History repeats itself when lessons are not learned.
“The whole propaganda weight of the Scherl newspaper and news agency combine, controlled by Ruhr industrialists, was thrown into the political scales in Hitler’s favor.”
“Of all the volumes that have been written on Nazi Germany, I know of but a very few which have properly interpreted that political phenomenon. The best, in my opinion, is Frederic L. Schumann’s The Nazi Dictatorship, published long before the present war. Most of the others have accepted the very name of the present German State, National Socialism, the most ridiculous and devoid of content of all the concepts of Nazi ideology—as a real representation of what Hitlerism is. They have accepted Nazism as a form of Socialism. They have also accepted the Nazi revolution as a bona fide Revolution. In actual fact, Nazism is the most reactionary and vicious form of capitalism that has ever existed, and Hitler has destroyed systematically every element in his state which was, in any degree, revolutionary.
A revolution, as that term has customarily been used in history, is something which, however horrible and destructive in may be in practice, is progressive in idea. Hitlerism has been retrogressive. Hitler has turned back the clock of social history backwards; his ship of state has ridden the wave, not of the future, but of the blackest past.
Revolution means nothing if it does not mean an overthrow of existing rulers of a society by the ruled-over elements of that society. The existence of those two social factors in that particular relation has characterized every revolution to which history has given the name: the French Revolution, the American, Russian, and Mexican Revolutions. Revolution also means a vast, sweeping change of a whole system of society. Nazism possesses neither of those two requisite features.
The rulers of German society not only did not struggle against the Nazi rise to power in the early 1930’s; they suborned, abetted, and aided Hitler to gain power with all their vast resources of money and influence—a strange manner of revolution, indeed! And, contrary to the views of the majority of observers, Nazism was not a vast social change. Superficially, things appeared to be altered: people were put in gay uniforms; there were new salutes and a new flag, and new, but empty ideas—empty baubles on a highly and cheaply decorated Christmas tree meant to hide, by its brightness, the basis of corrupt German society which Hitler left intact. The only actual change that occurred with the rise of Hitlerism consisted in this: the old, corrupt system of acquisition was dying, and Hitler was called upon—and he and his followers were ready to accept their historical assignment—to save that moribund society by reinforcing its most unsalutary features and crushing all opposition to unlimited militarism, by which, alone, his system could be preserved for any period of time. The only new feature the Nazis introduced was a set of measures to make permanent the existing basis of society possessed before 1933. To use a simile applied by one acute observer, Hitler locked himself and the German ruling classes in the top storey of society and threw the key out the window.
Compare the Russian with the so-called Hitler Revolution. The Bolsheviks never called on the Tsarist rulers for aid; and never got anything from them save opposition as ruthless as their own. Hitler not only called on Germany’s wealthiest families, but received generous gifts of millions of marks. The whole propaganda weight of the Scherl newspaper and news agency combine, controlled by Ruhr industrialists, was thrown into the political scales in Hitler’s favor. Dr. Dietrich in his little volume Met Hitler an die Macht, relates how the Fuehrer, addressing a luncheon meeting of Germany’s biggest capitalists in Dusseldorf before the Machtuebernahme, outlined to them the danger to their society, told them what he could do to save it and melted their solid gold hearts into a flow of funds for the Nazi party. Dr. Dietrich tells, with surprise, that these hard-fisted men whose hearts, one would have thought, were in their pocketbooks, mellowed and softened under the Leader’s words, and, at the end, applauded thunderously.
Whether one likes it or not, the Bolsheviks came to power on the shoulders of the working classes of Russia. When foreign nations intervened and occupied Vladivostock and, after arresting all active reds and banning Communists from the polls, held a “free” election to allow the people of that city to choose its own government, the results showed a Communist majority over the combined votes of all the legal parties which participated! Also, whether one likes it or not, the Nazis came to power against the will and violent opposition of the German working class which acted with singular unity at the last, late moment. Too many observers have allowed themselves to be fooled by the fact that, for reasons of expediency, Hitler chose to call his party the National Socialist German Workers Party. In the last partially free elections to the Reichstag in Germany in 1933, the two working class parties presented a solid phalanx and balloted 40 per cent of the votes, against Hitler. One of the two working class parties, the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands achieved the highest representation in the Reichstag it had ever enjoyed—one hundred deputies. And this was after the Brown Terror had begun; when a working man took his own life in his hands by voting against the new dictator! Hitler did not, and—I am convinced of it after living in Germany for two war years—has not yet won the German workers to his cause. In the year 1940, after eight years of Nazi rule, a German S.S. man I knew told me there was but one dull element in National Socialism’s bright, triumphant perspective at that moment (this was just after France had fallen and Nazism was enjoying its happiest period). That, he said, was the German workers. They were following, but reluctantly. They do not believe it can last, he said, and if we ever slip badly they’ve got “their damned red flag hanging over our heads.”
When the Bolsheviks achieved power they did so by the ruthless suppression of every agency supporting the old order. They destroyed all capitalist institutions. They placed all factories in the hands of the state and forbade the issue of dividends to private individuals. They made Trade Unions the almighty dictators over the Russian economic state. When Hitler came to power, he destroyed the Trade Unions and the workers’ political parties; confiscated their funds and shot or imprisoned their leaders. The funds he confiscated were used, indirectly, to buy armaments and to pay profits to his wealthy supporters. The economic history of Nazism ever since has been, in plain language, the systematic confiscation of workers’ incomes to pay profits to the owners of material Germany. As for the principal institutions supporting the old order, the industrialists’ associations, which were formed long ago to keep prices up, he either maintained them as they were or allowed them to reform themselves into more powerful capitalists’ combines—indeed, the most powerful capitalists’ combines that have ever existed in any nation in history. What elements of Socialism existed before Hitler assumed power, he abolished. The few shares of private industry which the former Social Democratic government’s weak attempt at socialization was a monetary gain, good business for the industrialists who had been the target of the Socialist attack.
Many people maintain Hitlerism is a form of Socialism are willing to admit that Hitler came to power with the aid of the wealthy, and favoured them at first; but, they say, digging themselves in the traditional last ditch, Hitler has, since that time duped them. He deceived his wealthy supporters, and instituted something entirely new, neither Capitalism nor Imperialism, but an oppressive form of state which is oppressive to capital and labour alike. In truth, what Hitler has instituted is just as new as the Old Army Game. Hitler’s government is shot through with the representatives of wealth. Goering dictates to the economic state, but Goering, himself, has become an economic royalist in the bountiful Nazi decade and receives his advice as to what measures must be adopted from several dozen boards, representing each big industry, and each board is made up of the men who live on profits from those industries. Walther Funk wears a brown coat and a military cap, rather than the traditional civilian array of the plutocrat, people are inclined to think of him as a party functionary rather than, what he is first and above all, a man born and bred in the atmosphere of profit making ownership.
