The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

Almost all of them, led by Thomas Mann, emigrated; the few who remained were silent or were silenced.

Unlike the writers, most of the great figures of the German music world chose to remain in Nazi Germany and indeed lent their names and their talent to the New Order.

But because the musicians did not emigrate and because of Germany’s great treasure of classical music, one could hear during the days of the Third Reich symphony music and opera performed magnificently.

Because he had been an ardent Socialist his plays had been banned from the imperial theaters during Kaiser Wilhelm II’s time.

He, like so many other eminent Germans, had made his peace with Hitler, and Goebbels, a shrewd man, had made much effective propaganda out of it, tirelessly reminding the German people and the outside world that Germany’s greatest living playwright, a former Socialist and the champion of the common man, had not only remained in the Third Reich but had continued to write and have his plays produced.

“I was always determined,” he said in a long speech inaugurating the exhibition, “if fate ever gave us power, not to discuss these matters [of artistic judgment] but to make decisions.”

In another part of the city in a ramshackle gallery that had to be reached through a narrow stairway was an exhibition of “degenerate art” which Dr. Goebbels had organized to show the people what Hitler was rescuing them from.

In fact, the crowds besieging it became so great that Dr. Goebbels, incensed and embarrassed, soon closed it.

Every morning the editors of the Berlin daily newspapers and the correspondents of those published elsewhere in the Reich gathered at the Propaganda Ministry to be told by Dr. Goebbels or by one of his aides what news to print and suppress, how to write the news and headline it, what campaigns to call off or institute and what editorials were desired for the day.

The Reich Press Law of October 4, 1933, which made journalism a “public vocation,” regulated by law, stipulated that all editors must possess German citizenship, be of Aryan descent and not married to a Jew.

Founded in 1704 and numbering among its contributors in the past such names as Frederick the Great, Lessing and Rathenau, it had become the leading newspaper of Germany, comparable to the Times of London and the New York Times.

That the last three newspapers survived was due partly to the influence of the German Foreign Office, which wanted these internationally known journals as a kind of showpiece to impress the outside world.

In the first four years of the Third Reich the number of daily newspapers declined from 3,607 to 2,671.

As Reich Leader for the Press and president of the Press Chamber, he had the legal right to suppress any publication he pleased and the consequent power to buy it up for a song. In a short time the Eher Verlag became a gigantic publishing empire, probably the largest and most lucrative in the world.

One rash editor, Ehm Welke of the weekly Gruene Post, made the mistake of taking Amann and Goebbels seriously.

His publication was promptly suspended for three months and he himself dismissed by Goebbels and carted off to a concentration camp.

His task was made easier because in Germany, as in the other countries of Europe, broadcasting was a monopoly owned and operated by the State.

The customers stayed away in droves from the Nazi films and jammed the houses which showed the few foreign pictures (mostly B-grade Hollywood) which Goebbels permitted to be exhibited on German screens.

In those days, in the Thirties, a German listener could still turn his dial to a score of foreign radio stations without, as happened later when the war began, risking having his head chopped off. And perhaps quite a few did, though it was this observer’s impression that as the years went by, Dr. Goebbels proved himself right, in that the radio became by far the regime’s most effective means of propaganda, doing more than any other single instrument of communication to shape the German people to Hitler’s ends.

It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it.

Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.

“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’” he said in a speech on November 6, 1933, “I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.’”

To strengthen their ideology they were dispatched to special schools for intensive training in National Socialist principles, emphasis being put on Hitler’s racial doctrines.

Later, no man could teach who had not first served in the S.A., the Labor Service or the Hitler Youth.

Prior to 1933, the German public schools had been under the jurisdiction of the local authorities and the universities under that of the individual states. Now all were brought under the iron rule of the Reich Minister of Education.

The teaching of the natural sciences, in which Germany had been so pre-eminent for generations, deteriorated rapidly. Great teachers such as Einstein and Franck in physics, Haber, Willstaetter and Warburg in chemistry, were fired or retired.

They began to teach what they called German physics, German chemistry, German mathematics.

“‘But,’ it will be replied, ‘science is and remains international.’ It is false. In reality, science, like every other human product, is racial and conditioned by blood.”

It would be found, he said, that the “founders of research in physics, and the great discoverers from Galileo to Newton to the physical pioneers of our time, were almost exclusively Aryan, predominantly of the Nordic race.”

