Stand By Your Nazi Man

 

James Wyllie, Nazi Wives:

The Women at the Top of Hitler’s Germany (St Martin’s, Press) 

With the proliferation of literature about seemingly every aspect of Adolph Hitler’s Nazi regime, women have hardly been overlooked.  One of the leading works is Wendy Lower’s Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, a nuanced study of women who joined the Nazi cause and in surprising numbers abetted willingly and enthusiastically the Holocaust, the Nazi project to exterminate Europe’s Jews (reviewed here in 2016).  But according to freelance British journalist and screenwriter James Wyllie, there has never been an in-depth study of the wives of the most notorious Nazis,  a gap he seeks to fill in Nazi Wives: The Women at the Top of Hitler’s Germany.  The absence of a serious study of the top Nazi wives, Wyllie contends, bolsters the claim made after World War II that they were helpless bystanders as the Nazi terror unfolded.  Wyllie seeks to refute this claim.  A close look at the women who married the leading Nazis also yields important insights into the nature of Nazi rule and the psychology of its leaders, he argues.

In Nazi Germany, the ideal woman was above all expected to be a child bearer, adding to the stock of the master Aryan race, while remaining compliant and subservient to her  husband.  Although supporting the goals and aspirations of the Third Reich, the Nazi woman was to be largely apolitical, with the serious questions of politics reserved for the men.  Concentrating on six women, Wyllie aims to demonstrate how the wives of Nazi leaders adhered in varying degrees to these standards, yet used their positions near the top of the party hierarchy to involve themselves, directly or indirectly, in the Nazi project.

Wyllie profiles: Isle Hess, wife of Rudolf Hess, Adolph Hitler’s chief deputy until he flew a solo mission to Scotland in 1941 in an attempt to negotiate peace with Great Britain; Magda Goebbels, married to chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels; Margaret Himmler, wife of Heinrich Himmler, head of the Schutzsaffell, the SS, the German paramilitary security unit, and a chief architect and implementer of the Holocaust; Gerda Bormann, whose husband Martin served as Hitler’s private secretary; Emmy Goering, second wife of Hermann Goering, commander-in-chief of the German Air Force, the Lutwaffe; and Lina Heydrich, married to Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s chief deputy in the SS who shared responsibility for design and implementation of the Holocaust and served as administrator of annexed Czechoslovakia until assassinated in Prague in 1942.  Also featured are Goering’s Swedish first wife Carin, perhaps the most fanatical Nazi among the women depicted in the book, who died early in her husband’s career; and Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress who became his wife 36 hours before both took their own lives in a Berlin bunker as the Red Army moved in on the shattered capital.

Wyllie has amassed an impressive amount of information about these women, arranged in rough chronological order against the backdrop of familiar events, beginning with the Nazis’ rise from obscurity to power in post-World War I Germany, through their defeat in 1945, and ending in the early post-World War II era.  He goes into strikingly intimate detail: how they met their husbands, in some cases when the couple first had sex together, how their marriages functioned and malfunctioned, how they squabbled among themselves, and the children each couple reared.

The six women came from similar backgrounds.  All were reasonably well educated, raised in conservative middle-class families, Catholic and Protestant.  They were inculcated with what Wyllie describes as a sense of “strident patriotism” (p.10), based on a belief in the superiority of German culture, a hatred of socialism and a “fear that the unruly masses would devour them” (p.10).  They came of age in the “profoundly insecure and volatile circumstances” of post-World War I Germany.  “Old certainties were gone,” writes Wyllie. “The civilized conventions of their parents’ generation appeared increasingly irrelevant.  Cut adrift, they each gravitated towards a self-styled savior who promised the world” (p.11).

That savior was of course Adolph Hitler, the Führer.  In a study of women, Hitler is unavoidably the book’s core character.  Each of the women Wyllie portrays had a different relationship to the Führer, but all were able to “enjoy their many privileges and their gilded lifestyles because Hitler allowed them to” (p.264-65).  Consequently, Wyllie   probes each woman’s relationship to Hitler.  “Any power the top Nazi wives had was entirely dependent on his goodwill,” he asserts.  “One false move was enough to ruin them; Hitler could reduce them to nothing with the wave of his hand”  (p.265).

But Wyllie also probes the women’s relationship to the Nazi regime, examining their ideological side, their anti-Semitism, and the degree to which they were aware of the gruesome details of the Nazi project.   After the Nazi defeat, none who survived evinced  willingness to accept responsibility for the havoc and destruction their husbands had wreaked upon Germany and Europe.  But these weighty questions are relegated mostly to the final chapters and seem secondary to the mundane and sometimes prurient details of the women’s personal lives.

** *

Hitler abstained from marriage and a normal family life because he considered himself married to the German people, the reason his relationship with Eva Braun was kept under wraps and largely out of public view (long-standing readers of this blog will recall my 2013 review  of two biographies of Braun).  When off duty, the Führer preferred the company of women and took great interest in the top Nazi wives, an interest “bound up with his need for an extended family” (p.264).  He was “more relaxed and comfortable in the company of women, as long as they openly and unconditionally adored him, didn’t discuss politics and conformed to the stereotypes he found attractive” (p.265).

