The Violins in Hitler's Germany (I Mean, Vio-lence)

From 1938 onward, violence steadily increased in Nazi Germany, not even including World War II, itself. As early as 1935, a euthanasia program was formed in Germany, and was designed to eliminate all people deemed "unworthy of life", from the gene pool. The system of euthanasia was explained in the Evangelical Memorandum on the Extermination of the So-called Unworthy of Life , which basically said that people who were deemed "feebleminded and otherwise hopeless cases" were to be euthanized, so they could be put out of their misery and kept out of the German gene pool. These people included those with both mental and physical handicaps. This program garnered much opposition from the church groups, and particularly the Catholic Church. Count Clemens August von Galen, cardinal-archbishop of Münster, came out against the euthanasia program in his sermons by making statements such as, "'Yes, citizens of Muenster, wounded soldiers are being killed recklessly, since they are, productively, of no more use to the state. Mother, your boy will be killed too, if he comes back home from the front wounded.'" Here, the bishop is comparing the "uselessness" of wounded soldiers to the "uselessness" of the mentally and physically challenged, hoping to strike a chord with the audience at the obvious level that euthanasia is murder, and that murder is wrong. Due to his sermons admonishing the Nazis for their practice, they changed their policies, and curtailed the euthanasia program.

Cardinal von Galen was one of the Nazi party's most outspoken critics. Major reasons he could get away with saying what he could in the atmosphere of fear created by the Gestapo was his status in the community as being a very well known and public figure, along with the fact that he was a representative of the church, which is a hard group to suppress. When most people at the time, in Germany, were religious, sending an archbishop to a concentration camp and/or having him murdered would not be good PR for the Nazi party. It is a refreshing change to hear a story like this (an individual standing up against the Nazi government). Unfortunately, not everybody had the resolve, or the safety net of public recognition, to stand up against the Nazis.
One major reason the Nazis were able to keep a firm grasp on the people in Germany was the Gestapo. It was not just what the Gestapo would do to a person if they were found out to be traitorous or committing some somewhat harsh crime against the state, but it was the fear of what they would do, as well as the fear of those around the person turning them into the Gestapo. German citizens were deathly scared of the Gestapo, like Frau Marianne Karlsruben, who said:
No one could predict what was going to happen. Two people were there once. My cousin said they're coming and he really trembled, thinking they were people from the Gestapo who would arrest me the very last minute, nicht? It wasn't unusual that something happened in the last days. It really was tension to the end.
People were afraid to do a lot in Nazi Germany. They were afraid to even listen to the wrong radio broadcasts. Granted, they were broadcasts from British and Soviet outlets, but nevertheless, it was a crime to listen to them.
He apparently was caught listening to...one then called it enemy radio. There was such a thing with directional equipment and so on. And then they suddenly stormed in, in the door, and saw that the dial pointed to a different station. And then they just took him away. And then [he] was in a concentration camp for many years, to the end.

There was a heightened level of fear and paranoia that doing the wrong thing at the wrong time could get you hauled away to a concentration camp. The scariest thing about it is that you wouldn't know if you were being monitored at any particular, so you would have to assume you were always being watched, so that you could stay out of the concentration camps. Big Brother was indeed watching. And, while this was not at all physical violence, the mere threat of physical violence is what kept people petrified.

A case of more overt violence was Kristallnacht. On November 9th and 10th, 1938, the SA vandalized and destroyed much of the Jewish sections of many German cities. Many citizens saw this as unreal. Although there had to be some opposition to the pogrom, many Germans stood by, helplessly, and watched the SA destroy the Jewish shops and synagogues. Furthermore, what could individual citizens do? That was the argument made by Frau Maria von Lingren
The next day one heard, ja, it was the anger of the Volk that caused the synagogues to burn. The anger of the Volk unloaded itself on the Jews. But it was not the anger of the Volk. It was the SA that did it all.... One thought, 'For God's sake, what is going on? What kind of government is that we have? It's impossible! One cannot do that in a civilized country!' But what should you then do?

