2. What Sort of a Revolution?

Editor's Introduction

THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST REVOLUTION stressed both the dynamic of the movement and the "taming" of that dynamic through an appeal to tradition and sentiment. The following documents illustrate this double aspect of the movement. The SA came to symbolize the violence and the fighting spirit of the Nazis before their accession to power. Founded in 1921 for the purpose of providing protection at Nazi meetings, they soon found themselves embroiled in pitched battles (Saalschlachten) at these meetings against left-wing elements or those loyal to the Republic. It was not long before the SA themselves began to provoke "the enemy," seeking them out in order to do battle or marching through the streets singing songs of triumph and hate. The SA men were young, drawn largely from the ranks of the unemployed, and less interested in long-range goals than in immediate and violent change. By 1933 nearly 300,000 men had joined the organization. Most of their leaders were former soldiers who had been unable to demobilize and in their brown uniforms carried on the "war experience" which they could not forget.

Ernst Rohm, who became SA chief of staff in 1930, was such a man. He glorified his war experiences (see page 101) and gave little thought to the long-range purposes and goals which Hitler had in mind. Small wonder that the SA proved a constant challenge to party discipline. The Nazi seizure of power eliminated the enemy who had to be fought in meeting halls and on the streets. The SA was no longer necessary -- the struggle for power was a thing of the past -- and on June 30, 1934, Hitler acted to bring this restless organization under control. Ernst Rohm and other SA leaders were shot in the "night of the long knives." Not only was the power of the SA destroyed, but Nazi leaders took the opportunity to eliminate other personal enemies as well. From that point on the SA played a minor role in the Third Reich: politically its time was past, but its battles during the Nazi rise to power were idealized in memory. The hard fight in which the Nazis had triumphed was thought to provide a necessary myth for the existence of the Third Reich, but, for all that, it was true that such battles had actually taken place.

Friedrich Joachim Klaehn describes one SA unit's successful attempt to conduct a meeting against the opposition of the regular and auxiliary police as well as that of the Reichsbanner, an organization of volunteers formed to demonstrate for and to protect the Republic. The incident took place in September 1932 after the brief and abortive attempt by the Reich government to ban the SA (April 13- June 14). Instead, a new wave of SA terrorism spread throughout Germany. The restrictions described in this extract are therefore local measures directed against the intimidation of the population by Hitler's Storm Troops. Such restrictions were doubly desirable because of the approach of a November election, which spurred the SA to redouble their efforts. Hitler lost votes in that Reichstag election, and the result only added to the SA's impatience with the Fuhrer's attempt to find a legal road to power, a disillusionment with legal methods which had set in much earlier among the SA. Friedrich Klaehn was well fitted to idealize this incident. He was a propagandist for the SA and, perhaps, a leader of a troop (Sturm) himself.

The radical spirit within the SA is further illustrated by Kurt Massmann's account of a meeting-hall brawl. Massmann acted as the leader for South Hanover and Brunswick of the Strength Through Joy movement of the Labor Front (see page 341). The SA leader, the "bear" whom he describes, represents the ideal type of SA man, uncouth and thus a simple man of the people, honest and strong. This idealization of the "days of struggle" was published in a volume which intended to show German youth in action against the Republic. The Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, wrote the preface. Both Klaehn's and Massmann's stories were meant to glorify the past struggles of the National Socialists on behalf of the "German spirit" -- but they do illustrate the radicalism prevalent among the Storm Troops.

The taming of this radicalism proved no easy task, and Hanns Anderlahn, a prolific writer of books about the SA, warns against the expanding revolutionary spirit. The rejection of all family ties, advocated by some SA men in this meeting, focuses the problem. The rejection of such traditional ties meant a clear and present danger to the Nazi world view. This was anchored in an idealization of the past which included an emphasis upon bourgeois morality. The taming of the activism through an "embourgeoisement" of the SA was accomplished by stressing the importance of founding a family -- the wife must be regarded as a "comrade." This extract shows clearly how the activism was supposedly combined with harmless relaxation in which the wife could participate. From marching and doing battle the SA passed to drama societies, from cracking skulls to comfortable "togetherness."

The family was the true cell of the state. Not merely was the ardor of the SA tamed through this emphasis, but it was an intrinsic part of the racial world view. Ludwig Leonhardt, an expert on racial theory, clearly states that the family is part of the whole biological inheritance of the individual, and such inheritance is crucial in the formation of a race. Genealogical research must be undertaken in order to discover the importance of one's racial origins. Beyond this, such research is essential in order to make the right kind of marriage, and Leonhardt's book Heirat und Rassenpflege (Marriage and Racial Hygiene) was designed for marriage counseling.

How far such counseling should go, another expert on racial hygiene, the physician Hermann Paull, takes pains to describe. If one acquires a wealthy husband or wife, one also marries into a high-grade biological and racial inheritance, for such wealth could not have been amassed without native ability typical of the superior race. The bourgeois cast of National Socialism could hardly find a better illustration, and what Paull has to say on the benefits of marriage itself further underlines this. Free love is dangerous to racial health. The puritanical element in the Nazi world view is pushed to the forefront.

This emphasis upon family and marriage brings home the fact that violence, such as that of the SA, was good only if directed against the enemy, those who opposed the Nazi revolution. Within the movement, and within a racially pure Germany, the "holy bonds" of tradition, including the family, had to be preserved.

The ideal of womanhood is a good illustration of the traditionalism, indeed the conservatism, which pervaded National Socialism and added so much to its attractiveness for the middle classes. Hitler's views on the place of women in society are essentially those of the mid-nineteenth century, and he was followed in this by the other National Socialists whose words are reproduced here. Man was the master --  about that there must be no doubt -- and it was he who determined the course of politics, of the law, indeed of all public affairs. The woman's sphere was the family, it was her duty to safeguard this cell from which the race has its being. The Nazis attacked the ideal of equal rights for women and rejected the woman's emancipation movement. This movement had been connected with that socialism and liberalism which the Nazis hated so much, but the vision of an idealized past also played its role. Alfred Rosenberg, in his Der Mythos des XX. Jahrhunderts (The Mythos of the Twentieth Century) (1930), typically enough inveighs against the emancipation movement as an affront to the true role of woman, who is an integral part of his historic Volk. Living up to this ideal could mean going back to work at the spinning wheel and the weaving loom, as suggested by the Volkischer Beobachter.

Joseph Goebbels, in his novel Michael (1929), presents this ideal of womanhood in so-called poetic form (for more from this novel, see page 104), while Rudolf Hess, the Fuhrer's deputy, discusses "women we can love." The stereotype of the ideal woman is always the same: guardian of the family, mother of her children, and obedient helpmate to her husband. Throughout the Third Reich, Magda Goebbels was put forward as the ideal German woman. While his enemies called her husband a "shrunken Teuton gone dark" (nachgedunkelter Schrumpfgermane), Magda Goebbels was blond, tall, and the mother of numerous children. Blond hair and blue eyes were essential elements in the stereotype of the Aryan woman as it had grown up in racial thought. Small wonder that in 1937 an SS leader could condemn the "blond craze," the more so as some girls seem to have thought that by itself blond hair would serve as proof of their Aryan descent -- a proof necessary for marriage to an SS man. But here racial thought had only itself to blame, for outward appearance was always stressed as a sign of the correct racial soul (see page 64).

Simplicity was an integral part of Aryan beauty. In an earlier extract the ideal SA leader was glowingly described as uncouth -- that is, simple and straightforward. This kind of primitive simplicity was transferred to the comportment of the female sex. The Nazis condemned lipstick, powder, and other make-up as relics of an age which had substituted artificiality for the naturalness that was intrinsic to the "genuine" Germanic race. The whole opposition of the Nazi world view to "artificial" modernity was involved here. For racial thought, living close to nature was regarded as proof that Germans had not lost touch with the roots of their race. The Labor Service which every German youth had to undergo helped to inculcate this idea. Working with the spade on the land meant a return to the foundations of national life. But such puritanism could go too far, even for Goebbels' paper, Der Angriff -- the female bird must pretty itself, as Goebbels put it in his novel. A shiny nose did not serve the Volk. But this article does show what had become the practice in the girls' branch of the Labor Service.

