Defying Hitler: A Memoir

by Sebastian Haffner

This is the story of a duel. It is a duel between two very unequal adversaries: an exceedingly powerful, formidable and ruthless state and an insignificant, unknown private individual. The duel does not take place in what is commonly known as the sphere of politics; the individual is by no means a politician, still less a conspirator, or an enemy of the state. Throughout, he finds himself very much on the defensive. He only wishes to preserve what he considers his integrity, his private life and his personal honour. These are under constant attack by the Government of the country he lives in, and by the most brutal, but often also clumsy, means.

I occasionally heard him utter words full of bitterness and doubt – not just about the Austrians – that offended my newly acquired enthusiastic bellicosity. No, it was not my father’s fault, nor any of my other relatives’, that within a few days I became a fanatical jingoist and armchair warrior. You must blame the atmosphere, the general mood, the tug of the masses, which produced unimagined emotions in those who surrendered themselves (even seven-year-old boys), and left those who stayed aloof suffocating in a vacuum of arid emptiness and isolation.

Not that I bore it all ‘like a little hero’. It was just that there was nothing very special to bear. I thought as little about food as a football enthusiast at a cup final. The army bulletins interested me far more than the menu. The analogy with the football fan can be carried further. In those childhood days, I was a war fan just as one is a football fan.

was a dark, mysterious game and its never-ending, wicked lure eclipsed everything else, making daily life seem trite. It was addictive, like roulette and opium. My friends and I played it all through the war: four long years, unpunished and undisturbed.

A childish illusion, fixed in the minds of all children born in a certain decade and hammered home for four years, can easily reappear as a deadly serious political ideology twenty years later.

From 1914 to 1918 a generation of German schoolboys daily experienced war as a great, thrilling, enthralling game between nations, which provided far more excitement and emotional satisfaction than anything peace could offer; and that has now become the underlying vision of Nazism.

Many things later bolstered Nazism and modified its character, but its roots lie here: in the experience of war – not by German soldiers at the front, but by German schoolboys at home. Indeed, the front-line generation has produced relatively few genuine Nazis and is better known for its ‘critics and carpers’. That is easy to understand. Men who have experienced the reality of war tend to view it differently.

The truly Nazi generation was formed by those born in the decade from 1900 to 1910, who experienced war as a great game and were untouched by its realities.

When I compare the deeper conclusions that Hitler and I drew from the same painful experience – the one fury, defiance and the resolve to become a politician, the other doubt as to the validity of the rules of the game, and a horrified foreboding of the unpredictability of life – then I cannot help thinking that the reaction of the eleven-year-old child was more mature than that of the twenty-nine-year-old adult. Undoubtedly, at that moment it was written in the stars that I could never be on friendly terms with Hitler’s Reich.

The effect of the revolution on me and my contemporaries was exactly the reverse of that of the war. The war had left our actual everyday lives unaltered, often to the point of boredom, while it supplied an inexhaustible fund of raw material for our imaginations. The revolution brought many changes to our daily lives, and the novelty was vivid and exciting enough – I shall soon be going into that – yet it failed to engage our imaginations. Unlike the war, it did not provide a simple, plausible narrative to explain events.

As middle-class boys, who moreover had only just been roughly jolted out of a four-year-long patriotic intoxication with war, we were naturally against the Red revolutionaries; against Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and their Spartacus League.2 Although we only vaguely knew that they would ‘rob us of everything’, probably liquidate those of our parents who were well-off, and altogether make life frightful and ‘Russian’, we had thus to be in favour of Ebert3 and Noske and their Free Corps. But, alas, it was impossible to work up any enthusiasm for these figures.

Next day came the news that Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg had been shot, both ‘while attempting to escape’. As far as I know, that was the origin of ‘shooting while attempting to escape’, which has since become the conventional manner of dealing with political opponents east of the Rhine. At that time people were so unused to it that the words were taken literally and believed.

