of peasants in different areas, varying with local conditions. It is clear that, while there were certain fundamental changes – particularly in the increased political direction of the economy, with the attempt to control and subordinate economic development to the goal of preparation for war – Germany continued to be an industrializing society with certain endemic conflicts and strains. The ‘national community’ was created neither in reality nor in popular social perceptions.15
The Radicalization of the Regime
Hitler had two main aims, expressed in Mein Kampf and the later Second Book: to create a ‘pure’ racial community in Germany; and to expand Germany’s living-space, dominating central Europe and, eventually, seeking world mastery. Hitler’s anti-Semitism, while finding resonance in the widespread prejudices against Jews, clearly went way beyond existing concepts of discrimination in its eventual practical implications. Hitler’s grandiose visions of the future of his Thousand Year Reich, while having much in common with conservative–nationalist desires for revision of the Treaty of Versailles, also went some considerable way beyond them in terms of global aspirations. While Hitler lost little time in jettisoning the political framework of the Weimar Republic, it took rather longer to transform the relationship of the Nazis to the old elites, whose miscalculated support had brought Hitler to power and who were essential for the effective use of that power. Moreover, Hitler had simultaneously to play to a number of galleries: to public opinion, dependent as his charisma was on repeated popular acclaim; to the Nazi Party activists, who were often frustrated at the apparent stalling of momentum and the incompleteness of the ‘national revolution’; and to the established economic and military elites whose co-operation was vital to the realization of Hitler’s ends. Added to these sometimes conflicting pressures was Hitler’s distinctive style of leadership, which allowed the duplication, indeed proliferation, of state and party offices and functions, and blurred the lines of leadership and responsibility. But on issues which mattered to Hitler he pursued his aims with ruthlessness and appropriate brutality. While Hitler’s intentions alone are not sufficient to explain the pattern of developments in the Third Reich – after all, Hitler had to attempt to realize his intentions under given circumstances and not always welcome conditions – the chronology of Nazi Germany reveals a progressive radicalization of the regime in line with Hitler’s pursuit of his overriding aims.
Anti-Semitic policies in peacetime were powered to a considerable degree by Nazi Party radicals, and Hitler sought to distance himself somewhat – at least as far as his public image was concerned – from the consequences of the more extreme or less successful of their actions. The attempted boycott of Jewish shops in April 1933 was rapidly called off. Systematic discrimination against Jews continued, however, in the removal of Jews from professional and cultural life. In 1935 the so-called Nuremberg Laws – announced in a last-minute way at the Nuremberg Party rally – sought to give legal validity to racial discrimination. Under the Reichsbürgergesetz two categories of citizenship were introduced, with Jews given second-class citizenship, in that they could not become Reichsbürger with full political rights. Under the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, Jews were no longer permitted to marry those of German or related extraction, nor – a deliberate affront in its moral implications – to employ German women under the age of forty-five in their households. Consideration was given to the vexatious question of Mischlinge – those of mixed extraction who, in Nazi eyes, might be deemed to ‘pollute’ German blood. The milder view of excluding ‘half-’ and ‘quarter-Jews’ from the Nuremberg Laws was finally adopted, while ‘three-quarter Jews’ were included. For many Germans, the Nuremberg Laws were welcomed as an apparent legalization of the rather ad hoc measures of discrimination against Jews. Yet what is particularly striking is the way in which Germans rapidly ‘learned’ to consider their fellow citizens in terms of the new racial categories: friendships were cut off, and German Jews not only lost status and livelihood but were also increasingly cut off from their former social circles and wider support networks. The ‘racialization’ of German society was extremely rapid, laying the groundwork for later, more radical measures.