When necessary, the Führer played the role of matchmaker and marriage counselor for his extended family.  Hitler coaxed Deputy Führer Rudolph Hess into popping the question with an impatient Isle Pröhl.  Isle had been involved with the procrastinating Hess for more than seven years, in a relationship Wyllie describes as sexless, held together primarily by the couple’s “unquestioning enthusiasm for Hitler’s poisonous ideology” (p.18).  The couple married in a small civil ceremony in December 1927, with Hitler serving as a witness.

The Führer took a different route to coax Magda Quant into marriage with his chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels.  Magda, “sophisticated, multilingual, well-travelled, elegant, poised, at ease in elevated company and never short of male admirers” (p.43), had been married and was divorced when she first met Joseph while working in his propaganda department.  From the beginning it was a volatile relationship, in no small measure because Joseph rejected monogamy as an “outdated bourgeois convention” and “made no secret of his own insatiable sexual appetite” (p.50), yet could not abide the thought of Magda with another man.

Hitler at least fantasized about having a clandestine affair with Magda and concluded that he might enhance his seductive fantasy if she were married.  Magda, no doubt infatuated with the Führer, appeared willing to enter a triangular relationship that would involve marrying the chief Nazi propagandist.  We don’t learn whether Hitler’s interest in Magda ever progressed beyond fantasy, but Magda and Joseph married in 1931, with Hitler again serving as a witness.

When Joseph’s affair with a Czech actress took the couple to the cusp of divorce, the Führer intervened, bringing the couple together at his mountain retreat, the Berghof, where he made “brutally clear” (p.192) that they would have to mend their marriage and Joseph would have to stop seeing his Czech paramour; otherwise, both would lose their exalted places in the Nazi hierarchy.  The couple got the message and stayed together.  Their marriage produced six children, all of whom they infamously killed before themselves committing suicide in the final days of the Third Reich.

Magda Goebbels appears to have been the only one of the six Nazi wives who did not genuinely love and admire her husband. But she was hardly the only one whose marriage was tested by her husband’s extramarital affairs. Margaret Boden, a Red Cross nurse, married SS chief Heinrich Himmler, eight years younger.  After having a daughter and adopting a son together, her dour husband fell in love with his twenty-six-year-old secretary, Hedwig.  She and the SS chief had two children together.  Although Heinrich spent most of his spare time with Hedwig and his new family, he regularly wrote tender love letters to Margaret and delivered presents to her and their children.  At Christmas 1944, with the Nazi war machine in full retreat, Margaret expressed in her diary how proud she was that “all of Germany” (p.218) looked up to her husband.

Gerda Buch, daughter of Walter Buch, a high-ranking military officer in World War I who fell under Hitler’s spell in the aftermath of the war, met Hitler when she was a teenager and called him “Uncle Adolf.”   From an early age, Gerda “lived and breathed Hitler’s ideology.  It was second nature to her” (p.266).  Through her father, Gerda met Martin Borman, who surely calculated that an “association with the daughter of such a prominent Nazi could only smooth his passage through the ranks of the party” (p.40). When the couple wed, Hitler and Hess served as witnesses.

Gerda, Wyllie’s nomination for the  wife who adhered most closely to ideal Nazi feminine standards, had seven children with Martin, even while her husband pursued liaisons with multiple women during the couple’s married life and probably abused his wife physically.  Gerda didn’t fight back, didn’t seek help, and didn’t confide in anyone else.  She believed it was her duty to obey her husband, and “there’s every indication that she was truly devoted to Bormann” (p.96-97).

Gerda also befriended Himmler’s mistress Hedwig.  That Himmler was married to another woman was in Gerda’s view the natural way men were, the “healthy expression of a man’s biological need to reproduce” (p.202).  She had the same attitude toward her husband and his serial extra-marital affairs. When Martin departed from his usual habit of short stands by falling for an actress—one who had previously rejected Goebbels’ advances—Gerda was oddly unopposed to the affair.  She seems to have conceived of a ménage-à-trois where the two women would produce children for Martin, thereby contributing to Germany’s efforts to increase its sagging national birthrate.

* * *

The Nazi leadership was notorious for its infighting, bureaucratic rivalries, and sharp competition for the Führer’s favor.  It is thus no surprise that sharp competition also marked many of the relationships between the wives of the top leadership.  The Nazi wives competed continually for the informal moniker of “First Lady” of Nazi Germany, a contest to which Wyllie returns repeatedly.  Eva Braun, although recognized as the alter ego of the Führer among the women at the Berghof, was kept under wraps and never part of the competition (Braun was nevertheless often quite assertive among the women at the Berghof).  Once the Nazis seized power in 1933, Magda Goebbels was the obvious candidate to assume this public role.  She gave the first Nazi Mother’s Day address via national radio, and, with her husband and their children, was constantly photographed as the “perfect Nazi family” (p.75).