The BDM project "Faith and Beauty" seems closer to the ideal of the Labor Service than to that of Der Angriff. The BDM (Bund Deutscher Madel) was the party youth organization to which every girl, up to the age of eighteen, should belong -- it was the female counterpart to the Hitler Youth. "Faith" is acquired through ideological indoctrination in various subjects, such as foreign affairs and folklore. "Beauty" means gymnastics, hygiene, etc., but not "beauty culture" as we understand it -- learning to make up one's face, to dye one's hair, or to obtain the right figure. The Nazi ideal of female comportment is illustrated once more in an official order concerning women charged with forging a close connection between shop or plant and the National Socialist movement. The NSBO (National Sozialistischer Betriebs Obman) was a part of the official labor organization, the Labor Front (see page 341). This office, purely honorary, was now opened to women -- but not to those who were painted and powdered or who smoked in public.

In describing the Aryan woman's duties to the Volk, the Nazis often employed a distinctly military vocabulary. The Honor Cross of the German Mother was established (1938) in order to recognize the most important service a woman could render: the bearing of children. Long before this, families with many children had obtained special tax benefits (see page 358). Typically enough, the German mother was likened to the soldier in the front-line trenches. But these trenches were different from those occupied by men. Women students from the universities might proclaim their usefulness to the Volk, and stress their National Socialism, but to little or no avail -- though the Volkischer Beobachter might occasionally print one of their statements in order to restore a balance in the Nazi view of women. More typical, however, is the pronouncement of the official Nazi publication which strongly rejects the existence of "political women" within the party and demands their return to the sphere of family and motherhood.

The Nazi ideal of womanhood illustrates well the traditionalism of their revolution. They believed they were pursuing the ideal of the Germanic race of ancient times, but in reality they had embraced merely the bourgeois ideal of the nineteenth century: the simple but devoted housewife and mother who lives solely for her family and behaves dutifully toward her husband. The modern concept of beauty is rejected together with the contemporary emancipation of women. Every revolution is puritanical, for men's thoughts should be on "higher" matters than those of the flesh. Did not Robespierre during the French Revolution assert that "virtue must be woman's only ornament." But here this female ideal illustrates the embourgeoisement of the Nazi movement, the taming of the activism typified by the SA.

The social reality had to be adjusted to these ideals. The condemnation of the afternoon "tea and dancing" is significant in this regard. "Tea and dancing" was a regular part of the social life of the upper classes in Germany as well as throughout the rest of Europe. The Nazis' condemnation of this custom illuminates some deep preconceptions of their ideology. "Tea and dancing" is international and therefore not properly German; at a time when Hitler stressed the rootedness of the arts such music and dancing represented a cosmopolitan vagabondage. Moreover, puritanism comes to the fore once more: the kind of conversation encouraged here is superficial, not concerned with those essentials upon which the German mind should focus. National Socialism regarded modern dancing as harmful to its ideal of womanhood for its rhythms were thought to be an open incitement to sexual promiscuity. Such dancing amounted to an Asiatic orgy-typified by the "Negro music" of jazz (though the Soviet Union under Stalin, Marxist and Asiatic in Nazi eyes, shared an identical attitude toward jazz and modern dancing).

"Tea and dancing" was a symptom of modernity, of a piece with the degeneracy of modern music and modern art. Such modern art could be seen in the same year that this article was published (1937), in the Munich "Exhibition of Degenerate Art" (see page 11). "Tea and dancing," like everything else, was seen in terms of the Nazi ideology: it is no coincidence that this article was published in the newspaper of the SA, who prided themselves on being the "simple" and unsophisticated representatives of the Nazi movement.

Reality in some cases tended to escape the clutches of ideology, especially when the Nazi elite gave a party. The "love gods" who danced on Peacock Island (near Berlin) and the use of the best dance bands are difficult to reconcile with the criticisms of "tea and dancing" made a year later. Joseph Goebbels gave this party in July 1936, and it was attended by some three thousand guests. To be sure, it was meant to impress the many foreigners who were present, for the Minister of Propaganda was playing host to the participants in the Olympic Games and their guests. However, the entertainment could have been more subdued, folk-dancing exhibitions could have taken the place of dancing to the international tunes of excellent jazz orchestras. The love gods, it must be added, were clad, however lightly. Goebbels did make an effort to see that as little of the festivities as possible got to the press. At his luxurious estate at Schwanenwerder he gave many other parties of this sort; he did not need an international congress to justify a gay time.

Nor did puritan simplicity extend to festive occasions, such as the annual hall for the press. Gambling too was not affected, even in wartime. The advertisement for croupier candidates was published in the official paper of the Karlsruhe NSDAP. This hardly sounds like a fit occupation for the ideal Aryan as represented by the "bear" of an SA leader.

For all this, the leadership as a whole, and especially Adolf Hitler, tended to be frugal and generally lived up to the desired morality. This bourgeois morality served to tame the activism, to channel it against the enemies of the Reich. The Nazi world view, and the culture which sprang from it, made a puritanical, moral ideal its own concern. Thus the Nazi revolution could appeal to traditionalism, to the good old times, and yet provide an outlet for the activism so vital for the dynamic of the movement.

G.L.M.

THE GOOD FIGHT

Here Marched the New Germany, by FRIEDRICH JOACHIM KLAEHN

September 1932! The old system still triumphed, the bigwigs in office clung to their titular dignities, the police still wielded their clubs viciously. But we didn't let anyone get the best of us. We wanted to prove to these people that their positions were crumbling beneath them and to show with what holy faith we await the future Reich of Adolf Hitler.

The SA unit had to be defended. For this reason we were called together one evening in the meeting hall of the capital city of the province.

It was forbidden for the assault troops to march in closed ranks. If here and there four or five men started out toward the meeting hall together, a patrol wagon would suddenly appear and the police would begin to swing their rubber truncheons without warning.

Singing was forbidden.

Carrying banners was forbidden.

Transportation by trucks, private automobiles, bicycles, and other means was forbidden.

It was forbidden for the SA units to stand outside the meeting hall. The rabble gathered on the streets. But on this day they did not dare to make themselves conspicuous by shouting or spitting, for then they could be beaten up.

These comrades of the darkness waited for individual SA men in dark doorways and on lonely streets. The patrol wagons of the defense police whizzed over the cobbled streets, and played searchlights over the crowd streaming toward the meeting hall, in order to see whether any formations of SA men were being assembled.

Police patrols streamed through the dark training area behind the hall, not to protect us against the Communists who were lurking about, but lustily looking for Brown-shirt victims for their clubs.

The meeting hall, which could hold 7,000 persons, was gaily decorated -- at least to the extent that the police had allowed, for the display of posters with inciting inscriptions was thought to endanger the Republic.

A giant rectangle had been kept clear in the middle of the hall. The seats to the right and left of it had been occupied long before the beginning of the celebration by civilians, by the relatives of SA men, by their women and children, and by people for whom the SA had become what it should be: the last hope for and the last faith in the Fatherland.

By way of exception, the police allowed the assault troops to form outside the hall. But on this night, to be sure, the same thing occurred as always: the commanding lieutenant (Krauth was the scoundrel's name) of the police unit professed ignorance of this permission on the part of the police authorities and many telephone calls had to be made before the matter was cleared up in our favor.

But now the friction had begun. The SA formed itself into one block, forty men abreast in forty ranks, banners waving in the first ranks.

This block now was to march through the doors of the meeting hall to the tune of "The Badenweiler March" in a broad front and occupy the space in the hall that had been left vacant.

The SA-unit band had already begun to strike up the tune, but the SA did not come, because First Lieutenant Krauth would not permit the side doors to be opened.

The standard-bearer argued with the First Lieutenant and the Reichsbanner [1] leader, while the SA stood at parade rest.

Hard words were exchanged. At the very moment when the First Lieutenant began to shout in a shrill voice and he was about to call out to his unit to arrest the standard-bearer, the latter's command resounded loudly: "Clear the way!"

The block marched and the police stepped back in the face of the rhythmically raised SA boots and legs. Slowly the block of the SA, flawlessly lined up on the point man and the rear man, moved into the meeting hall. The music boomed out and the civilians stood up and raised their hands in salute. Brightly lit eyes greeted us! Many eyes filled with tears. Here marched the new Germany. Here ancient Germany was reawakening. They are the men who will save us, who are our future.

Then joy broke out and all the annoyance over the chicanery of the police disappeared. What was it to us that these men were still there, confused, with woebegone faces, trying to preserve their rotten system? Soon these men would be forgotten, swept away, liquidated! Germany would awake!

