Treacherous Signposts: The Perils of Misreading Germany's Past
Oppenheimer, Franz M.
BOOK REVIEWS There is another world for the expiation of guilt; but the wages of folly are payable here below. ∔Lord Acton Hitler's seizure of Germany was a historical fluke. As Golo Mann has...
...Is one bound to believe such a ghastly story...
...Her fiance Help us explode myths about Catholics...
...THE FEDERALIST PAPERS* 11...
...His speech before major industrialists in Dusseldorf during 1932 also omitted anti-Semitic references...
...This truth applies equally to the way a country must live with its history and the way nations must deal with one another...
...1 he best account I have found of the "accidents, errors, and avoidable bungles" that caused Hitler to be appointed chancellor thirty days after that obituary is given in a recent biography of the last chancellor of the Weimar Republic, Reichskanzler Kurt von Schleicher, by Friedrich-Karl von Plehwe...
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...Stalin and his successors have by now starved, tortured, and murdered more innocent people than even Hitler, yet we never hear the aspersions that are routinely cast on the Germans cast on the Russians...
...Probably Schleicher's crucial error, which permitted Papen to turn Hindenburg against Schleicher, came in his first speech as chancellor, which endorsed the resettlement of unemployed people from the West to Prussia east of the Elbe, on the large bankrupt estates of noblemen∔estates that had been kept going only by enormous governmental subsidies...
...There was a horrifying article by two Czechs, who escaped from a concentration camp in the east...
...TREACHEROUS SIGNPOSTS: THE PERILS OF MISREADING GERMANY'S PAST by Franz M. Oppenheimer ducers' goods had turned up in the second quarter of 1932 and that of consumer durables in the third quarter...
...The point is: if you want a Roman Catholic magazine that confounds the conventional stereotypes, then the NEW OXFORD REVIEW is for you...
...Be that as it may, so the conventional view of German history goes, some thirteen million Germans, one out of three, voted for Hitler, a big enough minority to indicate the climate of a country and only that climate could have produced the gas chambers...
...This new edition, with modernized typography, is based on the posthumous edition of 1778, the last to contain corrections by Hume...
...Many issues of La Croix incited to murder...
...Decline in employment had come to a halt...
...have supported an anti-Jewish campaign, and another 20 to 25 percent would have sympathized with such a movement...
...The existing political system seemed unable to help them∔and only the Communists and the Nazis promised a break with the system...
...Without historical illiteracy the extravagant uproar about President Reagan's visit to the Bitburg cemetery would have been impossible...
...She adored Fritz von der Schulenburg, one of the leaders in that plot...
...After the Kristallnacht, besides trying to hush up the scope of the outrages, Nazi rulers reacted to their failure to arouse anti-Semitic popular feelings by starting a great "hunt for 34 state enemies...
...These myths also play a malignant role in Germany itself...
...They want to look directly at the sun without blinking...
...and the remaining majority were either mild anti-Semites or indifferent to the "Jewish question...
...Hardly anyone spoke up publicly in protest...
...It is no accident that Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass, No News Is Bad News Talk about thankless jobs...
...Secular humanists also purvey the myth that Catholics call abortion murder because they are puritanical and hate sex...
...There is a tenacious myth among Americans generally that says Catholics are stupid, lazy, and superstitious...
...Significant excerpts from each work are included, but these tapes are far more than a mere reading...
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...The party was bankrupt...
...In the light of those developments, it was not surprising that the Frankfurter Zeitung summed up a widespread general consensus on January 1, 1933: "The mighty National Socialist assault on the democratic state has been repulsed...
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...Hindenburg was himself the owner of one of those estates, and his closest friends were fellow East Prussian noblemen and landowners...
...it was a pariah no longer...
...Information that eventually did seep through was widely disbelieved by Germans, just as it was by the British, American, and Vatican authorities...
...Actually, we at the NEW OXFORD REVIEW don't waste much time fretting about the myth-makers...
...A group of officers suggests that their contribution be used to buy nails to "crucify the Jews...
...One great merit of Sarah Gordon's study is its emphasis on Hitler's overwhelming responsibility for the deportations and exterminations between 1940 and 1944...
...no human beings had ever had to contemplate premeditated carnage on quite so vast a scale...
...This was reflected in the rising of shares on the stock markets and the rising prices of raw materials...
...In Alan Bullock's words, "Hitler did not seize power, he was jobbed into office by a backstairs intrigue...
...Of course, this did nothing to improve the military situation...
...Gordon's analysis of available data reveals a conflicting pattern of reactions...
...Revolutions are still fought over his ideas...
...The destructive system of proportional representation in the Reichstag made it impossible for Schleicher, as it had made it impossible for Briining, to obtain a majority from the representatives of the two-thirds of German voters who did not want Hitler...
