What was it like to be a resident of the Third Reich? Six myths of the Third Reich.

LIFE IN THE THIRD REICH: 1933-1937

It was precisely at this time, in the middle of the summer of 1934, that I came to the Third Reich for permanent work. And he discovered a lot in the new Germany that impressed, puzzled, and alarmed the foreign observer. The overwhelming majority of the German people seemed to have nothing against the fact that they were deprived of personal freedom, that many cultural values ​​were destroyed, offering senseless barbarity in return, that their life and work were subjected to such regulation as even he, accustomed for many generations to strict order

True, behind all this was hidden the fear of the Gestapo, the fear of falling into concentration camp, if you have gone beyond what is permitted, if you share the views of communists or socialists, if you are too liberal or pacifist, or if you are a Jew. The “bloody purge” of June 30, 1934 showed how merciless the new rulers could be. However, at first, Nazi terror affected relatively few Germans. An outside observer who had just arrived in the country was somewhat surprised that the Germans apparently did not recognize themselves as victims of intimidation and oppression by an unscrupulous and cruel dictatorship and, on the contrary, they supported this dictatorship with genuine enthusiasm. In some ways, Nazism gave them hope, new motivation and amazing faith in the future of the country.

Hitler was dealing with the past, which had brought so much trouble and disappointment. Step by step, without wasting time, which we will describe in detail later, he freed Germany from its last obligations under the Treaty of Versailles, which baffled the victorious countries, and restored Germany’s military power. The majority of Germans wanted this and were ready to make the sacrifices that the Fuhrer demanded: renunciation of personal freedom, meager food (“guns instead of butter”) and hard work. By the fall of 1936, the problem of unemployment was largely over: almost everyone able to work had a job (From February 1933 to the spring of 1937, the number of unemployed fell from six to one million. - Author's note). I have heard how workers, deprived of the right to form trade unions, joked after a hearty lunch: “Under Hitler, the right to hunger was abolished.” The Nazi motto “Common interests above personal interests” became widespread in those days, and although many representatives of the party elite, especially Goering , secretly enriched themselves, and the profits of entrepreneurs grew, there was no doubt that the masses believed in “National Socialism,” which supposedly put public welfare above one's personal gain. Racial laws that turned Jews into outcasts of German society appeared to the shocked foreign observer as a throwback. to primitive times; but since Nazi theories extolled the Germans as the salt of the earth and as a superior race, the population of the country was far from negative about these laws. Some of the Germans (former socialists, liberals or true Christians from the old conservative layers) had to talk, they were indignant and even indignant about the persecution of Jews, but, although in a number of cases they helped individual victims, they did not try to stop the campaign of persecution. “What can we do?” they often asked. It was not easy to answer this question.

The press and radio, despite censorship, gave the Germans some idea of ​​how critical the world community was, but this circumstance, as they could see, did not prevent foreigners from flooding into the Third Reich in droves and enjoying its hospitality. At that time, entry into Nazi Germany was much freer than entry into Soviet Russia (Again, in contrast to Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany allowed all citizens, except those few thousand who were blacklisted by the secret police, to travel abroad, although this hampered largely by financial restrictions due to a lack of foreign currency. However, financial restrictions for Germans at that time were no stricter than for British citizens after 1945. Apparently, the Nazi rulers did not fear that the average German visiting a democratic country would be anti-Nazi. ideology will have a destructive effect. Tourism flourished in the country, bringing in large amounts of much-needed foreign currency. It seemed that the Nazi leadership had nothing to hide. A foreigner, be he any opponent of Nazism, could come to Germany and see and study everything he wanted, with the exception of concentration camps and, as in all other countries, military installations. And many came. And if, upon returning from there, they did not become adherents of Nazism, then at least they began to be tolerant of the “new Germany”, believing that they had discovered, as they put it, “positive changes” there. Even such an astute man as Lloyd George, who led England to victory over Germany in 1918 and who campaigned that year under the slogan “Kaiser to the Gallows!”, found it possible to visit Hitler in Obersalzberg in 1936, after which he publicly proclaimed him a “great man” who had shown enough foresight and will to solve the social problems of the modern state, primarily the problem of unemployment, which, as non-healing wound, England was still suffering; The program proposed by this outstanding leader of the Liberal Party, called “We can defeat unemployment,” did not find support within the country.

The Olympic Games, held in August 1936 in Berlin, provided the Nazis with an excellent opportunity to surprise the world with the achievements of the Third Reich, and they did not fail to take advantage of this opportunity. Signs with the words “Jews are undesirable” that hung in shops, hotels, pubs, and entertainment establishments were slowly removed, the persecution of Jews and two Christian churches was temporarily stopped, and the country acquired a completely respectable appearance.

Not a single previous Olympics was so superbly organized or accompanied by such impressive spectacles as this one. Goering, Ribbentrop and Goebbels organized lavish receptions in honor of foreign guests. More than a thousand guests gathered for dinner at the Minister of Propaganda on the island of Pfaueninsel on Wannsee, where a grandiose performance took place called “Italian Night,” which was reminiscent of scenes from “The Arabian Nights.” Foreign guests, especially from England and America, were amazed: the sight of seemingly happy, healthy, friendly people rallying around Hitler was far from consistent with their ideas about Berlin, gleaned from the newspapers.

But behind the splendor of the Summer Olympic Games, an outside observer, at least a foreigner, could not help but see something that was hidden from tourists and that the Germans themselves stopped noticing or took for granted: the deterioration of the moral climate of German society. After all, no one hid the anti-Jewish, so-called Nuremberg laws adopted by Hitler on September 15, 1935, which deprived persons of this nationality of German citizenship. The laws prohibited marriages and extramarital affairs of Jews with Aryans, and Jews were deprived of the right to hire domestic servants from women of Aryan origin under thirty-five years of age. Over the next few years, thirteen more decrees were issued that essentially outlawed Jews. Moreover, in the summer of 1936, that is, just at the time when Germany, as the organizer of the Olympic Games, tried to captivate the imagination of guests arriving from the West, Jews either by law, because with the help of Nazi terror they began to install so many slingshots when entering service in government and private institutions that at least half of them were left without any means of subsistence. In 1933, the first year of the Third Reich, they were excluded from government service and from work in the press and radio, and were not allowed to engage in agriculture, teaching, or work in the field of theater and cinema; in 1934 they were expelled from the stock exchange. As for the ban on medical and legal practice, as well as trade, although it was imposed by law only in 1938, it actually began to operate at the end of the fourth year of Nazi rule.

Moreover, the Jews were denied not only the blessings of life, but also the most necessary things. In many cities it became difficult, if not impossible, for Jews to buy food. Above the doors of grocery stores, meat shops, dairy stores, and bakeries, signs hung: “No Jews allowed.” Often they could not provide milk for their children. Pharmacies did not supply them with medicine. Hotels did not provide overnight accommodation. And everywhere they went, mocking signs awaited them: “Jews are strictly prohibited from entering this city” or “Jews may enter here only at their own peril and risk.” On a steep bend in the road near Ludwigshafen there was a sign: “Caution - sharp turn! Jews - drive at a speed of 120 kilometers per hour!” (I was subjected to fierce attacks from the press and radio; they even threatened to expel me from the country for reporting that during the Olympic Games some of the inscriptions were removed. - Ed.)

Such was the fate of the Jews during the Olympic Games - it was the beginning of a path that soon led them to physical death.

Persecution of Christian churches

Less than four months had passed, and on June 20 the Nazi government had already concluded a concordat with the Vatican, which guaranteed the freedom of the Catholic faith and the right of the church to independently “regulate its internal affairs.” On the German side, the treaty was signed by Papen, on the Vatican side - by his Secretary of State, Monsignor Pacelli, who later became Pope Pius XII. The Nazi government began to violate the terms of the treaty almost before its text was put on paper; but, being concluded at a time when a wave of indignation was sweeping across the world at the first excesses of the new German regime, the concordat undoubtedly contributed to the increase in prestige of the Hitler government, which it greatly needed (June 2, 1945, in an address to the Council of Cardinals, Pope Pius XII defended the concordat he signed, but declared that National Socialism, as he subsequently saw it, was nothing more than “an open apostasy from Jesus Christ, the denial of his teachings and his deeds in atonement for human sins, the preaching of the cult of violence and racial hatred, disregard for human freedom and dignity." - Author's note).

On July 25, five days after the ratification of the concordat, the German government passed a sterilization law that particularly offended the Catholic Church. And five days later, the first steps were taken to dissolve the Catholic Youth League. In subsequent years, thousands of Catholic priests, monks and lay leaders were arrested, often on trumped-up charges of “immorality” and “foreign currency smuggling.” The leader of Catholic Action, Erich Klausener, as we already know, was killed during the purge on June 30, 1934. Dozens of Catholic publications were banned. Under pressure from Gestapo agents, the secret of confession was even violated. By the spring of 1937, the Catholic hierarchy in Germany, which, like most Protestant priests, had initially sought to cooperate with the new regime, had lost all illusions. On March 14, 1937, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical entitled “With Profound Sorrow,” accusing the Nazi government of “deviating” from, violating, and spreading “tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, slander, secret and open hostility towards Christ.” and the holy church." On the “horizon of Germany,” the pope saw “the looming storm clouds of destructive religious wars... which pursue no other goal than... extermination.”

Reverend Martin Niemöller welcomed the Nazis' rise to power in 1933. Then his autobiographical book entitled “From Submarine to Pulpit” was published. The story of how this man, who served as a submarine commander during the First World War, became a famous Protestant pastor, earned much praise from the Nazi press and was a great commercial success. To Pastor Niemöller, like many other Protestant ministers, the fourteen years of the republic seemed, as he put it, “years of darkness.” At the end of his autobiography, he notes with satisfaction that the Nazi revolution was finally victorious and led to the “national revival” for which he himself had fought for so long, and for some time in the ranks of the “Free Corps”, from which many Nazi leaders came.

Soon, however, he was severely disappointed.

In Germany, as in the United States, Protestantism is divided into different denominations and churches. Only a very few Protestants - about 150 thousand out of 45 million - belonged to various nonconformist churches such as the Baptist and Methodist. The rest belonged to twenty-eight Lutheran and Reform churches, the largest of which was the Church of the North German Union, which united 18 million parishioners. With the advent of the National Socialist movement, Protestants were further divided. More fanatically minded Nazis of this religion organized in 1932 the “German Christian Movement”, the most violent leader of which was a certain Ludwig Müller, a chaplain from the East Prussian military district, an ardent supporter of Hitler; It was he who first brought Hitler together with General von Blomberg, who was then the commander of this district. “German Christians” actively preached Nazi ideas of racial superiority, trying to instill them in the Reich church and thereby contribute to the inclusion of all Protestants in a single congregation. In 1933, out of 17,000 Protestant pastors, about three thousand were “German Christians,” although these latter may have had a disproportionately large number of parishioners.

The enemy of the “German Christians” was another group that called itself the “confessional church.” It consisted of approximately the same number of pastors, and Niemöller eventually became its head. She opposed the Nazification of Protestant churches, rejected the Nazis' racial theories, and condemned the anti-Christian ideas of Rosenberg and other Nazi leaders. The majority of Protestants took an intermediate position. Apparently wary of joining any of the opposing groups, they preferred the role of observers and ended up largely in the hands of Hitler, accepting for granted his right to interfere in the affairs of the church and obeying his orders. It is difficult to understand the behavior of the majority of German Protestants in the early years of Nazism without taking into account two things: the history of Protestantism and the influence of Martin Luther (To avoid any misunderstandings, it should probably be noted that the author of the book is a Protestant. - Author's note). This great founder of Protestantism was both an ardent anti-Semite and an ardent champion of the idea of ​​​​unconditional submission to political authority. He wanted Germany to get rid of the Jews, and advised that when expelling them, they should take away “all cash, precious stones, silver and gold... set fire to their synagogues and schools, destroy their homes... herd them like gypsies into tents or stable... and let them wallow in poverty and bondage, constantly groaning and complaining to the Lord God about us.” This advice was followed four hundred years later by Hitler, Goering and Himmler.

During the Peasants' War of 1525 - perhaps the only mass uprising in German history - Luther called on the princes to mercilessly deal with " mad dogs", as he called the oppressed, desperate peasants. And here, as in attacks against the Jews, Luther resorted to such rude, rigoristic expressions that history did not know until the advent of the Nazis. Many generations of Germans experienced the influence of this outstanding personality , especially Protestants. Another consequence of this influence was the ease with which Protestantism in Germany became an instrument of the absolutism of kings and princes, from the 16th century to 1918, when kings and princes were overthrown by hereditary monarchs and petty rulers who became archbishops in their lands. Thus, in Prussia, the king from the Hohenzollern dynasty became the head of the church. According to the established tradition, in no other country, except for Tsarist Russia, did the ministers of the church subservient to the state political power as in Germany. All of them, with rare exceptions, They stood firmly for the king, the Junkers and the army. Throughout the 19th century they invariably opposed liberal and democratic movements. Even the Weimar Republic was anathematized by most Protestant pastors, not only because it overthrew kings and princes, but also because it relied mainly on Catholics and socialists. During the elections to the Reichstag, it was impossible not to notice that the Protestant clergy, of which Niemöller was a typical representative, quite openly supported the nationalists and Nazis - the enemies of the republic. Like Niemöller, most pastors welcomed Adolf Hitler's assumption of the chancellorship in 1933.

They soon learned the Nazi strong-arm tactics that brought Hitler to power. In July 1933, representatives of Protestant churches drew up the text of the charter of the new Church of the Reich, which was officially recognized by the Reichstag on July 14. Immediately after this, a fierce struggle unfolded in connection with the election of the first bishop of the Reich. Hitler demanded that his friend Chaplain Müller, who served as his adviser on the affairs of the Protestant Church, be ordained to this highest rank. The leaders of the federation of churches proposed the famous theologian Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwing for this post. It was a naive calculation. The Nazi government intervened: dissolved several provincial church organizations, removed a number of leading dignitaries from positions in the Protestant churches, unleashed the SA and Gestapo on recalcitrant priests - in essence, terrorized everyone who supported Bodelschwing. On the eve of the election of delegates to the synod, which was to elect the bishop of the Reich, Hitler “called” on the radio for Protestants to vote for the “German Christians” who nominated Müller as their candidate. The intimidation tactic worked perfectly. Bodelschwing was forced to withdraw his candidacy, after which the majority of votes in the elections were given to “German Christians”; They elected Müller as bishop of the Reich at the synod held in September in Wittenberg, where Luther first challenged Rome.

However, the new head of the church, a despotic man by nature, was unable to either create a unified church or completely Nazify the Protestant congregation. On November 13, 1933, the day after the overwhelming majority of the German people supported Hitler in the all-German referendum, “German Christians” held a mass rally in Berlin's Sportpalast. A certain Dr. Reinhardt Krause, the head of a sect in the Berlin district, proposed to abolish the Old Testament "with its cattle dealers and pimps" and revise the New Testament in order to bring the teachings of Christ into "full conformity with the requirements of National Socialism." The texts of resolutions were prepared under the motto “One People, One Reich, One Faith,” demanding that all pastors take an oath of allegiance to Hitler and that all churches accept clauses concerning Aryans and the exclusion of Jewish converts. But this was too much even for humble Protestants, who refused to take any part in the war of the churches, so Bishop Müller was forced to disavow Dr. Krause.

In essence, the struggle between the Nazi government and the churches was of the same nature as the eternal dispute about what is Caesar's and what is God's. Hitler said: if pro-Nazi “German Christians” are unable to subjugate evangelical churches Reich Bishop Müller, then the government will subjugate them. He always harbored dislike for Protestants, who constituted a tiny minority in his native Catholic Austria, and two-thirds of the population in Germany. “You can twist them any way you want,” he once boasted to his assistant. “They obey... Little people, they obey like dogs, and they sweat from embarrassment when you talk to them.” Hitler knew very well that only a small number of pastors and an even smaller number of believers opposed the Nazification of Protestant churches.

By early 1934, the disillusioned Pastor Niemöller had become the soul of the minority opposition in the Confessional Church and the Extraordinary Pastor's League. At a general synod held at the BBL in May 1934, and at a special meeting held in November at Niemöller's Church of Jesus Christ in Dahlem, a suburb of Berlin, the "confessional church" declared itself the legitimate Protestant church of Germany and established a provisional church government. . Thus, two groups were formed: one led by Reich Bishop Müller, the other led by Niemöller, and each claimed to be the legitimate Church of Germany.

It became obvious that the former army chaplain, despite his closeness to Hitler, had failed to unite the Protestant churches, and at the end of 1935, when the Gestapo arrested seven hundred pastors of the "confessional church", he resigned and left the scene. Already in July 1935, Schitler appointed his friend the Nazi lawyer Hans Kerrl as minister of church affairs, instructing him to make another attempt to unite Protestants. At first, Kerrl, who was one of the moderate Nazis, achieved significant success. He managed not only to win over the conservative clergy, who formed the majority, but also to establish a committee of churches, headed by the venerable Doctor Zellner, who enjoyed authority in all factions, to develop a common platform. But Niemöller's group, without refusing to cooperate with the committee, continued to consider itself the only legitimate church. In May 1936, when she submitted a polite but forceful memorandum to Hitler protesting the new regime's anti-Christian tendencies, condemning its anti-Semitism and demanding an end to government interference in church affairs, Interior Minister Frick responded with brutal repression. Hundreds of "confessional church" pastors were arrested, and Dr. Weissler, one of the signatories of the memorandum, was killed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The cash register of the “confessional church” was confiscated, and the collection of donations was prohibited.

On February 12, 1937, Dr. Zoellner resigned as chairman of the committee of churches (the Gestapo had forbidden him to visit Lübeck, where nine Protestant pastors were imprisoned), complaining about the obstacles caused by the Minister of Church Affairs. Dr. Kerrl answered him in a speech delivered the next day to a group of obedient priests. He in turn accused Zoellner of failing to appreciate the Nazi theory of the "race of blood and soil" and clearly demonstrated the government's hostility towards both the Protestant and Catholic churches.

“The Party,” said Kerr, “stands on the platform of positive Christianity, and positive Christianity is National Socialism... National Socialism is the will of God... The will of God is embodied in German blood... Doctor Zoellner and Count Galen, Catholic Bishop of Munster, tried to convince me that Christianity implies faith in Christ as the son of God. I felt funny... No, Christianity does not depend on the apostolic creed... The true personification of Christianity is the party, but the party, and first of all the Fuhrer. , calls on the German people to support true Christianity... The Fuhrer is the exponent of the new divine will."

On July 1, 1937, Dr. Niemöller was arrested and imprisoned in Berlin's Moabit prison. On June 27, as always, he read a sermon to the members of his congregation in a crowded Dahlem church, which became his last in the Third Reich. As if sensing what would happen to him, he said: “We are no more than the ancient apostles thinking about using force to save ourselves from the hands of the authorities. And no more than they are ready to remain silent at the command of man, when the Lord himself commands us to speak. For it was and remains our duty fulfilling the will of God, not man."

On March 2, 1938, after eight months in prison, he was tried in a “special court” established by the Nazis for state criminals; on the main charge ("secret subversion of the state"), the court acquitted him, but found him guilty of "abuse of the pulpit" and collecting donations in a church building, for which he was fined two thousand marks and sentenced to seven months in prison conclusions. Since Niemöller had already served more than his sentence, the court ordered his release, but upon leaving the courtroom he was captured by the Gestapo, taken into custody and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. From there he was transported to the Dachau camp, where he remained for seven years until he was liberated by Allied forces.

