Sebastian Haffner on how it felt when the Nazis first came to power
This post is about a book called Defying Hitler that I’ve recommended before. Even though it was written in the late 1930s, it wasn’t published in the author’s lifetime and he died in 1999. But it’s a unique document of how it felt to be Haffner (that was his pen name; his real name was Raimund Pretzel) undergoing the transition from the previous German government to the Nazi regime, and then the Nazis’ process of consolidating its power and making it more absolute.
Haffner characterized himself as an ordinary person – although he doesn’t seem all that ordinary to me in the keenness of his observations and the clarity of his writing. He was in his mid-twenties and a law student when the Nazis came to power and he ended up leaving for England after a number of years .
I plan to periodically offer some excerpts from the book. Here’s one [additions in brackets and emphasis mine]:
It was not only the Kammergericht [high court for which Haffner worked at the time of the transition] that I had to bid adieu to in those days. “Adieu” had become the model of the day – a radical leave-taking of everything, without exception. The world I had lived in dissolved and disappeared. Every day another piece vanished quietly, without ado. Every day one looked around and something else had gone and left no trace. I have never since had such a strange experience. It was as if the ground on which one stood was continually trickling away from under one’s feet, or rather as it the air one breathed was steadily, inexorably being sucked away.
What was happening openly and clearly in public was almost the least of it. Yes, political parties disappeared or were dissolved, first those of the left, then also those of the right. I had not been a member of any of them. The men who had been the focus of our attention, whose books one had read, whose speeches we had discussed, disappeared into exile or the concentration camps [these were not the later death camps whose entire purpose was mass murder, but they were bad enough]; occasionally one heard that one or another had “committed suicide while being arrested” or been “shot while attempting to escape.” At some point in the summer the newspapers carried a list of thirty or forty names of famous scientists or writers; they had been proscribed, declared to be traitors to the people and deprived of their citizenship.
More unnerving was the disappearance of a number of quite harmless people, who had in one way or another been part of daily life. The radio announcer whose voice one had heard every day, who had almost become an old acquaintance, had been sent to a concentration camp, and woe betide you if you mentioned his name. The familiar actors and actresses who had been a feature of our lives disappeared from one day to the next. Charming Miss Carola Neher was suddenly a traitor to the people; brilliant Hans Otto, who had been the rising star of the previous season, lay crumpled in the yard of an SS barracks…He had “thrown himself out of a fourth-floor window in a moment when the guards had been distracted,” they said. A famous cartoonist, whose harmless drawings had brought laughter to the whole of Berlin every week, committed suicide, as did the master of ceremonies of a well-known cabaret. Others just vanished. One did not know whether they were dead, incarcerated, or had gone abroad – they were just missing.
The symbolic burning of the books in April had been an affair of the press, but the disappearance of the books from the bookshops and libraries was uncanny. Contemporary German literature, whatever its merits, had simply been erased.
I’ll stop at that somewhat arbitrary point. But I’ll add that in recent years I’ve become more and more convinced that we simply don’t know what percentage of the German people were against the Nazis and were silenced either by the government or even by suicide when the government was closing in.
Haffner also wrote a book that was published in his lifetime, Germany: Jekyll and Hyde. I’ve never read it. The book was published in Britain in 1940 and in it Haffner addressed the question of the opinion of the German people towards Hitler:
Germans had entered the war divided. Less than one in five were true devotees, the “real Nazis”. No consideration, not even the “Bolshevik menace”, could reconcile this “morally inaccessible” section of the New Germany to a stable Europe. The anti-Semitism that is their “badge” had outrun its original motive: the venting of Hitler’s private resentments, the scapegoating of a minority as a safety valve for anti-capitalist sentiment. It functions rather as “a means of selection and trial”, identifying those who are prepared, without pretext, to persecute, hunt and murder and thus be bound to the Leader by “the iron chains of a common crime”. Hitler, in turn, (a “potential suicide par excellence”) recognises only devotion to his own person.
A greater number of Germans–perhaps four in ten–wish only to see the back of Hitler and the Nazis. But “unorganised, dispirited and often in despair”, very few identified with the submerged political opposition, itself divided and confused. Side-by-side they live with a roughly equal of Germans who, dreading a further Versailles, bear “the surrender of personality, religion and private life” under Hitler as a “patriotic sacrifice”. Through their generals, these Reich loyalists might eventually seek terms with the Allies, but Haffner urged caution. Anything less than a decisive break with the status quo ante would merely return to “a latent and passive state” the Reich’s animating spirit of aggrandisement and “vulgar worship of force”.
Insights into the viewpoints of Jewish Biden* staffers gleaned from reading a Biden* Admin proclamation. Sure, a bit off topic.
https://spinstrangenesscharm.wordpress.com/2021/05/03/david-bernstein-on-bidens-jewish-heritage-month/
Into the Darkness (referring to the blackout) by Lothrop Stoddard is an interesting book if one wants to get a feel for what Germans of different backgrounds were experiencing and thinking during the ‘Phony War’ after the lightning victory in Poland.
I’m not going to argue for or against Stoddard or his book for that matter. Stoddard was once very famous but has been an Un-person for a long time now. It is an original work from the time in question, before a great many other things happened — same as Haffner’s.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.180053/mode/2up
Stoddard wrote extensively on immigrant races in America too, plus Old Stock New Englanders. He had good and bad things to say about everyone. An useful exercise is to dig out *that* book and read while asking continuously, ‘What did this man get wrong?’ — a bit but not much.
Original Contemporary Sources have their uses because while they may sometimes be wrong or part-wrong or bent and twisted or mad and bad, all of these pale beside the ideological tyranny and censorship we now live under.
To get closer to a feel for 1930s and the mood of the times and what daily life and institutional life felt, the best sources have to be works like Haffner’s and Stoddard’s because frozen in amber. There was plenty of tendency to ham it up and paint oneself in a good light after the fact.
The good Germans waited until it was far too late. Reportedly, after he’d seized power, the first thing Hitler did was confiscate all the guns. Xiden’s puppet masters may try that, if they do it will prove to be a fatal mistake. More likely, they’ll look to put the manufacturers of ammo out of business. More than one way to skin a cat. Our RINO Congress is unlikely to object beyond a proforma protest.
@Geoffrey+Britain:Reportedly, after he’d seized power, the first thing Hitler did was confiscate all the guns.
There was no mass confiscation of guns, they never made guns illegal, and in fact in 1938 they relaxed the gun laws considerably over the laws that had been in existence since 1928, lowering the age from 20 to 18. Certainly Jews were denied civil liberties and gun ownership was one of those, but that was only 200,000 people and the vast majority of Germans had no such restrictions.
If Germany had not already been awash in guns from WWI–many Germans belonged to paramilitaries–certain once WWII started they did their best to get as many guns to Germans as they could.
Haffner is an apologist whose apology and elucidations I do not fully accept.
Economically, Germany did great under Hitler for several years while the rest of the West was deep in the Great Depression. Further, Germany became a country only ca. 1871, and Hitler was superb a mere 60 years later in molding the various parts of Germany, with their different accents, sometimes barely intelligible (Read Thomas Mann’s novel, Buddenbrooks, in the original German if you can, because he uses these dialectical differences to great effect)), into one nation, “Die Volk” (The People”). Germany was Lutheran, except for Catholic Bavaria, and Hitler seized control of the Lutheran church, renaming it the German Lutheran Church, and peopled it with Nazi Party-favoring pastors. Which caused Paul Bonhoeffer, a true Christian martyr, to return to Germany to try to maintain true Lutheranism. He was murdered in prison just a few weeks before the war ended. Eric Metaxas has written a superb biography of him.