...Unfortunately, there are those who advise killing the messenger∔freezing wages and prices∔rather than addressing the root cause of the problem...
...It had to show that Hitler's personal role . . . was of little consequence, but that the money he received for Emil Kirdorf and other industrialists was all-important . . . that National Socialism was not a phenomenon sui generis, but broadly speaking the same as fascist and reactionary parties elsewhere . . . the same as capitalism, a right-wing, conservative political party...
...Quite to the contrary, old time German anti-Semites, of whom "the Court Chaplain," Pastor Adolf Stocker, is a prominent example, far from wanting to kill the Jews, wanted them to abandon their separate ways and become fully assimilated into German life and culture...
...The extermination camps in the East "were in most cases out of view of soldiers and were kept strictly secret...
...These events 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBE1...
...Gorbachev today, I am leaving myself open to violent accusations...
...The NEW OXFORD REVIEW is simply the best publication of its kind in the United States ∔ always provocative, always interesting, always solidly Catholic...
...The Greens revel in the horror of the twelve Hitler years...
...The U.S...
...instead he had placed a highjacker in the nation's cockpit...
...The Value of Great Ideas...
...It will be said that I am belittling the Holocaust, whitewashing its perpetrators, and displaying "insen-sitivity" to the ordeal of the victims� including presumably that of my aunt, uncle, and grandmother...
...One-third of those early Nazis were not anti-Semites at all...
...At about that time Gregor Strasser, the head of the party bureaucracy and after Hitler the party's strongest personality, resigned from the party...
...The high tide of his party in free parliamentary elections had come on July 31,1932, when the Nazi party obtained 37.2 percent of the vote...
...An army doctor proposed "to use the Jews for vivisection rather than inoffensive rabbits...
...Hitler, Germans, and the "Jewish Question," by Sarah Gordon, Princeton University Press, $40.00...
...Indeed in his profound and brilliant book on Hitler, Sebastian Haffner argues persuasively that Hitler gave the order for "the final solution of the Jewish question" only after he was convinced that his war was lost∔because of the Russian offensive in December 1941, and his declaration of war against the United States...
...Knowledge Products has gathered the works of the world's most influential writers into a collection of professionally produced, provocative audio tapes...
...Since the murder of six million Jews is generally considered the result, if not of the anti-Semitism of Germans as a whole, then at least of that of the German Nazis, determining the prevalence and kind of anti-Semitism among Nazis is crucial to the issue of culpability, an issue that, as we have just seen again in the Bitburg controversy, continues to bedevil the Federal Republic of Germany's relations with the United States...
...Q101 Indianapolis, IN 46250 abandoned after four days "when it failed to receive domestic or foreign support...
...Her favorite brother had been killed there...
...Please allow 2 to 8 weeks for delivery of first issue 35 was missing on the Eastern front...
...Not that there are no lessons to be drawn from the past...
...In fact, the only Western country in which anti-Semitism in the Hitlerian mode ever became a popular movement is France, and if the source of Hitler's dementia can be traced to any country it is to France...
...He gave the masses and the centers of power . . . what they wanted: militarism and defense contracts, promises of prosperity and linguistic conquest, racial theories about their own superiority, a scapegoat in the Jews...
...Germany Today: A Personal Report, by Walter Laqueur, Little, Brown and Company, $16.95...
...they simply choose not to dwell on them...
...Only an army of saints and martyrs would have been capable of a giant spontaneous uprising "pour ecraser I'infame...
...Unaware of the desperate circumstances they faced, the Romans were unable to take corrective action until it was too late...
...Thus the Weimar Republic had finally achieved international equal rights...
...ambassador filed a similar report: "In view of this being a totalitarian state, a surprising characteristic of the situation here is the intensity and scope among German citizens of a condemnation of the recent happenings against Jews...
...If you spend 20 minutes a day in your car, you have time to listen to the ideas of Locke, Mill, Tocqueville and others...
...dollars...
...A significant minority could have known but willfully shut their eyes and ears...
...Depending on your circumstances, this may be tax deductible...
...The contents of those letters were even worse: "A Jew is a 'stinking and malignant beast,' " "vermin," "pest," "a centipede," "a microbe," "a tick," "a cancer," "a hideous spider," and "a flea of the synagogue...
...During the same period, Germany's political humiliations by the Allies of World War I, which had been almost as useful a propellant for Hitler as the economic Depression, had come to an end...
...Since the passivity of their parents and grandparents made that horror possible, the young Greens and their fellow-travelers glorify resistance against any authority, any government, any military establishment...