In addition to Niemöller, 807 pastors and laymen - active adherents of the "confessional church" - were arrested in 1937, and hundreds of others in the next one or two years. If the resistance of the Niemeller wing was not completely broken, then, in any case, it was crushed. As for the majority of Protestant pastors, they, like almost all German citizens, submitted to Nazi terror. At the end of 1937, Dr. Kerrl forced the very venerable Bishop Mararens of Hanover to make a public statement that could not but seem particularly humiliating to such stalwarts as Niemöller: “The National Socialist worldview, based on national and political doctrine, defines and characterizes the German maturity. As such, it is also obligatory for “German Christians.” And in the spring of 1938, Bishop Mararens took the final, final step, ordering all the pastors of his diocese to take a personal oath of allegiance to the Fuhrer. Soon the majority of Protestant priests bound themselves to this oath. and being legally and morally obliged to carry out the dictator's orders.

It would be a mistake to believe that the persecution of Protestants and Catholics by the Nazi state traumatized the German people or greatly disturbed large sections of them. Nothing like this. A people who easily gave up freedoms in other areas of life - political, cultural, economic, was not, with relatively rare exceptions, going to face death or even expose themselves to the danger of arrest in the name of freedom of religion. What really touched the Germans in the thirties were Hitler's impressive successes in eliminating unemployment, raising economic levels, restoring military power, as well as successive victories in the field of foreign policy. Few Germans lost sleep because of the arrest of several thousand priests or because of the quarrels between different sects of Protestants. Even fewer realized that the Nazi regime, under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler and with the support of Hitler, intended to eradicate the Christian faith, replacing it with the old, pre-Christian religion of the Germanic tribes, combined with the new paganism of the Nazi extremists. As Bormann, one of Hitler's closest associates, openly stated in 1941, “National Socialism and Christianity are incompatible.”

What Hitler's leadership had in store for Germany was clearly formulated in the thirty-point program for a "national church of the Reich" drawn up during the war by Rosenberg, an outspoken ideologist of paganism. Along with other duties, Rosenberg served as "the Fuhrer's representative in the system of complete intellectual and philosophical education and training in the spirit of the National Socialist Party."

Here are some of the most significant points of this program:

"1. The National Church of the German Reich categorically demands the exclusive right and exclusive powers to control all churches located within the boundaries of the Reich. It declares them to be the national churches of the German Reich...

5. The national church is determined to completely eradicate... the alien and alien Christian confessions brought to Germany in the ill-fated year 800...

7. The national church does not have preachers, pastors, chaplains and other priests, but only national speakers of the Reich...

13. The national church demands an immediate stop to the publication and distribution of the Bible in the country.

14. The national church declares... to the German nation that "Mayi Kampf" is the greatest document. This book... represents the purest and truest ethic of life of our nation now and in the future...

18. The national church will remove all crucifixes, bibles and images of saints from its altars.

19. There should be nothing in the altars except “Maya Kampf” (for the German nation and, therefore, for God this is the most sacred book) and... a sword...

30. On the day of the founding of the national church, the Christian cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals and chapels... and replaced by the only invincible symbol - the swastika."

Nazification of culture

On the evening of May 10, 1933, approximately four and a half months after Hitler became chancellor, an event occurred in Berlin that the Western world had not witnessed since the late Middle Ages. Around midnight, a torchlight procession in which thousands of students took part ended in the park on Unter den Linden, opposite the University of Berlin. They threw their torches into the huge mountain of books collected here, and when they were engulfed in flames, new piles of books flew into the fire. In total, about 20 thousand books were burned. Similar scenes could be observed in several other cities - this is how the mass burning of books began.

Many of the books thrown into the fire that night with the approval of Dr. Goebbels by the jubilant students of Berlin were written by world famous authors. Of the German authors whose books ended up in the fire, we can name Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Jacob Wasserman, Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Erich Maria Remarque, Walter Rathenau, Albert Einstein, Alfred Kerr and Hugo Preuss. The latter is a German scientist who once drafted the Weimar Constitution. The books of many foreign authors were burned, such as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Helen Keller, Margaret Sanger, H.G. Wells, Havelock Ellis, Arthur Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud, Andre Gide, Emile Zola, Marcel Proust. According to the student proclamation, any book “that undermines our future or strikes at the foundations of German thought, the German family and driving forces of our people." While the books were turning to ashes, the new Minister of Propaganda, Dr. Goebbels, addressed the students, who considered his main task to put the Nazi straitjacket on German culture. "The soul of the German people will again be able to express itself," declared He. - This fire is intended to illuminate not only the final decline of the old era. It also highlights the advent of a new era."

The beginning of the new, Nazi era of German culture was marked not only by bonfires of books and a more effective, although less symbolic, measure - a ban on the sale and lending of hundreds of books in libraries, on the publication of many new books, but also by the regulation of all cultural life on a scale not known until then to any of the Western states. Back on September 22, 1933, the Reich Chamber of Culture, headed by Dr. Goebbels, was legally established. The law defined its purpose as follows: “In order to implement German cultural policy, it is necessary to gather creative workers in all spheres into a single organization under the leadership of the Reich. The Reich must not only determine the direction of intellectual and spiritual progress, but also organize and direct the activities of workers in various fields of culture.” .

To guide and control each sphere of cultural life, seven chambers were created: fine arts, music, theater, literature, press, radio broadcasting and cinema. All persons working in these areas were required to join the relevant chambers, whose decisions and instructions had the force of law. In addition to other rights, the chambers were given the right to exclude persons from their composition due to their political unreliability or not to admit them there. This meant that those who were not particularly enthusiastic about National Socialism could lose the right to practice their professional activities in the arts and thereby lose their livelihood. Among those who lived in Germany in the 30s and were sincerely concerned about the fate of its culture, there was not a single figure who would not note its horrific decline. Naturally, this decline became inevitable as soon as the Nazi leaders decided that the visual arts, literature, radio and cinema should serve exclusively for the purpose of propaganda of the new regime and its ridiculous philosophy. Not a single living German writer, with the exception of Ernst Jünger and the early Ernst Wichert, was published in Nazi Germany. Almost all the writers, led by Thomas Mann, emigrated, and the few who remained remained silent or were forced into silence. The manuscript of any book or play had to be submitted to the Ministry of Propaganda in order to obtain permission for publication or production.

Music was in a more advantageous position, since it was the art most distant from politics and the German musical treasury was filled with outstanding works, from Bach, Beethoven and Mozart to Brahms. But performing the music of Mendelssohn, who was Jewish, was, for example, prohibited, as was the music of the leading modern German composer Paul Hindemith. Jews were quickly excluded from leading symphony orchestras and opera houses. Unlike writers, most of the outstanding figures of German musical art decided to remain in Nazi Germany and, in essence, give their names and their talents to the service of the “new order”. One of the most outstanding conductors of the century, Wilhelm Furtwängler, did not leave the country either. For about a year he was in disgrace for speaking out in defense of Hindemith, but then returned to active musical activity, which he carried on throughout the subsequent years of Hitler's rule. Richard Strauss, the leading contemporary German composer, also remained. For some time he was president of the chamber of music, associating his name with Goebbels’s prostitution of culture. The famous pianist Walter Gieseking, with the approval of Goebbels, toured mainly abroad, promoting German culture. Thanks to the fact that musicians did not emigrate, and also thanks to the enormous classical heritage, during the Third Reich it was possible to enjoy excellent performances of opera and symphonic music. The orchestras of the Berlin Philharmonic and the Berlin State Opera were considered unsurpassed in this sense. Great music helped people forget about the decline of other arts and the many hardships of life under Nazism.

It should be noted that the theater also preserved traditions, but only in productions of the classical repertoire. Of course, Max Reinhardt emigrated, as did other directors, theater directors and actors of Jewish nationality. The plays of Nazi playwrights were laughably weak, and the general public avoided them. The stage life of such plays turned out to be very short-lived. The president of the theater chamber was a certain Hans Jost, a failed playwright who once publicly boasted that when someone used the word “culture” in front of him, his hand involuntarily reached for a pistol. But even Jost and Goebbels, who determined who should act and who should stage, were unable to prevent German theaters from staging the dramatic works of Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare.

Oddly enough, some of Bernard Shaw's plays were allowed to be staged in Nazi Germany, probably because he ridiculed English morals and made scathing comments about democracy, and also because his wit and left-wing political statements did not reach the Nazis.

Even stranger was the fate of the great German playwright Gerhard Hauptmann. During the time of Kaiser Wilhelm II, his plays were prohibited from being staged in imperial theaters because he was an ardent supporter of socialism. During the Weimar Republic, he became Germany's most popular playwright and managed to maintain this position in the Third Reich, where his plays continued to be performed. I will never forget the scene at the end of the premiere of his last play, Daughter of the Cathedral, when Hauptmann, a venerable old man with flowing gray hair falling over his black cape, left the theater on the arm of Dr. Goebbels and Jost. Like many others famous people Germany, he resigned himself to the Hitler regime, and the cunning Goebbels extracted a propaganda effect from this, never tired of reminding the German people and the whole world that the largest modern German playwright, a former socialist and defender of ordinary workers, not only remained in the Third Reich, but also continues to write plays that are performed on theater stages.

How sincere or adaptable or simply fickle this elderly playwright was can be inferred from what happened after the war. American authorities, believing that Hauptmann served the Nazis too zealously, banned his plays in their sector of West Berlin. The Russians invited him to East Berlin and gave him a hero's welcome, organizing a festival of his plays. And in October 1945, Hauptmann sent pi with the hope that the union would be able to ensure a “spiritual revival” of the German people.

Germany, which gave the world Dürer and Cranach, was unable to produce a single outstanding master in the field of modern fine art, although German expressionism in painting and the Munich urban school in architecture were interesting and original trends, and German artists reflected in their work all the evolutions and ups , which were characteristic of impressionism, cubism and dadaism.

For Hitler, who considered himself a real artist, despite the fact that he was never recognized in Vienna, all modern art bore the stamp of degeneration and meaninglessness. In Mein Kampf he launched into a long tirade on this subject, and after coming to power one of his first measures was to “cleanse” Germany of decadent art and attempt to replace it with new art. Almost 6,500 paintings by contemporary artists such as Kokoschka and Grosz, as well as Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso and many others, were removed from German museums.

What replaced them was revealed in the summer of 1937, when Hitler officially opened the "House of German Art" in Munich, in a tan building built in a pseudo-classical style. He himself helped design the building and called it “incomparable and unsurpassed.” Some 900 works were squeezed into this first exhibition of Nazi art, selected from 15,000 submitted. The author of these lines has never seen a more absurd selection in any country. Hitler personally made the final selection and, as his party comrades who were present testified, lost his temper at the sight of some of the paintings selected for display by the Nazi jury, chaired by the mediocre painter Adolf Ziegler (Ziegler owed his position to the fortunate circumstance that he wrote in his time portrait of Geli Raubal - author's note). He not only ordered them to be thrown out immediately, but also punched several of them with a blow from his army boot.

“I have always been determined,” he said in a long speech at the opening of the exhibition, “if fate brings us to power, not to go into discussion of these issues (appraisal of works of art), but to act.” He did.

In a speech given on July 18, 1937, he outlined the Nazi line regarding German art:

“Works of art that are impossible to understand and that require a whole series of explanations in order to prove their right to exist and find their way to neurasthenics who perceive such stupid and impudent nonsense will no longer be in the public domain. And let no one have any illusions on this score, National Socialism is determined to cleanse! German Reich and our people from all these influences that threaten its existence and spirit... With the opening of this exhibition, madness in art comes to an end, and with it the corruption of our people by such art..."

Yet some Germans, especially in an art center like Munich, chose to remain artistically “corrupt.” At the opposite end of the city, in a ramshackle gallery accessible only by a narrow staircase, there was an exhibition of “degenerate” art that Dr. Goebbels organized to show the people what Hitler was saving them from. It presented a brilliant collection of modern paintings - Kokoschka, Chagall, works of expressionists and impressionists. On the day I visited there, having previously walked around the countless halls of the “House of German Art,” the gallery was full of people. A long line lined the creaky stairs and ended in the street. The crowds besieging the gallery became so large that Dr. Goebbels, angry and embarrassed, soon closed the exhibition.

Control over the press, radio and cinema

Every morning, the publishers of the Berlin daily newspapers and the correspondents of newspapers published in other cities of the Reich gathered at the Propaganda Ministry to listen to instructions from Dr. Goebbels or one of his deputies on what news to print and what not, how to present the material and what titles it campaigns to curtail and which ones to expand, what are the most pressing topics for editorials today. To avoid any misunderstandings, a written directive for the day was issued, and oral instructions were also given. For small rural newspapers and periodicals, directives were transmitted by telegraph or sent by mail.

In order to be a publisher in the Third Reich, one had to first of all have a politically and racially pure profile. The Reich Press Law of October 4, 1933 declared journalism a public profession; in accordance with this, it was stipulated that publishers must have German citizenship, Aryan origin and not be married to persons of Jewish nationality. Section 14 of the Press Law ordered publishers “not to publish in newspapers anything that in one way or another misleads the reader, confuses selfish goals with public ones and leads to a weakening of the power of the German Reich from within or without, to undermining the will of the German people, the defense of Germany, its culture.” and the economy - as well as everything that offends the honor and dignity of Germany." Such a law, if it had been put into effect before 1933, would have meant prohibiting the activities of all Nazi publishers and the publication of all Nazi-related publications in the country. Now it led to the closure of those magazines and the expulsion from work of those journalists who did not want to be in the service of the Nazis.

The Vossische Zeitung newspaper was one of the first to be forced to cease to exist. Founded in 1704 and boasting past support from the likes of Frederick the Great, Lessing and Rathenau, it has become Germany's leading newspaper, comparable to the likes of the English Times and the American New York Times. But it was liberal and it was owned by the Ullstein families, who were Jewish by origin. It closed on April 1, 1934 after 230 years of continuous existence. Another world-famous liberal newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt, lasted somewhat longer, until 1937, although its owner Hans Lakmaga Mosse, also a Jew, was forced to give up his share of the capital in the spring of 1933. The third German liberal newspaper with a large circulation, the Frankfurter Zeitung, also continued to publish after it parted ways with its Jewish publishers. Its publisher was Rudol Kircher. Like Karl Zileks, publisher of the conservative Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, published in Berlin, he was a correspondent for his newspaper in London. A Rhodesian, passionate Anglophile and liberal, Kircher served the Nazis faithfully. Moreover, according to Otto Dietrich, chief of the Reich press, he, like the former “opposition” newspapers, was “a greater Catholic than the Pope himself.”

The fact that these newspapers survived is partly due to the intervention of the German Foreign Office, which wanted these world-famous newspapers to serve as a kind of showcase for Nazi Germany abroad and at the same time serve as a means of propaganda. Since all newspapers in Germany were told what to publish and how to present those publications, the German press inevitably found itself in the grip of a stifling conformity. Even among people accustomed to regulation and accustomed to obeying authorities, newspapers began to cause boredom. As a result, even the leading Nazi newspapers, such as the morning Völkischer Beobachter and the evening Der Angriff, were forced to reduce their circulation. The overall circulation of German newspapers also fell as control over them increased and they passed into the hands of Nazi publishers. During the first four years of the Third Reich, the number of daily newspapers dropped from 3,607 to 2,671.

However, the country's loss of a free and diverse press harmed the party's financial interests. Hitler's boss during the First World War, former sergeant Max Amann, now head of the Nazi party publishing house Eyer Verlag, turned into the financial dictator of the German press. As the chief head of the Reich press and president of the press chamber, he had the right to ban any publication at his discretion, in order to then purchase it for next to nothing. In a short time, Eyer Verlag turned into a gigantic publishing empire, perhaps the most extensive and richest in the world (Amann’s personal income jumped from 108 thousand marks in 1934 to the fabulous figure of 3 million 800 thousand in 1942. (From a letter, received by the author from Professor Oron J. Neil, who studied the surviving documents of the Nazi publishing trust.) - Ed. Despite the decline in demand for many Nazi publications, the circulation of daily newspapers owned or controlled by the Party and individual Nazis on the eve of World War II accounted for two-thirds of the daily total circulation, 25 million. In his testimony to the Nuremberg Tribunal, Amann described how he acted: “After the Party came to power in 1933, the owners of many publishing concerns, such as the publishing house of the Ullstein family, or those that were under Jewish control and served political and religious interests , hostile to the Nazi Party, found it expedient to sell their newspapers or assets to the Eyer concern. There was no free market for the sale of such types of property, so Eyer Verlag, as a rule, was the only buyer. In these conditions, Eyer Verlag, together with the publishing houses. the concerns which he owned or controlled became a monopoly newspaper trust in Germany. The party's investments in these publishing enterprises proved to be very profitable financially. It is fair to mention that the main goal of the Nazi press program was to abolish all press, standing in opposition to the party."

In 1934, Amann and Goebbels asked fawning publishers to make their newspapers less monotonous. Amann said that he regrets the monotony that has afflicted the current press, which is not the result of government measures and does not correspond to the will of the government. One reckless publisher, Em Welke of the Grüne Post weekly, made the miscalculation of taking seriously the statement of Amann and Goebbels. He reproached the Minister of Propaganda for infringing on the freedom of the press and putting pressure on it, as a result of which it became so boring. The Grüne Post publication was immediately closed for three months, and Goebbels ordered the publisher himself to be sent to a concentration camp.

Radio and cinema, like the press, were quickly brought into the service of the Nazi state. Goebbels always considered radio (there was no television at that time) as the main propaganda tool in modern society. Through the radio department of his ministry and through the Broadcasting Chamber, he established complete control over radio broadcasts, adapting their content to achieve his own goals. His task was made easier by the fact that in Germany, as in other European countries, radio broadcasting was a state monopoly. In 1933, the Nazi government automatically became the owner of the Reich Broadcasting Corporation.

Cinema remained in the hands of private companies, but the Ministry of Propaganda and the Chamber of Cinema controlled all aspects of film production. Their task was, as it was officially announced, “to withdraw the film industry from the sphere of liberal economic ideas and thereby allow it to carry out the tasks assigned to it by the National Socialist state.”

In both cases, the same result was achieved - the German people were offered radio programs and films as meaningless and boring as daily newspapers and periodicals. Even the public, which meekly accepted everything that was instilled in it as useful and necessary, resisted. For the most part, people preferred the few foreign films (mostly second-rate Hollywood ones) that Goebbels allowed to be shown on German screens over Nazi films. At one time, in the mid-1930s, booing of German films became so common that Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick issued a stern warning against “treasonous behavior on the part of moviegoers.” Radio programs were criticized in the same way, and the criticism was so harsh that the president of the Broadcasting Chamber, a certain Horst Dressler-Andress, declared: such nit-picking constituted an “insult to German culture” and could no longer be tolerated. In those days, a German radio listener could tune in to a dozen foreign radio stations without risking his neck, as was the case during the war. And many, probably, did so, although the author of these lines has the impression that Dr. Goebbels was right and over the years radio, of course, became the most effective means of propaganda, helping more than any other means of communication to shape the views of the German people in the Hitlerian spirit.

I had the opportunity to see from my own experience how easily minds are captured by the lying press and radio in a totalitarian state. Although, unlike most Germans, I had constant access to foreign newspapers, especially those from London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and although I regularly listened to the BBC and other radio stations, my work required hours of daily collation German press and radio reports with press and radio reports from other countries, as well as meetings with Nazi leaders and visits to party rallies. It was surprising, and sometimes horrifying, that, despite the opportunity to receive information about ongoing events from foreign sources and a well-founded distrust of information coming from Nazi sources, the constant imposition of falsifications and distortions over a number of years still had a certain impact on me and often introduced misleading. Anyone who has not lived for years in a totalitarian state simply cannot imagine how difficult it is to avoid the dire consequences of thoughtful and systematic propaganda of the ruling regime. Often in the house of a German friend, in an office, or during a casual conversation with stranger in a restaurant, pub or cafe, I heard rather strange statements from seemingly intelligent people. It was obvious that they, like parrots, repeated various absurdities heard on the radio or read from newspapers. Sometimes I was in a hurry to tell them this, but in such cases I was met with such an incredulous look or such a reaction, as if I had committed terrible blasphemy in their presence. And then I realized how futile it was to try to establish contact with a person with a deformed consciousness, for whom reality was only what Hitler and Goebbels, those cynical falsifiers of the truth, had instilled in him.