Germany was then peopled only by Germans, not diluted by immigrants such as the Turks and Muslims from Libya, etc., there today. German Jews, multi-generational residents, thought of themselves first as Germans, second as Jews. Which gave them false hope, just as we have false hope under Biden presently…surely he cannot do this or that to the nation! Or to us! The Jews were incrementally ground down, as we now experience.
I own Haffner’s writings, all of them. I read German haltingly, but I can still read it. almost 50 years since my last college course. With a dictionary, of course!
This was one of two books that made me REALLY focus on the danger of what we are seeing in our public interactions with the left today. The second was Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning. I read both, back to back, a couple years ago. The second is an eye opening account that should make every person question just what role LEOs might play if asked to do things that border on questionable, whether constitutionally or morally.
The first fellow who can give this demographic
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/073/217/250/original/e649f8f6f95139ec.png
a reason to live or even just something they feel it’s worthwhile to die for, wins. There’s your Army of the Damned. Just needs a spark.
Cicero:
I certainly didn’t think Haffner was whitewashing the role of the German people. In fact, for quite a while he thought that the solution was to dismantle Germany and make it into a bunch of little states as it had been before.
They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer
@ Zaphod on May 3, 2021 at 8:05 pm
Why would Democrats want to address the high white male suicide rate?
Most of them secretly wish for a Final Solution to the White Heterosexual Male Problem.
The ones that don’t secretly wish for it, openly wish for it.
@momo:
Slightly related, but I read this incredibly depressing advice column today:
https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/05/masculinity-incel-crisis-care-and-feeding.html
This poor boy is having a breakdown because he’s “white, male, and ‘probably’ straight,” and he’s being told in his class (and probably by his own mother) that he’s horrible for it. His mother’s biggest fear is that he might start to listen to Jordan Peterson. And the advice given to her? “Don’t let him be ‘red-pilled.’ Just watch Cobra Kai and he’ll be fine.”
God, this generation of white males is totally screwed.
Wait, no. The whole generation us screwed. We’re all screwed.
The left will need to consolidate political power in 19 months. We have 19 months to stop this.
Read Erik Larson’s “In The Garden Of Beasts” a few months ago. Very sobering chronicle of William E. Dodd’s tenure as United States Ambassador to Germany from 1933-1937. It gives account of the gangland level of brutality and vicious political infighting associated with Hitler and his National Socialists as they came into power. One takeaway that sticks in my mind is the word “gleichschaltung”–the universal coordination/enforcement of Nazi philosophy in all aspects of German life. It brings to mind the trend of the today’s Left to actively browbeat, demonize and/or threaten dissidents, and it’s pursuit of institutionalizing their particular Manichean world-view.
The late Constitutional Republic the United States of America (July 4th, 1776 – November 3rd, 2020) demonstrated with its death at the hands of the poisonous swamp leftoxenomorphs that it had no immune system to defend itself from the slow but deadly infestation that begun even before WW2 started.
You can’t let vermin like the Frankfurt School and george soros set up a beachhead on your property and proliferate and set up nests and take over spaces and invade and infest all of yours and all the while you watch and retreat piecemeal, in disgust but with a clear and open “live and let live” attitude that the vermin welcome with open arms all the while appealing to tolerance and diversity and benevolence and weaponizing both virtue and flaw and taking advantage of the comfort and safety afforded by a civilization so successful that it bred apathy, indolence and pusillanimousness in its would be patriots and defenders that abdicated their duties and became peasants and through The Long March Through the Institutions you one day you find yourself surrounded on all sides by poisonous vermin leftoxenomorphs that don’t need tolerance anymore because they are in charge and won’t afford you any because they are at war with you and it is them who begin to clean up . . . YOU.
Thus the late Constitutional Republic the United States of America (July 4th, 1776 – November 3rd, 2020) died.
It wasn’t super-aliens from outer-space.
It wasn’t a coalition of strong enemy parties that got together and defeated us in pitched battle.
It was an infestation from within, it was the deliberate abandoning of humanity by a continuously growing subset of the population to descend into devolution (the opposite of evolution) towards a sub-human species of humanoid-maggot-poisonous-army-ant strange leftist being, a lefto-xeno-morph, utterly hostile to humanity, utterly hostile to America, utterly hostile to Western civilization, utterly hostile to decency, goodness, reason, logic, attachment to reality and respect for its laws and its current manifestation of utter and terminal hostility to anything white, straight and male.
White, straight males built civilization.
White, straight males defended civilization.
White, straight males provided solution to most of human problems.
White, straight males created the best civilization ever, Western civilization and its greatest, most glorious, sanest, healthiest, most valuable, free, rational and decent manifestation ever of humanity’s evolution and betterment, the late Constitutional Republic the United States of America (July 4th, 1776 – November 3rd, 2020)
It is only the most natural thing in the world and most logical way to approach the destruction of Western civilization and the taking over of its remains and survivors to go after white, straight males as the worst beings ever.
If you want to destroy the world to eat its remains the best way is to go against the motor of the world: white, straight men.
An alien race from outer-space that wanted to infest and destroy from within the edifice of humanity to enslave the survivors and pocket Earth for their own ends could do exactly what the left is doing. It’s a good plan. And its’ working.
Recruit our weakest link: females. They betray their own and turn on civilization and men like rabid hyenas and with gusto proclaim we are a “rape culture” and “#killallmen” and now gynocentrism, gynosupremacism, feminazism and gynofascism are the law of the land.
Leftoxenomorphs are trying their worst to destroy Western civilization and mop up any remaining resistance from the American patriots left behind by The Steal of November, 2020.
Every single leftoxenomorph initiative is geared towards destroying Western civilization, mopping up remaining resistance and preventing white, straight men from reacting in healthy self-defense of their own lives and the civilization that is their responsibility by take up arms (that’s EXACTLY what the 2nd Amendment is all about) and doing a massacre of leftoxenomorphs that will still be sung about a million years from now and abolish leftoxenomorphism for good and forever.
That is the leftoxenomorph plan.
And they are getting away with it to the letter.
So far, nothing of importance or relevance stands in their way.
They got away with cultural marxism, The Long March Through the Institutions, the taking over 95% or more of everything that was organized in the late Constitutional Republic the United States of America (July 4th, 1776 – November 3rd, 2020) and finally The Steal.
The three branches of government, the intelligence community, academia, the whole miseducation establishment, most all hollyweirdoes, you name it, they took it all, they infested it all, they reproduced and hired their own and they gatekept it all jealously that no non-leftoxenomorph could intrude and threaten their plans.
And the civilized, comfortable, safe, tolerant, benevolent, apathetic, passive, indolent, pusillanimous and possessed by the normalcy bias peasants that should, through it all, have remained American patriots but didn’t, woke up one day and found their country occupied, most of the resorts of government turned against them in a poisonous reversal of their declared purpose, their taxes used to oppress them.
