The new Indiana Jones movie (which I haven’t seen) got me thinking again about the Nazis, and the Berkley podcast I’m listening to (not sure which one) just got to the Third Reich, too. This got me thinking back to Brian’s post, A question I shouldn’t HAVE to ask, and I wanted to expand a bit on some of those thoughts.
If the very reality of the Third Reich doesn’t shake the foundations of your soul, there are only two options. Either:
- You don’t actually know enough about the Third Reich to be scared, or
- You are in denial about the reality of the Third Reich
The Third Reich literally took everything that seemed so positive about humanity and turned it inside out. And it didn’t do it in some magical way — it did it through taking one step after another, and the citizens of the Third Reich just adapting to their new normal. The citizens under the Third Reich were no more stupid, cowardly, or susceptible to corruption than you and I are — we’re just as likely to be suckered in by the same tactics. And that’s what should be scaring you. It petrifies me.
Everything that might bring you hope, or that you might see as redeemable in humanity, was corrupted by the Third Reich. They took whatever it was and used its own rules and its own internal consistency in order to reach their extreme ends. There is no place to retreat to — no part of our society which inculcates you from the Third Reich’s siren call.
The most obvious example is science and technology. Germany was the foremost scientific powerhouse of Europe: both before, during, and after WW2, most of America’s great and famous scientists of the time period were really German scientists who relocated to the United States for one reason or another. But the Nazis took medical science and turned it into gruesome and tortuous medical experiments on unwilling patients. They took Nobel prize chemistry and turned it into poison gas. They took the fledgling science of sociology and used it to argue for their own tragic policies. The very thing that defined the modern era — the railroad — was the very thing that enabled the concentration camps to function. Science and technology were thoroughly co-opted by the Third Reich, and so scientific and technical advancement simply became new ways for the Third Reich to advance itself.
Mass media is another example. Germany was on the forefront in early films, and that was corrupted into propaganda. If you have not seen “Triumph of the Will”, do so now. As you watch it, watch out — there is something innate and horrifically enticing about what it is portraying.
Governmental guidance for society — that is, “progressivism” — were just as corrupted. The Third Reich spent a lot of time (particularly during its rise) in establishing effective governmental offices, reducing poverty, improving education, and cleaning up the cities. Hitler took many of his cues for economic reconstruction from the New Deal. They made the trains run on time. And, in the process of establishing this new society, the Third Reich established the Hitler Youth, indoctrinated the children, and rendered people complacent. And the eugenics programs were all progressive ideas at their time, based on equal parts of cutting-edge science and cultural bigotry.
You can go through all the places where people seem to place their hope — religion, the free market, music, books, national identity…whatever you want. All of them were taken and completely subsumed into the Nazi system.
And through all of this corruption, people just lived their day to day lives, just getting by. Some genuinely ignorant, some willfully ignorant, people walked through this world just getting by. And that’s the part that scares me the most.
The most frustrating point in all of this, though, is that we don’t take the Third Reich seriously anymore. They were just token bad guys for a long time — “the guy with the swastika was the bad guy” is a hackneyed way of establishing a villain. Now, the Nazis aren’t even token bad guys, as Brian’s post pointed out. Comparisons with Nazis are so lightly done that we have Godwin’s Law, but nobody seems to really grasp what they’re comparing against. I’m not saying we should start referring to Hitler as He Who Shall Not Be Named, but we can at least start taking our own weakness and susceptibility seriously. And we can start acknowledging, as a culture, that each of these places where we place our hope has a dark side which we need to watch out for.
17 Comments
“The citizens under the Third Reich were no more stupid, cowardly, or susceptible to corruption than you and I are — we’re just as likely to be suckered in by the same tactics.”
You bring up a crucial point here, I think. We do a disservice to future generations by portraying the Third Reich as inhuman, and not as people who were systematically led into the darkest side of humanity. If we do not understand that aspect of WW2 history, we’ll be doomed to repeat it.
(Also, you made a small typo in the 4th paragraph: “medical experiments on unwilling patience.”)