Commands resound. The SA stands!

The standard-bearer ascended the broad podium. His gaze swept over his unit, over the glorious banners, and over the people awaiting the future men of the Third Reich. At a celebration like this, there was no point in excoriating the existing system. But the leader could not refrain from dealing it a sudden blow with a trenchant observation to the overzealous police who were present. He said that we National Socialists could not imagine that those who were there today in green uniforms, allegedly in order to preserve order and peace, and who today were called police but who in actuality extended protection only to their like-minded comrades, that these men someday would exercise the same function in our Reich. When soon the swastika waves from all public buildings, this green phantom and terror will vanish.

Before the police had fully understood these words and before the thunderous applause, the standard- earer returned to his theme and said: "You are SA men not just for these years of struggle or during the service that you are now performing; you are SA men for your whole life. All the spiritual and physical energy that you possess, all your time and means, belongs to the people and to the Fatherland and to the Fuhrer, even life itself. Now the oath! Attention!"

The civilians rose from their seats. The oath of loyalty and commitment was pronounced, word by word, loudly and clearly, by the SA men. Then the standard-bearer paced off and every SA man stepped forward from the ranks, and placing his hand on the banner, declared: "I pledge it to my Fuhrer!"

The "Horst Wessel" song and the "Deutschland Lied" ended this unforgettable celebration.

During the night the patrol wagons roared through the streets. The police were in a state of heightened preparedness.

The SA men went back to their homes one by one. There were many bloody heads that night, but it wasn't only among us, for now One couldn't attack SA men with impunity.

At this celebration the unit leader took leave of his troop. But he did not tell anybody, since here the individual is nothing, everything.

From Friedrich Joachim Klaehn, Sturm 138: Ernstes und viel Heiteres aus dem SA-Leben (Leipzig: Verlag H. Schaufuss, 1934), pp. 202-207.

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Notes:

1. The Reichsbanner was a voluntary defense organization composed of men loyal to the Republic.

A Meeting-Hall Brawl, by KURT MASSMANN

Once we held a meeting in a workers' suburb. The meeting had been called by us National Socialist students.

It was a very small meeting hall. One SA troop sufficed to guard the gathering. Around nine-thirty another SA troop was expected to show up at the close of the meeting in order to protect the participants from possible attack....

At eight o'clock the giant Schirmer, who was to speak that night, rolled up his shirt sleeves and with a friendly smile spat into his hands, which were as big as an average-sized trunk. He had been in Russia for three years and was familiar with the whole swindle there. Upon his return to Germany he became a National Socialist with all heart and soul, one of those who cause shivers to go through the hearts of the timid bourgeois, anxious over the dangerous "Socialism" rampant among the National Socialists! A splendid fellow! A man to whom one could entrust all one's money and who would sooner kick the bucket from hunger before he would take a penny of it.

It is said that one day he was introduced to the Fuhrer. The tall, uncouth lad, who otherwise was never at a loss for words, just stood there, swallowed hard, wiped his eyes with his fore-paw, and finally stammered: "Well, Adolf Hitler ..." and exuberantly shook his hand. Then he came to his senses, blushed fiery red -- oh, holy miracle! --  pulled himself to his full height, saluted, and marched off with a smart about-face.

The SA man pushed himself through the roaring crowd, which had been staging a noisy reception for fifteen minutes, and took his place in a very narrow space in front of the podium.

It was a remarkable situation! There was a terrible ruckus lasting a half hour, nothing but a deafening din. There was no act of violence. Schirmer, the bear, stood on the podium, his mighty arms crossed, and smiled at the goings-on in the hall with a relaxed, unconcerned air....

Gradually this smile produced its effect. The din slowly died down and gave way to an air of tense expectancy.

Around eight-thirty Schirmer grabbed the water carafe, placed it to his lips, took a hearty swallow, and then poured the water into a glass that had been placed alongside the carafe. He took this glass and directed the water most skillfully over the heads of the SA and right into the neck of a man in the first row who had been yelling and egging on the crowd in the hall the whole time. Then Schirmer, abruptly and with a powerful voice, roared: "Quiet! Now I'll do the talking!" And indeed quiet descended on the hall in an instant.

Then he let loose. He spoke in simple, plain words, in the everyday speech of these workers. They listened to him.

In the middle of the hall, which had been the source of the din the whole evening, a little Jew with horn-rimmed spectacles set on a thick nose climbed on a chair and began to give an opposing speech in an unpleasant and high-pitched voice like that of a eunuch.

Schirmer made a contemptuous motion with his hand and continued speaking in a voice that was so powerful that the echo reverberated from the walls and completely drowned out the whimpering of the little man on the chair.

But the little man persisted in his aim to break up the meeting and ranted on and on with an unheard-of display of gestures.

When Schirmer, who had just spoken about the community of fate of the Volk, paused for a moment, the little Jew could be heard screaming: "Workers! Proletarians! Your front is the international proletariat! ... Your ..." No further words were heard. Schirmer had pushed his way through the thick chain of the SA men and went all by himself through the shouting crowd straight up to the little Jew, the spokesman and leader of the Communists. The Jew cut his speech short in astonishment, and although he was surrounded by three hundred and fifty comrades, he climbed down from the chair with a monkeylike agility and stepped back a few rows. Schirmer shrugged his shoulders, and had a grim expression on his face. Then he roared at the people in the hall: "Workers, look at the toad who brought you here and then look at me! I'm a worker like you are! I produce with my fists like you! Do you belong to him over there or to me?"

The Jew, meanwhile, was screaming: "Comrades, he wants to provoke us.!" Schirmer could no longer speak amid the tumult that had been unleashed: Grimly, he returned to the podium and continued to speak from there.

But the little Jew had climbed on his chair once more. He certainly had reason to fear that his people could be influenced by this speaker, and he gave the signal to break up the meeting. "Let's go!" he screamed. "Moscow! Let's go!"

In a moment the hall resounded with yells, ear-shattering noises, blows, and wild screaming.

Schirmer stood on the podium and roared a few times the word "Germany!" into the hall with such strength that it could be heard above the din. "Germany!" It sounded like a trumpet call. I did not know whether this word was actually part of his speech or whether it was a last exhortation thrown into the meeting-hall brawl. After uttering it he sprang into the fray with a mighty leap.

At that moment the main door of the hall was opened and the second SA troop stormed in. The little Jew, who a minute ago had still looked like an unlucky Napoleon, stood on his chair as if paralyzed. Schirmer, who was knocking down his opponents right and left, had already gotten close to the Jewish ringleader along with a couple of SA men. In a really artistic movement, the Jew leaped from his chair, ran like a weasel through the hall, between the brawlers, and jumped through the closed window into the courtyard, the shattered glass panes crashing on the ground with him.

For a moment a current of laughter coursed through the hall.

Most of the Communists, above all the main hecklers, had already fled through the side door. Only a little band of Reds tenaciously defended themselves in a comer. I saw that those who resisted were precisely the best-looking among the Communists, mostly older workers.

Soon even the resistance of these people was broken. They were allowed to leave unmolested, after they had given up.

The hall was a scene of desolation. It was covered with blood, not a single chair was in one piece, wreckage was strewn everywhere. Some of the Communists, not those of the last group, had fought with beer bottles and glasses!

About eight SA men had received head injuries from these rude and contemptible weapons. The faces of same of them were so en crusted with blood that it covered their eyes and they groped around the hall like blind men.

Several Communists remained stretched out on the floor. When the SA medics began to attend to their injuries, an older worker with a good clean-cut face, who had fought to the last and defended himself with real courage, exchanging blow for blow, took his party book from his pocket, tore his party badge from his lapel, and handed both to the giant Schirmer, whom he had demanded to see. He shook his hand and said: "So, now I'm cured!" After he was bandaged he signed an entry blank to join the National Socialist Workers' Party....

The eternal petit bourgeois complained about the "primitivization of politics." They said that things would not improve in Germany by people busting one another's heads in.

They had no idea of what was at stake! The fight for the soul of German man and the new Germany was being fought even in such assemblies and in such brawls at meeting halls!

We National Socialist students did not go into working-class quarters to have our heads broken for nothing! Neither did we do it to win a dozen votes for some election or other, which wouldn't have been worth the effort. We could have held academic discussion evenings, which at least would have been less dangerous.