Education in the Third Reich

On April 30, 1934, SS-Obergruppenführer Bernhard Rust, once the Gauleiter of Hanover, a member of the Nazi Party and a friend of Hitler since the early 1920s, was appointed Reich Minister of Science, Education and Popular Culture. In the absurd, hectic world of National Socialism, Rus was the best person for this post. A provincial teacher, in 1930 he became unemployed because local authorities fired him due to some mental problems. However, his dismissal was partly due to his fanatical adherence to Nazism, for Dr. Rust worshiped the Nazi doctrine with the zeal of Goebbels, multiplied by the confusion in the brain of Rosenberg. Having taken the post of Prussian Minister of Science, Arts and Education in February 1933, he boasted that he had, in one fell swoop, managed to liquidate the school as “a haven of intellectual acrobatics.” And such a person, devoid of common sense, was entrusted with control over German science, the education system and youth organizations.

Education in the Third Reich, as Hitler imagined it, was not to be reduced to stuffy classrooms: it was to be supplemented by Spartan, political and military training in accordance with certain age groups. It was supposed to reach its peak not in universities or technical colleges, where a small number of young people studied, but starting from the age of 18 in the process of forced labor and then military service. The pages of Mein Kampf are literally dotted with examples of the author’s contemptuous attitude towards “professors” and intellectual life in educational institutions. Outlining some of his ideas regarding education, Hitler wrote: “All education carried out by the national state should be aimed primarily not at filling the heads of students with knowledge, but at shaping healthy body"But even more important, according to the author, is the attraction of youth to the service of the “new national state” - a subject to which he often returned after becoming a dictator. “When the enemy says, “I will not come over to your side,” - Hitler said in his speech on November 6, 1933, - I calmly answer: “Your child already belongs to us... And who are you? You will leave. You will be gone. And your descendants are already on our side. And soon they will not be know nothing except that they belong to a new community." And on May 1, 1937, he said: “Our new Reich will not give its youth to anyone, it will attract them to itself and give them its education and upbringing.” This was not empty boasting - this is exactly what was implemented in practice.

The German school, from first grade to university inclusive, quickly became Nazified. Textbooks were hastily rewritten and curricula were changed. In the words of Der Deutsche Erzier, the official organ of educators, Mein Kampf has become a “pedagogical guiding star.” Teachers who failed to see its light were fired. Most of the teachers were more or less Nazis in spirit, or even active members of the Nazi Party. For ideological training, they were sent to special courses, where they intensively learned the basics of National Socialist teaching, with special emphasis on studying Hitler’s racist doctrine.

Everyone working in the education system - from kindergarten before university - was obliged to join the League of National Socialist Teachers, which was entrusted by law with the task of coordinating the ideological and political activities of all teachers in accordance with the National Socialist doctrine. The 1937 Civil Service Law required teachers to be “executors of the will of the Party-supported state” and to be ready “at any time to wholeheartedly defend the National Socialist State.” In an earlier decree, they were qualified as civil servants - thus, they were subject to the laws on race. Jews, of course, were forbidden to teach. All teachers take an oath of “loyalty and obedience to Adolf Hitler.” Later, it was forbidden to teach to anyone who had not previously served in the SS, had not served labor service, or was not a member of the Hitler Youth. Candidates for teaching positions at universities had to undergo six weeks of camp training, where Nazi specialists studied their views and characters, and then generalized their findings and submitted them to the Ministry of Education. The latter, depending on their political reliability, issued them a certificate for the right to teach.

Until 1933, secondary educational institutions in Germany were under the jurisdiction of local authorities, and universities were subordinate to the authorities of the respective states. Now they were all placed under the authority of the Reich Minister of Education, who ruled them with an iron fist. From now on, university rectors and deans, who had previously been elected by full-time faculty professors, were appointed only by him. He also appointed the leaders of the Students' Union, which included all students, as well as the leaders of the University Teachers' Union, of which all teachers were required to be members. The National Socialist Association of University Teachers, led by old Nazi functionaries, played a decisive role in selecting those entrusted with teaching and ensuring that teaching was carried out in accordance with Nazi theories. The results of such Nazification of education and science were catastrophic. In textbooks and lectures, history was falsified to the point of absurdity. The racial sciences that proclaimed the Germans to be the superior race and branded the Jews as the source of all evil on earth were even more ridiculous. At the University of Berlin alone, where so many distinguished scientists had taught in the past, the new rector, a former stormtrooper and veterinarian by profession, instituted twenty-five new courses in racial science, and by the time he essentially collapsed the university, eighty were being taught there. six courses related to his own profession.

The teaching of science, for which Germany had been famous for generations, was rapidly declining. Scientists such as the physicists Einstein and Frank, and the chemists Haber, Willstätter and Warburg were fired or forced to resign. Of those who remained, many were infected with delusional Nazi ideology and tried to apply it to pure science. They sought to teach, as they themselves put it, “German physics,” “German chemistry,” and “German mathematics.” In 1937, the first issue of the journal entitled "German Mathematics" was published. The editorial declared that any idea that mathematics could be considered outside of racial theory “carries within itself the germ of the ruin of German science.” Even to the uninitiated, the ideas of these Nazi scientists seemed crazy. “German physics?” asked Professor Philip Lenard from the University of Heidelberg, one of the most famous scientists of the Third Reich. “And they will immediately answer you: “Science has always been and remains international.” This is a false statement. In fact, science is racial, like any other the creation of man, which is due to the blood flowing in his veins."

The director of the Institute of Physics in Dresden, Rudolf Tomashek, went even further. “Modern physics,” he wrote, “is a weapon of world Jewry, designed to destroy Nordic science... True physics is the creation of the German spirit... Essentially, all European science is the fruit of Aryan or, more precisely, German thought.” Professor Johannes Stark, head of the German National Institute of Physical Science, thought the same thing. “It is not difficult to discover,” he noted, “that the founders scientific research in physics and the great discoverers in it from Galileo and Newton to the leading physicists of our time - almost all, without exception, were Aryans of a predominantly Nordic race."

And a certain professor Wilhelm Müller from a technical university in Aachen discovered a worldwide conspiracy of Jews to desecrate science and thereby destroy civilization, which he described in his book entitled “Jewry and Science.” He considered Einstein with his theory of relativity to be an arch-scoundrel. This inimitable Nazi professor considered Einstein’s theory, on which all modern physics is based, not only as a theory aimed “from the very beginning to the end at the transformation of the existing, that is, non-Jewish, world, all living things generated by mother earth and connected with her blood ties, but also witchcraft capable of transforming all living things into a ghostly abstraction, where all the individual features of peoples and nations and all the internal boundaries of races are blurred and only minor differences remain, which explain the origin of all events by violent godless submission to their laws." The worldwide acceptance of Einstein's theory of relativity, according to Professor Müller, was, in essence, "an explosion of joy in anticipation of the Jewish rule of the world, which will irreversibly suppress and forever reduce the spirit of German courage to the level of impotent slavery."

For Professor Ludwig Bieberback of the University of Berlin, Einstein was a "foreign charlatan." Even in the view of Professor Lenard, “the Jew is noticeably lacking in the understanding of truth... In this sense, he differs from the Aryan researcher, who is characterized by thoroughness and perseverance in the search for truth... Thus, Jewish physics represents a mirage and a phenomenon of degenerative decay of the foundations of German physics.” . Nevertheless, from 1905 to 1931, ten German Jews were awarded the Nobel Prize for their contributions to science. During the Second Reich, university professors, like the Protestant clergy of Germany, blindly supported the conservative government and its expansionist policies. Lecture halls in those years became a breeding ground for ardent nationalism and anti-Semitism. The Weimar Republic insisted on ensuring complete freedom of teaching, but one of the results of such freedom was that the vast majority of university teachers, who were generally illiberal, anti-democratic and anti-Semitic, helped to undermine the democratic regime. Most of the professors were fanatical nationalists who longed for the revival of conservative monarchical Germany. And although before 1933 many of them considered the Nazis too violent and cruel for them to have sympathy for them, with their teachings they created the ground for the Nazis to come to power. By 1932, most students were enthusiastic about Hitler. Some were surprised by the number of university teachers who came to terms with pacification after 1933 higher education. Although, according to official data, the number of dismissed professors and teachers in the first five years of the regime was 2,800 people (about a quarter of the total), the number of those who lost their jobs due to rejection of National Socialism, according to Professor Röpke, who himself was dismissed from the University of Marburg in 1933, quite a bit. True, among this small number there were such famous scientists as Karl Jaspers, E. I. Gumbel, Theodor Litt, Karl Barth, Julius Ebbinghaus, and dozens of others. Most of them emigrated first to Switzerland."

Holland and England, and then to America. One of them, Professor Theodor Lessing, who fled to Czechoslovakia, was hunted down and killed by fascist thugs. This happened in Marienbad on August 31, 1933.

However, most of the professors remained in their posts, and by the fall of 1933, about 960 people, led by such luminaries as the surgeon Sauerbruch, the existentialist philosopher Heideger, and the art critic Pinder, publicly swore allegiance to Hitler and the National Socialist regime.

“It was a scene of prostitution of beliefs,” Professor Röpke later wrote, “that tarnished the glorious history of German science.” And Professor Julius Ebbinghaus, looking back at his past in 1945, said: “German universities were unable, when there was still time, to openly and fully oppose the destruction of science and the democratic state. They were unable to raise the torch of freedom and law in the darkness of tyranny.” .

This came at a heavy price. After six years of Nazification, the number of university students fell by more than half - from 127,920 to 58,325. Enrollment of students in technical institutes that trained scientists and engineers for Germany fell even more dramatically - from 20,474 to 9,554. The quality of graduate training declined terribly. By 1937, there was not only a shortage of young people in the scientific and technical fields, but also a drop in the level of their qualifications. Long before the outbreak of war, representatives of the chemical industry, who diligently ensured the rearmament of Nazi Germany, complained in their journal Kemiche Industrie that Germany was losing its leading role in chemistry. “Not only the national economy is under threat, but also national defense itself,” lamented this magazine, seeing the reason for this situation in the lack of young scientists and the mediocre level of their training in technical universities.

As it turned out, Nazi Germany's losses turned out to be gains for the free world, especially in the race to create the atomic bomb. The story of the successful attempts of the Nazi leaders, led by Himmler, to undermine their own nuclear energy program is too long and complicated to recount here. Ironically, the United States owed the creation of the atomic bomb to two scientists expelled on racial grounds from Germany and Italy - Einstein and Fermi.

In preparing young people for the implementation of his plans, Adolf Hitler relied not so much on general education institutions, from where he himself left so soon, but on the Hitler Youth. During the years of the Nazi Party's struggle for power, the Hitler Youth movement did not play a major role. In 1932, the last year of the Republic, it numbered only 107,956 people, while the other organizations united under the leadership of the Reich Committee of German Youth Associations included approximately 10 million boys and girls. No country had such an active and numerous youth movement as in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Realizing this, Hitler firmly decided to subjugate this movement and Nazify it. The main executor of this task was a young man of attractive appearance, with ordinary abilities, but with great assertiveness, Baldur von Schirach, who, under the influence of Hitler, joined the party back in 1925 at the age of 18, and in 1931 was appointed youth leader of the Nazi party. Young and inexperienced, among the quarrelsome, scarred Brownshirts, he stood out for his unusual appearance American college student. This was apparently a result of his ancestors being American (including two signers of the Declaration of Independence).

In June 1933 he was proclaimed youth leader of the German Reich. Imitating the tactics of senior party mentors, he first ordered an armed gang of fifty strong young men, members of the Hitler Youth, to seize the building of the Reich Committee of German Youth Associations, and then put to flight the chairman of the committee, an elderly Prussian general named Vogt. After this, Schirach took on one one of the most famous heroes of the German navy, Admiral von Troth, who in the First World War was the chief of staff of the naval forces, and now the president of youth associations, the venerable admiral was also forced to flee, and his post and the organization itself were abolished. At the same time, the property of the organizations was seized. , valued at millions of dollars, mainly in the form of youth camps and camps scattered throughout Germany.

The Concordat of July 20, 1933 specifically provided for the unhindered activities of the Catholic Youth Association. On December 1, 1936, Hitler issued a law prohibiting the activities of this association and other non-Nazi youth organizations. "... All German youth of the Reich are organized within the framework of the Hitler Youth. In addition to education in the family and school, German youth will receive physical, intellectual and moral training in the spirit of National Socialism... through the Hitler Youth."

Schirach, whose activities had previously been directed by the Ministry of Education, now began to report directly to Hitler. This infantile young man of twenty-nine years old, who wrote sentimental poems in which he praised Hitler (“this genius touching the stars”), who was a follower of Rosenberg in his strange paganism and Streicher in his ardent anti-Semitism, became the Fuhrer of Youth in the Third Reich.

Young people aged 6 to 18 were obliged to join various organizations that existed in Hitler's Reich. Parents accused of trying to keep their children from joining these organizations were sentenced to long prison terms, although they sometimes objected simply to their daughters' participation in the activities of groups that had become notorious for cases of early pregnancy.

Before joining the Hitler Youth, boys between the ages of 6 and 10 underwent something like an apprenticeship at Pimpf. For each teenager, an “activity book” was kept, in which records were made of his successes, including ideological growth, during the entire period of his stay in the ranks of the Nazi youth movement. At the age of ten, after passing the appropriate tests in physical education, field life skills and history, prepared in the Nazi spirit, he joined the Jungfolk, having previously taken the following oath:

"In the face of this banner the color of blood, which represents our Fuhrer, I vow to devote all my energy and all my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler. I strive and am ready to give my life for him. May God help me!"

At the age of 14, the young man joined the Hitler Youth and remained a member until the age of 18, when he was called up to serve labor or military service. The Hitler Youth was a paramilitary organization, similar to the SA. Teenagers, right up to adulthood, received systematic training here - they mastered life skills in the field, went in for sports, and became familiar with Nazi ideology on the eve of military service. More than once on weekends, my outdoor recreation in the vicinity of Berlin was interrupted by noisy teenagers from the Hitler Youth, making their way through the bushes or running across the wasteland with rifles at the ready and with heavy army packs on their backs.

Sometimes girls also took part in war games - this was also envisaged by the Hitler Youth movement. German girls between the ages of 10 and 14 were enrolled in the Jungmedel organization. They wore the same uniform, consisting of a white blouse and a long blue skirt, socks and heavy, not at all women's military boots. Their training was much the same as that of boys of the same age, and included long hikes with heavy backpacks on weekends, during which they were usually indoctrinated into Nazi philosophy. But the emphasis was still placed on the role of a woman in the Third Reich - to be a healthy mother of healthy children. This was emphasized even more persistently when, upon reaching the age of 14, girls joined the League German girls.

Upon reaching the age of 18, several thousand girls from the league (they were in it until they were 21) were required to work for a year on farms. This was the so-called agricultural year, which corresponded to the year of labor service for young men. The girls' task was to help in the house and in the field. They were housed on farms, but more often in small camps in the countryside, from where they were transported to the farms by truck every morning. However, moral problems soon arose. The presence of young, pretty girls in rural houses sometimes caused discord in families. Complaints began to pour in from angry parents whose daughters had become pregnant on the farms. But that wasn't the only problem. Usually the women's camp was located not far from the camp where the young men did their labor service. So dangerous neighborhood also did not help strengthen morale. It is not for nothing that the caption under the caricature of the “Strength through Joy” movement went around all of Germany, since it was very successfully associated with the agricultural year of young girls:

In the fields and in the shacks

I lose strength through joy...

Similar moral problems arose during the “housekeeping year,” when girls were required to work as housekeepers in urban families. In truth, the more outspoken Nazis did not consider this a problem at all - I myself more than once heard how mentors from the league, usually unattractive and unmarried, enlightened their young charges about their moral and patriotic duty - to bear children for Hitler's Reich in marriage, if it is possible, but since it is impossible, then it is beyond it.

By the end of 1938, the Hitler Youth numbered 7,728,259. No matter how large this number is, still about 4 million boys and girls remained outside this organization. Therefore, in March 1939, the government passed a law conscripting all youth into the Hitler Youth on the same basis as the army. Parents who opposed this measure were warned that if their children did not join the Hitler Youth, they would be sent to orphanages or other homes.

The education system was completely undermined by the establishment of three types of schools for the training of the elite: Adolf Hitler's schools under the tutelage of the Hitler Youth, the institutes of national political education and the castles of the order of knighthood. The last two types of schools were under the auspices of the Nazi Party. The most promising young people from the Jungfolk at the age of 12 were sent to Adolf Hitler's schools. Here she underwent a training course for 6 years with a view to further use in leadership positions in the party and in the public service. Students lived at schools under conditions of Spartan discipline and had the right to enter university upon completion of their studies. A total of ten such schools were established after 1937, the main one being the academy in Braunschweig.

The task of the institutes of national-political education was to restore the kind of education that was provided by the old Prussian military academies. According to one official explanation, they cultivated "the soldier's spirit with its attributes of valor, duty and simple living." To this was added a special course of training in Nazi principles. The institutes were supervised by the SS service, which appointed rectors and most of the teachers. Three similar universities opened in 1933, and by the beginning of the war their number had reached 31, 3 of which were intended for women.

At the very top of the pyramid were the so-called castles of the knightly order. In these educational institutions, with the characteristic atmosphere of the castles of the knights of the Teutonic Order of the 14th-15th centuries, the Nazi elite of the elite was trained. Knights of the Teutonic Order unquestioningly. They obeyed their master, and the main goal of the order was the conquest of Slavic lands in the East and the enslavement of the local population. The Nazi castles of the order were based on the principles of the same discipline and pursued the same goals. The most fanatical young National Socialists were selected here, usually from among graduates of Adolf Hitler's schools and national political institutes. Four order castles were established, in which students took one of the courses and then moved on to another. The first year of six was devoted to "racial science" and other aspects of Nazi ideology. The emphasis here was on the development of mental abilities and on strict adherence to discipline, and physical training was given a secondary place. The second year of study took place in another castle, where, on the contrary, athletic training and various sports, including mountaineering and parachute jumping, came first. In the third castle, over the next year and a half, training in political and military sciences was carried out. At the fourth and final stage of training, students were sent for a year and a half to a castle located in Marienburg (East Prussia) near the Polish border. Here, within the walls of the very castle that was the stronghold of the Teutonic Order five centuries ago, the main attention in political and military education was paid to the “eastern question” - the “right” of Germany to expand its living space at the expense of the Slavic lands. For the events of 1939 and subsequent years, this preparation, as expected, played an excellent service.

This is how the Third Reich prepared its youth for life, work and death. Although her mind was deliberately poisoned, regular classes were interrupted, and the place of training was repeatedly changed, the boys and girls, young men and women, seemed to be unusually happy, full of enthusiasm and readiness to live the life of a member of the Hitler Youth. And, undoubtedly, such a practice, which united children of all classes and estates, poor and rich, workers and peasants, entrepreneurs and aristocrats who strived for a common goal, was in itself healthy and useful. In most cases, compulsory labor for six months did not harm the city boy or girl. All this time they lived away from home, learned the value of physical labor and learned to communicate with young people of different social groups. Anyone who traveled through Germany in those days, talked with young people, watched them work and have fun in their camps, could not help but notice that, despite the sinister nature of Nazi education, there was an unusually active youth movement in the country.

The young generation of the Third Reich grew up strong and healthy, full of faith in the future of their country and in themselves, in friendship and camaraderie, capable of crushing all class, economic and social barriers. I thought about this more than once later, in the days of May 1940, when on the road between Aachen and Brussels I met German soldiers, bronzed from the tan, well built and hardened by the fact that in their youth they had spent a lot of time in the sun and eaten well. I compared them to the first English prisoners of war, stooped, pale, with sunken chests and bad teeth - a tragic example of how, between the two world wars, the rulers of England irresponsibly neglected the youth.

