Catrine Clay - The Good Germans: Resisting the Nazis, 1933-1945

Anthony Sheil
(19332017)
Agent, and friend

CONTENTS

Translations from the German are the authors own. The dialogue is invented, but never the content.

My father always said there were no Good Germans. I suppose you can understand it: he fought them for five years during the Second World War. In fact, that view was widespread among his generation: there was something wrong with the German psyche, a sort of Teutonic fatal flaw. At first, I didnt take much notice too busy with my own life. Later I got to thinking: but surely there were Germans and there were Nazis and they were not the same thing. Later still, I learned that two-thirds of Germans some twenty million people had never voted for the Nazi Party, as the National Socialist German Workers Party was known. The near hysterical crowds featured in the newsreels of the time, screaming Sieg Heil! and throwing bouquets of flowers as Hitler drove past in his black Mercedes, never amounted to more than a few hundred thousand. The membership of the Nazi Party when they came to power through a fateful coalition of right-wing parties in 1933, was some two million. For them Hitler was their Fhrer, the man who would lead them out of their desperate lives following Germanys humiliating defeat in the First World War and the chaos of the Weimar years which followed. But what of those two-thirds of Germans who did not vote for the Nazis and had to live through the Nazi terror regime, then the Second World War, and then, once it was all over, suffer the opprobrium of the whole world as more and more of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis became public knowledge, extermination camps and all? Not to mention their own feelings of guilt, because many of those Good Germans ended up believing it had all been their fault. What of them?

Ive been working on the Nazi period off and on for many years, first at the BBC making history documentaries, then in writing books. Now Ive come to the subject which has been hovering all these years: what of those two thirds? How would I have managed if Id had to live through that terror regime any terror regime for that matter knowing that even the slightest indication that I wasnt a committed Nazi could have lost me my job or got me sent me to a concentration camp. Or shot. Or hanged. Or guillotined. What would any of us do?

Within just six months of the Machtergreifung , the seizure of power, on 30 January 1933, Germanys democracy had been replaced by the Nazi regime: no more political parties, trade unions, independent judiciary, civil service, free press or independent churches. The policy of Gleichschaltung , brought in by March 1933, meant those who were not politically aligned teachers, doctors, civil servants were removed from their jobs and, if they persisted in opposing the regime, arrested, sent to a concentration camp, shot while trying to escape or simply shot on the spot. Many Jews had already lost their jobs. The Volksgericht , the Peoples Court, was set up early in 1934 as an alternative legal system to bypass the traditional judicial system, specifically for acts of treason. Treason could be anything from not giving the Heil Hitler salute with sufficient zeal, to taking part in a full-scale plot to assassinate Hitler.

War was always part of the grand plan for the Nazis, as Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf as early as 1925, in order to gain Lebensraum , the space for living necessary to bring about the triumph of the Master Race and what Hitler referred to as the Thousand Year German Reich, or Third Reich, the natural successor to the Holy Roman Empire (First Reich) and the German Empire (Second Reich).

As the terror regime took hold, most of those Germans who werent Nazis just tried to keep their heads down and protect their families they moved to the country or pretended to support the regime to avoid being denounced by neighbours, and they tried to work out what was really happening in the Reich, surrounded as they were by Nazi propaganda and fake news. But hundreds of thousands of Germans, mostly unknown, decided to resist the regime in large ways and small: Communists, Social Democrats, Catholics, Protestants, Quakers and Jehovahs Witnesses, teachers, shopkeepers, Prussian aristocrats, priests, army officers, factory workers, mothers, grandfathers each risking their lives every day during that time, a period which lasted no more than twelve years, but which cost millions of lives.

Once power gets into the wrong hands there is little the individual can do.

So I decided to write a book about those Good Germans who tried to resist the Nazis in small ways and large. But how? I didnt want to write the big history again the one about Hitler and Himmler and Goebbels. I wanted to write about people like you and me. Reverse things: write the small history big and the big history small. But where to find such small, personal stories of quiet courage the unknown stories, based on memoirs, many unpublished? Luckily my years of interest stood me in good stead: I knew where to look. And I speak German.

This is not to ignore the famous stories of resistance to Nazi rule, like the White Rose Group in Munich, but more to show that there were hundreds of thousands of other, unknown people acting at the same time. So the book starts in 1932, in the lead-up to the January 1933 Machtergreifung , and ends in 1946 when everything the terror regime, the war, all the destruction and downfall and the millions of dead was over, though far from done.

I decided on six characters, making them as wide a selection as possible: workers and aristocrats, Communists and conservatives, women and men, young and old. Because their actions inevitably affected the people around them, they are not seen in isolation but as part of their families: a brother and sister; a wife; a father with three children; an only son; the parents of a Communist pioneer daughter. Their stories are interwoven throughout the book, each experiencing the big events of Nazi history as they unfold in their own small lives. Good Germans, all.

BERNT ENGELMANN is a schoolboy living in Dsseldorf in 1932 at the start of this story. His father is a businessman, his mother a housewife. He is an only child. The family is an ordinary German family, generally Social Democrat but not especially political or religious. They join a local clandestine resistance group made up of people like themselves a teacher, a tailor, a lawyer, a pastor, and led by Tante Ney, Aunt Ney, who runs the bakery and caf on the corner of their street, welcoming everyone, including local Nazis who never suspect this old woman who used to treat them well in their poor days, before they rose and rose to unheard-of positions of power and influence. The Engelmanns reason: they simply cannot countenance what they see happening all around them under the new terror regime. And for that they risk their lives.

FABIAN VON SCHLABRENDORFF is a law student in Berlin, serious-minded and quietly determined. His father died when Fabian was 16 and his mother was left to bring up her five children on her own. The family are anti-Nazi from the very beginning. When we first meet Fabian, in 1933, after the Nazi Machtergreifung , he is walking across Berlin in search of a man he doesnt know and has never met a man from a very different background to his own privileged one: Ernst Niekisch, the editor of a magazine called Widerstand , Resistance. Fabian is looking for like-minded people to start fighting the Nazis, whoever they are. Among the secret resisters the traditional class divisions are breaking down, factory worker and Prussian aristocrat working hand in hand, finding they have much more in common than they ever realised.

RUDOLF DITZEN is a middle-aged man, already famous as the author Hans Fallada, best known for his novel Alone in Berlin . But he is also a morphine addict, drinker, liar and womaniser who killed a friend in a duel when he was young and has done time in prison for embezzlement. He has been in several clinics and lunatic asylums, trying to cure him of his addictions. Rudolf is married to the strong and long-suffering Suse and they have three young children. They live in Carwitz, a rural hamlet in Mecklenburg in northern Germany, where Rudolf writes furiously day and night, chain-smoking all the way. His subject, time and again, is the decent little people of Germany who have somehow to manage their difficult lives. This is his act of resistance reaching out to his readers. Not for him acts of great courage. I am a weak man, but not a bad man , he wrote to his mother. The problem for Rudolf is how to keep going under this Nazi terror regime without making too many compromises and still remaining true to his liberal convictions.