How Hitler Happened

...Intoxication and rapture are the code words for Fascism, for its front, its face, just as terror and death are the code words for its backside____I am the typical child of those innocuous Germans who were never Nazis and without whom the Nazis would never have been able to do their work...

...It was just too promising____" Hitler's bloodless invasions were admired on esthetic grounds...

...They would then come to wrack and ruin all the sooner...

...The question arises purely sociologically what is left to live by when politics and sexuality are gone...

...Since his own correspondence revealed that he was innocent of any plotting, Horst was not tortured...

...Both parents were a bit shaken by Crystal Night: "Thoughtful faces at home...

...Without knowing that half-Jewish, half-Russian Vanya had joined an underground group, Horst delivered some sealed letters for him and soon found himself with dozens of conspirators in Moabit Prison...

...Like Hitler, my mother was 'artistic' and 'sort of Catholic,"' says the son...

...InVanya's flat there were no inhibitions, everything under the sun was discussed...

...They considered the Social Democrats Reds, and Reds were carnal 'rabble.' "Came the summer of 1932____And now someone had appeared who was eager to carry them ever higher, as on wings...

...I was not content with outrage____I had stumbled upon something the phenomenon of the unpolitical German petit bourgeoisie, which in its social insecurity, its instability and need for the irrational, furnished the fertile ground for the internal seizure o f power by National Socialism...

...Karl Radek, who later paid for his foresight with his life, is said to have remarked to a German Communist while pointing to Stalin's office in the Kremlin: "There sit those who bear the guilt for Hitler's victory...

...Communist ideologues among them Willi Munzenberg, who controlled the liberal press and the anti-Fascist movement during the Weimar decade, manipulating public opinion "in the interests not of revolution but of Soviet domestic and foreign policy" presented the Social Democrats as the primary menace to democracy in Germany...

...All was nevertheless forgotten in the joy of Germany's resurgence...

...Hitler exploited the great fears (of Communism and of modernity) that had afflicted the German bourgeoisie for a century...

...The Weimar politicians had had no psychological sense" with which to combat this...

...Does the Fuhrer know about this...

...The Krugers in Eichkamp (a suburb of Berlin) shared these characteristics...

...When Hitler came to power, it was not because finance capital in Germany had engineered it, nor did he thereafter do the bidding of those who were supposed to have "made" him...

...He projected the latent forces in the German soul, a culminating expression of German Romanticism...

...Fortunately for Horst Kriiger whose book is considered a classic in West Germany and may indeed be the most revealing work about "how it happened" that anyone has written he did not remain unpolitical long...

...I learned at an early age that a decent German is always unpolitical...

...and his analysis of "Hitler and the New Generation" parallels Kriiger's autobiography remarkably...

...How greatly this Marxist fallacy fostered the tragic denouement of 1933 is driven home definitively in David Pike's scholarly study, German Writers in Soviet Exile...

...They were mildly anti-Semitic...

...The man was an artist...

...technicians who operate without feeling or hatred, pleasant and proper civil servants____I did not exclude myself...

...They all lived in constant fear of backsliding, wanted to stay on top, briskly voted for the German National Party, watered their lawns and set great store by order and convention...

...It was resentful of Versailles and the deprivations forced upon Germany in the aftermath of that treaty...

...The more complex, historical reasons why Hitlerism triumphed in Germany rather than somewhere else (every country, even England and France, had its colored-shirt bigot with a flair for oratory and public drama) are treated exhaustively, and at times exhaustingly, by Gordon A. Craig, a professor emeritus of humanities at Stanford...

...Reviewed by Selden Rodman Author, "Tongues of Fallen Angels" With one important difference I was an American student, not a native German my introduction to Nazism was the same as Horst Kriiger's...

...448 pp...

...My father was peaceable and good-natured...

...a breed unknown until now, the administrators and bureaucrats of mass death...

...Neighbors...

...Craig, too, was a student in Germany during the '30s, and this gives a breath of life to the first part of his book...

...Horst's father did disapprove of the Blood Purge in 1934: "It would have been better to try 'that kind' before a proper court rather than shoot them in bed...

...Later on, though where such chapters as "Religion," "Money," "Germans and Jews," "Women," "Professors and Students," "Soldiers," etc...

...John Chrysostom (347-407) and Martin Luther (1483-1546) had encouraged so actively...

...Bored with his family and Eichkamp, he drifted into the company of a nonconformist friend, Vanya, early in 1939...

...are pursued with an almost Teutonic relentlessness and every event is split down the middle to contrast West with East German practices the reader comes up for breath every 10 minutes to save himself from drowning in alphabet soup...

...Craig shifts part of the load of guilt for his mind-numbing meticulousness on the subject of his final chapter, "The Awful German Language...

...Each of its members was much taken with German romantic poetry, neoclassical sculpture and Wagner's operas...

...Since "Fascism was an unavoidable phase to be passed through before the revolution could occur," it was falsely reasoned, "why not let the Nazis into power...

...Vanya, saved from death in the concentration camps by the judiciary that had sentenced him to life for high treason, was eventually liberated by the Russians, who turned him into a devout Marxist...

...The family I lived with for some months in Munich in 1931-32 was lower middle class, Catholic, fearful of Communism...

...All of us sat like marionettes____My parents were not only unpolitical but also unerotic and asexual...

...29.50...

...He was erecting opera houses and art galleries____My mother joined the Nazi Cultural Association____ She bought her first swastika pennant from a Jew...

...Hitler "spoke to everyone's secret grievance and hidden desire as well as to the collective mood...

...But the climax is the author's account of attending the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in 1964...

...He worked in a tiny state-career, inspector in the Prussian ministry of culture____All his life he left home at 8:23 and returned at 4:21____ In our family nothing was ever noticed...

...German Writers in Soviet Exile: 1933-1945 By David Pike North Carolina...

...The people, as if electrified, recognized themselves in him...

...Craig is especially illuminating in pinpointing the contributions of German Romanticism and Catholicism to the Hitler mystique...

...He offered salvation by means of art and myth...

...Of course, as with everything else German that contributed its increment to the disaster of 1935-45, the language has already been dealt with most dev-astatingly by Germans themselves notably GoetheandLessing, Heine and Nietzsche...

...It was the last three, together with Theodor Mommsen and Moses Mendelssohn, who also gave early warning against the virus of anti-Semitism, a virus that such early figures as St...

...Released after a year, he served on the Russian and Italian fronts, defecting in March of 1945 to an American regiment closing in on Berlin from the West...

...The reunion of the two young men at a restaurant in East Berlin is one of the high points of the book...

...maybe the three go together...

...I was aghast to find that murderers look like this so harmless, so amiable and fatherly...