...As far as I know, only Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism recognized France of the turn of the century as a main inspiration for Hitler's psychotic anti-Semitism...
...Von Papen, the principal intriguer, stupidly believed that he had hired a pilot...
...With the publication of volumes V and VI, LibertyPress/LibertyClassics brings to a conclusion this new edition of David Hume's History of England...
...Shortly thereafter the party lost 40 percent of its prior votes in the Thuringia state elections...
...The subscription," wrote La Libre Parole, is "to defend the honor of a French officer, killed, assassinated by the Jews...
...The letters sending contributions bore signature lines such as "one of the Vende who would be happy to take up the gun of his ancestors of 1793 to shoot the Yids who poison France" and "for God, my country, and the extermination of the Jews...
...The quotes just cited could be duplicated by quotes from the newspaper of the Assumptionist Fathers, La Croix, which had a circulation of more than 70,000, in addition to the circulation of about 100 papers of the same name and inspiration...
...and resistance heroes like Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoffer were matched by some Protestant "German Christian" bishops and other clergy who were vociferous Nazis...
...Rising prices don't cause inflation, they merely inform us that something, somewhere is very wrong...
...Among evangelicals there is a more sedate myth that Catholicism is a numbing religion riddled with dead formulas, empty rituals, and rigid prohibitions ∔ a legalistic religion which fears the Bible and freezes out the grace of Christ...
...and friend, President Hindenburg, to prevent Schleicher from obtaining the authority to dissolve parliament...
...but] were the embodiment of an absolute immutable evil . . . parasites . . . poison...
...The sentiments brought to light by the responses to the campaign of La Libre Parole did not grow independently in individual backyards, but had been nourished by a massive campaign carried on primarily by Drumont and Catholic clergy...
...Anti-Semitic violence in France during the 1880s and 90s did not remain verbal only...
...The Marxists, who according to La-queur have had a belated renaissance in the Federal Republic, also exploit the feelings of collective guilt for their purposes...
...Who would be willing to criticize her for simply noting in her diary the horror she had learned and going on to other things...
...Thus, in Brigitte Sauzay's phrase, "the Peace Movement constantly fuses Pershing and Hitler...
...Those directly involved knew, killed, and tortured...
...During the critical campaign for the elections in the first Depression year of 1930, elections in which the Nazi vote jumped from 2.6 percent to 18.3 percent of total votes, "Hitler even proclaimed that he had nothing against 'decent' Jews and discountenanced violent anti-Semitism...
...It is sad to report that the third column attacking NATO's battle for the survival of decency in the world is the German Protestant Church...
...This is an intimidating syllabus of myths ∔ but happily, each myth is inaccurate and erroneous, and each one is disproved by the existence and insistence of the NEW OXFORD REVIEW...
...Approximately 30 percent . . . would have actively opposed it...
...Oddly, myths about Catholicism have even worked their way into the Catholic Church herself...
...Today, America faces a similar threat...
...And revelations by a committee of the Reichstag of numerous instances of landowners' misuse of governmental subsidies had made Hindenburg and his friends especially sensitive to plans of east-Elbian agrarian reform...
...This is the Knowledge Products guarantee: return the first package of tapes within 30 days, and you owe nothing...
...For Hitler, killing Jews was more important than winning the war...
...Still, there were Austrian anti-Semites in parliament who, according to Karl Bracher, asked "that a reward be paid to anyone who murdered a Jew and that the property of the victim be awarded to the murderer...
...DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA* * One title in a two-tape set 33 lack of appeal anti-Semitism had for the German voters...
...It is not an idle exercise to rehearse these historical facts...
...She shows that, even among the committed core of Nazi party members before Hitler's seizure of power, rabid anti-Semites were a small minority of 12.5 percent, and even that minority of card-carrying Nazi party members "did not appear to have envisioned the expulsion of Jews from Germany, much less genocide or extermination...
...Among fundamentalists there is that whopper of a myth that the Pope is the Anti-Christ and the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon, a hideous and many-tentacled pagan cult...
...rather, we are content to be living witnesses to the truth about Catholicism and the falsehood of all the myths...
...The victors of World War I suffered no comparable series of disasters...
...Hardcover $15.00 each volume Softcover$ 7.50 each volume Prepayment is required on all orders not for resale...
...Street violence broke out with particular vehemence throughout France after the publication of Zola's J'accuse...
...But I hope a few readers will understand: While we must at all times and in all places be conscious of the burden of original sin and the role of the Devil in the human condition, we must also know that though we sin every day cogitatione, verbo, opere et omissione, we cannot do the Lord's work when obsessed by guilt for past and repented sins...
...In short, Papen succeeded in overcoming Hindenburg's aversion to Hitler by touching the old man's rawest self-interest...