Far from being the culmination of Nazi anti-Semitic measures, the Nuremberg Laws marked but a stage in the systematic exclusion of Jews from ‘normal’ life. With a brief, partial respite in deference to international opinion when Berlin hosted the Olympic Games in 1936, a series of Verordnungen consequent on the Reichsbürgergesetz in the following years systematically continued to exclude Jews from their professions, from education, and from public and cultural life. From 1938 discrimination became more severe, with the ‘aryanization’ or confiscation of Jewish property, and the effective removal of the means of material existence in a variety of ways. The effect, as a Nazi article of 24 November 1938 remarked with glee, would be to reduce the Jews to dependence on crime – which would ‘necessitate’ the appropriate measures on the part of a state committed to law and order, ending in the complete extermination (restlose Vernichtung) of German Jewry.16
Commitment to law and order was scarcely evident in the actions against Jews on the Reichskristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) of 9 November 1938. Ostensibly precipitated by the murder of a member of the German Embassy in Paris by a young Jew, a supposedly ‘spontaneous uprising’ was incited by a speech by Goebbels on the occasion of the annual anniversary celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch. Party radicals burned synagogues and attacked and looted Jewish property across Germany. Official party figures reported ninety-one deaths of Jews, and subsequently around thirty thousand Jews were arrested and detained in concentration camps for a period of time; the true number of deaths as a result of Nazi brutality, and individual suicides out of sheer desperation and despair, ran into far higher figures. Jews had to pay compensation for the destruction of property themselves, and hand over any payments from insurance policies to the state. Many Germans, far from having spontaneously perpetrated attacks – as the Nazi propaganda would have it – were actually appalled at the wanton destruction of property and evident lawlessness of the Reichskristallnacht. But they did little to protest against the continued series of measures discriminating against the Jews – the removal of their driving licences, the withdrawal of their passports (which were returned stamped with the initial ‘J’), the enforced adoption of the first names Israel or Sara, the ban on visiting museums, theatres, concerts, swimming-pools, the forced surrender of gold and silver objects and all precious jewellery with the exception of wedding rings, the systematic reductions in status and livelihood. Most Germans simply acquiesced in the piecemeal process by which Jews were identified, defined, stigmatized, segregated and stripped of the status of fellow citizens and even human beings to become an oppressed community in their own homeland. These peacetime measures of discrimination were a precondition for the subsequent preference of many Germans to ignore the later, more tragic fate of these people who had already been effectively removed from a normal status in civil society.
On the foreign policy front, desires for the revision of the Treaty of Versailles were, as indicated above, widespread among Germans. Already in the closing years of the Weimar Republic, after the death of Stresemann, less cautious, more strident tones had been evident in German foreign policy. These revisionist tendencies were unleashed with vigour by Hitler. In 1933 he made clear his preference for bilateral rather than collective security arrangements, and soon withdrew from the League of Nations. With the approval of the Army, by 1934 rearmament was in full swing, with the production of aircraft, ships and explosives. In January 1935, after a plebiscite, the Saarland was returned to German jurisdiction. In March 1935 the rearmament programme, the existence of a German air force and the introduction of one year’s conscription (raised to two years in August 1936), were made public. These clear breaches of the Treaty of Versailles were censured by the so-called Stresa Front of Italy, France and Britain, and by the League of Nations, in April 1935, but to little effect. By June of that year Britain and Germany had concluded a Naval Agreement under which Germany was permitted to increase her Navy to one-third the strength of the British Navy. The ‘Stresa Front’ was in any case less than solid. Hitler on the whole tended to admire Italy’s Fascist leader Mussolini, and, despite tensions between Italy and Germany over Austria after the attempted coup by Austrian Nazis in 1934, Hitler was concerned to foster good relations with his fellow-dictator. Hitler was also a prime opportunist. Taking advantage of British and French preoccupation with the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935, and under some pressure from domestic discontent over a deteriorating economic situation, Hitler took his first major foreign policy risk in March 1936. German troops marched over the Rhine to reoccupy the demilitarized left bank, in clear defiance of the Versailles Treaty. This served to boost Hitler’s domestic popularity considerably, and occasioned only very limited criticism from abroad.