The only basis on which to judge the relative oppression of the two social classes by National Socialism is the manner in which German national wealth has been, and is, distributed between the two said classes, one of which lives by its labour, and the other by its ownership. The individual incomes of workers have fallen each year of Hitler’s rule, and fallen severely. Nazi statistics on this matter are faked, but even on the grounds of Nazi statistics the real wages of workers have fallen. Money wages have been frozen or lowered, since 1933, and the prices of the goods workers can buy with them have risen without interruption. A better way of determining the same development is simply to ask Germans. In the course of the past two years in Germany I have, inevitably, talked to thousands of German workers in taverns, in tubes, trams, and in offices, and without a single exception, I have never heard of a case in which a worker’s real income has risen. They all agree, even a few workers who claim to be Nazis, that what they get to eat and wear with their wages is less and worse than before 1933. Even the little bureaucrats in Dr. Goebbels’ propaganda ministry testify to the same fact; they are all miserably under-paid. Dr. Froelich, who bears the high sounding title of Referant for the American Press and Radio in the Propaganda Ministry, was paid a salary lower than that of an office-boy in the editorial office of the United Press—an American concern. There cannot be the slightest doubt about it that the wages of German workers have fallen each year of Hitler’s rule, and are nor unbelievably low.
The Nazi indices for the earnings of capital, on the other hand, on the other hand, show a steady rise since 1933. Both, the figures for total net profits for major industries as published in the magazine of Reichmarshal Goering, Der Vierjahreplan, and the index for the average value of all German stocks and shares as published in the industrial periodical Der Deutsche Volkswirt show falling profits and share-values from 1929 until 1933, when Hitler came to power, and from then on an unbroken rise. If Hitler had duped his benefactors, it has been for them, indeed, a pleasant manner of deception. It is a strange form of oppressing wealth which allows the oppressed owners of mills, mines, and factories to earn more and more each year, and even, as in the case of Krupp works, to reach and break records for annual profits, while the standard of living for the other ninety-eight per cent of the population falls precipitately. Of course there is always the argument which admits that German capitalists make egregious profits, but maintains all these profits are taken away in taxes. Since the people who determine the tax scale are the representatives of the fattest, richest banks in Germany, which in turn, are owned body and soul by the arms-makers, this is obviously false on the surface. Did you ever hear of a man granted the power of making out his own tax returns gypping himself? Anyhow, the above facts are based on statistics of Reingwinn: pure profits after taxes have been extracted from profits; and nevertheless the munitions factories break records! Of course, after the pure profits are turned into dividends and made the private funds of individuals they are taxed as private incomes. But a member of the American embassy once worked out a schedule for me to show conclusively that plutocratic American capitalists pay more taxes per unit of income than German capitalists who are supposed to be fighting plutocracy. Furthermore, those funds which are taken from the German industrialists in taxes go to pay the same industrialists for more arms. Germany is good business—for millionaires.
There is no denial of the fact that Nazism was and is a retrogression, not a revolution; it is not socialism, but a form of capitalism that is virtually feudalistic in the safeguards granted to and preserved for the wealthy, as well as in the total servitude it demands of those who possess nothing but their hands and brains to work with. These great “warriors against plutocracy” have established one of the best protected plutocracies any nation or civilization has ever known. I am not, here, exploiting the theory that Hitler is a will-less puppet of the German capitalists. It is not nearly so simple as that. That is an over-simplification and it is untrue. Hitler rules, and there is no doubt about it. But no man can govern alone, for it is humanly impossible for a single man to run a whole state. He governs with the aid of governors and bureaucrats who agree heartily with him, and they are the wealthy families of Germany. Hitler is president of a board of directors which runs Germany, and each member of the board is, by birth, as Krupp and von Borsig, or by party influence, as Goering and Ley, a member of that class of German society which has a stake in the game of Profit-making, and stands to lose by higher wages and labour costs.
If the point can be considered established, then a concession can safely be made: though the net effect of Hitlerism has been retrogressive rather than revolutionary, there was indubitably one revolutionary feature in the rise of National Socialism. That feature was the rise of the German petty bourgeoisie; the irrepressible Kleinbuergertum, the middle classes of the little shopkeepers, white-collar clerks and bureaucrats and a goodly portion of the unprosperous professional classes.
Lodged uncomfortably between the upper and the nether millstones of society, the great middle-classes were being painfully ground in the depressed years from 1929 to 1933. They were crying for organized leadership; they were God’s gift to a clever, unscrupulous demagogue. They were begging for leadership, for a little colour to brighten their dull lives, and for rescue from extinction, and History gave them a Man and a Platform. Hitler promised death to the proletarian left wing with its trade unions which kept wages and labour costs above the head of the pinched independent shopkeeper, and made prices for their goods higher. He promised to bridle the wealthy right-wing privilege, to break the Zinsknecht-schaft, the slavery of interest, and make capital flow more easily to the small shops and stores. And he promised death to the Jew, who was, to the German middle-classes, the symbol of the prosperity they envied.
Nazism was Spiessbuergertum in Revolt, the Timid Soul in shining armor. There had been revolutions for Capitalists, and Revolutions of the Proletariat, but there has never been a Revolution of the middle classes, and the attraction of the idea was overwhelming to Germany’s millions of Little Men. Those were the days when Hitler was still called the Apotheosis of the Little Man. It was their Revolution, and they carried their Leader—who in his very personal appearance was another prosaic, ordinary exemplar of each of them—to power on a wave of middle-class enthusiasm.
The financial basis of the Nazi ascension was the rich privileged class. Its main basis, and its revolutionary impetus, however, came from the middle classes. The little men also furnished it with its Army—proudest element in Hitler’s little state within a state, the colorful, exciting Storm Troops, who beat up the Jews and the Communists and “freed the streets” in Germany cities, in outright armed political warfare. The generals of the Brown Army of the shopkeepers and clerks were Hitler’s war comrades, young men who grew up in World War, whose minds were warped by war, and who were utterly worthless for anything else. They were the neurotic lost generation who suffered torture worse than death when the only element of excitement in their lives, the Army, was taken away from there by Versailles, and the trend of German opinion, after the revolution, turned against militarism. Ernst Roehm, their psychopathic, homosexual commander-in-chief was leader and prototype at once. To this uninformed body flocked the sons of the middle classes, bored, suffering from personal and national inferiority complexes, thirsty for colour and excitement, and they learned well the precepts of their warped generals and idols. It was organized Rowdyism, it was tough and ruthless, but it was truly the vanguard of the middle-class revolution, the Army of the Middle Class state.
When Hitler won, they were content with the world, and sat back to watch the realization of their hopes, the materialization of the first State founded on a Dictatorship of the “small” Buerger. Results were swift in coming, satisfactory beyond expectations. The Fuehrer eliminated the proletarian Left from politics in a series of lightening, dramatic blows, and with incredible ease: the Reichstag fire brought an end of legal Communism, the imprisonment of its leaders and the crippling of the movement for evermore. By next May Day, the Day of Labour, the Socialists too, had been eliminated, and with them their Trade Unions. Wages were henceforth at the mercy of Dr. Robert Ley, of the middle classes, and of the big industrialists, who enjoyed a community of interests with the Little Men on this particular economic question. In the National cabinet, one portfolio after another was given to brown-uniformed Party men, or their present holders were forced to don brown uniforms and administer their offices according to the interests of the Kleinbuergertum.