...What those voters wanted in the first place was an out from the economic misery of the Depression...
...And rightly so...
...Only the Devil can have been amused during the recent Bitburg circus of the American media: He wants us to let the murdered victims of the past make us forget the murdered and tortured slaves of an empire that is still with us...
...When she made that entry, Schulenburg and many others among her friends had been hanged...
...She was a journalist in Berlin, a hater of the Nazis and everything they stood for, and a close friend of many of the participants in the plot against Hitler of July 20, 1944...
...The Ardennes offensive has bogged down...
...In some parts of Germany, they tried to force their way into Jewish shops [picketed by Storm Troopers] and even generals in uniform bought in Jewish stores...
...Said another way, no news is bad news...
...Moreover, in a few limited geographic regions like Middle Franconia and Munich, the boycott seems to have been partially successful...
...Though standing now last in the series, these were the first (and most famous) of the volumes which Hume wrote...
...Consider the words of Francis X. Maier, Editor of the weekly National Catholic Register...
...Prior to the pogrom, the socialist underground's Deutschland-Berichte, which "made a fetish of trying to report objectively," reported that "anti-Semitism was slowly taking root among the German people...
...The Vienna of Hitler's youth contained a few closer models, although the most successful Viennese politician who made anti-Semitism a major issue, Mayor Karl Lueger, enforced scrupulous fairness toward Jews in his city administration...
...At least for a while, Hitler seems to have been in a deep depression, and talked of ending it all with his pistol...
...The History of England illustrates Hume's belief that the growth of liberty is neither inevitable nor necessary and that the preservation of liberty requires an understanding of the conditions which gave rise to it as well as the institutional arrangements which sustain it...
...Hitler was virtually alone, even among the Nazi hierarchy, in being possessed by the psychotic conviction that "Jews were not merely inferior and despicable subhumans...
...All newspapers were ordered to describe general events at local levels only, not at regional or national levels...
...The objective was to reach the Channel coast in order to get better launching sites for the V-2s...
...Eliot Award for Creative Writing Eugene Ionesco Paris The Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters Robert Nisbet Washington, D.C...
...While La Croix was not the authorized official organ of the French Catholic Church, many of the faithful treated it as such, and the Church did nothing to change their belief...
...Franz von Papen, Schleicher's immediate predecessor, held Schleicher responsible for losing the chancellorship and used his influence with his next door neighbor This essay is principally based on the following recent books: The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945, by David S. Wyman, Pantheon, $19.95...
...Just as the Russians were unable to stop the crimes of Stalin, and are unable to stop the crimes in the Gulag, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, so the Germans were unable to stop the crimes of Hitler...
...Three months later, in what were to be the last free elections for the Reichstag, the Nazi party lost two million votes and reduced its percentage to 33.1∔5 percent less than McGovern's in 1972...
...Knowledge about them was very limited except among top officials, the resistance, and church leaders...
...As for resemblances between the Nazi and Communist regimes, they are merely coincidental and at any rate vastly exaggerated by cold warriors...
...Pictures and reports of individual burnings and lootings were prohibited, and articles were to appear on the second or third, rather than first, page...
...The chief preachers and practitioners of "constructive dialogue" with the Soviets usually do not deny Soviet crimes...
...We do not know how many Americans among those 15 percent of active anti-Semites nurtured genocide in their hearts∔ probably a statistically insignificant minority∔but the same can be said of the 12.5 percent of rabidly anti-Semitic Nazi party members∔murder or expulsion of the Jews was not on their agenda either...
...If that's what you've been looking for in a Catholic monthly magazine, then help us explode myths and prejudices, and subscribe today...
...as much as 35 percent to 40 percent of the population was prepared to approve an anti-Jewish campaign, some 30 percent would have stood up against it, and the rest would have remained indifferent...
...Henry Ashby Turner tells us that the "relations between the NSDAP and the business community," which, contrary to Marxist folklore, had never been amicable, "seemed to have reached an all-time low...
...once said that prejudice against the Roman Catholic Church is "the deepest bias in the history of the American people...
...All orders from outside the United States must be prepaid in U.S...
...The extensiveness of murder and property destruction . . . was never reported...
...I am convinced that that uproar came close to wrecking NATO and Germany's place in it...
...The response to that appeal became a triumph...
...The Ingersoll Foundation of Rockford, Illinois Clayton Gaylord, Chairman John A. Howard, President Thomas Fleming, Executive Secretary, The Ingersoll Prizes The awards, in the amount of $15,000 each, will be presented at a formal banquet at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago on November 22, 1985...
...New elections would have spelled the demise of Hitler, for, as we have seen, the party had no funds for another campaign...