It is interesting to note that, even then, in the spring of 1919, when the revolution of the Left tried in vain to establish itself, the Nazi revolution was already fully formed and potent. It only lacked Hitler. The Free Corps, who had rescued Noske and Ebert, resembled the later Nazi storm troops which most of them later joined. They certainly had the same outlook, behaviour and fighting methods. They had already invented the device of ‘shooting while attempting to escape’, and had made significant advances in the science of torture. They also anticipated the events of the 30th of June 1934,7 with their bold habit of lining less important opponents up against a wall, without many questions or distinctions. All that was lacking was the theory to justify the practice. That would be provided by Hitler.

When I think about it, I have to say that by 1919 even the Hitler Youth had almost been formed. For example, in our school class we had started a club called the Rennbund Altpreussen (Old Prussia Athletics Club), and took as its motto ‘Anti-Spartacus, for Sport and Politics’. The politics consisted in occasionally beating up a few unfortunates, who were in favour of the revolution, on the way to school. Sports were the main occupation. We organised athletic championships in the school grounds or public stadia. These gave us the pleasurable sensation of being decidedly anti-Spartacist. We felt very important and patriotic, and ran races for the fatherland. What was that, if not an embryonic Hitler Youth? In truth, certain characteristics later added by Hitler’s personal idiosyncrasies were lacking, anti-Semitism for one. Our Jewish schoolmates ran with the same anti-Spartacist and patriotic zeal as everyone else. Indeed, our best runner was Jewish. I can testify that they did nothing to undermine national unity.

After the Kapp Putsch, interest in politics flagged among us boys. All parties had been compromised and the entire topic lost its attraction. The Rennbund Altpreussen was dissolved. Many of us sought new interests: stamp-collecting, for example, piano-playing, or the theatre. Only a few remained true to politics, and it struck me for the first time that, strangely enough, those were the more stupid, coarse and unpleasant among my schoolfellows. They proceeded to enter the ‘right sort’ of leagues: the German National Youth Association or the Bismarck League (there was still no Hitler Youth), and soon they showed off knuckledusters, truncheons and even coshes in school.

Again and again the same pattern was repeated. A few strokes combined in an unexpected, pleasing way to form a symmetrical, box-like ornament. I was immediately tempted to copy him. ‘What is that?’ I asked in a whisper as it was during a lesson, boring though that was. ‘Anti-Semitic sign,’ he whispered back in telegraphic staccato. ‘The Ehrhardt Brigade wore it on their helmets. Means “Out with the Jews”. You ought to know it.’ And he went on scribbling. It was my first acquaintance with the swastika.

It was another two years before politics became interesting again, and that was due to the appearance of one man – Walther Rathenau. Never before or afterwards did the German Republic produce a politician who so deeply stirred the imagination of young people and the masses. Gustav Stresemann and Heinrich Brüning, who enjoyed longer periods of power and whose policies could be said to have moulded two brief periods of history, never radiated the same personal charisma. Hitler alone can be compared to Rathenau,

Can such a man, you ask, be a leader of the masses? Surprisingly, the answer is Yes. The masses – by which I mean not the proletariat, but the anonymous collective body into which all of us, high and low, amalgamate at certain moments – react most strongly to someone who least resembles them. Normality coupled with talent may make a politician popular. But to provoke extremes of love and hate, to be worshipped like a god or loathed like the devil, is given only to a truly exceptional person who is poles apart from the masses, be it far above or far below them. If my experience of Germany has taught me anything, it is this. Rathenau and Hitler are the two men who excited the imagination of the German masses to the utmost; the one by his ineffable culture, the other by his ineffable vileness. Both, and this is decisive, came from inaccessible regions, from some sort of ‘beyond’. The one from a sphere of sublime spirituality where the cultures of three millennia and two continents hold a symposium; the other from a jungle far below the depths plumbed by the basest penny dreadfuls, from an underworld where demons rise from a brewed-up stench of petty-bourgeois back rooms, doss-houses, barrack latrines and the hangman’s yard. From their different ‘beyonds’ they both drew a spell-binding power, quite irrespective of their politics.