Now, in every society the two most important elements are Wealth and Force. Those who own much and have great resources can deal out favours and exercise most influence. It is almost proverbial that power goes with ownership, and always has in the history of Society. As for the second element, it is the ultimate authority in every State. A legislature is no good if it has no force to back up its authority. And whosoever controls the Armed Forces of a nation can also control the nation itself on assuming power. Hitler systematically shoved the representatives of the Little Men into almost every phase of government. But precisely these two he did not grant them. The middle classes did not even get a smell of real economic power. His economic state Hitler shaped in the form of twelve Wirtschaftsgruppen, each “corporation” possessing dictatorial powers of life and death over the industry concerned; the fixing of prices, the granting of raw material import licenses, and export subsidies—all decisive factors in the ultimate economic function of a state: the determination of how the nation’s wealth, and the power that goes with wealth, shall be shared. The administrators of each Gruppe were the wealthiest capitalists in the particular industry it wealth with. In short, the wealthy were made supreme judges in their own case. Such change as this signified was not revolutionary change in favour of the rising middle classes, but reactionary change in favour of those who already ruled economic Germany: the top storey and the key out the window.
Nor did the Brown Army achieve its coveted destiny of becoming and controlling the Armed Forces of the nation. The army, which Hitler set about rejuvenating and expanding, remained in the hands of the old Prussian caste, the military counterpart of the wealthy dictators of German economic life.
The Little People enjoyed the spectacle of apparent gains in certain phases of power, but the promised millennium was not immediate. In fact, events took the opposite direction from what they had hoped. The more prosperous shops were taken from Jews in stages, but only to be co-ordinated into the Wirtschaft combines. What the independent shopkeepers really disliked was not that the big stores were run by Jews, but that their competitive strength was so enormous that the little shopkeepers could not vie with them, and this feature was not changed except in so far as it was reinforced to the disadvantage of the little men. Wholesale prices, which the little men paid for the commodities they retailed, did not fall with lowered labour costs, but rose with bigger profits for the big men, and higher government taxes to build up the army. The middle classes were disappointed, and did not hide the fact.
Discontent among the masses usually first overtly expresses itself in the deflection of a section of their leaders. The first overt indication of the disappointment of the small Buerger in Germany was the deflection of Otto Strasser, one of the Nazi Party’s big numbers, and an ardent believer in middle-class socialism. Strasser broke with Hitler and fled the country. A more serious indication was the projected “revolt” of Ernst Roehm, leader of the Storm Troops, in 1934, which called forth the “blood surge” of the Brown Army. Although the “revolt” apparently did not correspond to the lurid accounts in preparation for it which the Nazis issued to the world, it is generally accepted that the elements of a revolt were there. There was certainly no plan to liquidate the beloved Fuehrer, but there is no doubt that disgruntled Storm-troop leaders hoped to eliminate many of Hitler’s direct underlings, on whom they blamed the deception from which they suffered.
The Roehm affair was more than a weather-vane of disappointment; it also marked a milestone in Nazi history. It was the first and last revolt of the middle classes. After the blood surge, which crippled the basis of what Force the Little Men had on their side, the revolutionary element of Nazism, its program for the Little Men, entered on a long decline. The existence of the Kleinbuergertum, as reasonably independent economic elements, grew more precarious each year. The chain-stores increased in power and became ubiquitous; Aryans enjoyed far more rigid monopolies in the retail trade than the hated Jews had ever exercised. Many little businesses were destroyed deliberately by economic decrees issued as part of Hitler’s vast, severe rationalization program. The planning of imports to fit the arms program, banning certain imports in order to spend more of the national income on imports of war-important raw materials, eliminated the raison d’être of many. Others died because, with their own costs rising, they could not compete with the big combines. Not only small shopkeepers, but little industries suffered. According to Nazi statistics, by 1939, just before the outbreak of war, there were only half as many joint stock companies in Germany as there had been in 1933, when many had already been weeded out by depression. In Berlin, hundreds of small retail wine and liquor shops were gobbled up by a large combine which formed by the Kaiserhof Hotel under Nazi paternity.
The war, of course, only hastened this process. While big industry, the arms and chemical industries, grew bigger, wealthier and mightier, little shops and little industries have died like flies. Where death was caused before by rationalization and inability of small concerns to compete with the new large ones, it was now caused, at a swifter rate, by the calling up into the army of their owners and their few employees. Still more powerful a casual force has been the dwindling to zero, or near it, of the imports most of them depended on. The Russian war period hastened the development even more, drawing, as it did, many more men, and older men, into the armed forces, and bringing scarcities and disappearances of all kinds of retail commodities. Coupled with this came the fall in the average production of German laborers, and the need to compensate for this by increasing the quantities of workers available for industry.
The significance of this development I have tried to indicate in another part of this book. It means that the popular basis of Nazism has suffered a diminution. During the Russian period, the development gathered such speed that it assumed the proportions of a wholesale annihilation. The economic basis of the lower middle classes has been systematically carried almost to extirpation. The social strength of the whole Nazi movement was, in the beginning of that movement, the middle strata of German society, and the people of those strata were Nazis because they had roots in a particular way of life, and saw in Nazism an opportunity to preserve that way of life and make it even better for themselves. Each little family owned a little something, and looked on itself as a shareholder in the German state. But for eight years, Nazism has had the effect of gradually uprooting them from the soil of German society, setting them adrift and removing their interest in Nasism’s permanence.
Of course, membership in the middle classes is not purely an economic matter. It is also a psychological one. A little shopkeeper can lose his little shop, but still consider himself higher in the social scale that a mere wage-worker. And though he has descended to the level of a mere wage-earner, he may still act politically and socially according to that pattern of behavior which the middle classes generally follow. In every respect except as regards his economic status, he thus remains what he was before his economic status changed. Middle-Class pride, people call that. In view of this, it is perhaps even more symptomatic of how far the social mutation inside Germany has gone, that the middle-class people are ceasing to behave according to their old standards. The matter of Middle-Class Morality, that factor glorified by Shaw’s Mr. Doolittle, is a case in point already referred to. Morality has lapsed badly in Germany. Sexual license of people once proud of their respectability has virtually run the prostitutes out of business. In the place of a couple bottles of cool wine, they are guzling—the verb is properly descriptive—everything and anything they can get. The aim is not mild titillation in either case, but intense excitement; to get rip-roaring drunk and forget about the unpleasantness of reality. The shock has come too quickly and been too great for them. That is part of what I meant when I said the pretty red apple was getting rotten-ripe.
They are the only section of the German people who can truly claim to have been duped, and sadly disappointed. The nether millstone knew what was in store for it when Hitler won; and the German workers fought tooth and nail to avoid it, but unfortunately they fought in disunity until too late. The upper millstone was not duped. The hermetically sealed top caste has every reason to be satisfied with the results of Hitlerism thus far. (Uneasiness has crept into their ranks as well now, but for different reasons; but more of that in its proper place.) But the little men have been done in, and they have only just begun realizing how completely they have been done in.