But the Goebbels’ marital difficulties left Magda open to competition from Emmy Goering, Herman’s second wife and an accomplished actress.  While all the Nazi wives lived well during the 1930s and most of the war years, the Goerings were in a class by themselves for  unabashed opulence.   Their vast estate, known as “Carinhall” after the deceased Carin, dwarfed the accommodations of the other top Nazis.  The couple’s lavish lifestyle attracted much public attention.  For a while during the mid-1930s, Emmy and Herman became the Nazis’ “first couple” (p.80).

But if Emmy’s increasingly high profile was a “direct challenge to Magda’s status as the First Lady of the Reich” (p.75), Magda was able to hold on to her title because Hitler never warmed to Emmy.  Among the top wives, she was the “least interested in Nazism” (p.267).  Hitler didn’t disparage or criticize her, but he was “never relaxed around her either,” Wyllie indicates. “There was none of the intimacy or the meeting of minds that he experienced with Magda” (p.84-85).

The fiercest rivalry was between Lina Heydrich and Margaret Himmler, whose husbands forged a surprisingly close working relationship as top SS brass until Reinhard was assassinated in Prague in 1942, leaving Lina a widow.  Before her husband’s death, Lina yearned to be the most influential SS wife, a position Margaret held by virtue of her husband’s lead role in the SS.  Lina “couldn’t bear playing second fiddle to a woman for whom she had nothing but contempt.  Lina thought Margaret was inferior to her in every way and never missed an opportunity to ruthlessly put her down” (p.113).  She sabotaged Margaret’s efforts to host regular tea parties for SS wives.  Margaret, less outspoken than Lina, sought to have her husband tell Lina’s husband that he should divorce Lina.

But for all the energy the two women expended sniping at one another, Wyllie describes both as “snobs” who “looked down their noses at most of humanity” (p.266).  Moreover, the two women shared a fervent anti-Semitism.  Margaret, visiting the Eastern Front, reacted to the “Jew trash” she saw — “most of them don’t even look like human beings” (p.169).    As a young woman, Lina loathed the Polish Jews who had settled in her Baltic fishing village: “to her, they were like an alien species.” Later, when she lived on an estate outside Prague, according to one of the estate’s Jewish prisoners, she “spat at her workers, calling them ‘Jewish pig[s]’” (p.209).

* * *

All but Magda Goebbels survived the war and each found herself alone in the post war era.  Along with Joseph Goebbels, Himmler and Goering took their own lives, and Bormann likely did the same.  Hess remained imprisoned until his death in 1987.  Although the Allies’ post-war justice system treated the women lightly, all engaged in denial and deception over their roles and those of their husbands in the Nazi project.  Margaret Himmler told an American journalist she had seen press coverage about the death camps and “knew her husband would be blamed.”  She told the journalist she was “just a woman” who “did not understand politics” (p.245).

Lina Heydrich wrote a book, candid and in its own way “disarmingly honest” (p.253).  She was unapologetic about the ideological convictions she shared with her husband, and shameless about their racism, while downplaying her husband’s direct involvement in the Holocaust.  Lina was obsessed by the idea that her husband was being treated “unfairly by posterity.”  He was being judged harshly for acts he considered an “unavoidable political necessity,” as she put it.  It was all too easy to condemn the “decisions of those times from today’s warm bed” (p.252), Lina wrote.

Emmy Goering wrote a spirited a defense of her husband, My Life with Goering, which avoided the issues that had marked her husband’s career.  Hermann’s  only crime had been loyalty to Hitler, she contended.  A woman in love “thinks only of her partner’s success, and it is of little importance to her how he obtains it” (p.261).  But among the top Nazi wives, Emmy came closest to expressing an iota of remorse about what the Nazis had done and the extent to which she and her husband may have been responsible.

“I often wonder now,” Emmy wrote, if we should not have been “a little more vigilant and when we saw injustices being done, if we should not have put up stronger resistance, especially to Hitler over the Jewish question” (p.261).   Wyllie characterizes Emmy’s uneasiness as “willful blindness,” which was “not accidental” but rather “typical of many Germans who benefited from the regime and preferred to ignore its brutal excesses and look the other way, rationalizing their lack of resistance and passive complicity” (p.267).  In an account heavy on the minutiae of the personal lives of the top Nazi wives, “willful blindness” may be the most apt common denominator tying those lives together.

Thomas H. Peebles

La Châtaigneraie, France

December 7, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Advertisement

Apolitical Technocrat or War Criminal?

 

Martin Kitchen, Speer: Hitler’s Architect 

            Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s chief architect who also served as Nazi Germany’s Minister of Armaments from 1942 up to the end of World War II, was one of 24 high level officials placed on trial by the victorious allies at the International Military Tribunal, which met from November 1945 to October 1946 in Nuremberg, Germany.  The Nuremberg defendants were charged under a common indictment with four general counts: 1) participating in a common plan or conspiracy against peace; 2) planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; 3) war crimes; and 4) crimes against humanity.  Ten of Speer’s fellow defendants received the death penalty.  In a compromise verdict among the court’s eight judges — two each from the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union — Speer was acquitted on the first two counts, found guilty on the last two, and sentenced to a 20-year prison term, which he served at Berlin’s Spandau Prison until 1966.  Speer considered his sentence outrageously severe: he had seen himself as a primary candidate to lead the effort to rebuild a New Germany after the war and felt that he was being punished for the honesty and candor he had demonstrated at Nuremberg.