We fought for the German worker. We wanted to help the worker take his place in the nation!

Often we had to use fists and chair legs in order to reach him and to drive out the racially alien "leaders" and their bodyguards who stood between them and us!

From Kampf: Lebensdokumente deutscher Jugend von 1914-1934, compiled and edited by Bert Roth (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam jun., Verlag, 1934), pp. 228-232.

THE BONDS OF FAMILY

National Socialism Has Restored the Family, by HANNS ANDERLAHN

"The family ..." Wernicke began falteringly, not knowing just what to say. If the others up front would start laughing, he was thinking, then I could get out of it. I have nothing to say on the subject! But they all kept looking at him. The Assault Leader had an ice-cold expression on his face, full of scorn and anger. The minutes became nerve-racking, hammering, overwhelming eternities.

"The family is of no concern to us!" A voice from the audience finally came to his assistance. "We are SA men, we do our duty, we are National Socialists, and nothing else concerns us."

For a moment this seemed to be satisfactory. Indeed, it was very decent of the Assault Leader to come to his aid. So he parroted after him: "Nothing else concerns us!" But this didn't sound quite right. Hadn't the Assault Leader hammered into him a hundred times the phrase: "The service of an SA man never ends"? Wernicke remained silent. He paced up and down, unsure of himself, and then suddenly the pallid, tear-stained face of his wife stood before him: "What am I supposed to fill the children's bellies with?" Perhaps the comrades also saw that face now, and Wernicke felt the hot blood rushing to his brain.

"So you can't say anything on the subject? I thought so. So sit down!" The Assault Leader said nothing else, but every word had felt like a blow, cut him like a lash, and left behind a painful feeling of shame.

SA man Dietrich took great delight in being told to get up and speak. "The family is the most important cell of the state. Whoever disturbs the family acts against the well-being of the state. National Socialism has restored the family to its rightful place. We do not want any petit-bourgeois ideal in the family, with its plush-sofa psychology and walking mannikins, with its contempt for and degradation of the woman and effeminization of the children. We know that the wife has a heavy burden to bear. The National Socialist stands beside her because she lends him a helping hand. The wife is a comrade, a fellow combatant." Everything he said was simple and clear; everybody could understand him, even Wernicke. "What am I supposed to fill the children's bellies with?" How that bored through him and pained him at that moment.

"How was it before?" asked the Assault Leader, his eyes still blazing with anger and contempt.

Otto Dennig had not been asked at all, but he stood up and talked because he had to speak now: "In my assault troop at that time there was one who was married. The young bride knew us all, and if things got tough with someone and he didn't have a place to stay or was hungry, all he had to do was show up at the flat and everything would be all right. Then came a time when her husband would not be at home in the evening for weeks on end. In those days we would travel to the villages on our bikes. We tried to protect each other at our meetings, but when the others lay in ambush for us, there would be bandaged heads.

"The young bride stood at the window every evening until we came back, and sometimes we would not return until dawn. We always saw the light burning from afar; it was like a symbol to us. Before going to our own homes we usually sat around together in the tiny kitchen awhile, unwinding and telling jokes.

"One evening they threw garbage at us in the street. They outnumbered us and occupied well- efended positions. Here retreat was the best defense. We got on our bikes and started down the steep hill. One of our group fell off his bike at the bottom of the hill. We didn't notice it until after we had gone a little further. We turned back and found him lying unconscious under his bike. He died on the way to the hospital without regaining consciousness. And now we had to break the news to the young bride. It was terrible for all of us to see how she wept softly to herself, because she loved him very, very much. But never once did she ask: 'Why?'

"Later she moved back with her parents, for he had had no one besides her and us. When in 1933 we held a great torchlight parade, she suddenly appeared. She went up to each one of us, and when the order came: 'SA, halt! Forward in equal step ... march!' we saw her smiling. We passed by her, eyes right, as though he stood there too, and a couple of us had to make odd movements with our faces to control our feelings. That was a young family, and at that time I had swam to myself: No petit- bourgeois marriage for me, no lazy lounging around on a plush sofa and in indifferent luxury. The girl that I marry must be like that young bride. Yes, that's how it's going to be with me. And I am getting married next month,"

All this had little or nothing to do with ideology and education. Or did it?

The Assault Leader bowed to Otto Dennig. "Thanks!" Was he referring to the story or to the announcement of the marriage? Actually, he wanted to break off the discussion here. For Wernicke it was enough for the time being, but now the discussion was in full swing. "That's the way it was before, but now it's easier. Life and health are no longer at stake, only comfort. What still remains is the inner sense of commitment and he who does not possess it is not with us. Some have already been weakened by the chatter of their relatives, the plush sofa, the creature comforts. Or the wife bends their ears, nagging them because she gets anxious at night or because she finds it too boring to be alone, she has perhaps no mission, and then the men get upset, become lax and listless, and stay away....

"In the evening each one of us gladly stretches out his legs and sits back and rests, with the thought: 'At last, I'm at home!' But this sitting around and relaxing must not become a purpose in itself and a world view. The purpose of rest is to release energies for a new struggle and for the further march forward...."

Couldn't someone think up an activity in which wives and young women could also participate, so that everyone could get acquainted with each other? Then maybe some would have a different view. Three, four voices expressed this wish. All the others nodded their heads in agreement, and one man immediately developed a program: charades, for example, the dying warrior, and then perhaps a play -  Homecoming in the Dawn -- and, in between, battle songs....

"Waving banners, patriotic speeches, and then three cheers," Otto Hallmann said, grinning. "It's not so easy to bury this idea of a dramatic group, my boys. Your proposal sounds like something that would be better left to lackluster bowling leagues. If we're going to do anything, let's do it with sense and understanding. In the afternoon, athletics, in conjunction with other branches of the party. In the evening, a big cultural gathering, and SA man Dietrich will be responsible for carrying it out. Then we can also see whether we understood what the Fuhrer has prescribed for us in the way of intellectual orientation."

"Yes, sir, Assault Leader. I'll lay the program before you the evening of the day after tomorrow."

From Hanns Anderlahn, Gegner erkannt! Kampferlebnisse der SA. (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Frz. Eher Nachf., 1937), pp. 60-63.

The German Volk Is an Interlacing of Families, by LUDWIG LEONHARDT

Deeply perceiving the source of the renewal of the Volk, National Socialism considers the family to be the foundation of the state. In order to grasp the importance of this statement and to evaluate it properly, we must look more closely at the concept of "family." By family we must not understand only parents and children. To a family, in our sense of the word, belong not only those who bear the name or who possess a piece of land or some other property. Neither do legal relationships alone encompass the concept. Rather, the family embraces everything that existed spiritually and psychically as a living patrimony in a definite circle of persons. What we are, what we accomplish, is not due to our own merit; in the last analysis we owe it to our parents and grandparents, our whole line of ancestors, whose heritage we carry within ourselves. In short, we owe it to the spiritual values which have been transmitted to us and which we are to pass on to our children and the children of our children. All this belongs to the family, whose importance in the life of the nation the new state is ready to acknowledge in the fullest sense. And we must always keep in mind that we are not the last configuration of these multiple endowments, that we are destined to pass them on pure and unspoiled in order to continue what we call the family, and to push our heritage ever forward, so that a German Volk may emerge out of an ever-repeated interlacing of families.

In this goal, however, it is clear that each of us bears an enormous responsibility. Just as we cannot let such a precious heritage go to ruin, just as we cannot allow ourselves to be guilty of harming it, so must we strive to extirpate, to overcome, or to destroy the bad and the inferior. How can the individual get a clear idea of just how he represents this responsibility toward the Volk? Can he do this without a precise knowledge of his whole hereditary and physical picture, hence without an exact knowledge of his own being and of the being of his ancestors? No! He who loves only for the day, who is indifferent to the roots from which he sprang, who does not realize the importance of the words "forefathers" and "posterity" in their deepest sense, cannot be regarded as a responsibility-conscious member of the Volk community.

Therefore let us begin by studying our own family picture! It will require a good deal of work in the case of those families where no records of any kind have been made or kept, but it must be done. If we wish to be honest, we must confess that in only the fewest instances is our information adequate for providing even a moderately clear picture. Unfortunately, many people hardly know the color of the eyes of their parents and of their brothers and sisters, much less their grandparents, not to speak of the more important characteristics of mind and disposition. Thus each one of us has the duty to inform himself in the greatest possible detail on this, to find out from which stock he springs....