The last apparent hold they had on a lever of influence, after their shops were closed and falling salaries robbed them of any economic weight, was the once glorious Brown Army. The Storm Troops were only an apparent lever, and the polish of their glory tarnished badly. The old elements had been promoted long since into the Schutzstaffel, the S.S., the Gestapo, where they could continue being aggressive and brutal to their own people, and later to other peoples. The more clever of the old Storm Troops got in the lift of economic profits and soared to the top. And the sons of the middle classes were left to their own devices in the Brown-shirted legions. The Storm Troops expanded in size, but deflated in meaning. But the Storm Troops at least continued to exist as the last symbol and the last trace of the middle class revolution.
Then, in August, last year, the axe fell. A tipster told me. He brought to me a copy of the official newspaper of the Storm Troops—the S.A. Mann. On its mast-head was the old drawing of a firm-faced, brown capped man, frowning rays of will-power and holding in his hand the great Swastika banner which the Storm Troops had carried to Power. The newspaper was dated August 22, 1941. The tipster told me this was the most remarkable edition of that newspaper that had ever been published. I looked it over, but could find only the usual emptiness, save for loud editorial boasts and one chapter of a serial novel with the words: Fortzetzung folgt—to be continued in the next issue—at the bottom. I asked him what was so sensational about it, and he told me that the serial story was not continued; the story was left hanging in mid-air. I asked him to stop being cryptic and he said what he meant was, the S.A. Mann had been banned!…
In September, I learned the official newspaper of the Storm Troops was banned for some other reason. This, a storm-trooper, a young employee in a shipping office told me, and other Nazis confirmed later. An anonymous authority, not Hitler or Viktor Lutze, the S.A. chief of staff, by name, but just an anonymous authority issued an order labelled streng geheim, strictly secret, to each district group of the Storm Troops. The order stated that the Brown Shirts were to hold no more meetings. There was to be no more drill, no more political lectures, and no future political demonstrations of any kind. The brown uniforms were henceforth to be worn only on specific orders, not at will. The man told me this, dolefully said it amounted to dissolution of the Storm Troops…. Hitler had not just bitten the hand which once fed him; he had devoured it. The middle classes were deprived of every ounce of real influence in the Nazi state, and now they were robbed of even the raiment of power. All that was revolutionary in the Nazi revolution was over for ever….
On last May Day, when rumours of a coming conflict between Germany and Russia were rife, almost every worker in the industrial suburbs of Berlin wore some spot of red in his or her clothing, in hats, in coat-lapels, etc. On the fiftieth birthday of Ernst Thaelmann, the prison farm in Hanover where he is being held, was deluged with thousands of telegrams of congratulations which people had dropped in mailboxes with money attached to pay for transmission; and the German postal authorities transmitted them! Bouquets of red roses and carnations were sent by telegraph from foreign countries, especially from Russia, and one big bouquet bore the name Molotov. Prison authorities, however, withheld all telegrams, flowers, and presents from Thaelmann except a message from Thaelmann’s wife, who lives in Berlin…..
The Little Men who realize they have become workers and nothing better are steadily increasing in number. All over Germany last year this bitter question-answer joke was circulated: what is the difference between Germany and Russia? And the answer: in Russia the weather is colder. Germans who had been told for eight years there was no slavery greater than that of Communist Russia, were telling themselves in this bit of bitter-sweet frankness that they, too, were proletarians….
“Should anyone among us,” Hitler said, “seriously hope to disturb our front—it makes no difference where he comes from or what camp he belongs to—I will keep an eye on him for a certain period. You know my methods. That is always the period of probation. But then there comes a moment when I strike like lightening and eliminate that sort of thing.”
It was then, too, that the Fuehrer declared that the Nazi organization, by which he meant the Gestapo, watches every single house and “zealously keeps watch that there shall never be another November 1918.”
The manner in which this particular speech was handled by the Propaganda Ministry and the German press is still more significant. The Fuehrer’s speech of November 8, alone of all the Leader’s addresses, was not broadcast to the German people. About six hours after the Fuehrer had spoken, the official Nazi news agency issued an expurgated, or better, a slaughtered version of the speech. The version was empty….
Almost every foreign correspondent in Berlin plagued the Propaganda Ministry with inquiries about the unusual handling of the address that evening. I telephoned twice, to beg for the actual text to use in a radio broadcast that night. In the past, the Propaganda Ministry had been all too happy to provide the texts of Hitler’s speeches. In the past, each speech had been broadcast by radio in Germany and all over the world. … But on this occasion, for the first time, the Ministry was reluctant; it had no interest. The occasion, it was said, was purely a party occasion, and the rest of the world could have little interest in what amounted to a routine meeting of party officials. Two hours after the first version was issued, a second, much fuller version was released, doubtless due to the embarrassing solicitation of the foreign correspondents. But it was obvious that there were gaps even in the second version…. it was obvious that the Fuehrer had said much more than the party authorities considered good for the world’s ears. The fact that he was speaking to old Storm-troop comrades, on a Storm-troop red-letter day indicated the theme of his expurgated remarks….
As the Russian war proceeded into winter and the bottom dropped out of the standard of living, the Nazis turned from explanatory propaganda and the fiasco of the Jewish campaign to the propaganda of Fear. Simultaneously, with this alteration in propaganda policy, the Gestapo began carrying out actual measures to meet revolt, to make certain as possible that “another November 1918,” would not happen: Himmler who next to Goebbels is about the only big Nazi leader who concerns himself with German internal affairs any more, began taking up positions for battle. What he did was circulated over Berlin by way of rumour, apparently by the Nazis themselves, with the object of intimidating grousers; but the content of the rumour was real. The Gestapo began confiscating buildings, and setting up headquarters in purely residential districts of Berlin. The first buildings occupied were a Catholic convent in West Berlin…. In all the confiscated properties, the S.S. not only set up information headquarters, but also arsenals, storing away machine guns, small arms and ammunition. It should be noted that the confiscated rooms and buildings were all in purely residential quarters of Berlin; districts with no military importance whatever…. But I have had reports of similar wholesale seizures by the S.S. black guards in Leipzig, Dresden, Kiel, and other towns. In Berlin, it is also worth noting that almost all the confiscations I have been able to confirm occurred in the bourgeois West End, which belongs to the Kleinbuergertum as much as Wedding belongs to the working class. That may be, however, due to the fact that as early as 1933, the Gestapo had already begun building up a network of arsenals in the latter section of Berlin…
Less than a month after Hitler’s singular threat to destroy any menace to his power, his black Army, specially formed to put down civilian revolt, had donate same thing his green coated armies do when they prepare to invade a foreign victim. The confiscations, and the arsenals meant simply the Aufmarsch, the deployment of his forces for battle. Not mainly for combat against Plutocrats, or Jews, or Communists. But for eventual battle against those who called on his to save them from destruction, and whom he destroyed.
– Excerpts from the Chapter:8 The End of The Nazi Revolution.
It’s important to understand how the Council of Gods/IG Farben Directors and the Ruling Class of Germany destroyed journalism throughout Europe. Howard K. Smith explains how they destroyed journalism.
