World War Two

Berlin, September 30th, 1937. Spartacus Olson reporting from the German capital. This quarter, some of the last remaining foundations for resistance to the Nazis fell as some of the few remaining institutional spaces where dissent could still be voiced, however narrowly, were violently shuttered and the very concept of work was militarized. Tonight, we look back at a quarter when from the outside Germany looked surprisingly quiet inside a stormy world, but from the inside it looked ever likelier that Hitler was going to go to war. The summer of 1937 has seen the world slide even further into violence and authoritarianism. Japan's war with China exploded after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. Shanghai became a battlefield. Stalin's purges tore through the Soviet Union. Palestine faced continued unrest and the Peel Commission proposed partition into Jewish and Arab states with the Arab state linked to Transjordan. Spain's civil war ground on and the dictatorship of Hitler and Mussolini drew visibly closer. Across the world, democracy and peace are losing ground. That went for Germany as well. Although here it wasn't the thunderous bangs of battlefield civil unrest and public purges, it was the continued hush of a cold Nazi wind eroding away diversity, liberty, and freedom of thought. The regime moved resolutely but without fanfare to close down independent cultural, religious, and economic spaces, subordinating civil society and militarized the daily lives of the population, turning labor, art, and even faith into tools of the totalitarian state. These moves bridged the gap between grand political pageantry and the silent terror of the secret police, ensuring that no German can stand apart from the National Socialist community as it looks like the regime continues to march towards conflict, a march that would tolerate no dissent. It started right at the beginning of the quarter when the Gestapo launched a wider wave of repression against what had until now been one of the only safe haven for criticism against the Nazi ideology, the Protestant Confessing Church. On July 1st, they arrested the figurehead of that church, Pastor Martin Niemöller. By September, one of the Confessing Church's most important training centers had been shut down and the movement was more isolated, surveilled, and intimidated than ever. From controlling religion, they moved on to art. On July 18th, Adolf Hitler inaugurated the monumental Haus der Deutschen Kunst, House of German Art in Munich, showcasing state-approved racially pure works. The very next day, the propaganda ministry opened the juxtaposed degenerate art exhibition nearby, deliberately displaying confiscated modernist masterpieces in a chaotic, mocking arrangement to incite public revulsion. Simultaneously, the physical machinery of terror expanded. On July 15th, the SS established a new concentration camp on the Ettersberg hill near Weimar. In the economic sphere, the militarization of industry continued. Frustrated by private industry's reluctance to mine unprofitable domestic iron ore, Hermann Göring founded the state-owned Reichswerke Hermann Göring on July 15th. This move will pour public funds into what fiscally responsible, profit-driven corporations deemed wasteful and inefficient, showcasing once again that neither economic reality nor practicality shall stand in the way of rearmament. Huge public funds were also dedicated to massive displays of political choreography. Between September 6th and 13th, the NSDAP held the annual Nuremberg Rally, officially dubbed the Rally of Work. While ostensibly celebrating reduced unemployment, it looked more like another step in the militarization of civil society, presenting regimented columns of the labor service as a uniformed army. This spectacle of unified power was soon followed by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's state visit to Germany in late September, culminating in a colossal rally in Berlin that projected the strength of the emerging fascist axis to the world. While Mussolini and Hitler displayed militant pomp and circumstance, the yet darker side of the Nazi ideology could be gleaned from the establishment of the new concentration camp to be called Buchenwald. The method is to ship the prisoners there before there even is a camp and force them to build their own prison. The construction work is carried out under grueling circumstances, under the constant threat of violence by the guards. Several inmates are already reported to have perished from exhaustion and abuse. The camp underlines the expansion of the immediate targets of Nazi terror that we saw the beginning of last quarter. The inmate population here is more heterogeneous in comparison to the camps at Dachau and Sachsenhausen. Alongside political prisoners, among others, Buchenwald has absorbed hundreds of Jehovah's Witnesses. But it was the other religious target, the Protestant Confessing Church, that was the greater focus of the Gestapo in the quarter. The arrest of Pastor Niemöller on July 1st sent a shockwave through the movement. Niemöller had long infuriated the regime by founding the Pastors' Emergency League to combat state interference in church affairs and oppose the exclusion of Jewish converts from the clergy. From his pulpit in Berlin-Dahlem, he delivered defiant sermons to packed congregations, openly condemning top Nazi officials by name, reading out lists of arrested pastors, and leading prayers for non-Aryans who had been deprived