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

She had delicate, slender, and expressive hands, but they were two left hands, which never maste...

Greta was also baffled by the questions Mildred asked her during dinner: “Have you read about the struggles of the American worker?” “Do you want to see the Ford and Chevrolet plants?” “Do you know about the organizational structures capitalism has created?” Mildred, tremulous...

Mildred wasn’t a pampered American ice-skating princess. She had grown up poor. This surprised Greta, who had grown up poor too. Her father was a metalworker, her mother a seamstress.

Once, Goebbels aspired to be a writer. In 1921, at the age of twenty-four, Goebbels received a PhD (he wrote his dissertation on an obscure nineteenth-century playwright), and he struggled for several years to build a respectable career. He wrote a novel that no publisher would publish, two plays that no producer would produce, and when he turned his attention to journalism, no newspaper would hire him. When he encountered his idol Hitler, his luck began to change.

Goebbels wastes no time in setting up seven departments in the Reich Chamber of Culture to oversee Germany’s newspapers, film, radio, music, visual arts, theater, and literature. Germany’s celebrated free press is no more. Hundreds of newspapers are banned, and Jewish-owned publishing houses are forced out of business.

The Reich Chamber of Culture, under Goebbels’s ruthless eye, dictates what can and cannot be published.

Germany’s museums are purged of art that is not Germanic. Paintings by Cézanne, Picasso, van Gogh, Gauguin, and Matisse are no longer worthy of exhibition, as Hitler considers them too modern, too decadent, too degenerate.

The man who was twice rejected by art school will go on to cocurate an exhibition of “Great German Art,” held in a building he helped design, a feat of architecture that Hitler brags is “unparalleled and inimitable.”

Painters, writers, musicians, architects, producers, directors—anyone who is a Communist or a Social Democrat or suspected of being one is forbidden to work in these professions.

Goebbels seized on the notion that he could use radio to coax ideas into people’s heads, repeating again and again core messages of Hitler’s ideology. For the first time in history, Germans living in the most remote regions of the country could be reached, even the destitute and uneducated, even the apolitical. All it required was getting radios into their hands.

The People’s Radio was designed with a limited range to ensure that only German stations could be heard. Turning the dial to a station broadcasting from London was an exercise in frustration, the whistling static a reminder that the Nazi government didn’t want its citizens to hear news from other countries. Now that Germans were cut off from the rest of the world, Nazi propaganda would be all the more successful.

“It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio.” —Joseph Goebbels, August 18, 1933

Hitler’s latest revolution will fail too—this is what Mildred believes right now. She’s not alone. Arvid believes this, as do many of their friends who consider themselves politically astute. They’re convinced that Germans will revolt against this lunatic politician. It’s just a matter of time.

Hitler sits at the head of the table. “Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy,” he begins. “It is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority.” Hitler pledges to eliminate left-wing opponents and destroy trade unions.

When Hitler is done speaking, the host of the meeting, a shrewd economist named Hjalmar Schacht, asks the businessmen to reach into their wallets and support the Nazi cause. The businessmen fork over three million Reichsmark.

How does a dictator overthrow a democracy? Bullets and blood, usually. Violent revolution, military coup. Hitler does it differently.

The immigrant bricklayer is clearly part of a Communist plot, declares Göring, and tonight marks “the beginning of a Communist revolution.” “There will be no mercy now,” Hitler shouts. “Every Communist official will be shot where he is found! The Communist deputies must be hanged this very night! Everybody in league with the Communists must be arrested! There will no longer be any leniency for the Social Democrats either!”

approximately midnight, a mass arrest begins. Storm Troopers break into homes, drag men out of their beds, and deposit them in barracks and holding cells.

The next morning, Hitler uses the fire as a pretext to declare a national emergency, pressuring President Hindenburg to sign a decree that suspends indefinitely all seven sections of the Weimar Constitution guaranteeing basic civil liberties to Germans.

The order is called the “Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State,” and it grants the Nazi government the right to silence all opposition.

Six days ago, Hitler gutted the Weimar Constitution. He did it legally, right under everyone’s nose, without bullets or blood. Germans have lost nearly all their rights—all but one. They still have the right to vote. Germany is still a democracy, not a dictatorship.

In the days leading up to the election, Goebbels undertakes a massive publicity campaign. “Radio and press are at our disposal,” he writes in his diary. “We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda.”

At the polling sites, swastikas are on full display—on armbands, posters, flags, banners. Storm Troopers, the SS, and a paramilitary veterans’ army called the Stahlhelm—Steel Helmets—are monitoring the polls. Anyone who wants to cast a vote must walk past rows of armed Nazis. In the face of all this fearmongering and intimidation, Germans show up at the polls in droves. The voter turnout is 89 percent.

