Nazi Germany

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The Wannsee Conference – an introduction

On 20 January 1942 took place one of the most notorious meetings in history. In a grand villa on the picturesque banks of Berlin’s Lake Wannsee, met fifteen high-ranking Nazis. Chaired by the chief of the security police, 37-year-old Reinhard Heydrich, the fifteen men represented various agencies of the Nazi apparatus.

‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’

Reinhard Heydrich‘s objective, as tasked by Hermann Göring (and therefore, presumably, Adolf Hitler), was to secure the support of these various agencies for the implementation of the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’, the systematic annihilation of the European Jew.

Goring’s letter to Heydrich, dated July 1941, states, ‘I hereby command you to make all necessary organizational, functional, and material preparations for a complete solution of the Jewish Question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.’ 

The mass murder of Jews was already taking place. The initial method of shooting Jews on the edges of pits was considered too time-consuming and detrimental to the mental health of the murder squads. The squads, often recruited from the local populations in conquered areas, willingly collaborated in the killings but eventually found the task gruelling. Seeking alternative methods, the Germans began experimenting with gas, using carbon monoxide in mobile units, but although better this was still considered too slow and inefficient. Eventually, after experiments on Soviet prisoners of war in Auschwitz during September 1941, Zyklon B gas was discovered as a rapid and efficient means of murder.

The Wannsee Conference, as it became known, discussed escalating the killing to a new, industrial level. Heydrich estimated that 11 million Jews still resided in Europe and needed to be “combed from West to East.” He produced a list of nations and their respective number of Jews, not only in countries already under Nazi occupation but also neutral nations and those not yet occupied. For example, Britain, according to Heydrich’s figures, contained 330,000 Jews; Sweden 8,000; Spain 6,000; Switzerland 18,000; and Ireland 4,000, plus 200 Jews in Albania.

“Eliminated through natural reduction” Continue reading →

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Hermann Goring – brief biography

Born in Bavaria, 12 January 1893, to a well-to-do Prussian family, Hermann Goring fancied himself as a cut above the rest, a cultured man, fond of fine living, the arts and women. Indeed, as a young fighter pilot during the First World War, Goring cut a dashing figure and in June 1918, won the Pour le Mérite, otherwise known as the Blue Max, Prussia’s highest award.

At the time of his birth, Goring’s parents were stationed in Haiti, his father working for the German consul there. His mother returned to Germany to give birth, then promptly returned to Haiti, leaving baby Hermann with a friend, not to see her child again for three years.

After the First World War, Goring worked as a commercial pilot in Denmark and Sweden, where he met his future wife, the Swedish baroness Carin von Kantzow. They married in Munich on 3 February 1923. Serving as a Prussian deputy in the German Reichstag, he met the young Adolf Hitler and, soon afterwards, in 1922, joined the fledging Nazi Party.

Austria

A year later, on 8 November 1923, Goring was shot in the leg and badly injured during the Munich Putsch, Hitler’s failed attempt to seize power by force. From there, together with his wife, Goring escaped to Austria. In Innsbruck, his wound was operated on but such was the pain he was given morphine, thereby starting an addiction that would last until his final days. At one point, during his forced sojourn in Austria, and later Italy, where he met Italy’s fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, Goring’s addiction had become so severe he had to be incarcerated in a mental hospital, occasionally having to be restrained by means of a straitjacket. In 1927, after four years away, Goring returned to Germany.

Elections

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The Reichstag Fire – brief summary

9 p.m.  27 February 1933, Berlin’s Reichstag building was set ablaze. By the time firefighters had arrived, the parliament building was already gutted. But the Reichstag Fire provided Hitler with a perfect excuse…

A communist outrage

Only four weeks earlier, Adolf Hitler had been appointed German Chancellor. On hearing the news of the fire at the Reichstag, Hitler and Joseph Goebbels were rushed (at 60 mph) to the site and there were met by a sweaty and overexcited Hermann Goering, who declared, ‘This is a communist outrage! One of the communist culprits has been arrested. Every Communist official must be shot where he is found. Every Communist deputy must this very night be strung up.’ Hitler agreed and saw the fire as a ‘God-given signal’ to impose his rule over the German people.

