Translated material
And then there was a disaster
National Socialism as a way of life, as a force leading the country to the declared goals. About the book "Hitler's weather. The completely normal life of the Germans with dictatorship "
“Can people under the dictatorship lay happily on the beach? Having fallen in love, stagger through the streets, go to the cinema or in a cafe? Can they dance relaxedly, laugh and be satisfied, play football and go on vacation, get together to start a family and make plans for the future? ” Thus begins the book by the historian of Tilman Bendikovsky “Hitler's weather”, which has a remarkable subtitle: “The completely normal life of the Germans at the dictatorship: the Germans and the Third Reich 1938/39”.
On huge actual material, using hundreds of sources, including newspapers, magazines, diaries, speeches, letters, reports, special services, Bendikovsky tells in detail how the Germans lived in recent months before the outbreak of World War II and its first months. During, which we, their descendants, call it terrible and abnormal, they lived their usual and normal life for them, went to work, raised children, prayed in churches, listening to the radio, and dreamed of a new apartment and car. The optics do not coincide: we, looking outside, see the unbearable nightmare of their lives with the arrests and executions of dissenters, poisoning of Jews, concentration camps, and they, looking from the inside, see all this differently, more familiar, indifferent. It seems to be less concerned than us.
But the truth: they need to live. The people are not consisted of political analysts, but of the most ordinary people - teachers, doctors, workers, unemployed, sellers, businessmen, peasants, school students, as well as happy owners of cars and driver’s license, who are 1.7 million in Germany in 1939. All these people live a difficult life in a poor country that has not yet come to their senses after an economic crisis. But the changes in her life over the past six years are obvious.
National Socialism in the book of Tilman Bendikovsky does not appear as an unexpected obsession, which was not known from the Germans. He shows National Socialism as a way of life, as an organization of life, as a force leading the country to the declared goals.
All classes of society, all professional groups and religious denominations accept National Socialism as the path of Germany to revival. And even those who, in their vocation and their profession, should put a person and help him above everything else, abandon this in favor of brown ideology and blind faith.
German doctors with the consciousness of responsibility for the case entrusted to him enter the path leading to the murders of mentally ill and disabled in special institutions. German bishops idolize Hitler as the sent by Germany from above fate and heaven. And even a little girl walks the Fuhrer, a touching letter, chocolate and prays for him with all her heart.
“Hitler is Germany and Germany is Hitler” (writes Hamburger Neueste Zeitung). This is propaganda, but this is the reality of the thoughts and feelings of the Germans of 1939. In Berlin, people stand on the street for hours to see the Fuhrer on the balcony for a few minutes. People are chanting, urging him to go out to them. "No one is forced to take on the pen on this day and praise him as the Savior of Germany." People do this themselves, in enthusiastic poems, in newspaper articles and in the glory published in the Protestant press: “Adolf Hitler, du Glaubender, Du Liebender, Du Schauender, Du Wollender ...”
“For millions of processions Christians in 1939, there is no contradiction in the morning during the Mass with folded hands to pray to God, and in the afternoon in the form of one of the Nazi organizations to march around the native city and an extended right hand with respect to welcome the flag with the swastika. For them, the lover of the Lord, Adolf Hitler and the German Fatherland are inextricable - and they all feel obligated to serve them equally. ” So the historian writes. But the point is not only in the deification of the Fuhrer, the point is still in the absence of solidarity within society. A third of Jehovah's witnesses* in concentration camps, but the Protestants and Catholics do not notice this.
The people and the "folk unity" are above a person. This is one of the main postulates of Nazi propaganda. Everything for the people, this million -headed organism, struggling with the enemies surrounding it for living space.
In National Socialism, the cult of the mother is extinguished-giving birth to children, it replenishes the losses in the last war and gives new soldiers for the future. The birth of children in Germany in 1939 is not about family, not about love, this is about the people and its biological strengthening. "Every child she produces is the battle in which she participates, the battle for the existence or non -existence of her people." Therefore, rewards are introduced for mothers, depending on the number of children - a bronze cross (4-5 children), silver (6–7) and gold (8 or more). Teenagers from the Hitler Youth - Hitlerite in short pants - should welcome women with a cross with an outstretched hand. At the same time, the first 900 female navigated ones arrive at the Ravsbryuk concentration camp. Among them are Jews.
"The fact that the attitude towards a woman and mother is different on the basis of racist considerations does not cause the majority of the Germans discontent."