From Ludwig Leonhardt, Heirat und Rassenpflege: Ein Berater fur Eheanwarter (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1934), pp. 7-8.

Marriage, Morality, and Property, by HERMANN PAULL

I come back to genealogy. This is possible only where monogamy has led to the formation of the family and thus to clearly perceptible biological hereditary stocks. With free love, which aims to offer man many possibilities of change in the exercise of sexual intercourse and in human breeding, a wholly unsurveyable ancestral series comes into being whose biological investigation is much too complicated and therefore wholly impossible. In free love, in which the mutual impulse to union is contained exclusively in erotic feelings, the confluence of the germ-plasma endowments of both parents is left exclusively to chance, whereas monogamy, through the elaboration of perceptible biological hereditary stocks, enables human reason to bring together high-grade hereditary stocks for human breeding and to exterminate hereditary stocks of inferior grade.

In this context free love means the admission of inferior biological ancestry to human breeding and the necessary squandering of high-grade germ endowments, whereas monogamy at least offers the opportunity for biological selection and preservation of the high-grade germ plasma.

Thus biological investigation has uncovered a series of families in which, as a result of the entry of individuals or even only one person of low-grade quality, the whole subsequent generation was ruined. The Kallikak family in America and the Zeros in Switzerland are now universally recognized as prototypes for the degeneration of whole families through the infiltration of inferior individuals.

On the other hand, we are acquainted with a sufficient number of families in which the preservation of a family tradition which took account of soundness and excellence has engendered a great number of high-grade persons. Here I shall mention the clan of Johann Sebastian Bach of Thuringen, which has been thoroughly investigated biologically, and which rightly can serve as a textbook example of the preservation and higher development of a good biological heritage.

Thus the family is the most important instrument of eugenics. It will become even more clear later that the eugenic concept of "family" in its deepest essence is synonymous with the Christian concept of a "religious-moral family," which rests upon the twin pillars of "premarital chastity" and "conjugal fidelity."

The free-thinker: Where in any part of the world have people based their marriage choices on such biological principles? It can be proved that men have indeed never known about the doctrine of the germ plasma and of the law of heredity. And prostitution in all times has found room for itself between the pillars of "premarital chastity" and "conjugal fidelity." Hence mankind should have gone to ruin a long time ago because of the squandering of germ plasma.

Eros is too much of a roguish lad for him ever to bother about the Jaw of heredity, or ever to give it a thought.

The doctor: This objection is not correct in this sharp form, for it can easily be shown that the bonds of a religious, ethical, and economic kind, under which the men living in the times before industrialization, which with some justice can be called the "good, old times," made their marriage choice, to a great measure have had the effect of specializing and breeding germ plasma. Naturally the biological power of these bonds was not always known to man, but this did not limit their effectiveness.

Let us for a moment return to the roots of human culture.

The introduction of monogamy -- that is, the overcoming of promiscuity, of the general mixing, of the belonging to all in sexual intercourse --  was the first germ-plasma specializing bond. Further, it signifies the fettering, the bridling of the naturally polygamous instinct of the male sex, as opposed to the female sex.

This fettering raised the male Eros out of the depths of the purely animal instincts to the heights of a moral happiness. It freed woman from the immoral and undignified position of being the object of man's lust, and placed her alongside him as an equal marriage partner.

Woman's honor, woman's dignity and material happiness, owe their existence to this fettering of the male Eros through monogamy.

Hence monogamy also stands at the beginning of our culture. It led to a further bond through which germ-plasma breeding was enormously fostered, generally accepted "morals." Morals and morality strive to attain something lofty, to overcome bad conditions, Morality strives for health and beauty. "Good morality" demanded a far-reaching purity in sexual life and it also prevented prostitution in Germany from assuming dimensions that would have been immensely harmful to the people's welfare, at least in the times under discussion here.

It was good morals for a woman to have several children. A childless married woman was regarded as inferior, as was a woman who had many miscarriages, or who brought deformed, sick, or sickly children into the world.

In former times, the doubtlessly greater concern of the parents not only with the moral but especially with the material welfare of their children, the greater feeling of responsibility for the future generation, is closely connected with this. A man who was not yet in a position to feed a wife and a troop of children either had to renounce marriage temporarily or had to rely on his wife's dowry.

In other words, one married frequently, or mostly, on the basis of property. But in those days, since there was no shareholder's right and no mammon-like capital formations, property was linked to the ability of the men concerned. Capital did not yet work independently of the ability of an individual proprietor. Whoever had possessed a fortune either had acquired it through his own ability or had inherited it through his parents, who had acquired it through their ability. The increase and preservation of property could take place only through the ability of the individual proprietor. Property-possessing families therefore were also proficient families. Whoever married property also married a high-grade biological heritage.

The history professor: The guild system also surely worked favorably in a biological sense. Membership in a guild presupposed an extensive proficiency. This was in the nature of the guild. One preferably married within one's own guild or took his life comrade from another guild. This provided a certain guarantee for happiness in life. For in this way high-grade biological heritage was brought together for human breeding.

It is certainly no accident that the musical endowments of the Bach family, cultivated over two centuries in a wholly special way through guild marriages, vanished from the biological heritage of the Bachs with the cessation of the guild system.

The doctor: To be dependent upon others ran counter to the general bourgeois concept of honor. Upon entering a marriage the bourgeois so arranged his affairs that he could live independently as a free man. He strove to acquire esteem among his fellow burghers for himself and his wife. Therefore he looked for a wife in esteemed, proficient families and in consequence of such considerations also married a high-grade biological heritage.

The situation has become wholly different as a result of the extensive industrialization and especially the Marxist spirit of the postwar age.

Thanks to public welfare, broad strata of the people no longer need to concern themselves with the material upbringing of their children. When money for the vital necessities cannot be procured by the parents, the welfare agency takes over this task. This happens especially in the case of children whose progenitors have no reason to be proud of their biological heritage and who therefore, in a biological sense, are unsuitable for producing children. It is well known that the greatest lack of scruples with regard to producing children prevails among inferior-grade families.

Thus, according to the findings of an inquiry made in 1928, the children in the Welfare School in Stuttgart came from families who had an average of 4.6 children. On the other hand, the average number of children possessed by the totality of fruitful married couples of the middle class in Stuttgart is 2.3, and that of the whole population 2.32.

These few figures express the serious life crisis in which the German people finds itself at this time.

From Hermann Paull, Deutsche Rassenhygiene: Ein gemeinverstandliches Gesprach uber Vererbungslehre, Eugenik, Familie, Sippe, Rasse und Volkstum, Part II: Erbgesundheitspflege (Eugenik) , Rassenpflege (Gorlitz: Verlag fur Sippenforschung und Wappenkunde, C. A. Starke, 1934),  pp. 17-21.

THE IDEAL OF WOMANHOOD

The Tasks of Women, by ADOLF HITLER

... So long as we possess a healthy manly race -- and we National Socialists will attend to that -- we will form no female mortar battalions and no female sharpshooter corps. For that is not equality of rights, but a diminution of the rights of woman....

An unlimited range of work opportunities exists for women. For us the woman has always been man's most loyal comrade in work and in life. I am often told: You want to drive women out of the professions. Not at all. I wish only to create the broadest measure of possibility for her to co-found her own family and to be able to have children, because by so doing she most benefits our Volk! ...

If today a female jurist accomplishes ever so much and next door there lives a mother with five, six, seven children, who are all healthy and well-brought-up, then I would like to say: From the standpoint of the eternal value of our people the woman who has given birth to children and raised them and who thereby has given back our people life for the future has accomplished more and does more!

From a speech to the National Socialist women's organization (Die Frauenschaft), published in the Volkischer Beobachter, Sept. 13, 1936. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.

The so-called granting of equal rights to women, which Marxism demands, in reality does not grant equal rights but constitutes a deprivation of rights, since it draws the woman into an area in which she will necessarily be inferior. It places the woman in situations that cannot strengthen her position -- vis- a-vis both man and society -- but only weaken it....

I would be ashamed to be a German man if in the event of a war even only one woman had to go to the front. The woman has her own battlefield. With every child that she brings into the world, she fights her battle for the nation. The man stands up for the Volk, exactly as the woman stands up for the family.

