PART I

Germany

HOW COULD THE Holocaust have happened in 20th-century Germany, a society that valued art and philosophy, where university professors were highly esteemed, and where Jews were leaders in every realm of society? There are three main reasons: the Treaty of Versailles, the Great Depression, and Adolf Hitler.

German military aggression had been a major cause of World War I (1914–1918), a conflict that had taken the lives of millions of soldiers and destroyed the economies of many European countries. After Germany surrendered, Great Britain, and especially France—Germany’s major combatants at the war’s end who had suffered the most casualties—wanted to make Germany pay for the damage. They did so by way of the Treaty of Versailles, signed by German leaders the summer following the armistice (the end of the fighting). The treaty placed tight restrictions on the German military, forced Germany to give up portions of its territory, and, most crushing of all, forced Germany to pay war reparations.

The terms of the Treaty of Versailles caused humiliation and resentment among the German people, and the war reparations eventually led to severe inflation of the German economy. Wealthy Germans spent their life savings just to buy food, while the poor starved. The economy’s collapse brought political instability as people lost faith in their current leaders, and an array of political parties vied for the attention of the German people.

No political leader caught quite as much attention as Adolf Hitler, the head of the new Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), or Nazi for short. When Hitler was arrested for treason in 1923, he spent his nine-month jail sentence writing his autobiography Mein kampf, which eventually became a German bestseller. In the book, Hitler railed against those he blamed for Germany’s current problems: Germany’s former military leaders, Communists, and especially German Jews.

The book was obsessed with the issue of race: Hitler believed that Germans, as a nation composed largely of blue-eyed blondes, were part of the Aryan race, superior to all others. As such, Germany had a duty to destroy the Jews and to kill or enslave Slavic people such as Poles and Soviets.

Many thoughtful Germans found Hitler absurd and didn’t think he would ever be taken seriously as a national leader. But they didn’t take into consideration Germany’s desperate problems, which were only made worse by the Great Depression of the 1930s (which began in the United States but severely affected the economies of Europe). In the midst of Germany’s political turmoil and collapsed economy, Hitler and the Nazi party gained prominence in Germany. In 1933 Hitler was appointed the chancellor (prime minister) of Germany.

THE THIRD REICH

Nazi Germany is often referred to as the Third Reich (Third Empire). In using that name, Hitler was attempting to portray Nazi Germany as a descendant of the 1,000-year Holy Roman Empire (the first Reich), a large territory in central Europe during the Middle Ages, and the German empire (the second Reich), which had unified many small German states into one country between 1871 and 1918. Hitler also referred to Nazi Germany as the Thousand Year Reich, believing that it would last as long as the Holy Roman Empire.

Within six months, Hitler bestowed on himself the grand title of Führer (a German word meaning “leader” or “guide”), dissolved the Reichstag (the democratic German governing institution), outlawed all other political parties, and built concentration camps for his political opponents. He established the Gestapo, an organization of plain-clothed secret police ordered to weed out any and all political opposition, which often arrested people simply for uttering a single negative comment about the Nazi party.

He instituted the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth), a state-run program for all children ages 10–18. The Hitler Youth program was geared to make Germany’s children proud, militant Nazis. They engaged in warlike games, killed small animals (to become insensitive to suffering and death), sang songs about German streets running with Jewish blood, and were encouraged toward fanatical, personal devotion to Hitler, a devotion that was to take precedence over their relationships with their parents. (Children were encouraged to turn in their own parents to the Gestapo if they heard them say anything against the Führer.)

Schools also became places of indoctrination, where history classes taught that Hitler was descended from great German heroes, math classes discussed how much money the state lost while supporting mentally challenged individuals, and biology classes taught the superiority of the Aryan race and the inferiority of the Jewish race.

Many Germans were blinded to the cruelty and darkness of the Nazi regime. Hitler’s policies created jobs, and, in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler was rebuilding the armed forces, something that had long been a source of pride to many Germans. If personal freedom of expression was the cost, so be it, many thought. At least Germany was becoming strong again. This nationalistic pride grew during the summer of 1940 when Germany had conquered nearly all of mainland Europe. It seemed that Hitler’s promise of a 1,000-year German Reich was coming true.

But there were some Germans who strongly objected to the loss of personal freedoms in Nazi Germany and to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews. Jews had been harassed by the Nazis for years before the Nazi party came to power. But when Nazism became the law of the land, Jews lost their citizenship, and there was no one in the government they could turn to for protection. One November night in 1938, anti-Semitic Germans were given a green light from Hitler to destroy Jewish synagogues, homes, and businesses all over Germany and Austria in what became known as Kristallnacht (Crystal Night, usually referred to as the Night of Broken Glass). Afterward, Jews fled the countries by the hundreds of thousands.

The German Jews who remained eventually began to be shipped out of Germany to be “resettled” in the east, but it soon became clear that they were being shipped to cruel concentration camps. Many Jews were saved by German resisters who risked everything to conceal them. When Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, officially declared Germany’s capital city of Berlin to be Judenfrei (Jew-free) in the middle of 1943, there were thousands of Jews still hiding there.

Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra) was the name the Gestapo gave to several Resistance organizations in different countries. The Red Orchestra in Berlin was composed of a small group of people with Nazi affiliations who worked to overthrow the Nazi government from the inside by passing top-secret and high-level information to the Soviets. They also recruited Resistance members and helped hide Jews.

One of the women involved in the Berlin-based Red Orchestra was an American named Mildred Fish Harnack, a scholar, translator, and professor of the German language. After she was caught and tried, she received a prison sentence. But Hitler specifically ordered a new trial for her, which resulted in the death sentence. Just before she was beheaded, she was reported to have said, “And I have loved Germany so much.”

Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941 proved disastrous for Germany. When the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy in June 1944, they met German forces who fought furiously but whose numbers had been depleted from the long and fruitless battle against the Soviets. Finally convinced that his regime would be defeated, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. The German armed forces formally surrendered to the Allies on May 7, 1945.

Mildred Harnack in 1938.

German Resistance Memorial Center