The totalitarian state captures man. He no longer belongs to himself, he is part of the whole, his health and strength are needed by people in a life struggle. Who smokes, undermines the health of the nation, who drinks, commits a crime against the race. The Fuhrer is an example for everyone, he has no bad habits, he does not smoke or drink, spends all his strength to work in the name of the future Germany - and, caring for his Germans, requires the same from them. In his free time from the revolution of the country and the world, the Fuhrer stretches the expander and strengthens his hands to be able to stand for hours with his hand raised in greeting, when the weapons of the working people flow past him and the Wehrmacht passes by the front march. In April 1939, he personally prohibits smoking in the party’s offices. True, there are rumors that among the bonz of the regime is a fat morphinist Goering, since childhood, a clubfoot Goebbels, a Leoil of Leo. But for such rumors you can get to the Gestapo.
Human labor is also no longer his personal business, the work of each is nationalized by the state and put to the service of Germany. The Germans require zeal, discipline and self -sacrifice. The Führer gives the order to build autobahns; The masses of German men, as in the days of pharaohs, work at the construction sites of roads and live in huts. The working day lasts 16 hours.
The state calls for a feat and the victim, and it is very fit and scored: if work is impossible in bad weather, then workers are not paid for this day. Safety precautions are not observed. For every 6 km of a built autobahn - one death of a fatal outcome.
SMENTIONALY, from the head to the chapter, in thousands of details, the author creates a picture of life in Germany in 1939. Amazing paintings for a person of our time. Germany in these paintings is more like North Korea than to the country of Goethe and Hegel. After work, the Germans must continue to work - together with their neighbors, they cultivate the lands of the earth to grow a meager harvest on them, which will help the state in providing the people with food. Children should help peasants in the villages during the summer holidays, the working day of children lasts 12 hours. Women, in order to match the image of a German wife and mother, must cook, wash, bake pies, at the first request of her husband to go for a walk with him, meekly let him go into a beer - and, in addition, work at a factory or in the office. There is no war yet, but there is already a mobilized nation.
"The work is ennobled." Therefore, every German young man should take a shovel in his hands and dig for the benefit of the people. All boys who have reached the age of 18 are called up for six months to the imperial work service. All unmarried girls under 25 for a year are called for service in agriculture, where they work 56 hours a week. On May 1, on the feast of labor, the “national holiday of the German people”, in the morning everyone listens to the speeches of the top leadership on the radio first, then at the meetings they listen to the speech of local leadership about the need for everyone as one ... not sparing strength ... and so on. The Germans for the most part approve of a similar attitude to work. It is rooted in them, in their family history, in their Protestant morality. Parents believe that young people are good to be in a labor camp, work with a pick and shovel, become stronger, throw out frivolity from their heads. "Work will make a person out of you."
The state requires a woman to preserve vegetables. It seems that what is the case with this to the state? The totalitarian state is a matter of everything! It wants to free a woman from daily cooking so that she gives her more time and effort to work in a factory. Therefore, the German wife and mother, you are obliged to prepare cans in advance, which you will put up on the table when the family will gather for dinner after work. If a girl wants to go beyond the SS member, she is obliged to attend brides courses where she will give lectures on housekeeping, hygiene, gymnastics, and motherhood. One and a half million women underwent training (from 25 to 50 hours) for the duties of mother and wife in state State University.
So in friendly rows, approving the policies of the Fuhrer, the German people are moving towards the prosperity promised to him and at the same time to war.
This is a poor, difficult people living in difficult conditions. In 1938, in Germany there are not enough 1.5 million apartments, 400 thousand apartments are in disrepair, 50-60 people respond to each announcement of renting an apartment. The shoemakers disappear good skin, it is not in shoe factories - it goes to the production of shoes for the army. The same with leather gloves, they have become a deficit. The textile industry uses synthetics to replace the imported wool. The task is to make Germany independent of the outside world and external supplies of rubber, paper, leather, oils, textiles. For this, children are charged with the duty and patriotic debt to collect waste paper and scrap metal. Activists walk around the apartments and gather a junk, which the jackets previously took. But now it is a valuable raw material for the homeland! And the bones of the scraps - too. Children carry them to school. 120 thousand tons of bones were collected in 1938. The Reich Commissioner for the collection of junk declares this a success. “This is not a personal matter when someone donates his old dresses, collects bones or waste paper-we are talking about the good of the people.” And if someone throws potato cleaning into the garbage bucket, then this is a crime. Cleaning must be fed pigs. It is forbidden to drown furnaces with wood - a tree is necessary for the construction of fortifications on the western border and for the chemical industry.
