How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

In the spring of 1936, my grandmother, Ilse Stanley, had just returned from a theater tour that had kept her away from Berlin for almost the whole winter, only to discover a city in which “more and more friends were missing.” Soon after her return, a cousin arrived at her home. The Gestapo, her cousin told her, had taken her husband away to a concentration camp. In her 1957 memoir, The Unforgotten, my grandmother describes asking her cousin about the reasons for her husband’s arrest. Her answer: Because he was a criminal with a record. He had paid two fines in court: one for speeding and one for some other traffic fine. They said they finally wanted to do what the court had missed doing all these years: to get rid of all Jews with criminal records. A traffic fine—a criminal record!