The six and a half years of peace from 1933 to 1939 shine out in the memories of many who lived through them as an era of happiness. The bleakness of the preceding years gave way to relief, optimism, even exuberance; Germans were swept off their feet by the can-do attitude of Hitler and his youthful team. Their society’s transformation was so rapid it left no time for reflection. The Nazis were initiating social reforms that had previously seemed doomed never to get off the ground. Workers’ holidays, days off, family allowances, tenants’ rights protection—ordinary people were profiting from the new welfare policies on a broad scale. Owning a house—and perhaps even a car—was no longer a utopian dream; travelling was no longer a privilege. The leisure industry was booming. Upward social and professional mobility were possible as never before. Despite the repression of dissenting voices and limits on intellectual freedom, many felt that their country was more open now, as a result of its growing prosperity.
In late 1933, faith in economic recovery asserted itself. The decline had in fact begun to slow under the Weimar government, and the economy was only just beginning to pick up, but a lot of demonstrative first-sod-cutting gave the impression that Hitler alone was responsible for the upturn. In Demmin, his appointment as chancellor had sparked euphoria. Until then the town had been in debt and the streets full of unemployed people. After the handover of power, Demmin experienced its own provincial version of events in Berlin: its own torchlight parade, its own communist hunt, its own Jewish pogrom, its own rallies and May Day celebrations. At the Reichstag elections in March, the proportion of Nazi voters in Demmin was higher than in the Reich as a whole. Party members formed a living swastika on the square in front of the town hall. The new city fathers set about enforcing conformity and dismantling what remained of their democracy. They renamed Anklamer Strasse ‘Adolf Hitler Strasse’, planted a Hitler oak and drew up a ‘kitsch law’ to prevent the production of embarrassing fripperies such as Hitler cups or swastika sweets. Meanwhile, two colossal swastikas flanked the pediment over the entrance to the town hall.
Marie Dabs, the furrier’s wife, hadn’t forgotten Brüning’s brutal austerity drive. The queue of the unemployed had reached all the way from the Baustrasse labour exchange to her family’s shop on Luisenstrasse. Marie Dabs had struggled daily to make ends meet, borrowing a bit here and a bit there, chasing up IOUs. She had come to live in fear of bills and rent day. All around her, businesses were going bankrupt. Without her, her husband Walter would have thrown in the towel; he wasn’t cut out for a life of struggle.
When the town hall began to fill with brown uniforms, Marie Dabs was sceptical. She liked to think of Demmin as the elegant garrison town of imperial times, where noble-born officers from the Uhlan regiment could be seen strolling in and out of Luise Gate. The Nazis’ vulgar flamboyance wasn’t something she took to.
There was something coarse about those hands raised in salute. But even one year on, a lot had changed for the better. The large numbers of unemployed had disappeared, young people were working for the labour service. At Tutow, only half an hour from Demmin on the local railway, they built the largest military airfield in Germany.
Tutow was a classic case of Nazi rearmament. The flying school was used by combat squadrons, training squadrons and a flak training regiment. Housing sprang up around the airfield—sports grounds, a swimming pool. Local building firms moved further out of the red with every contract signed. The garrison swelled to more than three thousand men, who all came into Demmin to do their shopping. Marie and Walter Dabs seized the moment and got hold of a licence to sell military decorations and medals. ‘I filled the two showcases at the shop door with everything the airmen would need, and they weren’t long in coming,’ Marie Dabs said. The fur shop suddenly had its own arms business.
There was such a rush of airmen that the shop was soon too small, and they had to rent space next door. Marie rose to the top of Demmin society. Walter was declared the town’s ‘king of the marksmen’ in 1936, and they attended the big winter ball as a ‘royal couple’, Marie in a champagne-coloured evening dress with a dark-red rose. ‘Everyone wanted to dance with the queen, who was much complimented that evening,’ Marie would later recall. At dinner she was put opposite a prominent district councillor, a member of a noble family, and had soon made a customer of him. Queen of Demmin. Marie Dabs had climbed higher than she’d ever dreamed. The German economic miracle was entering its fifth year.
Business was also picking up in the goldsmith’s shop run by Renate Finkh’s father. In Ulm, the after-effects of the Depression had subsided.
Dad was full of optimism and confidence at that time. I knew he was one of the ones who’d believed in the Führer before the takeover. He made a point of that. Now he was proud and happy to have been proved right.
People everywhere could be heard telling each other that everything was better, thanks to the Führer. Renate’s father was even able to grant his wife her wish for a little house with a garden. She drew up the plans and he found a plot of land. After years of conflict, they had a common goal at last. Renate felt that things were looking up.
I often sat astride the bare roof ridge, relishing the warm wave of joy that swept through me. One day, there would be a real home here. When the house was finished, I wrote a long illustrated poem about the building of it and gave it to Dad for Christmas. I could tell he was proud of me.
Renate’s father had been aloof and irritable. Now he could do anything again. His wife found that the garden gave her a zest for life and new-found courage. Renate gained a sense of security from the house unlike anything she’d known before.
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But the German people’s happiness had another, more public aspect to it in the 1930s. This was Hitler’s string of foreign-policy successes, which produced a continual buzz of triumph and satisfaction among the Germans. As Hitler pulled off coup after coup, at almost yearly intervals, he rekindled the nation’s desire to restore Germany’s lost greatness.