From a speech to the National Socialist Women's Congress, published in the Volkischer Beobachter, Sept. 15, 1935. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

Emancipation from the Emancipation Movement, by ALFRED ROSENBERG

Emancipation of woman from the women's emancipation movement is the first demand of a generation of women which would like to save the Volk and the race, the Eternal-Unconscious, the foundation of all culture, from decline and fall.

The age of Victorianism and the "dreamy romantic girl's life" are naturally finished once and for all. The woman belongs deeply to the total life of the people. All educational opportunities must remain open to her. Through rhythmics, gymnastics, and sport the same care must be given to her physical training as is the case with men. Nor should any difficulties be created for her in the vocational world under present-day social conditions (whereby the Law for the Protection of Mothers should be more strongly implemented). Doubtless, however, the efforts of those who would renew our Volkdom, after breaking up the Volk-alien democratic-Marxist system, must prepare the way for a social order which no longer forces young women (as is today the case) to stream in droves to the labor markets of life which use up the most important feminine energies. Hence all possibilities for the development of a woman's energies should remain open to her. But there must be clarity on one point: only man must be and remain a judge, soldier, and ruler of the state.

From Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythos des XX. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hoheneichen-Verlag, 1930), p. 512. (This extract has been taken from the 1938 edition.)

Domestic Diligence from Blood and Soil

It might seem amazing that women and girls should return to work at spinning wheels and weaving looms. But this is wholly natural. It was something that could have been foreseen. This work must be taken up again by the women and girls of the Third Reich.

From the Volkischer Beobachter, Feb. 2, 1936. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

The Female Bird, by JOSEPH GOEBBELS

The mission of woman is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world. This is not at all as rude and unmodern as it sounds. The female bird pretties herself for her mate and hatches the eggs for him. In exchange, the mate takes care of gathering the food, and stands guard and wards off the enemy.

From Joseph Goebbels, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblattern (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Frz. Eher Nachf., 1929), p. 41. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.) (This extract has been taken from the 1934 edition.)

Women That We Can Love

After a performance by an a cappella choir, the Fuhrer's deputy, Reich Minister Hess, took the floor and was jubilantly greeted by those present.

The Fuhrer's deputy began his speech with the remark that in Germany the honorable place held by woman as mother, as comrade of her husband, and as an equal member of the Volk community is taken as a matter of course. Then he briefly contested the views of German women that have been spread abroad, and compared the foreign concepts of woman with the type of woman which the new Germany aims to produce: "We want women in whose life and work the characteristically feminine is preserved -- women that we can love!

"We grant the rest of the world the ideal type of woman that it wishes for itself, but the rest of the world should kindly grant us the woman which is most suitable to us. Not that 'Gretchen type' which foreigners imagine as being a somewhat limited, indeed unintellectual creature, but a woman who is capable of intellectually standing at her husband's side in his interests, in his struggle for existence, who makes the world more beautiful and richer in content for him. This is the ideal woman of the German man of today. She is a woman who, above all, is also able to be a mother.

"And it is one of the greatest achievements of National Socialism," continued the Fuhrer's deputy, "that it made it possible for more women in Germany today to become mothers than ever before. They become mothers not merely because the state wants it so or because their husbands want it so. Rather, they become mothers because they themselves are proud to bring healthy children into the world, to bring them up for the nation, and in this way to do their part in the preservation of the life of their Volk."

From an account of a mass meeting of the Berlin National Socialist women's organization (Die Frauenschaft) and the Frauenwerk (Women's Social Welfare) in the Deutschland-Hall, published in the Volkischer Beobachter, May 27, 1936. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

Frau Goebbels on German Women

A woman reporter of the London Daily Mail came to Heiligendamm to visit Frau Magda Goebbels, whom she had called "the ideal woman of Germany." She wanted to learn more details about the new status of women in Germany. Frau Goebbels told her visitor that the accounts printed in England about the expulsion of women from their jobs are highly exaggerated. The German woman has been excluded from only three professions: the military (as is the case all over the world), government, and the practice of law.

If the German girl is faced with a choice of marriage or a career, she will always be encouraged to marry, since this undoubtedly is best for a woman. According to the report of the English woman journalist, Frau Goebbels said: "I am trying to make the German woman more beautiful."

From the Vossische Zeitung, July 6, 1933. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

The Blond Craze

Brunswick, May 31. -- SS Chief Group Leader Jeckeln attacked the "blond craze" at a meeting of the NSDAP. Blond hair and blue eyes by themselves, he said, were not convincing proof that one belongs to the Nordic race. A girl who wants to marry an SS man today must be above reproach in every respect. Therefore she is required to possess the Reich sports medal. Many people, perhaps even today, could not understand the reason for this requirement. Germany does not need women who can dance beautifully at five o'clock teas, but women who have given proof of their health through accomplishments in the field of sport. "The javelin and the springboard are more useful than lipstick in promoting health."

From the Frankfurter Zeitung, June 1, 1937. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

A Shiny Nose and the German Nation

Recently we read the following in an article on girls' Labor Service camps. It set us to thinking:

The physical facilities of the camp must never go beyond a certain simplicity, for the girl must be trained along Spartan lines in the Labor Service -- by habituation to the pallet of straw, to early risings in the morning-cold, to the simplest washing facilities, to the renunciation of all beauty aids and treatments, to the simplest clothing, which is to be as uniform as possible.

But what is too much, is too much. Even we consider early rising one of the virtues of woman. But to habituate "to early risings in the morning-cold"? Wouldn't it be all right also without the morning-cold? And as far as the "simplest washing facilities" are concerned, this can mean either magic or a country water pump. We don't know whether the author is married or not. In the last analysis this is his private affair. But anyone who writes for life must not sit at his writing desk and dream of a "tough" race and of the old Spartans, who, as is known, knew how to distinguish between the education of men and women on the basis of well-considered reasons. We want German women and not tough-eggs as our comrades along life's path. There is no woman who renounces "all beauty aids and treatments,'" which we must not confuse with the fabrication of masks in the style of the Kurfurstendamm. [1]

We would still like to meet an acceptable woman who for hygienic reasons will give up, say, powder when her little nose shines ... and anyone who demands this categorically must, to be consistent, say with Orpheus the Second:

Only when your countenance shines like bacon,
Do you fulfill the purpose of the German nation!

Why must we always have such gross exaggerations anyway?

From Der Angriff, Jan. 16, 1936. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection. )

_______________

Notes:

1. The Kurfurstendamm was a main street of Berlin where the most fashionable shops and restaurants were located. To the Nazis it was synonymous with decadent "Jewish" culture, and before 1933 they staged many disturbances there.

Faith and Beauty

Jutta Rudiger, the Reich reporter of the Bund Deutscher Madel, has on several occasions discussed the tasks of the BDM project "Faith and Beauty," such as at a convention of Hitler Youth leaders in Hammersbach on February 9 and in the Reich Youth Press Service.

According to her reports, the BDM program "Faith and Beauty" is not a radical departure for the BDM, but marks a logical step forward in the development of this girls' organization. Hence the usual uniform of the BDM will be maintained and participants in the program will be distinguished only by a special badge. It is planned to set up work communities for gymnastics, handicrafts, folklore, foreign affairs, games and music, health service, and the like. The groups meet weekly, and once a month the meetings take the form of evenings-at-home which are devoted to discussions of cultural life and the structuring and guidance of one's personal life.

From Das Archiv: Nachschlagewerk fur Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur, No. 47, Feb. 1938 (Berlin: Verlagsanstalt D. Stollberg, 1938), p. 1393.

Right Conduct

The district plant department of the NSBO [1] in Unterfranken published a regulation in which it is stated that lately a great number of women had been accepted. This is a privilege of which women can be proud, and therefore it is also their duty to conduct themselves in a true National Socialist manner. It was therefore announced that painted and powdered women will be forbidden entry to all NSBO gatherings. Women who smoke in public -- in hotels, in cafes, on the street, and so forth -- will be expelled from the NSBO. Local officials are instructed to adopt similar rules.

From the Frankfurter Zeitung, Aug. 11, 1933. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

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Notes:

1. National Sozialistischer Betriebs Obman (see page 21),

The Honor Cross of the German Mother

"The prolific German mother is to be accorded the same place of honor in the German Volk community as the combat soldier, since she risks her body and her life for the people and the Fatherland as much as the combat soldier does in the roar and thunder of battle." With these words, Reich Physician Leader Dr. Wagner, head of the People's Health Section in the Reich leadership of the party, at the behest of the Fuhrer, announced the creation of a Medal of Honor for prolific German mothers at the Party Day of Labor.

