The Nazis- a Warning From History Page 6
Erna Kranz speaks fondly of the amusements the Nazis organized for young people, such as pageants and celebrations. One of the most famous ‘artistic’ processions was the ‘Night of the Amazons’ held in Munich each year for four years, starting in 1936. Surviving colour film of this extraordinary event shows topless German maidens on horseback. The semi-naked young women were arranged to represent historical tableaux, including hunting scenes from Greek myths. Erna Kranz took part in the parade, not as one of the topless girls, but as a Madame Pompadour with a hooped skirt and a plunging neckline. She did not see the event as pornographic – far from it: ‘The girls were there the way God created them, but the real purpose was, I think, a feast for the eyes and the edification and joy of the people who went there.’ After all, she points out, ‘In the Sistine Chapel, they’re all naked, aren’t they?’
There was more to an event like the ‘Night of the Amazons’ than a pageant designed to fulfil the fantasies of the watching Nazi leaders. According to Erna Kranz, the purpose of events like this was to present the Germans as an elite: ‘People had the conceit to say that a German is special, that the German people should become a thoroughbred people, should stand above the others.’ This idea was contagious: ‘You used to say that if you tell a young person every day, “You are something special,” then in the end they will believe you.’
Knowing as we do the unique horrors perpetrated by this regime, people who claim to have been happier under Nazi rule than they are today are, at best, likely to attract ridicule. But it is vital that people like Erna Kranz speak out, for without their testimony an easier, less troublesome view of Nazism might prevail – that the regime oppressed the German population from the very beginning. Academic research shows that Erna Kranz is not unusual in her rosy view of the regime during this period. Over 40 per cent of Germans questioned in a research project after the war said they remembered the 1930s as ‘good times’. As this survey was conducted in 1951, when the Germans knew the full reality of the wartime extermination camps, it is a telling statistic.
All this may seem incomprehensible now, or perhaps only comprehensible by relying on a cultural view of the Germans as a uniquely odd people peculiarly susceptible to a crazed authority figure. But there is another explanation, and to grasp it fully one must try to imagine oneself in the same position as Erna Kranz and her family in 1934. What did they have to look back on over the previous twenty years? A war that had drained the country of young men and resulted in national shame; a peace treaty that had economically crippled the country and taken away much of its territory; raging inflation that had destroyed people’s savings; a plethora of political parties who appeared to bicker constantly with each other; street fights between the paramilitary supporters of rival political parties; unemployment on a scale never seen before. Is it surprising that the apparent stability of the Nazi regime from 1934 onwards was welcomed?
Unexpected as it may be to discover that many Germans were content during the 1930s, this news is as nothing compared to recent revelations about the infamous Nazi secret police – the Gestapo. In popular myth the Gestapo have a secure and terrifying role as the all-powerful, all-seeing instrument of terror that oppressed an unwilling population. But this is far from the truth. To uncover the real story you have to travel to the town of Würzburg in southwest Germany. Würzburg is a German town much like any other, except for one special attribute: it is one of only three towns in Europe where Gestapo records were not destroyed by the Nazis at the end of the war. Resting in the Würzburg archive are around 18,000 Gestapo files, which exist more by luck than design; the Gestapo were in the process of burning them as the American troops arrived. They had begun to burn them alphabetically, so there are relatively few A–D files left; otherwise the files are complete.