of their jobs. By September, the Gestapo had also completely suppressed the seminary at Finkenwalde run by the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. A staunch opponent who had publicly defended the equal status of Jewish converts since 1939, Bonhoeffer had established the underground school to train a new generation of clergy outside [music] of state control. Its closure effectively choked off the training of opposition clergy. The incessant anti-Semitic rhetoric and gradual suppression of Germany's tiny Jewish population continued to grind away like clockwork. A very public expression of anti-Semitism this quarter was that they were supposedly corrupting art and culture as part of the delusion that the Jews seek world domination by any means. Thus, the very essence of the crackdown on modernity and art was aligned with the Nazis' virulent anti-Semitism. While that was for certain the dominating tone when the exhibit of Nazi-approved art opened at the House of German Art in Munich on July 18th, it also seemed likely that it is Hitler's own rigid aesthetic dogmas that are driving this cultural purge. As he declared at the opening speech to the new approved art exhibition, the regime is determined to purge the life of German art of phraseology, threatening that works of art which cannot be understood in and of themselves will from now on no longer find their way to the German folk. He insisted that art is not a fashion, but cubism and Dadaism have nothing to do with our German folk. He went on to explicitly equate modernism with genetic defect and political subversion, declaring a ruthless war to eradicate the last few elements that are subverting our culture. He marked the avant-garde artists as pre-historical antediluvian cultural stone agers and art stutterers whose creators belonged in medical care or criminal courts. A stone's throw away from the newly erected marshally rigid exhibition hall, on the following day, the propaganda ministry opened the degenerate art exhibition as an anti-pole and deliberate mockery of modernism. At the inauguration, the curator of that exhibit, art professor and Nazi ideologue Adolf Ziegler, explained to us how this is supposed to be an example of the subversion attempted by the imagined Jewish enemy in the culture war that Germany is supposedly facing. You see around us these monstrous products of madness, insolence, incompetence, and degeneration. What this exhibition presents causes all of us shock and disgust. I have shown by means of one example their urge of museum directors to display only what is pathological and degenerate. I do not have the time here to show you, my national comrades, everything that these fellows, acting on behalf of and as trailblazers for international Jewry, permitted themselves to commit as crimes against German art. Over 600 confiscated works by artists like Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, and Marc Chagall were displayed chaotically alongside slogans attacking cultural Bolshevism and Jewish influence. The campaign quickly escalated. From August onward, Ziegler began to scour public galleries nationwide seizing thousands of modern artworks. This cultural purge aims to eliminate all abstract and expressionist art and is escalating the exodus of Germany's most prominent artists and intellectuals like Beckmann who fled into exile the same day that the exhibition opened. The exhibit puts into context last quarter's ban on independent art criticism and enforcement of only art description. A controlled narrative in the press now ensures that the public absorbs these visual dictates without contradiction. Thus, the press enthusiastically promoted the degenerate art exhibition as an educational warning, utilizing sensationalist headlines that has already drawn over a million, turning the destruction of modern art into a massive populist spectacle. The economy was no less of a spectacle. The foundation of the Reichswerke Hermann Göring on July 15th put on display the strange economic ideas that the regime is pursuing. Economists have long frowned on the idea that Germany would be able to achieve complete military autarky within its own borders. The country is not big enough to provide the natural resources needed for that, and many of the resources have been collected for centuries. This is especially true for many iron ore operations where what remains to be mined is not anywhere close to commercially viable. Mining is costly, and with low yield of low-grade ore, it is financial suicide to try. The Nazis have been trying to press the Ruhr industrialists to do it anyway, but they have stoutly declined. Frustrated by this refusal, Göring has now bypassed private enterprise entirely in an attempt to ensure domestic supplies for armaments. Capitalized at 5 million Reichsmark, the state-owned conglomerate is set to expand to integrate mining, steel production, and weapons manufacturing. But, at a cost and efficiency that is at best questionable. That issue becomes all the more pregnant when you consider that iron and steel prices in Germany are being kept artificially low around 20% below the world market price to subsidize military growth and exports. The issues that are being created by the drive for military autarky is impacting the broader economy. Up to 2/3 of industrial investment is being diverted into war and war-related sectors. Free wage bargaining has been crushed, labor is politically controlled, and although employment and weekly earnings have improved