With the Constitutional Republic dead due The Steal and the removal of the consent of the governed, with the Constitution mocked, with our rights in mortal danger, with civilization dying, with the comfort and the safety waning, with our tolerance and diversity and benevolence weaponized against us, with our apathy, passivity, indolence, pusillanimousness and normalcy bias like a slave’s shackles impeding the normal reaction of a free man because we forgot how to be men and what the price is for freedom, we are looking at the juggernaut of the religion of leftoxenomorphism approaching us like the sacrificial victims to destroy next.
As an ex-nation of individualists our chances of organizing for armed struggle are small and dubious.
In the 1770s it was simpler.
But this is 2021 and decades of leftoxenomorph brainwashing have even turned many if not most of the children against their parents just like the “Hitler Youth” organization did in 1930s germany and the parents into self-doubting simpletons that can’t think and hardly dare to go against the societal leftoxenomorph grain.
We have to give it to leftoxenomorphs: like a cancer that develops without reaction from its victim until it becomes a life threatening condition, leftoxenomorphs did their thing much better and much more effectively than anything that the late America proved willing to do to defend itself, basically nothing at all.
And so we stand . . . or . . . crawl? . . . Like beggars? . . .
“If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”
– Winston Churchill
Gotta give it to the dude: he knew how to put it.
We never fought against the leftoxenomorphs. Not really. We just let it all happen.
We could have won a thousand times. “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave”? A thousand times. Gloriously.
But . . .
[Q] Tough men create safety,
Safety engenders weak men,
Weak men engender weak societies,
Weak societies engender tyrannies. [/Q]
We are in the lasts verse.
Do we meekly go into a new medieval Dark Ages, into slavery, into the utter inanity of a new iteration of the most brutal of collectivisms?
nazi? soviet? cultural revolution? venezuericanich?
Do we insult the memory of every man that ever died to defend America?
Or do enough tough men among us create safety, again?
That’s the question on the table.
Things we know: (a) we have tyranny and (b) weak men don’t create safety.
Do we want safety or do we accept tyranny?
Do we throw it all away, give up and surrender or do we re-found the Constitutional Republic and “provide new Guards for their future security”
There’s nothing in between.
And, mind you, the leftoxenomorphs are sub-human but not completely stupid. They know what they are doing. And they know what we should be doing. And they are surprised that we are not doing it. But they are not sleeping. They are waiting for us. They are deathly afraid of what they know might still happen.
Their job is to go on at full speed.
Ours . . .
Another good contemporary account by an insightful ordinary German who chronicled the boiling of the frog is “I Will Bear Witness” by Victor Klemperer. It, too, was published by the author’s family after his death when they discovered his diaries.
After the Nazis took power, Carola Neher went to Russia, where she was purged and put in a Soviet concentration camp. She appears to have been still alive at the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact because she was included in the list of Germans in Russia that Stalin ordered handed over to the Nazis, but she died of the brutal Gulag treatment before the hand-over (most people didn’t live long in the Gulag).
As George Orwell said of an Italian militiaman he met in Spain fighting against Franco, “In the peculiar conditions of our day, when people like that are not killed by the Gestapo they are killed by the OGPU.” Carola Never was an example of this.
She had been a mistress of Bertold Brecht’s. His indifference to her fate was one of many evidences that he new very well what the regime he lied for was really like.
(More details in Robert Conquest’s ‘The Great Terror’ and Margarete Neumann’s ‘Under Two Dictators’. Neumann was one of those handed over by the Communists, who then managed to survive the German concentration camp into which the Nazis put her till her liberation by the western allies.)
The Haffner book is very insightful, well-written, and important. I reviewed it in some depth here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/42473.html
From “Hitler’s First Hundred Days” by Peter Fritzsche. Sound familiar?
“While anti-Semitism was not the hot-button issue in the big election year of 1932 that readers might assume when considering events from the perspective of the Holocaust, the public’s acceptance of the persecution of the Jews in the early years of the Third Reich sheds light on how the Nazis resolved the paradox of promoting national unity by dividing the country.
“They did so by promulgating a binary worldview. National Socialists gathered in friends and pushed out foes. They nurtured good Germans while clobbering bad ones. This two-way movement of inclusion and exclusion meant that the Nazis relied on both consent and coercion to fortify the Third Reich. National Socialists continuously strengthened and mobilized the virtuous against the enemies they themselves conjured, pitting patriotic Germans against subversive Communists, Aryans against Jews, the healthy against the sick, the Third Reich against the rest of the world. In the end, the Nazi view proved more compelling than not; the achievement of unity and prosperity, they claimed, rested on the destruction of corrosive elements threatening the German whole.”
Insights into the viewpoints of Jewish Biden* staffers gleaned from reading a Biden* Admin proclamation. Sure, a bit off topic.
they tend to be apostates with gentile spouses.
or as the meme goes, what’s the difference between Trump and Jewish liberals?
Jewish grandchildren
History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes. The Totalitarians haven’t taken complete control yet though they pretend they have. That is the beauty of our federal system. Where under Trump they had sanctuary states and cities now we have sanctuary COVID cities and states. We took a page from their playbook.
There is active opposition. Do not relent or be discouraged. Resolve to fight. What I am finding is there are many many many people who just need direction and encouragement. The groups I belong to are in the outreach phase to connect them with others to show that they are not alone. Next we train them and select candidates to run and then work.
This summer will be a hot one and we will see if the Fascists deploy their shock troops. But to have an impact they have to move from their cannibalized burned out husks into the Karen and Chad neighborhoods. Then things will get interesting.
Good books mentioned above. I have read a few of them. I can also put a plug in for Evans “The Third Reich in Power” in his trilogy.
Also I recommend these as short hand articles to use for others.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/liberation-dachau-and-holocaust-lessons-we-havent-don-feder/
https://www.revolver.news/2021/04/woke-cancel-culture-lenin-bolshevik-red-terror/
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/the_commonalities_between_the_rise_of_the_nazis_and_the_tactics_of_the_american_left_cannot_be_ignored.html
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/signs_that_2021_rioters_will_be_attacking_and_burning_wealthy_neighborhoods.html
Place the blame on those who allowed this. Great article.
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/americas-true-believers-and-their
And finally:
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2021/03/25/this-is-no-time-to-ride-into-the-sunset/
But each of us is the hero of his own story. And we can’t walk out. We can quit, and turn our story into one of those Frenchmen love, with despair and nihilism as the message. Or our form of heroism might be the little caryatid where we know the cause is doomed, but we go out fighting (and if that’s it, try for the defiant song to the end, please.) Or we might think the end is foretold and we’re already doomed, but still fight. And fight the best we can and as big as we can. And sometimes, sometimes, a miracle occurs and we win anyway. Now that’s rare enough that it becomes the stuff of legends… and westerns. But you know, the chance is worth it.
Anyway, we might be impotent, or frankly ridiculous in the hero role. Or we might be temperamentally suited to play the villain, and bit and curse, but….
Each of us is the hero in our story, and a lot of us are puzzled at being on the side of light.
The battle is much bigger than us, and has been going on a long time. But each of us has a role to play. Even if we are a misguided pet chameleon lost in the middle of the desert and having to face up to a conspiracy much bigger than any of us.
Yes, we’ll surely die. But not today. Today, we fight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjZY2EfR-f8&ab_channel=Joris
Strongly recommend “They Thought They Were Free: the Germans, 1933-1945” by Milton Meyer. There is a brilliant section where he is interviewing a professor about how all of it creeped up incrementally so that once you had taken step A, B didn’t seem so bad, then C, then D, etc., then the boxcars.