...The Investment in Time: The Hours You Aren't Using...
...The Deutschland-Berichte reported that "people were arrested while traveling in the train and taken to Dachau...
...They say the Jews there are systematically gassed...
...German Protestants have never been able to accommodate themselves to the human condition...
...But it is equally true, as Sarah Gordon discusses, that the Nazi regime went to great lengths in attempting to conceal its crimes...
...When that assumption is examined it must be found faulty...
...The two books run remarkably parallel in their diagnoses of the Federal Republic today...
...It simply cannot be true...
...Bredin concludes: "At least a latent justification, if not the expectation, of genocide permeates the subscription in memory of Commandant Henry...
...Moreover, pogroms, however beastly, committed by primitive peasants against mysterious strangers, cannot have been the inspiration for Hitler's technology of murder, nor did those murderous peasants have the commensurate ideology...
...Even so prominent a Jewish leader as Leo Baeck, the head of the Berlin Jewish community, said that he did not know of Auschwitz and the systematic murder of Jews until 1943, by which time millions had already been murdered...
...Nor did the kind of virulent anti-Semitism that was embraced by much of the French literary elite∔from Celine and Jules Romains on the left, to Drieu la Rochelle, Jouhandeau, and Brasillach on the right∔throughout the 1930s and the occupation have any counterpart among German writers of comparable distinction, not even during the Hitler regime...
...If what was in the paper is really true there is only one prayer left for us, "Lord, deliver us from the evildoers who besmirch our name by their shame...
...A dramatic format brings the classics to life, making them entertaining as well as informative...
...Such reasoning, however, must be predicated on the assumption that those thirteen million Germans knew and desired what they were voting for...
...The Audio Classics discuss the authors, their ideas, and the historical conflicts that inspired their work...
...They dwell on the Nazi crimes, but trivialize them at the same time...
...In all charity, however, it is difficult to sympathize with German clergy who somehow manage to confuse their hang-ups over the past of their Church and their willful blindness to the exploding toys given by the Soviets to children in Afghanistan...
...In sum...
...Even more people had seen the deportation of Jews with their own eyes but chose to believe that they would "merely" be "resettled...
...The established media have duly noted us: Time finds us "conservative" (true enough, when it comes to doctrine, morality, and eccles-ial authority), Newsweek says we're "cheeky" (probably more true than we realize), and The New York Times thinks our editorial policy is "curious" (probably very true, at least from the Times's perspective...
...i.e., some people did stay away from Jewish shops...
...By 1942, the brave and vigorous were themselves being killed at the Russian front...
...In the twelve years before the Depression, Germany had lost a war, had been dismembered, had been stamped a pariah for its supposedly exclusive responsibility for starting the war it lost, and had the savings of its people wiped out by inflation...
...Volume V begins with the accession to the throne of James I and ends with the execution of Charles I. Volume VI carries the history forward to its end in the Glorious Revolution...
...The Dreyfus case was not the cause but only a symptom of anti-Semitic paranoia, of which a high point was a public campaign, launched by Drumont's virulently anti-Semitic newspaper La Libre Parole, to permit the widow and orphan of Commandant Henry to sue one of his accusers�after Commandant Henry had cut his own throat, when it had been established beyond any reasonable doubt that he had forged one of the crucial documents on which the case against Dreyfus was founded...
...A here has been much controversy about how much "the Germans" knew about the ultimate horror of the gas chambers...
...Lord Acton Hitler's seizure of Germany was a historical fluke...
...And during the first few days of Schleicher's chancellorship, in December 1932, a treaty between the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Germany lifted the limitations on Germany's armaments imposed by the Versailles treaty in order to make possible, as that treaty had humorously put it, "the beginning of a general limitation of the armaments of all nations...
...Choose the terms you prefer∔$47.50 per month for four months ($190∔ less than $8 per cassette), or save 10% by paying the advance price of $170 (just over $7 per cassette...
...German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., Oxford University Press, $25.00...
...In many cities this violence raged for several days...
...The Audio Classics Series is designed for those who have the desire but not enough time to lead what Socrates called ' the informed life '. There is absolutely no risk to you...
...Hitler's obsession was not rooted in, nor comparable with, the marginal strains of anti-Semitism that had their ups and downs in nineteenth-century and Wilhelminian Germany...
...They are to be found in the human penchant for making use of abstractions in order to be able to ignore the uncomfortable and to pursue the questionable...
...Having been repressed, the past has become omnipresent...
...The stench and gore of the Gulag, the deaths of slave laborers during the construction of the Siberian pipeline, are not permitted to intrude into discussions with civilized The Ingersoll Prizes Literature and the Humanities 1985 The T.S...
