Defying Hitler: A Memoir

by Sebastian Haffner

For the first time I felt, with naive delight and without a trace of doubt or misgiving, the effect of my people’s strange talent for creating mass hysteria (it may be a compensation for their limited talent for individual happiness). I had no idea that one might possibly exclude oneself from this general festive delirium. It did not occur to me that there could be anything bad or dangerous in something that so obviously filled one with joy and provided such delightful intoxication.

What counted was the fascination of the game of war, in which, according to certain mysterious rules, the numbers of prisoners taken, miles advanced, fortifications seized, and ships sunk played almost the same role as goals in soccer

and points in boxing. I never wearied of keeping internal scorecards. I was a zealous reader of the army bulletins, which I would proceed to recalculate in my own fashion, according to my own mysterious, irrational rules: thus, for instance, ten Russian prisoners were equivalent to one English or French prisoner, and fifty airplanes to one cruiser. If there had been statistics of those killed, I would certainly not have hesitated to “recalculate” the dead. I would not have stopped to think what the objects of my arithmetic looked like in reality. It 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. It is this game, and not the harmless battle games we organized in streets and playgrounds nearby, that has left its dangerous mark on all of us.

It may not seem worthwhile to describe the obviously inadequate reactions of a child to the Great War at such great length. That would certainly be true if mine were an isolated case, but it was not. This, more or less, was the way an entire generation of Germans experienced the war in childhood or adolescence; and one should note that this is precisely the generation that is today preparing its repetition.

The force and influence of these experiences are not diminished by the fact that they were lived through by children or young boys. On the contrary, in its reactions the mass psyche greatly resembles the child psyche. One cannot overstate the childishness of the ideas that feed and stir the masses. Real ideas must as a rule be simplified to the level of a child’s understanding if they are to arouse the masses to historic actions. 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. That is where it draws its allure from: its simplicity, its appeal to the imaginati...

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. Granted, there are exceptions: the eternal warriors, who found their vocation in war, with all its terrors, and continue to do so; and the eternal failures, who welcome its horrors and its destruction as a revenge on a life that has proved too much for them. Göring perhaps belongs to the former type; Hitler certainly to the latter. 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.

Quite untouched? At least, you may protest, they suffered starvation. True enough; but hunger scarcely interfered with the game. It may even have enhanced it. Well-fed, satisfied men are not given to visions and imaginings. At any rate, hunger alone did not bring disillusion. It was, one could say, digested. Its final result has merely been a certain indifference to undernourishment — one of the more admirable traits of this generation.

I think the widespread opinion that the Germans lost the war because of hunger is quite mistaken. By 1918 they had already gone hungry for three years, and food had been scarcer in 1917 than in 1918. In my opinion, the Germans abandoned their war effort not because they were starving, but because they thought the war militarily lost and politically without prospect. Be that as it may, the Germans will scarcely give up Nazism or a second world war out of hunger.

Life gained its thrill, the day its color, from the current military events.

Only the Free Corps carried arms — the Free Corps, who were already good Nazis in all but name.

As Bismarck once remarked in a famous speech, moral courage is, in any case, a rare virtue in Germany, but it deserts a German completely the moment he puts on a uniform. As soldier and officer, he is indisputably and outstandingly courageous on the field of battle. He is usually even prepared to open fire on his own compatriots if ordered to do so. Yet he is as timid as a lamb at the thought of opposing authority.

In the playground we played “Nationalists and Reds” in the fine weather, though this was difficult because no one wanted to be a Red.

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 blackjacks in school. They boasted of dangerous nocturnal poster-pasting or poster-removing expeditions and began to speak a certain jargon that distinguished them from the rest of us. They also began to behave in an unfriendly

way toward the Jewish boys.

About this time, not long after the Kapp Putsch, I saw one of them scribble a strange design in his notebook during a tedious lesson. Again and again the same pattern was repeated. A few strokes combined in an unexpected, pleasing way to form a symmetrical, boxlike 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.” He went on scrib...

Walther Rathenau.

Though scarcely anyone had previously had any idea what “deliveries in kind” meant, and the text of the Treaty of Rapallo, with its formal, diplomatic phraseology, conveyed nothing to the

nonexpert, both achievements were animatedly discussed at the grocer’s and the baker’s, and at the newspaper kiosks; while we of the eleventh grade exchanged blows because some called the treaties “a work of genius,” while the others spoke of a “Jewish betrayal of the nation.”