The Nazi Party gets 44 percent of the vote. Fifty-six percent of German voters cast their ballots for another party. A majority is required to pass any new law in the Reichstag, which puts Hitler in a pickle. Any law that supports the Nazi agenda will most likely be rejected.

The setting is strange enough, but it’s the law itself that is most unusual. It will put the members of the Reichstag out of work. Not permanently, Hitler assures them. Just for four years. Essentially, he’s asking the Reichstag to take a very long holiday.

One representative stands. He is Otto Wels, leader of the Social Democrats. Many of his friends and colleagues were arrested after the Reichstag fire. He speaks, according to Shirer, “quietly and with great dignity.” We German Social Democrats pledge ourselves solemnly in this historic hour to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom.

Wels refuses to support Hitler’s law. He urges his colleagues to do the same. No law, Wels tells Hitler, “can give you the power to destroy ideas which are eternal and indestructible.”

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, t...

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 arme...

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.

Across Germany, women lose their jobs. 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.

Young women are discouraged from going to college. A new quota restricts the number of women who can enroll in a German university to 10 percent. There were over eighteen thousand female university students in Germany before Hitler took power, a number that soon plummets to 5,447.

German women are urged to have as many children as possible. A bronze medallion etched with the words Ehrenzeichen der Deutschen Mutter—the Cross of Honor of the German Mother—is awarded to a woman on the birth of her fourth child. For her sixth child, the medallion is silver; for her eighth, gold.

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.”

Abortions are considered an act of sabotage against Germany’s future, but she can’t have a baby. Not now. She tells no one about the doctor’s appointment—no one except her mother. Georgina Fish mails the London doctor a check for fifty-six dollars. How she scraped together the money is a mystery.

She develops a sly technique. Others in the Circle use it too. Pretend you’re a Nazi. Don’t beat around the bush. Tell the shopkeeper or the factory worker or the friend of a friend that you admire something Hitler did or are otherwise sympathetic to Nazi policies and see how the person responds. “The object was to lead the other person to reveal his political attitude,” her recruit Wilhelm Utech remembered. “This ‘testing’ was to be carried out very carefully, so that we did not reveal ourselves prematurely and thus endanger our work.”

It is now a crime to criticize the Nazi government. The Malicious Practices Act prohibits Germans from expressing their disapproval about anything Hitler says or does. Even a joke could bring the Gestapo to your door.

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.

The words arrested and imprisoned are no longer used. Protective custody—Schutzhaft—is the term that the Nazi government prefers.

Critcal importance of language to political brainwashing. Brings to mind "collateral damage" instead of "murdered civilians".

Persuading Germans to fight back is getting increasingly difficult. The systematic prohibition of all forms of opposition—leaflets, posters, rallies, meetings, marches—is wildly effective. Many throw up their hands and say there is nichts dagegen zu machen—nothing to do about it.

Neither will Dietrich’s grandmother, who defied the April 1 boycott to buy a quarter pound of butter. When a Storm Trooper guarding the entrance of the store warned her not to buy butter from a Jew, the ninety-one-year-old woman rapped her cane against his jackboots and strode in, declaring, “I shall buy my butter where I always buy it.”

He’s in charge of the holding facility, which he calls a camp. The camp is located near a picturesque town called Dachau. This is the very first camp established under Hitler’s regime, he explains to the journalists. It will serve as a model for other camps.

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.

After the prisoners rebuild the crumbling brick buildings, he writes, they will be led out in small groups of about fifty men into the countryside, where extensive land cultivation projects wait to be implemented. Perhaps later some of the camp inmates will be offered the possibility of settling here.

Over the next twelve years, more than two hundred thousand people will be imprisoned in Dachau. An estimated forty thousand will die here.

The murders were not premeditated, he tells the journalists. The prisoners had been “auf der Flucht erschossen”—shot while trying to escape—a phrase that will soon become a shopworn Nazi euphemism for murder.

In the early days of the Nazi regime, Hitler targets political opponents first. There are twenty thousand political prisoners by March 1933. By the end of the year, over two hundred thousand Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists have been put in “protective custody” at concentration camps.

Mildred sees swastikas on cigarette packages, coffee cans, cake pans. Every day, Nazi propaganda disseminates misinformation and false promises. Every day, Hitler wins more German hearts and minds. And it’s all happening so fast.

The torches illuminate their faces. Their cheeks are smooth or pockmarked by acne. Their foreheads are unfurrowed by wrinkles. They are teenagers. They heap book after book onto the logs and hold their torches to them.

A gleeful Goebbels steps up to a podium adorned with swastikas. He addresses the students, hollering into a loudspeaker. The age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended… these flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era; they also light up the new!