...Before the start of World War II, the regime staged two spectacular anti-Semitic outrages by which it could test popular reactions...
...of his town in big ovens of the Glass Works...
...Hume himself wrote of these volumes...
...Workers were given new confidence when Chancellor Schleicher restored the inviolability of wage contracts, which Chancellor Franz von Papen had abolished...
...Moreover, the economic misery that had propelled his party towards power had also begun to recede in the summer of 1932...
...The corpses are burned...
...Moreover, it is said, Catholics opposed to abortion don't really care about the sanctity of human life, as they claim to, because they are utterly indifferent to the threat to innocent life posed by nuclear weapons...
...Soviet economists of the benefits of liberalizing trade...
...He particularly avoided any discussion of future measures against Jews...
...Jews were deported at night in a variety of public and private vehicles, including furniture vans...
...His resignation caused fear of a more general revolt against Hitler by other Nazi leaders...
...Some Germans want to resurrect it at all costs to make 'reparation' for their derelictions...
...Her apartment had been bombed out...
...But we must endeavour to be above any Regard either to Whigs or Tories...
...Thus the German Protestant clergy, like many American liberals, use the abstraction of a past collective German responsibility in their arguments justifying surrender to totalitarianism by unilateral disarmament now...
...14.50 paper...
...Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant, edited by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., Yale University Press, $29.95...
...There were no comparable events in Germany until they were arranged by the Hitler regime...
...Jean Denis Bredin's masterful book on the Dreyfus case, LAffaire (1983), brings the passionate intensity of that popular movement alive...
...Profits had begun to rise as a proportion of industrial income and costs had begun to fall enough to restore some measure of business confidence...
...The enemy is inflation...
...As Golo Mann has put it: "The entire 'Third Reich' was a shamefully stupid episode of German history, in no way the inevitable result of what went before, but the result of a chain of accidents, errors and avoidable bungles...
...Obviously, Papen could have found no better ammunition against Schleicher than a plan to convert the property of Hindenburg and his closest friends into small family farms...
...She had already risked her life by helping Schulenburg...
...an abscess, virus, or contagion...
...On the other hand, Hitler must have concluded that he could not succeed in reaching his objective of murdering all Jews in peace time...
...The Complete Audio Classics Series 1. ♦ COMMON SENSE ♦ DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 2. ♦ CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE ♦ THE LIBERATOR 3. ∢ WEALTH OF NATIONS (Part 1)* 4. ♦ WEALTH OF NATIONS (Part 2)* 5. ∢ THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO ♦ THE SOCIAL CONTRACT 6. ♦ THE PRINCE ♦ DISCOURSE ON VOLUNTARY SERVITUDE 7. ∢ ON LIBERTY ♦ VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN 8. ♦ REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE ♦ RIGHTS OF MAN 9. ∢ LEVIATHAN* 10...
...they differ only in their prognoses: Laqueur is an optimist and Sauzay a pessimist...
...Yet with heroic exceptions, the Protestant, and only to a somewhat lesser extent the Catholic, clergy were as passive in the face of evil as the laity...
...In the east, ominous quiet...
...1985 were spontaneous and not organized by a totalitarian government...
...Given these statistics, and the fact that even the hard core of card-carrying Nazi party members in the Weimar Republic contained only a small rabidly anti-Semitic minority, I find it difficult to attribute any culpability (beyond original sin) to the average Nazi voter...
...They are still changing the world today...
...The average American," she says, "or even the typical present day German who did not experience Hitler's tyranny, has little conception of the magnitude and functions of power in a non-democratic state...
...Marxism," says Laqueur, "ought to prove that Hitler and his party had not been free agents, but merely running dogs of monopoly capitalism...
...she had lost all her possessions...
...The misreading of German history, with its attribution of a measure of collective culpability to the Germans, amplifies and perverts that search for national identity...
...But lack of sainthood and of readiness for martyrdom are not unique to Germans, nor have other peoples been subject to continuing reprobation for such deficiencies...
...Hence, among modernist Catholics there is a corrosive myth that Catholics who believe in the creeds and the Church's magisterium are both narrow-minded ignoramuses who self-righ-teously cling to the letter of the law and mean-spirited bigots who fear Protestants and fail in charity toward their neighbors...
...Both make much of the German need for ideological certainty and perfection, both describe the young's delusion about the moral equivalence of the Soviet Union and the United States and the resulting neutralism and agitation for unilateral disarmament, and both stress the need and search for a sense of national identity...
...If we wish to monitor our progress in the battle against inflation, it is critical that prices be free to tell us the bad news as well as the good...
...A reserve officer wants "to massacre the dirty Yids...
...Soldiers who had witnessed the shooting of Jews and Poles in the East were threatened with execution for revealing what they had seen...