If I recall correctly, the Nazis never obtained more than about 38% of the popular vote in any free and honest national election; the last one being held in late 1932? or early 1933?
Just goes to show that, more often than not, it is a MINORITY group of well organized, very persistent, never give up, willing to use any and all means, that can achieve absolute power.
Given the situation here today in the USA, it’s time to discard the notion of the “good Germans,” – those Germans that basically did nothing to halt Hitler’s rise – as some sort of unique German character flaw that enabled Hitler’s rise to power.
Present day Americans are no more resistant to the rise of an autocratic ruler than were the Germans or Russians or Cubans or Venezuelans or Chinese or Italians or Yugoslavs (when it existed) or the many nations that once formed the Russian dominated Eastern Bloc alliance.
Just check out what happened to Guiliani or a General Flynn and compare that to how Hunter Biden is treated.
There is NEVER a shortage a govt. employees and their enforcers willing to do the dirty work of an oppressive regime.
Most citizens just get on with their lives as best they can, which allows the tyrants to take over.
it’s time to discard the notion of the “good Germans,” – those Germans that basically did nothing to halt Hitler’s rise – as some sort of unique German character flaw that enabled Hitler’s rise to power.
I disagree. Good Italians sold weapons to the Warsaw ghetto fighters. Good Germans committed atrocities like they were Nazis during the war and in the first and second Reich
Don’t worry we have “good karens” keeping an eye on us. For our own good.
According to Ludwig von Mises, the German professors spent more than 70 years preparing the “educated” in Germany for what became known as Nazism. Many may have been disturbed by Hitler and his band of sociopaths in specifics, but the underlying beliefs were not questioned.
–von Mises, Ludwig (1947). Planned Chaos
And here were are 70 years on from beating back the worst of the educated German’s beliefs with the professors having again imbued a body of disciples with “a hysterical hatred of capitalism, and preached the war of “liberation” against the capitalistic West”. This time with the Third International (communist) focus on internationalism instead of nationalism. But they do seek to enslave populations in service of the “betters”.
What these comments show is that resistance is building.
As to our possibly but not certainly inferior numbers in the coming resistance, read “Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All is Lost”, by Michael Walsh.
We have no place for weak men, self-selection of “gender” despite the present Sec Def, feminism, socialism, unfettered social media, or the elevation of blacks into a superior class.
We are all born equal.
After birth, it is all about Freedom, for Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness.
Recall Patrick Henry’s ” Give me liberty, or give me death”. Amen, say I.
Germany suffered several traumas over the period running from 1914 to 1932 which discredited the political class therein. On top of that, the country’s head of state was the hopeless Paul v. Hindenburg. Note, constitutional processes broke down all over continental Europe during the inter-war period. The abattoir regimes were those of Hitler in Germany, the Ustashe in Croatia, Szalazi in Hungary, and (in re the Jewish population), Antonescu in Roumania – i.e. Hitler, two derivative regimes, and another whose behavior was a function of the dynamic of the war. What Germany lacked in 1933 was an analogue of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg in Austria, Svinhufvud in Finland, and Horthy in Hungary.
There have been no comparable traumas here, though there have been some puzzling and peculiar shifts in the culture, especially between 2000 and 2008. It is true that Joseph Biden is as impaired as Hindenburg. He wouldn’t be an impediment to the malevolent actors in the Democratic Party were he perfectly lucid.
I think you’re reaching for the wrong analogies. Three more apt come to mind: one is the period in Spain just prior to the Civil War there. Another is the Mexican PRI regime (1920-2000), which seems to be the direction in which the Democratic Party is headed. A third is the Peronist regime in Argentina (1946-55).
According to Ludwig von Mises, the German professors spent more than 70 years preparing the “educated” in Germany for what became known as Nazism.
It may be an occupational hazard for professors to fancy their chatter is more consequential than it is.
Here’s an alternative thesis: sensible monetary policy during the period running from 1930 to 1932 would have saved Germany from take-over by madcap revanchists. Or some more capable person in the Presidency, like Karl Jarres.
I was a US soldier in Berlin during the late 70s, and lived on the economy for a while. My German landlord, an older fellow who obviously lived through the war years and before, once gave a harangue that went something like (it’s been a while, but the gist is correct): “You young Americans don’t understand how bad things were before the war! Hitler changed all that! He rebuilt the economy, gave us jobs and our self-respect back! Okay, he got carried away with the Jew thing [IIRC he said something like _der Judische sache_], but you always ignore how much _good_ he did!”
I had no idea what to say, but muttered something about having not thought about it that way before.
I do not defend Hitler; God forbid. But at least some ordinary Germans seemed to have welcomed him, at least as the best of a bad lot.
I’ve heard from people who traveled in the USSR during the 1960s that some older Russians would say such things about Stalin (“sure, he did bad things, BUT …”).
I do not justify either of these totalitarian dictators, may they both rot in Hell, but they did have supporters.
Passer By:
There is absolutely no question the Nazis had supporters in Germany – LOTS of them. However, it was by no means all of the German people, and my question involves wondering what the percentage was.
There is also no question that people who were anti-Nazi and expressed it had a rough time of it and were often snuffed out, so it’s a very hard question to answer, I think.
Art Deco:
The analogy is not to Germany in the 20s and 30s, which was obviously a very different place than the US recently. The analogy is to how a regime tightens its tyrannical grip on people step by step and how many of those people feel as it’s happening.
>The analogy is to how a regime tightens its tyrannical grip on people step by step and how many of those people feel as it’s happening.<
And it all happens without a shot being fired (except for the one that killed Ashli Babbit).
Avi:
Some good Germans.
Sensible monetary policy. Yeah that is very powerful thing to counter propaganda (socialist/Marxist), and that wimpy thing called anti-Semitism. Okay.
Sensible monetary policy, was that tried in the USA by the way? Or in Japan during that time?
Funny that those professors of the Frankfort School have had such trivial effects since the late 1940s? Okay, again.
neo:
My encounter with that one German … long ago as it was … was shocking enough to me at the time that I remember it quite clearly, but of course it says nothing about how many Germans were supporters of which side. I mention it only because I was surprised to have encountered a person with those views.
The simple fact is that at that time (1978 IIRC) nearly all the actual Nazis and/or their supporters were dead. To me that made him a relic, a curiosity. That’s all.
I had a few other surprising (to me) experiences with Germans of that generation while in Berlin, but I will forbear.
If I have inadvertently tripped over anyone’s sensibilities, I apologize. You need not be concerned about a repeat offense.
Art+Deco wrote “sensible monetary policy during the period running from 1930 to 1932 would have saved Germany from take-over by madcap revanchists.”
What sensible policy? The tremendous inflation was a decade before, in 1921-22. The mark was stable in purchasing power during the period you reference, in comparison.
Kindly clarify.
What sensible policy? The tremendous inflation was a decade before, in 1921-22.
The tremendous inflation was in 1922 and 1923. Germany would have benefited from a devaluation of the currency and a moderate inflation during the period from 1930-32. The British recovery began with the devaluation of the pound in September 1931.
Sensible monetary policy, was that tried in the USA by the way?
Tentatively, beginning in March 1932. Vigorously in the Spring of 1933, to good effect.
Yeah that is very powerful thing to counter propaganda (socialist/Marxist), and that wimpy thing called anti-Semitism.