From then on, foreign policy moved into a new gear. Under the Four Year Plan, presided over by Goering, rather unorthodox economic policies were initiated, which marked a clear break with Hjalmar Schacht’s notions of economic management. Schacht’s resignation as Minister of Economics in November 1937 came partly as a result of conflicts between the Economics Ministry and Goering’s office. There were similar conflicts between Nazis and more traditional conservative nationalists on the diplomatic front. For some time Ribbentrop had been running a diplomatic service in rivalry with the Foreign Ministry. In 1936 Ribbentrop became Ambassador to Britain. The Spanish Civil War, which broke out in July 1936, fostered closer relations between Italy and Germany (with both supporting Franco), and helped to bring about a new alignment. The emergent ‘Rome–Berlin Axis’ was strengthened as, in the course of 1936, it had become clear to Hitler that he would have to abandon his ideas about an alliance with Britain; and, in 1938, under Ribbentrop’s influence, Hitler opted for Japan as the third member of the ‘Axis’. The Tripartite Pact was finally signed in September 1940. Meanwhile, it was becoming increasingly clear that the attempt to combine preparation for war with domestic consumer satisfaction was in the long run economically impracticable and that it was essential for Germany to go to war sooner rather than later. This realization occasioned a new rift between the increasingly radical Nazi regime and the old elites: Hitler’s clash with Army leaders in the winter of 1937–8 marked a further step in the gathering momentum of the Nazi regime.
In November 1937, at a meeting with leaders of the Army, Navy and Air Force, together with the Foreign Minister and War Minister, Hitler delivered a lengthy harangue on Germany’s need for Lebensraum. Notes of this meeting were taken unofficially by Hitler’s military adjutant Colonel Hossbach, in what has become known as the ‘Hossbach memorandum’. Some of Hitler’s audience were not convinced by his ideas, which were greeted with grave reservations. Notwithstanding criticisms, in the following weeks Nazi military planning became offensive. Rather than responding or listening to criticism, Hitler simply removed the critics from their strategic positions. By February 1938 a significant purge had been effected: Blomberg’s post of War Minister was abolished; the old Wehrmacht office was replaced by the Oberkommando (High Command) of the Wehrmacht (OKW) under General Keitel; Fritsch was replaced as Commander-in-Chief of the Army by General von Brauchitsch; fourteen senior generals were retired and forty-six others had to change their commands; and, in the Foreign Ministry, Ribbentrop officially replaced Neurath as Foreign Minister. Hitler, who was already Supreme Commander of the Army by virtue of his position as head of state since the death of Hindenburg, now also became Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. The regime was now more specifically Nazi, less conservative–nationalist, in complexion.
The overthrow of Hitler was first seriously contemplated by members of the elite during 1938–9. Army leaders including Beck and Halder, as well as the head of the Foreign Ministry Ernst von Weizsäcker, considered the possibility of a coup. Their ideas were conveyed to the British government, but ignored. Similarly, any prospect of success for Adam von Trott’s visit to Britain in June 1939 was marred by suspicions of his real intentions: while Trott was seeking to buy time for a military coup to be successful, his official reports back to the German Foreign Ministry and his proposals for further concessions to Hitler, as well as his sincere German nationalism, sufficiently opened his aims to misinterpretation and misrepresentation for the Americans as well as the British to choose to take little notice of his mission.17 But these early attempts at resistance in high places were deflected, first by the apparent success of Hitler’s foreign policy – and the ‘appeasement’ with which he was met – and then, after the final outbreak of war in September 1939, by the combination of rapid early military success and unwillingness to commit an act of treason against the head of state when the fatherland was at war.
In the course of 1938–9 Hitler achieved certain major foreign policy goals without igniting an international conflict. In March 1938, after considerable exertion of pressure on the Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg – who attempted to organize a plebiscite which would avoid German takeover, but was outmanoeuvred and replaced by the Nazi sympathizer Seyss-Inquart – the peaceful invasion of Austria by German troops and its annexation into an enlarged German Reich was effected. Later myths of ‘the rape of Austria’ and being ‘Hitler’s first victim’ notwithstanding, the entry of German soldiers was greeted by many Austrians with considerable enthusiasm. While those Austrians of left-wing and liberal opinions viewed the Anschluss with foreboding, others gave a rapturous welcome to the triumphant return of Adolf Hitler to his native land, in which, over a quarter of a century earlier, he had collected his ideas and fomented his rag-bag of prejudices while a drifting failed art-student in Vienna. Austrian Jews had good reason to be worried: a virulent anti-Semitism was unleashed, soon making their situation even more demoralizing and unpleasant than that of the Jews in Germany, against whom discriminatory measures had unfolded more gradually and legalistically. As far as international responses were concerned, the reaction was muted. For one thing, since Austria had been a dominant force in ‘German’ affairs for centuries, and had only recently been excluded from Bismarck’s small Germany (and forbidden any union under the Versailles Treaty), it did not seem entirely unnatural that Germans in the two states should be united under the Austrian-born leader of Germany. For another, the major powers were at this time not prepared for military confrontation with Hitler. The USA was adopting an isolationist, neutralist stance with respect to European affairs; the Soviet Union under Stalin was preoccupied with domestic purges of perceived internal opposition; neither France nor England was ready for a military challenge to Hitler, although rearmament had been underway since the mid-1930s.