...Somewhat surprisingly the second spectacular anti-Semitic outrage before World War II, the pogrom known as Kristallnacht, launched by the regime in November 1938 after more than five years of constant, virulent anti-Semitic propaganda, aroused more widespread dismay among Germans than the boycott of April 1933, launched after only two months of totalitarian propaganda...
...Under conditions of total war and total terror, it is more than doubtful, in any event, whether effective popular resistance to the extermination would have been possible, even if the facts had been widely known...
...The wallowing of Protestant clerics in guilt is a bit more understandable than that of other groups, for if any calling can be expected to respond to the challenge of martyrdom it is the priesthood...
...namely, too rapid a growth of the money supply...
...Hitler's election tactics from 1928 to his seizure of power in 1933 can be explained only by his knowledge of the listen to Jefferson...
...To find a particular culpability in Germany∔ because it was the only industrial country in which so many voted for so evil a party, although other countries, like 32 the United States, had been hit equally or worse by the Depression∔is to forget that in Germany, the misery of the Depression had come as a last straw...
...The first of these was a boycott against Jewish businesses, doctors, and lawyers in April 1933 that was LibertyClassics The History of England From the Invasion of Julius Caesar To the Revolution in 1688 By David Hume All Six Volumes Now Available...
...By contrast there was "a torrent of reports" indicating public disapproval of Kristallnacht...
...One of the reasons for the disenchantment was the Nazis' alliance with the Communists in a wildcat strike of transportation workers in Berlin, which caused widespread violence and paralyzed the capital for five days...
...The myths that Hitler and his crimes were the result of "the German character" inevitably following Hegel, Bismarck, the Kaiser, Richard Wagner, Nietzsche, if not Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, that Germany was the nursery of genocidal anti-Semitism, and that the ordinary German shared a heavy responsibility for Hitler's crimes, bedevil our foreign policy here and now...
...Then, there is the abiding myth that Catholics can't really explain why they are Catholic, that when Catholics are challenged their convictions crumble, and hence Catholics fear democracy, the open circulation of ideas, and freedom of religion...
...Someone from Baccarat would like to see "all the Yids...
...At the beginning of January 1933 Hitler was on the ropes...
...To gain perspective on the meaning of these percentages, it is useful to compare them with public opinion polls taken in the United States from 1938 to 1946, presented in David S. Wyman's chilling description of American anti-Semitism during that period: "From 15 to 24 percent . . . looked on Jews as 'a menace to America.' " Fifteen percent "would 'In Diary of a Nightmare: Berlin, 1942-1945, Ursula von Kardorff, a young Prussian anti-Nazi journalist, notes how an American consular official rebuked a German "Aryan" colleague of hers for attempting to help a Jewish girl obtain a visa: How could a German woman "intervene on behalf of a Jewess, 'because after all that is forbidden, isn't it?' " Miss von KardorfPs dismay would have been even greater had she known that just before the War the American ambassador in London, Joe Kennedy, had advised the Nazi ambassador to be less noisy about the Jews, adding that "he himself understood the . . . [Hitlerian] policy on Jews completely...
...Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr...
...A he reactions of Germans to the anti-Semitic realities that prevailed after Hitler's seizure of power are consistent with this analysis...
...and the kind of remark that might have led to arrest and temporary incarceration in 1938 would have led to swift execution in 1942...
...A cook sends his subscription "to roast the Jews...
...For instance in the New York Times of August 22, Herbert Mitgang, in a review of Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant, quotes the following from William Shirer's simplistic history of the Third Reich, in the manner of one proclaiming an unquestionable fact: Germany was ready for its Fuhrer...
...Surely even the most brutal fanatics could not be so absolutely bestial...
...William B. Todd, Kerr Centennial Professor in English History and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin, has provided a new Foreword in Volume I. Hume's own cumulative index may be found at the conclusion of Volume VI...
...Needless to say, Rome developed a false sense of security...
...Nor was that disbelief surprising, as Sarah Gordon says: Since what they heard was on the surface incredible by normal standards of common sense and past experience, this is not shocking...
...During the waning days of the Roman Empire, messengers who brought bad news to Rome from the front were tortured to death...
...The reparation payments imposed by the Dawes and Young Plans were virtually abolished by the Lausanne Conference in June 1932...
...The Knowledge Products Audio Classics Series can become a mobile seminar...
...For example, the British consul general in Frankfurt reported: "I am persuaded that, if the government of Germany depended on the suffrage of the people, those in power and responsible for these outrages would be swept away by a storm of indignation if not put up against a wall and shot...
...the history of the two first Stuarts will be most agreeable to the Tories: That of the two last, to the Whigs...