Three million German mothers, on the German Mother's Day in 1939, for the first time will be solemnly awarded the new badge of honor by the leaders of the party. These celebrations are to be held every year on Mother's Day and on the Awarding of Medals Day for prolific mothers.

The youth above all must be brought up with a reverence for the mothers of the people. Thus the honoring of German mothers with many children is not to be limited only to Mother's Day and to the Awarding of Medals Day. In the future the prolific mother will occupy the place that is due her in public life. The young National Socialist will show his respect for her through the obligatory salute of all members of the youth formations of the party. In addition, the wearers of the Honor Cross of the German Mother will henceforth enjoy all those privileges which are already possessed as a matter of course by meritorious racial comrades, disabled war veterans, and the martyrs of the National Socialist revolution -- such privileges as honorary seats at party and government-sponsored gatherings, special treatment in government offices, and preferred seats assigned by conductors in rail coaches and trolley cars. Further, they are to be provided with old-age care and be given priority for acceptance in homes for the aged or in special sections of such homes already in existence.

For this honoring of the prolific mother and especially of the German aged mother by the Fuhrer is not only an expression of thanks, but at the same time expresses the trust that the Fuhrer, and with him the whole German people, has in all German mothers, that they will continue to help to pave the way for our people, and that they will make us a gift of that youth which, after perilous times, will crown the rise of our Volk....

From the Volkischer Beobachter, Dec. 25, 1938. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

The Woman Student

"Woman student, what do you want in the Third Reich?" "After all, your place is at the cooking pot!" "The Fuhrer does not want you to study." "Intellectual work is harmful to women!" After the seizure of power, we National Socialist women students repeatedly heard such statements. In fact, we still hear them once in a while.

How can it be, we asked ourselves, that anyone would want a National Socialist university without German women?

The National Socialist woman student places her whole life and achievement in the service of the German people. The tasks that are hers to fulfill clearly grow out of this attitude.

From the Volkischer Beobachter, Dec. 11, 1935. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

Against the Political Woman, ENGELBERT HUBER

There is no place for the political woman in the ideological world of National Socialism....

The intellectual attitude of the movement on this score is opposed to the political woman. It refers the woman back to her nature-given sphere of the family and to her tasks as wife and mother. The postwar phenomenon of the political woman, who rarely cuts a good figure in parliamentary debates, signifies robbing woman of her dignity.

The German resurrection is a male event.

From Engelbert Huber, Das ist Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1933), pp. 121-122.

THE SOCIAL REALITY

Does the Five O'Clock Tea Suit Our Time?

The German people and all cultural-minded people in other countries are still feeling the impact of the Fuhrer's speech at the Munich art festival. This speech is undoubtedly the most important cultural-political document of modern times. [1] And it did not take long to make itself felt in a practical way. The custodians of all government and private museums and art collections are busy removing the most hideous creations of a degenerate humanity and of a pathological generation of "artists" and in this way are helping to bring recognition to a true art imbued with a German spirit. This cleaning out of all works that bear this same Western Asiatic stamp has been set in motion in the field of literature as well, having begun with the symbolic burning of the most evil products of Jewish scribblers shortly after the seizure of power. On the other hand, the fact that a racially alien spirit, in conjunction with artistic impotence here and there, still produces swamp weeds in one of the most important fields of artistic creation, namely music, that even today it still asserts itself in the pages of a gutter journal of a disreputable tradition which doesn't seem to understand what coordination in music means, that it still disseminates an artistic interpretation and gives expression to the glorifiers of Negro music, is betrayed by a feuilleton [2] (this word alone is a fitting designation of this mental attitude) of a Berlin afternoon newspaper of August 19 of this year under the heading "Tea and Dancing." Either the author of this effusion has been living on the moon these past four years, or the dog days are responsible for this remarkable product of his Dada brain.

Tea and dancing: this is not only an excellent alliteration [3] but also an amalgamation of two concepts which, in content and in consonance with each other, are intimately and naturally connected, like the terms of such other alliterations as house and home, [4] bag and baggage. [5] Therefore, we must deal with them together, as a unit, in order to recognize and overcome the inner hollowness and the danger to the Volk posed by these forms of international civilized life.

One may think what one pleases about the custom of afternoon tea. No one can prescribe what beverages are most suitable for drinking, although the good old German coffee hour for family and good-fellowship has a tradition at least as glorious as the custom of the tea hour taken over from northern countries. After all, this is a question of taste, perhaps even of temperament. Fundamentally, however, we should reject the custom of the five o'clock tea which came to us from England, where it is already a degenerate social form. We Germans have never known a five o'clock tea. First it was the modern way of life, shaped by the Jewish spirit, which, through the adoption of alien customs, has in all fields tried to hide the fact that it has no values and cultural forms of its own. Properly understood, it is not a question of the kind of beverage, much less the time of day which one devotes to this pleasure, since the author of the above-mentioned article recommends that in Berlin the tea hour be changed from five to four o'clock and, indeed, that one should not drink tea at all but "preferably coffee." Rather it is much more a question of a wholly distinct form of social life bearing the mark of an alien spirit.

By five o'clock tea, if it takes place in a private circle, one understands a chattering, sandwich-eating, tea-drinking, cigarette-puffing group of people circulating about a rubber-wheeled tea wagon which sets down the expensive cups now here and now there, wherever one pauses momentarily in one's wandering, only to pick them up again immediately thereafter. Five o'clock tea: that is to say, a social gathering in which one cultivates not conversation but gossip. In particular, it is thought that through this abominable American custom (namely, eating and drinking standing up) an especially agreeable and spontaneous conversation can develop, whereas actually only chatter is achieved, not conversation, if one walks up and down in a room with his hat, gloves and cookies in his hand, so that a clumsy waiter can knock over the full cup held with two fingers into the hat which floats from the third finger. One is not supposed to rest in this society, not even in his chair. This, however, is not the German "custom of the house," but Jewish vagabondage which has been transplanted to the salon. These are not community-conscious, sociable German men, but "stray international gypsies on a parquet floor."

Five o'clock tea: according to the writer of the article in the 12-Uhr-Blatt, [6] this is the domain of the young man in his busy "public life." Here he takes his new suit for a stroll. Here he practices the difficult art of "conquering the fair sex." And the conversation! Let no one faint at these flashes of wit: "Do you often come here, my dear?"; "The orchestra plays very nicely indeed, but did I hear one in St. Moritz! ..."; "At the moment I'm still working in the office, but in six months at the latest I'm going into films"; and such other platitudes as are further wrenched from these lame brains.

Five o'clock tea: this means above all, however, the "third" and most important "prerequisite": "There's dancing!" And what kind of dancing! One dances swing -- one hears all the latest hits and learns to recognize all the famous dance orchestras. Actually all this would be no more than a harmless waste of time for the "nice young man" if, a few lines further down, this choppy, noisy, meaningless squeaking were not described as "good music." We most decisively reject the possibility that, in the Third Reich, a newspaper can still exist and serve as the advocate of the Jewish impulse which has been done with once and for all, that a spirit against which the Fuhrer, and with him the whole healthy-minded German people, has declared a war to the death, can again be allowed to worm its way into the field of music.

Let it be clearly understood that we have nothing against light music. Indeed we demand such music and are convinced that composers will find rewarding tasks in this field. We consider it one of the most deplorable losses in the field of music that a specializing, intellectual consideration of art has led German artists to regard light music as commonplace, stale, and second-rate, as an accommodation of the lowest tastes of the people, and that the artist must offer not something simple but something extreme and lofty, in a complicated form with a great display of elaborate technique.

This elaborate technique is in keeping with an intensified experience, whereas simple structure and an ordinary experience supposedly have lesser artistic value. It is not the ordinary general human sensibility, but the effect, the rarefied feeling, that sets the work of art in motion. With respect to his conception we see in light (but nevertheless content-rich) music a conceivably lofty artistic task which our greatest composers have willingly undertaken. It suffices to recall Bruckner, who, unaffected by the international trends in art, dedicated himself to simple, unpretentious musical composition. This was not a concession to a fashion in popular taste, or a mirroring in musical form of a current tasteless literature, or a display of clever contrivances and technique. Rather, his compositions attested to the bond of a creative artist to his Volk, which in the monumentality of their form inevitably drew closer to the simplicity of Volkish song and dance types.