Plate 2 Hitler’s triumphal arrival to popular acclaim in his former home town of Linz during the 1938 Anschluss of Austria (which subsequently represented itself as ‘Hitler’s first victim’).
In the summer of 1938 Hitler turned his attention to Czechoslovakia. The Sudeten German Party under Henlein, with help from the German Nazis, had been cultivating unrest among ethnic Germans in the border areas, the Sudetenland. There was a heightened sense of crisis as misperceptions of German mobilization led to an actual Czech mobilization, and for a week in August 1938 it appeared that war was about to break out. By September the threat of war had been averted, and attempts were made to resolve the Czech crisis by diplomatic means. The British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, braving the novelty of airborne diplomacy, returned from the Munich conference of September 1938 – at which Czechoslovakia, whose fate was to be decided, was not represented – waving the famous piece of paper with Hitler’s signature and proclaiming ‘peace in our time’. The Western powers – apparently overlooking the catastrophic longer-term consequences of failing to protect the interests of smaller central European states – appear to have felt that, by ceding portions of the Czech border territories, they had fulfilled legitimate ethnic demands and averted the threat of a war for which they were not yet ready. Whether or not their policy of appeasement was justifiable, it certainly served to buy further time for rearmament. Hitler, for his part, felt cheated out of war by the Munich Agreement.
Czechoslovakia’s loss of the Western border territories also meant loss of key border defences – and the will to defend herself, after the debacle of the summer. When, in March 1939, Hitler’s armies invaded Prague, there was little the Czechs could do to resist German take-over. Bohemia and Moravia became a German protectorate, while Slovakia became a satellite state of the German Reich. As far as Britain was concerned, it was prudent to allow this ‘far-away country’ of which they knew little (as it was put in September 1938) fall without Western military intervention.
Emboldened by the feeble Western response to the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Hitler now turned his attention to Poland and the Baltic states. Lithuania ceded Memel to Germany, but the Poles stood firm on Danzig. At this point, the British took a stronger stand, issuing a guarantee of Polish independence. Hitler chose not to take too much notice of this, given the British record of appeasement. In August 1939, in a surprise move – and putting an end to parallel British negotiations with the Russians – Hitler concluded a pact with his ideological arch-enemy, the communist leader Joseph Stalin. In conjunction with a further agreement in September, Hitler and Stalin mutually carved up the Polish and Baltic states, and achieved certain strategic aims; while Stalin bought time for further rearmament, Hitler sought to avoid the possibility of war on two fronts. Again, the longer-term consequences were to prove catastrophic.
On 1 September 1939 German troops used the pretext of incited border incidents for a well-organized invasion of Poland. By 3 September Britain and France had concluded that this clear act of German aggression now meant that they were, at last, at war with Germany. The precarious attempt at stabilizing European affairs and achieving a new international order after the First World War had collapsed. Germany under Hitler was again unleashing war in Europe. But this time – unlike the mood of August 1914, however exaggerated by nationalist mythology – there was little enthusiasm for war among the German people. The peaceful gains of the preceding years had been greeted with an acclaim tinged by relief at the avoidance of bloodshed; now, in the main, the Germans took up arms in sombre mood, with considerable foreboding, clinging to the hope that Hitler was right in his predictions of an assured and early German victory. But, as it was to turn out, Hitler’s aims for the ‘master race’ were so ambitious as to pave the way for eventual total defeat.