I actually studied the Holocaust in school. Yeah, it’s both amazing and terrifying what they were able to do. We (western governments) helped create that perfect storm by levying harsh reparations (courtesy of the Treaty of Versailles) after WWI that crushed their economy and destroyed their sense of pride. Hitler gave them their pride back. People will do anything to feel good about themselves and he knew that. Look at those sharp dressed soldiers marching down the street in perfect synchronization and how proud they are! I can only imagine the powerful psychological effect of that to the average German. That said, I could see how that would get them on the warpath but I still can’t connect with how they were able to translate that into the despicable way they treated their prisoners.
Anyway, I wouldn’t count on humanity remembering that event the way we should. Humanity is notorious for forgetting history. We simply don’t learn our lessons and we replay these events over and over again. The names and places may change but that’s it. Perhaps you should be more afraid of that than the feelings about the Nazi’s in particular.
@Marc
Most people weren’t the ones treating the prisoners despicably. Those that did were just following orders — those that issued the orders never really dealt with the human consequence of the orders they issued. And the medical experiments and all of that — that was all for a greater purpose. If you can engage a utilitarian mindset, it’s not too far a stretch.
And you miss my point if you’re seeing me scared of Nazis in particular. I’m terrified by the undeniable way that the Third Reich laid bare our human weaknesses, and how all great and seemingly positive things were corrupted.
“And you miss my point if you’re seeing me scared of Nazis in particular. I’m terrified by the undeniable way that the Third Reich laid bare our human weaknesses, and how all great and seemingly positive things were corrupted”
I was referring to your last paragraph where you say we don’t take the Third Reich seriously anymore.
I believe it was Dostoevsky who said “The line between good and evil runs through the human heart.” (or maybe it was Solzhenitsyn) Our society is just as capable of Nazi depravity as the German society of the 1930s & 1940s. Many make the mistake of buying into the Hegelian positivism that says we have progressed beyond the possibility of repeating what happened in Nazi Germany at that time. This is a huge mistake: we need always to be on guard against the darker demons of hatred, indifference and greed that can just as easily lead our society down the same road. Similar atrocities have happened since the Nazi era (Genocides in Rowanda and Darfur come to mind as recent examples) though they generally haven’t been as systematic nor as “high tech” – perhaps we don’t view them as being as “bad” due to our own latent racism: those examples involve people of color and not white folks. Unfortunately, similar atrocities will happen in the future – to think otherwise is not only naive, but the denial makes it even more likely that we won’t stop ourselves.
If you haven’t yet read The Cunning of History by Richard L. Rubenstein, you really should. It’s a powerful argument about how the Holocaust is an expression of Western culture.
@Stevi
The atrocities that occurred during the Holocaust have nothing to do with western culture in particular, neither does slavery (which the book supposedly alludes to). This stuff has all occurred long before western culture existed. It’s an expression of humanity’s dark side. In the right conditions, it could be perpetrated by any culture. It’s happening right now…and it’s not the least bit western.
@Marc “I still can’t connect with how they were able to translate that into the despicable way they treated their prisoners.”
Agreed, although apparently it isn’t that hard for humans to do such things. Also, I just wish it weren’t gradually creeping into even places like the USA e.g.
http://www.cnn.com/US/9903/04/amnesty.women.prison/
is just one example. I think we got us a nice prison-industrial system going in the USA, and I don’t believe it does you or me any good. But somebody else seems to get off on it. Profit? Fun? I just don’t know.
I think you mean:
Hitler took many of his cues for economic reconstruction from the New Deal.
@Stephen
Fixed.
You said there were two different sorts of people:
You missed the third group of people: those who think the Nazis didn’t commit crimes.
And I’m not just talking about the people who actually call themselves Nazis. No, the real danger is the people who don’t come out and say that the Nazis weren’t criminals, because the other 99% of the population would be horrified by that admission, but beleive it anyways. People who support the right of some people to commit the same crimes the Nazis committed. People who support the right to torture, the right to invade other countries who haven’t attacked us, the right to jail anyone for any amount of time without a trial, the right to spy on anyone, the right to violate the laws with impunity.