Thus we, too, believe that light music is neither a primitive art expression nor cheap sentimentality, but an interplay of folk-song and folk-dance rhythmics. Behind them stands neither the thinker, nor the world-denying ascetic, nor the dubious genius, but an original, joyously sensual, world-asserting musician who lets the energies of life with its multiple forms flow into his art, smoothly and simply into a structure of meaning and beauty. This music is not a borrowing from alien sources, but an ideal which the artist shapes into significant form.

His relation to light music is not limited to taking over national and Volkish melody types; it also includes finding and developing new forms and melodies in the genre of the folk song and the folk dance. The German people urgently need this light music. One cannot listen to Beethoven, Bach, or Handel every hour of the day. For that one goes to the concert hall, not to the coffeehouse. After all, there is an enormous difference between digestible light music and a din of drums, washboards, guitars, cowbells, rattlers, and other noise-makers, the same difference as exists, say, between the intoxicating spirit of the German waltz and the rhumba or swing, or between a good newspaper supplement and the feuilleton-scribbling of the 12-Uhr-Blatt.

We gladly leave Kestenberger, Schonberg, and Stravinsky to the civilized and pretentious art circles abroad. We, the young German generation, are in any case aware of the fact that the legacy of a great past in the field of music places a special obligation on us. We, the people of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Handel, cannot and will not any longer allow one of the noblest blooms of cultural life to fall increasingly victim to degeneration and to ultimate degradation to satisfy the demands of big-city night clubs and international bordellos.

For this it is necessary that we destroy once and for all the deeper ideological roots of this monstrous degeneration. The issue here is wholly different from the struggle for a new musical style, for the "ideal" of a new formal linear structure independent of harmonics, for the burgeoning powers of a new tonal sensibility, or however the philosophical ornaments of these confusions may be called. Rather, this music quite simply represents the outbreak of the nihilism of the postwar period, and accordingly is no longer expression, revelation, but a shriek, an unbridled discharge of its raw material. "Contemporary music" quite clearly presents both types of every phenomenon of decay.

One of these works almost entirely on the intellect, the other on the nerves. The former can be called paper music, the latter nerve music. Here too the usual dichotomy between soul and body emerges, which is the mark of the Western Asiatic racial and cultural expression. Both types are out of contact with the emotional life and try to make a virtue out of this shortcoming: in the place of intuitively grasped ideas they set rationally constructed work.

The first type comes from mechanistically ill-structured brains. A noisy, meaningless music is its means of expression. The second type is the product of jaded, diseased nerves. The effect achieved constitutes its principal means of expression: complicated cacophony resembling noise and choppy rhythm. It loves to simulate temperament, but in reality it is nothing but impulse. Both types are one-sided, and as a result their effect is weakened. What is more obvious now than the attempt to amalgamate both tendencies, which bear in themselves the germ of quick decay, in order to prolong their short life! But in vain! An amalgamation proved itself to be impossible.

The result was a combination of over-stimulated intellect and pathological impulse. Technique was the only element that held them together. But even technique can only couple; it cannot unite, for it is nothing but an external emergency measure. Besides, "contemporary music" itself leads to absurdity. It has gone beyond itself; it is no longer the expression of feeling but corresponds to the pleasure which the intellect takes in forming combinations and to the craving of the nerves for sensations. No doubt this music is difficult to master, but one can recognize it. It is no longer a rare novelty; it has lost its uniqueness. But it wanted above all to be unique, and rarefied! Thus the level of this music gradually sank lower and lower. It became a kind of night plant living under electric lights in an atmosphere of bad air, cheap perfume, and sticky tobacco smoke, even if it was produced in a setting of "high" society.

Alongside this ideological and general human degeneration there emerged the doctrine of the so-called international character of art and its independence from the Volk spirit and temporal events. The organic relationship between the creative artist and the people was denied. Denied also was the fact that Volk and race constitute the roots of every artistic creation, that, above all, music also is subject to the conditions and uniformities of biological data, that the energies of the people contribute to creativity, just as in a tree the sap rises from the root to the blossom. In this way the artist became incapable of shaping the elements of art, and thus the primordial symbol of his people, into significant form. He borrowed the art forms of alien peoples and races....

From Der SA-Mann, Sept. 18, 1937. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

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Notes:

1. For this speech, see p. 11.

2. Referring, to the cultural section of the press. Ever since this had developed in the nineteenth century, its style was highly subjective, introverted, and critical of all aspects of life. The Nazis put an end to it.

3. In German: Tee und Tanz.

4. Haus und Hof.

5. Kind und Kegel.

6. A Berlin daily newspaper which featured articles on sports and the theater, light and amusingly written.

Fairytale Scenes on Peacock Island

On the eve of the festival days, when the great Olympic Games came to an end, the Reich Minister for the People's Enlightenment and Propaganda, in the name of the German Reich Government, invited the honored guests of the contests to a summer festival on romantic Peacock Island.

Under the command of Major Henke, army engineers on Saturday night dismantled the pontoon bridges leading to the platforms that had been built on the water at Grunau and then put them up again between the shore of Nikolskoe and the island. The flags of many nations fluttered in the breeze from the masts which were fastened to the pontoons. The lights of hundreds of sailboats and canoes were reflected in the dark waters of the Havel, and when the guests arrived at the scene they were encircled by a picture of magical beauty. A chain of pages dressed in white led the way to the great meadow. Numerous lanterns cast a resplendent, hundredfold light; melodies played by the state orchestra of the [NSDAP] district of Berlin, under the direction of conductors Spiess and Wicke, rang out on the air. Loudspeakers carried the music to the remotest corners of the island. A magic light radiated from hedges and bushes, filtering through the lush green of the leaves. Giant night moths glowed in the centuries-old linden and oak trees. The special setting of the festival was created under the general direction of chief government councillor Gutterer and of Reich stage designer Benno von Arent, who was responsible for the decorative scheme and who masterfully transformed the beauties of the romantic island in the Havel into a fairyland. The evening sky of a mild summer night stood over the scene of joy and splendor.

The summer festival of the German Reich Government was especially enhanced by the artistic presentations. Famous soloists and the entire ensemble of the German Opera House of Berlin, under the direction of ballet master Rudolf Kolling, were part of the colorful program, which began with a dance of the Olympic Games to the tunes of the old maestro Johann Strauss.

Love gods from the eighteenth century, with various robes and colorful wings, which had been modeled after figurines from the age of Frederick the Great, fluttered like porcelain figures on the tables as gifts for the ladies. The enormous dancing area, set amid the majestic groves of trees, filled up with couples who danced to the music of bandleader Oskar Joost of the "Femina," Eugen Wolff of the "Eden," and Emanuel Rambourn of the "Kaiserhof."

Late at night a splendid fireworks display won the special applause and admiration of the many guests.

From Der Angriff, Aug. 18, 1936. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

Beautiful Gowns at the Annual Press Ball

One of the most beautiful gowns consisted of pale-blue, delicately threaded mat crepe set off by a short, saddlelike ruffle in the front and a very deep One in the back made of pearl-studded circular figures of the same color.... A similar effect was created by a snow-white tulle gown which was not so theatrically insubstantial that it threatened to fly off in a draft of air. ... No doubt the tulle ruffles, despite their unreal delicacy, had surprisingly great body thanks to an invisible stiffening of their base with horsehair tulle strips.... One saw heavily embroidered silver edges combined with blue velvet which formed a contrast to fine-meshed, very thinly woven edges. ... Half of a heavily ruffled, strongly shaped side was made of strawberry-colored satin silk and the other half of black velvet as a seam end for a freely 'swinging frock.... Wine-red and blue-gray scintillating taffeta with the front part delicately tucked in.... Smoothness and dignity were also the leitmotifs of the dancing gowns.

From Die Neue WeItbuhne, Vol. I, No.7 (1934), p. 215. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

Wanted: Croupiers

Several croupier candidates, 25 to 35 years of age, wanted for a training course. Knowledge of languages and skill in dealing with figures required as well as no previous criminal record. Written applications only, to be sent to the management of the Casino, Personnel Division, Baden-Baden.

From Der Fuhrer, May 4, 1940. (Wiener Library Clipping Collection.)

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