“The rotten inside is the whole fabric of Nazi society.
This is a serious statement to make. I sincerely believe that a journalist who consciously misinforms his people and allies about the state of the enemy in time of war for the sake of sensation is the second lowest type of criminal (the lowest type being anyone who profits out of arms production). I have always sought to avoid underestimating the strength of the Nazis. I refer to the internal strength of the Nazi system, which this book concerns itself with alone, not the military strength. But, with these self-imposed restrictions in mind, I am sure of what I say: Nazi society is rotten from top to bottom and in all its issues, save the strong hermetically closed hull. The people are sick of it…
Another was a crude but clever mimeographed cartoon which was secretly circulated over Berlin, showing a German propaganda soldier standing above a trench across Russian lines and holding up a big placard to the enemy which read: “Russians! You have to cease to exist!” It was signed “Dr. Dietrich.” At the moment of drawing, however, the said propaganda soldier had become involved with a Russian shell and his various members were flying in all directions. Below him in the trench a very Prussian lieutenant, who had been looking through a periscope, had turned to a quizzical general behind him and was saying: “Stupid, these Russians; they apparently don’t understand a word of German!”
Less funny, but more incisive was the little observation which might be called the “Three Climaxes of Hitler,” which circulated at the same time. It has no particular punch-line., but belongs to the same category of expression for, like them, it was always introduced with the traditional preface: “Do you know what the people are saying?…” According to this, the first climax was the climax of Diplomacy—Munich. After that diplomacy never again played an important part in Hitler’s policies; the rest was guns. The second was the military climax: the campaign in France, the perfect application of Blitzkreig with the perfect ending: the total destruction of a great army. The third was the climax of propaganda: the Dietrich speech. After Hitler’s little press chief had raised the spirits of his people to the skies and then let them fall again down into the abyss of despair Germany propaganda could never influence to any important degree the morale of the German people. From now on a wall of distrust separated the Ministry of Dr. Goebbels from his people. The shepherd boy had hollered “Wolf!” too often.
This was more than a cogent little analysis suitable for table talk. The evidence for its truth is overwhelming. The first sign was the decline in newspaper sales. To test word-of-mouth reports that a decline had occurred, I asked my newspaper vendor in a large kiosk on Wittenberg Platz, and was told that the sales of newspapers had fallen off in all the kiosks operated by her particular concession-holder. In her kiosk the drop had been greater than forty per cent. As Berliners will, they invented a joke about the German press after that. It concerns a Berlin paper called the “B.Z.,” meaning Berliner Zeitung. You were supposed to ask, to make the joke click, why it was that the only newspaper people read any more was the “B.Z.” The answer was: because it lies only from B to Z, while all the others lie from A to Z.
More important still, because it was a positive sign people were seeking news elsewhere, rather than the negative one that they were ceasing to look for information from Nazi sources, was the rapid increase in listening to news broadcasts from foreign capitals—especially London and Moscow. An official of the Propaganda Ministry told me arrests for this “crime” in Germany triples after the Dietrich speech. In the newspapers it was announced that two individuals were punished with the extreme penalty, death, for listening to London! One October 30, Dr. Goebbels confirmed the increase by publishing in every newspaper in Germany a list of stations to which people might listen, stations in Germany and occupied countries; and he coupled with it a warning not to overstep these limits, which were clearly drawn exactly for this purpose. In November, every citizen in Germany received, with his ration-tickets for the month, a little red card with a hole punched in the middle of it so that it might be on the station-dial of a radio set, and on the card was the legend: “Racial Comrades! You are Germans! It is your duty not to listen to foreign stations. Those who do so will be mercilessly punished!” A week later in my neighborhood houses were visited by local Nazi chiefs to make sure the cards had been fastened to radios and were still there. People who had no radio sets were told to keep the cards anyhow, and to let them be a reminder not to listen to the conversation of people who did have radios and tuned in on foreign stations. The conclusion to be drawn from this is obvious: there had been a tremendous increase in listening to enemy radio stations; people distrusted their own propaganda and threats against listening was to make those who had been afraid to do so curious, and to convert them into regular listeners of enemy stations. After all, it is almost impossible to catch a person actually listening to foreign stations; it is so easy to switch back to the Deutschland Sender the moment the door-bell rings. Almost all those who have been arrested were apprehended, not while listening but while telling others, in public places, what they had heard….
But all Goebbels’ little propaganda stratagems were not so harmless. A Nazi in embarrassment is a dangerous Nazi, and he will resort to any method to rescue himself. To support his line about the bestiality of the Soviet troops, Goebbels also published in German press dozens of pictures of dead, tortured bodies of Soviet civilians, killed by the retreating Bolsheviks, the captions said. Jean Graffis, the Berlin representative of the American Acme News picture agency, picked several of these out of the files of the Nazi Hoffman picture agency and offered to buy them. But the agent, blushing at the situation he found himself in, told Graffis he was sorry but those were not for sale; they were only for internal consumption. Graffis had wanted to buy them because he read on their backs the date of 1920—they were dead bodies from the Russian Civil War! These photographs were being published in German newspapers as snapshots taken by German troops in the war of 1941! Again, a group of foreign correspondents was taken to Lemberg to see a real Soviet torture chamber, in order to reinforce the same line of propaganda in the outside world. The walls of one of the rooms, the “execution chamber,” was picked with bullet-holes from the rifles of Soviet firing squads. When the conductor of the tour left the room, one of the correspondents searched the room’s contents and found a Russian propaganda poster with Stalin’s photograph reproduced on it; it was shot through with holes. He placed it against the wall, and the punctures tallied exactly, hole for hole! Obviously the Germans themselves were responsible for their “atrocity.”