Farmer in the Third Reich

When Hitler came to power in 1933, farmers in Germany, as in most other countries, were in desperate need. According to one article published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, their situation was worse than at any time since the Peasants' War of 1524-1525, which devastated the German soil. Agricultural income in the 1932/33 financial year fell by one billion marks compared to the post-war year 1924/25. The total debt of farmers has reached 12 billion (it has formed over the past eight years). Payments on this debt accounted for 14 percent of total farm income. To this was added approximately the same amount in the form of taxes and levies for social needs. “My party comrades, you must be completely clear on one point: the German peasantry has only one, last and only, chance to survive,” Hitler warned immediately after taking over as chancellor, and in October 1933 he announced that "The collapse of the German peasantry will be the collapse of the German people."

For a number of years, the Nazi Party pursued a policy of supporting farmers. Point 17 of the “unchangeable” party program promised them “land reform... a law on the confiscation of land without compensation, the abolition of interest on loans issued to farmers, and the prevention of any land speculation.” Like the promises contained in other points of the program, the promises made to the farmers were not fulfilled, with the exception of the last one, directed against land speculation. In 1938, after five years of Nazi rule, land distribution in Germany remained more unequal than in any other Western country. Figures published in the official statistical yearbook for that year show that the 2.5 million smallest farms accounted for less land than the landowning elite, who made up 0.1 percent of the total German population. The Nazi dictatorship, like the socialist-bourgeois governments of the Weimar Republic, did not dare to partition the vast Junker fiefs that stretched east of the Elbe.

Nevertheless, the Nazi regime nevertheless proclaimed a new agrarian program, accompanied by loud sentimental propaganda, the essence of which was that the peasantry was the salt of the earth and the main support of the Third Reich. Hitler appointed Walter Darre to lead its implementation, who, although he subscribed to most of the Nazi myths, was one of the few party leaders who professionally knew the area of ​​\u200b\u200btheir activities. Being an outstanding agricultural specialist with an appropriate university education, Darre served in the Ministry of Agriculture of Prussia and the Reich. Forced to resign from his post in 1929 as a result of conflicts with the leadership, he settled in the Rhineland, where he wrote a book entitled “The Peasantry as the Source of Life of the Nordic Race.” Such a headline was sure to attract the attention of the Nazis. Rudolf Hess introduced Darre to Hitler, who was so impressed by him that the Fuhrer instructed him to develop an appropriate agrarian program for the party. After Hugenberg was removed in June 1933, Darré became Minister of Food and Agriculture. By September he had prepared plans for the transformation of German agriculture. Two major laws passed that same month were aimed at reorganizing the entire structure of production and marketing of agricultural products in order to ensure rising prices for them in the interests of farmers. At the same time, the German peasant acquired a new status, which was achieved, paradoxically, by a return to feudal times, when the farmer and his heirs were forcibly assigned to their plot of land for life (provided that they were Germans of Aryan origin).

The Land Inheritance Law of September 29, 1933 was a bizarre mixture of provisions: on the one hand, according to this law, the peasantry was thrown back into the Middle Ages, on the other, the law protected the peasants from abuses. All farms with land up to 308 acres (125 hectares) in size that could provide a decent living for the landowner's family were declared hereditary holdings, subject to the jurisdiction of the ancient laws of inheritance without right of alienation. They could not be sold, divided, mortgaged or transferred in payment for debts. After the death of the owner, they were to be inherited by the eldest or youngest son, depending on local customs, or to the closest male relative, who was obliged to provide funds for the maintenance and education of his brothers and sisters until they came of age. Only a German citizen of Aryan origin who had proven the purity of his blood before 1800 could own such land. Only such a person, as determined by the law, could bear the “honorary title” of Bauer, or peasant, which he could lose if he violated the “peasant code of honor” or stopped actively farming due to physical condition or for any other reason. Thus, at the beginning of the Third Reich, the debt-ridden German farmer was freed from the threat of losing his allotment, say, as a result of defaulting on a mortgage payment, or from its gradual reduction (now there was no need to sell part of it to pay off the debt). But at the same time, he was tied to the land as inextricably as a serf in the feudal era.

Every aspect of his life and work was now strictly regulated by the Reich Food Administration, which Darre established by law of September 13, 1933. It was a large organization that controlled any type of agricultural production, processing and marketing of products. As leader of the peasantry in the Reich, Darre personally headed this department. He pursued two main goals - to establish firm and favorable prices for farmers and to transform Germany into a country that would be completely self-sufficient in food.

How successful was this? At first, the farmer, whose interests had been neglected for so long by the state, occupied by entrepreneurs and workers, was, of course, flattered by such attention to himself - as to a “national hero and respected citizen.” He was even more pleased with the increase in prices for agricultural products, which Darre carried out by simply volitionally fixing them at a level that provided the peasant with a profit. In the first two years of Nazi rule, wholesale prices for agricultural products rose by 20 percent (prices for vegetables, dairy products and livestock rose even slightly more). But this benefit was partially negated by rising prices for items that the farmer was forced to buy, primarily machines and fertilizers.

As for the second goal - food self-sufficiency, the Nazi leaders considered its achievement extremely important, since, as we will see, they were already planning war. But they were never able to solve the food problem due to the quantity and quality of productive land compared to the population. Despite all the Nazi calls contained in the widely advertised “Battle for Agricultural Products” program, the country was able to self-sufficient in food by 83 percent. Only by seizing foreign lands did the Germans begin to receive so much food that they were able to hold out throughout the Second World War.

Economy of the Third Reich

Hitler's success in the first years of his reign relied only on the achievements of foreign policy, which ensured bloodless conquests, but also on the economic revival of the Germans, which was extolled as a miracle in party circles and even among some foreign economists. It might seem that way to many people. Unemployment, the bane of the 1920s and early 1930s, fell, as we have seen, from six million in 1932 to less than one million four years later. Between 1932 and 1937, national industrial production increased by 102 percent and national income doubled. To an outside observer, Germany in the mid-30s might have seemed like a huge beehive. The wheels of industry turned faster and faster, and everyone worked harder.

During the first year, Nazi economic policy, which was largely determined by Dr. Schacht (Hitler was dejected by it, since he was almost completely ignorant in economic matters), was reduced to efforts to employ all the unemployed by sharp increase front of public works and stimulation of private entrepreneurship. The unemployed were provided with government credit in the form of special bills. Taxes were significantly reduced for those companies that expanded capital investment and provided employment growth.

But the true basis of Germany's revival was rearmament, to which, starting in 1934, the Nazi regime directed all the efforts of entrepreneurs and workers along with the efforts of the military.

The entire German economy, which in Nazi jargon was called the war economy, was deliberately organized to function not only during war, but also in peacetime, also oriented towards war. In his book Total War, published in Germany in 1935, the title of which was incorrectly translated into English as A Nation at War, General Ludendorff emphasized the need for the total mobilization of the country's economy, as well as everything else, in order to adequately prepare for total war. . This idea was not new to the Nazis. During the 18th-19th centuries, Prussia, as we have seen, allocated about 5/7 of state income to the army, and its entire economy was always considered primarily as an instrument for ensuring military policy, and not for the people's well-being. Now the Nazi regime could only implement the idea of ​​a war economy, adjusted for the third decade of the 20th century. The results were indirectly summed up by the chief of the military-economic staff, Major General Georg Thomas: “History knows only a few cases when a country, even in peacetime, deliberately and systematically directed its entire economic potential to the needs of war, as is the case with Germany, which was forced to do so in the period between the two world wars."

Germany, of course, was not "forced" to prepare for war on such a scale - this was a deliberate decision by Hitler. In the secret Defense Law of May 21, 1935, he appointed Schacht as Plenipotentiary General of the War Economy, obliging him to “begin his work while still in peacetime” and giving him the power to direct “economic preparations for war.” The incomparable Dr. Schacht did not wait until the spring of 1935 to begin the expanded construction of the German war economy. On September 30, 1934, less than two months after his appointment as Minister of Economics, he submitted to the Fuehrer a “Report on the progress of work on economic mobilization as of September 30, 1934,” in which he proudly emphasized that the ministry was “entrusted with economic preparation for war." On May 3, 1935, four weeks (more precisely, 18 days before the appointment. - Approx. Per.) before his appointment as plenipotentiary general of military economics, Schacht handed Hitler a memorandum he personally compiled, which began with the statement that “the implementation of the weapons program at the proper pace and on the required scale is the direct (emphasis added by him - author) task of German policy, therefore everything else must be subordinated to this goal." Schacht explained to Hitler that since weapons had to be camouflaged until March 16, 1935 (when Hitler announced conscription into the army to form 36 divisions), at the first stage it was necessary to use printing press to make money to finance weapons. He also noted with a grin that funds confiscated from enemies of the state (mainly Jews) or withdrawn, for example, from frozen foreign accounts, made it possible to pay for the guns. And he boasted: “Thus, the costs of our weapons were partially covered by loans from our political enemies.”

Although during the trial Nuremberg trials he, throwing; assumed the guise of innocence, protested against those presented. accused of participating in a Nazi conspiracy to prepare for a war of aggression and declared that he had acted just the opposite - the truth is that no one else was more responsible for the economic preparations for the war provoked by Hitler in 1939 than Schacht. This was fully recognized by the command of the German army. On the occasion of Schacht's 60th birthday, the army magazine Militervochenblatt, in its issue of January 22, 1937, praised him as "the man who made the restoration of the Wehrmacht economically possible." And further we read: “The defense forces owe it to Schacht’s enormous abilities that, despite all the financial difficulties, they were able to grow from an army of 100 thousand people to the level of their modern power.”

Schacht's inherent ability to masterfully arrange financial affairs was aimed at paying for the preparation of the Third Reich for war. Printing banknotes was just one of his tricks. He carried out currency manipulations so skillfully that, as foreign economists calculated, the German mark at one time had 237 different rates at once. He concluded trade deals with dozens of countries that were amazingly profitable for Germany and, to the surprise of orthodox economists, successfully demonstrated that the more you owe a country, the more you can do business with it. His creation of a credit system in a country that has little liquid (easily realizable) capital and almost no financial reserves was a discovery of genius or, as some said, a clever manipulator. His invention of the so-called bills of exchange "mefo" can serve as an example of this. These were bills issued by the Reichsbank and guaranteed by the state. They were used to pay arms companies. The bills were accepted by all German banks and then discounted by the German Reichsbank. They did not appear in the national bank's bulletins or in the state budget, which allowed the scale of German rearmament to be kept secret. From 1935 to 1938 they were used exclusively to finance rearmament and were valued at 12 billion marks. Once explaining their function to Hitler, Finance Minister Count Schwerin von Krosig timidly noted that they were just a way to “print money.”

In September 1936, in connection with the transfer of the four-year plan under the strict control of Goering, who replaced Schacht as dictator of the economy, although he was almost as ignorant in this area as Hitler, Germany switched to a system of total war economy. The goal of the four-year plan was to transform Germany in four years into a country that would provide itself with everything it needed, so that in the event of war it could not be strangled by a military blockade. Imports were reduced to a minimum, strict control over prices and wages was introduced, dividends were limited to 6 percent per annum, and huge factories were built to produce synthetic rubber, fabrics, fuel and other products from their own raw materials. Hermann Goering's giant factories were also built, producing steel from local low-grade ore. In short, the German economy was mobilized for the needs of the war, and industrialists, whose incomes soared, became cogs in the war machine. Their activities were constrained by such restrictions, such enormous reporting, that Dr. Funk, who succeeded Schacht in 1937 as Minister of Economics and in 1939 as President of the Reichsbank, was forced to admit with regret that "official reporting now accounts for more than half all business correspondence of entrepreneurs" and that conducting "German foreign trade involves the conclusion of 40 thousand separate transactions daily and for each of them it is necessary to fill out 40 different documents."

Overwhelmed with mountains of papers, constantly receiving instructions from the state about what, how much and at what price to produce, burdened with growing taxes, subject to endless large “special contributions” to the party, industrialists and businessmen who so enthusiastically welcomed the establishment of the Hitler regime because they expected that he would destroy the unions and allow them to freely engage in free enterprise, now felt deeply disappointed. One of them was Fritz Thyssen, who was among the first to make the most generous contributions to the party's coffers. Having fled Germany on the eve of the war, he admitted that “the Nazi regime destroyed German industry,” and he said to everyone he met abroad: “What a fool I was!”

At first, however, businessmen flattered themselves with hopes that Nazi rule was the answer to all their prayers. Undoubtedly, the “unchangeable” party program proclaimed ominous calls to nationalize trusts, fairly divide profits in wholesale trade, “communize department stores by renting out retail space in them for a low fee to small traders” (point 16 of the program), carry out land reform and abolish interest on mortgages , but industrialists and financiers soon realized that it was not Hitler's intention to take into account any of its clauses, that radical promises were included in it only in order to gain votes. During the first few months of 1933, a number of party radicals tried was to establish control over associations of entrepreneurs, take over the management of the largest department stores and establish a corporate (with local self-government) state along the lines of the one that Mussolini tried to create, but Hitler quickly succeeded in replacing them with conservative entrepreneurs. One of them, Gottfried Feder, who was one of Hitler's first mentors in the field of economics, a man with oddities who sought to abolish "interest slavery", received the post of assistant minister of economics. But his boss Dr. Karl Schmidt, an insurance magnate who spent his entire life issuing loans and collecting interest on them, did not give him any work, and when Schacht later headed the ministry, he was completely freed from Feder’s services.

Small businessmen, who had originally been one of the main pillars of the party and who expected much from Chancellor Hitler, at least many of them, soon found themselves being gradually eliminated and forced to rejoin the ranks of those living on wages. After the laws were passed in October 1937, all corporations with a capital of less than 40 thousand dollars were simply dissolved, prohibiting the creation of new ones with a capital of less than 200 thousand dollars. This immediately led to a reduction in the number of small firms by one fifth. But the large cartels, which were even patronized by the Weimar Republic, received additional support from the Nazis. According to the law of July 15, 1933, their creation was actually recognized as mandatory. The Ministry of Economy was given the right to force the creation of new cartels and order firms to merge with existing ones. The Nazis retained the system of industrial and trade associations formed during the Republic in a huge number. However, in accordance with the fundamental law of February 27, 1934, they were reorganized on clear principles of subordination and placed under state control. All enterprises were required to belong to the relevant associations. At the head of this incredibly complex structure was the Economic Chamber of the Reich, whose president was appointed by the state. Subordinate to it were seven national economic groups, twenty-three economic chambers, one hundred chambers of industry and trade and seventy chambers of handicrafts. In this labyrinth-like system, among the countless departments and agencies of the Ministry of Economy and the departments of the four-year plan, among the Niagara Falls-like avalanche of special laws and instructions, even an experienced businessman often got lost, therefore, in order to ensure the activities of the company, it was necessary to hire special lawyers. It is not surprising that bribes to find a way to the right high-ranking culprit, who made the decisions on which the placing of orders depended, bribes to circumvent the countless rules and regulations issued by the government and trade associations, reached astronomical numbers in the Third Reich. One businessman called this system “economic necessity” in a conversation with the author of the book.

However, despite such a hectic life, the entrepreneur made considerable profit. The income from rearmament was received mainly by heavy industry. From 2 percent in the good boom year of 1926, they rose to 6.5 percent in 1938. Even the law limiting profits to 6 percent did not create difficulties for companies, quite the contrary. In theory, according to the law, all profits above 6 percent went to the purchase of government bonds; there could be no talk of withdrawing it. In practice, most firms invested these unpaid profits in their own business. From 175 million marks in 1932 it rose to 5 billion marks in 1938, when total savings in the savings bank reached only 2 billion marks, or less than half the amount of unpaid profits. The total amount of profit paid out in the form of dividends amounted to only 1.2 billion marks. In addition to the feeling of satisfaction from receiving increased profits, the entrepreneur was also pleased that Hitler put the workers in their place. From now on, there were no unjustified demands to increase wages. In fact, it was even cut somewhat, despite a 25 percent increase in the cost of living. The main thing is that there were no such costly strikes. In practice, there were none at all - manifestations of such unrest were prohibited in the Third Reich.

Forced labor

Deprived of trade unions, collective bargaining and the right to strike, the German worker became an industrial slave in the Third Reich, as dependent on his entrepreneurial master as medieval serfs were on their feudal lord. The so-called Labor Front, which theoretically replaced the trade unions, was not a representative body of workers. According to the law of October 24, 1934, which established it, the Workers' Front was "an organization of creative Germans with a head and fists." It included not only workers and employees, but also entrepreneurs and people of other professions. In essence, it was a broad propaganda organization - a "giant fake", as some workers called it. Its goal, as the law put it, was not the protection of workers, but “the creation of a truly social and productive community of all Germans.” His task was to ensure that each individual "was able... to do the maximum amount of work." The Labor Front was not an independent administrative organization, but like any other organization in Nazi Germany, except the army, it was an integral part of the NSDAP, or, according to Thyssen, “an instrument of the party.” The law of October 24 indeed provided that the leaders of the Labor Front should be nominated from the party ranks, from members of the Nazi unions, SA and SS, which was carried out in practice.

Previously, the law of January 20, 1934 for the regulation of the use of national labor resources, known as the "Labour Charter", put the worker in his place and raised the entrepreneur to his former position of absolute master. Of course, the omnipotent state could interfere with its implementation. The entrepreneur now became the head of the enterprise, and workers and employees were people “led” by him. Article 2 of the law determined that “the head of the enterprise makes decisions regarding employees and workers on all issues relating to the enterprise.” And just as in ancient times the landowner was considered responsible for the welfare of his subjects, so under Nazi law the entrepreneur was responsible for the welfare of his employees and workers. As the law provided, “in turn, employees and workers must pay him with loyalty,” that is, they had to work hard and a lot, not enter into disputes and not show dissatisfaction, including with the size of their salaries.

Salaries were set by so-called worker guardians, who were appointed by the Labor Front. In fact, they determined the amount of wages at the direction of the entrepreneur; the law did not even provide for meetings with workers on this issue. Although there was a shortage of workers in the war industry after 1936 and some entrepreneurs tried to raise wages to attract people, the government lowered tariffs and wages remained the same. Hitler did not hide the reasons why wages were deliberately kept low. “The National Socialist leadership has always adhered to the iron principle,” he declared in the early years of the regime, “not to allow an increase in the level of hourly wages, but to encourage an increase in earnings only by increasing the intensity of work.” In a country where most wage rates were based on piecework, this meant that a worker could earn more only by increasing the intensity of work and extending the length of the working day.

Compared to the United States, if we allow for differences in living standards and social services, the average salary level in Germany has always been low. Under the Nazi regime it dropped even further. According to the Reich Statistical Office, wages for skilled workers fell from 20.4 cents an hour in 1932, during the worst of the depression, to 19.5 cents in mid-1936. Hourly wages for unskilled workers fell from 16.1 to 13 cents. In 1936, at the party convention in Nuremberg, Dr. Ley stated that among members of the Labor Front, the average wage for a full-time worker was $6.95 per week. The average earnings of a German worker throughout the country, according to the statistical office, was $6.29.

Although the country added millions of new jobs, the share of all German workers in national income fell from 56.9 percent in 1932 (the time of the depression) to 53.6 percent in 1938 (the time of the economic boom). At the same time, the share of capital profits and profits of commercial and industrial firms in national income increased from 17.4 to 26.6 percent. It is true that, as a result of the significantly increased employment of the population, the income from taxes on the wages of workers and employees in the total income increased from 25 to 42 billion marks, that is, by 66 percent. However, capital profits and profits of commercial and industrial firms increased even more - by 146 percent. All propagandists of the Third Reich, starting with Hitler, in their public speeches usually burst out into tirades against the bourgeoisie and capitalists and advocated solidarity with the workers, but sober calculations of official statistics, which probably few people in Germany did, showed that it was the capitalists, and It was not the workers who benefited most from Nazi policies.