What should one then do? With a Gestapo that is willing to silence any opposition and a government that is going to sponsor a violent pogrom against people living inside its own borders, it is almost impossible to mount any sort of opposition to these policies. The public basically had their hands tied. But even before that, it would have to be assumed that the public would want to revolt. Most of the people in Germany were affected very minimally by these pogroms. And, if the policies did not harm them, why should they risk anything? Aside from moral convictions of what is right and wrong, they couldn't do anything.

Aside from the pogroms against the German Jewry, with the onset of World War II, the Nazis could take their hatred of Jews international. And that is exactly what they did. While the German army was rolling through Eastern Europe, groups (the Einsatzgruppen) followed behind them to round up, deport, and kill the Jews living in the recently conquered territories. This is one of the most violent actions or policies the Nazi party had. It was brutal, and it was murder. But, humans carried out the ghastly acts of the killings. Unfortunately, very few turned down the job of murdering innocent civilians, "At Jósefów a mere dozen men out of nearly 500 had responded instinctively to Major Trapp's offer to step forward and excuse themselves from the impending mass murder." The reprehensible act of mass murder was passed on by roughly only 2 percent of the men offered the job. The members of the 101st Reserve Police Battalion were even able to rationalize the killings, "My neighbor then shot the mother and I shot the child that belonged to her, because I reasoned with myself that after all without its mother the child could not live any longer." The Germans who were given a choice of whether or not to kill innocent civilians were able to do it and rationalize it. Furthermore, 80 percent of those who were called on to commit these heinous acts stayed on the squads and continued with the killings. Meanwhile, as time progressed, they did not become disturbed and develop mental angst, but rather just became calloused killing machines with better aim. These are all people who, could have said "no" on their own, but were given the opportunity, repeatedly, and never took it. These are men who have failed as human beings, and who have let the human race down.

Of course, the Einsatzgruppen lead to another dark mark in German history, the death camps. This is what most people think of when the hear of the Holocaust is the thoughts of the death camps, with the gas chambers and furnaces. Many German people knew that mass-murder was being committed, but were basically powerless to do anything, "One always heard things. Through foreign broadcasts and through rumors, which emanated from circles of people who were close to the German resistance...What could you do? What could you prove?" The attitude of the citizens seemed to be that these death camps were so secretive, and the Nazi government would never admit to it, it would be next to impossible to get them to stop. No matter how hands-off German citizens claim to have been with the Holocaust, the morals were still there for some.
It was bad and didn't have to happen. If they didn't like the Jews, they should just lock them up, but not gas them, kill them. They didn't have to kill them. I also don't know how that would have gone further, with the Jews. I don't know. They didn't have to punish them. They were also human beings, no? Hitler could have taken their possessions away from them, no? Possessions and jewelry, that they all had. But for heaven's sake not push them out, into the camps, and kill them. They didn't have to do that."
Frau Rigl had enough sense in her to see what the men who stayed on and continued the killings in the Einsatzgruppen and at the death camps for some reason could not grasp: "They [Jews] were also human beings, no?"

The period in Germany between 1938 and 1945 was certainly a bloody one. This culture of fear and violence, created by the state, sparked many different reactions from the German citizens spawned many reactions. Some citizens felt that they were powerless, and therefore could not do anything. Some used their position of power and popularity to alter governmental policy. Meanwhile, some unabashedly engaged in mass murder. Many refused to speak up because they were afraid of the Gestapo taking them away as a political prisoner. And, armed with a watchful eye and an ounce of prevention, we can keep this world from ever creating another territory that forms these types of laws of fear and violence, again.

Works Cited:

Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993).
Inside Hitler's Germany, eds. Benjamin Sax and Dieter Kuntz (Lexington: D.C. Heath & Co., 1992).
Alison Owings, Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1995).