Professor Robert Gellately of Ontario was the first person to uncover the secrets of the files. As he started work on them, an old German man saw what he was studying and said to him, ‘Perhaps you’d like to interview me, because I lived here during that time and I know a lot about it.’ Professor Gellately talked to him over a cup of coffee and asked him how many Gestapo officials there had been in this part of Germany. ‘They were everywhere,’ the old man replied, confirming the conventional view of the Gestapo.7
Yet after studying the files, Professor Gellately discovered that the Gestapo simply couldn’t have been ‘everywhere’. Würzburg lies in the administrative area of Lower Franconia, a district covering around a million people. For that whole area there were precisely twenty-eight Gestapo officials. Twenty-two were allocated to Würzburg, and almost half of those were involved only in administrative work. The idea that the Gestapo itself was constantly spying on the population is demonstrably a myth. So how was it possible that so few people exercised such control? The simple answer is because the Gestapo received enormous help from ordinary Germans. Like all modern policing systems, the Gestapo was only as good or bad as the cooperation it received – and the files reveal that it received a high level of cooperation, making it a very good secret police force indeed. Only around 10 per cent of political crimes committed between 1933 and 1945 were actually discovered by the Gestapo; another 10 per cent of cases were passed on to the Gestapo by the regular police or the Nazi Party. This means that around 80 per cent of all political crime was discovered by ordinary citizens who turned the information over to the police or the Gestapo. The files also show that most of this unpaid cooperation came from people who were not members of the Nazi Party – they were ‘ordinary’ citizens. Yet there was never a duty to denounce or inform. The mass of files in the Würzburg archive came into being because some non-party member voluntarily denounced a fellow German. Far from being a proactive organization that resolutely sought out its political enemies itself, the Gestapo’s main job was sorting out the voluntary denunciations it received.
The files teem with stories that do not reflect well on the motives of those who did the denouncing. One file tells of a Jewish wine-dealer from Würzburg who was having an affair with a non-Jewish woman who had been a widow since 1928. He had been staying overnight with her since 1930 and they had declared their intention of getting married. The file demonstrates how Hitler’s becoming Chancellor coincided with the widow’s neighbours starting to voice objections to the presence of the Jewish man and confronting him on the communal stairs. As a result, he stopped staying overnight with the widow, but continued to help her out financially and to eat with her. Then, a 56-year-old woman who lived in the same house sent a denunciation to the Gestapo. Her main complaint was that she objected to the widow having a relationship with a Jew, although it was not then an offence. From correspondence between the party and the police it becomes clear that she and a male neighbour pressurized the party into taking action. The local Nazi Party then put pressure on the SS, who, in August 1933, marched the Jewish man to the police station with a placard around his neck. The placard, with its despicable message painted in blood red, is still carefully preserved in the file. In neatly stencilled letters it reads, ‘This is a Jewish male, Mr Müller. I have been living in sin with a German woman.’ Herr Müller was then kept in jail for several weeks before leaving Germany altogether in 1934. He had broken no German law.
Denunciations became a way in which Germans could make their voices heard in a system that had turned away from democracy; you see somebody who should be in the army but is not – you denounce them; you hear somebody tell a joke about Hitler – you denounce them as well. Denunciations could also be used for personal gain; you want the flat an old Jewish lady lives in – you denounce her; your neighbours irritate you – you denounce them too.
During, his many months of research in the Würzburg archive Professor Gellately struggled hard to find a ‘hero’ – someone who had stood up to the regime, an antidote, if you like, to the bleak aspect that the study of the Gestapo files casts on human nature. He believed he had found just such a person in Ilse Sonja Totzke, who went to Würzburg as a
music student in the 1930s. Her Gestapo file reveals that she became an object of suspicion for those around her. The first person to denounce her was a distant relative, who said that she was inclined to be too friendly to Jews and that she knew too much about things that should be of no concern to women, such as military matters. This relative said that he felt driven to tell the Gestapo this because he was a reserve officer (though there was nothing in being a reserve officer that required him to do so). Totzke was put under general surveillance by the Gestapo, but this surveillance took a strange form: it consisted of the Gestapo asking her neighbours to keep an eye on her. There follows in the file a mass of contradictory evidence supplied by her neighbours. Sometimes Totzke gave the ‘Hitler greeting’ (Heil Hitler) and sometimes she didn’t, but overall she made it clear that she was not going to avoid socializing with Jews (something which at this point was not a crime). One anonymous denouncer even hinted that Totzke might be a lesbian (‘Miss Totzke doesn’t seem to have normal predispositions’). But there is no concrete evidence that she had committed any offence. Nonetheless, it was enough for the Gestapo to bring her in for questioning. The account of her interrogation in the file shows that she was bluntly warned about her attitude, but the Gestapo clearly didn’t think she was a spy, or guilty of any of the outlandish accusations made against her. She was simply unconventional. The denunciations, however, kept coming in, and eventually the file landed on the desk of one of the most bloodthirsty Gestapo officials in Würzburg – Gormosky of Branch 2B, which dealt with Jews.