            That apparent honesty and candor had made a strong initial impression upon the British and American interrogators who had interviewed Speer prior to the trial, including Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper and Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Speer impressed his interrogators with what seemed like genuine remorse for his participation in the Nazi war effort.  He offered his assistance to Great Britain and the United States in bringing the war against Japan to a quick conclusion and expressed his willingness to work with the British and American governments to prevent valuable inside information on the German armaments industry from falling into the hands of the Soviet Union.  But Speer also impressed his interrogators by being the antithesis of the stereotypical Nazi official: he was articulate and refined, with a sense of culture and history, anything but the boorish, psychopathic thug that most people outside Germany associated with Nazi leadership.

              At the Nuremberg trial, Speer cast himself as an apolitical technocrat thrust into a role in the armaments industry which he had not sought, and emphasized how untamed technology was more responsible for the catastrophe of World War II than the Western Allies had realized.  He explained how, as Armaments Minister, he had concluded by late 1943 that the war was lost, and that in late 1944 and early 1945 had courageously countered Hitler’s order that German soldiers destroy everything in reach as they retreated – sometimes referred to as Hitler’s “Nero Order” – thereby saving many lives and substantial property.

          Perhaps because of his refined personal qualities and his refreshing differences from the stereotypical Nazi, neither his interrogators nor the prosecutors who presented the case against him probed in any depth into the labor conditions in the armaments operations that Speer controlled, or what he had or had not done to counter the Nazi project to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population. Speer professed to have had no knowledge of the appalling mistreatment of the hundreds of thousands of unfortunates who had worked for him and to have been unaware of the fate of the European Jews.  He told the Nuremberg judges that he was willing to accept “responsibility” for his role in Nazi war crimes, but not “guilt.”  He admitted that he should have known about the Holocaust and the extent of other Nazi crimes, but he did not. His were errors of omission rather than commission, which he maintained were less reprehensible.

            If Speer was incensed by the harshness of the 20-year sentence he received at Nuremberg, British-Canadian historian Martin Kitchen considers the sentence almost unconscionably lenient.  In Speer: Hitler’s Architect, Kitchen, who has written extensively on Germany, World War II and the Cold War, contends that Speer was fortunate to escape the death sentences that befell many other members of Hitler’s inner circle, including Martin Bormann, Herman Göring and Fritz Sauckel, who had worked hand-in-hand with Speer in recruiting the labor force for the armaments industry during the war.  Kitchen writes throughout this exhaustively researched biography with the fervor of a man on a mission: to deflate what might be termed the “Speer myth” that Speer successfully cultivated at Nuremberg and afterwards as a refined and repentant former Nazi with no knowledge of the appalling labor conditions in the armaments industry or of the fate of European Jewry.  To the contrary, Kitchen argues, Speer was an “active participant in Nazi crimes” (p.364), one of the Third Reich’s leading criminals.

              It is “utterly inconceivable,” Kitchen writes, that a man in Speer’s position “knew nothing of the persecution of the Jews or the ill-treatment of the slave laborers that had the misfortune to work under him” (p.334).  Speer’s attempt to cast himself as a “conscience-stricken prophet in a technological wilderness” was a “sham” (p.364). Speer was “particularly frightening” because he was not a thuggish and boorish Nazi.  A “hollow man, resolutely bourgeois, highly intelligent, totally lacking in moral vision, unable to question the consequences of his actions and without scruples,” Speer was the “outstanding representative of a widespread type that made the regime possible.” The Third Reich “would never have been so deadly effective had it relied on the adventurers, thugs, half-crazed ideologues, racist fanatics and worshippers of Germanic deities that people the public image of the regime” (p.371).

          Readers hoping to glean an understanding of Speer’s character through information about his childhood or as the father of six children are likely to be disappointed by Kitchen’s account. Speer’s personal life barely figures in Kitchen’s 350 plus pages.  His book is almost exclusively about what Speer did after he said good-bye to the wife and kids in the morning and went off to work.  After an initial chapter on Speer’s early life, the book’s remaining 13 chapters can be divided into three parts: 1) Speer’s role as Hitler’s architect; 2) his work as Armaments Minister; and 3) his post-war life up to his death in 1981. The chapters on the German wartime armaments industry are by far the most extensive, with considerably more about bureaucratic in fighting and the manipulation of production statistics than most general readers will feel they need to know.

          But the chapters on Speer the architect and as Armaments Minster serve as a predicate for Kitchen’s assessment of Speer in his post-war life and his protracted effort to reinvent himself, at Nuremberg, during his twenty-year prison term, and in the 15 years that remained to him until his death in 1981.  The chapters on the post-war Speer have much of the tone and flavor of a prosecutor’s closing argument, where Kitchen seems to ask his readers to serve as jurors and render a judgment for the court of history on Speer and his carefully cultivated self-image in light of the facts presented about the man’s work in Hitler’s Third Reich.

