The dull glow of dictatorship. The Germans 1938/39. – Politics

There is now a book for almost every year in the first half of the 20th century. Tillmann Bendikowski, publicist and author of many popular historical works, has now given this type of historical observation a little twist by creating the genre of the year-end book. One could write maliciously after a cursory reading. On closer inspection, however, one cannot deny Bendikowski’s precise consideration. His book, with the attention-grabbing title “Hitlerwetter”, covers the twelve months from December 1938, the last “Peace Christmas” for the Germans, to November 8, 1939, when the Swabian carpenter Georg Elser tried in vain two months after the German invasion of Poland to kill Adolf Hitler with a time bomb in the Munich Bürgerbräukeller.

Those who obeyed had little to fear

Why these twelve months in particular, and what can the description of a year of Nazi dictatorship actually show? Because books on National Socialism as a whole, as well as individual studies on what made it special, are available in unmanageable numbers – does it really help historical knowledge to single out a single year? Bendikowski justified the choice of the twelve months between the weeks of Advent 1938 and November 1939 by saying that they form the middle of the Nazi regime, which lasted a little over twelve years.

Hitler’s dictatorship was stable, as shown not least by the pogroms of November 9 and 10, 1938 against the Jewish population still living in Germany, against which hardly anyone had protested – the Germans submitted to the brutal anti-Semitism of their government, many approved of it , very many benefited from the “Aryanization” of the property of their expelled and killed Jewish neighbors and fellow citizens. Political opponents had long since fled, been imprisoned or murdered. And since the Munich Agreement of September 1938 at the latest, Hitler, the “Führer and Reich Chancellor”, has been considered the keeper of European peace. The Germans had settled into the dictatorship; those who obeyed the regime’s instructions had little to fear in everyday life.

Tillmann Bendikowski is concerned with this daily normality in the last months of the Third Reich before the Second World War and in the first weeks of the war; about “‘normal life’, in which the criminal has long been part of everyday life,” as he writes. Bendikowski points out that the everyday practices of the people in the dictatorship, the family and social customs and customs were not very different from today – Mother’s Day, summer vacation, Sunday cake and visits to the cinema were also available for the large, silent and accompanying majority of Germans in the dictatorship, usually garnished with a Hitler salute and brown uniforms.

Occasionally there were parades or cross-country marches for the Hitler Youth, but there were also football games. How did they live and were they like us, the citizens of the Nazi state? Tillmann Bendikowski clearly does not answer this question, but he is not wrong in referring to traditions such as the Sunday walk, which our grandparents and great-grandparents took just as calmly and self-satisfiedly as we do today, regardless of the external circumstances.

The customs are adapted, such as the “German Christmas”

The book begins with the Advent season of 1938, which for many was no longer followed by the Christian Christmas festival, but by the “German Christmas”, the festival reinterpreted by the National Socialists, with a Germanic touch and “dechristianized”, as Victor Klemperer noted. In the chapter about March 1939, when the German Christians passed their ethnically influenced, anti-Semitic “Godesberg Declaration”, Bendikowski deals with the relationship between the two major churches and the Nazi state and the disintegration of the Protestants into “German Christians” and “Confessing Churches”. .

Open detailed view

The “harvest operation” of the Hitler Youth follows in June, and in October 1939 a colonel’s concerns about the incomplete schooling of the officer candidates entrusted to him are addressed. However, such thoroughly characteristic occurrences alone would not be enough to capture the mood and mental condition of NS society. Bendikowski’s achievement, which should not be underestimated, consists in arranging each of the twelve chapters with the help of a large pool of individual studies on the Nazi era, printed sources, diaries and newspaper articles in such a way that, month after month, a deeper, enlightening look into the ideologized, almost always useful to the regime Everyday life of the Germans succeeds.

The exaggeration of the term “work”, the annual exploitation of children and young people in agriculture, the hostility towards science and intellectuals, the National Socialist birth control policy, the state-propagated obligation to be healthy, including constant physical exercise – the Germans, this is the impression the book conveys, were in constricted in almost every way. But they did not resign unsatisfied to their fate, because the German struggle for existence and the “Führer” demanded it after all.

Seagull eggs for the “Fuhrer” birthday

It was hardly any different when the dictator gave his people a day off on April 20, 1939. People should be able to celebrate his 50th birthday appropriately – if possible in sunny “Hitler weather”. A day off in the country for the people would have been for wimpy democracies (which, of course, would never have paid such homage to an active politician), but instead there were marches, speeches, parades, pledges of allegiance and countless printed eulogies. And of course heaps of gifts, as if the “Führer” were an uncle loved by everyone: a swastika made out of hair by a hairdresser, a model of an anti-aircraft gun, 6,000 pairs of socks knitted by the mothers of the southern Westphalia region, seagull eggs from the city of Schleswig …

Open detailed view

Tillmann Bendikowski’s successful book shows that the absurd and the threatening were not only close together on “Führer’s birthday”.