Then came 1923. That extraordinary year is probably what has marked today’s Germans with those characteristics that are so strange and incomprehensible in the eyes of the world, and so different from what used to be thought of as the German character: the uncurbed, cynical imagination, the nihilistic pleasure in the impossible for its own sake, and the energy that has become an end in itself. In that year an entire generation of Germans had a spiritual organ removed: the organ that gives men steadfastness and balance, but also a certain inertia and stolidity. It may variously appear as conscience, reason, experience, respect for the law, morality, or the fear of God. A whole generation learned then — or thought it learned — to do without such ballast. The preceding years served as a novitiate in nihilism, but in 1923 its high priests were ordained.

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 thr...

That year newspaper readers could again play a variation of the exciting numbers game they had enjoyed during the war, when counts of prisoners and size of booty had dominated the headlines. This time the figures did not refer to military events, in spite of the warlike way the year had begun, but to an otherwise quite uninteresting, everyday item in the financial pages: the exchange rate of the dollar. The fluctuation of the dollar was the barometer by which, with a mixture of anxiety and excitement, we measured the fall of the mark. The higher the dollar went, the more extravagant became our flights into the realms of fancy.

By the end of 1922, prices had gradually risen to between ten and a

hundred times the prewar peacetime level, and the dollar stood at about five hundred marks. This, however, had happened gradually. Wages, salaries, and prices in general had risen at the same pace. It was a bit inconvenient to work with the large numbers, but not overly difficult. Many people still spoke of it as a “rise in prices.” There were more exciting things to think about.

But the mark now went on the rampage. Soon after the beginning of the Ruhr War, the dollar shot to twenty thousand marks, rested there for a time, jumped to forty thousand, paused again, and then, with small periodic fluctuations, coursed through the ten thousands and then the hundred thousands. No one quite knew how it happened. Rubbing our eyes, we followed its progress like some astonishing natural phenomenon. It became the topic of the d...

Anyone who had savings in a bank or bonds saw their value disappear overnight...

whether it was a penny put away for a rainy day or a vast fortune. Everything was obliterated. Many people quickly moved their investments only to find that it made no difference. Very soon it became clear that something had happened that forced everyone to forget about their savings and attend to a far more urgent matter. The cost of living had begun to spiral out of control. Traders followed hard on the heels of the dollar. A pound of potatoes which yesterday had cost fifty thousand marks now cost a hundred thousand. The salary of sixty-...

Casting around, people found a life raft: shares. They were the only form of investment that kept pace — not all the time, and not all shares, yet on the whole they managed to keep up. So everyone dealt in shares. Every minor official, every employee, every shift wor...

shares. On wage days there was a general stampede to the banks, and share prices shot up like rockets. The banks were bloated with wealth. Obscure new ones sprouted up like mushrooms and did a roaring trade. Every day the entire population studied the stock-market listings. Sometimes some shares collapsed and thousands of people hurtled toward the...

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 were punished by starvation and death, but rapid appraisal of new situations and speed of reaction were rewarded with sudden, vast riches. The twenty-one-year-old bank director appeared on the scene, and also the high school senior who ear...

and supported his embarrassed father. Amid all the misery, despair, and poverty there was an air of light-headed youthfulness, licentiousness, and carnival. 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. Bars and nightclubs opened in large numbers. Young couples whirled about the streets of the amusement quarters. It was like a Hollywood movie. Everyone was hectically, feverishly searching for love and seizing it without a second thought. Indeed, even love had assumed an inflationary character. Unromantic love was the fashion: carefree, restless, light-hearted promiscuity. Typically, love affairs followed an extremely rapid course, without detours. The young who learned to love in those years eschewed romance and embraced cynicism. I myself and those of my age were not among them. At fifteen or sixteen we were a few years too young. In later years, when we had to entertain our girlfriends with twenty-odd marks’ pocket money, we often secretly envied the older boys who had had their chance at this time. We only...

Privation was balanced by adventure.

If we did not become callous, we were in no danger of becoming soft. If we avoided cynicism, we were not likely to become dreamy Parsifals. Something very fine and auspicious was silently ripening among the best of German youth from 1925 to 1930: a new idealism beyond doubt and disappointment, a new liberalism broader, more comprehensive, and more mature than the political liberalism of the nineteenth century; indeed, perhaps the basis of a new nobility of spirit, a new excellence, a new aesthetic of life. It was as yet a long way from realization and influence. Hardly had it been thought of and put into words than the quadrupeds arrived and trampled it all underfoot.