No other nation has experienced anything comparable to the events of 1923 in Germany. All nations went through the Great War, and most of them have also experienced revolutions, social crises, strikes, redistribution of wealth and currency devaluation. None but Germany has undergone the fantastic, grotesque extreme of all these together; none has experienced the gigantic, carnival dance of death, the unending, bloody Saturnalia, in which not only money but all standards lost their value. The year 1923 prepared Germany, not specifically for Nazism, but for any fantastic adventure. The psychological and political roots of Nazism reach further back, as we have seen, but that year gave birth to its lunatic aspects: the cool madness, the arrogant, unscrupulous, blind resolve to achieve the impossible, the principle that ‘Might is right’ and ‘“Impossible” is not in our vocabulary’. Nations, it seems, cannot go through such experiences without spiritual damage. I shudder to think that after the next war the whole of Europe will probably experience a magnified 1923 – that is, unless very wise men make the peace.

The old and unworldly had the worst of it. Many were driven to begging, many to suicide. The young and quick-witted did well. Overnight they became free, rich and independent. It was a situation in which mental inertia and reliance on past experience was punished by starvation and death, but rapid appraisal of new situations and speed of reaction was rewarded with sudden, vast riches. The twenty-one-year-old bank director appeared on the scene, and also the sixth-former who earned his living from the stock-market tips of his slightly older friends. He wore Oscar Wilde ties, organised champagne parties, and supported his embarrassed father. Amid all the misery, despair and poverty there was an air of light-headed youthfulness, licentiousness and a carnival atmosphere. Now, for once, the young had money and the old did not. Moreover, its nature had changed. Its value lasted only a few hours. It was spent as never before or since; and not on the things old people spend their money on.

Indeed, my father was one of those who did not, or did not wish to, understand the times, just as he had already refused to understand the war. He entrenched himself behind the maxim: ‘A Prussian official does not speculate’, and bought no shares. At the time I regarded that as extraordinarily narrow-minded and out of character, for he was one of the cleverest men I have known. Today I understand him better. In retrospect, I can sympathise with the disgust with which he rejected the ‘monstrous scandal’ and with the impatient contempt that lay behind the attitude that ‘what ought not to be, cannot be’. Alas, the practical result of such high-mindedness could degenerate into farce, and the farce would have turned to tragedy if it had not been for my mother, who adapted to the situation in her own way.

We had lived through a series of contradictory creeds: pacifism, nationalism and then Marxism. (This last has much in common with sexual infatuation: both are unofficial, slightly illicit; both use shock tactics, both mistake an important, though officially taboo part for the whole, sex in the one case and economics in the other.)

murders. People disappeared in their dozens. Almost always it was people who had something to do with the leagues. Years later, their skeletons might be dug up in some nearby wood. Within the leagues, it had become the practice to dispose of unreliable and suspicious comrades without ceremony. When we heard rumours of this, it did not seem as incredible as it would have done in normal, civilised days. Indeed, the atmosphere had gradually become apocalyptic. Saviours appeared everywhere, people with long hair and hair shirts, declaring that they had been sent by God to save the world.

The ‘Stresemann era’ – the only genuine period of peace that my generation in Germany has experienced – had begun: a period of six years, from 1924 to 1929, during which Stresemann directed German policy from the foreign office.

