and to defame those who think differently.10
The defamation of those who thought differently indeed had begun very early. After the burning of the Reichstag in Berlin, Göring proceeded to arrest thousands of Communist suspects all over Germany.11 In the name of the State, he had armed the regular police force, adding to it 25,000 S.A. men and 10,000 SS men, which during the election days in Berlin alone arrested 5,000 persons.12 Only two days after the Reichstag incident, Hitler suspended all normal civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution while turning the Secret Service into an instrument of terror. This meant that Germans were denied freedom of speech and of the press, the freedom to gather in groups, as well as the freedom of privacy regarding mail, telegrams, and telephone calls. Anyone who acted suspiciously or was overheard saying something against the Nazi Regime could be arrested and detained without trial.13 Even before this time, the Party would send its agents to public lectures and gatherings of groups, and it was known to have dispersed meetings when speakers uttered even some harmless jokes at the expense of the Party. Intellectuals experienced harrassment if they were suspected of dissent, and early as May, 1933 there were arrests, imprisonments and reported mistreatments of those who disagreed openly with the Party’s policy.14
During the year 1933 a total of 1,684 academics lost their jobs. Among these were 781 professors, 322 instructors, 42 lecturers, 232 assistants, 133 academic employees at scientific institutions, and 174 persons of academic rank working in schools, libraries, and museums.15 Among these, undoubtedly, were those who were dismissed on racial grounds, but there were also others who had “shouted back at them” in the way that Kaestner would have liked to do.
Simultaneously with the Nazis’ purge of academics and intellectuals there occurred the “cleansing” of the libraries and school libraries. Party and State authorities followed up the public book burning ceremonies so thoroughly that the public no longer was held in doubt who had instigated the “book purge” in the first place. In Bonn alone 20,000 books were thrown into the flames. In Berlin 70,000 tons of books were removed from the libraries. Books were no longer counted but merely measured in terms of estimated weight.16 By mid-May, 1933 the action had spread to the smaller towns in Germany, where local authorities were placed in charge of removing the “undesirable” literature from the library shelves.17 It is estimated that in this process about one-third of all library holdings in Germany was destroyed.18 This affected not only general literature but also children’s literature. Whatever the authorities considered “folk-alien” or “decadent,” whatever appeared to promote the spirit of Bolshevism, liberalism or internationalism, or whatever had been written by Jewish authors was condemned to go to the incinerator, the public bonfire or the scrap paper collection. While in the beginning the book “purge” was carried out somewhat erratically, following only the general guidelines and “black lists” of Goebbels, eventually it was stabilized within the context of a gigantic censorship apparatus of Party and State authorities that screened every book that was printed, sold, purchased or circulated.
The only consistent factor from the very beginning was the National Socialist ideology. In spite of lapses in the implementation of censorship at various levels, the National Socialist ideology determined a cultural policy in which Volkish-political views prevailed throughout the Nazi Regime. Rooted in the “organic” concepts of folk and community, it selectively emphasized Volkish thought of pre-Nazi times while calling for a new unity of the German Reich under the swastika flag. The frequent references of the Nazi ideologists and Hitler himself to such concepts as the “folk spirit,” the “folk soul,” the “folk tradition,” and the “folk community” harkened back to earlier times when Herder, Grimm, Jahn, and Arndt, and later Langbehn, de Lagarde, and Moeller van den Bruck had appealed to the German people to unite in their quest for unity and German ethnic identity.19
Plate 6
A New Call for Unity and Community
While a number of intellectuals in those early days of the Nazi Regime just “played along” in the hope that one day things would change for the better, while contributing their required amount of “Volkish thought” to literary, educational, and scientific journals, without taking themselves too seriously in this role, others were genuinely enthusiastic about the Party’s “Volkish” ideology. Unlike Ricarda Huch who had premonitions about the nightmare of a totalitarian super-power that was only in its childhood stages, others welcomed the rise of a “folk state” as a fulfillment of their pre-Nazi “Volkish” dreams about ethnic identity, unity, and community. Nolte commented that when on February 1st the masses joined the mammoth torchlight processions in honor of the “People’s Chancellor,” they did not react to mere propaganda but to their heartfelt hope that Hitler would realize their dreams of a unified folk community built on German faith, morality, and honor, and that he would re-establish pride in German history and heroism while making the Germans more idealistic in fighting for a common cause. Many famous philosophers, professors, and writers tended to look at the Nazis’ “Volkish” cultural policy in optimistic terms.20 Whereas on the one hand they perceived in it a continuation of Volkish ideas prevailing in the twenties, they did not think that it was necessarily opposed to Christianity either. Hitler himself had promoted this illusion by stating in Mein Kampf that National Socialism not only stood for “neutrality” in regard to the domain of the churches, but that both the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church were needed to build the true community spirit of the German Volk.21 The Concordat of July, 1933 further supported the notion that the Catholic Church would be able to pursue its goals and preserve its rights, provided it would agree to a clear separation of State and Church. Little did the public realize that this agreement actually served Hitler personally, as it led to the dissolution of the Catholic Labor Union which he feared as a rival.22 In his 1934 speech in Marburg, von Papen further gave the appearance that the Nazis were not at all inclined to foster a “Volkish” dictatorship at the expense of the Christian conscience and the concept of a united Christendom in Europe. Whatever might look somewhat “extreme” in regard to the Nazis’ practical politics, he assured his audience, was only to be understood as the result of some temporary measures, and it was the Party’s goal to achieve the freedom of every member of the German folk community, including his voluntary participation in the work of the folk community.23
During the National Convention of the German Teachers Association in Magdeburg in June, 1933, Hans Schemm, President of the Association, used similar rhetoric to von Papen by reminding his colleagues that the German folk community under National Socialism actually stood for the “unity of Christianity,” and that both the Catholic and the Protestant churches now stood united in its cause.24 Schemm’s speech was greeted with strong applause, and then all of the 155 regional delegates, one by one, stepped forward and signed a document committing them formally to the Party’s policy of Gleichschaltung (coordination), which also implied a submission to censorship. There were no abstentions. In retrospect, we realize that it was dangerous for individuals at that time to express their dissent openly, for in practice the Gleichschaltung was already enforced by the power politics of Party and State. Some sources made available after World War II indicate that during the Convention opinions among teachers were actually still divided among those who supported Wolgast’s liberal ideas on behalf of education through children’s literature and those who joined Rüttgers’ call to follow the “God-given leadership of the Führer.”25
Still, it was not clear to many educators among the latter group of enthusiasts that Hitler actually was out to reverse the Romantic concept of the Volk (folk). To the Nazis, it embodied what one ideologist called “the essential reality of race, tradition, mythos, and fate”26 and what another one appraised as “the very spirit of homogeneity, solidarity, and organization”27—an idea that soon was to be echoed on thousands of Nazi posters