Throughout the period running from about 1890 to 1930, the volkisch parties were good for about 6% of the vote, if that. The onset of the Depression triggered an electoral revolution in 1930 beneficial to the Nazis in a major way and the Communist Party in a more attenuated way.
“Tentatively, beginning in March 1932. Vigorously in the Spring of 1933, to good effect.”
Yep those were years of good effect, and sensible too. They were great years. 🙂
David Foster: thanks for your thorough review of Haffner’s book.
Neo: for a contemporaneous first-person account of the German resistance to Hitler–specifically, Adam von Trott zu Solz and the Kreisau Circle–see Marie Vassiltchikov’s “Berlin Diaries 1940-1945”. Edited by Vassiltchikov after the war and published in the 1980s. Photo of Trott zu Solz at the People’s Court:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_von_Trott_zu_Solz#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_151-43-22A,_Volksgerichtshof,_Adam_von_Trott_zu_Solz.jpg
The policeman on the left is Just Doing What They Tell Me, Mein Herr. Prudent to assume that ours will do the same.
Zaphod: indeed, I had not heard of Lothrop Stoddard. It seems he had an interesting encounter with W.E.B. DuBois–a fellow Bay Stater!–in the late 1920s. Thanks for posting the IA link to his book on Nazi Germany. Page 288 suggests that the physical elimination of the Jews was already generally assumed (and celebrated) in Berlin in 1939-1940. Interesting.
Other contemporary accounts of late 1930s totalitarianism:
Out of the Night (1941) by “Jan Valtin” (Richard Krebs). There’s uncertainty about Krebs’ true allegiance–Gestapo or NKVD?–and veracity, so this book is interesting primarily for its period flavor. A Book-of-the-Month Club selection at the time.
In Stalin’s Secret Service (1939) by “Walter Krivitsky” (Samuel Ginsberg). Krivitsky was the head of Soviet military intelligence in western Europe. He defected in The Hague in 1937, was debriefed in London, and made his way to the States in 1938. He died of a gunshot to the head in a hotel in Washington, D.C. in early 1941, shortly before he was to testify before the Dies Committee (later HUAC). The official verdict was suicide; Krivitsky himself told friends that he was on the NKVD hit list and that they should regard his untimely end (should it occur) as an assassination.
“…1978…”
Those born in 1910 would have been 68.
Those born in 1915 would have been 63.
Those born in 1920 would have been 58.
In which case there were still a lot of them around in 1978 and into the 80s—and even into the 90s.
FWIW, Remarque, if I recall correctly, claimed that one of the major reasons why Hitler was so popular amongst the general population was that he put an almost immediate stop to the widespread and open debauchery, in the larger cities at least, that characterized the Weimar period, and which the general population found so offensive and destructive. And, of course, he stood up to France and England, etc. and he also put people back to work. (Remarque’s novels of the early-to-mid 30s are an eye-opener. David Foster has mentioned some of them in posts over the years.)
That he contributed to the utter destruction of Germany is, I guess, a minor blemish for such people. (Not to mention the utter destruction of wide swaths of Europe, but then who knows?—amongst them, that might be a point in his favor…. And after all, he did come pretty damn close to conquering the world…)
FWIW, in 1979 I came across an old European woman (not sure from which country) who worked in a tiny grocery store on a side street in Astoria Queens, which woman for some reason found it necessary to let me know that the Jews were responsible for WWII. (You never know what you’ll find out when you buy a Coke, I guess). One hears of such things but actually witnessing it was more than a tad unnerving….
Passer by – “If I have inadvertently tripped over anyone’s sensibilities, I apologize. You need not be concerned about a repeat offense.”
I can say that retelling accounts of true life experiences will not upset this group’s sensibilities. We are grown adults here. I worked with Germans with parents from the war. I spoke with them concerning that time. By and large the Germans accepted what was happening because things were so bad economically during the Weimar Republic. However when they slide into war there was not a sense of jubilation. The early victories helped. But when the bombs fell the German’s settled in for a long war.
As far as totalitarians go the Nazi’s were pretty sloppy and unorganized with party struggles back biting and toadying going on. So that made it a bit easier too. That stuff didn’t go on in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
My in-laws were Polish refugees from the war. My father-in-law was a partisan in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. The stories he told were of a desperate people fighting for their lives. War is hell.
I lived in Munich in the 1980s. There were still plenty of people who had lived through the 1933-1945 period around then, not all of them Germans. I worked with one guy who had been a Red Army officer, been captured outside Moscow in 1942, and joined Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army in order to get out of one of the Nazis’ POW camps for Red Army men. He somehow managed to evade Operation Keelhaul…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Keelhaul
…and stay on in West Germany after the war. Had some interesting conversations with him and others, especially after a schnaps or two.
Try the Philip Kerr novels starting with March Violets to get an idea of life in Germany during Hitler. We know they are fiction but research is obvious and they are really well done.
There is a UK based history video maker on YouTube who has been supported by Elon Musk.
Musk quite rightly complains that Hitler’s war aims are very inadequately explained, with the complaint, “But TIK, the reason WHY Hitler started WW2 makes no sense!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQKM5b1SoS0&t=1624s
Specifically, “Why would Hitler go to war with Poland, knowing that Britain would declare war on Germany? [The…] reason why Hitler started the war [doesn’t] make any sense.
“But when you look at the way Hitler viewed the world (his ideology and his economics — [Thomas Sowell gets a graphic at 15m]) and if you understand the way Chamberlain changed his mind after the Munich Agreement, then it all falls into place. This video will help you put the pieces of the puzzle together.”
Before Britain declared war, Germany expanded territorially. This became Hitler’s economic model to insulate Germany while stripping productive assets as well as disposable riches to import.
National Socialism doesn’t fiscally work without external subsidy of other people’s money. Once begun, these exploitive practices were equally used against the Jews — not only were they treated as conquered outsiders, they were abused and exploited on the same model, only more ruthlessly and relentlessly.
TIK show’s us Musk’s lengthy thought piece to him, doubting traditional explanations like Lebensraum (living space).
Indeed, historical disciplinary isolation long cemented the “Madman Hitler” myth, thereby discounting his ideology and economic necessity. And so, his book “Mein Kampf” went neglected, as well as bankrupt Reich finances.
But Hitler believed that capitalism faced a ‘shrinking markets problem,’ and thus Europe had only a few decades to counter complete civilizational decline, after Juden miscegenation soon corrupts superior Aryan families.
Citing Gotz Aly’s recent and important “Hitler’s Beneficiaries,” TIK argues that socialist state policies demanded the asset stripping of conquered peoples and territories (see his summary from 23m through 27m):
https://youtu.be/EQKM5b1SoS0?t=1382
Thus, Hitler had to go to war in September 1939, to keep the gambit going.
This particular video is fun, deep, and a provocative romp through otherwise familiar ground. What’s new is also quite important to countering the Left.
It compellingly refutes the “Nazi’s were capitalists” mythology of always insisted byMarxists. It’s also far more digestible than TIK’s epic 5 hour video refuting this myth in exhaustive, heavily documented, detail, SEE
“Hitler’s Socialism | Destroying the Denialist Counter Arguments” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCkyWBPaTC8&t=614s).
Since Elon Musk appears to have been red-pulled a year ago (or before), one imagines that encountering economics through history like TIK’s have been powerful influence upon the richest man in the world. Not a bad thing.
TIK has done many extensive videos about various campaigns of WWII, Stalingrad for example. Very detailed and deep. Not “received english” BTW.