...The article was seriously written and did not sound like atrocity propaganda...
...It said the camp is at a place called Auschwitz...
...These are myths that are constantly reiterated as the gospel truth...
...A hat the Nazi voters' hope for something new had nothing to do with Hitler's crimes to come, must be concluded from a recent scholarly work by Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans and the "Jewish Question...
...Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery...
...On the other hand, "many people bought deliberately from Jews...
...I do not believe that these parliamentarians were more than freaks and outsiders, nor do I agree with Sebastian Haffner that Hitler's anti-Semitism bent on extermination existed "only in Eastern Europe from where he copied it...
...In countless cities mobs of thousands took to the streets crying death to the Jews...
...The most persuasive evidence of the extent Germans disapproved of Kristallnacht is found in the Propaganda Ministry's directives to the press...
...L'Affaire, by Jean-Denis Bredin, Paris 1983...
...Among secular humanists there is a politically handy myth that only Catholics regard abortion as murder, and that no one in his right mind who is not a Catholic would object to legalized abortion...
...Clearly, you can't deal with a problem if you don't know it exists...
...Even worse, it wasn't long before Rome received only good news∔or no news at all...
...The Empire fell...
...the output of proFranz M Oppenheimer, a frequent contributor, is a Washington lawyer...
...This 'age of information' in which we live is not necessarily the age of wisdom...
...Reichskanzler Kurt von Schleicher: Weimars Letze Chance Gegen Hitler, by Friedreic-Karl von Plehwe, Esslingen, FRG 1983...
...This is her diary entry for December 27, 1944: I read surreptitiously in the lavatory at the Kochstrasse a copy of the Journal de Geneve, which Barchen slipped to me...
...Two tapes will arrive approximately every 30 days, 24 cassettes in all...
...It is instructive to contemplate how an especially well-informed young woman, Ursula von Kardorff, heard for the first time of Auschwitz...
...it had debts of 12 million marks and no visible means of prospective financial support...
...It was more kindly anti-Semitism than that preached by the Nazis, but anti-Semitism nevertheless...
...At the beginning of January 1933 even the Social Democratic party newspaper, Vorwarts, had to conclude that "Hitlerism has long since lost all credit with high finance, heavy industry and the large landowners...
...The ideas of Jefferson, Paine, Thoreau, Marx, Rousseau and others have changed the world...
...Barchen and I could talk of nothing else all evening...
...The Investment in Money: No Obligation For 30 Days...
...According to several historians cited by Sarah Gordon, anti-Semitism was not a major campaign theme during that period, and, in particular, Hitler himself toned down his anti-Semitism to win votes after 1928...
...37 the most visible postwar German writers, who were overwhelmed by the Nazi past and did more than any historians to resurrect it, have also been major advocates of crippling NATO...
...TWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT* 12...
...Professor Gordon's data on anti-Semitism should lay to rest the conventional wisdom...
...We pay book rate postage on prepaid orders...
...We should realize that the willingness of so many "good" and anti-Nazi Germans to participate in Hitler's economy and in Hitler's war, even to the point of doing heroic deeds, is not a different phenomenon from that of the willingness of so many well-meaning Americans to participate in Pugwash and countless other conferences, meetings, and seminars with supposedly Russian "opposite numbers" that are carefully selected by the KGB...
...Le Vertige Allemand, by Brigitte Saugay, Paris 1985...
...And the bad news messenger is a rising price level...
...Send for our first package of tapes...
...As those Americans manage to put aside their knowledge of Soviet crimes, so those Germans managed to put aside their knowledge of Hitler's crimes while fighting for the abstractions of "doing their duty," "not letting their comrades down," and a "legitimate" German government...
...At the same time they manage to convert the concrete crimes of the Soviet government into an abstraction that can be kept in a desk drawer while pursuing the lofty goals of peace and brotherhood...
...I know that by spelling out the proposition that the vast majority of Germans, "the Germans" in common parlance, carried no greater guilt for Hitler's crimes than others did for those of Stalin yesterday and of dear Mr...
...Two books, just published, Germany Today by Walter Laqueur in this country, and Le Vertige Allemand by Brigitte Sauzay in France, permit us to trace the connection between mistaken assumptions about German collective guilt and the prevalence of irrational anti-Americanism, pacifism, and other peculiarities among the German young...
...The high and the low, workers, artisans, generals, students, doctors, lawyers, and, alas, many priests rushed to the defense of the forger and false witness's honor...
...They are taken into a big washroom, ostensibly to have a bath, and gas is then pumped in through hidden valves, until they are all dead...
...They smashed shop windows, looted and attacked synagogues...
Vol. 18 • November 1985 • No. 11