The ‘Communist culprit’ was 24-year-old Marinus van der Lubbe (pictured), an unemployed Dutch bricklayer, found half-naked on the premises, having used his shirt to start the fire.

Van der Lubbe readily confessed to the crime, stating, ‘I considered arson a suitable method. I did not wish to harm private people but something belonging to the system itself. I decided on the Reichstag.’  But he denied any involvement with the communists.

For the protection of the people and state

The following day, 85-year-old Paul von Hindenburg, the increasingly senile German president, accepted Hitler’s request for a decree suspending all political and civil liberties as a ‘temporary’ measure for the ‘protection of the people and state’.

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Georg Elser, the Man Who Almost Assassinated Hitler

The date is 8 November 1939, the location – the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall in Munich. With their uniforms freshly pressed, their buttons gleaming, their shoes polished, Hitler’s longest-standing comrades filed into the hall, their chests puffed up with pride, their wives at their sides. This event, on this day, had become an annual occasion in the Nazi calendar, a ritual of celebration and remembrance. The climax of the evening, awaited with great anticipation, would be Hitler’s appearance and his speech in which he would praise and pour tribute on these self-satisfied men, his old-timers.

But there was one man who awaited Hitler’s appearance with equal anticipation – but for entirely different reasons. This man was a 36-year-old carpenter, Johann Georg Elser, born 4 January 1903. For Elser, a long-time anti-Nazi, had planted a bomb with the full intention of killing Adolf Hitler. And his bomb was due to explode halfway through the Fuhrer’s speech.

Kill Hitler

Georg Elser had always been quietly defiant in his hatred of the Nazi regime – he’d supported the communists and, once Hitler was in power, refused to give the Nazi salute. He feared Hitler’s aggressive warmongering and foresaw the coming of war and resolved himself, in his own way, to do something to prevent it – and that was to kill Hitler.

Exactly a year earlier before the fateful night, on the 8 November 1938, Elser attended the same annual commemoration in Munich marking the anniversary of Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. And it was this annual event, he decided, that would provide the perfect opportunity to implement his audacious plan. The following night, he witnessed first-hand the vicious Kristallnacht, when Nazis throughout the country terrorized Germany’s Jews in a concentrated orgy of killing and violence. Seeing for himself this state-sponsored anarchy merely confirmed for Elser that what he was doing was right.

Elser spent the next year preparing. Each year on 8 November, since 1933, Hitler had come to the same beer hall and delivered a two-hour speech, starting at 8.30, the precise time that, in 1923, he had bulldozed into the hall brandishing a pistol, interrupting a meeting of Bavarian city officials and, firing two shots into the ceiling, declared revolution. The Beer Hall Putsch failed but had become an occasion to honour and remember the Nazis that had fallen that night in Munich.

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Alois Hitler, father to Adolf – brief biography

Alois Schicklgruber’s only claim to fame was that he was the father of Adolf Hitler.

Born 7 June 1837, Alois Schicklgruber was the son of a 42-year-old unmarried farmhand by the name of Maria Anna Schicklgruber. The identity of his father remains uncertain: on Alois’s birth certificate the space for the father’s name was left blank and the word illegitimate was scrolled across the certificate.

When he was five years old, Alois’s mother married Johann Georg Hiedler. Five years later, following his mother’s death, the 10-year-old Alois went to live with his stepfather’s brother, his uncle, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler.

Aged 13, Alois found employment as an apprentice cobbler before joining the Austrian Customs Service at the age of eighteen, an organization that was to remain his employer for the rest of his working life.

Schicklgruber becomes Hitler

Alois changed his name to Hitler, a variant of his stepfather’s name, Hiedler, in January 1876. Johann Georg Hiedler had died nineteen years earlier but his name was added to the birth certificate as the father of the 39-year-old Alois. Thus Alois Schicklgruber became Alois Hitler.