But the press stuck to its guns…
(America is also rotted from the inside out but America will never be able to see what she’s become because it’s not covered on their TVs nor in their newspapers. )
It happened long before the Russian war. The Foreign Press Association, Der Verein der auslaendischen Presse, was a unique institution inside Nazi Germany. In eight years of power, the Nazis had carried out a Gleichschaltung of all other organizations in Germany; every organization of every kind had been either placed under control of Nazis, or disbanded and then refounded as purely Nazi organization with the exception of the Foreign Press Association. Last year, after almost a dozen nations had been conquered by Germany, the German Foreign Office and the Propaganda Ministry, launched their long delayed campaign to crush the independence of the Foreign Press and bring it under control of the Nazi government to the same extent as the German press was. The method was by dilution; by flooding the ranks of the Foreign Press corps with a sort of Axis fifth column. Each conquered or quislinged nation was invited by the German government to withdraw its former correspondents (if these had not listened to Nazi reason and changed their ways) and replace them with an increased number of carefully chosen hacks who could be depended on to take orders. An amazing, motley crew of fake newspapermen began to show up in press conferences. Old friends, able friends from Holland, Norway, and Belgium disappeared and their places were filled by local Nazis, some of them barely able to write their own names! All, by virtue of being accredited journalists, were allowed to join the Foreign Press Association. It was a considerably increased burden to the expense account of the Propaganda Ministry, but Goebbels was expansive and invited especially the little Balkaneers by the dozen to the big city. They were noisy and exuded odours clearly indicative of their unaccustomedness to soap and water. At first, the Nazis gave them the free run of facilities, but eventually even the Nazi journalists began complaining about the plague, and both press clubs, Goebbels’ and Ribbentrop’s, ultimately forbade most of their invited newcomers entrance, refusing to issue them guest cards! The Propaganda Ministry used to maintain a service whereby all journalists could telephone in at a certain time of evening and be told whether or not there was a likelihood of an air-raid that night. The reason was that all the little quisling newspapermen took advantage of the service by arranging with restaurant owners to tell them when an air-raid was coming, so that the restaurant might warn its patrons; this in exchange for free meals for the informers every evening! The dignity of the new Foreign Press corps in Berlin left considerably much to be desired. The first considerable black market for Balkan currencies in Berlin was instituted by the new employees of Dr. Goebbels. But, like it or not, these individuals were poured in to the Verein, even as German “tourists” were poured into nations marked for conquest.” ……
But while the Propaganda Ministry and the Gestapo were straining their every resource to keep the new developments from ears and eyes of the outside world, unmistakable admissions of their existence were blurted out by none other than—Adolf Hitler himself! Speaking to party comrades on November 8, 1941, Hitler, for the first time mentioned the existence of opposition to him inside Germany. The Fuerhrer said: “Should anyone among us seriously hope to be able to disturb our front—it makes no difference where he comes from or to which camp he belongs—I will keep an eye on him for a certain period of probation. You know my methods. The is always the period of probation. But then there comes a moment when I strike like lightening and eliminate that kind of thing.” The Fuehrer then stated that the Nazi organization “reaches into every house and zealously keeps watch that there shall never be another November, 1918.”
Since 1933, opposition to Hitler inside Germany had been a strict “unmentionable” for party speakers and even the Fuehrer himself. The deviation, at this particular time, was significant.
(Pages – 166, 108 – 110, 100, 236 – 237, 80)
“People in the outside world who know the Nazi system only from photographs and films; from dramatic shots of its fine military machine and the steely, resolute faces of its leaders, would be amazed at what a queer, creaky makeshift it is behind its handsome, uniform exterior. It is not only that the people who support those stoney-faced leaders are timid, frightened and low-spirited. It is also, the government, the administration of those people and their affairs. In “The House that Hitler Built,” Stephen Roberts drew as nearly perfect of picture of that strange complicated mechanism as it was in peace time, as it is possible for a human to draw. But even that capable author would be buffed by a thousand queer, ill-shaped accretions that have been added illogically to it and the contraptions that have been subtracted illogically from it since the beginning of war. It looks roughly like a Rube Goldberg invention, inspired by a nightmare, but it is more complicated and less logical. And there are no A, B, C directions under it to show how it works. The men who work it have no idea how it works, themselves. The old, experienced, semi-intelligent bureaucrats who made the old contraption function wheezingly in peace, have been drained off to the war machine where their experience can be used more valuably. The new screwier contraption is operated haltingly by inexperienced little men who do not like their jobs and know nothing about them. The I.Q. of the personnel in the whole civil administration machine has dropped from an average of a fifteen-year-old to that of a ten-year-old.
For example, it is strictly against the law for any foreigner to remain in Germany more than a month without a stamp on his passport called by the formidable name of Aufenthaltserlaubnis, a residence permit. But nowadays, between the time you apply for one and the time you get it, a year generally passes; you break the law for eleven months because nobody knows what to do with your application once you’ve filled it out. Most foreigners never get one at all. But that is one of the more efficient departments. My charwoman’s sister, who worked in a hospital, disappeared once. Together my charwoman and I tried every police and Gestapo agency in town to find out about her, but nobody knew anything, or what to do to find anything out. Thirteen months later, it was discovered she was killed in a motor car accident in central Berlin, and the record of it had simply got stalled in the bureau of some little official who didn’t know which of eleven different departments he should have passed it on to. He tried three of six possible departments, but they didn’t know what to do with it.
Nobody knows who is zustaendig (responsible) for anything. When I complained to the Propaganda Ministry about being refused trips to the war-front, I was told the Ministry had nothing to do with the matter, that I should see the radio people. I went to the radio people who were not zustaendig for such matters and who sent me to the censors. The Foreign Office censor knew nothing about it and told me to see the High Command censor, who told me to go back to the Propaganda Ministry itself and complain there. Ultimately, Dr. Froelich, in the Ministry, showed an uncommon sense of the state of affairs and shrugged his shoulders and told me neither he, nor anybody else, had the least idea who the responsible official was, or which the responsible department. I was simply banned from trips to the front by nobody for no reason, but no one could do anything about it. When I was finally banned from the air, I went to the American embassy and asked the proper officer to protest to the Nazi authorities. He smiled and said: “It has become hopeless to protest to the Nazis about anything. Not only because of their ill-will towards Americans, but also because they frankly do not know which department any particular protest should be delivered to.” He told me the whole Nazi civil government is in a state of unbelievable chaos. Hitler no longer pays the slightest attention to the civil side of German life, and his underlings have followed the transition of his interests to the purely military side of things. Nobody of any consequence has any interest in the government of the German people, and it has become hopelessly confused and chaotic, and, in its innards, irremediably constipated. It is, in short, going to hell in a hurry…” – (Portions from pages 168 – 170)
Howard K. Smith made many observations.
“The attitude, frozen into the fabric of the “ruling class mind” by years of privilege was one of indifference to the people…
After that my sense sharpened and I guided them to fill out my impressions. I watched propaganda in the newspapers, placards on street-corner billboards, listened to it on the radio, I took closer note of the trends and tone of lectures in Heidelberg, listened more attentively to conversations with university professors, chosen for their ability as propagandists rather than as teachers, at Saturday night social gatherings in the Institute for Foreigners. Everything I saw and heard confirmed my new-born fear. I had now gone through all the stages save one—that is when fear has matured and been converted to political action. In its own way, that came later…. First: the object of any government in any state in the world is to maintain and increase the well-being of the people living in it. And on their success or failure at this, governments must be judged. Second: Hitler took over a nation in which the well-being of the people was prevented from being well by several serious problems. The Principle problems were: (a) a low standard of living; (b) millions of unemployed workers; and (c) an economic crisis was in course, in which industry, which furnishes the people with the necessities of food, clothing, and shelter was virtually paralyzed. Third: Hitler’s success of failure must be judged on the extent to which he has solved, or failed to solve, these problems…. Hitler’s solution to the crisis was not by making useful goods but by producing the greatest aggregation of arms, which nobody can eat, or wear, in all history… Krupp… enjoyed record profits in 1935 and broke the record in each successive year, including 1941!) So, from the outset, Hitler had not solved the problem of economic crisis in our sense, for he has not added to, but subtracted from the quality and quantity of consumers’ goods which existed in 1933.
I asked about a Communist dock-worker I had met before and learned he had been placed in a concentration camp for trying to talk up a dockers’ strike for higher wages.
