All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler

by Rebecca Donner

Hitler claimed to enjoy the publicity (“It makes no difference whatever whether they laugh at us or revile us,” he wrote in Mein Kampf, “whether they represent us as clowns or criminals; the main thing is that they mention us”),

With few exceptions, the men who are running the government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.

Consul General Messerschmidt describing nazi government. Or Trump’s.

What’s burning the night of January 30, 1933, are torches—twenty thousand of them. It’s a Nazi victory parade. The celebration begins at seven p.m. and lasts six hours.

Vice-Chancellor Papen belongs to a right-wing Catholic party known as the Zentrum. He has convinced President Hindenburg, an independent, that a cabinet chock-full of conservatives who, to varying degrees, distrust and even disdain the Nazi Party will surely keep Hitler in check.

Chancellor Hitler is a tool in the hands of the nationalist conservatives. This is what many believe, including both liberal and conservative politicians in the Reichstag and editors of major German newspapers and the international press. Hitler may run the cabinet meetings, but he’s not the man in charge.

And while all media is put in the service of spreading Hitler’s ideology, it is radio that will become the Nazi government’s most powerful instrument of propaganda.

“The feminization of men always leads to the masculinization of women,” he says, and the net result is profound despair for both sexes. “A fundamental change is necessary!” Goebbels bellows into the microphone: The first, best, and most suitable place for the woman is in the family, and her most glorious duty is to give children to her people and nation, children who can continue the line of generations and who guarantee the immortality of the nation!

Kindersegen—women blessed with children—are praised as national heroines. You see them everywhere, on posters, in magazines: images of young blond smiling women cradling numerous cherubic babies.

Newspapers carry stories about German gynecologists facing criminal charges. Gynecologists may receive the death penalty if they are found guilty of terminating an unwanted pregnancy, but only if the woman is Aryan, “racially pure.” There is no penalty for terminating the pregnancy of a woman who is “racially inferior.”

Hitler orders the Ministry of Justice to retroactively legalize what has happened, promising to deliver a speech that will explain everything.

The violence was a “spontaneous demonstration” by ordinary citizens who were outraged after reading a newspaper article about a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew who had shot someone at the German embassy in Paris several days earlier. The teenager, Goebbels explains, had been “systematically trained” to commit this crime by a “Jewish organization.”

Blaming riots on antifa