On 28 October 1941 Totzke was summoned for an interrogation. The Gestapo kept an immaculate record of what was said. Totzke acknowledged that, ‘If I have anything to do with Jews any more, I know that I can reckon on a concentration camp.’ But despite this, she still kept up her friendship with Jews and was ordered once more to report to the Gestapo. She took flight with a friend and tried to cross the border into Switzerland, but the Swiss customs officials turned her over to the German authorities. In the course of a long interrogation conducted in southwest Germany, she said: ‘I, for one, find the Nuremberg Laws and Nazi anti-Semitism to be totally unacceptable. I find it intolerable that such a country as Germany exists and I do not want to live here any longer.’ Eventually, after another lengthy interrogation in Würzburg, Totzke was sent to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück, from which we have no reason to believe she ever returned. Her courage cost her her life.
We decided to follow up Professor Gellately’s research with this file by trying to find living witnesses to Totzke’s denunciation. Eventually we traced Maria Kraus, who had lived with her parents less than a hundred metres from Totzke. At the time we interviewed her, she was 76 years old and no different in appearance from any of the respectable elderly ladies one sees on the streets of Würzburg, itself a solid, respectable town. But lying in Totzke’s Gestapo file there is a denunciation signed by a 20-year-old Maria Kraus on 29 July 1940. The statement begins: ‘Maria Theresia Kraus, born 19.5.20, appeared in the morning at the Secret State Police.’ During our own interview with her we read her the statement, which includes the section: ‘Ilse Sonja Totzke is a resident next door to us in a garden cottage. I noticed the above-named because she is of Jewish appearance . . . I should like to mention that Miss Totzke never responds to the German greeting [Heil Hitler]. I gathered from what she was saying that her attitude was anti-German. On the contrary she always favoured France and the Jews. Among other things, she told me that the German Army was not as well equipped as the French . . . Now and then a woman of about 36 years old comes and she is of Jewish appearance . . . To my mind, Miss Totzke is behaving suspiciously. I thought she might be engaged in some kind of activity which is harmful to the German Reich.’ The signature ‘Resi Kraus’ is under the statement. We asked Frau Kraus if it was her signature. She agreed that it was but said that she did not understand how the document could exist. She denies having given the statement and has no recollection of ever visiting the Gestapo. ‘I do not know,’ she told us. ‘The address is correct. My signature is correct. But where it comes from I do not know.’ Whether Resi Kraus’s amnesia was genuine or merely diplomatic is impossible to say. Of course, it is scarcely in anyone’s interests today to confess to having denounced one’s neighbour to the Gestapo. In a telling remark at the end of our brief interview with her she said: ‘I was talking to a friend of mine and she said “Good God! To think that they rake it all up again fifty years later” . . . I mean I did not kill anyone. I did not murder anyone.’
I still have the image in my mind of Frau Kraus as we left her, after the interview, standing in the cobbled town square of Würzburg; a profoundly unexceptional figure and thus a deeply troubling one. If you want to believe there is a difference in kind between those who may have aided the Nazi regime and those who definitely did not, then a meeting with Frau Kraus is a shocking one, for in all respects, other than the denunciation signed with her name that lies in the Gestapo file, she appears an ordinary, decent woman – someone who kindly enquired how old my children were and where we planned to go for our holidays.
If Frau Kraus is the sort of person who signed a denunciation (which she cannot now remember), what does this say about the Gestapo itself? On examination, it transpires that just as the notion that the Gestapo were ‘everywhere’ is a myth, so is the idea that Gestapo officials themselves were fanatical SS members who, when the Nazi regime began, managed to oust decent law-abiding officers from the police and substitute themselves. What actually happened was that most of the police remained in their posts when the Nazi regime began, but they did not have to carry on as usual; they were now off the leash. Under the Nazis, the German police could act in ways that, for many of them, must have been liberating – disregarding the rights of suspects and pursuing what in their view was a strong law-and-order policy.