for many workers, consumer choice and living standards remain squeezed by shortages, longer hours, and the priority given to rearmament. It would seem that the solution against potential unrest has now gone from Agitprop for patriotic sacrifice to military regimentation of the workforce. That was on full display at the September Nuremberg Rally of Work, which celebrated the supposed near elimination of the unemployment and simultaneously showcased the workforce in rigid military uniformity. Behind this facade of Prussian-style order and progress, the reality was an economy overheating from military contracts, severe raw material shortages, and covert austerity that prioritized strategic output over consumer comfort and fiscal responsibility. But such things did not seem to worry the Nazi elite as the mood among the Nazi leadership looked much like aggressive triumph and supreme confidence bolstered by their successful cultural purges and international pageantry. The massive crowds at the Nuremberg Rally and the spectacular reception for Mussolini affirmed their belief that the regime possessed unassailable, popular, and diplomatic strength. As we have seen, beneath this triumphant exterior lay a vindictive determination to crush ideological holdouts. Commenting on the arrest of Pastor Niemöller, Joseph Goebbels coldly noted that the defiant clergyman must be put away until he can no longer see or hear. But all these actions to atomize German cultural life and streamline it into a The nightmare of sameness was not just cold calculation. The actions of the party were anchored in ideological conviction and fanaticism. Commenting on the program to rid Germany of modern culture and the degenerate art exhibition, Goebbels noted that they had hung pieces that make your flesh creep. These were by no means unpopular opinions. For many ordinary Germans, the spectacular pageantry and economic recovery fostered genuine enthusiasm. At the degenerate art exhibition, young party activists in brown shirts were seen laughing and jeering at the modern paintings. Some party groups who visited the exhibition telegrammed the propaganda ministry with messages such as "The artists should be tied up next to their pictures so that every German can spit in their faces." While there are certainly many Germans who frowned at all of this, the cultural reshaping of Germany is being met with enthusiasm by even more, sometimes even by those at the margins of Nazi intolerance. In Hamburg, the nationalist Luise Solmitz, whose own household is threatened by Nazi racial policy because of her husband's Jewish ancestry, embraced this new age by the newly encouraged pseudo-Germanic name for the months, substituting words like Julmond instead of July. Conversely, other parts of the targeted minorities and cultural elites felt a profound sense of despair. The expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, watching his life's work confiscated and famed, wrote bitterly from his home in Davos, Switzerland. "I had always hoped that Hitler was for all Germans, and now he has defamed so many and really serious, good artists of German blood. The elimination of freedom has now reached the inner sanctum of the individual, religion and abstract artistic expression. The Nazis began by dictating opinion and angry articles and loud, screaming voices to out-scream the opposition. Then they seized control of the means to communicate and silence those other voices. From there, they proceeded to eliminate political speech by forcefully removing the sources. But throughout, there were still, at least in theory, spaces left for whispering dissent with a sermon, a prayer, or a paintbrush. With the crackdown on the Catholic Church last quarter, the Protestant opposition this quarter, and the elimination of freedom to even literally paint outside the lines of Hitler's dictate, the most basic freedom to believe has been curtailed. It is no coincidence that this coincides with the organization of labor into uniform lines of men marching under the Nazi flag with spades shouldered like rifles. For if you will make war, your soldiers must be disciplined, obedient, and coordinated. Nothing is more contrary to the unquestioning following of orders than the imagination that there might be something greater beyond. This is why freedom of expression, freedom of belief, is the most fundamental of ideas. Not in the way that the likes of Hitler and his followers frame it, to be as intolerant as you like, to say whatever you want, however offensive and hateful. No, that is a perversion of freedom of expression that is anathema to the freedom itself. It is the freedom to define yourself, your very own identity without the interference of others, which must be founded in the tolerance of each other's identity and opinions, and an intolerance of intolerance. Consequently, you have no right to force others to think like you, and you have no right to oppress anyone with your words or actions, but you have the absolute right to think, dream, and envision as you like, and be whoever you like. If your community is allowed to encroach on those rights, you are already living under the yoke of authoritarianism, or you will be very soon. Never forget. Join us in the Time Ghost Army on timeghost.tv or patreon.com to exercise our freedom of expression in service of remembrance and learning so that we can use the lessons of the past to strive for better tomorrow. It is only thanks to the Time Ghost Army that we can put out this content.