Finally, the net earnings of the German worker also fell. In addition to significant income taxes, compulsory sickness contributions, unemployment and disability insurance contributions, and Labor Front contributions, every manual worker, like every other worker in Nazi Germany, was constantly forced to pay increasing levies by various Nazi charities. , the main of which was the Winter Help society. Many workers have lost their jobs because they were unable to contribute to the organization, or because their contributions were judged to be too modest. Such facts, as one "labor court" upheld the dismissal of a worker without notice, "constitute conduct hostile to the human community... and must be severely condemned." According to estimates made in the mid-1930s, taxes and contributions amounted to between 15 and 35 percent of a worker's total earnings. After deductions from $6.95 a week, there wasn't much left to pay for housing, food, clothing, and recreation.

Like medieval serfs, workers Hitler's Germany found themselves increasingly tied to their workplace, although it was not so much the entrepreneur who tied them to it as the state. We have already seen how the law on land inheritance attached the peasant to the land in the Third Reich. The agricultural worker was similarly attached to the land and had no right to leave it to work in the city. It should be said that this was the only Nazi law that was practically not obeyed - between 1933 and 1939, more than one million (1 million 300 thousand) agricultural workers went to work in industry and trade. But industrial workers had to obey this law. Various government decrees, starting with the law of May 15, 1934, sharply limited the freedom of workers to move from one job to another. Since June 1935, government departments for employment records received special rights. Now they decided who should be hired for what job and where to send it.

In February 1935, "work books" were introduced, and no worker could be hired if he did not have one. The book kept records of his employment and growth in qualifications. Work records not only provided the state and the entrepreneur with all the latest information about every worker in the country, but were also used to keep him in the workplace. If he wanted to move to another job, his employer could withhold his work book, which would not allow him to get another job. Finally, on June 22, 1938, the Four-Year Plan Administration adopted a special resolution that obligated every German to serve his labor service wherever the state sent him. Workers who avoided work without a valid reason were subject to fines and imprisonment. It is clear that this medal also had a flip side. A worker who was serving his labor service could not be dismissed by an entrepreneur without the consent of the government department for employment records. Thus, he had job security, which was rare even during the republic.

Bound hand and foot by tight controls and paid little more than subsistence wages, German workers, like Roman proletarians, were able to attend entertainment shows put on by the rulers to divert their attention from their miserable existence. “We needed to shift the attention of the masses from material values ​​to moral values,” Dr. Ley once explained. “It is much more important to satisfy the spiritual hunger of people than to fill their stomachs.”

And Ley came up with the idea of ​​​​creating an organization called "Strength through Joy." It provided what could be called unified leisure. Under the totalitarian dictatorship of the 20th century, perhaps as under earlier ones, it was necessary to keep under control not only the working, but also the free time of each individual. That's what Strength Through Joy did. During Nazi times in Germany there were tens of thousands of clubs dedicated to literally everything from chess and football to songbirds. Under the Nazis, no group was allowed to exist, be it social, athletic or recreational, except under the control of the organization "Strength through Joy."

The ordinary German of the Third Reich, of course, preferred this comprehensive organization for providing rest and leisure, so as not to be left to his own devices. She, for example, organized very cheap tourist trips for members of the Labor Front and sea ​​travel. For Strength Through Joy, Dr. Ley built two 25,000-ton steamships, one of which he named after himself, and chartered ten ships for ocean cruises. The author of this book once had the opportunity to be on such a cruise, and although life on the ships was organized to the point of exhaustion by the Nazi leaders (at least so it seemed to me), the German workers were pleased with what a good time they had. And at a bargain price! For example, a cruise to Madeira Island cost only $25, including travel railway to the German port and back. Other pleasure trips were also inexpensive. The organization acquired beaches on the sea coast and near lakes, providing them to thousands of vacationers in the summer. One of them was a beach on the island of Rügen on the Baltic Sea, the equipment of which had not been completed before the war and which was designed to accommodate 20 thousand people in nearby hotels. In winter, special trips were organized to ski resorts in the Bavarian Alps, and it cost $11 a week, including bus travel, accommodation, meals, ski rental and lessons with an instructor. Mass classes various types sports were organized exclusively through "Strength through Joy". According to official data, they covered up to 7 million people annually.

The organization distributed cheap tickets to theatres, operas and concerts, making these cultural entertainments for the elite accessible to ordinary working people, as Nazi figures often boasted. Strength Through Joy had its own symphony orchestra of ninety people, which constantly toured the country, often giving concerts in small towns and villages where good music was generally unavailable. Finally, this organization took over more than 200 adult educational institutions. Originating in Scandinavia, these establishments became widespread in Germany, especially widely during the republic. Strength Through Joy continued to oversee them, incorporating a healthy dose of Nazi ideology into their programs.

Ultimately, the workers also had to pay for attending entertainment performances. The annual income from contributions to the Labor Front reached, according to Dr. Ley, $160 million in 1937, and by the outbreak of the war exceeded $200 million. True, there was no accurate reporting (it was not controlled by the state, but by the financial department of the party, which never published its reports). 10 percent of proceeds were earmarked for Strength Through Joy. Payment by vacationers for the cost of tourist trips and entertainment events, no matter how meager it was, brought in $1.25 billion in the year preceding the war. And another type of extortion lay on those who lived on their salaries. The Labor Front, as the country's largest and only Labor Party organization with 25 million members, had a bloated bureaucracy with tens of thousands of full-time employees. According to verified estimates, in fact, 20-25 percent of the proceeds went to the maintenance of this apparatus.

At least one of Hitler's fraudulent ploys against German workers should be mentioned here. It is connected with the Volkswagen, a delusional idea of ​​the Fuehrer himself, who declared that every German, or at least every German worker, should have his own car, like, say, a worker in the United States. In a country where until now there was one car per fifty people (for comparison, in the USA there was one car per five people) and where workers used bicycles or public transport, Hitler ordered the creation of a car costing only 990 marks, that is, 396 dollars according to the official exchange rate. He personally, according to him, had a hand in the design of the car, which was carried out under the leadership of the Austrian designer Dr. Ferdinand Porsche.

Since private production was not capable of producing cars at a price of $396, Hitler ordered that the state take over its production, and entrusted this task to the Labor Front. Dr. Ley's organization then, in 1938, zealously set about building in Fallersleben, near Braunschweig, "the largest automobile plant in the world" with a capacity of 1.5 million cars per year - "more than Ford," as Nazi propagandists declared. . The Labor Front provided capital of 50 million marks, but this was not the main part of the financing. Lay's cunning plan was to have the workers themselves invest the necessary funds, paying cash contributions towards a future purchase of 5 marks a week, or even 10 or even 15, if they can afford it. This plan became known as "Pay Before You Receive." Having paid 750 marks, the future buyer received a numbered order that allowed him to receive the car as soon as it came off the assembly line. Unfortunately for the workers, not a single car came off the assembly line or was purchased during the entire existence of the Third Reich. German workers paid tens of millions of marks, of which not a pfennig was reimbursed to them. By the beginning of the war, Volkswagen factories had been converted to produce products more necessary for the army.

And although the German worker, duped in the above case and in many others, was reduced, as we have seen, to the level of an industrial serf, receiving a wage that provided only a subsistence wage, and although he was less than the representative of any other class, inclined to support Nazism or succumb to its annoying propaganda, he apparently did not complain so much about his humiliated position in the Third Reich. The colossal German war machine that unleashed its might on Poland at dawn on September 1, 1939, would never have been created if not for the exceptional contribution of the German worker, who lived and worked in accordance with the strictest regulations, and at times was subjected to terror - such a situation found itself and all the other German workers, accustomed over a century to unquestioning obedience. These may not be very clever generalizations, but the author's personal opinion of the workers of Berlin and the Ruhr is this: although they were sometimes skeptical of the promises of the Nazi authorities, they were no more eager than anyone else in the Third Reich to rebel against it. However, the workers often wondered what they, deprived of organization and leadership, could do.

But the main reason that the working class accepted this role in Nazi Germany was without the slightest doubt rooted in the fact that they had a job and the guarantee that they would not lose it. Eyewitnesses aware of the dangerous and difficult situation in which workers found themselves during the Weimar Republic can understand why they were not very worried about the loss of political freedom and even their own trade unions while they were fully employed. working week. In the past, for many, more precisely, for 6 million people and their families, political freedoms in Germany amounted, as workers put it, to the freedom to go hungry. By depriving the workers of this last freedom, Hitler enlisted the support of a class that was perhaps the most skilled, hardworking and disciplined in the Western world, and this class gave its support not to Hitler's far-fetched ideology or monstrous intentions, but to the actual production of military products.

Justice in the Third Reich

From the first days of 1933, when a wave of mass arrests, beatings and murders swept across the country under the heel of National Socialism, with the approval of the authorities, National Socialist Germany ceased to be a society in which the rule of law was respected. “Hitler is the law!” - the legal luminaries of Nazi Germany proudly proclaimed, and Goering, in a conversation with Prussian prosecutors on July 12, 1934, especially emphasized this: “The law and the will of the Fuhrer are inseparable.” And this was true. What the dictator said became the law, and in moments of crisis, for example during the “bloody purge,” as became known from the speech in the Reichstag he delivered immediately after the bloody atrocity, he himself would be, as he declared, “the supreme judge.” the German people, who have the power to execute or pardon anyone according to their wishes.

During the period of the republic, the overwhelming number of judges, like the majority of Protestant clergy and university professors, sincerely disliked the Weimar regime and with their actions, as many believed, they wrote the darkest pages in the history of the German Republic, thereby hastening its end. But according to the Weimar constitution, judges were independent, subject only to the law. They were guaranteed against removal from office at the behest of superior authorities and were intended, at least in theory, under Article 109 of the constitution to ensure all general equality before the law. Most of them sympathized with National Socialism, but were hardly prepared for the treatment to which they were subjected as soon as Hitler came to power. The Civil Service Law of April 7, 1933 was extended to all magistrates and ordered the immediate expulsion from courts not only of Jews, but also those who questioned Nazi ideology, or, as it was written in the law, those “who gave reason to believe that he was not ready to constantly contribute to the National Socialist state.” Of course, few judges were fired under this law, but they were made clear what their official duty was from now on. To make sure they understood this, the Commissioner of Justice and head of justice in the Reich, Dr. Hans Frank, told lawyers in 1936: “The foundation of all fundamental laws is the National Socialist ideology, especially its interpretation in the party program and the speeches of the Fuhrer.” .

And then Dr. Frank explained how he understands this: “Under National Socialism there is no independence of law. When making any decision, ask yourself: “What would the Fuhrer do in my place? Is this decision consistent with the National Socialist conscience of the German people? "Only in this case will you receive a solid foundation, as strong as steel, which, combined with the unity of the National Socialist People's State and along with your recognition of the eternal essence and immortality of the will of Adolf Hitler, will endow your decision with the authority of the Third Reich, and it will always be so."

The meaning of what was said was quite clear, as was the new civil service law adopted the following year (law of January 26, 1937), which required the dismissal of any civil servant, including a judge, who was “politically unreliable.” Moreover, all lawyers were required to join the League of National Socialist German Lawyers, where they were often given indoctrination in the spirit of Frank.

However, some judges, while they may have been anti-Republican, did not take the party line too warmly. In their practice they tried to rely on the law. An example of this is the German Supreme Court's decision to acquit, on the basis of eyewitness testimony, three of the four communists accused of burning down the Reichstag. Their trial took place in March 1934 (only Van der Lubbe, a half-crazed Dutchman, confessed and was found guilty). This inflamed Hitler and Goering so much that a month later, on April 24, 1934, the power to try cases of treason, which had hitherto fallen under the jurisdiction of the supreme court, was taken away from that awe-inspiring body and transferred to the people's court, which soon became the most the most terrible tribunal in the country. It consisted of two professional judges and five judges from among party officials, the SS service and the armed forces. This part of the court was given the right to make decisions by majority vote. It was forbidden to file appeals against the decisions and sentences passed by them, and meetings were held, as a rule, behind closed doors. However, sometimes, for propaganda purposes, when relatively lenient sentences were expected, foreign correspondents were allowed to attend its meetings.

So, in 1935, the author of this book once had the opportunity to attend a meeting of the people's court. I was struck by the atmosphere of a court-martial that prevailed there, which bore little resemblance to a meeting of an ordinary civil court. The trial was conducted over the course of one day, it was almost impossible to present defense witnesses to the court (would there be anyone who dared to speak out in defense of the accused of “high treason”?), and the arguments of the defenders, who were “qualified specialists” from among the Nazis, were ridiculously weak. When reading the newspapers, which published only the verdicts, one got the impression that most of the unfortunate accused were sentenced to death. The number of death sentences was never announced, although in December 1940 the dreaded President of the People's Court, Roland Freisler (killed during the war by an American bomb that hit the courthouse during a hearing), stated that only 4 percent of the accused had received death sentences.

Even earlier (before the sinister people's court) there was a special court that accepted cases of political crimes or cases of “treacherous attacks on the government” from ordinary courts, as defined by the law of March 21, 1933. The special court consisted of three judges, who were invariably experienced members of the Nazi Party, and the court sat without a jury. The Nazi prosecutor had the right to choose whether to send the case to a regular or a special court. For obvious reasons, he invariably chose the latter. The candidacies of defense attorneys for this court, as well as for the people's court, were each time approved by the Nazi authorities. Sometimes, even after being confirmed, the defenders were terribly afraid of acting rashly. Thus, defenders who tried to defend the interests of the widow of Dr. Klausener, the leader of Catholic Action, who was killed during the bloody purge, suing the state for damages, were thrown into the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where they were kept until they officially died stopped the case.

Hitler, and for a time also Goering, had the right to cancel the trial. In the documents of the Nuremberg Tribunal, a case surfaced in which the Minister of Justice persistently recommended bringing to trial a high-ranking Gestapo officer and a group of SS people against whom, as he believed, there was evidence that proved their guilt - the use of torture on concentration camp prisoners. He sent the materials to Hitler. The Fuhrer ordered the case to be stopped. Goering initially had the same powers. One day in April 1934, he suspended proceedings against an industrialist. It was soon discovered that the accused had paid him about three million marks. A well-known lawyer in Berlin at that time, Gerhard Kramer, commented on this as follows: “Whether Goering blackmailed the industrialist or whether the industrialist bribed the Prussian Prime Minister is impossible to establish.” It was only possible to establish that Goering stopped the case.

Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, had the right to resort to “ruthless measures” against defendants for whom, in his opinion, the sentence was too lenient. Judicial sentences were sent to him against all persons convicted of attacks on the party, the Fuhrer or the state, and if the punishment did not satisfy him, he prescribed “merciless measures,” which usually consisted of throwing the convicted person into a concentration camp or killing him.

It should be said that sometimes the judges of the special court still showed some independence and even adherence to the letter of the law. In these cases, Hess or the Gestapo intervened. Thus, when a special court cleared Pastor Niemöller of the main charges and sentenced him only to a short prison term, which he had actually already served during the investigation, the Gestapo seized him at the exit from the hall where the court was sitting and sent him to a concentration camp, because they, like Hitler, she also embodied the law.

The Gestapo was originally established on April 26, 1933 for Prussia at the initiative of Goering, replacing the former intelligence department of the old Prussian political police. He intended to call it the secret political department, but an unknown postal employee, who was asked to suggest an abbreviation for the new department, suggested calling it the secret state police - Gestapo for short. Thus, without knowing it, he came up with a name that struck terror first in Germany and then beyond its borders.

Initially, the Gestapo served as a means of dealing with opponents of the regime for Goering. It was not until April 1934, when he appointed Himmler deputy chief of the Prussian secret police, that the Gestapo, as an organ of the SS, began to expand under the watchful eye of a new chief, a mild-mannered but sadistic man, a former chicken farm owner, and also under the leadership of Reinhard Heydrich, a young man from the “devilish caste”, who became the head of the security service - SD, gradually turned into a punitive body, in whose power was the life and death of any German.

Back in 1935, the Prussian Supreme Administrative Court, under pressure from the Nazis, adopted a resolution according to which the orders and actions of the Gestapo could not be the subject of trial in the courts (were not subject to review in the courts?). The Basic Law on the Gestapo, adopted by the government on February 10, 1936, placed this secret police organization above the law. The courts were prohibited from interfering with the Gestapo in any form. As explained Dr. Werner Best, one of Himmler's closest lieutenants, "as long as the police carry out the will of the leadership, they act within the framework of the law."

The veil of “legality” was intended to hide the arbitrariness of the Gestapo during the arrests and imprisonment of victims in concentration camps. This was designated by the term “protective arrest,” and its application was determined by the law of February 28, 1933, which, as we have seen, temporarily abolished the provisions of the constitution that guaranteed civil rights. But the “protective arrest” did not protect a person from harm, as is done in more civilized countries. On the contrary, he was punished by being thrown behind barbed wire.

In the first year of Hitler's reign, concentration camps began to grow like mushrooms after rain. By the end of 1933, there were already about fifty of them, mainly created by the efforts of the SA to beat their victims and then extort a hefty ransom from their relatives and friends. Basically, such actions were a crude form of blackmail, however, sometimes prisoners were killed simply out of sadism and cruelty. At the Nuremberg trials, four such cases surfaced, which occurred in the spring of 1933 in the SS concentration camp Dachau, near Munich. In each of these cases, the prisoners were brutally killed: some were beaten to death with a whip, others were hanged. Even the Munich state prosecutor protested. After the "bloody purge" in June 1934, open resistance to the Nazi regime was over. Many Germans believed that from now on there would be neither mass terror for the purpose of “protective arrest” nor sending to concentration camps. On Christmas Eve 1933, Hitler announced an amnesty for 27,000 concentration camp prisoners, but Goering and Himmler ignored his order and only a few were actually released. Around the same time, in April 1934, Interior Minister Frick, a hardened bureaucrat, tried to curb abuses by Nazi thugs by issuing secret orders aimed at stemming the tide of "protective arrests" and reducing the number of people sent to concentration camps. However, Himmler convinced him to abandon this idea. The SS Fuhrer more clearly than the minister understood the purpose of the concentration camps - not only to punish the enemies of the regime, but also to terrorize the population with the mere fact of their existence, to keep them from even thinking about the possibility of resistance to Nazi rule.

Soon after the “bloody purge,” Hitler handed over the concentration camps to the control of the SS, which decisively and mercilessly took up their reorganization, which, by the way, has always distinguished the actions of this privileged service. Their protection was entrusted exclusively to the SS “Totenkopf” units, which recruited the most brutal Nazis who were called up for compulsory service for 12 years. On their black uniforms they wore a distinctive sign in the form of a skull and crossbones. Theodor Eicke, the commander of the first SS security detachment "Totenkopf" and the first commandant of the Dachau concentration camp, was appointed head of all concentration camps. Camps that were poorly suited for life were demolished, and in their place vast, clearly planned ones were built, the most famous of which before the war (when it began, they began to be created in the occupation territories) were Buchenwald near Weimar, Sachsenhausen, which replaced the notorious Oranienburg camp near Berlin, Ravensbrück in Mecklenburg (female) and created after the occupation of Austria in 1938 Mauthausen, near Linz. These names, including those later created in Poland, Auschwitz, Belzek and Treblinka, are now well known throughout the world.

In these camps, until merciful death came, millions of the doomed languished, and millions of others were subjected to humiliation and torture so terrible that few can imagine them. But at the beginning - in the 30s - the number of prisoners of Nazi concentration camps in Germany, apparently, did not exceed 20-30 thousand people, and the terrible tortures and methods of murder, invented and tested later by Himmler’s executioners, were not yet known at that time. Death camps, convict camps, camps where prisoners were used as test animals for Nazi "medical" experiments, were to appear only during the war years.

But the first camps were by no means famous for their humanity. I have before me a copy of the rules of conduct developed for the Dachau concentration camp and approved on November 1, 1933 by its first chief, Theodor Eicke, who later became the head of all camps and disseminated these rules everywhere.

"Article 11. Violators of the following rules are considered agitators and are subject to hanging, namely:

Anyone who... is involved in politics, makes campaign speeches, holds meetings, organizes factions, loiters around and distracts others;

Anyone who reports true or false information about a concentration camp, and also spreads tales of atrocities to be passed on to enemies for propaganda purposes, who receives such information, stores it, divulges it to others, illegally smuggles it out of the camp to foreigners, etc.