Rabbits, not any, but only Angora, suddenly become of great importance for Germany. Angora rabbits should be bred to supply industry with wool! And the Germans obediently bred rabbits. In this detailed detailed book, you will find a lot of numbers of the book, including information about the growth of the number of Angora rabbits in Germany in 1939.
The country needs metal. Throughout Germany, iron fences and fences at the graves in cemeteries are removed. Children from the Hitler Yugen are rushing the streets in search of scrap metal. Everything goes into business - rusty nails, tin plates, old castles and loops. All this will be re -melted into metal and steel, in machines and tools, in armor and in helmets, in guns and tanks that will protect peace -loving Germany from the vile provocations of England.
Instead of oil, guns are not a sonorous phrase, but the reality of life in Germany in 1939. The industry produces more and more weapons, and there is no butter in stores. 85% of the monthly salary of the worker goes to the rent, meals, heating, and a minimum of clothing. If you subtract more costs for transport, then 80 Pfennigs remain. Mandarins and oranges are a deficit.
The Healthcare Reich Commissioner Leonardo Conti teaches the Germans to a healthy lifestyle - more movement, more time in nature! - And he personally makes deadly injections to patients, whose life the Nazis consider unnecessary to the people and Germany.
In April, on the day of Hitler, trucks with spruce branches drive along the streets of German cities, everyone can take from the body how many branches for decorating houses want. Germany in euphoria, it is decorated. One of the newspapers, choking with delight, praises a wonderful April weather that day and calls it Hitlerwetter (hence the name of the book). A woman who connected the Fuhrer’s birthday 6000 socks for soldiers, a hairdresser who sent a swastika from human hair, an employee of the hotel, who gave Hitler a violin on which you can’t play, but it is decorated with 245 small swastikas - all this is sincere, from the heart. The Union of Imperial Kurovoda requests whether the Fuhrer has a birdhouse, they want to give him selected chickens. And the eggs of the seagulls are also given to him.
We have not yet read half of the book, but we are already getting stuffy, physically sickening and stuffy from what we read. From the pastors singing brown as the color of the revival of the nation, from doctors discussing a decrease in the diet in boarding schools for inconspicuously sick, because they do not need to be fed for their unnecessary German affairs, from newspapers with their sized-armed tone, from bishops explaining to the parishioners that Hitler was given by Germany.
On posters, a German worker, German soldier and German mother appear samples of strength and health, they have strong -willed faces and strong hands. So the Germans see themselves, or rather, so propaganda tells them to see themselves. Many agree, many people like to see themselves strong, invincible, heroic. But the dry information of the special services suggests that 80% of young men in Baden have flaws of health, such as anemia, flat feet, curvature of the spine, and asthenia. The Nordic hero, suffering from anemia, is a sample of racial valor, asthenic from malnutrition? The stronger the propaganda howls, calling for a healthy lifestyle, the higher the growth of alcohol and tobacco consumption (676 cigarettes per year for every German, including children). Propaganda of marriage is growing - along with an epidemic of sexual diseases, which are almost completely ill with residents of entire areas.
Picture in one phrase: Hitler arranges a reception in the front hall of the Reich Scanning Committee for 3600 young officers. The future of Germany, young Aryans who have to conquer the world! The officers drank so that they could not reach the toilets. The front room is sparkled.
Newspapers, magazines and Nazi speakers promote blood and soil - a healthy conservative life on Earth. In reality, people flee from hard work of village life: in the mid-twenties, 27% of the population worked in agriculture, in 1939-18%. To stop the flight of people from the villages, prohibitions are introduced. The worker can change the place of work only with the permission of ArbiTitsamt. Industry is forbidden to hire people working in agriculture.
In the second half of 1939, food cards are introduced. Not because the situation is bad, but so that it does not become bad, - propaganda explains intelligibly.