Everyone was cordially invited to concentrate on their personal lives, to arrange their affairs according to their own taste and to find their own paths to happiness. Now something strange happened – and with this I believe I am about to reveal one of the most fundamental political events of our time, something that was not reported in any newspaper: by and large that invitation was declined. It was not what was wanted. A whole generation was, it seemed, at a loss as to how to cope with the offer of an unfettered private life. A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions, for love and hate, joy and sorrow, but also all their sensations and thrills – accompanied though they might be by poverty, hunger, death, chaos and peril. Now that these deliveries suddenly ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful and worth while, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of the political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation. They were bored, their minds strayed to silly thoughts, and they began to sulk. In the end they waited eagerly for the first disturbance, the first setback or incident, so that they could put this period of peace ...

Not every single individual reacted in this fashion. There were some who learned during this period, belatedly and a little clumsily, as it were, how to live. They began to enjoy their own lives, weaned themselves from the cheap intoxication of the sports of war and revolution, and started to develop their own personalities. It was at this time that, invisibly and unnoticed, the Germans divided into those who later became Nazis and those who would remain non-Nazis.

The menace of monotony hangs, as it has always hung, over the great plains of northern and eastern Germany, with their colourless towns and their all too industrious, efficient and conscientious businesses and organisations. With it comes a horror vacui and the yearning for ‘salvation’: through alcohol, through superstition or, best of all, through a vast, overpowering, cheap mass intoxication.

Thus, under the surface, all was ready for a vast catastrophe. Meanwhile, golden peace, serenity, benevolence and goodwill reigned in the tangible world of public affairs. Even the heralds of the coming calamity seemed to fit seamlessly into the peaceable scene.

I felt the utter joy of being in complete harmony with thousands, tens of thousands of people, yes, even with the entire world. There was no one of my age, however alien, uneducated or unpleasant, with whom I could not at first meeting engage in prolonged, animated conversation – about sports, of course. Everyone had the same figures in their heads. Without the need to say a word, everyone had the same feelings about them. It was almost as grand as the war. It was the same sort of great game again. We all understood each other without the need for words.

as a mass phenomenon the sports craze lasted just three years. (I, personally, overcame it even earlier.) To last longer, it would have needed something comparable to the concept of the Final Victory in the war: a goal as well as an end. It remained always the same: the same names, the same numbers, the same sensations. It could go on indefinitely, but it could not occupy our imaginations indefinitely.

the semi-dictatorship in the name, and in defence, of democracy against fully-fledged dictatorship. Anyone who takes the trouble to study Brüning’s rule in depth will find all those factors which make this sort of government the inevitable forerunner of the very thing it is supposed to prevent: its discouragement of its own supporters; the way it undermines its own position; its acceptance of a loss of freedom; its lack of ideological weapons against enemy propaganda; the way it surrenders the initiative; and its collapse at the final moment when the issue is reduced to a simple question of power.

he made two promises with obvious honesty: the revival of the great war game of 1914 to 1918 and a repetition of the triumphal anarchic looting of 1923. In other words, his subsequent foreign policy and economic policy. He did not promise these things in so many words. Sometimes he even pretended to deny them (as he did in his later ‘peace speeches’). He was understood all the same. It won him his true disciples, the kernel of the Nazi Party. He appealed to the two great experiences which had marked the younger generation.

(Strange: whatever they undertook, the Communists were always beaten in the end and ‘shot while attempting to escape’. That seemed to be a law of nature.)

The mindset of ‘appeasement’ was also apparent. Powerful groups were in favour of rendering Hitler ‘harmless’ by giving him ‘responsibility’.

How could things turn out so completely differently? Perhaps it was just because we were all so certain that they could not do so – and relied on that with far too much confidence. So we neglected to consider that it might, if the worst came to the worst, be necessary to prevent the disaster from happening.

Marinus van der Lubbe

All of them were very interested in the question of who had committed the crime, and more than one of them hinted that they had doubts about the official version; but none of them saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from now on, one’s telephone would be tapped, one’s letters opened and one’s desk might be broken into.