Article 12 Violators of the following rules are considered rioters and are subject to shooting on the spot or later hanging:

Anyone who attacks a guard or SS officer;

Anyone who refuses to obey or work along;

Anyone who shouts, speaks in a loud voice, incites, makes speeches while moving in formation or while working."

More lenient punishments of two weeks' solitary confinement or twenty-five lashes were given to "anyone who makes, in letters or other documents, condemnatory remarks about the National Socialist leaders, the state or the government... or who praises the Marxist or liberal leaders of the old democratic parties."

The security service also acted together with the Gestapo. The abbreviation SD caused fear in the soul of every German, and later among the population of the occupied countries. Created in 1932 by Himmler as the intelligence service of the SS and placed under the command of Reinhard Heydrich, later known as “Hangman Heydrich,” it initially aimed to monitor party members and report to their superiors any suspicious activity. In 1934 it became the intelligence department of the secret police, and by law in 1938 its activities extended to the entire Reich.

Under the experienced hand of Heydrich, a former naval intelligence officer who was dismissed by Admiral Raeder in 1931 at the age of twenty-six for misconduct because he had compromised the daughter of a shipbuilder and refused to marry her, the SD soon spread its network throughout all over the country. About 100 thousand part-time informants who were involved in surveillance of every citizen of the country were required to report any statement or activity that seemed hostile to the Nazi regime. No one, unless he was a fool, ever allowed himself to make statements or actions that could be construed as anti-Nazi without first making sure that he was not being recorded by secretly installed tape recorders or eavesdropped by SD agents. An informant for Heydrich's organization could be your son, your father, your wife, your nephew or niece, your close friend, your boss or your secretary. You couldn't be sure of anyone, and if you were smart enough, you couldn't take anything for granted. In the 1930s, the number of professional SD detectives apparently did not exceed three thousand people, most of them recruited from the ranks of unsettled young intellectuals - university graduates who were unable to find suitable work or even take a place in normal society . And among these professional bloodhounds there was always a strange atmosphere of pedantry. They were distinguished by an exaggerated interest in such side branches of “science” as Teutonic archeology, the study of the shape of the skulls of lower races, and eugenics of the master race. However, it was not easy for an outsider to establish contact with these strange people, although Heydrich himself, an arrogant, cold and ruthless man, could sometimes be found in a Berlin nightclub surrounded by young blond thugs. They tried not to attract attention to themselves, not only because of the nature of their work. It is known that at least in 1934-1935, those of them who were following Rem and his SA accomplices were killed by a secret gang calling themselves the "Avengers for Rem." They always pinned this inscription to the corpses of the dead. One of the interesting, although secondary, tasks of the SD was to find out who voted “against” in the plebiscites organized by Hitler. Among the numerous documents that appeared at the Nuremberg trials is the secret Report of the SD from Cochem in connection with the plebiscite held on April 10, 1938:

“Attached is a list of people who voted “against” and those whose ballots were declared invalid. Control was carried out as follows: members of the election commission put numbers on all ballots. During the voting, a list of voters was compiled. Ballots were distributed in numerical order , therefore, it later became possible... to identify the persons who voted “against”, the persons whose ballots turned out to be invalid. The number was stamped on the back of the ballot in sympathetic ink. Attached is also the ballot of the Protestant priest Alfred Wolters.”

On June 16, 1936, for the first time in German history, a unified police force was established for the entire Reich. Initially, each land formed its own police force separately. When will the boss German police appointed Himmler, this was tantamount to transferring the police into the hands of the SS, whose power had been rapidly increasing since the suppression of Röhm’s “rebellion” in 1934. It became not only the Praetorian Guard, not only the only armed formation of the party, not only the elite from whose ranks the future leaders of the new Germany were subsequently elected, but also a body that also possessed political power. The Third Reich, inevitably in the course of the development of totalitarian dictatorships, turned into a police state.

Government in the Third Reich

Although the Weimar Republic was dissolved, Hitler did not officially abolish its constitution. Therefore, the “legitimacy” of his rule - and this cannot be perceived without irony - was based on the constitution of the republic that he despised. Thus, the thousands of laws it adopted - and there were no others in the Third Reich - were entirely based on the emergency presidential decree of February 28, 1933, “On the Defense of the People and the State,” signed by Hindenburg in accordance with Article 48 of the constitution. I would like to remind you that it was Hitler who deceived the elderly president into signing this decree. This happened the day after the Reichstag fire, when Hitler managed to convince Hindenburg that there was a real threat of a communist revolution. The decree, which temporarily abolished all civil rights, remained in effect throughout the years of the Third Reich and allowed the Fuhrer to rule under a kind of continuous state of emergency.

The "legal act" which the Reichstag voted for on March 24, 1933, and by which it transferred its legislative functions to the Nazi government, was the second bulwark of the "constitutionality" of Hitler's rule. Since then, the formally existing Reichstag has punctually extended the validity of " legal act"for the next four years, and the dictator never once thought of abolishing this once democratic institution of power. He deprived it of its democratic foundations. Before the war, the Reichstag met about ten times and adopted only four laws (the Reconstruction Law of January 30, 1934 and three anti-Semitic laws adopted in Nuremberg on September 15, 1935 - author's note), without ever resorting to debate or voting and without hearing a single speech, with the exception of Hitler's speeches.

After several months, at the beginning of 1933, serious debates in the Reichstag ceased, then after the death of Hindenburg, in August 1934, its meetings were held less and less frequently, and after February 1938 the Reichstag no longer met. However, individual members of the government retained significant power, having the right to prepare bills, which, after approval by the Fuhrer, automatically acquired the force of law. Established with great fanfare in 1938, the Cabinet Privy Council, apparently to impress then British Prime Minister Chamberlain, existed only on paper, having never met. The Reich Defense Council, established early in the regime as a military planning body under Hitler's chairmanship, held only two official meetings, although some of its working committees were extremely active.

Many functions of the cabinet were transferred to special bodies, such as the office of the Deputy Fuhrer (Hess and later Martin Bormann), the plenipotentiary representatives for the war economy (Schach), the administration (Frick) and the commissioner for the four-year plan (Goering). In addition, bodies known as "higher government agencies" and "national administrative agencies" were created, many of which had existed since the days of the republic. There were a total of 42 executive agencies of the national government, directly reporting to the Fuhrer.

The parliaments and governments of the individual states of Germany, as we have seen, were abolished in the very first year of the Nazi regime, when the country became united, and the governors of the states, transformed into provinces (regions), were now appointed by Hitler. Local government- the only area in which the Germans seem to have actually made a step forward in democratic development - was also eliminated. A series of laws issued between 1933 and 1935 deprived municipalities of their local autonomy and placed them directly under the Reich Minister of the Interior, who appointed burgomasters to cities if their population exceeded 100 thousand people, or reorganized municipalities by appointing leading officials. In cities with a population of less than 100 thousand people, burgomasters were appointed by provincial governors. Hitler retained the right to appoint governors in Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna (after 1938, when Austria was occupied).

The governing bodies through which Hitler exercised his dictatorial power consisted of four offices; president (although this title ceased to exist after 1934), chancellor (the title was abolished in 1939), party and Fuhrer, who controlled the execution of Hitler's personal orders and carried out special tasks.

In fact, Hitler was burdened by everyday administrative affairs and, when he strengthened his position after the death of Hindenburg, he transferred them to his assistants. His old party comrades - Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Ley and Schirach - were given a free hand in creating their own empires of power and, as a rule, in accumulating income. Schacht sought to gain freedom to raise money for increasing government spending through whatever schemes he could muster. When the henchmen could not share power or government positions, Hitler intervened. He had nothing against quarrels and, in fact, often encouraged them, since they served to strengthen his position as the supreme arbiter and prevent the possibility of conspiracy against him. For example, he seemed to enjoy watching three people compete with each other in the field of foreign policy: Foreign Minister Neurath, head of the foreign affairs department in the Rosenberg party, and Ribbentrop, who headed his own bureau, working on foreign policy. All three were in strained relations, and Hitler contributed greatly to this by maintaining rival departments until he eventually chose the dim-witted Ribbentrop as Foreign Minister to carry out his instructions in international affairs.

Such was the government of the Third Reich, led by a vastly expanding bureaucracy on the basis of the so-called "principle of leading persons", ineffective, which is unusual for the Germans, paralyzed by bribery and constant confusion, as well as by merciless rivalry, aggravated as a result of the ignorant intervention of party bosses and the terror of the SS - the Gestapo.

At the top of the pyramid, to which everyone was climbing, crushing each other, sat the former Austrian vagabond, who became the most powerful dictator on earth after Stalin. Dr. Hans Frank reminded the lawyers gathered at the congress in the spring of 1936 of this: “Today in Germany there is only one power, and that is the power of the Fuhrer.”

With the power of this power, Hitler quickly destroyed those who opposed him, united and Nazified the state, regulated state institutions and culture, suppressed personal freedoms, eliminated unemployment, developed industry and trade to full speed - considerable achievements during his three or four years in power. Now he could turn - in fact, he had long turned - to the two great passions of his life: the pursuit of a German foreign policy aimed at preparing for war and conquest, and the creation of a powerful military machine that would enable him to achieve this goal.

Now it is time to tell the story - and it will be the most documented story in modern history - of how this extraordinary man, at the head of such a great and powerful nation, set about achieving his goals.

LIFE IN THE THIRD REICH: 1933–1937

It was precisely at this time, in the middle of the summer of 1934, that I came to the Third Reich for permanent work. And he discovered a lot in the new Germany that impressed, puzzled, and alarmed the foreign observer. The overwhelming majority of the German people seemed to have nothing against the fact that they were deprived of personal freedom, that many cultural values ​​were destroyed, offering senseless barbarity in return, that their life and work were subjected to such regulation as even he, accustomed for many generations to strict order

True, behind all this was hidden the fear of the Gestapo, the fear of ending up in a concentration camp if you went beyond what was permitted, if you shared the views of communists or socialists, if you were too liberal or pacifist, or if you were a Jew. The “bloody purge” of June 30, 1934 showed how merciless the new rulers could be. However, at first, Nazi terror affected relatively few Germans. An outside observer who had just arrived in the country was somewhat surprised that the Germans apparently did not recognize themselves as victims of intimidation and oppression by an unscrupulous and cruel dictatorship and, on the contrary, they supported this dictatorship with genuine enthusiasm. In some ways, Nazism gave them hope, new motivation and amazing faith in the future of the country.

Hitler was dealing with the past, which had brought so much trouble and disappointment. Step by step, without wasting time, which we will describe in detail later, he freed Germany from its last obligations under the Treaty of Versailles, which baffled the victorious countries, and restored Germany’s military power. The majority of Germans wanted this and were ready to make the sacrifices that the Fuhrer demanded: renunciation of personal freedom, meager food (“guns instead of butter”) and hard work. By the fall of 1936, the problem of unemployment was largely over: almost everyone able to work had a job. I have heard workers, deprived of the right to form trade unions, joke after a hearty lunch: “Under Hitler, the right to starve was abolished. The Nazi motto “Common interests above personal interests” became widespread in those days, and although many representatives of the party elite, primarily Goering, secretly enriched themselves, and the profits of entrepreneurs grew, there was no doubt that the masses believed in the “national socialism” that supposedly puts public welfare above one's personal gain. The racial laws that made the Jews outcasts of German society appeared to the shocked foreign observer as a return to primitive times; but since Nazi theories extolled the Germans as the salt of the earth and as a superior race, the country's population was far from negative about these laws. Some of the Germans (former socialists, liberals or true Christians from the old conservative layers) with whom I spoke were indignant and even indignant about the persecution of Jews, but, although in a number of cases they helped individual victims, the campaign of persecution was not stopped. tried. “What can we do?” - they often asked. It was not easy to answer this question.

The press and radio, despite censorship, gave the Germans some idea of ​​how critical the world community was, but this circumstance, as they could see, did not prevent foreigners from flooding into the Third Reich in droves and enjoying its hospitality. At that time, entry into Nazi Germany was much freer than entry into Soviet Russia. Tourism flourished in the country, bringing in large amounts of much-needed foreign currency. It seemed that the Nazi leadership had nothing to hide. A foreigner, be he any opponent of Nazism, could come to Germany and see and study everything he wanted, with the exception of concentration camps and, as in all other countries, military installations. And many came. And if, upon returning from there, they did not become adherents of Nazism, then at least they began to be tolerant of the “new Germany”, believing that they had discovered, as they put it, “positive changes” there. Even such an astute man as Lloyd George, who led England to victory over Germany in 1918 and who campaigned that year under the slogan “Kaiser to the Gallows!”, found it possible to visit Hitler in Obersalzberg in 1936, after which he publicly proclaimed him a “great man” who showed enough foresight and will to solve the social problems of the modern state, first of all, the problem of unemployment, from which England was still suffering, like an unhealed wound; The program proposed by this outstanding leader of the Liberal Party, called “We can defeat unemployment,” did not find support within the country.

The Olympic Games, held in August 1936 in Berlin, provided the Nazis with an excellent opportunity to surprise the world with the achievements of the Third Reich, and they did not fail to take advantage of this opportunity. Signs with the words “Jews are undesirable” that hung in shops, hotels, pubs, and entertainment establishments were slowly removed, the persecution of Jews and two Christian churches was temporarily stopped, and the country acquired a completely respectable appearance.

Not a single previous Olympics was so superbly organized or accompanied by such impressive spectacles as this one. Goering, Ribbentrop and Goebbels organized lavish receptions in honor of foreign guests. More than a thousand guests gathered for dinner at the Minister of Propaganda on the island of Pfaueninsel on Wannsee, where a grandiose performance took place called “Italian Night,” which was reminiscent of scenes from “The Arabian Nights.” Foreign guests, especially from England and America, were amazed: the sight of seemingly happy, healthy, friendly people rallying around Hitler was far from consistent with their ideas about Berlin, gleaned from the newspapers.

But behind the splendor of the Summer Olympic Games, an outside observer, at least a foreigner, could not help but see something that was hidden from tourists and that the Germans themselves stopped noticing or took for granted: the deterioration of the moral climate of German society. After all, no one hid the anti-Jewish, so-called Nuremberg laws adopted by Hitler on September 15, 1935, which deprived persons of this nationality of German citizenship. The laws prohibited marriages and extramarital affairs of Jews with Aryans, and Jews were deprived of the right to hire domestic servants from women of Aryan origin under thirty-five years of age. Over the next few years, thirteen more decrees were issued that essentially outlawed Jews. Moreover, in the summer of 1936, that is, just at the time when Germany, as the organizer of the Olympic Games, tried to captivate the imagination of guests arriving from the West, Jews either by law, because with the help of Nazi terror they began to install so many slingshots when entering service in government and private institutions that at least half of them were left without any means of subsistence. In 1933, the first year of the Third Reich, they were excluded from government service and from work in the press and radio, and were not allowed to engage in agriculture, teaching, or work in the field of theater and cinema; in 1934 they were expelled from the stock exchange. As for the ban on medical and legal practice, as well as trade, although it was imposed by law only in 1938, it actually began to operate at the end of the fourth year of Nazi rule.

Moreover, the Jews were denied not only the blessings of life, but also the most necessary things. In many cities it became difficult, if not impossible, for Jews to buy food. Above the doors of grocery stores, meat and dairy stores, and bakeries, signs hung: “No Jews allowed.” Often they could not provide milk for their children. Pharmacies did not supply them with medicine. Hotels did not provide overnight accommodation. And everywhere they went, mocking signs awaited them: “Jews are strictly prohibited from entering this city” or “Jews may enter here only at their own peril and risk.” On a steep bend in the road near Ludwigshafen there was a sign: “Caution - sharp turn! Jews - drive at a speed of 120 kilometers per hour!”

Such was the fate of the Jews during the Olympic Games - it was the beginning of a path that soon led them to physical death.

Persecution of Christian churches

Less than four months had passed, and on June 20 the Nazi government had already concluded a concordat with the Vatican, which guaranteed the freedom of the Catholic faith and the right of the church to independently “regulate its internal affairs.” On the German side, the treaty was signed by Papen, on the Vatican side - by his Secretary of State, Monsignor Pacelli, who later became Pope Pius XII. The Nazi government began to violate the terms of the treaty almost before its text was put on paper; but, being concluded at a time when a wave of indignation was sweeping the world over the first excesses of the new German regime, the concordat undoubtedly contributed to the increase in prestige of Hitler's government, which it greatly needed.

On July 25, five days after the ratification of the concordat, the German government passed a sterilization law that particularly offended Catholic Church. And five days later, the first steps were taken to dissolve the Catholic Youth League. In subsequent years, thousands of Catholic priests, monks and lay leaders were arrested, often on trumped-up charges of “immorality” and “foreign currency smuggling.” The leader of Catholic Action, Erich Klausener, as we already know, was killed during the purge on June 30, 1934. Dozens of Catholic publications were banned. Under pressure from Gestapo agents, the secret of confession was even violated. By the spring of 1937, the Catholic hierarchy in Germany, which, like most Protestant priests, had initially sought to cooperate with the new regime, had lost all illusions. On March 14, 1937, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical entitled “With Deep Sorrow,” accusing the Nazi government of “deviating” from the provisions of the concordat, violating it and spreading “tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, slander, secret and open hostility towards Christ.” and the holy church." On the “horizon of Germany,” the pope saw “the looming storm clouds of destructive religious wars ... which pursue no other goal than ... extermination.”

Reverend Martin Niemöller welcomed the Nazis' rise to power in 1933. Then his autobiographical book entitled “From Submarine to Pulpit” was published. The story of how this man, who served as a submarine commander during the First World War, became a famous Protestant pastor, earned much praise from the Nazi press and was a great commercial success. To Pastor Niemöller, like many other Protestant ministers, the fourteen years of the republic seemed, as he put it, “years of darkness.” At the end of his autobiography, he notes with satisfaction that the Nazi revolution was finally victorious and led to the “national revival” for which he himself had fought for so long, and for some time in the ranks of the “Free Corps”, from which many Nazi leaders came.

Soon, however, he was severely disappointed.

In Germany, as in the United States, Protestantism is divided into different denominations and churches. Only a very few Protestants - about 150 thousand out of 45 million - belonged to various nonconformist churches such as the Baptist and Methodist. The rest belonged to twenty-eight Lutheran and Reform churches, the largest of which was the Church of the North German Union, which united 18 million parishioners. With the advent of the National Socialist movement, there was a further division of Protestants. More fanatically minded Nazis of this religion organized in 1932 the “German Christian Movement”, the most violent leader of which was a certain Ludwig Müller, a chaplain from the East Prussian military district, an ardent supporter of Hitler; It was he who first brought Hitler together with General von Blomberg, who was then the commander of this district. “German Christians” actively preached Nazi ideas of racial superiority, trying to instill them in the Reich church and thereby contribute to the inclusion of all Protestants in a single congregation. In 1933, out of 17,000 Protestant pastors, about three thousand were “German Christians,” although these latter may have had a disproportionately large number of congregations.

The enemy of the “German Christians” was another group that called itself the “confessional church.” It consisted of approximately the same number of pastors, and Niemöller eventually became its head. She opposed the Nazification of Protestant churches, rejected the Nazis' racial theories, and condemned the anti-Christian ideas of Rosenberg and other Nazi leaders. The majority of Protestants took an intermediate position. Apparently wary of joining any of the opposing groups, they preferred the role of observers and ended up largely in the hands of Hitler, accepting for granted his right to interfere in the affairs of the church and obeying his orders. It is difficult to understand the behavior of most Protestants in Germany in the early years of Nazism without considering two things: the history of Protestantism and the influence of Martin Luther. This great founder of Protestantism was both an ardent anti-Semite and an ardent champion of the idea of ​​​​unconditional submission to political authority. He wanted Germany to get rid of the Jews, and advised that when expelling them, they should take away “all cash, precious stones, silver and gold... set fire to their synagogues and schools, destroy their homes... herd them like gypsies into tents or stables... and let they will wallow in poverty and bondage, constantly groaning and complaining to the Lord God about us.” This advice was followed four hundred years later by Hitler, Goering and Himmler.

