The “Night of the Long Knives” just had an anniversary which got me to wondering: After the “Night of the Long Knives”, didn’t the German populus suspect something wasn’t right with their leader??? Or, were they too scared to do anything? (Like, many weren’t eager to seek revenge?)
Germany had been poltically volitile since the end of World War One, with street fighting, death squads and the threat of revolution becoming almost a mundane part of national politics. “Hummingbird” as the Nazis called it actually reassured the German populace, since it was directed in part at the very S.A. Brownshirt thugs that the average German on the street most feared, and Hitler was saavy enough to sell the killings as a preemptive attack against a planned coup by Röhm. Even the German courts acquiesced to it in the name of order and stability.
Yep, around that time you could sell a lot of seemingly outrageous measures (including political suppression and union-busting) as “restoring order” and Good Germans liked that sort of thing.
intolerance (of the SA) was not to be tolerated! LOL…
Anyway, just because Hamas, Nazis or other such entities stand for election in legit manner it would not fool anybody into believing that they will now be goody two shoes non-violent political party. And if anybody is ever deceived, it is events like the Night of Long Knives or, for that matter, the Battle of Gaza (2007) - Wikipedia that serve to disabuse everybody.
What do you think “populus” could do? You’re a passenger to events.
In terms of relationships with power (and no more than that) how did much of the populas feel when the NeoCons and media went on that nonsensical 8 year trip? Not a lot you can do.
Remember the anti-recount riot? You can sell a lot in the name of stability, and a fait accompli goes a long way.
Indeed, while it may have assured the average Johann Schlag, they weren’t the people whose opinions it was directed to. The supression of the SA was aimed at big business and the army, since they still had some power at that point in time, and the SA contained many who believed in actual Socialism in addition to Nationalism, which disturbed the businesses, and many in the SA expressed a desire to replace the old Army with themselves.
It seems to me the populace probably didn’t worry too much about anything that occurred outside of their own households unless it had to. The change for the common person in Germany between the years of inflation and the accession of power by the Nazis was negligable, but after 1933 things got considerably better with millions of jobs created.
You don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
I want to second this. Try to imagine how it must have felt like: loosing your job along with thousands others while the economy was crashing (the Depression happened in the US, too, and democracy was being attacked, too). Of about two dozen newspapers, only 2 had anything good to say about the difficult job the Weimar democracy was doing. Otherwise, democracy was being attacked from the right and the Left. There were uprisings by Rights and Monarchists (ex-Military groups) and by Left (Spartakus) trying to seize power by coup (1923, Hitler tried his revolution and was sent to prison in Landshut for one year - which he spent writing “Mein Kampf”). And in the election battles before Hitler won, there was actual, literal fighting in the streets between the Brownshirts (SA) and Redshirts (Communists). Try to imagine Teabaggers and liberals duking it out in the street, so that any passerby’s life is also in danger.
And the courts and police were blind on one side: there’s a chilling book, called “4 years of political murder”, where the author collected data on political murders committed by the Left and Rights, and how many were caught, and how harsh the sentences were. Almost all Lefts were caught and sentenced harshly, several of them to death; few Rights were caught, and then most let go with a slap on the wrist. These murders were things like a group of military guys invading the home of a known communist, taking him outside and shooting him. Or the arrest and killing of Rosa Luxemburg while the police didn’t intervene.
Imagine being a citizen during that time, trying to live your life. It’s like gang-wars between drug gangs. If one guy gets power and promises to put a stop on all those drive-by shootings, people would cheer him on. A few hard measures against one gang would not raise suspicion, especially if the other group is far more disclipined and behaved.
I also heard that there was indeed a significant popular outcry in Nazi Germany about the rising levels of oppression against Jews and other elements of society, which forced the Nazis to be more ‘underground’ about those policies from then on. I can’t remember any more details than that though, if anyone could confirm I’d be grateful.
Offhand I can only remember the Rosenstrasse-protest due to the movie made about it in 2003. After Jews from mixed marriages were collected in Berlin in 1943, there was a spontaneus protest by their wifes and family members, which lead to the Nazis releasing them. (Although historians doubt that it was the protest itself that convinced the Nazis to not deport these Jews, apparently sources show that they were not intended for deportation in the first place).