Once, however, I broke my routine and took a trip to Russia. That land impressed me disgustingly favorably for an individual who was still more Liberal than Socialist. Contrary to the development of my reactions in Germany, Russia looked better the longer I stayed and the more I saw….
You got the impression that each and every little individual was feeling pretty important doing a pretty important job of building up a State, eager and interested as a bunch of little boys turned loose in a locomotive and told to run it as they please. It showed promise like a gifted child’s first scratchings of “a house” on paper. Klein aber mein; a little but mine own, as the proverb goes. What is more the standard of living was definitely rising nor falling… I knew all along the atmosphere reminded me of a word, but I couldn’t think what it was until I got back to Germany. The word was “democracy.” That, I know, is a strange reaction to a country which is well known to be a dictatorship, but the atmosphere simply did not coincide with the newspapers’ verdict.
Schlaf schneller, Genosse had been for a year more than a book to me, it had been a close friend. It was the only Soviet Russian book which the Germans had allowed to be published in Germany after the German-Russian pact… I wrote that the Nazis permitted this book alone because it was obviously unfavorable, and according to their calculations its publication would, at once, show that Germany was not afraid of Communist literature, and it would cast a bad light on Russia. I added that the result was a little alarming to the Propaganda Ministry which an official in that institution confirmed to me, for the little book was sold out three days after the first edition had reached the bookshops, and several more editions had to be printed. Germans were delighted, and one German woman who borrowed my copy, because the edition had been exhausted when she had tried to buy a copy, told me afterwards: “It’s unbelievable. Why no German author could say things like that about Germany. He would lose his head. It raised Russia’s stock far higher than the book censors had calculated.
Well, the volume was missing from the window, for the first time in a year. I wandered on home, but the observation stuck in my mind all day and the next morning. So the following afternoon I went back to the bookshop, went inside, and, working on a hunch, told a salesgirl I wanted something on Russia and what did she have? My hunch was a square hit. She took me to a shelf filled with political books and pointed to…. the screaming titles, “The TRUTH about the Soviet Paradise,” “The Betrayal of Socialism,” “My Life in Russian Hell.” My friend, Sclaf schneller was no where to be seen. I told the salesgirl no and returned home…
Yes, he said, there were rumors: Hitler had presented a list of demands to Stalin. The most important was the lease of the Ukraine to Germany for ninety-nine years…
Being called out of bed at three in the morning, I knew from several past occasions, meant one thing: Germany was going to save the world from somebody again…”
When the war entered its third month, however, a moral depression set in which joined the economic decline. The downward movement was slow; then, from the beginning of autumn, both declines gathered speed, reacting on one another. By the end of October it became obvious that this was no mere “seasonal” drop, but a dangerous, perhaps permanent movement. People began grumbling openly, tempers were perceptibly short. This together with the decay of capital equipment caused a leveling off of war production for the first time in Nazi history, then a steep decline in production. The German propaganda machine adopted new tactics, introduced all kinds of of new “explanatory” propaganda and finally instituted a new anti-Jewish campaign to divert bitterness. The campaign failed entirely of its goal. From appeasing the people to offering them scapegoats, the Government then turned to threats and force. The Storm-troops, the “fighting vanguard of the Kleinbuergertum,” were in effect disbanded because of disaffection in their ranks. The Berlin garrison of the Gestapo was doubled in numbers and the Gestapo took up strategic positions in residential districts, set up arsenals; and the number of arrests tripled.
The Nazis took excessively great pains to keep these things quiet. Probably the most revealing measure they adopted was to muzzle the American press with an open censorship. This is the first time censorship of the foreign press has been resorted to in the nine years of Hitler’s power. For the three radio correspondents, of whom I was one, there had always been a censorship; but when the Great Depression of late 1941 set in, it was converted into a verifiable strait-jacket. I could no longer give a reasonable accurate picture of what was happening in Berlin; pressure was even applied to make me tell blunt falsehoods. I was actually ordered by the Nazis to use their propaganda material! I, of course, promptly reported these incidents to the American Embassy in Berlin. The situation was unbearable, and I sent a telegram to Paul White, director of News Programs for the Columbia Broadcasting System, in New York, telling him so. The Nazi censors informed me they would not send the telegram or any other information containing complaints against them. Then I telephoned White, and and told him the facts. Telephone conversations were still uncensored, but they were listened to by the Gestapo… The following day we were all informed that the German radio refused to allow us the use of facilities any longer, and that we might, thus, no longer work in Germany. They did not forbid our companies from operating from Berlin, and they did not throw us out. Had they done either of these things, we would be able to leave the country and to speak freely, once outside, without the fear of reprisals being taken on our companies in Berlin. But instead, they even refused to let us leave. We stayed in Berlin another month able neither to work nor to leave; until eventually our companies agreed to send substitutes for us who, in Nazi eyes, would serve as hostages against our talking. – (Page 78 – 79)
…dangerous diet of people in any totalitarian country where news is twisted or kept from them.. (Page 90)
But while the Propaganda Ministry and the Gestapo were straining their every resource to keep the new developments from ears and eyes of the outside world, unmistakable admissions of their existence were blurted out by none other than—Adolf Hitler himself! Speaking to party comrades on November 8, 1941, Hitler, for the first time mentioned the existence of opposition to him inside Germany. The Fuehrer said: “Should anyone among us seriously hope to be able to disturb our front—it makes no difference where he comes from or to which camp he belongs—I will keep an eye on him for a certain period of probation. You know my methods. The is always the period of probation. But then there comes a moment when I strike like lightening and eliminate that kind of thing.” The Fuehrer then stated that the Nazi organization “reaches into every house and zealously keeps watch that there shall never be another November, 1918.”
Since 1933, opposition to Hitler inside Germany had been a strict “unmentionable” for party speakers and even the Fuehrer himself. The deviation, at this particular time, was significant. – (Page 80)
When the telephone rang, I was lying in bed with a miserable cold an a skull-splitting headache. It was the secretary of Dr. Froelich, the Propaganda Ministry’s liaison officer for the American press and radio. She was excited, and told me I should come to an important special press conference at noon sharp; something of extremely great importance….
Cameras snapped and flashlight bulbs flashed. On the great stage behind the central figure, Dietrich, the red velvet curtains were drawn apart to reveal a monstrous map of European Russia thrice as high as the speaker. The effect was impressive… With an air of finality, Dietrich announced the very last remnants of the Red Army were locked in two steel German pockets before Moscow and were undergoing swift, merciless annihilation…..
Behind his unrecorded words there arose, in the minds of his listeners, inevitable images. Russia, with her rich resources in Hitler’s hands: an increment of almost 200,000,000 units of slave labour to make implements of war, bringing total man-power at Germany’s disposal to a figure greater than that of England, and North and South America. Hitler’s armies, ten million men, flushed with victory, eager for more of the easy, national sport, were in the main free to return west and flood England, at long last, with blood and Nazis….