During the Peasants' War of 1525 - perhaps the only mass uprising in German history - Luther called on the princes to mercilessly deal with the “mad dogs,” as he called the oppressed, desperate peasants. And here, as in his attacks against the Jews, Luther resorted to such rude, rigoristic expressions that history did not know until the advent of the Nazis. Many generations of Germans, especially Protestants, experienced the influence of this outstanding personality. Another consequence of this influence was the ease with which Protestantism in Germany became an instrument of the absolutism of kings and princes, from the 16th century until 1918, when the kings and princes were overthrown. Hereditary monarchs and petty rulers became archbishops of the Protestant Church on their lands. So, in Prussia, the king from the Hohenzollern dynasty became the head of the church. According to established tradition, in no other country, except for Tsarist Russia, did church ministers subserviently to state political power as in Germany. All of them, with rare exceptions, stood firmly for the king, the junkers and the army. Throughout the 19th century, they consistently opposed liberal and democratic movements. Even the Weimar Republic was anathematized by most Protestant pastors, not only because it overthrew kings and princes, but also because it relied mainly on Catholics and socialists. During the elections to the Reichstag, it was impossible not to notice that the Protestant clergy, of which Niemöller was a typical representative, quite openly supported the nationalists and Nazis - the enemies of the republic. Like Niemöller, most pastors welcomed Adolf Hitler's assumption of the chancellorship in 1933.

They soon learned the Nazi strong-arm tactics that brought Hitler to power. In July 1933, representatives of Protestant churches drew up the text of the charter of the new Church of the Reich, which was officially recognized by the Reichstag on July 14. Immediately after this, a fierce struggle unfolded in connection with the election of the first bishop of the Reich. Hitler demanded that his friend Chaplain Müller, who served as his adviser on the affairs of the Protestant Church, be ordained to this highest rank. The leaders of the federation of churches proposed the famous theologian Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwing for this post. It was a naive calculation. The Nazi government intervened: dissolved several provincial church organizations, removed a number of leading dignitaries from positions in the Protestant churches, unleashed the SA and Gestapo on recalcitrant priests - in essence, terrorized everyone who supported Bodelschwing. On the eve of the election of delegates to the synod, which was to elect the bishop of the Reich, Hitler “called” on the radio for Protestants to vote for “German Christians” who nominated Müller as their candidate. The intimidation tactic worked perfectly. Bodelschwing was forced to withdraw his candidacy, after which the majority of votes in the elections were given to “German Christians”; They elected Müller as bishop of the Reich at the synod held in September in Wittenberg, where Luther first challenged Rome.

However, the new head of the church, a despotic man by nature, was unable to either create a unified church or completely Nazify the Protestant congregation. On November 13, 1933, the day after the overwhelming majority of the German people supported Hitler in a national referendum, “German Christians” held a mass rally in Berlin’s Sportpalast. A certain Dr. Reinhardt Krause, the head of a sect in the Berlin district, proposed to abolish the Old Testament “with its cattle dealers and pimps” and revise the New Testament in order to bring the teachings of Christ into “full conformity with the requirements of National Socialism.” The texts of resolutions were prepared under the motto “One People, One Reich, One Faith,” demanding that all pastors take an oath of allegiance to Hitler and that all churches accept clauses concerning Aryans and the exclusion of Jewish converts. But this was too much even for humble Protestants, who refused to take any part in the war of the churches, so Bishop Müller was forced to disavow Dr. Krause.

In essence, the struggle between the Nazi government and the churches was of the same nature as the eternal dispute about what is Caesar's and what is God's. Hitler declared: if pro-Nazi “German Christians” are unable to subjugate the evangelical churches to Reich Bishop Müller, then the government will subjugate them. He always harbored dislike for Protestants, who constituted a tiny minority in his native Catholic Austria, and two-thirds of the population in Germany. “You can twist them any way you want,” he once boasted to his assistant. “They obey... Small people, they obey like dogs, and they sweat from embarrassment when you talk to them.” Hitler knew very well that only a small number of pastors and an even smaller number of believers opposed the Nazification of Protestant churches.

By early 1934, the disillusioned Pastor Niemöller had become the soul of the minority opposition in the Confessional Church and the Extraordinary Pastor's League. At a general synod held at the BBL in May 1934, and at a special meeting held in November at Niemöller's Church of Jesus Christ in Dahlem, a suburb of Berlin, the "confessional church" declared itself the legitimate Protestant church of Germany and established a provisional church government. . Thus, two groups were formed: one led by Reich Bishop Müller, the other led by Niemöller, and each claimed to be the legitimate Church of Germany.

It became obvious that the former army chaplain, despite his closeness to Hitler, had failed to unite the Protestant churches, and at the end of 1935, when the Gestapo arrested seven hundred pastors of the "confessional church", he resigned and left the scene. Already in July 1935, Schitler appointed his friend the Nazi lawyer Hans Kerrl as minister of church affairs, instructing him to make another attempt to unite Protestants. At first, Kerrl, who was one of the moderate Nazis, achieved significant success. He managed not only to win over the conservative clergy, who formed the majority, but also to establish a committee of churches, headed by the venerable Doctor Zellner, who enjoyed authority in all factions, to develop a common platform. But Niemöller's group, without refusing to cooperate with the committee, continued to consider itself the only legitimate church. In May 1936, when she submitted a polite but forceful memorandum to Hitler protesting the new regime's anti-Christian tendencies, condemning its anti-Semitism and demanding an end to government interference in church affairs, Interior Minister Frick responded with brutal repression. Hundreds of Confessional Church pastors were arrested, and Dr. Weissler, one of the signatories of the memorandum, was killed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The cash register of the “confessional church” was confiscated, and the collection of donations was prohibited.

On February 12, 1937, Dr. Zellner resigned as chairman of the committee of churches (the Gestapo forbade him to visit Lubeck, where nine Protestant pastors were imprisoned), complaining about the obstacles caused by the Minister of Church Affairs. Dr. Kerrl answered him in a speech delivered the next day to a group of obedient priests. He in turn accused Zoellner of failing to appreciate the Nazi theory of the "race of blood and soil" and clearly demonstrated the government's hostility towards both the Protestant and Catholic churches.

“The Party,” Kerr said, “stands on the platform of positive Christianity, and positive Christianity is National Socialism... National Socialism is the will of God... The will of God is embodied in German blood... Dr. Zoellner and Count Galen, Catholic Bishop of Munster, tried to instill to me that Christianity implies faith in Christ as the son of God. I felt funny... No, Christianity does not depend on the apostolic creed... The true personification of Christianity is the party, and the party, and first of all the Fuhrer, calls on the German people to support true Christianity... The Fuhrer is the exponent of the new divine will.”

On July 1, 1937, Dr. Niemöller was arrested and imprisoned in Berlin's Moabit prison. On June 27, as always, he read a sermon to the members of his congregation in a crowded Dahlem church, which became his last in the Third Reich. As if sensing what would happen to him, he said: “We no more than the ancient apostles think of using force to save ourselves from the hands of the authorities. And no more are they ready to remain silent on the orders of man, when God himself commands us to speak. For our duty was and remains to do the will of God, and not of man.”

On March 2, 1938, after eight months in prison, he was tried in a “special court” established by the Nazis for state criminals; on the main count of the charge (“secret subversion against the state”), the court acquitted him, but found him guilty of “abuse of the pulpit” and collecting donations in a church building, for which he was fined two thousand marks and sentenced to seven months in prison conclusions. Since Niemöller had already served more than his sentence, the court ordered his release, but upon leaving the courtroom he was captured by the Gestapo, taken into custody and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. From there he was transported to the Dachau camp, where he remained for seven years until he was liberated by Allied forces.

In addition to Niemöller, 807 pastors and laymen of active adherents of the “confessional church” were arrested in 1937, and hundreds of others were arrested in the next one or two years. If the resistance of the Niemeller wing was not completely broken, then, in any case, it was crushed. As for the majority of Protestant pastors, they, like almost all German citizens, submitted to Nazi terror. At the end of 1937, Dr. Kerrl forced the very venerable Bishop Mararens of Hanover to make a public statement that could not but seem particularly humiliating to such stalwarts as Niemöller: “The National Socialist worldview, based on national and political doctrine, defines and characterizes the German maturity. As such, it is also obligatory for “German Christians.” And in the spring of 1938, Bishop Mararens took the last, final step, ordering all the pastors of his diocese to take a personal oath of allegiance to the Fuhrer. Soon the majority of Protestant priests bound themselves to this oath, thereby legally and morally obliging themselves to carry out the dictator’s orders.

It would be a mistake to believe that the persecution of Protestants and Catholics by the Nazi state traumatized the German people or greatly disturbed large sections of them. Nothing like this. A people who easily gave up freedoms in other areas of life - political, cultural, economic, was not, with relatively rare exceptions, going to face death or even expose themselves to the danger of arrest in the name of freedom of religion. What really touched the Germans in the thirties were Hitler's impressive successes in eliminating unemployment, raising economic levels, restoring military power, as well as successive victories in the field of foreign policy. Few Germans lost sleep because of the arrest of several thousand priests or because of the quarrels between different sects of Protestants. Even fewer realized that the Nazi regime, under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler and with the support of Hitler, intended to eradicate the Christian faith, replacing it with the old, pre-Christian religion of the Germanic tribes, combined with the new paganism of the Nazi extremists. As Bormann, one of Hitler's closest associates, openly stated in 1941, “National Socialism and Christianity are incompatible.”

What Hitler's leadership had in store for Germany was clearly articulated in the thirty-point program for a "national church of the Reich" drawn up during the war by Rosenberg, an outspoken ideologist of paganism. Along with other duties, Rosenberg served as "the Fuhrer's representative in the system of complete intellectual and philosophical education and training in the spirit of the National Socialist Party."

Here are some of the most significant points of this program:

"1. The National Church of the German Reich categorically demands the exclusive right and exclusive authority to control all churches located within the Reich. She declares them the national churches of the German Reich...

5. The national church is determined to completely eradicate... the alien and foreign Christian confessions brought to Germany in the ill-fated year 800...

7. The national church does not have preachers, pastors, chaplains and other priests, but only national speakers of the Reich...

13. The national church demands an immediate stop to the publication and distribution of the Bible in the country.

14. The national church declares... to the German nation that Maya Kampf is the greatest document. This book... represents the purest and truest ethic of life of our nation now and in the future...

18. The national church will remove all crucifixes, bibles and images of saints from its altars.

19. There should be nothing in the altars except “Maya Kampf” (for the German nation and, therefore, for God this is the most sacred book) and... a sword...

30. On the day of the founding of the national church, the Christian cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals and chapels... and replaced by the only invincible symbol - the swastika.”

Nazification of culture

On the evening of May 10, 1933, approximately four and a half months after Hitler became chancellor, an event occurred in Berlin that the Western world had not witnessed since the late Middle Ages. Around midnight, a torchlight procession in which thousands of students took part ended in the park on Unter den Linden, opposite the University of Berlin. They threw their torches into the huge mountain of books collected here, and when they were engulfed in flames, new piles of books flew into the fire. In total, about 20 thousand books were burned. Similar scenes could be observed in several other cities - this is how the mass burning of books began.

Many of the books thrown into the fire that night, with the approval of Dr. Goebbels, by jubilant Berlin students, were written by world famous authors. Of the German authors whose books ended up in the fire, we can name Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Jacob Wasserman, Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Erich Maria Remarque, Walter Rathenau, Albert Einstein, Alfred Kerr and Hugo Preuss. The latter is a German scientist who once drafted the Weimar Constitution. The books of many foreign authors were burned, such as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Helen Keller, Margaret Sanger, H.G. Wells, Havelock Ellis, Arthur Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud, Andre Gide, Emile Zola, Marcel Proust. According to the student proclamation, any book “that undermines our future or strikes at the foundations of German thought, the German family and the driving forces of our people” was set on fire. While the books were turning to ashes, the new Minister of Propaganda, Dr. Goebbels, addressed the students, who considered his main task to put a Nazi straitjacket on German culture. “The soul of the German people will again be able to express itself,” he proclaimed. - This fire is intended to illuminate not only the final decline of the old era. It also highlights the advent of a new era.”

The beginning of the new, Nazi era of German culture was marked not only by bonfires of books and a more effective, although less symbolic, measure - a ban on the sale and lending of hundreds of books in libraries, on the publication of many new books, but also by the regulation of all cultural life on a scale unknown until then, none of the Western states. Back on September 22, 1933, the Reich Chamber of Culture, headed by Dr. Goebbels, was legally established. The law defined its purpose as follows: “In order to implement German cultural policy, it is necessary to gather creative workers in all areas into a single organization under the leadership of the Reich. The Reich must not only determine the direction of intellectual and spiritual progress, but also organize and direct the activities of workers in various spheres of culture.”

To guide and control each sphere of cultural life, seven chambers were created: fine arts, music, theater, literature, press, radio broadcasting and cinema. All persons working in these areas were required to join the relevant chambers, whose decisions and instructions had the force of law. In addition to other rights, the chambers were given the right to exclude persons from their composition due to their political unreliability or not to admit them there. This meant that those who were not particularly enthusiastic about National Socialism could lose the right to practice their professional activities in the arts and thereby lose their means of subsistence. Among those who lived in Germany in the 1930s and were sincerely concerned about the fate of its culture, there was not a single figure who did not note its horrific decline. Naturally, this decline became inevitable as soon as the Nazi leaders decided that the visual arts, literature, radio and cinema should serve exclusively for the purpose of propaganda of the new regime and its ridiculous philosophy. Not a single living German writer, with the exception of Ernst Jünger and the early Ernst Wichert, was published in Nazi Germany. Almost all the writers, led by Thomas Mann, emigrated, and the few who remained remained silent or were forced into silence. The manuscript of any book or play had to be submitted to the Ministry of Propaganda in order to obtain permission for publication or production.

Music was in a more advantageous position, since it was the art most distant from politics and the German musical treasury was filled with outstanding works, from Bach, Beethoven and Mozart to Brahms. But performing the music of Mendelssohn, who was Jewish, was, for example, prohibited, as was the music of the leading modern German composer Paul Hindemith. Jews were quickly excluded from leading symphony orchestras and opera houses. Unlike writers, most of the prominent figures in German musical art decided to remain in Nazi Germany and essentially give their names and talents to the service of the “new order.” One of the most outstanding conductors of the century, Wilhelm Furtwängler, did not leave the country either. For about a year he was in disgrace for speaking out in defense of Hindemith, but then returned to active musical activity, which he carried on throughout the subsequent years of Hitler's rule. Richard Strauss, the leading contemporary German composer, also remained. For some time he was president of the chamber of music, associating his name with Goebbels’s prostitution of culture. The famous pianist Walter Gieseking, with the approval of Goebbels, toured mainly abroad, promoting German culture. Thanks to the fact that musicians did not emigrate, and also thanks to the enormous classical heritage, during the Third Reich it was possible to enjoy excellent performances of opera and symphonic music. The orchestras of the Berlin Philharmonic and the Berlin State Opera were considered unsurpassed in this sense. Great music helped people forget about the decline of other arts and the many hardships of life under Nazism.

It should be noted that the theater also preserved traditions, but only in productions of the classical repertoire. Of course, Max Reinhardt emigrated, as did other directors, theater directors and actors of Jewish nationality. The plays of Nazi playwrights were laughably weak, and the general public avoided them. The stage life of such plays turned out to be very short-lived. The president of the theater chamber was a certain Hans Jost, a failed playwright who once publicly boasted that when someone used the word “culture” in front of him, his hand involuntarily reached for a pistol. But even Jost and Goebbels, who determined who should act and who should stage, were unable to prevent German theaters from staging the dramatic works of Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare.

Oddly enough, some of Bernard Shaw's plays were allowed to be staged in Nazi Germany, probably because he ridiculed English morals and made scathing comments about democracy, and also because his wit and left-wing political statements did not reach the Nazis.

Even stranger was the fate of the great German playwright Gerhard Hauptmann. During the time of Kaiser Wilhelm II, his plays were prohibited from being staged in imperial theaters because he was an ardent supporter of socialism. During the Weimar Republic, he became Germany's most popular playwright and managed to maintain this position in the Third Reich, where his plays continued to be performed. I will never forget the scene at the end of the premiere of his last play, Daughter of the Cathedral, when Hauptmann, a venerable old man with flowing gray hair falling over his black cape, left the theater on the arm of Dr. Goebbels and Jost. Like many other famous people in Germany, he resigned himself to the Hitler regime, and the cunning Goebbels extracted a propaganda effect from this, never tired of reminding the German people and the whole world that the greatest modern German playwright, a former socialist and defender of ordinary workers, not only remained in the Third Reich , but also continues to write plays that are performed on theater stages.

How sincere or adaptable or simply fickle this elderly playwright was can be inferred from what happened after the war. American authorities, believing that Hauptmann served the Nazis too zealously, banned his plays in their sector of West Berlin. The Russians invited him to East Berlin and gave him a hero's welcome, organizing a festival of his plays. And in October 1945, Hauptmann sent a letter to the communist-led “Union of Culture for the Democratic Revival of Germany”, wishing him success and expressing hope that the union would be able to ensure a “spiritual revival” of the German people.

Germany, which gave the world Dürer and Cranach, was unable to produce a single outstanding master in the field of modern fine art, although German expressionism in painting and the Munich urban school in architecture were interesting and original trends, and German artists reflected in their work all the evolutions and ups , which were characteristic of impressionism, cubism and dadaism.

For Hitler, who considered himself a real artist, despite the fact that he was never recognized in Vienna, all modern art bore the stamp of degeneration and meaninglessness. In Mein Kampf he launched into a long tirade on this subject, and after coming to power one of his first measures was to “cleanse” Germany of decadent art and attempt to replace it with new art. Almost 6,500 paintings by contemporary artists such as Kokoschka and Grosz, as well as Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso and many others, were removed from German museums.

What replaced them was revealed in the summer of 1937, when Hitler officially opened the “House of German Art” in Munich, in a tan building built in a pseudo-classical style. He himself helped design the building and called it “incomparable and unsurpassed.” Some 900 works were squeezed into this first exhibition of Nazi art, selected from 15,000 submitted. The author of these lines has never seen a more absurd selection in any country. Hitler personally made the final selection and, as his party comrades who were present testified, lost his temper at the sight of some of the paintings selected for display by the Nazi jury, chaired by the mediocre painter Adolf Ziegler. He not only ordered them to be thrown out immediately, but also punched several of them with a blow from his army boot.

“I have always been determined,” he said in a long speech at the opening of the exhibition, “if fate brings us to power, not to go into discussion of these issues (appraisal of works of art), but to act.” He did.

In a speech given on July 18, 1937, he outlined the Nazi line regarding German art:

“Works of art that are impossible to understand and that require a whole series of explanations in order to prove their right to exist and find their way to neurasthenics who perceive such stupid and impudent nonsense will no longer be in the public domain. And let no one have any illusions on this score! National Socialism is determined to cleanse the German Reich and our people from all these influences that threaten its existence and spirit... With the opening of this exhibition, madness in art comes to an end, and with it the corruption of our people by such art...”

Yet some Germans, especially in an art center like Munich, chose to remain artistically “corrupt.” At the opposite end of town, in a ramshackle gallery accessible only by a narrow staircase, there was an exhibition of “degenerate” art that Dr. Goebbels organized to show the people what Hitler was saving them from. It presented a brilliant collection of modern paintings by Kokoschka, Chagall, works of expressionists and impressionists. On the day I visited there, having previously walked around the countless halls of the “House of German Art,” the gallery was full of people. A long line lined the creaky stairs and ended in the street. The crowds besieging the gallery became so large that Dr. Goebbels, angry and embarrassed, soon closed the exhibition.