Heinrich Müller, the notorious head of the Gestapo from 1939, was no exception to this rule. He had been a policeman before the Nazis came to power, working in the political department, where he concentrated on left-wing parties. Indeed, Müller was so far from appearing to be a committed Nazi that the local party headquarters recommended that he should not be promoted in 1937 because he had done nothing of merit for the Nazi cause. Their appraisal, referring to his actions against left-wing groups before the Nazis came to power, contains the words: ‘It must be acknowledged that he proceeded against these movements with great severity, in fact partially even ignoring the legal regulations and norms. It is not less clear, however, that Müller, had it been his task, would have proceeded just the same against the right.’ The report goes on to contain a chilling insight into Müller’s motivation for serving the Nazis: ‘With his vast ambition and relentless drive, he would have done everything to win the appreciation of whoever might happen to be his boss in a given system.’ Despite this negative evaluation, Müller still won promotion. His superiors, Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, must have felt that it was more important to give the job to someone ruthless, ambitious and qualified rather than to someone who was merely politically correct.8
Most Germans, of course, would never have come into contact with the Gestapo. If you were law-abiding (in Nazi eyes), you were safe. The terror was rarely arbitrary, unless you had the misfortune to belong to one of the regime’s target groups – beggars, social misfits, Communists or Jews.
The chaotic nature of the Nazi administration of Germany was one factor that meant that Nazi anti-Semitic policy, until the start of World War II, was less consistent than one might have expected from a party committed to hating Jews. The basic anti-Semitism, particularly among the hardline Nazis, never changed, but the nature of the persecution varied wildly.
There were a series of uncoordinated attacks against Jews immediately after the election of March 1933. We have already seen one form this took in Würzburg – the public humiliation and imprisonment of a Jewish man for having an affair with a non-Jew (something, it bears repeating, that was
not then against the law). But unofficial anti-Semitic action could be even more violent. Arnon Tamir was a fifteen-year-old Jewish boy when Hitler became Chancellor, and was told by a friend that, shortly after Hitler gained power, Storm Troopers from outside his village came in and thrashed all the Jews so badly that they were ‘unable to sit down for weeks’. Elsewhere in Germany there were reports of Jews being subjected to a variety of humiliating measures, such as having their beards shorn or being forced to drink castor oil.
Rudi Bamber and his family, part of the Jewish community in Nuremberg, quickly learned about the arbitrary way in which Nazi Storm Troopers could act against Jews: ‘In 1933 the Storm Troopers came and took my father away, and together with many other Jews in Nuremberg, they were taken to a sports stadium where there was a lot of grass and they were made to cut the grass with their teeth by sort of eating it . . . It was to humiliate them, to show them that they were the lowest of the low and simply to make a gesture.’
None of these actions was formally ordered by Hitler, though he must have sympathized with the motives of those involved. On 1 April he authorized a boycott of all Jewish shops and businesses. When it was planned, the boycott was intended to be indefinite but, after pressure from Hindenburg and others (concerned about the danger of foreign trade reprisals), it was limited to one day. Nonetheless, for the Jewish population of Germany it was a day of great symbolic importance. Arnon Tamir saw Storm Troopers daub paint on Jewish shop windows and then stand intimidatingly outside to enforce the boycott. The Storm Troopers shouted slogans such as, ‘Germans do not buy in Jewish shops’ and ‘The Jews are our misfortune’. He saw one or two brave Germans force their way into Jewish shops but witnessing their bravery only showed him how desperate the position of Jews in Germany had become. ‘I felt like I was falling into a deep hole,’ he says. ‘That was when I intuitively realized for the first time that the existing law did not apply to Jews . . . you could do with Jews whatever you liked . . . a Jew was an outlaw.’ From that moment on he resolved to try to distance himself from non-Jewish Germans. In a sense, he reacted as the Storm Troopers hoped all Jews might. The Nazis wanted the Jews to separate themselves from other Germans, creating their own Jewish state within Germany. Jews consequently formed their own schools, their own youth clubs, their own sports clubs – they began voluntarily to segregate themselves. This was all the more tragic given that so many Jews in Germany had taken such pains to integrate themselves into the population as a whole. Even though they remained physically within Germany’s borders, they felt expelled.