Life Under the Swastika

By Ketih R. Johnson

THE 12-YEAR REICH: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF NAZI GERMANY, 1933-1945 by Richard Grunberger. 535 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $10.

In The Course of German History, Britain's A.J.P. Taylor advanced the debatable argument that Germany has always carried with it a special kind of doom, and that the horrors of Third Reich totalitarianism were utterly consistent with the nation's past. Now, in The 12-Year Reich, Richard Grunberger draws a chilling corollary: Hitler's accession in 1933, he contends, wrought no sudden or serious changes in the daily life and social institutions of Germany. Most Germans took to the swastika as naturally as they would to a new hiking path in the Schwarzwald.

Grunberger, a Vienna-born historian raised and educated in England, is author of two previous books on Nazism: Germany 1918-1945 and Hitler's SS. In The 12-Year Reich, he employs a variety of sources to assemble a riveting portrait of the skillful Nazi corruption of an already rotting society. Grunberger even examines the peculiarities of Nazi speech and humor. Of all the jokes that a few dared whisper about Hitler, perhaps the most revelatory of him, and of the Germans, has the Fuehrer in a fishing boat with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Mussolini. Chamberlain puts out a line, patiently lights a pipe, and within two hours has landed a respectable catch. Mussolini jumps into the water and grabs a fat pike. Hitler orders the pond drained. As the fish flop about helplessly on the bottom, Chamberlain asks Hitler: "Why don't you scoop them up?" Hitler replies: "They have to beg me first."

The book is a mosaic of fascinating vignettes, both ghastly and ridiculous. Railway workers were allowed to abandon the otherwise mandatory Heil Hitler arm salute because it was mistaken for a signal and caused accidents. Goethe's favorite oak tree near Weimar became the central point around which the Buchenwald extermination camp was built. In one village, a neighbor told a mother that the name of her missing soldier son had been read on a list of German P.O.W.s held by the Russians. Far from being grateful, the mother thereupon denounced her well-meaning informant to the authorities for listening to Radio Moscow, which had broadcast the list.

Grunberger thinks that the pre-Hitler Weimar Republic applied the merest veneer of democracy over what remained basically an authoritarian state. Thus the mass of Germans easily accepted dictatorship. Within a year after Hitler became Chancellor, the birth rate, which is normally a sure index of public confidence, rose by 22%. Crime dropped off noticeably after 1933. War preparations and economic recovery did away with joblessness. Living standards improved under the peacetime Third Reich; food shortages did not become severe until 1943, the fourth year of the war.

Meddlesome Conformity. In one phrase, Grunberger puts his finger on a German trait that the Nazis carefully exploited: he calls it "the majority's meddlesome conformity." He observes that "the average Nazi citizen did not so much live in a state of terror as in a state of delusion tinged by delirium." To be sure, some Germans resisted the Nazi takeover and Hitler's turning the nation into a police state, but their resistance was politically ineffective. There are other, less harsh ways to look at the German experience with Nazism, but Grunberger makes a telling case.

Most of all, he underlines the German propensity to blame the regime's excesses on lesser functionaries while exonerating the Fuehrer: "If only Adolf knew about this" became a reflex response, and reality was simply ignored. One day on the Eastern Front, an ashen-faced adjutant announced to Field Marshal Ernst Busch that men and women were being shot outside the headquarters building. Busch's curt and typical reply: "Draw the curtains!"

-Keith R. Johnson

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