But when you search for TIK on YouTube you get TikTok by default …
I spent about 3 months in Luneburg, Germany in 1977.
I was renting a room from a 65ish year old widow. On occasion she would have her friends – one in particular about 80 years of age – come over for coffee and cake.
The widow had been a nurse during WWII and recounted to me the horror of watching trains of wounded soldiers being bombed by allied aircraft.
She insisted she knew nothing about the death camps.
I believed her because the Nazi govt. had total control of all the media.
Her older friend, recounted how much safer the streets were during Hitler’s reign and he, and the widow, clearly had a problem with jewish folks.
He also mentioned that Italians were adept at using knives when mugging/attacking folks.
Another of the renters at her home – another American student – had some books in French that he was reading. The widow brought them out of his room for me to see and she claimed they were in Hebrew.
No, I said, they are in French.
The weird part of all this is that otherwise they were totally “normal” likable folks; not raving Hitler loving Nazi fanatics.
People can be made to believe absolutely anything at all if the news / propaganda is targeted, repetitive and 24/7/365.
It is independent of one’s ethnicity, culture, religion or nationality and that is the scary part.
“If only Stalin knew………….”
Another good source on the pre-Nazi social climate in Germany is Hans Fallada’s novel ‘Little Man, What Now?’ I reviewed it here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/29873.html
@Hubert:
That Vlasov follower sounds very interesting!
@Art+Deco:
You’re right. While we all love a good reminiscence about Nazi Germany, Spain 1935/36 is what we should be looking at.
FWIW, in his book “The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer”, Dutch historian Dan van der Vat writes that according to Speer, Hitler never expected Britain (and France) to react to the Nazi invasion of Poland with a declaration of war, in spite of the treaty (or “Agreement of Mutual Assistance”) they signed with Poland to defend Polish sovereignty. As Speer tells it, IIRC, Hitler didn’t think war would break out until about the early-to-mid-1940s, by which time Germany would be fully ready.
Hitler’s belief that a British/French declaration of war would make no sense appears to be vindicated somewhat by the subsequent desperate, if unsuccessful, attempt on the part of Lord Halifax and others to persuade Churchill to pursue peace with Hitler. In a similar vein is Pat Buchanan’s more recent ultra-revisionist (and absurd) claim that there was no real reason for Chamberlain (Britain) and Daladier (France) to declare war on Germany on Sept. 3—the upshot being that Britain, more precisely Churchill’s recalcitrant determination to pursue the war, was responsible for causing WWII.
More likely, though (if Speer’s claim is accurate), is that Hitler’s judgment was based on British/French equivocation regarding Hitler’s earlier land grabs: a) his territorial expansion in the Saarland/Rhine in 1935, b) the Anschluss of Austria in the Spring of 1938 and c) the actual acquiescence of Britain and France, in Munich, to the German takeover of the Sudetenland (Czechoslovakia) in the Autumn of 1938. Thus, Hitler felt, no doubt “reasonably” from his POV, that such past behavior would take precedence over the “Agreement” signed by Britain and France to defend Polish sovereignty in the event of attack.
Anyway, an interesting book…
https://www.amazon.com/Good-Nazi-Life-Albert-Speer/dp/039565243X
FWIW, knew through friends of family an old East Prussian couple whose only major complaint about Hitler was his loss of their ancestral home, now in Poland. The old guy got his first job working on the Autobahns. So there was the economic angle. And this is the bit gets hyped because people read about it, nod, and don’t go off piste with any awkward questions.
But, and some are not going to like this, poster above who makes a point about the depraved moral climate in the Weimar Republic is right about the other big reason the Nazis had a lot of support. The hyperinflation did terrible things to people’s psyches — wiped out the hopes and certainties of millions and put a lot of women into prostitution. A. Lot. Take three guesses who *did* have gold and hard currency and join some dots.
Big or Small Differences, it doesn’t matter… two or more distinct peoples living together is asking for trouble. In the Sunny Years, it might sort of work. In the Bad Years, someone’s headed for the Pit – only question is who gets the honour each time around. That’s baked-in evolved human behaviour and it’s not going away except with our extinction.
Anyway… We live in 2021 and what happened during the first week of the kickoff of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 should concern us more. Not the later movement of armies and foreign interventions — just what happened to people as they realised they lived in the wrong town for them or the wrong side of town or the wrong street.
RJ:
Hitler also believed that the Poles were subhumans and he planned to eliminate most of them after he killed all the Jews and won the war, and to keep the rest for slave labor. See this.
Zaphod:
That is all well and good (sarc), but what about their skin/pigmentation? Keep it base.
Something about distinct peoples living together. French and Germans, Flemmish and Waloons, English and Irish, Prussians and Poles, Hatfields and McCoys ……
@Om:
None of those worked very well, did they. The price of peace in most of the above cases seems to have been firstly emasculation and finally The Camp of the Saints.
You may wish to be the Last Eunuch, not everyone does.
Some peoples rub along kind of OK together, some worse. The big thing is not to *add* to the problem by importing more problematic human materials.
Yep those were years of good effect, and sensible too. They were great years.
Over the period running from 1933 to 1941 in this country, per capita product in real terms grew at a rate of 7.7% per year and personal consumption per capita at a rate of 4.5% per year. The object in 1933 was to strive for conditions which would allow a very injured economy and society to recover, and that object was achieved. You could have had a policy mix closer to an optimum, but it’s characteristic of policy made by human beings that it’s suboptimal. There were just three occidental countries which had higher growth rates in per capita product than did the U.S. during the period running from 1932 / 33 to 1939, so it’s not as if the Roosevelt Administration was failing in comparative terms.
Well I wouldn’t go so far as to call Poles subhuman.
But I would go so far as to call them a god-almighty pain in the rectum.
Everybody goes on about the Partitions and injustices done to the Poles…. but it’s mostly their fault for not keeping their act together. The Polish Nobility had one job: maintain a coherent hedgehog-like military posture against Prussia, Austria, and Russia *and* not waste away their days in internecine power struggles and royal succession disputes. That’s all. Couldn’t do it, and so Poland had to be put down to remove a festering source of instability and temptations in the heart of Europe. And it was all downhill for everyone from there.
A good chunk of the lingering Jew-hatred in Polish lands goes back to the Nobility factoring out their country estates to Jewish merchants so that the Nobility could hang around in the Sejm posturing and vetoing and making speeches about their 64 quarterings. This was a very feudal world literally until very late in the day, so that we’re talking about manorial courts, powers of life and death over the serfs in the hands of aliens, etc… Not pretty.
They did show up at the Siege of Vienna to save the day and they did stop the Red Cavalry at the Battle of Warsaw, so there is that.
Still… the poor bloody Czechs were more worth starting a global conflagration over than the Poles.
And I even *like* what they do with plums and potatoes.
And after all, he did come pretty damn close to conquering the world
France, the Low Countries, Austria, Poland, Bohemia and Moravia, a portion of the Balkans, and a portion of Russia. And he was losing ground for nearly half the war.
Zaphod:
You seem to miss a few things about ideology, propaganda, and demagogy while harping about race and pigmentation. It is what is in the minds that causes the mayhem. Focus. History. Too complicated?
Take your castration fantasies somewhere else. China had quite the cultural history of that sort IIRC.
Art Deco
That’s why it called the Great Recovery.