The barriers between the classes had become thin and permeable — perhaps a fortunate by-product of the universal impoverishment. There were many students who were laborers, and many young laborers who were students. Class prejudice and the starched-collar mentality were simply out of fashion. The relations between the sexes were freer and franker than ever —

They have drowned the Germans, who thirst after it, in this alcohol to the point of delirium tremens. They have made all Germans everywhere into comrades, and accustomed them to this narcotic from their earliest age: in the Hitler youth, the SA, the Reichswehr, in thousands of camps and clubs — and in doing this they have driven out something irreplaceable that cannot be compensated for by any amount of happiness. Comradeship is part of war. Like alcohol, it is one of the great comforters and helpers for people who have to live under unbearable, inhuman conditions. It makes the intolerable tolerable. It helps us cope with filth, calamity, and death. It anesthetizes us. It comforts us for the loss of all the amenities of civilization. Indeed, that loss is one of its preconditions. It receives its justification from bitter necessities and terrible sacrifices.

but in the generous softness of “one for all and all for one.” It is one of the most unpleasant falsehoods that the laws of comradeship are harder than those of ordinary civilian life. On the contrary, they are of a debilitating softness, and they are justified only for soldiers in the field, for men facing death. Only the threat of death justifies and makes this egregious dispensation from responsibility acceptable. Indeed, it is a familiar story that brave soldiers, who have been too long bedded on the soft cushions of comradeship, often find it impossible to cope with the harshness of civilian life.

It was remarkable how comradeship actively decomposed all the elements of individuality and civilization. The most important part of individual life, which cannot be subsumed in communal life, is love. So comradeship has its special weapon against love: smut. Every evening in bed, after the last patrol round, there was the ritual reciting of lewd songs and jokes. That is a hard and fast rule of male comradeship, and nothing is more mistaken than the widely held opinion that this is a safety valve for frustrated erotic or sexual feelings.

Nevertheless, the condition of comradeship, dangerous as it is, has its weak point — as does every condition that is based on deception, doping, and mumbo-jumbo. The moment, namely, that its external requisites are missing, it disappears into thin air. That has been observed many thousand times, even with genuine, legitimate, wartime comradeships: men who in the trenches would have given their lives for one another, and more than once shared their last cigarette, feel the greatest shyness and inhibitions when they meet again as civilians — and it is not the civilian meeting that is deceptive and illusory. Our comradeship at Jüterbog had been an artificial fit of drunkenness fabricated by the Nazis, and it evaporated with eerie rapidity — in the space of a single week between two parties.

We did not need great orations, he said, or interminable lectures and explanations. Being young German men, all that we needed to show, quite automatically, that we were at heart National Socialists, was to be removed from our deceitful bourgeois environment and our dry-as-dust legal files, and put in the right surroundings. That was the secret of the success of National Socialism, that it appealed to something that was part of every German’s makeup. Those of us who were not yet National Socialists knew now that it was in their blood. The rest would look after itself. The appalling thing was that there was some truth in this speech, if you interpreted it correctly. It really was true that you had only to place us in the right circumstances for a kind of chemical process to corrode our individualities and turn us into an unthinking mass, easily arousable for any cause whatever... This process reached its climax that evening. There was universal brotherhood. Everybody praised and proposed toasts to everybody else. The lieutenant praised our military prowess. We praised the lieutenant’s strategic genius. A petty officer, replying humorously to a toast, stated in his gruff manner that he had never dreamed that lawyers and academics would make such good soldiers. “Sieg Heil.” There were humorous poems written for the occasion, and read out by their authors to general acclaim from the undiscerning, tipsy audience. We sang that we were Geyer’s black band one last time, and at the...

god of comradeship. The chosen victim demurred, and several others immediately offered themselves, but that did not satisfy the sacrificial priests. So they started to persuade him that he should accept it, of his own free will, for his comrades’ sake, and so that the party would not end on a sour note. It was rather spooky, but also transfigured by high spirits, alcohol, and madness. The victim finally agreed. “I’ll do it. But only douse my head,” he said. “I don’t want to sleep in wet pajamas again.” They promised, but of course, once he was under the pump they doused his whole body. “You assholes,” he shouted, but the Homeric laughter that greeted this left him no choice but to join in. It was an orgy of barbarity.