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”.