First wife

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The ‘Jews Out’ Board Game – a brief history

The Wiener Library in London has on display a macabre board game intended to be a bit of fun for your average family living in 1930s Nazi Germany. It is called Juden Raus! ‘Jews Out!’ – with an exclamation mark.

The object of the Jews Out board game is to force the Jews beyond the medieval walls and out of the city. The first player to rid the city of six Jews wins the game.

The game comes with a dice, a 50×60 cm board, and a number of figurines. The board has thirteen circles representing various Jewish-owned shops and businesses. Each player adopts one of six red figurines with a pointy hat and a belt around its waist, representing the German police force, and the idea is to land on the Jewish business and eject the Jew. The Jew is represented on 32 hat-shaped counters, the same shape as the hats Jews were compelled to wear during the Middle Ages. Each Jew is depicted with a vile, contorted face.

The rules explain that the Jews Out board game is an ‘extraordinarily amusing and up-to-date family game’. On the board are written three bits of text: Display skill in the dice game, so that you collect many Jews! / When you succeed in driving out 6 Jews, you will be winner beyond all question! And at the bottom right, a ‘typical’ Jewish family on the move accompanied by the text, Off to Palestine! Continue reading →

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Hitler the Artist

As works of art they are pleasant enough to the eye but, being almost instantly forgettable, don’t linger too long in the memory. Painted almost a century ago in Vienna, they were probably sold to a middle-class family or a local business where, hung on a wall, they were promptly ignored for years to come. But whenever one of these paintings comes up for auction, they usually fetch in the region of about £2,000 each. The price tag reflects not the works’ artistic value but the notoriety of the man who painted them – for they were created by a young Adolf Hitler.

So how did the future dictator start off as an artist?

‘Artist? No, never as long as I live’

Hitler fared poorly at school. One teacher in Hitler’s Austrian hometown of Linz later described the schoolboy as ‘argumentative, autocratic, self-opinionated, and bad-tempered and unable to submit to school discipline.’ Art was the one subject Hitler enjoyed but when, as an 11-year-old, he approached his father and declared his ambition to become an artist, Hitler Snr took it badly. ‘Artist? No, never as long as I live.’

All his working life, Alois Hitler had been an employee of the Austrian customs service, a man who worked hard at a humdrum career and fully expected his son to follow in his footsteps. Problem was, Hitler Jr had no intention of ‘sitting in an office, deprived of my liberty, ceasing to be master of my own time.’ Continue reading →

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Ernst Rohm – a brief biography

Everyone called Adolf Hitler Mein Fuhrer, everyone except one man, one man who called him by his first name, a trusted comrade from the earliest days of the Nazi Party. That man was Ernst Rohm and in 1934 Hitler conspired to have him murdered.

Rohm – World War One

Born 28 November 1887, Ernst Rohm fought with distinction throughout the First World War, winning an Iron Cross, First Class, and attaining the rank of captain. Twice he was wounded, on one occasion shot in the face, and he carried the scars for the rest of his life. In 1918, as the war drew to its close, Rohm contracted the Spanish Flu which killed millions across Europe. Rohm was lucky to have survived.

Rohm’s Early Years

In 1919, Ernst Rohm joined the newly-formed German Workers’ party, forerunner to the National Socialist Workers Party, nicknamed by its opponents as the Nazi Party. Rohm was the ultimate Nazi thug, relishing his role of street revolutionary. There he met the young Adolf Hitler. Four years later he would march alongside Hitler during the failed Munich Putsch (or revolution). Rohm, along with Hitler, was arrested and charged with high treason, a charge that carried the death penalty. But the Bavarian court, sympathetic to the Nazi cause, showed leniency and sentenced Hitler to the minimum punishment, and merely handed Rohm a suspended sentence.

In 1925, following a disagreement with Hitler, Ernst Rohm resigned from the party and found employment in Bolivia. Six years later, Hitler wrote to Rohm asking him to return to Germany and to head the SA. Rohm accepted the challenge.

Rohm’s ‘Second Revolution’ Continue reading →