The civil population were hanging wreaths of roses on German tanks in joy at being liberated. It would be announced in a special communique tonight or tomorrow. In the days that followed, bookshops got in new sets of Russian grammars and simple readers for beginners in the tongue, and displayed shop windows full of them; the eagerness to get a job in the rich, new colony was everywhere. The economics minister of the Reich, Dr. Walter Funk, at himself down and wrote a fine speech about Germany’s colonial mission in Russia, entitled “The contribution of the East to the New Europe,” and the next day the papers published it under the heading; “Europe’s Economic Future Secured.”
– (Portions from pages 18 – 21, 25, 37, 65-67, 69, 90, 80, 84, 85, 86, 90)
Howard K. Smith also wrote about the health of the working class citizens of Germany.
“The war dragged on beyond schedule and another cut became necessary. But an official reduction was never made. From a source in the Nazi food ministry, whose reliability cannot be doubted, I learned that the food ministry had determined to introduce the cut, lopping off another 50 grammes, leaving the total ration at 350 grammes a week. And, if the campaign lasted much longer, this too, was to be reduced by another 50 grammes…. the squabble that began with meat and then led into other departments of the food problem, eventually cost Walther Darre, the Nazi agricultural minister, his job. He retained the title, for purposes of front, for some time, but Hitler, in anger at the unexpectedly swift drop in all resources, took away from him the administration of one department after another, accusing him of having given false information to the party leadership concerning the abundance of supplies with which Germany began the Russian war.
The solution to the meat problem was eventually settled by compromise—and here we have another typical Nazi “solution” to a given problem. The cut would be made. But it simply would not be announced. Appearances would thus be maintained, and the two parties concerned satisfied; only the people were left out of consideration. So, while there was no official announcement, less meat was delivered to butchers’ shops and to restaurants. In restaurants, for a 100-gramme meat coupon, the chef simply dealt out an 80-gramme piece of meat.
But even this could not be maintained. Food supplies were not, to use a figure, walking down a staircase; they were sliding down a chute, and a very slippery one. More reductions were introduced in the same manner….
For almost two weeks there were no potatoes in Berlin…
Other vegetables came to count as luxuries. Tomatoes were rationed too for a while, then disappeared altogether to canning factories where they could be preserved and sent to the Eastern front. Two-vegetable meals became virtually extinct. Scarcities were made more severe by the prudence of the food ministry which, having its palms slapped once, began to play it safe by preparing more and more canned goods for the troops in the event that the war should last through the winter….
Ersatz foods flourished. Icing for the few remaining pastries tasted like a mixture of saccharine, sand and cheap perfume. White bread was issued after the third month of the campaign only on the ration cards formerly for pastry. A red coloured paste called Lachs Galantine, resembling salmon in color and soggy sawdust in taste, appeared in restaurants on meatless days. Several strange bottled sauces made of incredible combinations of acid-tasting chemicals made their appearance in shops to answer the public’s growing demand for something to put a taste of some kind in their unattractive and scanty meals.
Cigarettes suffered the most rapid decline in quality… My tobacconist told me “Johnnies” were made of the same dry, powdery, inferior tobacco as other cigarettes, but the leaves were sprayed with a chemical to give them a distinctive flavour and kill their original one. The chemical, he said, was severely damaging to the lungs, which I can believe…
It caused visible pain to the old bar-tender to answer an order for a cocktail saying he was dreadfully sorry but today, precisely today, he had run out of all the ingredients. But perhaps tomorrow. Actually, all he had was some raw liquor the management had been able to squeeze out of a farm-house outside Berlin, Himbeergeist, or a fake Vodka that took the roof off your mouth, or wood alcohol with perfume in it which was served under the name of Sclibovitz, two fingers to a customer and no more…
Civilian hospitals are overcrowded and doctors overworked. Environment, which has a great deal to do with mental health and well-being has grown seedy and ugly. Hours are longer and real wages immeasurably lower than they were before the Russian war. Families are losing their youngest and strongest members, or seeing them some home legless and armless. The horizon of the average German is desolate….
Today, also after two years of war, there are only two meat dishes on the menu, one of which is struck through with a pencil mark along the strategy of the Kaiserhof Hotel. The other is generally two little sausages of uncertain contents, each about the size of a cigar butt. Before the meat they give you a chalky, red, warm liquid called tomato soup, but which a good-natured waiter-friend of mine always called: Ee-gay Farben Nummer zwei nulleex! all of which means, “Dye trust formula number 20-X.” With the meat you get four or five yellow potatoes with black blotches on them… (Portions from pages 120 – 149)
Hitler’s solution to the crisis was not by making useful goods but by producing the greatest aggregation of arms, which nobody can eat, or wear, in all history…
Krupp… enjoyed record profits in 1935 and broke the record in each successive year, including 1941!” – (Page 21)
IG Farben united all the German industrialists. NATO united all Western industrialists. They continued their capitalist market expansion plans.
“And so in capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority.” – Vladimir Lenin – State and Revolution (1917)
“Should anyone among us,” Hitler said, “seriously hope to disturb our front—it makes no difference where he comes from or what camp he belongs to—I will keep an eye on him for a certain period. You know my methods. That is always the period of probation. But then there comes a moment when I strike like lightening and eliminate that sort of thing.” It was then, too, that the Fuehrer declared that the Nazi organization, by which he meant the Gestapo, watches every single house and “zealously keeps watch that there shall never be another November 1918.”
The Weird DARPA/Facebook “Coincidence” You Never Heard About by corbettreport https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1_yMGQ5Uv0I
Important history into DARPA.
“DARPA’s mandate, as was instructed to Congress when DARPA was created in 1958, was “to create vast weapon systems of the future” – that was its job.” – Annie Jacobsen
“Many scientists, from rocket pioneer Dr. Wernher von Braun to former Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” entered the country under the aegis of Operation Paperclip.” – Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington (Fellow in ethics at Harvard)
DARPA’s origin is Operation Paperclip which imported the Nazi war machine to the US and expanded to all NATO nations.
“We stayed in Berlin another month able neither to work nor to leave; until eventually our companies agreed to send substitutes for us who, in Nazi eyes, would serve as hostages against our talking. …dangerous diet of people in any totalitarian country where news is twisted or kept from them..
But while the Propaganda Ministry and the Gestapo were straining their every resource to keep the new developments from ears and eyes of the outside world, unmistakable admissions of their existence were blurted out by none other than—Adolf Hitler himself! Speaking to party comrades on November 8, 1941, Hitler, for the first time mentioned the existence of opposition to him inside Germany. The Fuehrer said: “Should anyone among us seriously hope to be able to disturb our front—it makes no difference where he comes from or to which camp he belongs—I will keep an eye on him for a certain period of probation. You know my methods. The is always the period of probation. But then there comes a moment when I strike like lightening and eliminate that kind of thing.” The Fuehrer then stated that the Nazi organization “reaches into every house and zealously keeps watch that there shall never be another November, 1918.”
Since 1933, opposition to Hitler inside Germany had been a strict “unmentionable” for party speakers and even the Fuehrer himself. The deviation, at this particular time, was significant.” – Last Train From Berlin by Howard K. Smith, 1942.
And FB enables them to reach into every single home and zealously keep watch that there will never be another November, 1918.
The Silent War 