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October 10 - November 1, 2022
The official name of the Nazi Party is the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), Mildred explains, or the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, “although it has nothing to do with socialism and the name itself is a lie. It thinks itself highly moral and like the Ku Klux Klan makes a campaign of hatred against the Jews.”
“Life seemed more free, more modern, more exciting than in any place I had ever seen.… The old oppressive Prussian spirit seemed to be dead and buried,” wrote the American journalist William Shirer, remembering the days when he was a young foreign correspondent in Berlin.
The Reichstag members cast their votes: 441 in favor, 84 against. This gives the Nazis far more than a two-thirds majority. In a spectacle of cowardice and political opportunism, the politicians support Hitler and pass a new law. Hitler calls it the “Law to Remove the Distress of People and Reich.” It will come to be known as the “Enabling Act.” In five short paragraphs, it guts what remains of the Weimar Constitution and transforms Germany into a dictatorship. And it’s all done legally. Not by armed revolution, not by a bloody coup. But in an opera house, among cherubs.
It’s essentially impossible to find a condom in Berlin or anywhere else in Germany. Contraception was readily available in major cities by the end of the Weimar Republic. Vending machines dispensed condoms in men’s public restrooms. Clinics provided free condoms. Now they’re illegal.
Over nineteen thousand women in leadership positions at the ministries and in regional and local government offices are immediately fired. Women lawyers are dismissed from firms. Women physicians are ousted from clinics. Restaurant owners are threatened by police if they don’t sack their waitresses and replace them with men.
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.”
The Münchener Post publishes articles with urgent headlines like GERMANY UNDER THE HITLER REGIME: POLITICAL MURDER AND TERROR and BRUTAL TERROR IN THE STREETS OF MUNICH and OUTLAWS AND MURDERERS IN POWER until Storm Troopers raid the editorial office and throw everyone in prison. One of the journalists, Fritz Gerlich, is transported to the concentration camp at Dachau, where he is murdered by the SS.
This, then, is the rationale for Dachau. It’s called a concentration camp because all the individuals who threaten the security of Germany are concentrated here.
Wealth does things to people, his father says, makes them cockeyed.
To be an American in Berlin is to turn a blind eye to atrocity.
He much prefers the “clear vodka, caviar, and trout in aspic” served at Russian embassy soirees to the “thin-blooded cocktails” and tasteless canapés he chokes down at American embassy events.
He tells Harro that his activities in the resistance are dangerous. And more—they’re treasonous. He is committing “a crime.” Harro’s winning smile fades. His eyes harden. “Inactivity,” Harro says, is “the greatest crime of all.”
This meeting marks the beginning of a resistance effort that will culminate when Ernst von Harnack, Klaus Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Justus Delbrück, and Hans von Dohnányi join forces with Oster, Canaris, Beck, and other high-ranking military officers. Code-named Walküre (Valkyrie), the plot will become the most historically well-known attempt to assassinate Hitler.
The Great Purge averages one thousand murders a day between 1936 and 1938. Because executions are carried out at night and mass graves are hidden, most of the population remains blissfully ignorant of Stalin’s killing spree.
At precisely the time in history when Stalin needs accurate, high-level intelligence about Hitler, he murders all the spies who could provide it.
This is a pattern that repeats again and again. As early as 1937, emissaries from the German resistance attempted to make contact with the U.S. and British governments and warn them about the threat Hitler poses to the rest of the world. But statesmen in the West remain profoundly skeptical that a German resistance actually exists.
As food shortages worsen, Berliners tell bad jokes: What’s the difference between India and Germany? In India one man starves for everybody. In Germany everybody starves for one man.
In Brussels, a pair of Moscow-trained agents set up an import-export company to serve as a cover for their espionage. They name their company Foreign Excellent Trench Coats.
