by Sallust, Daily Sceptic:
It’s always glib to wheel out Nazi Germany as a case study in totalitarianism and the ruthless suppression of divergent views and dissent. One focuses too easily on the late 1930s and the war years, as well as the Holocaust.
Nora Waln (1885-1964) was an American writer married to an Englishman she had met in China while he worked for the Chinese Post Office. In 1934 they moved to Germany where her husband was about to embark on a period of private study in music.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
During that time Nora Waln wrote Reaching For The Stars (1939). It is an unmatched portrait of life under the Reich, starting just five years after the liberal period of the Weimar Republic, and before the worst that was yet to come. The book is little known now, but the following extracts will provide a flavour of what Nora experienced as she watched free speech disappearing before her eyes, and with the active compliance of much of the population.
It’s important when reading these words to bear in mind that they describe a developed West European country less than a century ago.
“Still, sprich durch die Blume,” was said to me when I asked a simple question as we sat drinking coffee on a Rhineland terrace.
“Hush, speak through a flower!” It seemed a curious answer. Because I looked puzzled, it was amplified: “Do not speak the names of Government officials or Party members unless you praise them.” I felt hurt, for I had meant no harm. I probed no further that day. Mine had been but an idle curiosity.
Never before had I been so close to the frequent passing of tragedy, nor among a people who accepted tragedy as these. Every few days I encountered stories that appeared incredible in a land as outwardly serene and gay as this. For instance, I saw a woman go by, tall and fair, her beautiful face so marked by pain that I had to ask about her.
I was hushed and not answered until we were in our host’s house. Then, after the servant had left the room, pillows were put down along the crack of the door, a wad of plasticine stuck in the keyhole, and the telephone — which in Germany plugs into a wall socket — pulled from its connection “because the inventions for listening in on families are most easily applied to the telephone and some chance remark overheard might be judged treason”.
These arrangements completed, I was cautiously told the following about the woman. Two unknown men wearing the brown uniform of the National-Socialist Party had entered the house while husband and wife sat at dinner, and taken the husband away. Three months later four young men wearing black uniform with the “death’s head cap” had brought back a coffin, and informed her that her husband had committed suicide. It was forbidden to open the sealed casket.
My narrators carefully explained that the husband was not a Jew, but an Aryan, as they call non-Jews here, a distinction in tragedy of which I did not see the point. The party officials stayed until after the funeral. The widow was made to pay five thousand marks for “burial services”.
From what I could learn her husband had been a respected member of the community. Neither the community nor her kin had made any united protest. In fact, no protest of any kind had been made. And this was explained with the sentence: “It is not wise to interfere between individuals and the Party.”
Later, Nora mused on the phenomenon:
I found their [the Germans’] desertion of the cause of free speech disconcerting, and their failure to stand by kin and neighbours astounding.
She met a young German who had forgotten his papers when attending a rally at which Hitler was to speak. He was arrested for being too close to the podium but seemed untroubled:
“We young Germans must learn to be silent, not only when we are dealt with justly, but to endure injustice with silence,” he told me. “And I was not treated unjustly; I should not have forgotten my credentials.” When I showed my surprise he added: “Wir sind zu blindem Gehorsam verpflichtet!”
“We are pledged to blind obedience,” I repeated after him. “Yes,” he assured me solemnly.
Nora then started learning about prohibited books:
Going to the shoemaker to have some repairs done, I learned that he was away — indefinitely away. There had been a search for books. Such searches, so a 12-year-old son told me, are periodic but not systematic. A Party person may descend on only one house in a block when he comes. The child told me that it is not allowed to possess a book written by a pacifist, a communist, a Jew, a Mason, or any book about Masonry; any book on politics or political science other than National-Socialism; any book of science which refutes the National-Socialist theory of race and blood; or any novel or poems by any author who has in any writing whatsoever, ridiculed the National-Socialist Party Members or their tenets; any printing which gives any account of the Christian Church strife in Germany excepting that allowed by the Third Reich; or any book dealing with the German post-War period from a democratic or liberal point of view.
The searchers, two armed men, had found a book by the Englishman, Bertrand Russell, behind the shoemaker’s clock. The child said it was a book telling of paths which lead to peace.
“Does your father read English?” I asked.
“No, he cannot. The book belongs to a friend. We were keeping it for the friend.”
“Has the friend been arrested, too?”
“He is not in the Rhineland now and Pappa would not give his whereabouts or name.”
“Isn’t the responsibility your friend’s?”
“We do not reason that way in our family. We believe that loyalty between friends is above submission to the imposed will of this usurper party. We are, every one of us, ready to die for that belief.”
It transpired the boy’s mother had gone to the concentration camp to find out what had happened to her husband – for having a prohibited book in his house.
Nora soon discovered that her own books, supposedly being shipped from France, had been stopped by the Reich customs. She had to go through them with a customs official. She questioned some of the books being refused entry. The official said: “I do my duty… If I let the book in I may find myself in trouble.”