* * *

         Albert Speer was born in Mannheim, Germany in 1905 into a Protestant family of comfortable means.  At age 22, he married Marguerite (“Gretel”) Weber, to whom he stayed married for the rest of his life. Although the workings of the marriage are almost entirely absent from Kitchen’s account, we learn in the initial chapter that Speer’s parents, who had a distant and generally cold relationship with their son, did not approve of his relationship with Gretel and did not meet her until seven years into the marriage. The couple had six children together, but we learn almost nothing about Speer’s relationship with any of them, other than that it was cold and distant, much like his relationship to his own parents.

            In March 1931, Speer joined Adolph Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party as Party Comrade 474,481. There is ample evidence that Speer’s attitude toward National Socialism was “far from being lukewarm” (p.22).  Although neither an ideologue nor anything more than an “instinctive anti-Semite,” Speer was an opportunist who utilized his party connections to make his rise to power possible. “In this too he was typical of the well-educated and skilled middle class that gave the Third Reich its compliant support, despite some reservations and occasional feelings of remorse” (p.24), Kitchen writes.

               Through chief Nazi Party propagandist Joseph Goebbels, Speer met Adolph Hitler in early 1933, shortly after Hitler had come to power. Over the course of the next twelve years, Speer remained a particular favorite of the Führer, forming with his boss the “closest thing to a friendship that Hitler ever managed to enjoy” (p.42).  When Paul Troost, Hitler’s architect, died suddenly in 1934, Hitler appointed the 28 year old Speer to succeed Trost.

            Speer was in Kitchen’s estimation at best a mediocre architect, lacking in creativity.  But Hitler sought a conversational partner to listen attentively to his grandiose ideas about architecture: “massive atavistic cult monuments that were a defiant rejection of modernity” (p.33), and “vast monuments to his boundless imperial ambitions” (p.34).  Speer filled that role perfectly. He gave “precise and direct answers to all his [Hitler’s] many questions. He never made the slightest attempt to curry favor. He appeared not to be intimidated by his immense power and prestige. Hitler admired his impeccable manners and self-confidence. He was a pleasant contrast to the toadying courtiers, adulating acolytes and heel-clicking automata in his customary entourage” (p.41).

        Speer was initially charged with designing a vast new chancellery in Berlin, a structure “designed to overawe and intimidate by its sheer size” (p.4). Then, in 1937, he was appointed General Building Inspector (GBI) for Berlin, with the task of drawing up plans for a New Berlin, grandiosely termed “Germania.”  In that capacity, Speer coordinated the seizure, exploitation and allocation of Jewish assets after the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. The GBI handed over some 10,000 Jews to Heinrich Himmler’s SS, “to be shipped to what was delicately described as ‘the East’” (p.96). An essential part of Speer’s plans to rebuild Berlin involved the creation of new concentration camps to quarry the stone and make the bricks for the Germania project.  In close collaboration with the SS, Speer ruthlessly exploited the labor of concentration camp inmates working in inhumane conditions. “There is no evidence that Speer and his colleagues showed the slightest sign of concern or even interest as to their fate” (p.95), Kitchen writes. National Socialist monumental architecture was thus “inextricably linked to the oppression, terror and murderous intent of Himmler’s SS” (p.73). From at least the time when he became GBI, Speer and his team of planners and architects were “intimately involved in the ‘Final Solution’” (p.100).

           Speer stepped into his position as Minister of Armaments when Fritz Todt, the minister at the war’s outset,  was killed  in an airplane accident in February 1942 under mysterious circumstances.  That Speer had no expertise in the armament field was a plus for Hitler, who “detested experts” and considered Speer a “loyal vassal, who would never dare step out of line” (p.121). Kitchen credits Speer with having exceptional organizational talent and being a generally effective bureaucrat, with a flair for besting rivals in inter-agency turf wars.  He “knew how to pick a team, delegate responsibility and deliver the goods” (p.35).  Speer was aware that with “virtually unlimited access to Hitler he held the key to power in the Third Reich. . . His closeness to Hitler enabled him to show scant concern for established rules of procedure or legal constraints” (p.122). Within a few weeks of becoming Minister of Armaments, Speer had made himself into “one of them most powerful figures in the Third Reich” (p.133-34).

        Hitler gave Speer authority to shut down all branches of industry that were not directly or indirectly connected to armaments and supported him in almost all instances.  By mid-1943, Speer had acquired “virtually dictatorial powers over the economy at home and in the occupied territories. . . His powers extended from the Soviet Union, Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to Luxembourg, Alsace Lorraine, Carinthia, Carniola and Lower Syria” (p.177-78).  Although Speer may have concluded in this time frame that the war was hopelessly lost, as he subsequently claimed at Nuremberg, this was not the message he was delivering to those working under him and to the Führer himself.

