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How NAZIs could be both better and worse than you thought they were.
This is an account of how the NAZIs affected Oberstdorf, the most Southerly village in Germany.
The proximity of Oberstdorf to mountain routes into Austria and Switzerland made the village a relatively prosperous resort in peacetime and also ensured that its inhabitants played a role in some key points in twentieth century history, especially the annexation of Austria because military reservists were well placed, well orientated and physically well-suited, to simply march across the border and take possession of key locations. The toughness and cold weather experience of the men (mostly working in outdoor trades) from Oberstdorf and the surrounding district also made them first choice for fighting on the Eastern front and the village paid a heavy price because of this.
Instructively, for the British reader, the village had minimal interactions with Britain in both peace and war. Tourists came mostly from Northern Germany and Holland. Even in wartime when villagers were listening to banned radio broadcasts from outside the Reich in the hopes of finding out what was really going on, it was to a Swiss station that they tuned. (The author doesn’t say, but, surrounded by mountains, that may well have been the easiest station both to receive and to understand.) Still, for such a rural community the inhabitants were outward-looking and knew that their prosperity depended upon strangers. The national NAZI leadership never, in fact, managed to turn even the opinion of some local NAZI officials completely against the strangers in their midst, never mind that of the general population. There was, at least at some key points in time, majority support for the NAZIs in the village, even though some key policies were disliked and the bullying antics of uniformed NAZI party members widely disapproved of.
Indeed, most of the local political confrontations were between different types of NAZI. These don’t appear to have been rival factions so much as different groups of people who had joined The Party for different reasons at different times and who held different priorities. Those who had joined because they thought something drastic simply had to be done about Germany’s core problems, were focused on doing that and either didn’t spare a lot of time for persecuting scapegoats, or even quietly sabotaged the persecution whenever a safe opportunity arose. Those who had joined out of a sense of victimhood, particularly in the early years of The Party, were utterly committed to the persecution of those they saw as persecuting themselves, and were furiously opposed to those, often more senior than them, who seemed to have other things to care about!
A larger number of Party members joined at quite a late stage, simply because it had become impossible to have a career or further any other form of ambition without joining. Those who joined simply to further their own interests could easily be incentivised to do anything Hitler wanted them to do. They may not have been as individually monstrous as some of the grudge-bearing, hatred-driven members with very low party card numbers, but in the general scheme of things they were the ones who enabled Hitler to carry out his policies. The Party was never designed to REPRESENT its members, but to be a tool by which The Leader controlled the membership and through them the Reich. If Hitler has left a legacy at all, this is it. Because all over Europe there are political parties which wouldn’t be seen dead supporting anything that might be perceived as a NAZI policy or ideology, but which are none-the-less well-honed instruments for implementing their leader’s will rather than representing that of their membership or the wider electorate. This sort of thing has become normalised in UK politics since 1994.
As for the actual policies: a lot of them, such as improving the position of farmers in society and investing in agriculture would have been reasonable or even beneficial if that was what had actually happened. But Fuhrerprinzip or the “leadership principle” meant that it was considered actually offensive for anyone in a leadership position to be seen to consider the opinions of anyone who wasn’t. And so the community of Oberstdorf, whose citizens knew an awful lot about cattle-farming in an alpine environment, found policies being dumped on it from above by people, most of whom knew nothing about farming. The seeds of failure were duly sown, not just in agriculture but across the whole of the Reich economy and German society. Even technical education, something which Germany had once been very good at, was massively dumbed down in favour of tighter control. Having lauded the men literally at the grass roots of the economy, the NAZIs proceeded to ignore them, and this, again, is something a lot of modern political parties are guilty of.
Other policies of Hitler were incapable of being beneficial however they were carried out. The Jewish Holocaust is the most obvious example, but less celebrated and in some ways even more sinister was the extermination, completed before most of the Jews were touched, of pretty well all the handicapped and disabled from the ethnic German population. Hitler had stated, in a speech, that it would benefit the German people if something like eighty thousand of the million or so babies which were born in the Reich each year were to die. He stopped short of openly saying that he was going to kill them all, but he did in fact directly and personally set in motion the killing of eighty-thousand-odd of the most handicapped or “feeble minded” people. The thing is, this was a quota, and where there was a shortage of very disabled people, less disabled ones could have been selected for termination and in many cases they were. This policy wasn’t publicly proclaimed, but local NAZI officials in Oberstdorf knew it was coming and the NAZI Mayor Fink brought his own handicapped son back from an institution, to the village where he was less likely to be selected and killed. In other instances, he quietly advised Jews and perhaps others how to register their residency in a way that made it less likely they would be “selected” for any sort of special measures. It is clear that Fink and some even higher-ranking colleagues didn’t think that this sort of policy held any benefits at all. They did not dare to openly oppose the policies, but implemented them as sparingly as they could, whereas the more self-interested NAZIs just did exactly what they were told in the hope of being rewarded for doing so.
The killing of an arbitrary percentage of the weakest in society closely parallels the activities of Lenin and Stalin, who believed that ten percent of the Bourgeoisie needed to be killed at regular intervals to effect social change by creating vacancies which people of a different social class might fill. It comes from the same class of ideas as Fuhrerprinzip, in that it’s a top-down, single-narrative way of magically creating a better world without having to engage in debate or with any complicated real-world issues. It’s hard to know where this idea originally came from, but the author’s previous book “Travellers in the Third Reich” makes it clear that Hitler and the other top NAZIs were greatly impressed by the writings and speeches of George Bernard Shaw on the topic. As were Lenin and Stalin.
It is, therefore, the Hitler policy which this reviewer most expects to see replicated in the present day, because although very few people in influential positions would admit to being admirers of Hitler, it’s almost compulsory in certain political circles to profess an admiration for George Bernard Shaw.
This is a book full of interesting insights, but it is not a book which sets out to reinforce the received “wisdom” about the NAZIs or anything else and it may well prove controversial because of this. The authors have sought out and found an awful lot of good primary source material and their work is the sum of this, rather than any particular agenda. It is, therefore, a more valuable book than others which might be easier to swallow.
A Village In the Third Reich by Julia Boyd, with Angelika Patel is published by Eliot and Thompson on the 5th of May 2022
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