Barricades may be out of date, but some form of spontaneity, uprising, commitment and insurrection seem to be an essential part of a genuine revolution. None of that was to be found in March 1933. The events were a combination of the most disparate ingredients. What was completely absent was any act of courage or spirit by any of the participants. The month of March demonstrated that the Nazis had achieved an unassailable position of power: through terror, celebration and rhetoric, treachery and finally a collective breakdown – a million individuals simultaneously suffered a nervous collapse. More bloodshed has accompanied the birth of many European states, but none came into being in a more loathsome way.

Even cruelty can have a magnificent aspect, if it is practised with open commitment and idealism; when those who are cruel stand by their deeds with fervour – as happened in the French Revolution and the Russian and Spanish civil wars. In contrast, the Nazis never showed anything but the sly, pale, cowardly face of a murderer denying his crime. While they were systematically torturing and murdering their defenceless victims, they daily declared in fine, noble words that not a single hair of anyone’s head would be harmed, and that never before had a revolution shed less blood or been conducted more humanely.

a law was passed that forbade anyone, under pain of severe penalties, to claim, even in the privacy of their own home, that atrocities were taking place. Of course, it was not the intention to keep the atrocities secret. In that case they would not have served their purpose, which was to induce general fear, alarm and submission. On the contrary, the purpose was to intensify the terror by cloaking it in secrecy and making even talking about it dangerous.

These elections, the last that were ever held in pre-war Germany, brought the Nazis only 44 per cent of the votes (in the previous elections they had achieved 37 per cent). The majority was still against the Nazis.

56 per cent of the population who had voted against the Nazis on the 5th of March

the German nationalists, the right-wing conservatives, who venerated ‘honour’ and ‘heroism’ as the central characteristics of their programme. Oh God, what an infinitely dishonourable and cowardly spectacle their leaders made in 1933 and continued to make afterwards! One might at least have expected that, once their claim in January proved illusory – that they had ‘tamed’ the Nazis and ‘rendered them harmless’ – they would act as a ‘brake’ and ‘prevent the worst’. Not a bit of it. They went along with everything: the terror, the persecution of the Jews, the persecution of Christians. They were not even bothered when their own party was prohibited, and their own members arrested.

They did it for many reasons, often for a whole tangled web of them; but however hard one looks, one will not find a single solid, positive, durable reason among them – not one that can pass muster. In each individual case the process of becoming a Nazi showed the unmistakable symptoms of nervous collapse.

The simplest and, if you looked deeper, nearly always the most basic reason was fear.

Only the daily routine provides security and continuity. Just beyond lies a dark jungle. Every European of the twentieth century feels this in his bones and fears it. It is the cause of his reluctance to do anything that could ‘derail’ his life – something audacious or out of the ordinary. It is this lack of self-reliance that opens the possibility of immense catastrophes of civilisation like the rule of the Nazis in Germany.

It shows how ridiculous the attitude is, still found widely in Germany, that the anti-Semitism of the Nazis is a small side issue, at worst a minor blemish on the movement, which one can regret or accept, according to one’s personal feelings for the Jews, and of ‘little significance compared to the great national issues’. In reality these ‘great national issues’ are unimportant day-to-day matters, the ephemeral business of a transitional period in European history – while the Nazis’ anti-Semitism is a fundamental danger and raises the spectre of the downfall of humanity.

There is an unsolved riddle in the history of the creation of the Third Reich. I think it is much more interesting than the question of who set fire to the Reichstag. It is the question: ‘What became of the Germans?’ Even on the 5th of March 1933 a majority of them voted against Hitler. What happened to that majority? Did they die? Did they disappear from the face of the earth? Did they become Nazis at this late stage? How was it possible that there was not the slightest visible reaction from them?

When they hear the speeches coming from Germany today (and become aware of the foulness of the deeds emanating from there), most of these people will think of their acquaintances and be aghast. They will ask, ‘What’s wrong with them? Don’t they see what’s happening to them – and what is happening in their name? Do they approve of it? What kind of people are they? What are we to think of them?’

Concentration camps had become an institution. One was advised