The Einstein theory, on which so much of modern physics is based, was to this singular Nazi professor “directed from beginning to end toward the goal of transforming the living—that is, the non-Jewish—world of living essence, born from a mother earth and bound up with blood, and bewitching it into spectral abstraction in which all individual differences of peoples and nations, and all inner limits of the races, are lost in unreality, and in which only an unsubstantial diversity of geometric dimensions survives which produces all events out of the compulsion of its godless subjection to laws.”

And yet from 1905 to 1931 ten German Jews had been awarded Nobel Prizes for their contributions to science.

During the Second Reich, the university professors, like the Protestant clergy, had given blind support to the conservative government and its expansionist aims, and the lecture halls had been breeding grounds of virulent nationalism and anti-Semitism.

By 1932 the majority of students appeared to be enthusiastic for Hitler.

Though official figures put the number of professors and instructors dismissed during the first five years of the regime at 2,800—about one fourth of the total number—the proportion of those who lost their posts through defying National Socialism was, as Professor Wilhelm Roepke, himself dismissed from the University of Marburg in 1933, said, “exceedingly small.”

Most of them emigrated, first to Switzerland, Holland and England and eventually to America.

And as Professor Julius Ebbinghaus, looking back over the shambles in 1945, said, “The German universities failed, while there was still time, to oppose publicly with all their power the destruction of knowledge and of the democratic state. They failed to keep the beacon of freedom and right burning during the night of tyranny.”

The decline in enrollment at the institutes of technology, from which Germany got its scientists and engineers, was even greater—from 20,474 to 9,554.

By 1937 there was not only a shortage of young men in the sciences and engineering but a decline in their qualifications.

Not only the national economy but national defense itself was being jeopardized, it complained, and it blamed the shortage of young scientists and their mediocre caliber on the poor quality of the technical colleges. Nazi Germany’s loss, as it turned out, was the free world’s gain, especially in the race to be the first with the atom bomb. The story of the successful efforts of Nazi leaders, led by Himmler, to hamstring the atomic-energy program is too long and involved to be recounted here. It was one of the ironies of fate that the development of the bomb in the United States owed so much to two men who had been exiled because of race from the Nazi and Fascist dictatorships: Einstein from Germany and Fermi from Italy. To Adolf Hitler it was not so much the public schools, from which he himself had dropped out so early in life, but the organizations of the Hitler Youth on which he counted to educate the youth of Germany for the ends he had in mind.

The concordat of July 20, 1933, had specifically provided for the unhindered continuance of the Catholic Youth Association. On December 1, 1936, Hitler decreed a law outlawing it and all other non-Nazi organizations for young people.

Parents found guilty of trying to keep their children from joining the organization were subject to heavy prison sentences even though, as in some cases, they merely objected to having their daughters enter some of the services where cases of pregnancy had reached scandalous proportions.

Each youngster was given a performance book in which would be recorded his progress through the entire Nazi youth movement, including his ideological growth.

Recalcitrant parents were warned that their children would be taken away from them and put into orphanages or other homes unless they enrolled.

In these, with their atmosphere of the castles of the Order of Teutonic Knights of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were trained the elite of the Nazi elite. The knightly order had been based on the principle of absolute obedience to the Master, the Ordensmeister, and devoted to the German conquest of the Slavic lands in the East and the enslavement of the natives.

There, within the walls of the very Order Castle which had been a stronghold of the Teutonic Knights five centuries before, his political and military training was concentrated on the Eastern question and Germany’s need (and right!) of expanding into the Slavic lands in its eternal search for Lebensraum—an excellent preparation, as it turned out and no doubt was meant to turn out, for the events of 1939 and thereafter.

And there was no doubt that the practice of bringing the children of all classes and walks of life together, where those who had come from poverty or riches, from a laborer’s home or a peasant’s or a businessman’s, or an aristocrat’s, shared common tasks, was good and healthy in itself.

According to a writer in the Frankfurter Zeitung, his situation was worse than at any time since the disastrous Peasants’ War of 1524–25 devastated the German land.

In 1938, after five years of Nazi rule, land distribution remained more lopsided than in any other country in the West.

The Nazi dictatorship, like the Socialist-bourgeois governments of the Republic, did not dare to break up the immense feudal estates of the Junkers, which lay to the east of the Elbe.

To carry it out Hitler appointed Walther Darré, one of the few party leaders who, though he subscribed to most of the Nazi myths, knew his field professionally and well.