      Speer continually emphasized how will power could overcome all obstacles to victory, aided by forthcoming “miracle weapons.” The worse the situation on the ground became, the “greater the emphasis on ‘miracle weapons’ that would soon become operational and turn the tables on the enemy. Speer did all he could to raise expectations, even appointing a special propaganda section within his ministry to trumpet future wonders” (p.253).  Kitchen has no doubt that Speer “did indeed help to prolong the war longer than many thought possible, as a result of which millions were killed and Germany reduced to a pile of rubble” (p.364-66).

            Kitchen contends that Speer’s resistance to Hitler’s “Nero Order,” in which the Führer ordered the destruction of areas not likely to be regained in light of the Allied advances in both the East and West, was far less courageous than Speer made it seem at Nuremberg.  A “scorched earth policy was never a viable option. The Germans lacked the time, the manpower and the explosives to carry out demolition on this scale” (p.255).   Industrialists, bankers and the business elite, along with substantial portions of the military and the civil administration, all “refused to accept the preposterous notion that there was no alternative to national suicide” (p.265).  Speer had the support of the vast majority of the German people, who wanted “nothing more than an end to all the misery and suffering. He also had the distinct advantage that the communications network had broken down.  Orders from Hitler’s bunker seldom reached the front line” (p.265).

           In close collaboration with Fritz Sauckel, Speer used laborers, including POWs, as needed in his armament operations.  As in the projects for Berlin, Himmler once again supplied Speer and Sauckel with much of the labor they needed from the slave labor camps his SS maintained. Himmler viewed the camps as instruments of oppression to punish the state’s enemies and eliminate undesirables — “annihilation through work” (p.39) was his mantra.   Speer took the more pragmatic view that starving workers to death was “not an effective way to run a business” (p.153). But Speer “needed workers, which Himmler had in ample supply” (p.73).

        At Nuremberg, Speer pointed the finger at Sauckel as being responsible for the inhumane working conditions in the armaments industry. Sauckel was “crude and uneducated, lacked style and had a grating personality.” He stood in sharp contrast to Speer, “handsome, suave, polite, cultured and solidly bourgeois” (p.311). These differences, in Kitchen’s view, account for the difference in sentencing of the two men: the death penalty for Sauckel versus 20 years in Spandau prison for Speer.

          Kitchen describes Speer’s defense at Nuremberg as “masterly,” presenting himself as a “diligent minister who stuck to the immediate tasks at hand, leaving politics to others” (p.286). Speer’s decision to accept “overall responsibility” for Nazi crimes but not “guilt” – which Kitchen terms an “empty formula” (p.363) — was contrary to what his lawyer wanted but turned out to be a “brilliant move that saved him from the hangman’s noose” (p.286). Speer remained calm throughout the trial, “convincing all who witnessed his performance that he stood apart from his more unsavory colleagues” (p.286-87).  But the reason he did not receive the death penalty at Nuremberg was that “no mention was made of his treatment of the Jews in Berlin” and that his “close cooperation with Himmler, the SS and the concentration camps was overlooked” (p.312).

          After he left Spandau prison in 1966, Speer continued to reinvent his past, claiming to have been victimized by an evil system and by the “phantom of technology that had enslaved him.” It was an “extraordinary achievement for a man who was responsible for so many deaths to present himself to the world as a guiltless innocent,” Kitchen concludes, “and to have been so astonishingly successful in getting away with it” (p.328).

* * *

      Kitchen presents a highly-convincing case that Speer was indeed lucky to have escaped a death sentence at Nuremberg.  The self-image which Speer so carefully cultivated — an “apolitical penitent, unaware of the crimes committed by the regime he served, an innocent victim of a remorseless technocratic age” (p.9), as Kitchen phrases it — had begun to crumble well before Kitchen’s fervently argued book.  But with Kitchen’s assiduous compilation from a more complete factual record than what had previously been available, there is little likelihood that  Speer’s implausibly benign self-image will be taken seriously anytime in the foreseeable future.

Thomas H. Peebles

Paris, France

March 26, 2018

 

 

 

 

Discovering Humanistic Culture in the Land of Hitler and Himmler

Joachim Fest, Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood,
translated by Martin Chalmers

      It is nearly impossible to reflect upon the Nazi period in Germany without asking how this exceptionally cultured country could sink to such unprecedented levels of barbarity.  This reflection upon what might be termed Germany’s “duality” – the land of Beethoven and Bach, Goethe and Schiller becoming the land of Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels — is so commonplace as to be a platitude.  But it is also the main thread tying together Joachim Fest’s engaging memoir, Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood, recently translated into English.  Fest, born in Germany in 1926, went on after World War II to become a respected historian, one of a handful of Germans who wrote openly about his country’s descent into barbarity during the Nazi period.  His works include a biography of Adolf Hitler and books about Albert Speer and the German resistance to Nazism.  Fest was 7 years old when the Nazis came to power in 1933 and was old enough in 1944, at age 18, to serve in the Nazi military.  Fest died in 2006.