Control over the press, radio and cinema

Every morning, the publishers of Berlin's daily newspapers and correspondents from newspapers published in other cities of the Reich gathered at the Propaganda Ministry to listen to instructions from Dr. Goebbels or one of his deputies on what news to print and what not to print, how to present the material and headline it, what campaigns to curtail and which ones to expand, what are the most pressing topics for editorials today. To avoid any misunderstandings, a written directive for the day was issued, and oral instructions were also given. For small rural newspapers and periodicals, directives were transmitted by telegraph or sent by mail.

In order to be a publisher in the Third Reich, one had to first of all have a politically and racially pure profile. The Reich Press Law of October 4, 1933 declared journalism a public profession; in accordance with this, it was stipulated that publishers must have German citizenship, Aryan origin and not be married to persons of Jewish nationality. Section 14 of the Press Law ordered publishers “not to publish in newspapers anything that in one way or another misleads the reader, confuses selfish goals with public ones and leads to a weakening of the power of the German Reich from within or without, to undermining the will of the German people, the defense of Germany, its culture.” and the economy, as well as everything that offends the honor and dignity of Germany.” Such a law, if it had been put into effect before 1933, would have meant prohibiting the activities of all Nazi publishers and the publication of all Nazi-related publications in the country. Now it led to the closure of those magazines and the expulsion from work of those journalists who did not want to be in the service of the Nazis.

One of the first newspapers to cease to exist was the Vossische Zeitung newspaper. Founded in 1704 and boasting past support from the likes of Frederick the Great, Lessing and Rathenau, it has become Germany's leading newspaper, comparable to the likes of the English Times and the American New York Times. But it was liberal and it was owned by the Ullstein families, who were Jewish by origin. It closed on April 1, 1934 after 230 years of continuous existence. Another world-famous liberal newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt, lasted somewhat longer, until 1937, although its owner Hans Lakmaga Mosse, also a Jew, was forced to give up his share of the capital in the spring of 1933. The third German liberal newspaper with a large circulation, the Frankfurter Zeitung, also continued to publish after it parted ways with its Jewish publishers. Its publisher was Rudol Kircher. Like Karl Zileks, publisher of the conservative Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, published in Berlin, he was a correspondent for his newspaper in London. A Rhodesian, passionate Anglophile and liberal, Kircher served the Nazis faithfully. Moreover, according to Otto Dietrich, chief of the Reich press, he, like the former “opposition” newspapers, was “a greater Catholic than the Pope himself.”

The fact that these newspapers survived is partly due to the intervention of the German Foreign Office, which wanted these world-famous newspapers to serve as a kind of showcase for Nazi Germany abroad and at the same time serve as a means of propaganda. Since all newspapers in Germany were told what to publish and how to present those publications, the German press inevitably found itself in the grip of a stifling conformity. Even among people accustomed to regulation and accustomed to obeying authorities, newspapers began to cause boredom. As a result, even leading Nazi newspapers, such as the morning Völkischer Beobachter and the evening Der Angriff, were forced to reduce their circulation. The overall circulation of German newspapers also fell as control over them increased and they passed into the hands of Nazi publishers. During the first four years of the Third Reich, the number of daily newspapers dropped from 3,607 to 2,671.

author Voropaev Sergey

Cinematography in the Third Reich After the Nazis came to power, German cinematography, which had previously received worldwide recognition thanks to the originality and talent of German actors and directors, became an integral part of the Gleichschaltung program - the subjugation of all spheres of life

From the book Encyclopedia of the Third Reich author Voropaev Sergey

Literature in the Third Reich After the Nazis came to power, modern German literature suffered more than other forms of art. More than 250 German writers, poets, critics and

From the book Encyclopedia of the Third Reich author Voropaev Sergey

Music in the Third Reich All forms of art in Nazi Germany were subordinated to the policy of Gleichschaltung, or coordination, and only music, the least political of the arts, did not experience serious pressure under Hitler's dictatorship, finding itself somewhat isolated

From the book Encyclopedia of the Third Reich author Voropaev Sergey

Education in the Third Reich For many centuries, the German educational system served as a model for the whole world. The organization of education, from kindergarten to university, the status of the teacher, the essence of the curriculum - all this caused widespread

From the book Encyclopedia of the Third Reich author Voropaev Sergey

Submarine fleet in the Third Reich Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, Germany was prohibited from having a submarine fleet, but its secret construction did not stop for a minute. In 1927, as a result of a parliamentary investigation into a scandal involving information about

From the book Encyclopedia of the Third Reich author Voropaev Sergey

The Press in the Third Reich Even before he came to power, Hitler considered the press as one of the most powerful weapons in the struggle to establish the Nazi regime and personal dictatorship in Germany. Having become Chancellor, he, following radio broadcasting, cinematography, music, theater,

From the book Encyclopedia of the Third Reich author Voropaev Sergey

Propaganda in the Third Reich The rise of the National Socialists to political power and the entire period of the Third Reich were accompanied by an intense propaganda campaign led by the Minister of Education and Propaganda, Dr. Paul Joseph

From the book Encyclopedia of the Third Reich author Voropaev Sergey

Broadcasting in the Third Reich Like other media of the Third Reich, the Nazi authorities subordinated national broadcasting to the interests of the Gleichshaltung policy. Soon after Hitler came to power, he provided the Minister of Education and

From the book Encyclopedia of the Third Reich author Voropaev Sergey

Religion in the Third Reich Despite the fact that Hitler was born into a family that professed the Catholic religion, he very early rejected Christianity as an idea alien to the racist model. “Antiquity,” he said, “was much better than modern times, because it did not know

From the book Encyclopedia of the Third Reich author Voropaev Sergey

Theater in the Third Reich During the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), German theater acquired a high reputation for its excellence. German playwrights, directors and actors, thanks to their creative energy, made a huge contribution to the development of various genres

From the book Encyclopedia of the Third Reich author Voropaev Sergey

Universities in the Third Reich For many generations, the German university system was the model of higher education for the whole world. The level of student preparation and the competence of the teaching staff enjoyed a well-deserved reputation. Meanwhile,

From the book Encyclopedia of the Third Reich author Voropaev Sergey

Justice in the Third Reich The legal system of the Third Reich fully corresponded to the Fuhrer's personal ideas about justice. Hitler had a contemptuous attitude towards the traditional legal system of bourgeois parliamentarism, which he tirelessly repeated in the early years

From the book Doctors Who Changed the World author Sukhomlinov Kirill

A great doctor in the Third Reich In 1927, Sauerbruch was invited to Berlin to serve as chief surgeon at the Charité Hospital, the most famous and respected clinic in Germany. The professor is studying here surgical treatment tuberculosis, chest injuries, esophageal diseases,

From the book Victims of Yalta author Tolstoy-Miloslavsky Nikolai Dmitrievich

Chapter 1 Russians in the Third Reich On that Sunday morning, June 22, 1941, the young Red Army lieutenant Shalva Yashvili, who served in the units that occupied Poland, was counting on lying in bed for an extra hour. According to him in my own words, he was then timid and rather soft

Overwhelming
the majority of the German people seemed to have nothing against the fact that they
deprived of personal freedom, that they destroyed many cultural values, offering
in return for the senseless barbarity that his life and work were subjected to such
regulation, which even he, accustomed over many generations to
strict order
True, behind all this was hidden the fear of the Gestapo, the fear of falling into
concentration camp if you went beyond what is permitted if you
you share the views of communists or socialists if you are too liberal
or pacifist or if you are Jewish. "Bloody Purge" June 30, 1934
year showed how merciless new rulers can be. However, on
At first, Nazi terror affected relatively few Germans.
An outside observer who had just arrived in the country was somewhat surprised
that the Germans obviously did not recognize themselves as victims of intimidation and harassment from
sides of an unscrupulous and brutal dictatorship and vice versa, they are with genuine
enthusiastically supported this dictatorship. In some ways, Nazism inspired
They gave them hope, new incentive and amazing faith in the future of the country.
Hitler was dealing with the past, which had brought so much trouble and disappointment.
Step by step, without wasting time, which we will describe in detail later,
he freed Germany from its last obligations under the Treaty of Versailles,
which baffled the victorious countries, and restored the military
the power of Germany. This is what the majority of Germans wanted and were ready to agree to
the sacrifices that the Fuhrer demanded: renunciation of personal freedom, meager food
(“guns instead of butter”) and hard work. By the autumn of 1936 with a problem
unemployment was largely ended: almost every able-bodied
had a job (From February 1933 to the spring of 1937, the number of unemployed
decreased from six to one million. - Approx. ed.). I had to hear
how workers, deprived of the right to form trade unions, joked after a hearty lunch:
“Under Hitler, the right to starve was abolished. The Nazi motto is “Common interests are superior.”
personal" became widespread in those days, and although many
representatives of the party elite, primarily Goering, secretly
enriched themselves, and the profits of entrepreneurs grew, there was no doubt that
the masses believed in "national socialism" which supposedly puts
public welfare is higher than one's personal gain. Racial laws
turning Jews into outcasts of German society, were presented
to the shocked foreign observer as a return to primitive times; But
since Nazi theories extolled the Germans as the salt of the earth and as the highest
race, then the population of the country had a far from negative attitude towards these laws.
Some of the Germans (former socialists, liberals or true Christians from
old conservative strata), with whom I had to talk, were indignant and
were even indignant about the persecution of Jews, but although in some cases they
helped individual victims, it was not possible to stop the campaign of persecution
tried. "What can we do?" - they often asked. Reply to this
the question was not easy.
The press and radio, despite censorship, gave the Germans some
an idea of ​​how critical the world community is,
however, this circumstance, as they could see, did not interfere with foreigners
flood the Third Reich in crowds and enjoy using it
hospitality. At that time, entry into Nazi Germany was much
freer than entry into Soviet Russia (Again, in contrast
Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany allowed all citizens except those
several thousand who were blacklisted by the secret police, to leave
abroad, although this was largely hampered by financial restrictions
due to lack of foreign currency. However, financial restrictions for
Germans at that time were no stricter than for British citizens after 1945
of the year. Apparently, the Nazi rulers were not afraid that the average German,
visiting a democratic country, anti-Nazi ideology will have an effect
decomposing. - Approx. ed.). Tourism flourished in the country, bringing it great
quantities of much-needed foreign exchange. It seemed like a Nazi
management has nothing to hide. A foreigner, be he any opponent
Nazism, could come to Germany and watch, study everything he wanted, for
with the exception of concentration camps and, as in all other countries, military installations. AND
many came. And if, having returned from there, they did not become adherents
Nazism, at least they began to be tolerant of the “new Germany”,
believing that they had discovered, as they put it, “positive developments” there. Even
such a shrewd man as Lloyd George, who led England to
victory over Germany in 1918 and who carried out his election campaign
campaign in the same year under the motto “Kaiser to the gallows!”, considered it possible
visit Hitler in Obersalzberg in 1936, and then publicly
proclaimed him a “great man” who showed sufficient insight and
will to solve the social problems of the modern state, first of all
- the problem of unemployment, which, like an unhealed wound, is still
England suffered; proposed by this distinguished leader of the liberal
party program called “We can defeat unemployment” was not found
support within the country.

The Olympic Games, held in August 1936 in Berlin,
provided the Nazis with an excellent opportunity to surprise the world with their achievements
the Third Reich, and they did not fail to take advantage of this opportunity. Inscriptions
with the words "Jews are undesirable" hanging in shops, hotels, pubs,
entertainment establishments, were slowly removed, persecution of Jews and two
Christian churches temporarily stopped, the country regained full
respectable appearance.
Not a single previous Olympics was so magnificently organized,
was not accompanied by such impressive spectacles as this. Goering,
Ribbentrop and Goebbels organized lavish receptions in honor of foreign guests.
More than a thousand guests gathered for dinner at the Minister of Propaganda on the island
Pfaueninsel am Wannsee, where a grandiose performance took place, called
"Italian Night", which was reminiscent of scenes from "A Thousand and One Nights".
Foreign guests, especially from England and America, were amazed: the appearance
happy, healthy, friendly people rallying around Hitler are far away
did not correspond to their ideas about Berlin, gleaned from the newspapers.
But an outside observer of the splendor of the Summer Olympic Games
at least a foreigner, could not help but see what was hidden from tourists and
that the Germans themselves stopped noticing or took for granted: the deterioration
moral climate of German society. After all, no one hid
Hitler's anti-Jewish laws, the so-called Nuremberg laws, dated 15
September 1935, which deprived persons of this nationality of German
citizenship. Laws prohibited marriages and extramarital affairs of Jews with Aryans,
Jews were deprived of the right to hire domestic servants from among Aryan women
origin under thirty-five years of age. Over the next few years
thirteen more decrees were issued, which placed the Jews, essentially,
outlaw. Moreover, in the summer of 1936, that is, just at the time when
Germany, as host of the Olympic Games, tried to capture the imagination
guests arriving from the West, Jews, either by law, because with
with the help of Nazi terror, they began to put so many slingshots on admission
to serve in public and private institutions that at least
half of them were left without any means of subsistence. In 1933
year, the first year of the existence of the Third Reich, they were removed from service in
government agencies and from working in the press and on radio, were not allowed
engage in farming, teaching and work in the field of theater and
movie; in 1934 they were expelled from the stock exchange. Regarding the ban on
medical and legal practice, as well as trade, although in
it was imposed legislatively only in 1938, but in fact
began to operate at the end of the fourth year of Nazi rule.
Moreover, the Jews were denied not only the blessings of life, but also the very
necessary. In many cities it has become difficult, if not impossible, for Jews to
buy food. Above the doors of grocery, meat and dairy
shops and bakeries had signs: “Jews are not allowed to enter.” Often they don't
could provide their children with milk. Pharmacies did not supply them with medicine.
Hotels did not provide overnight accommodation. And everywhere they went they were waited for
mocking inscriptions: “The entry of Jews into this city is strictly prohibited” or
"Jews may enter here only at their own risk." On a steep bend
On the road near Ludwigshafen there was a sign: “Caution - sharp turn!
Jews - drive at a speed of 120 kilometers per hour!" (I was subjected to fierce
attacks from the press and radio; they even threatened to expel him from the country for reporting on
that during the Olympic Games some of the inscriptions were removed. - Approx. auto)
Such was the fate of the Jews during the Olympic Games,
was the beginning of a path that would soon lead them to physical death.

There were quite a few established myths in Soviet historiography. In particular, there was a myth that the population of Hitler's Germany, drawn into the war by its criminal leadership, was forced to bear the burden of the hardships of war.
The 12-volume History of the Second World War said:
“While the German people were increasingly experiencing the hardships of war, the ruling elite of Nazi Germany received huge profits and continued to live in contentment and luxury.”

At the everyday level, many people of the former USSR have a stereotype: war means deprivation!
If we won, we strained ourselves so terribly, then what must have been the hardships and deprivations of those who lost?
From this false message followed another false one: why do we, the victors, live worse than the vanquished? In the late 80s, many of our fellow citizens, who were unable to resolve this issue, cursed the political system of the Soviet state!
In fact, the situation in Germany was the opposite of what Soviet historiography told us. Of course, Germany is a country of many millions and among so many people, there were certainly people who experienced hardships. But in general, the Germans did not feel any particular hardships of the war almost until the very defeat. A decrease in consumption, of course, was observed, but it was not significant.
To understand what this deterioration in the quality of life of Germans was like, remember the manifestations of the global financial crisis in Russia in 2008.
About the same!!!
In Italy, Japan, not to mention the USSR, the hardships were felt much more strongly.
It is well known from books and films how the mobilization of the economy took place in the USSR. Perfume factories began to produce Molotov cocktails, pipe factories began to produce bomb casings and mortar barrels, clothing factories began to sew uniforms, etc.
So there was nothing like this in Germany.
The production of consumer goods did not decrease significantly during the war years.
As I wrote earlier, taught by the bitter experience of the First World War,

West German historians explain the absence of a sharp drop in the production of consumer goods for three reasons.
1. On October 16, 1942, the “war maintenance program” was released. An attempt was made to limit the production of "unnecessary" consumer goods. However, they also admit that this program was not implemented due to the desire of “some entrepreneurs to receive high profits even during the war.” But measures to concentrate production at the best enterprises have borne fruit. The production of beds increased by 130%, wardrobes by 56%, kitchen tables by 35%, kitchen cabinets by 52%, chairs by 49%. The production of glass and porcelain products also increased. I admit honestly, I could not find data on whether wardrobes were produced at all during the war by the industry of the USSR...
2. Another reason German historians name is a significant share in the production of consumer goods by enterprises of the occupied countries.
3. The Germans' food supply was ensured by reducing the rations of the population of the occupied countries.

Even in the face of true evil, life goes on. A new government regime may implement a policy that hurts many, but unaffected citizens continue to live their normal lives.
While the Nazis brutally persecuted Jews and everyone else considered second-class citizens, many Germans did not notice much change in their daily routine. They went to school, joined clubs, got married, worked, shopped...

It was ordinary life against the backdrop of one of the most terrible periods in history. Then, when the war broke out, destruction and violence affected everyone - but even against the backdrop of the war, civilian life in the rear did not stop.
1. Students greet the teacher, Berlin, January 1934.

2. Children buying popsicles from a tray, Berlin, 1934.


3. Volunteers collecting Christmas donations for the poor, Berlin, December 1935.


4. Children wave flags as they leave Berlin for evacuation, ca. 1940–1945


5. Representatives of the Union of German Girls (the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth) doing gymnastics, 1941.


6. German children during a geography lesson in a Nazi school in Silesia (Poland), October 1940.


7. Members of the Hitler Youth tug of war in gas masks, Worms, 1933.


8. Distribution of portraits of Adolf Hitler for hanging in apartments, resettlement camp in Lublin (Poland), 1940.


9. Members of the Hitler Youth on a campaign, location unknown, 1933.


10. Passersby read a propaganda board entitled “The Jews are our misfortune,” Worms, 1933.


11. Members of the Imperial Labor Service, where for six months in mandatory All young men were called up for field work, approx. 1940


12. Children with Down syndrome in the Schönbrunn Psychiatric Clinic, 1934
Initially, all children with developmental delays were forcibly sterilized; later, all mentally ill children began to be physically destroyed.


13. Activists of the Union of German Girls hang up posters about their organization, Worms, 1933.


14. A family looks with admiration at a boy in a Hitler Youth uniform, February 1943.

15. A Jewish woman examines the goods of a street vendor, Radom (Poland), 1940.


16. Activists of the Union of German Girls clean up, Berlin, date unknown.

17. Jews stand in line at a travel agency in the hope of leaving Germany, Berlin, January 1939.


18. A newlywed wears an SS uniform at a wedding, December 1942.


19. Members of the NSDAP with election campaigning at the gates of the church, Berlin, July 23, 1933.


20. Ritual jumping over a fire during the traditional summer solstice festival, Berlin, 1937


21. Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller delivers a speech at Berlin Cathedral from a pulpit draped in a Nazi flag, September 1934.


22. SA stormtroopers hang leaflets calling for a boycott on the window of a shop owned by Jews, April 1, 1933.


23. Newlyweds admiring their rings, location unknown, 1944.


24. Newborns under the Lebensborn program - descendants of carefully selected "racially pure" parents, September 1941.


25. Two SS men at the christening of a child, 1936.

26. Children salute the banner in one of the evacuee camps, date unknown.


27. Miraculously surviving a Jewish store after Kristallnacht - a terrible pogrom during which thousands of synagogues and Jewish offices were destroyed, Berlin, November 10, 1938.


28. French woman in forced factory work, Berlin, 1943


29. Ostarbeiters at lunch at the Scherl publishing house, Berlin, February 1943.


30. Children with parents descend into a bomb shelter, Berlin, October 1941.

31. Boys spending the night in a bomb shelter of the Reich Air Ministry, Berlin, 1940.

32. Men, women and children fighting fires after an air raid, location unknown, 1942.


33. The mayor of Leipzig committed suicide at work, fearing retaliation from the Allies, 1945.