Like the spectators at a sporting event, the German people were themselves part of the show, part of the action. In one of her first diary entries in June 1933, Lore Walb describes a memorial day held in her hometown of Alzey to mark the anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles. It was like a national day of mourning. The flags hung at half-mast, the radio played solemn music. At school, lessons came to a standstill, and the children were given a speech about the abhorred treaty. The government’s foreign policy had pushed its way into the classrooms of Alzey Secondary School. Lore Walb was fourteen.
In January 1935, a referendum was held in the Saarland to decide if the region should be reintegrated into Germany after fifteen years of administration by the French. By then the feeling of enthusiasm had been growing for some time. Standing in the crowd at the Saar rally in October 1933, Lore glimpsed the Führer twice. He was standing in his car, serious and upright, shoulders back, arm raised. She felt giddy.
The sight of him brought tears to my eyes. I don’t know why, but I think I sensed how wonderful it feels to trust a leader of our people. I almost believe it was the most beautiful, moving and powerful moment of my fourteen years of life.
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In her diary, Lore Walb chronicles the revision of the Treaty of Versailles. Every one of the country’s risky manoeuvres is also hers; when Germany leaves the League of Nations in October 1933, she leaves too. She fills several pages on the subject of the Saar Referendum on 17 January 1935, noting, reporter-like, any anecdotes that strike her as relevant. At 6.30 am she sees the ‘blood flag’ of the Saarland being carried through Alzey towards Berlin.
‘We are living in great times. Things are happening thick and fast,’ she writes when German troops march into the Rhineland in March 1936. The rapid pace of events is dizzying, but it inspires her with confidence. Until the annexation of Austria in 1938, she reports enthusiastically and at length on each event. In the space of a few years, Hitler has overcome the ignominy of Versailles, expanded Germany’s borders and made it a military nation again—all without bloodshed. The sense of relief is as great as the triumph. Lore Walb reveres her Führer as a man of peace. ‘If he could only bring peace to the world. His greatest desire, his goal.’
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For more than six years, it seemed to be ever upwards for Germany. Meanwhile people rushed from one celebration to the next. There was an endless succession of national holidays, when people gathered to assure one another of their loyalty. The cycle was ushered in on 30 January with the Day of National Rising. There followed the tenth anniversary of the party’s foundation in February and Heroes’ Memorial Day in March, the Führer’s birthday in April, the Day of National Labour in May, the summer solstice in June, Reich Party Day and Harvest Festival in September, Memorial Day for the Movement’s Fallen in November and finally the winter solstice in December. All were excuses for drums and marching bands, paramilitary parades, flag-waving children, mass choirs, blazing torches and Albert Speer’s Lichtdome—spectacular ‘cathedrals’ constructed from beams of light. Reports of recent successes punctuated this calendar of festive rituals like stories of miracles, providing regular boosts to German self-celebration.
In February 1934, René Juvet, the Swiss notary living in Augsburg, was asked to make a speech about Hitler at a party at the factory. He had no hope of extricating himself. At eleven in the morning, Juvet’s colleagues were waiting. He choked out a few sentences about the fight against unemployment, the government’s achievements, and how it should be everyone’s duty and pleasure to support it in its efforts. He felt that he’d got out of the predicament as best he could. Even a democratically minded outsider like him couldn’t deny Hitler’s success in getting the German people back to work. ‘Anyone who had witnessed the cruel misery of unemployment was inclined to give its vanquisher a chance, even if he didn’t see eye to eye with him ideologically.’
Foreigners who visited the Third Reich during those years of peace were impressed by the mood of optimism. René Juvet’s friend from university, Ernst Scheitlin, who came to stay from Basel in the autumn of 1937, was bowled over by the changes he saw in Germany. He hadn’t expected what he found: magnificent buildings built to last for millennia, modern expressways for long-distance travel, and everywhere cheerful people who had put the Depression behind them. When Juvet pointed out that the Germans had paid for the boom with personal and public freedom, Scheitlin waved his objections aside. ‘You’ve grown small-minded, old chap. Maybe you’re too close to things to see them. All I can say is, I’d be jolly glad if Switzerland had a Hitler.’
During Germany’s ‘happy’ years, the Munich Agreement of 30 September 1938 was considered the keystone of Hitler’s peace-keeping politics. Under the terms of this agreement, Hitler absorbed the Sudetenland—at the time, a part of Czechoslovakia—into the German Reich. Again, there was no bloodshed. René Juvet’s boss, Waldmeyer, was full of optimism, convinced that peace would never end. Neder and Hofmann, the factory’s keenest party members, raved about world dominance, eager at the prospect of colonies in the east.
Not long afterwards, in Munich on a business trip, Juvet attended the Oktoberfest. He’d been many times before, but never had he seen such high spirits. In every beer tent he visited, the festive mood ran higher. Long rows of beaming people stood arm in arm, swaying to the music. Beer flowed in torrents, roast chickens seemed to fly through the air. In the oompahpah music and the clinking beer steins, the merry faces and the sweaty bodies, Juvet thought he saw the secret of the Germans’ happiness under Hitler.
He had conquered a great Reich for his people without resorting to the sword, triumphed over the obstacles of the detested peace treaty, and, it seemed, transformed yesterday’s enemies into friends of the Third Reich. Unemployment, that grey guest of the last years of the Weimar Republic, was banished. Wealth reigned supreme, the people of Munich could eat their fill…and if they compared all that with the little bit of democratic plunder they had sacrificed, they could, on the whole, be satisfied.
Of those six happy years, 1938 was considered the happiest.