Additional cards for milk for nursing mothers and for children under six years of age. Shoes are also on cards. But socks and stockings without cards! So the situation is not so bad. We must rally, gather, become a folk organism with a single will, ready to fight for peace against the provocateurs of war by order of the Fuhrer. Therefore, in a rattling weapon, marching the goose step of Germany, a voluntary gathering of curtains is carried out - from them they will make dressings. Gasoline for private individuals is issued with restrictions, lovers to ride are condemned as egoists who do not think about folk affairs. The beer is introduced. Since rubber is needed in the military industry, the one who wants to buy new tires for the bicycle must present the commission of old tires and prove that it is worthy of new ones. Those who tell others what they heard from foreign radio reasons are shot.
United Germany, Germany, rallying without distinction of classes and groups, Germany without trade unions and parties (rather, with one ruling and popular), Germany, which puts the will to action and a collective struggle for popularity - such Germany is invincible. This is repeated in hundreds of speeches on the radio, in thousands of newspaper editorials. Those who interfere with unity are traitors and enemies.
Those who are unhappy, sabotage, grumble, complain - "they will mercilessly destroyed." But first of all, first of all - Jews. They must be removed from German life, it is necessary to destroy their harmful influence and at the same time destroy them themselves.
The mobile exhibition "Eternal Jew" is traveling along Germany, tens of thousands of Germans visit it and nod their heads, standing in front of the exhibits. The institution of research and elimination of Jewish influence on the church life of the German people is working. Dirty Jewish hands should not touch the pure Aryan body, so 9,000 Jewish doctors are expelled from medicine. От 20 до 25% преподавателей университетов уволены по политическим или расовым основаниям. Это приводит к тому, что в Германии падает уровень медицинских услуг и образования.
Евреям пока ещё разрешается покинуть страну, но прежде они должны заполнить анкеты, где во всех подробностях сообщают о своём движимом и недвижимом имуществе. Столы, шкафы, стулья, кастрюли, одеяла, подушки, пальто из еврейских домов будут переданы на специальных раздачах немцам. Покидающим страну евреям разрешается взять с собой 10 рейхсмарок, с этой мелочью они могут отправиться за 20 тысяч километров в Шанхай, единственное место на Земле, куда они могут попасть без визы. Но это скоро кончится, Шанхай закроется для беженцев из Германии. Им останется биться в закрытые двери европейских консульств и получать отказ в визе от равнодушной Америки, которая разворачивает назад в Европу приходящие к её берегам корабли с бегущими от нацистов евреями. Им больше некуда деться. Среди беженцев — эпидемия самоубийств.
Фактура — самая сильная и самая важная часть этой большой книги, которая в подробнейших описаниях охватывает все стороны немецкой жизни 1939 года. Тысячи фактов образуют полотно огромного, занимающего пять сотен страниц повествования. Это фактура жизни людей в Германии, где каждый день клеймят декадентский Запад с его гнилой демократией, где антисемитизм стал народным убеждением, где молодежь поёт патриотические песни и пакует рюкзаки, чтобы отправиться на сельхозработы, где после присуждения Нобелевской премии пацифисту Карлу Осецкому учёным запрещено принимать Нобелевскую премию (создана своя, государственная, её вручает лично Гитлер), где все знают, что жизнь в Германии трудна, но отмечают перемены к лучшему и верят в мудрость фюрера.
Это безжалостная книга. Спокойным тоном, без эмоций и патетики, автор говорит о немцах и немецком народе, который принял национал-социализм, полюбил Гитлера, восхищался им и с полным согласием, а часто и с восторгом, следовал курсом, который указывал фюрер. Кто-то ведь в день рождения Гитлера ( 20 апреля 1889 года. — Ред. ) украшал свой дом еловыми ветками, кто-то нёс домой кастрюли, изъятые у евреев, кто-то соглашался в беседе за пивом, что страна в окружении врагов и, значит, нет пощады тем, кто против.
После 1945 года немцы — напоминает Тильман Бендиковски — вдруг забыли обо всём этом. В их памяти случился переворот. Фашистами были другие, а не они. В чёрной форме, в сапогах и с нарукавными привязками ходили какие-то особые и редкие изверги, а они — большинство — просто жили трудной жизнью, в которой, конечно, иногда звучала музыка, и бывали танцы, и играли в футбол, и было немного личного счастья. А потом — национальная катастрофа. Но в книге историка, посвящённой 1939 году, о катастрофе нет ни слова. Немецкий народ в большинстве своём не думает о ней. А те мученики и отщепенцы, которые догадываются, чем всё это кончится, сидят в концлагерях или пишут тайные дневники.