And we can add to the list: people with physical “handicaps.”
I know they did experiments with twins. Did they choose twins who were already in a persecuted group, or did they grab any twins they could find?
Or Jehovah’s Witnesses. Or Roman Catholic preists who allowed Jews to convert. Or for that matter any clergyman who allowed Jews or homosexuals to even partcipate in a service.
I think Si Amigo hit closest to the truth. Provided that there was absolutely nothing you were and nothing you did and nothing that you ever wanted to do that would conceivably clash with Nazi doctrine you were OK. But for a sizable monority or possible majority of the populace life was one of constant paranoia even in the good times.
Stories of people being publicly humiliated or charged for even casual comments criticising the regime were commonplace. These people weren’t usually killed, but being forced to ‘volunteer’ to do humiliating work in addition to working a 10 hour day were quite normal, as was asking your children to explain your actions and beliefs to the entire school and similar types of bullyoimg/psychological harassment.
Life was only good provided that you accepted low level paranoia and the stress that accompanies it as part of a good life.
Bolded text added by me.
Did the Nazis typically tell Germans where to live and whom to marry?
And it was just not true, for either Mussolini or Hitler.
It might have been true, for the first few years during peacetime. (But more likely stationmasters reported the train as on time, because reporting it as being late tended to get you in trouble).
But eventually, the trains were hardly ever on time – they were bombed and so short of stock they just ran when they could. By 1945, the trains were nearly completely shut down altogether. (Though I guess that technically, if you cancel all the scheduled trains, they are “on time” when they don’t arrive. But not much use to the populace.)
Recommended books on the topic:
• They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45, by Milton Mayer.
• The 12-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany, 1933–1945, by Richard Grunberger.
For those interested in how Jews were classified check out Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold History of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military by Bryan Mark Rigg. ISBN# 0-7006-1358-7
Marc
William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich devotes some pages to life in Nazi Germany prewar and it’s pretty interesting. He notes how healthy young German men were compared to French and English young men, that Germany was paying attention to its youth (for sinister purposes, ultimately) and that it wasn’t all bad. Shirer isn’t trying to excuse the Nazis, just saying that before the war, Germans who weren’t persecuted had it pretty good.
Skeptic42, not only were you forbidden to marrying a Jew if you were an Aryan it was your duty to keep the master race pure and marry another Aryan. So yes, they did have social systems set up that controlled who you married. Also, freedom of travel and move about was famously controlled by having to have the proper travel permits. The phrase “papers please” referring to the Nazis tight control of there peoples movements is not a myth.
It kind of suprises me that a lot of people don’t just know these things about Nazi Germany. Looks like history may have to repeat itself before we realize just how evil the human race can be to itself at times. Just look to the Middle East and you can see it starting up again.
To be fair, Si Amigo, starting a war, death camps, and other examples of barbarity kind of take the attention away from the less evils like travel papers.
Marc
Well during the war everyone was in danger of being killed one way or another.
Come to think of it the same applied before the war if Hitler and his cohorts decided your face didn’t fit
Exactly. Pretty much everyone but the Fuehrer was in danger of death under the Fuehrerprinzip.
Sailboat
As the old joke went, even after 1933 most Germans were tall like Goebbels, slim like Goering, and blond like Hitler.
This is my recollection of something I heard at secondhand, so take it with a considerable dollop of salt.
I recall talking about the subject with a neighbor in Montana whose family emigrated shortly after WWII. According to his grandfather (who had been in the Great War), it was kind of like being in the trenches: as long as you kept your head down and did as you were told, you’d probably be all right; but stick your head over the top to see the world around you, and you’d likely get it blown off.
And joining the Party was a mixed blessing. You got the connections, but you also got the SD (the Party’s own secret police) as well as the Gestapo keeping tabs on you.
When Hitler banned made it illegal for Jews to marry Aryans what happened to existing mixed marriages? Where they all dissolved or was there a grandfather clause? I remember watching a movie about a group of German women who’s husbands were Jewish.
They were not automatically dissolved but the non-Jewish part was encouraged to get a divorce. In 1938 ‘racial’ grounds were added to the grounds for applying for a divorce (you needed grounds for a divorce then). Wikipedia article (German language) on the topic..
St. Edith Stein was a Jewish convert to Catholicism. She was take to Auschwitz (with her birth sister Rose) in full Carmelite habit. It did not matter to the Nazis what she believed (or that the Catholic Church believed she was ‘theirs’). To the Nazis, biologically, she was Jewish.
Life during the war, even if you weren’t one of the targeted minorities, wasn’t that great, to be honest. The German diet was rationed and poor, and luxury goods were in increasingly short supply. You could stay out of trouble pretty easily, to be honest, if you weren’t a Jew or a Gypsy or disabled, but it was a dull, grey and, for most people, very hard-working existence. Of course, towards the end of the war, it also got fairly dangerous.
Cite?
It’s a serious question since, as far as I’m aware, there were no formal restrictions on domestic travel for most German citizens until midway through the war, when they began to be introduced as part of the belated more general shift towards a total war economy. Until then, even leisure travel had continued without the need for permission. For example, from this review of Kristin Semmens’s recent study of tourism in the Third Reich:
Travellers certainly had to be wary of their indiscreet conversations on trains being overheard and reported, though that was more broadly true of public places in general.
Of course the situation was completely different if you were Jewish. But that’s not who the OP was asking about.
My grandmother grew up in Germany during Hitler’s regime. I did not ever ask what it was like to live there, and she has unfortunately reached an age where she no longer remembers much of anything. However, my mother says that as a girl in school, my grandmother frequently hid under her desk because of air raids and bombings. FWIW she lived in Munich, which is a fairly large town that often served as the country’s capital.