The other well-known example of protests were several leaders of homes for disabled people, who were euthanised in Action T4, and church leaders protested against that, and the Nazis changed the method. Instead of driving to the homes and killing the disabled there, they instead deported the disabled and killed them elsewhere. The famous postcard to the relatives was that the person had died of “heart failure”, which aroused suspicion when a great number of people died of heart failure on the same day regardless of their original illness. (Interesting for Americans to note is the infamous propaganda poster on how much a disabled person costs the state - money which a “erbgesunde” = genetically healthy family could use much better).
If you look at the measures against the Jews, however, the timeline already was with the Salami-tactic of using small measures, none big enough to cause a protest or alarm, so that many Jews themselves had trouble believing the full seriousness of the situation and therefore, not taking the radical step of fleeing the country.
There is an infamous quote where one of the leaders adresses his SS subordinates who run the concentration camps and do the actual killing, about how what they do is not something they can tell anybody else about, but is still a heroic and noble thing necessary to protect the people.
Likewise the documents of the Wannsee-conference are couched in euphemistic terms even there, amongst themselves.
And the death camps were all built in the sparser populated East, away from where the majority of the population lived. So obviously the Nazis knew enough to realize that the population wouldn’t have accepted gladly the real murder of million of Jews, so they did their best to hide it. And for the average citizen, it was easy to dismiss rumors as enemy propaganda.
Himmler’s Speech of October 6, 1943 at Poznan to SS leaders, in German and English:
http://www.holocaust-history.org/himmler-poznan/speech-text.shtml
You can also go up on that site and listen to the actual recording of the speech.
Thanks for that information constanze.
I think people underestimate how pernicious these barbaric government policies can be. Obviously the Nazis are an extreme example, but remember the United States was practicing compulsory sterilization of mentally disabled people in the 1920s as well, including epileptics, and black people were still being hung or burned at the stake with the complicity of the police. It’s easy to say, “why didn’t the Germans rise up against the Nazi policies?”, and it’s a valid question, but the same can be said of lots of policies being employed by other Western countries at the time, including the US.
All those Jews and other minorities didn’t get killed because Hitler wanted it that way. Or even the Nazis wanted it. They got killed because Hilter/Nazis wanted it, and “well if they’re gonna do it, well anyway I was looking over here when it happened.”
I read an autobiography by a secretary of Hitler’s. She was 19 at the time and she was in the bunker when he took his life. I think she had a very interesting take on the whole Nazi situation. She was asked whether or not she was aware what was going on around her. She said that she had no idea what was going on around her. BUT she added, if she had bothered to look she would have seen it.
I think that pretty much was the situation in Nazi Germany.
WAY off topic, but I can understand why that would have happened. I DO NOT think we need wholesale complusory sterilization targeting a particular population. BUT there ARE some (note I said SOME) people who b/c of disabilites or whatever don’t have the abilty at ALL to make good decisions about their lives. (ie the kind of person who would buy a purebred dog even thou they had no place to live)
And yet, even with everything constanze points out, the rise of the Nazis is still seen as a failure of a functional Liberal Democracy. It’s still preached about as if Weimar Germany was just like modern America or Great Britain, and therefore everything that happened then and there could happen here and now in exactly the same way.
If you doubt them, you’re forgetting history, because history comes with a moral lesson: Voting is Evil.
Also worth noting is that there was no television, no internet, vitually no free press, and the Nazi’s had a plausable case for thwarting a coup.
Yeah, it’s ironic that most of the people who draw parallels to Weimar to make a political point support conservatism (i.e. they think the main reason Weimar fell was hyperinflation and debt, and their parliamentary rules made forming a government too difficult). Whereas the chief reason was the reluctance of conservative judges and the police to crack down on the freicorps and their ilk as much as they did the communists.
Now, they have somewhat of a point w/r/t parliamentary democracies, in that they give fringe groups more of a voice, but what few people realize is that it was a failure of the system and not a feature that allowed the Nazis to get power – legally, but NOT elected.
I recall reading an article about the development of the gas chambers. Durig the first part of the war, troops would round up Jews (and other problem populations) in various areas of the occupied territories and shoot them en masse into open pits. Apparently there were complaints up and down the ranks that morale was not good and soldiers complained they did not sign up to shoot unarmed civilians in the back. Gas chambers were developed as a means to remove the need for soldiers in the field to shoot non-combatants.
Well there was television, but there was only one channel and the Nazis had total control. And only wealth Berliners actually had home TV sets; ordinary people had to make to with watching in department stores and public TV viewing parlours.