      The duality of the Germany which Fest describes proved fatal to many of his family’s Jewish friends, whose faith in the humanism of German culture blinded them to the true nature of the Nazi regime until it was too late. They had “believed all too unreservedly in reason, in Goethe, Kant, Mozart and the whole tradition which came from that” (p.261), Fest writes. But this duality is also at work throughout Fest’s memoir in his more mundane descriptions of everyday childhood life in Nazi Germany where, within the rigidly controlled and aggresively anti-intellectual Nazi environment, young Joachim discovered humanistic German culture.

* * *

       Fest describes his German childhood world, with the Nazis in firm control by his 7th birthday in 1933, as “utterly political,” where “[m]any conversations and almost all personal decisions were made with an eye to the prevailing situation.” Yet, the “traditional rules of upbringing still applied, in our home perhaps even a little more than elsewhere” (p.76), in large measure because of the structured home environment which Fest’s parents provided.  Fest’s father Johannes dominates the first half of the memoir, the author’s childhood years, then recedes to the background but remains a forceful influence as the author reaches adolescence and early adulthood, which he spent in boarding school and the German military.

     The senior Fest possessed an “authority which was never challenged, still less doubted” within the Fest family, where “fragments of this elevated image increasingly asserted themselves, in the face of all childish and later all adolescent resistance” (p.29). The “Not I” portion of the memoir’s title were words which Johannes dictated to his children, in Latin – etiam si omnes, ego non – “even if everyone else, not I,” from St. Matthew’s gospel, to remind them of the family’s resolute opposition to the Nazi regime.  As young Joachim moved through his childhood years, his father served as the lens with which the son came to view the regime.

      Johannes was from a staunch Prussian Catholic family yet, unusually, also strongly supported the Weimar Republic, Germany’s beleaguered post World War I experiment in parliamentary democracy. “If Prussia and republicanism were not easily reconciled,” Fest writes of his father, “then the contradiction was further sharpened by my father’s strict Catholicism. He was a pious man, who accounted to the ‘Lord God’ (as he usually put it in this context) for each of his private or political decisions” (p.16).  Joannes never wavered in his conviction that a “human being without faith was ‘incomplete.’ Neither reason nor walking upright separated him from the apes; the difference between the two lay in the need for a Beyond” (p.112).

      Professionally, the senior Fest was an erudite primary school headmaster who lost his job during Hitler’s first year in power. Unwilling to join the party and pledge allegiance to the new regime, which he repeatedly termed a “band of criminals,” the author’s father was informed that his “public speeches disparaging the Führer” were the reason for his dismissal (p.35). When handed his dismissal papers, Fest’s father reminded the Nazi bureaucrat in charge that he was a civil servant entitled to certain protections. “You can tell our Führer that. He’ll be very impressed” (p.34), the bureaucrat responded.

       Fest’s mother Elisabeth shared her husband’s opposition to the Nazi regime but was far from supportive of his outspoken hostility to the regime and his refusal to join the Nazi party.  Joannes’ stand in her view endangered the entire family and threatened its stability. On numerous occasions, Fest’s mother entreated her husband to yield to Nazi demands and provide the requisite assurances to the authorities to enable him to continue to hold a  job and maintain the family’s comfortable living standard.  If joining the party would be a lie to those in charge, the author overheard his mother telling his father, “then let it be a lie! A thousand lies even, if necessary!” (p.50).

      The Fest family grew up in Karlshorst, a middle class Berlin suburb.  Joachim was the second son in a family of five children, where the older three siblings were boys and the younger two were girls. Fest’s older brother Wolfgang died serving in Hitler’s military, but the other family members survived the war.  Fest was 13 when World War II began in 1939. By this time, he had developed a precocious interest in poetry, literature, and music, and much of the memoir details the evolution of these interests against a backdrop of ubiquitous pressure to support the Nazi regime.

       Fest’s Aunt Dolley introduced him to opera at age six, when they heard Mozart’s The Magic Flute, an “overwhelming experience” which served as Fest’s “entry to the magical world of music” (p.48-49). Another important influence on young Fest was Father Wittenbrink, the family’s anti-Nazi parish priest.  Father Wittenbrink tried to convince the author that Mozart was the “most convincing proof of the existence of God. . . Every single page of his biography teaches us that he comes from another world” (p.174), Father Wittenbrink argued.  Fest learned poetry through regular visits to the home of the Fest family’s friend, Dr. Meyer, who was incessantly talking about the “books he was reading for the second, third or fourth time” (p.89).

      One of the family’s many Jewish friends, Dr. Meyer disappeared during the war and, although his fate is not difficult to imagine, we never learn exactly what happened to him.  In their last meeting in the spring of 1939, Dr. Meyer ruminated to the young Fest that the great German poets  — and thus Germany’s duality — “bore some of the blame” for the uncertainty he was then facing in his life. He had often considered emigrating and had been “close to making the decision to leave.” But then “trust in the culture of the Germans had always won out” (p.129-30).  Dr. Meyer lamented that he had accepted the idea that a nation that had “produced Goethe and Schiller and Lessing, Bach, Mozart and whoever else, would simply be incapable of barbarism. Griping at the Jews, prejudice, there had always been that,” Dr. Meyer mused.  “But not violent persecution. They wouldn’t do anything to us.” Dr. Meyer’s final words to young Fest were, “You know how mistaken we were” (p.130).