This is the first time I’ve heard that Hitler copied the New Deal in any manner. I find this hard to beleive given Hitler’s politics- facism is a hard-right, conservative, pro-corporate, pro-wealth, anti-communist ideology. I have a hard time believing that he’d be involved in anything that smacked of redistribution of wealth anywhere but up. You might be thinking of the Kaiser- who’s policies did presage a lot of the New Deal.
Hitler’s efforts to rebuild the economy strongly mirror the implementation from the New Deal, even if his motivations were different. He reinstated social support services which had dissolved during World War I, engaged in an expansive construction/urban renewal campaign, provided food to the starving (Germans) and jobs to the unemployed (Germans), and spent a significant amount of government money to jump-start the free market (e.g. Volkswagen). If you weren’t getting gassed to death or drafted into the army, Germany was a reasonably nice place to be.
His motivation for doing this, from what I’ve gathered, was twofold: 1) to get the German economy back to the point where it could crank out the tanks and bullets to feed the war machine, and 2) to keep people sated — if they were comfortable and had a lot to lose, they weren’t going to become rebels.
I was always wondering how murder on an industrial scale could have been established in a country that had its share of civilization.
Killing in KZs required a lot of people that are willing to kill or support killing of innocent persons regularily. Could you imagine yourself killing a few children a day? I cannot but on the other hand I’m not that much different than the guys from my grandfarthers generation. A good hint how to resolve this paradox may be the Milgram experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment.
In order from least to most substantive:
s/patience/patients
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/12/was_nazi_science_good_science.php is a fascinating article on nazi science which I will not endorse but rather introduce for discussion.
A question: Was the Communist regime (in Russia better or worse than the Nazis? Facts: it was both longer lasting and killed more people. (A lot more people). For simplicity’s sake, let’s only include the reigns of Lenin and Stalin.
Hmm, I have more but I think that’s enough. It’s an extremely fertile ground for moral philosophy, although possibly too loaded due to its recency.
In order from least to most substantive:
s/patience/patients
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/12/was_nazi_science_good_science.php is a fascinating article on nazi science which I will not endorse but rather introduce for discussion.
A question: Was the Communist regime in Russia better or worse than the Nazis? Facts: it was both longer lasting and killed more people. (A lot more people). For simplicity’s sake, let’s only include the reigns of Lenin and Stalin.
Hmm, I have more but I think that’s enough. It’s an extremely fertile ground for moral philosophy, although possibly too loaded due to its recency.
Virginia Postrel talks about how Naziism was glamorous:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/virginia_postrel_on_glamour.html
Bad News, the nazi party still exist. But it’s very weak. Yes it’s serious when no one is remembering the holocoust. In germany the fear of Hitler riseing up from his grave, has resulted in restriction of the negative disagreable side of freedom of speech. If you express doubt about the holocoust and write a book about it jail you go and your book is burnt . If you make any grievances to the government and the political parties and the leaders jail you go. Anti war songs and all other milltary songs are banned.You can’t express any kind of dissent to a minority and jewish citizen but they can critisize you, Except for a few like, the films of Leni Riefenstahl, most of your third reich overtly political films, Like Jude Sus and Rothchilde’s shares Waterloo, which are anti semetic are banned from the home video dvd market in germany. Although the ban is inconsistant , Wunschkonzert ,1940 and Die Grosse Liebe ,1942 has the swatzstikas and the Hi Hitlers. Until it was withdrawn from vhs distribution, Robert and Bertram ,1939 an anti semetic comedy, was being distributed in the german market. Thanks to Adolph Hitlers legacy, The late actress Romy Schnieder career, as a hollywood star , failed. Her father was a member of the nazi party strongly contribute this as well as her parents divorce possibly. France forgave her , she became a big star up there. Horst Buscholz career in the united states as a movie star didn’t pan out thanks to Adolph legacy. The stigma has limited the interest in german film classics on american home video and broadcast, compare to to other Countries. Greed also plays a part on this too. Recent history channel special has reveiled that Adolph Hilter and Eva Braun did not commit suicide. They took off to Argetina. The so called Hitler skull was a women’s skull.