Voices from the past link Hitler fanatics to Germany’s new far-right
▶ Pre-war Nazis’ testimonies are found in US university archives
A new book containing more than 80 original testimonies from Nazi party members on why they backed Hitler has revealed similarities with the ideas voiced by today’s far-right supporters, except that Muslim immigrants have replaced Jews as a scapegoat.
Why I Became a Nazi, published this month, contains a selection of 600 essays gathered in 1934 by American sociologist Theodore Fred Abel who offered cash for “the best personal life story of a supporter of the Hitler movement”.
To take part, people had to have joined the Nazi party before January 1, 1933, and the campaign was supported by Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. Prof Abel used the findings in a 1938 book on the rise of Nazism.
The testimonies have been described as a Facebook of the Nazi period and the book is the first time they have been published on such a scale. They had lain in US university archives for decades until a German publisher and historian, Wieland Giebel, came across them during research for a museum he runs in Berlin on Hitler’s rise to power.
“People at the time felt excluded and that is a similar situation we have today. Even though we’re one of the world’s wealthiest and best organised countries now, many still have the subjective impression that they are getting left behind,” Prof Abel told The National. “In the 1930s, the Jews were the scapegoats. Today it’s the refugees.”
Many of the testimonies refer to the impact on people’s lives of the economic chaos that followed Germany’s defeat in the First World War. They reveal Nazi members’ views on how a strong leader is preferable to the chaos of democracy, their fury at the elites, mistrust of the press, wounded national pride and hatred of Jews.
Those sentiments echoed in the chants of far-right protesters who marched through the eastern towns of Chemnitz and Kothen in recent weeks demonstrating against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-border migrant policy after two incidents in which Muslim migrants were suspected of killing Germans.
Demonstrators shouted “Germany for the Germans – foreigners out”, “traitors”, “National Socialism, now, now, now”, “We are the people” and “Lying press”. In Chemnitz, which had the biggest neo-Nazi riots in a generation at the end of last month, migrants were chased through the streets and assaulted.
“Fortunately, they don’t have a charismatic leader today,” Mr Giebel said.
However, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which backed the Chemnitz protests and is campaigning for “Islam-free schools” before an election in Bavaria next month, is riding a wave of anti-migrant sentiment. It is the third-strongest party in the German parliament.
One opinion poll this month claimed it had overtaken the Social Democrats and was now in second place, not far behind Mrs Merkel’s conservatives.
Linguists noted that the party, whose leader said Germany had the right to be proud of its soldiers in the Second World War, has increasingly adopted Nazi-era terms such as “Volksgemeinschaft”, a reference to an ethnically homogenous people, “Luegenpresse”, or lying press, and “Volksverraeter”, or traitors to the people.
The sight of the AfD marching together with the anti-immigrant Pegida movement and neo-Nazi supporters in Chemnitz recalled the co-operation between Nazi politicians and the brownshirts of the Storm Division, Mr Giebel said.
Far-right supporters today have the benefit of hindsight and are ignoring history, he said. In contrast, the fervent Nazis who jotted down their passion for Hitler in 1934 did not know it would lead to the Second World War and the Holocaust.
One of the testimonies was from Gustav Heinsch, a labourer from Berlin, who wrote that he grew up in extreme poverty and could not understand why workers were treated with such disdain by the rich.
He went to demonstrations and heard Jews “talking cheekily about Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and Gen Erich Ludendorff and the two million dead”.
He wrote that he recognised “the threat of Jewish intelligence” and its influence on public opinion. This had turned him into the biggest “enemy of Jews”, he wrote.
Walter Naumann, 34, an agricultural official, wrote: “The Marxist press couldn’t stop stirring up hatred.”
Margarethe Schrimpff wrote: “After all these sad events was there any wonder that the whole of Germany yearned for a man who would sweep out this Augean stable with an iron broom?”
And Gustav Kohlenberg, a trainee civil servant, wrote: “Every gathering of National Socialists was an internal experience, a religious service sometimes.”
“We should not forget that the Nazis were in the minority in 1932,” Mr Giebel said.
“We need a strong state that tackles them and protects us from those who want to destroy it.”
People at the time felt excluded and that is a similar situation we have today. In the 1930s, the Jews were the scapegoats. Today it’s the refugees. WIELAND GIEBEL Historian