      Joachim and his older brother Wolfgang were sent off to a provincial boarding school near Frankfurt after the war began in 1939. As he left Berlin on the train, Joachim reflected on his German childhood. Although these years had been difficult ones for his parents, his childhood had nonetheless been “happy years” because his parents had “let us feel their fears as little as possible” (p.133).  A volume of Schiller’s work provided Fest with what he described as his “refuge from the irksome features of boarding school” (p.141). But Fest developed a reputation with the school’s administration for impertinence – for being a “wise guy” – as captured in a report from the school sent to Fest’s parents:

Joachim F. shows no intellectual interest and only turns his attention to subjects he finds easy . . . His religious attachment leaves something to be desired. He is hard to deal with. He shows a precocious liking for naked women, which he hides behind a taste for Italian painting . . . He is taciturn. All attempts by the rectorate to draw him into discussion were in vain (p.187).

       In 1944, Joachim reached age 18 and, facing conscription into the German SS, volunteered instead for the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe.  When he told his father by telephone from boarding school that he had volunteered to avoid being drafted into the SS, his father reacted indignantly. “Volunteered!. . . For this war! Have you thought of me? Of us?” Finally, “after long argument and even longer silence we hung up” (p.182). In the letter that arrived few days later, his father wrote, with an “unbelievable lack of caution,” that one “does not volunteer for ‘Hitler’s criminal war’, not even to avoid the SS” (p.182).

       Despite his father’s entreaties, Fest went ahead with his plan to volunteer for the Luftwaffe, where he again found refuge  in literature, music and poetry, abetted by a colleague who shared Fest’s cultured passions. In March 1945, advancing American forces captured Fest and he wound up in an American prison camp as the war ended two months later.  Although Fest initially found his capture a welcome happenstance, a rumor circulated within the camp that its administration was to be turned over to the French.  Fest and his fellow prisoners surmised that the French were likely to be more bent upon revenge than the Americans.  This prompted Fest to organize an ingenious but unsuccessful escape attempt from the camp, one of the memoir’s most memorable sections. Upon his return to prison camp, a book-loving American guard introduced Fest to English language novels, especially Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage.

       The memoir ends with the family reunited in devastated Berlin in late 1945, absent Fest’s older brother Wolfgang, who died of a lung infection on Germany’s Eastern Front. Upon returning home, Fest learned that his father at age 50 had been conscripted into the military, where he had been captured by the Russians and imprisoned in a Russian camp. Fest found his father “hardly recognizable: a man abruptly grown smaller, slighter, grey-haired. Most of the time he simply sat there, his eyes sunken, where previously he had always set the tone” (p.260).

      In her husband’s absence during the war, Fest’s mother had “proved to be a robust person and had completely shed her [family] gentleness” (p.259). But upon seeing his mother, Fest was “dismayed by the emaciated, scraggy picture that she presented, and how empty her eyes were” (p.248). When, unavoidably, the name of brother Wolfgang was mentioned, his mother’s “mouth began to twitch” (p.260). Wolfgang’s death was an “unnameable misfortune for our family. My mother had always said as long as we were all alive she would not complain. Now that security was gone. In the almost twenty-five years that remained to her, whenever Wolfgang’s name was mentioned or an episode which had something to do with him, she rose from her seat and left the room” (p.196).

     Fest’s father was given to reflection after the war on why even he and his highly literate friends, all ardent opponents of the Nazi regime, had nonetheless underestimated Hitler.  Until Hitler came to power, his father had always trusted that a “primitive gangster like Hitler could never achieve power in Germany” (p.261). But, in his father’s view, Germans in the Hitler era failed to uphold their cultured heritage. They “lost their passion for introspection and discovered their taste for the primitive.” Their model was no longer the “reflective scholar type of the nineteenth century” but rather, the “tribal warrior, dancing around a stake and showing his chief a painted grimace. The nation of Goethe!” (p.280).

      Remembering his Jewish friends who perished during the war, Fest’s father said that “in their self-discipline, their quiet civility and unsentimental brilliance they had really been the last Prussians; in any case, he had more often encountered his idea of Prussiansim among the long-established, often highly educated Berlin Jews than anywhere else” (p.63). Germany’s dualism, however, undermined them. Their “one failing” was that they were “overwhelmingly governed by their heads . . . [and] lost the instinct for danger, which had preserved them through the ages” (p.63).

* * *

      The prose in this poignant coming-of-age memoir is sometimes dense, making for slow reading, which might be a function of its translation into English from the German original.  But the memoir shines as a statement of how Fest and his family, led by his Nazi-resisting father Johannes, maintained their grasp on Germany’s cultivated heritage during the Hitler years. As this grim chapter in German and European history recedes, it remains useful to be reminded that there were Germans like Johannes Fest who said “Not I” to Hitler’s call.

Thomas H. Peebles

Paris, France

January 16, 2016