Poland’s tragedy was its frivolous elite. When a country’s ruling class shirks its duties, bad things happen and go on happening down the years.
Zaphod shats on the Poles. Such a ray of sunshine and wisdom today. Who’s next, the Irish, Italians, French, Mongolians, Boers?
A good chunk of the lingering Jew-hatred in Polish lands goes back to the Nobility factoring out their country estates to Jewish merchants
You’ve confounded Poland and Roumania.
@Art+Deco:
It was a damned close-run thing. A few weeks earlier with the kickoff and some better winter kit and who knows?
Much is made of the folly of invading Russia, but there was no doubt that eventually Stalin would attack Westwards. That would have happened, Nazis or no. Every Prussian at least knew what that meant. That’s how Frederick the Great got his formative wake-up call early in his reign: raped women crucified on barn doors, all the usual fun stuff when the Cossacks show. There… Cossacks, I said it 😀
Who gave the Brits the Enigma machine? Who played a big role in the breakup of the USSR? Must have been those efficient Germans? No? Calling Hong Kong. Calling Hong Kong.
Russia/USSR:
Worked for Napoleon. Oops. Worked for Germany. Oops.
Know logistics and geography or loose wars. Invade USSR with an army that still relied on horses. Brilliant minds, the Wehrmacht.
@Art+Deco:
I have not confounded with Romania. Life is short and coffee calls, so will suggest you spend more time figuring out the difference between Szlachta and Boyars and Jagiellons and Cantacuzenes. It’s complicated, but not beyond your powers of research. Do you even know what a Phanariot Greek is and how the Ottomans farmed out their tributary states?
Maybe you could write us a monograph on the ‘Saxons’ of Transylvania while you’re at it.
Just thought of something during my dump on Art+Deco in post above.
In one of Patrick Fermor’s books, he comes across a Jewish Timber Merchant whilst hiking in the mountains of Transylvania ca. 1933. Frankly the guy and his sons are not exactly 100% simpatico — let’s just say that they were not really into fraternising with Goyishe Cattle in a big way.
But what’s poignant about the encounter and so many others in this book is that an entire ancient way of life was about to be utterly wiped away by two giant steamrollers in the next 15 years… somewhat less for the Jews in question one imagines. But pretty much everything described in Fermor’s books ceased to exist, Jewish or otherwise. Utterly unfathomably tragic.
“Who gave the Brits the Enigma machine? Who played a big role in the breakup of the USSR? Must have been those efficient Germans? No?”
Same folks who gave us Felix Dzerzhinsky 🙂
Even I don’t blame everything on the Jews. They can’t be Everywhere.
I’m not here to dump on the Poles. I just think it’s mildly hilarious that World War II was kicked off for *them*. I’ve a fondness for Dvorak and Smetana and this colours my prejudices. Hell, I even like Schweik — and that’s from the devil. But there’s something engaging about the Czechs. And in these difficult times may I recommend the fine products of Ceská zbrojovka Uherský Brod == CZ 🙂
Ideology, propaganda, and demagogues do that. Forests and trees.
WWII was kicked off by the totalitarians of Germany. Stalin jumped in to carve up Poland, they had signed the non-aggression pact with Germany. Yeah it was those damned Poles, sucked to be them. Japan decided finally to take advantage after being ever so kind to China. Sorry to disabuse you. Bless you heart.
@om:
“Zaphod shats on the Poles. Such a ray of sunshine and wisdom today. Who’s next, the Irish, Italians, French, Mongolians, Boers?”
Don’t like the Irish. I’ve got enough Irish blood to make me a self-hating Irishman (amongst others, heh).
Italians over French. Freshness of Ingredients over Saucery every time.
Never met an Afrikaner I didn’t like except neighbour’s wife when very young.
Fun Fact: Mongolian Women are *very* flexible (see any circus, failing my unpublished memoirs) and are therefore to be cherished.
Further Fun Fact: The Nazis retconned Handel’s Oratorio ‘Israel in Egypt’ as ‘Mongolensturm’ — The mind boggles!
Zaphod:
Poland – a country surrounded by hostile powers and without geographic barriers. You write of Poland’s need to defend itself against its neighbors, “That’s all. Couldn’t do it…” as though that was some easy thing to do, under the circumstances. It was not.
As for anti-Semitism in Poland, most Jews in Poland lived in cities. I can’t find anything about Jews administering country estates in Poland. In Ukraine something like that occurred, however, starting back in the 1600s and continuing for quite a while:
Much much more at the link. But that was not Poland; it was Polish-occupied Ukraine.
In Poland for the most part the Jews were treated relatively well, with various waxings and wanings over time. The reason Poland had so many Jews prior to WWII was this relatively good treatment.
This is how the Jews of Poland supported themselves:
Entrepreneurs, craftspeople, and professionals.
During WWII almost all Polish Jews (about 90%) were murdered by the Nazis, and a lot of Poles were murdered by the Nazis, too. Some Poles cooperated in the murder of the Jews with vigor, and some risked their lives to save Jews. It is remarkable that any Poles saved any Jews, in light of the fact that it was in Poland that the penalty the Nazis meted out to Poles who helped save Jews was especially harsh compared to any other country.
I have written at length about a lot of it in this post, which I suggest you read. It even includes the fact that Poles have recently become somewhat Jew-friendly, although there are virtually no Jews there anymore.
I’ve never met a Nazi. Once, when I was an obstinate young man working my way through college – because I figured if my father could do it, I could too – I met a man named Nowak, who had been in some kind of fascist youth organization in Romania during WWII. He was quite proud of it.
He worked in a different department and was much older, and never gave me any personal grief. But on the couple of occasions I was unfortunate enough to be involved in a small group conversation with him, I was exposed to a worldview and psychology which I can only describe as the most callow, vulgar, Godless, casually vicious and gutter-dwelling I had ever encountered. Not until I met a middle aged Albanian many years later who was pleased to boast to me [apropos of nothing particular] of his clan’s virtue of being the most murderous and grudge bearing people on earth, did I meet another person somewhat like that.
Life for them is unapologetically about human manipulation, exploitation and domination.
If you carefully consider the matter, you grimly come to the realization that if our system of law broke down completely, you would simply have to kill such men as they revealed themselves. Because if you did not, they would be leading your 13 year old daughter (or kid sister) around on a chain attached to a dog collar.
@DNW:
“Because if you did not, they would be leading your 13 year old daughter (or kid sister) around on a chain attached to a dog collar.”
Listened to any Hip-hop lyrics lately?
The “suicides” or “shot while escaping” parts reminded me of Jeffery Epstein. But that one we’ll never know for sure.
@Neo:
I could be wrong, but I think that the general if unspoken in polite company feeling in Central Europe is ‘Very Sorry about what happened before, but you have your own country now and we’re very busy trying to hang on to our nations against the assaults of the assembled forces of GloboHomo — which you are doubtless totally unacquainted with.’ That may be less so in the Ukraine, but Ukraine as we can all see is ‘problematic’.
One can nit-pick about what happened here and there in ‘Poland’ — Poland itself is a kind of Moveable (and re-definable according to taste) Feast. You may want to look at the big green blob in the map here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Lithuanian_Commonwealth
Been on Gab lately?
“Been on Gab lately?”
Yep! Offended at least 10,000 people before breakfast. And just getting started.
@Neo:
Back to ‘Poland’ — I’m sure you’re aware, too, that land holdings of the nobility in all parts of Europe tended to be distributed here and there and were not monolithic. Generations of intermarriage and conflict and conquest and just plain horse-trading. Perfectly normal to have an estate on the Baltic and another one in Galicia or further East, or even to be a vassal of several different Christian monarchs plus the Ottoman Sultan all at the same time.
Too modest in your self assessment. And blowing smoke?
No, but I take your point.
We are there, courtesy of the both old and “new class” progressives, or the progressive clerisy, or whatever your want to call it, and no Nazis were involved at all.
That is why if they are thrown into the tumbrils by their own children, no Pimpernels need, nor should, interfere. It’s a far far better thing to let them reap what they have sown.
Unfortunately, they are fleeing to Texas and Florida; seeking refuge among the gun and Bible clutching “rednecks” they otherwise enjoy despising.
By the way, not apropos of nothing, but of many recent conversations here: Bill Whittle whom I don’t particularly like. But it appears he has noticed the same news pointed here … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSWNtP0H1w8
@DNW:
It’s nice to rake over the past and have a bit of fun with History — nobody comes out smelling of roses and I do enjoy the opportunity to pontificate.
But as you point out, this time around, I don’t see too many Nazi parallels — although many on the Dissident Right are happy enough to play along if accused of it — Denial doesn’t seem to get one anywhere anyway, so embrace and extend and take the piss.
It’s a Cold Day in Hell when Bill Whittle stops with the Rah Rah Flight 96 Civnattery and notices that Something is Wrong with Our Women. I will check it out.
Wait until he discovers Jimnianity:
https://blog.reaction.la/politics/make-women-property-again/
Zaphod:
t was Flight 93. What a maroon. I know, not your country.
Gab is calling you.
Thanks for correction Om.
Not My Country. My People. What is this Country you speak of?
Zaphod:
I made it clear that the situation you described was the Poles when they occupied Ukraine and used Jews as the go-betweens. This wasn’t in Poland and was not an explanation for Polish anti-Semitism. It is, however, part – but only part – of what sparked the intensity of Ukrainian anti-Semitism.
And if you read the content of that old post of mine that I linked to, you’ll see that in Poland (at least in 2007, when I posted it) there was quite a bit of nostalgia among young Poles for its lost Jewish population, now that the Jews are gone from that land. Jews made up between 10 and 11 percent of the Polish population prior to the German invasion. Only 10% of those Polish Jews survived the war, and very very few of them survived in Poland.
@Neo:
Fair enough. It’s a fertile field for much disputation — little of which bears much direct relevance to where we find ourselves in 2021.
Still, Nazi threads tend to be the longest threads in which we all do our respective bits. What *that* means, is a puzzlement for the ages.
Perhaps the reason is that it’s a comfortingly familiar Known Known where everyone knows their respective parts. We’re all on the Edge of the Unknown, and I for one do not like it one bit.
Zaphod:
I wouldn’t call anything about the Nazis “comfortably” familiar.
Or even “familiar,” for most people. I’ve been impressed by how little people know about the most basic facts.
I guess I could say that these days about history in general. In fact, a lot of people are more familiar with the future than with the past. Or at least as familiar – meaning, they don’t know squat. And often what they think they know is wrong.
Zaphod:
Who are “your” people? The “od?”
Do they want you back?
@Neo:
I’m having a little rhetorical fun with ‘Comfortably Familiar’ in order to make a point. I would not go so far as to say that we should let it all go and get on with Life, but I am saying that History is headed right at us all like an oncoming train and there is a balance between eyes on the road in front and rear view mirror.
I once saw a Tasmanian Devil in a zoo. It had gone insane in its captivity and ran in circles around and around its enclosure. Its running track was worn a good 10cm deeper than ground level. Not Rilke’s Panther. And we always laugh at generals for being prepared to fight the last war. This upcoming attraction will certainly rhyme with the past… but I’m thinking more contrapuntally… and not sure that this thread is anywhere near the dominant theme. YMMV and and more power to you for that.
Zaphod “knows” his Eastern European history but doesn’t necessarily “comprehend” it’s history. The facts cited are correct but the conclusions are not on point. First off it was the Kingdom of Poland and the Duchy of Lithuania that made up “Poland” before the partitions. A lot of the political conflict was along those lines. They did have a bad practice where 100% had to agree. So if someone left the Sejm then law or successor couldn’t be passed.
Also pre-partition Poland was before the concept of nation state existed. They had a sense of ethnicity or people but not of a national entity. Most US citizens don’t comprehend that the bulk of the world defines themselves by ethnicity or tribe and not a nationality. They are linked by blood and not by concept like we are. That is why there were Volga Germans 200 years after Catherine the Great invited them in to farm. German language newspaper were printed up until the 1930’s before Stalin shut them down. He deported all Germans to Siberia when the war started.
Why so many Jews in Poland/Ukraine or what is called the “Pale”? When Spain booted out Jews after 1492, the King of Poland Sobieski welcomed them with very friendly terms. There was blatant anti-Semitism mainly due to ethnic tensions. Also the Pale Jews became Hasidic after a time which set them apart more.
The Nazi racial ideology rose out of the writings of Houston Chamberlain (not associated with Neville). He got a lot of inspiration from the United States and it’s racial Social Darwinism interpretation as advocated by progressives such as Woodrow Wilson, Margret Sanger, Dewey et al. Read “War against the Weak” by Edwin Black.
All of this was allowed by Enlightenment Humanism that drove God from the public square.
Finally as a personal anecdote I was stationed in Poland from 1997 to 2000 where my plant was 15 miles from Auschwitz. One of the times I took a group the tour guide was a man who as a boy was the first to Auschwitz after the Germans left to look for his older brother and uncle. In his group was Karol Józef Wojty?a or you may know him as John Paul II. There is a picture of a dead woman who just gave birth with the baby still attached to her by umbilical cord. He showed me where she laid. I laid a lit candle there and wept. It was All Souls Day or Halloween here in the US.
I have no sympathy for those who spout excuses for man’s depravity against man. An ancient tradition that was only overthrown by the power of Jesus Christ. Those who fall away from his teachings are those that perpetrate these horrors. Like Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Idi Amin, Al Quada, Hamas and Al Shabab. Yes as Hobbes said in Leviathan “a man’s life is short, hard and brutish” if there are not laws and traditions structured on Christian teachings. But it does not have to be so. Little do the Karen’s and Chad’s understand what will be visited upon them if the Fascists take control.
That is why I fight today to restore those values that Secular Humanism has lost. I will not go quietly into the good night.
“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?” – Gina Carano
Pretty clear why she had to be cancelled.
“….A few weeks earlier with the kickoff…”
Barbarossa was supposed to “kick off” about a month earlier than it actually did. It was delayed because Hitler decided he had to send Wehrmacht units to save Mussolini’s backside from his poorly planned and disastrously executed Balkan/Greek campaign in early 1941.
Seems that the world owes Mussolini a whole lot more than it realizes….
I have not confounded with Romania.
The phenomenon you described was a feature of agrarian life in early 20th century Roumania. You’re in the wrong country.
You seem to be under the impression that displays of unearned self-confidence persuade people.
You’re in a different century and ballpark. If that floats your boat, well and good for you. Chill.
neo on May 4, 2021 at 1:00 pm said:
Avi:
Some good Germans.
Bad Germans who were good people. Like Bernard Lichtenberg obm